Dining notes: Oola and Ino Sushi

I haven’t been writing as much the last few days, partly because the show floor has kept me busy, partly because the hotel wanted me to pay for WiFi even if I already bought a day of wired Internet use in my room. Memo to Starwood: for a luxury hotel, you’re sure making me feel nickeled and dimed to death.

I had good luck on this trip with restaurants, thanks to the eGullet Forums. Monday night we tried Oola on Folsom Street, just a block or so south and west of the Moscone Center. Fabulous. A salad of peppery arugula and heirloom tomatoes followed by a daube of lamb with root vegetables—which in the 50-degree San Francisco summer night was richly fulfilling rather than overwhelming as it might have been anywhere else in the continental US. Great wine list—though a little light on my favored Southern Italian wines, they did have a Greco di Tufo from a producer I had never heard of and a good selection of Cotes du Rhone wines, which made up for it. Good ambience too, even if it was a former elevator repair shop.

Tonight my coworker and I were looking for an early meal before we headed airportward, and he suggested sushi. I found recommendations for Ino and we went. I think it was some of the finest sushi and sashimi I’ve ever had. The nigiri, with a little wasabi paste between the fish and the rice, was super fresh and bracing; the sashimi was just brilliant. I have to put in a special word for the unagi, which is broiled to order and served with a suggestion to skip the soy sauce, and may be the most perfect serving of eel I’ve ever tasted. The restaurant itself is tiny, a small mom and pop shop in a Japanese-focused shopping mall next to the Radisson, and very clean—the finished nigiri is placed directly on the sushi bar in front of you. The service was great and personable too, with the wife giving my co-worker a hard time for ordering a Coke (he sheepishly changed to a glass of white wine) and both owners filling us in on the best place to catch a cab after dinner. Highly recommended.

Wonder and loss

white building on brackbill farm against the sky, lancaster

It was good to see my extended family over the last two days, but sad as well. My great-uncle Hershey Brackbill passed away on Saturday. What was originally going to be just another annual family reunion turned into a commemoration of Hershey.

To back up: My grandfather had eleven brothers and sisters, of whom all but two survived to adulthood. For many years the ten remaining siblings, even after the passing of my great grandfather Harry, have brought the family together summer after summer, and the part of the family that stayed in Lancaster County (virtually everyone in that generation and most of their children) formed a tight knit extended family.

But recently the family has been thinning. After the second church service this morning I walked with Esta down the hill to pay respects to my grandmother. On the way I passed the markers of Hershey’s brother Jake, who died earlier this year, and Florence, who passed away several years ago. I also passed Hershey’s tombstone, which he will share with his first wife Jane; his stone was awaiting his final date. So the family is coming together in a corner of the cemetery at Leacock Presbyterian.

Fortunately the living family was able to come together in a more substantial tribute this morning. My second cousin Don Brackbill got a chorus of eleven Brackbill men, whether by blood or marriage, to sing an anthem at both Sunday services—in the Old Leacock church, which dates back to 1750 and is as historic as it is sweltering on an August morning, and the “new” Leacock church, which is probably close to 100 years old and is the one that was a block and a half down Route 30 from my grandparents’ home when I was growing up. The music was nice, the theology—the wonder of God’s love—somewhat better.

After services we all headed to the picnic, where my mother decided it was time for a changing of the guard and had me lead the family in the singing of the doxology (something my father or my cousin Lee would have otherwise done) and my sister the seminarian, as the most ecclesiastical person there, lead the prayer. Given how rarely I can spend time with the family, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable leading the song, which may have been the point for all I know, but it felt like a passing of the torch anyway.

And who is grabbing it? My mother’s generation, with a few exceptions, stayed pretty close to Lancaster and the rest of the family. My generation? One of my cousins is close by but the other is in Puerto Rico; other cousins were getting married in Michigan this weekend while another, my cousin Chris, lives on the west coast. As we spread further apart, the capacity of the yearly gatherings in Lancaster to keep the family bonds together is likely to strain.

There are solutions, I think, but I’m too tired to chase them tonight. Instead, I’ll close with an assortment of photos from the day. They won’t win any awards, but at least the resolution is higher than my last batch of Lancaster County photos.

Notes from the train

Written Saturday afternoon as I rode south from Boston:

I’m on the Acela, a few minutes outside New Haven. The car is filling up, but I have no seat companion as yet. The sun was out as we traveled along the Atlantic coast in Rhode Island and the early part of Connecticut, and it was as though we skimmed just above the surface of the water as we crossed coastal inlets and rivers. We’re inland now, and the scenery is, in that peculiar Northeast way, uglier; where there is no trash along the tracks, there are industrial parking lots or brown bracken covered banks. But there are still plots of wetlands here and there among the parked tanker trucks and huddled subdivisions, their backs to the train.

