Three nights in Midtown East and three excellent dinners:

1) Hane Sushi, 3rd Ave at 38th location. This is probably going to become our default restaurant for “we just got in, we’re tired, we want food near the hotel, and we want it to be good.” There’s a good selection of fresh sushi and the sake selection is also nice. Most of the waitstaff know enough about sake to help you pick the right sake and order the right food, including at least one self-described “sake fiend”. Note that we’ve only had sushi there, so no idea how their plates/dinners are. If this were my neighborhood sushi joint I would not complain one bit. (I’d compare the sushi quality to Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto, CA.)

2) Sakagura. I’ve never been to any restaurant like Sakagura, the closest I can think of is Nihon Whisky Lounge in SF. Imagine a huge sake list of the best sakes that Japan will export and a menu color coded to help neophytes pick the right food to match their sake choice. Given that they’re in a basement, they’ve done wonders with the decor. Take a look at their specials and dinner menus and tell me you’re not considering an “emergency junket” to Midtown. There was nothing whatsoever to complain about except for the loud jackasses at the bar chugging down Sapporo and trying to outdo Scarface in the profanity department. (I say this as a person who drops the f-bomb on a routine basis in regular conversation.) The food selection was amazing, including things like 黒枝豆　(kuru edamame, or black soybeans) as an appetizer and their own, homemade, sea-salt chocolate sorbet.

3) Aburiya Kinnosuke. I know it’s cliche’, but I almost don’t want people to know about this place. It clearly has enough business to keep it going, the last thing it needs is a bajillion tourists getting in the way when I want to eat there. Aburiya is not just an izakaya, it’s an old-school izakaya that uses a charcoal stack in a sand pit for 炉端 (robata, or “hearth-side”) cooking. I think we only ordered one or two things from the regular menu, everything else came from the daily special menu. The sauteed tuna was a bit overcooked, but everything else was so much better than expected that I barely remember the deficiency. One of the best dishes was the fried, homemade soft tofu — crispy outside, creamy inside. Such a simple dish yet so completely amazing. (No, we didn’t have the purportedly world-class tsukune, we filled up on specials first.)

Sakagura and Aburiya Kinnosuke were cheaper than Nobu, probably a better value overall, and we were able to make same-day reservations. I really liked dinner at Nobu, but their sake list is minimal and it’s so hard to get in that I’m not sure it’s worth the effort and advance planning. (Cue Morimoto’s ninja death squads hunting me down…. Hey, but I totally love Morimoto in Philly, so it’s a push!)

Technorati Tags: izakaya, manhattan, robata, sake, sushi

Technorati Tags: design, mtid, school

This is something you, the local media, have a say in. You are able to refuse ads, so why not set some civil standards? Only accept ads paid for by the candidates and only those ads that spend at least 3/4 of their time talking about the candidate and not the opponent. Or only accept ads aren’t currently debunked by factcheck.org.

But you, the local media, have decided to take every dollar and any ad that comes along. I find myself regularly turning off KQV as soon as an attack ad starts and listening to NPR or a CD. Soon, I’ll stop turning in to KQV all-together and spend a few minutes looking at the traffic online before I leave the house rather than waiting for a traffic report on the radio.

Same goes for local TV stations — why should I wade through repeated attack ads that insult my intelligence and damage the democratic process on local TV when I can tune to an international news channel or go to my computer and get the news and weather there?

You need to have viewers and listeners to justify your ad rates, and to get us, you need to broadcast content we want. I don’t mind ads for things I might want, but ads that make me angry also make me change to another station, CDs, or the Internet.

Technorati Tags: media, pittsburgh, politics,

A national children’s advocacy group is pushing to get Pittsburgh removed from the Street View of Google’s map search until the technology is refined so pedophiles can’t use it to pinpoint children’s homes, schools and playgrounds.

Street View, an addition to Google Maps that uses vehicle cameras to take 360-degree, street-level views of neighborhoods, allows users to virtually cruise down a street and across a city. In the process, the tool shows pictures of children, toys and family cars that could tip a would-be predator to an area where children could be found and potentially victimized, according to the group, Stop Internet Predators.
[...]

OMFG! I bet you could use Street View to find cars to steal! Or burglars could find houses with plate glass front windows surrounded by bushes that are easy to break into! Rapists could find bushes to hide in!

I mean, it’s not like people can drive around neighborhoods and find those things in real time, is it?

Sadly, this ignorance about crime is nothing new.

Quintilian, INSTITUTIO ORATORIA, II, xvi (first century AD):

“Doctors have been caught using poisons, and those who falsely assume the
name of philosopher have occasionally been detected in the gravest crimes.
Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside
houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword
be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber.”

Technorati Tags: google, idiocy, privacy

jet’s EAGLE lib o’ doom

Technorati Tags: Arduino, EAGLE, pcb

This from the Atlantic Division Director, Bill Edgar, N3LLR:

Please see the attached document from Joe, N3TTE. They’re sample letters to be sent to your local rep as well as Rep Dwight Evans, the Chair of the House Appropriations Committee. After speaking to my local representative his office suggested that all interested parties contact Representative Evans urging him to bring the bill out of Committee and up to the house for a full vote. AB3ER also called Rep. Evans office and the staffer there commented that the Appropriations Committed was being “used” to kill the bill. We need to look like an 800Lb Gorilla who votes coming at these representatives to keep the special interest (PA State Association of Township Supervisors) from killing this legislation.

