Life on Mars

As I mentioned previously, Kat and I had dinner at The French Laundry last week. Dinner at the French Laundry is something I’ve wanted to do for ages (being one of the very few restaurants of this caliber that has a vegetarian-friendly menu) and it didn’t disappoint.

The food was superb and the service was excellent. Each course was tremendous and worthy of praise, but I’ll mention a few that really stood out:

• The French Laundry Garden Lettuce and Herb Soup was interesting because the dark green, chilled soup tasted just like lettuce. It was presented with just the tomatoes, croûtons, and ice cream in a shallow bowl, and the soup was expertly poured on by the waiter so as to fill the bowl without so much as a drop falling on the food.
• The Garlic-Glazed Eggplant Confit was by a wide margin simply the best eggplant I have ever tasted.
• The “Fricassée” of Hand-Rolled Russet Potato “Gnocchi” was rich and delicious.
• The French Laundry Garden Basil Sorbet was, just as it says, a basil sorbet. Interesting and tasty, although I think Kat won out with her apricot sorbet.
• Finally, the “Mignardises” were delicious, but we were so full we had to take some home. Our waiter insisted we try at least a couple truffles (I had the peanut butter and the passionfruit) with the remaining dozen or so being put into a box and handed to us along with two packages of fresh shortbread.

Below is transcribed the full nine courses I enjoyed. The full menu is linked from the image (it’s a scanned PDF of both the tasting menu and tasting of vegetable menu).

Japanese Mountain Yams
with White Miso and Perilla

Compressed English Cucumbers
Green Grapes, Red Chili, Cilantro Shoots
and Sesame Seed Purée

French Laundry Garden Lettuce and Herb Soup
Toybox Tomatoes, Olive Oil-Fried Croûtons and Caper Mayonnaise Ice Cream

Garlic-Glazed Eggplant Confit
Garden Carrots, Pumpkin Seeds, Medjool Dates,
Spicy Greens and Madras Curry Emulsion

“Tarte de Courgette D’été”
Sweet Peppers, Armando Manni Olive Oil,
“Burrata” and Niçoise Olives

“Fricassée” of Hand-Rolled Russet Potato “Gnocchi”
Bluefoot Mushrooms, Golden Corn and Lovage

“Robiola Due Latti”
Globe Artichokes, Cipollini Onions,
Red Ribbon Sorrel and Dijon Mustard

French Laundry Garden Basil Sorbet
Lychee Fruit and Basil Seeds

Honeycomb “Sabayon Glacé”
Spiced “Tuile,” Tupelo Honey Ice Cream
and Santa Rosa Plum “Confiture”

“Mignardises”

The entire experience was delightful and certainly lived up to expectations. The service was excellent as expected, but I think I was caught a bit off guard by the clever details: the clothespin on the napkin (which I had known about ahead of time but is even more charming in person) and the bill hand-written on a laundry tag being two examples.

I believe we were the last ones to finish dinner. On our way out we asked to see the kitchen and were met by what I assume was most of the staff: all of the servers who had waited on us (five of them, perhaps? My memory of some of the details is already fading.) and what seemed like most of the fourteen chefs we were told occupy the kitchen during the night. True to the stories, the kitchen was spotless (just minutes after we had finished our meals) and thoroughly impressive. After dinner, we walked just a couple blocks back to our hotel, the wonderful Maison Fleurie.

We just got back from a week in San Francisco and Napa this morning on a red-eye via Chicago. We ate at French Laundry (a post on that will follow), visited wineries, had lunch at Google, visited the Computer History Museum, and spent the rest of the week with family around Fisherman’s Wharf.

All four flights (both to and from) went pretty well, but Chicago seems to be our problem city. Two firsts for me: being waived off of a landing (while within perhaps 50 feet of the runway) and aborting a takeoff. During landing at Chicago on our way to San Francisco, we were waived off of our landing within a few seconds of touching down due to a flock of birds. After circling around and trying again we landed and found we had to sit on the runway for a while as our gate was now unavailable.

Leaving Chicago on the way home, our takeoff was abruptly aborted about half way down the runway as the pilots slammed on the brakes (apparently due to miscalculated trim). After circling around the runway to try again, we had to sit for a while to let the brakes cool down. When the brakes didn’t cool off as fast as expected, we had to go back to the terminal for inspections and paperwork, and finally were told that changing planes would be faster than continuing to wait.

Gary was gracious enough to offer four of us lunch at Google, and then we went down the road to visit the Computer History Museum (and the very impressive Babbage Difference Engine). After the whole family met up in San Francisco, we had a great (but hectic) few days of Ghirardelli Square, Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf (sourdough bread bowls!), the Exploratorium, and many other things.

More photos of San Francisco and the Computer History Museum on Flickr.