Part of the feeling of coasting is the inexpensive pair of noise cancelling headphones I picked up on my last trip to San Francisco. I’m trying to keep up my policy of listening at least once to every new track I add to my iTunes library, so my iPod is full of enormous lossless copies of various classical and jazz tracks. At the moment it’s the Keller Quartet’s string version of The Art of the Fugue.

In fact, the only thing missing at present is an Internet connection. At the speed we’re moving, no open networks stay accessible long enough to permit a WiFi connection. It’s kind of fun seeing the names of some of the secured ones, though, such as the thoughfully named “Honeypot”. It’s also nice, frankly, just being able to use the laptop, something that becomes just about impossible with the less generously proportioned seats in coach on the airplane.

Gearing up

Tomorrow kicks off a virtual “road month” for me. I’m taking the train to the Brackbill family picnic tomorrow; leaving the picnic early on Sunday to fly to San Francisco for the Pink Elephant ITIL Case Studies Symposium; coming back only to turn around next week for a sales meeting in Stowe, Vermont; then relaxing for a week prior to the Munich trip in mid-September. Hopefully it will be quiet for the rest of September, as I also have a trip to the HDI ITIM conference in early October.

Of all the travel, I’m most looking forward to the trip tomorrow. I get to spend time with my first-cousin-once-removed Johnathan. I spoke to him on the phone for the first time yesterday (when I met him before, he was too busy putting things in his mouth to have learned to speak yet). I’m looking forward to teaching him “A birdie with a load of dirt” and other family jokes.

The CD Project: Other people’s laughter

Ripped in the last few days: about eight or nine PDQ Bach albums and a bunch of jazz (Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck). —Let’s read that back. Eight or nine PDQ Bach albums. Surely, as with the Anonymous 4 recordings, one or two would suffice?

To hear me tell a joke today (or to read this blog), one would never guess that I used to gather comedic material like a beetle collects dung. Bill Cosby, Allen Sherman, the Smothers Brothers… and the psychotic classical tweakings of Peter Schickele, professor of music at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

I remember getting about a third of the musical jokes. Mostly, though, I remember listening with my parents and their friends as they roared at the musical jokes—which they did get. And I think I wanted that laughter, or that attention.

So I memorized the album that we had (“Portrait of PDQ Bach,”) then chased PDQ through album after album, listening to such wonders as the oratorio “The Seasonings” and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice: An Opera in One Unnatural Act.” And after a while, I stopped laughing. Either Schickele was running out of material, I was losing my sense of humor, or both.

But one weird connection in the last recording in my list (The Short-Tempered Clavier): playing piano in the title work is none other than Christopher O’Riley, better known (or perhaps more infamous) for his piano renditions of Radiohead pieces. Who knew?

Insulated

Well, partly insulated, anyway. A contractor came out for about two hours yesterday and insulated the attic—placed batts around the blower for the upstairs AC and blew loose fiberglass everywhere else, and installed screened, louvered vents in both gables. Last night was the first time the upstairs AC cut off before 11 PM since it was installed.

Unbelievable, how much of a difference this has made. Even with the AC there was still the sense of oppressive heat overhead upstairs. But now it feels like the whole house is cooler.

Our first month’s electricity with the AC was $50 less than our monthly oil bill during the winter. I think, thanks to yesterday’s work, that month’s bill will stand as a high water mark.

Next week: the gas-fired high efficiency boiler, at last. I spent last Sunday building a platform against our basement mechanical room wall where it will be mounted. The basement walls slope inward by about five inches about three feet off the ground, and the plumbing contractors needed a straight shot out of the bottom of the boiler for the pipes. So I bolted 3/4″ plywood to the upper concrete wall with big-ass concrete anchors; screwed two-by-fours in a square frame around the outside of the frame; screwed another layer of two-by-fours with longer screws through the first layer into the plywood; and secured a final layer of 3/4″ plywood through the two-by-fours with big lag bolts. Final result sticks out from the bottom of the wall by about 1/4″ and isn’t going anywhere.

I am, though—catching a train to Lancaster, PA on Saturday for the family picnic, then flying from Philadelphia on Sunday to San Francisco for a conference for another few days. So I’ll miss the reveal of the boiler. Maybe, though, when I get back it will be working and the old oil burner will be gone. That would be something.

CD Project Days 1-2: So many

As I write this post, I’m ripping the last of my J. S. Bach discs. I am going more or less, on this project to digitize all my music, in the same order as my discs sit in their cabinet: classical first, then jazz, world, folk, Christmas, and blues, then rock, boxed sets and whatever else is left. I’m actually alternating blocks of classical and jazz so that the library isn’t too overwhelmingly classical for the next month or so.

