stay in the shallow end

Welcome to the first weekly “Last Week In Food” post where I tell you about all the tasty things I ate in Charlottesville. The format of this post will probably change over the next few weeks, but the general idea is that I’ll discuss individual dishes at local restaurants rather than the establishment as a whole.

Last week in food started out at Orbit on Tuesday night. I’m a big fan of their happy hour… who can argue with $2 pints of Guinness? To go with my Guinnesses, I ordered a dozen wings, extra hot and extra crispy. This particular batch didn’t come out as crispy as I like, but in general, when I want straight-up hot wings, Orbit is hard to beat.

Wednesday saw two meals. Lunch was the Jerk Chicken pizza at Mellow Mushroom. It’s their basic pizza with strips of chicken breast, pineapple, and Caribbean spices. While I love their Jerk Chicken Sandwich and their pizza, they weren’t two great tastes that taste great together. I won’t be ordering it again. Dinner was at Sticks. I tried the Kibbeh for the first time, and it tasted like what I would imagine meat falafel tasting like. As usual, the sesame beans were excellent. I love Sticks, but it’s so damn expensive, I don’t go out there nearly as much as I would if they dropped their entree prices a couple of bucks. Next time I do go, I’ll switch back to my normal lamb platter. All in all, Wednesday was a bust for discovering new and exciting Cville dishes.

Thursday was lunch at Old Virginia Fried Chicken. When I moved to Charlottesville, I was really excited when I saw that this place was so close to home. Then I went there a couple of times, and was sorely disappointed by the chicken, which tasted microwaved. That was two years ago, and I now realize that I must have just gone there at odd hours. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been back a few times, and it’s been delicious every time. Thursday I had a two piece white with baked beans, and the chicken was crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside, and well seasoned. I still rank Food of all Nations as the best fried chicken in town, but Old Virginia is definitely closing the gap.

Friday was another two meals. Lunch at Martha’s, which took one and a half freaking hours. The place was packed, and for some reason, they only had one server, who had not worked there very long. I ordered the Roasted Red Pepper and Goat Cheese Quesadilla. It was chipotle flavored flour tortilla with mozzarella, goat cheese, roasted red peppers, and portabello mushrooms served with a side salad of greens and salsa. It was very very good. My favorite thing about Martha’s is their homemade lemonade that comes with free refills. I made it through three glasses. For dinner, we splurged and went to Tokyo Rose. We ordered the Sashimi Entree, Spicy Tuna Roll, and Shrimp Tempura Roll. Considering most of my sushi consumption is at Asian, I mean China King Buffet, it was a pleasant change to have huge slices of fish, and not be as concerned as to whether or not it was going to kill me. Of course, this was right before I read Joe’s post over at bookofjoe, which informs me that all sushi will kill me. The service was absolutely atrocious. We were the only people there, and when we were ready to leave, it took a half hour for anybody to come back into the room, let alone our table. Very annoying.

And then Saturday, on the way back from the Mates of State show in DC, I had the nachos at Sheetz based on a friend’s recommendation. I can’t imagine any food being more awesome at 2 AM.

And thus ends my week in food. I wrote a lot more than I had anticipated, so you get a cookie if you made it this far.

Last night we went to NoVa to see Mates of State. They were playing at the State Theatre in Falls Church, which turned out to be an awesome venue. It reminded me a lot of the Georgia Theatre in Athena, GA where I’ve seen many a band. The venue is awesome… pretty big while still maintaining intimacy and great sound.

We got there way earlier than we needed to and ended up picking a spot pretty much front and center. It’s been a very, very long time since I’d been up front at a show, and I’d forgotten how it’s a completely different experience. We were surrounded by people that were really excited about the show, and it was very contagious.

