Tag: Anti complaint

Coppis on U Street

The wife and I had a little date night last night, having dinner at Coppi’s on U Street and then drinks at Saint Ex on 14th.

Coppi’s was courtesy of my occasionally blogging brother-in-law (As opposed to the others who don’t blog at all) and his girlfriend, who stayed with us a little while back, and were overly generous in expressing their gratitude.

In any event, Coppi’s was great. I beat the wife there by a bit, which meant I sat at the bar, chatted with a woman who was probably the manager, and drank an organic beer.

Then the wife arrived. We each had a salad and an entree, all delicious, and then shared a dessert. My salad was the Bietole al Forno, which was very good. For dinner I had a really nice lasagne. It was a bit more cream sauce than red sauce, which would not have been my first choice, but was very good anyway.

And then we shared the dessert. It’s not on their online menu, but it was recommended by the waiter. It was peaches with a wine and brown sugar sauce topped with ice cream, and it was quite good.

As for the restaurant itself, it was a great experience. The service was excellent, the place crowded but not uncomfortably so, and the music was eclectic and interesting.  I would highly recommend them for dinner.  Reservations are probably a good idea.

I’ve been to Saint Ex before.  It’s one of the wife’s favorite bars.  And it was, again, a nice place to hang out.

A magazine about Ubuntu

Full Circle Magazine » Issue 4

Full Circle – the Ubuntu Community Magazine are proud to announce our fourth issue.

I know, I’m going to get more user submitted complaints about rambling on about Ubuntu, but I’m more and more excited about Linux as a real alternative to Windows.  I’ve been thinking about trying to install it on my parents’ computers because I can log in remotely and fix things for them.

I mean, my dad is running Windows 98 on his desktop.  As a computer dork, this is roughly the same as a dentist allowing his father to lose all his teeth due to cavities.

Anyway, Full Circle Magazine is accessible for the non-geek, although some of it will seem like a foreign language.  But I mention it more as a symbol of things to come – there was an article in the previous issue (That I actually haven’t read, but the new issue mentions it) about someone installing Ubuntu on his grandmother’s computer, and how happy she’s been with it.  When people who didn’t use a computer until well into adulthood start using and being happy with Linux, it’s good for everyone.

Imagine you could go buy a computer, and they’d ask you, “Which operating system would you like?”, and you could choose whatever you wanted.  There would be real choice, and real competition.  Right now, for the vast majority of people, you either buy a Mac or you run Windows.  But Ubuntu isn’t far off.  And if Ubuntu succeeds at bringing Linux to the masses (And their deal with Dell is a huge step forward), then other distributions will follow.

Anyway, it’s exciting.  At least, I’m excited.

I win again!

That’s two more parking tickets adjudicated. I guess that means forgiven. I leave looking that up as an exercise for you, the reader. DDOT got back to me, and said that the Zone 1 parking restrictions were not supposed to be enforced until August 27th, so both of my tickets will be forgiven. So, if you live on the 1400 block of Harvard Street, NW, and you received a ticket for failure to display a Residential Parking Permit for Zone 1 before August 27th, 2007, you still have time to contest it. Contact the DMV, or contact Councilmember Graham’s office if that doesn’t work. Just don’t pay that ticket.

And then there was one

I have one functional OS. At least, mostly functional. I’m running Ubuntu now. Still no Windows, but I haven’t tried to fix it.

My graphics card is not 100% (I don’t have resolution higher than 1024, which kind of sucks). And the Gnome settings manager, which I haven’t tried to fix. But wireless worked right out of the box, and here I am, posting away on the new machine.

It’s pretty exciting. Still a little way to go, but my confidence is renewed.

No one gets the internet like the porn industry

My new laptop just shipped, and I’m very excited, and compulsively checking the UPS tracking every four seconds.  You know how you can plug a tracking number from UPS, FedEx, USPS, whatever, into Google, and it will take you to the tracking info?  This is hugely helpful, and is one of the things I love about Google.

Anyway, I plugged in the tracking number, and the first result was a link to UPS, as expected.

The second link was to a porn site.  This is absolutely brilliant, and I almost want to go give the porn site some money just to express my admiration.  I’m not going to, though. 

But if you’re reading this, penisdance.com, you all are pretty much the best search engine optimizers ever.

Oh, the poor, misguided anti-complainers

How to Stop Complaining via Lifehacker

It’s been said that the mind is like a hyperactive monkey. The more you fight with the monkey, the more hyper it becomes. So instead just relax and observe the monkey until it wears itself out.

It’s so cute that this guy thinks he can stop people from complaining by wrestling monkeys.  I just want to pat him on his head and say, “There, there”.

I ‘m mostly kidding.  But the article might as well be about how to reverse rotation of the Earth.  I could no sooner stop complaining than stop breathing.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I will stop doing both of those things at exactly the same time, although I’m not certain which will be the cause of the other.

Still, perhaps his article will be of some use to those of you who don’t entirely embrace the art of incessant complaining.

Automatic weapons with Legos

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Book Review (and build!): Forbidden Lego

Forbidden Lego written by a pair of Lego master builders, who used to work in designing advanced Lego sets (e.g., Mindstorms). While they obviously got to work on lots of cool things while they were there, there were certain projects that just turned not to be suitable to be made into kits released by the Lego company. They wrote the book to give some kind of a tantalizing hint at the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes at Lego, and the kinds of neat things that might get released in a world without product liability suits.

If you don’t want to read the article (Which you should, but I know you’re lazy), just watch the YouTube video linked within.  It’s pretty much the best YouTube video ever.  Well, maybe not.  But it won’t get stuck in your head like Chocolate Rain.

The book includes instructions on how to make automatic weapons with Legos.  What could possibly be cooler than that?  Anyone not intrigued by a self-loading Lego catapult is no friend of mine.

Some nice fruits and vegetables

We finally made it down to the U St. farmers market on Saturday.  It happens every Saturday, 9am-1pm, at 14th and U St NW.  I was quite pleased with the visit.  We got some really nice vegetables that the wife turned into brunch shortly thereafter, and I got some great apples.  I don’t remember what type they are – nothing I’d ever heard of.  But they’re very good.  I just ate one this morning.

I’d like to do more shopping at markets like that.  I don’t know how local the actual farmers are, but certainly more local than almost all the produce you find in the grocery store.  There’s a big debate among hippies as to whether to buy organic or local.  Obviously both is best, but if you have to choose one, it’s not clear which is the better choice.  I tend to think that local produce is better, since it uses fewer resources in transit.  But I’m open to other arguments.