As I go through the process, I have the opportunity to ask myself questions. Like: why do I have four Anonymous 4 discs? Isn’t one of them enough? In a sense, the answer is yes: they all sound the same if you aren’t listening too closely. Though if I hadn’t kept exploring the group, I wouldn’t have found their sublime Miracles of Sant’Iago, which granted is still four perfect female voices singing Renaissance music but which has much more distinctive material to work with.

But yeah, I have a lot of discs. Why? Sure, I love music, but so do my parents, and they just listen to the radio. Why do I—did I, I guess—buy so many? I read a post recently that talks about the “acquisitive nature of men.” Maybe that’s it, or maybe that’s just a convenient shorthand.

I’ve also had an opportunity to gripe, yet again, about the metadata for classical discs in the Gracenote CDDB. While most jazz data is getting pretty good—even starting to include accurate composer and recording date info, if not lists of performers—I’ve found classical discs that put the name of the composer in the title track, or the piece name in the title track and the movement in the artist.

My preferred order is to use the Grouping field for the work title, as it’s done on the iTunes Music Store, then movement in the track title, performer in the artist line, composer in the composer line (gee, what a concept). Recording date goes in the Year field. I would love to have more dates to play with, but for right now working by composer gets me where I need to go there. To display the information, I made a smart playlist, which simply chooses all music with a genre of Classical, and customized the displayed columns for the playlist so that the order is Grouping, Title, Time, Composer, Artist.

Stats at the end of ripping the last disc of the Furtwängler recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: 9134 songs; 26 days, 5 hours, 24 seconds total time; 46.10 gigabytes. Of these, the cds ripped for the project constitute: 349 songs; 21 hours, 26 minutes, 27 seconds time; 5.81 GB. The whole library numbers include my existing library, and will probably grow dramatically until I get into the rock area, where I’ve already digitized much of the music albeit at a lower bandrate.

Very, very hungry

NY Times: In Virginia Beach, Restaurants Where the Food Moves Sideways. Probably the first time that a New York Times reviewer has darkened the door of a Chick’s Oyster Bar. Props to Mimi Sheraton (is that a real name??) for finding the restaurants in the list, referencing Beautiful Swimmers, and calling out Hatteras clam chowder, on which I was raised. Boos for missing the Duck-In, which has a lousy buffet but the finest bucket of boiled shrimp, and one of the finest views, money can buy.

Friends for dinner

Lisa and I were lucky enough to get an old friend, Daria, to join us for dinner last night. I knew Daria from my undergrad years at UVA, where she was the roommate of Caroline, a good friend in the physics program. Then I bumped into her at Sloan. In about three weeks we’ll lose Daria to the vast midwest, where she’ll be relocating to join her fianc&eacute. So we were thrilled that we finally got her to join us for dinner, and we pulled out all the stops with three experimental dishes.

Lisa made a version of a broth-based minestrone with cabbage, zucchini, carrots, onions, garlic, celery, tomato, white beans, and herbs. We jointly produced a pollo diavolo — a broiling chicken flattened, covered with crushed black peppercorns and a little salt, marinated with olive oil and lemon juice, and grilled. And the meal ended with a black cherry granita: tasty but not quite right (perhaps a little too sweet—we’ll definitely make it again and play with the proportions).

Now that Lisa is regularly traveling for business, it was nice to have the chance to collaborate in the kitchen with her on a weeknight. My only regret is there wasn’t much chicken left over. Maybe next time I’ll make two.

The CD Project commences

As a result of this past Tax-Free Weekend, I now have the hard disk space necessary to start digitizing all my CDs. (It’s a long story and involves a painful morning spent staring at the SBOD while trying to go over finances with Lisa, and my mentioning that moving my music files off my laptop would greatly free the system, as most of the slowdown appears to be in paging to and from the hard disk when there is very little free disk space. Also involves purchasing some wool carpets for the living room and stairs, but that’s a different story.)

I ended up with more of a solution than I thought, actually. The way I had been laying it out in my head, this was a two phase project with months of separation between the phases:

  1. Move most or all existing music files off the laptop to an external drive; change the music folder location to the external drive; rip CDs losslessly to external drive. Music can be played as long as external drive is physically connected to computer.
  2. Connect external drive permanently to home network, either by placing it in an enclosure that would allow for network access (turning it into NAS), or by connecting it to a new machine that would be connected permanently to the network.

