Long Weekend in LA

Had a business trip to LA. Took the wife with me for a weekend getaway before the trip. We visited Santa Monica, Pasadena (CalTech is there; we've already established my wife and I are nerds), Malibu, Beverly Hills. Ate at Spago's. Met Wolfgang Puck.

Dune 7 Sucks (we knew it would)

I won't expand on what others have already stated so well - the insipid writing, the assumption that the readers are idiots who need to be beat over the head with backstory and foreshadowing, the 1-dimensional cartoonish characters, the ridiculous idea of bringing all the characters from the original series and the prequels back, etc.

It's bad enough that the enemy that the Honoured Matres are running away from is Omnius (that's not a spoiler, anybody who read either the House series or the Legends series would know that). But the old couple from the end of Chapterhouse are ... Omnius and Erasmus?! Are they kidding.

We are constantly reminded that BH and KJA have access to Frank Herbert's notes. Well, that may be true, but I am 100% certain that those notes have nothing to do with this book. There is no way on Earth that Frank Herbert's notes indicated that Omnius was the unknown enemy because in Frank Herbert's universe there was no Omnius. When he was talking about domination by thinking machines he clearly had something more subtle in mind that the simplistic interpretation of BH and KJA. And he certainly didn't intend the old couple (who represented him and his wife) to be machines.

Nothing but Noodles

Tonight my wife and I had dinner at Nothing but Noodles. What a great place!

First, there's the price ... how many places can one get a good meal for $7 a person?

Second, there's the food ... my wife and I both ordered the salad & noodles combo. My wife's was the Pear & Balsamic Spinach Salad with Southwest Chipotle Noodles. I had Oriental Salad with Pad Thai Noodles. It's really cool that they could do an equally good job on four such different dishes.

Third, there's the service ... very attentive. Not what you'd expect from a fast food place, but rather what you'd get from a high end restaurant.

Highly recommended.

Trip to San Francisco Day 8

Had breakfast at The Buena Vista Restaurant, where Irish Coffee was first introduced to the United States (my wife had one). The place is really small and tables are shared; we shared our table with a couple from Las Vegas. We briefly peeked into the Musee Mechanique. Then it was on to Alcatraz.





Darwin Coon, one of the last 29 convicts to leave Alcatraz, was there selling his (not particularly good, if Amazon reviews are an indication) book. The time on the island was definitely interesting. We did the audio tour and spent some time wandering the facility. A little more time would have allowed us to the exhibits discussing things like the occupation of the island by Native American activists in the late 60s.

Back on the mainland, we ate cioppino at Cioppino's on the Wharf, and followed this up with a sundae at Ghirardelli's. For some reason the sundae was all melted; the one we had at the Downtown Disney store in Orlando last year was much better.

The slow meandering walk back to our hotel from the Wharf was possibly the best part of the trip, probably because we knew the city pretty well at this point. Lombard Street (the "crookedest street in the world" but not really) offerred some spectacular views. Columbus Avenue, with the best view of the Transamerica building anywhere in the city. We made a brief stop at the Fairmont Hotel, where the UN charter was drafted in 1945.

Eventually, relucatanty we got ourselves to the airport and took the redeye home. This was an excellent vacation. My wife and I have resolved not to let 2 years pass before the next one.

Trip to San Francisco Day 7

Took the last of the three cable car lines today, the California Line to the Embarcadero. Saw the lobby of the Hyatt hotel, which the tour guides recommended. Eh.

We had breakfast at Noah's, a local bagel chain. Took the ferry to Sausalito. Had lunch at Caffe Trieste, a local Italian chain. Trekked out to the piers with the house boats. They were very pictureque and definitely an interesting lifestyle. When we got back to the Ferry building in San Francisco we ate at Ferry Plaza Seafood, which was one of few bad meals we had on this trip.

That night we had drinks at the Top of the Mark. The view from there is very nice, or rather WOULD BE very nice except for all the fog. We really couldn't see much. I can see why the big things there are breakfast and lunch. Breakfast and a nice view for $25 seems like a much better deal than a drink and a crappy view for $10. At least my wife and I got to dance.

Trip to San Francisco Day 6

Stopped at the Westfield Shopping Mall on Market Street, then took a bus through Chinatown to Fishermans Wharf. We did one of the many bay cruises and took the trip's best pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.