The first opener, Hail Social, was pretty good for a first opener. The second opener was Maria Taylor, better known as half of Azure Ray, who I love. From the beginning of the show to when she started, we drifted back to about three people from the stage. In front of us was a few high school girls and one of their moms. Anyway, during Mario Taylor, this girl appeared behind us, very into the music. She asked to get in front of us just for this set, and she’d leave for Mates of State. We let her through, and she was right ahead of us. She said she loved Maria Taylor, and it was kind of cute… she knew all the words and was screaming her head off between songs. Then it went creepy… a song later, she goes through her purse, and counts out some cash. Then she taps one of the high school girls in the front on the shoulder, and offers to pay to swap spots. The girl quickly agrees, comes back next to us and looks at the $20 in her hand smiling. Then she flips it open, and there’s another $20. She flips past that and there’s another and another and another. Psycho fan girl paid $100 so she could move three feet closer to the stage. After another song I watched her reach into her purse and grab more cash to try to swap with a guy leaning against the stage front and center. He let her have the spot for free. And, true to her word, as soon as Maria Taylor finished her set, she went to the back.

Then the awesomeness began. I’ve enjoyed all the MoS shows I’ve been to, but they’ve all been in very very small venues. Well despite there being only two of them, they fill up a stage really well. The biggest plus for me was the crowd. I think on the timeline of a rise and fall of a band’s popularity, MoS is now in what I consider the sweet spot. They’re big enough to where they pack a few hundred people into a decent size venue, but small enough where people aren’t just showing up because they’ve heard of them. Everybody around us knew all the songs, and they were jumping around having a good time. When they came out for the encore, they asked us if we wanted to hear Bowie or Nico. Obviously, the correct answer is Nico, but the crowd didn’t know that, so they started with their cover of Bowie’s Starman. Then they played Nico’s These Days anyway, so it all worked out.

The show and the crowd are both the best in recent memory. It made me wonder how different it would’ve been from the back. It’s entirely possible that this show had the same energy as all the other shows I’ve been to recently, but in the back, I’m just an observer, while up front I’m a participant. In any case, I think I’ll be making a greater effort to make it out early and claim a spot near the stage. I can always brina along the DS to pass the time.

I picked up Tetris DS and Metroid Prime: Hunters on Tuesday. While I haven’t had a chance to really dig deep into them, I’m pretty excited about the prospects. Tetris is Tetris, except now it’s online, which is cool. Metroid takes place between the two Gamecube games, and they’ve done an excellent job of porting it to the handheld platform.

I’ve already posted about how awesome Mario Kart DS is, which I think is the first in a series of killer apps for the DS. In a couple of months we’ll have New Super Mario Bros., a 2D side scrolling platformer for the DS, as well as Nintendo’s new Train your Brain franchise. And if that’s not enough, yesterday they go and announce Zelda DS, which looks unbelievably awesome.

I’m more than willing to admit that I’m a Nintendo Fanboy, but I think that they’ve really got the right idea this go round. I think there are a lot of gamers out there like me, who love video games, but don’t have the time or desire to learn how to use a dozen button controller for each game. The DS is great for picking up and playing for 15 minutes, and the Revolution controller, looks like it’s going to carry over that simplicity. Until we get more information about the Revolution, though, I think I’m safe saying that the DS will be my weapon of choice for a good time to come.

Well, for the DSL problem, and now the TiVo. The strong winds of late moved the dish out of alignment, and we realigned that last night. As the TiVo was collecting guide data, I was messing with our recordings, and then it locked up and rebooted. From there, it never recovered.

I popped it open and put the drive in a PC, and it pretty much said the drive was hosed. I called DirecTV up, and they said that because it’s out of warranty, they couldn’t just repair it, but since they wanted to keep me as a customer, they’d do a free replacement if I signed a two year contract. In addition to the two year contract, I would be switching to a lease, so while I own my TiVo now, I would not own the new one, and in fact, I’d have to pay a leasing fee. Forget that.

So I went online and downloaded a new drive image, and I’ll go pick up a new hard drive tonight and perform the transplant. Hopefully all will go well.

In the meantime, we missed the Sopranos, Big Love, 24, and Prison Break. Luckily HBO replays their shows a kazillion times, and for 24 and Prison Break, there’s always Bittorrent.

I need a constructive hobby. While my current hobbies of surfing the web, watching television, and eating haven’t quite reached destructive levels, it’d be nice to do something with my spare time that has tangible benefits.

