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Going to a Szechwan, Thai or Korean restaurant with my friend, David, frequently turns into a pantomime as we try various tactics to convince the staff that we REALLY DO MEAN IT when we say that we want our food authentically spicy- and not some watered down version designed for American/British palates. I don’t think that we are the stereotypical macho, competitive, chile-death capsicum cowboys that can be so annoying at Indian restaurants, but we do like extremes in flavor. ...

Seems we are all reminiscing. Went to the Tate Modern recently and, embarrassingly, emerged from the gift shop with the following: “Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer” (Gordon Laing) I remember lusting after practically every machine in here. Sad geek that I am- I particularly lusted after the Jupiter Ace because it came with FORTH as the built-in language. I must have read some article about FORTH, because I was obsessed with it and eventually used in on my Commodore 64. I was also inexplicably enchanted with the language MUMPS. What was wrong with me? ...

Warning Cafe Orient closed around 2006 If you live in Oxford and have not been to the Cafe Orient, drop what you are doing and go straight there now. ...

I am astonished at the current “anti-expertise” zeitgeist that seems to have taken hold of the US and UK. Recently Neil Stephenson summed up the prevailing mood in the February issue of Reason Online: “It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.” ...

Ok- so I’ve been trying to move stuff out of MT and into WordPress. And just because I love confounding variables, I’ve also been trying out Ecto. Ecto seems to be having trouble uploading pictures. Server keeps timing out. Hence the scattered posting with mysterious missing pix. Most embarrassing. Oh, yeah. And I’m having trouble getting WordPress extension to behave properly. Listening to: Cool As Kim Deal from the album “…The Dandy Warhols Come Down” by The Dandy Warhols ...