The full email, along with sample letters is here. Take a minute and write/fax/call your local Representative and ask that this bill be brought out of committee.

Technorati Tags: amateur radio, antenna, pennsylvania

CSV, PDF, and Excel(-ish) formats.

Technorati Tags: arduino

So far I have the obvious — # I/O pins, form factor, required power, etc. Anything in particular that you (collective) would find useful in such a chart that I might not think of? For example, do you care about weight? Physical dimensions without pins?

Let me know in email or in comments.

Technorati Tags: Arduino, survey

Apple’s OSX, however has not played well with it. Starting with 10.4, there’s been a low-level problem in CUPS (the free software Apple uses for printing and has since “bought”) on OSX/Intel that I’ve never been able to diagnose and Apple hasn’t cared to fix it either. So, to print from our MacBooks we’ve had to use a G5 as a print server. Not the end of the world, but annoying.

I finally upgraded everything to 10.5. and whammo, I can no longer print from the G5. After a few hours of mucking around, I discovered what you could either call the “right way” or a “workaround”. It’s certainly not something you’d think to try, but it works for me:

1. Go into Printer and Fax preferences and delete any existing HP printer using the “-” button.
2. Start adding a printer using the “+” button.
3. Pick “More Printers” and wait for it to grind.
4. Pick “HP IP Printing” from the scoll bar.
5. Pick “Manual”
6. Enter the printer’s IP address and click “Add”.

That should bring up a dialog correctly identifying your HP printer.

Technorati Tags: HP Business Inkjet 1200, OSX, printer

I’m one of those people — I spend a fair amount of time back in California or at least emailing/chatting with friends of mine in San Francisco, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc.

Lately I feel like I’ve been as frustrated with Pittsburgh (and Pittsburghers) as not. For every sales pitch I make to a friend back in Cali involving low property prices and access to local farm produce I seem to have an equally horrid story about things like the idiocy of stopping on on-ramps instead of merging, the massive taxes with no open records laws or other ways of finding out where my money goes, or the state bureaucracy in general.

Today I got bit by a combination of two things — the Pittsburgher attitude of “what do you mean you didn’t know that, everyone here knows that?” and a state bureaucracy from hell. We’re (you’re) not going to be able to convince people that this is a great place to move to until stories like this stop being what newcomers tell when we’re back visiting our friends in other states. Maybe that requires changing state and local government or maybe it just means not treating newcomers to Pittsburgh like we’re aliens or mentally challenged.

Those of you who’ve never lived in Pennsylvania will probably be surprised by how vehicle registration works. First off, you don’t go to the local Department of Motor Vehicles or Department of Public Safety to register your car in the state. Nope, the only thing you can do at a PENNDOT office is deal with driver’s licenses. All vehicle registrations must be done at the state capitol in Harrisburg, PA.

No, I’m not making this up. Vehicles can only be registered at the state capitol.

That’s pretty out of the way for most of us. To make things easier, the state has allowed certain companies, known as “messenger services”, to do the business of taking your paperwork to the capital for you. And no, it’s not free, nor even cheap.

This week I finally got around to registering a vehicle I bought while out of state after moving to PA. It’s a vintage bike, there’s only one dealer in town for this make, and it’s a good 30-45 minute drive away so I call ahead to see what I need to bring. Title, PA driver’s license, and proof of insurance, then pass safety inspection. Since it’s an obscure bike, I’m going to the dealer on the off chance I need some random part to pass inspection.

Today I roll into the dealership, paperwork in hand. First surprise: I have to pay PA sales tax on any purchase made in another state. (So, when I’m on vacation, do I need to pay tax for gifts I buy and bring back to my friends here?) It takes a good 30 minutes to do all the paperwork and then the clerk says, “ok, now I need two checks. One for $x for the state and one for $y for us.”

This caught me off guard, and since I rarely carry my checkbook these days I just kinda sputtered, “Uh, what? Nobody said anything about bringing checks when I called. Can’t I use a charge card or an ATM card or something?”

The clerk was not apologetic, but explained in that slow way you talk to people you think aren’t paying attention, “We can’t give the messenger service a credit card, we can only give them checks.” It wasn’t condescending as much as, “how can you not know that you need to pay for this by check? Everyone knows that you have to have a check.” Hell, I didn’t even know what a “messenger service” was until today, much less that I needed to pay for things with checks.

So, 3 hours driving/waiting and still no title transfer, no inspection, no nada. I go back tomorrow — with a checkbook this time — in hopes of finishing this.

This isn’t the sort of story that my friends back home need to hear. They need to hear how trivial it was go to to PENNDOT and drop off all the paperwork at once. They need to hear that when someone who didn’t grow up here is trapped in some sort of bureaucratic nonsense that the locals will be sympathetic, not just throw up their hands and say, “sorry, that’s just not how it works here”.

Technorati Tags: bureaucracy, penndot, pennsylvania, pittsburgh, rants