I’ve given this some thought in the past, and I always conclude that any hobby that I pick up should meet two criteria in order to truly benefit me:

1. Must not require electricity.
2. Must require being outside.

Unfortunately, these criteria give rise to a clear conflict of interest: a) I love electricity and b) I hate nature.

After spending three hours in the backyard Sunday raking up leaves, I decided I should give landscaping/gardening a shot. I kind of enjoy it while I’m doing it, and being able to immediately see the fruits of my labor provides very satisfying short term feedback, which does not seem to ever happen as a grad student.

So I’m going to try to put in a half hour after getting home every day just cleaning up the yard, and see how that works out. If it actually sticks, then maybe I’ll plan a full fledged project.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I got the most awesome fortune ever:

WTF? It took me a second to figure out what Confucius was trying to say with this one.

And if you’ve ever been to Tea Time Desires, then you know that fortune cookies say something about YOU!

Apparently, this means that I can’t kill ducks with my aim.

A few weeks ago we were shocked when Asian Buffet had a sign up saying that they were closing down. Fortunately, we later found out that they merged with China King Buffet up the street.

We checked it out Saturday afternoon on our way to see V for Vendetta. The new space seems a bit smaller, and the buffet area is definitely cramped, but I couldn’t think of any items they had on the old buffet that weren’t available here. My big concern was that they maintained the sushi, and it was still there. Unfortunately, they only had one sushi chef working, and he couldn’t keep up with the demand of a pretty crowded restaurant.

Unfortunately, my overall opinion is not favorable, although I can’t really pin down why. While I would never say that Asian Buffet is amazingly tasty, there is something to be said about being able to fill a plate with a variety of sushi for $6.95. I’m thinking I just caught them on a bad day, and they’re still working out the kinks of being in a new location. I’ll try again in a couple of weeks and reevaluate.

I just spent nearly four hours in the back yard raking and bagging leaves. I finally finish up, drag the bags to the curb, and come inside and grab my laptop, a granny smith apple, and the paring knife and take a seat at the table. As I’m reading my email, I slice off a piece of apple and toss it in my mouth. The searing pain hit before I even finish my first chew.

I know a consequence of growing older is that novel experiences are fewer and further between. I’m only 27 though! I’d like to think that with most of my life still ahead of me, I’m not so jaded that I feel like the world has no more surprises for me.

Unfortunately, though, it appears that I am that jaded. I stared at that apple with the same incredulity I imagine I’d have if Blackjack were to get up on two legs and start talking to me about the stock market. I hesitantly sliced off another piece, and again, the wave of heat passed from my lips, to my tongue, and then the rest of my mouth.

At this point, I rack my brain for what could possibly be happening. I kicked up a lot of dust outside, so maybe I got something on my lips that reacted with something in the apple. Maybe the pesticides or wax used on this particular apple were new, and I have an unknown allergy to them. Maybe terrorists had infected our apple supply with a chemical weapon designed to target our pain receptors and leave innocent Americans tortured with pain for the rest of our lives.

Then it hit me: I’d used the same knife to cut some habaneros for a batch of chili I’d made, and I’d probably just wiped the knife off and put it back in the block. Touching the knife to my tongue confirmed my suspicions, and I was able to return to being my normal jaded self.

Disregarding my geek post, it’s been 30 days since I’ve posted here. So here’s a few highlights of the last few weeks:

• Belle & Sebastian in DC and Nashville. Oh how I love this band. I wish I could make a blanket out of them. I would carry that blanket with me everywhere I went. In fact, I’d just wrap myself up in it and be naked underneath. It would be wonderful. Both of their sets were pretty much perfect.

• How awesome was it when Jack Bauer shot Robocop’s wife!

• Ate at Calypso, La Hacienda, and SATCO in Nashville. Mmmmmm. Then had ribs at Dreamland in Huntsville. Double-Mmmmm.

• Also regarding food, I’m convinced my mom tried to kill me over spring break. Her sinister plot was to keep feeding me until some portion of my gastrointestinal tract ruptured, and I succumbed to internal bleeding.