We had lunch at Boudin's, the sourdough bakery and restaurant. The clam chowder in a bread bowl was awesome, at least as good as any we had in Boston. After lunch, we did the trolley hop tour of town, which among other things included a tour of Pacific Heights, which we had not previously seen.



Later that day, we visited the Wax Museum on Fishermans Wharf, which we would normally not pay $13 to see but it was included with the Go San Francisco cards that my wife and I had obtained prior to our trip. We were really glad we didn't pay afterwards as the wax figures were not particularly good - it was definitely no Madame Tussaud's.

We did another cable car trip, this time on the Powell Hyde Line, which is considered to be the best of the three lines. We did not do it from one end to the other, but our trip did cover the awesome scenic part of the ride. We got back to our neck of the woods in Nob Hill and had dinner at Roxanne's Cafe.

Wine Country - Trip to San Francisco Day 5

Did a tour of the wine country today. We visited Kirkland Ranch and Madonna Estate in Napa, had lunch at Maya Restaurant in the Sonoma Square, then went on to Viansa in Sonoma. I'll spare you my amateurish attempts to describe the wines we sampled, but in general they were of high quality, with the best probably being the ones from Madonna Estate. We did learn quite a bit about wine making and wine tasting. Getting back to San Francisco late in the day, we had dinner at Tad's. We finished the day up with some quick shopping at Nordstrom and at the Nike and Levis stores.

Berkeley - Trip to San Francisco Day 4

Another day, another college. This morning we took BART to Berkeley. The tour of the school was interesting. There were not as many freaks as I would have expected; maybe it's because school was not in session. As far as the architecture on the campus, it was a far cry from the subtle luxury of the Stanford campus, as you would expect from a public school. The school's main library is a very impressive building; my wife described it as a little piece of luxury in a generally plain campus.

UC Berkeley has six Nobel Laureates on their current faculty: George Akerlof (Economics, 2001), Daniel McFadden (Economics, 2000), Steven Chu (Physics, 1997, who won the prize while at Stanford), Yuan Lee (Chemistry, 1986), Charles Townes (Physics, 1964) and Donald Glaser (Physics, 1960).

Our tour guide pointed out parking spaces with a "NL" sign. Apparently one of the perks of winning the Nobel Prize is that you get an assigned parking space, a quite valuable benefit given the extremely tight parking situation on campus. We saw a car with the NL parking decal in one of the spaces; based on its location it was probably Dr. Lee's car. Later we saw a second car in one of the NL spaces, but it wasn't a second Laureate sighting - it was just a dumbass who got a parking ticket for not realizing a space right outside the physics building was too good to be true.



Saw the town, very pretty. Walked around Telegraph Avenue. Wanted to go see Cody's Books, about which we had heard good things. When we arrived, it had closed. At first I thought it was a shame; then I saw this diatribe posted on the door.

One would think in a society that puts so much emphasis on information that a store like Cody's would thrive. But people wanted a different kind of information that was provided by the Internet. They wanted it fast and often, they wanted it glib. Cody's was offering something that was a little deeper, a little slower. [...] Great books that couldn't get the media hype were forgotten, left on the shelves and ultimately returned to the warehouses. We resisted these trends. But in spite of this, we found that increasingly we were selling more media-driven best sellers and less of our wonderful wide ranging back list. [...] We have celebrated the diversity of the human intellect. It is with great sadness that I must say that the world does not embrace these values today.

As somebody who still reads "great books" on a regular basis and who truly celebrates the human intellect, spare me your righteous indignation. I'm inclined to think that the true reason your store had to close is that you couldn't really accept the reality of your business. Did you regularly berate your customers without even realizing it, as you did by taping this multiple-page lecture to your door? Moe's Books two doors down from your place was a very enjoyable bookstore and seems to be doing quite well.

After that we walked to the Gourment Ghetto neighborhood, which boasts some great restaurants. My wife was positively giddy as we walked around. We ate at Chez Panisse, which is consistently ranked as one of the best restaurants in the world by Restaurant Magazine (#20 in this year's list). The owner, Alice Waters, is often credited as the founder of California cuisine. The restaurant's menu changes daily, so that she can serve only the freshest ingredients. And for lunch it was quite reasonable, only $60 or so for the two of us. For desert we had Ciao Bella gelato next door to Chez Panisse.

