DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Here’s a change of scenery for my 2560x1024 desktop… NASA’s awesome Earth at Night image. Click the thumbnails to download the fullsize images.

(Previous desktop image: Mount Shasta.)

If you’re still driving a single-monitor system, you should check out this deal at Amazon: a 17'' Samsung LCD, 1024x1280 resolution, for $275. You could buy two of these for less than I spent on my first Samsung 17'' LCD. Arrange them side-by-side and your productivity will double, at least. Especially if you use one of my cool desktop backgrounds.

(It’s actually true that using a bigger virtual desktop increases productivity. If my physical desk were bigger, I’d add a 3rd LCD in portrait orientation between the other two.)

Pictured is the second-best Tom Kha Hed I’ve ever had.

The best Tom Kha Hed I’ve ever had was at the same restaurant, the previous night, when it had even more stuff in it, including tofu, which is not normally something I get excited about, but in this case, wow.

(Thai restaurants in Germany offer a variation of this soup adapted to the local cuisine and culture. It’s called “Tom Kha Headcheese.”)

If you’re in the Gaslamp area of San Diego, check out Thai Time near the Westin Horton Plaza. The curries are great, and the price is right.

I booked my room for Etech at the Westin several weeks ago. As previously noted, the price was ridiculous ($215/night including tax), but I thought it would be important to stay at the site of the conference so I wouldn’t lose any schmooze time commuting to a cheaper hotel or that dry spot beneath the overpass.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay at the Westin for the entire conference, because the Wednesday night of that week was already sold out. I booked a room at a Best Western that charged a third less even though it included breakfast and in-room Wifi. (To my dismay it smelled strongly of disenfectant, about which the only nice thing I can say is that at least it didn’t still smell like whatever it smelled like before being hosed down with Lysol.)

On the final day of the conference, I cabbed back to the Westin with my 1000-lb duffle in tow. I dragged it painfully to the bell desk and asked to stow it for the day. “Only for hotel guests, sir,” said the bellperson with an irritatingly dismissive air. I explained that I had, until very recently, been a hotel guest, that in fact I’d checked out the day prior against my will and was returning for the final day of a conference on the second floor. Exercising iron-fisted control over his domain (by which I mean the luggage closet) the bellperson refused, citing the extreme number of check-ins and check-outs that day, although how that was relevant he didn’t deign to elucidate.

At that point the front-desk clerk, sensing conflict, came over to see if she should help with the public rejection of what I thought was a pretty reasonable customer-service request. The bellperson said something along the lines of “He says he stayed here the previous night.” I didn’t see him roll his eyes but it wouldn’t have surprised me. The clerk then returned to her terminal to do something I found both fascinating and insulting: to verify whether I’d really been a guest! As if people who attend expensive conferences and spend $200+/night on hotel rooms routinely lie about it to the staff.

But, hell, maybe they do. This is only my first conference. Who knows what fun I’ve been missing?

In a discussion of the origins of names, my brother pointed out that the suffix -el, as found at the end of some Hebrew names, means “God.” For example, the name Raphael means “God has healed.” Just for fun we made a list of all the other -el names we could think of. Not having a copy of a Hebrew-English dictionary handy, we had to speculate as to some of the names’ meanings.

Following is an excerpt of a journal entry I attempted to write late last December, about a trip to St. Louis the previous week for my little sister’s wedding.

The rest of the weekend happened meal-to-meal. The only moments we weren’t eating, we were waiting for appetizers. We did take a long walk on Friday, but we were walking to a restaurant.

Here’s a typical fancy dinner entree in St. Louis: eighteen ounces of meat, and an asparagus spear. Vegetables are simply a garnish. I felt like I was back in Germany. Or, worse, Cincinnati.

My family, knowing my self-imposed dietary restrictions, made arrangements for vegetarian and vegan entrees whenever possible. Their good intentions were filtered through the limited capacity of local commercial kitchens: St. Louis chefs don’t know how to cook vegetarian meals. Wedding guests were served poached salmon and a pork chop, two small potatoes, and two or three pieces of garnish. My vegan plate, mercifully free of cheese sauce or other secretions of livestock, consisted of a scoop of bland white rice, a row of bland steamed garnish, and — salvation! — a grilled portobello. I’m not that fond of portobellos, but it was the best thing on the plate. Any portobello in a storm.