• My brother owns a straightening iron… and yes, the kind of straightening iron you use on your hair.

• American Idol has it’s top 12. I don’t have a favorite yet, but McPhee is up there right now, as are Daughtry and Hicks.

Lunch time, maybe more later.

So I upgraded my Sprint DSL service to the 5.0 Mbps service about a month ago. At 3.0 Mbps, the service was rock solid, I never had downtime. Unfortunately, at 5.0 Mbps, that is no longer the case. My connection suffers from a condition called “Sync, No Surf.” Basically, my line is too noisy for that speed, and the DSL modem loses it’s connection, but doesn’t realize it, so it doesn’t try to reconnect, i.e. it still has “Sync”, but you can’t “Surf”.

Needless to say, this sucks. The fact that I host my own email in my basement makes it all the more annoying. I’ve called Sprint, and they sent somebody out who did something, that made it to where it only happens every few days rather than every few hours, but the line still isn’t up to snuff. I considered downgrading, but quite frankly, I really like the speed. Basically, I needed a little gnome to push the power button on the DSL modem whenever the connection was lost.

So two steps to the problem, first something to monitor whether the connection is dropped, and then something to restart the modem when it happens:

So the first player is Ruby. FreeBSD has a nifty little utility in ports called Daedalus. Daedalus simply sits in the background checking to see if things are as you want them, and if not, it runs a command. Although I haven’t had to hack it, it’s written in Ruby if I ever want to. Here’s what the relavant part of my configuration file looks like:

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<name>dsl</name>
<checkinterval>5</checkinterval>
<checkcommand>ping -c 4 news.com</checkcommand>
<regex>/icmp_seq/</regex>
<failcommand>/root/restart_dsl_modem.rb</failcommand>
<commandtimeout>90</commandtimeout>

Pretty self explanatory. I’m not sure why I picked news.com, it’s just what I always ping to test a connection. But what’s that restart_dsl_modem.rb script…

I’m sure all of you are familiar with X10. They ran the most obnoxious pop-up/pop-under advertising campaign of all time selling their spy cameras and what not. Anyway, many years ago, they were giving out these free (plus shipping) home automation kits they called Firecracker. A little dongle that plugs into a serial port and little modules that you plug into the wall and then plug appliances into. You can still buy one here, but unfortunately they are not free anymore.

So I’ve had this box full of random X10 stuff that I’d been carting around for my last three moves, and I kept telling myself I should just throw it away, since I hadn’t used it. When I was trying to solve this DSL modem problem, I dug through the basement looking for it and was pissed cause I thought I had tossed it. I took one more look though, and it turned up, so all’s well.

Anyway, I plugged the dongle into the serial port of the FreeBSD box, and installed the x10-cm17a gem which provides an easy peasy Ruby interface to control the Firecracker module. So without further adieu, I present to you restart_dsl_modem.rb:

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require ‘x10/cm17a‘

X10.controller = X10::Cm17a::Controller.new("/dev/ttyd0")

dsl_modem = X10.device(‘a1‘)

dsl_modem.off
sleep 10
dsl_modem.on
sleep 60

Again, pretty self explanatory. I tested it out by pulling the phone cord on the DSL modem and then plugging it back in after the restart, and it worked like a champ. Here’s the Daedalus logs:

I, [2006-03-13T21:07:24.647592 #79938]  INFO -- :
    State changed from "found" on monitor dsl - the new state
    is "not found"
W, [2006-03-13T21:07:24.648690 #79938]  WARN -- :
    Regular expression /icmp_seq/ did not match the output of
    "ping -c 4 news.com" for monitor "dsl"
W, [2006-03-13T21:07:24.649623 #79938]  WARN -- :
    Running "/root/restart_dsl_modem.rb" (failcommand) for
    monitor "dsl"
I, [2006-03-13T21:08:44.315012 #79938]  INFO -- :
    State changed from "not found" on monitor dsl - the new
    state is "found"

Now to hook up ActionMailer to get notification emails, and I’ll be all set.

So geek. So awesome.