We returned to the campus. I bought a math calendar in the campus bookstore. Continuing to tour the campus, we saw the physics building - which aside from the three Nobel Laureates previously mentioned, also boasts the authors of two of my graduate textbooks: John Jackson (Classical Electrodynamics) and Charles Kittel (Solid State Physics). The author of yet another book I used in school, Frederick Reif (Statistical and Thermal Physics), also had an office there until recently.

Our last stop was the law school, which we ran into somewhat by accident. My wife recognized it immediately, without a map, due to the ridiculously long-winded quotes engraved on plaque above the two entrances.

You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavour, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome. (Cardozo)

When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who once wrought at Bayeaux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past--figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every worldshaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life. (Holmes)

Leaving aside that these quotes are a little too heavy and a lot too long for an inscription over a door, they both struck me as more than little pompous. "You must order the life of mankind"? Justice Cardozo had a somewhat exaggerated opinion of the value of his profession to humanity. "Figures too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils"? Holmes had a somewhat exaggerated opinion of the intelligence of his colleagues relative to the general public.

Stanford - Trip to San Francisco Day 3

As part of our vacation, my wife and I were planning to see Stanford and Berkeley (yes, we're geeks - deal with it). We jumped on the CalTrain, to Palo Alto. Got to Stanford just in time for our tour at 11am. We learned that it is the biggest campus in the country (and the second biggest in the world behind the University of Moscow) at 8180 acres.

One of the things our tour guide discussed was the houses on campus. Many are the usual communal homes, Greek housing or dormitory setups you would expect. However, some of them have their own chefs. His own house apparently has a chef who turned down a job at a four-star restaurant to remain at Stanford. Must be nice. No wonder college tuition is through the roof!

Another interesting story that our tour guide told us concerned the physics department. A physics professor whose office was on on the first floor of the building won the Nobel Prize in 1996 (Douglas Osheroff, who shared the prize with Lee & Richardson at Cornell for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3). A physics professor on the second floor won the Nobel Prize in 1997 (Steven Chu, who shared the prize with Cohen-Tannoudji and Phillips). A professor of physics and applied physics whose office was on the third floor won the Nobel Prize in 1998 (Robert Laughlin, who shared the prize with Störmer and Tsui for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect). I assume at that point, the physics department started lobbying furiously for the addition of a fourth floor to their building ... alas, the 1999 prize went to tHooft and Veltman of the Netherlands.

Stanford claims 16 Nobel Laureates on their faculty, but this is a gross exaggeration because their definition is way too liberal. If you exclude fellows at the Hoover Institution (which is not in any way affiliated with teaching at Stanford) and emeriti faculty (who are retired), they really have only three Laureates. Interestingly, they are all in physics (Osheroff, Laughlin, and Richard Taylor, a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons). Chu is at Berkeley now.

The first PC to run Google is on display in one of their computer science buildings. They have twin buildings donated by the estates of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard, the HP founders. Not to be outdone, Microsoft has recently made a large donation to the computer science department.

We toured the Hoover Institution (no, there's no access to Thomas Sowell's office) and went up to the top of the tower, for a fantastic view of the campus and the city of Palo Alto.



We left campus and went into town, where we had lunch at Pluto's. (By the way, isn't it a shame about Pluto's downgrade to "dwarf planet" status?)

We got back to San Francisco and had dinner at Sears Fine Foods. Dinner was good, and for dessert we had their "world famous" pancakes.

Trip to San Francisco Day 2

This morning we took our first of many cable car rides, on the Powell-Mason line. We rode it from one end on Market Street to the other right by Fisherman's Wharf. The first stop was buying a jacket (yes, that's right, a jacket in California in August). We had read that it got cold in San Francisco because of the cold air blowing in from the bay, but we were unprepared for how cold "cold" was. Our touring the day before, particularly walking on streets at the top of hills and riding on the open second floor of a double-decker bus, convinced us that we most definitely needed heavier clothes than we had packed with us. Our first purchase was a nice jacket for $17, but we were somewhat unhappy with the San Francisco logo on it. A little more looking around, and I found the nicest leather jacket. It was only $20, and it's much better than the jackets I have at home that have cost $50-$60. Tourist trap, my butt.