Obviously there was potentially a large expense attached to the second phase, which is why I was delighted when Lisa found a gadget from D-Link that connects USB and USB 2.0 drives to the network via a 10/100 Ethernet cable. It now looks like my second phase is going to consist of taking the drive, once all the CDs are ripped, and plugging it into our hub.

The actual storage part was a 300 GB Maxtor drive and a Venus enclosure from AMSElectronics—previously recommended as a low noise enclosure with both USB 2.0 and FireWire support, and, as it happens, available off the shelf at our local MicroCenter.

I’ll post updates as I go through my collection. I can’t promise that my progress will be as artful or as quick as Fury’s—I’ll be lucky if I get more than five CDs ripped a night, at which rate my collection will be entirely transferred by Eastertime next year. I intend to take the opportunity to fill in performer, performance date, and composer information and cover art as I rip the albums, which (particularly for jazz discs) will probably take a long time.

But the first album I ripped using the lossless codec, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, went quickly—just as quickly as ripping to MP3 or AAC. The file sizes were in line with my estimates too, with the 9-minute-plus recording coming in at about 44 megabytes.

Morning Car-B-Q

Exiting the Mass Pike onto Route 30 in Framingham this morning, I smelled smoke. It was a frustratingly slow rainy commute, so at first I thought I was just smelling cranial smoke. But no: There was a car ahead with a bad smoke problem. Really bad. Can’t see inside the car because of all the smoke in the passenger cabin bad.

I passed the car as the driver was getting out. He was running around to the front of the car, which, I noted with some alarm, now featured flames starting to lick out from around the edges of the hood. And he was trying to open the hood.

I called 911, of course, and went on my way. But it made me think: Darwin Award candidate. If you can actually see flames coming out of your engine compartment, do you:

  1. Run like hell
  2. Stay a safe distance away from the car and wait for the fire department
  3. Risk burning your hands and a fireball in your face to open the hood

I know which one I wouldn’t choose.

—Incidentally, the title is the word that would inevitably be used in the radio traffic report back in Washington DC any time that a car fire occurred, and it always creeped me out. Because on the one hand, I could visualize people hurt and thousands of dollars worth of damage, and then at the same time … barbecue! So I just had to inflict that little piece of mental damage on my loving readers this morning. Happy Monday.

QTN™: Oud Beersel, Oude Geueze Vielle

I’ve been holding onto this one since my first pilgrimage to Downtown Wine and Spirits. My favorite kind of beer on the planet (very broadly speaking) is Belgian, and my favorite Belgian beer style is geueze, the amazingly complex melding of young and old lambics in one wild-yeast-fermented mouth bomb. And, as of this writing, my favorite geueze might be the Oude Geueze Vielle from the Brouwerij Oud Beersel.

What to say about such a complex beer? The nose is peppery with citrus overtones, with deeper notes of earth. The flavor is a little sweet immediately followed by a yeasty sour depth, with the lingering carbonation picking up the flavor and brightening it again. It’s all in perfect balance, and spectacularly tasty. Almost as refreshing as a Flemish red, but with a bready aftertaste that inevitably recalls Champagne—fitting, as Michael Jackson calls beers in this style “the Champagnes of the beer world.”

Lisa tried a little of this and said, “Wow. That’s different. Save me some.” I regretfully complied, though not without severe temptation.

I tasted this with a non-traditional food accompaniment—a platter of burnt ends and pulled pork from Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q. Somewhat to my surprise, it was a great combination, the sweetness and smokiness of the meat playing perfectly against the breadiness of the beer, and the vinegar in the greens joustling happily against the tartness of the geueze. Belgian beers may not replace sweet tea at Southern roadhouses anytime soon, but they may well at my table from now on.

North End boom

low tech google map hack showing north end buildings reported to be affected by underground explosions. the map pin is where we used to live.

As in “kaboom.” A pretty good roundup of this week’s underground fires and manhole explosions at Universal Hub—three this week—turns up personal observations from Catherine, Marianne Mancusi, Jeremi Karnell, Kristen, and Ron Newman. The Boston Globe article suggests that a fault in a buried electrical cable is to blame.

From the locations mentioned in the article, Lisa and I would probably have been affected if we were still in our North Street apartment (our apartment was where the Google Maps pin is in the photo).

Incidentally, that there were five bloggers who were personally affected by this is still nothing short of amazing to me. I think that three years ago I was probably the only blogger in the neighborhood.

Mmmm, bacon

The Bacon Show. “ONE BACON RECIPE PER DAY, EVERY DAY, FOREVER.” Um, subscribed.

Via Metafilter, where there are some really alarming links in response, including the Baconoff, a competitive bacon-eating contest party. Surely they can’t mean “each round is one package of bacon” each, can they?