We walked around Pier 39, saw the sea lions on the dock (amazing sight!) and had a really nice lunch at Chic's, with an outstanding view of the bay. We toured the city further, and had dinner at Lori's Diner.

Trip to San Francisco Day 1

My wife and I finally took a vacation this year. My wife and I went to Boston in August 2002 and to NYC in August 2004. There were reasons we couldn't find time to go on vacation in 2001 (got married and moved to Atlanta) or in 2003 (due to my job change), but I have no idea why we didn't take an extended vacation last year (we just did short trips to Miami and Orlando). I was way overdue for a vacation. This year's destination: San Francisco!





We arrived around noon, checked into our hotel and walked around Union Square where our hotel was located. We then took a cab to Fisherman's Wharf. [After we got back from our trip, I learned about this story which described the Wharf as "the mother of all tourist traps ... dominated by countless souvenir shops, chain restaurants and street hawkers." Crowded? Yup, no question, annoyingly so. Street hawkers? Yup, so walk around them, no big whoop. Chain restaurants? Yup, tons of them, but my wife and I didn't eat at any of them and we managed to find some good local restaurants (which were slightly pricey, but not outrageously so). Not really sure where the author is coming from.]

We bought tickets to Alcatraz; we'd been warned that you had to get them far in advance. Good thing we did too; turns out we could only fit it into our schedule on the last day we were going to be in San Francisco. We had lunch at a great mexican/deli place. Yes, you read right - at this place you could get a taco or corned beef on rye. And it was surprisingly good. (The place had free internet access; we came across quite a few places that did; it seems to be the culture there.) Then, we bought tickets for the double decker tour bus, which gave us a good overview of the town as well as transportation to get around the city to the various sights we wanted to see.

We toured the city the rest of the day. Eventually, tired and happy, we made our way back to our hotel and had dinner at Persimmon, a middle eastern place that was just alright but had the best feature of all - it was just up the street from our hotel.

Cuba

More pictures of the sad state of Cuba after 47 years of Castro's government on my website.

[Thanks to LL for sending me these pictures.]

Twelfth Night

My wife and I saw the Georgia Shakespeare Festival's production of Twelfth Night tonight. I had read the play but had never seen a production. As usual, the company put on a great show. With one exception (also as usual), Crystal Dickinson, who played Olivia, was horrible in her role - completely unable to carry the part in a believable way. At this point I have seen her perform Shakespeare (four times - Macbeth, R&J, Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night), I have seen her perform Williams and I have seen her perform Chekhov. And in each case, she has performed exactly the same role. I have never seen a stage actor with less range.

Yes, Prime Minister

I recently ran across a used copy of The Complete Yes Prime Minister. It's brilliant; beyond reproducing the plots of the brilliant BBC comedy, it provides all sorts of interesting background material, such as Sir Humphrey's private diary, Civil Service memos, personal recollections, etc.(The premise of the book is that it's 2024 and Jonathan Lynn and David Jay are researchers at Hacker College). I read The Complete Yes Minister back in college (1989?) and loved it, but never thought to look for the sequel. I'm glad I ran across it now.

Sidenote: Here is a website that has excellent summaries of the original TV series, as well as photos and other material. Check it out.

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is coming to the SciFi network today March 10 at 9pm. I'm not talking about re-runs of one of the old series, but an original production. Hopefully, it's as good as Battlestar Galactica.

More FEMA Katrina Problems

Congressional committee testimony that luxury hotels billed the federal government up to $438 a night for Hurricane Katrina evacuees raised the prospect of a potential price-gouging investigation Monday. While Skinner did not name the hotel, the Senate panel later identified it as the Millenium Hilton in Manhattan's financial district. The website for the hotel advertises 42-inch plasma TVs in most rooms. Skinner also said FEMA paid up to $375 a night to house Katrina evacuees in Panama City. The Senate panel identified the Florida facility as the Panama City Beachfront Condominiums, whose website says rooms have unobstructed views of the Gulf of Mexico.

"The hotels were taking advantage of an emergency situation involving innocent victims," said Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., after the hearing.

Interesting that senators' first thought is to say the HOTELS were taking advantage of the situation. It couldn't possibly be that the VICTIMS are taking advantage of the fact that the hotel tabs are being picked up by Uncle Sam to enjoy 42-inch plasma TVs and unobstructed Gulf views.