SFGate: Mozilla leads push to reimagine Web browsers

In one of the videos, for example, users can push, grab and lift all the objects in the browser, and surfing the Web feels more like moving through a 3-D space, with Web pages semantically organized in clusters.

It’s like VRML all over again! (Also, hilarious quote from the Wikipedia page: “VRML enjoys widespread use^{[citation needed]}”.)

Just got back from New York City where I spent two days at the Linked Data Planet conference, and then three days hanging out with Tom. The conference was good, but a bit more business oriented than I was hoping for. Maybe more on that later.

A few notable things recently:

• For the first time ever, I broke 500 miles on a tank of gas in my car, going 505 miles at 52.7 miles per gallon mostly on the drive to and from the city.
• On the drive down on Thursday, I pulled to the side of the road at exactly 1pm to try to make reservations for the French Laundry. Kat and I have reservations for August 19th. Expect a post about that in two months.
• I heard more talk of federated SPARQL, and how much we need it, at Linked Data Planet than I have at all the semantic web conferences and on all the semantic web mailing lists combined. Seems I need to really get moving on the work I’m doing (and have done) and start releasing and writing.

So, I’m back from ESWC in Tenerife. I was hoping to make a post once I arrived about going to ESWC, and with updates on papers, discussions, photos, etc., but events seem to have conspired against me.

I was scheduled to leave Albany on Saturday, May 31^st. I was meant to fly to Philadelphia, then to London, and finally on to Tenerife. Unfortunately, super cell thunderstorms were headed for Albany, and my first flight was delayed. This caused a cascade of problems, resulting in my arriving in Tenerife not on Sunday night, but on Tuesday afternoon. I ended up missing entirely the workshop I was meant to present at, and half of the first day of the conference.

I did get to spend an interesting night in the Gatwick Yotel (click through to Flickr to read more about it and see photo annotations):

Luckily, during the 2.5 days I was at the conference, I caught some interesting talks, had some great discussions with people about my research (and theirs), and enjoyed the Canaries. I’ll be posting more on the technical bits in a future post (probably on the Tetherless World weblog). There was no email or newsreader checking at the conference, as the hotel network had about 99% packet loss (when you could get an IP lease at all).

The trip home was almost as bad as the trip to the Canaries. I had to leave for the airport at 01:00 after a full day of driving around the island, and total travel time was roughly 28 hours. After sleeping in the Tenerife, Madrid, and Philadelphia airports, and a ~3 hour delay of my final flight, I finally made it home on Saturday night.

More photos can be found on my Flickr ESWC, Tenerife set.

A recent post on Treehugger, Further Thoughts on Turning Road Traffic into Electricity, got me thinking. The article revists another Treehugger post on harnessing truck traffic to generate electricity by capturing kinetic energy of truck traffic through “special plates” set in the road:

as big trucks drive over them (about 2,500 of them per day at the port), they compress a tank of hydraulic fluid under the road, which in turn creates a series of pumping actions that turns a generator to produce electricity.

The more recent post rightly brings up issues that people brought up in comments: the energy generation would be unclean (the energy coming indirectly from diesel) and inefficient (energy being lost in the transfer and having the effect of slowing down the trucks, thus requiring more diesel to be used overall).

It’s suggested that they might make sense in very specific situations, though, such as “a downhill lane with a stop sign at the bottom where vehicles need to slow down”. This might be true, but I started to wonder about the rights involved here. Is there any legal precedent regarding who owns the energy of an object? Such an in-ground plate system would take the energy I’ve turned into motion and prevent me from using it to recharge my hybrid’s battery. Shouldn’t I “own” the energy my car (and fuel) have created?

I took some photos today while wandering around the Albany Tulip Festival:

More photos on my Flickr 2008 Tulip Festival set.

Kat, Laurel, Stephen and I spent this past weekend in Rangeley, Maine at one of the L.L. Bean cabins on the shore of Rangeley Lake. Despite it being rather damp, cold and cloudy, it was a lot of fun and much needed time off after the spring semester.

We spent quite a bit of time on Route 17 south of Rangeley, seeing quite a bit of wildlife. We saw something like 18 moose, 20 deer, a couple of rabbits and wild turkeys.

Saturday evening was cold and windy, but after driving all the way from Troy with kayaks, I decided to head out onto the lake. It was pretty bleak out, but I had a really great time. I paddled around the South Bog Islands (which seem to be missing from Google Maps, but show up on this embedded Google Map) for a while, but didn’t stay out too long because of the close-to-freezing temperatures (parts of the main island still had a couple of feet of snow).

A few more pictures from Rangeley are on Flickr.

After a weekend in New York City, Simon and Katia took a round-about way home to Providence through Albany to come see us and spend the night. Simon, Katia and I went to the Jimmy Eat World and Paramore show at the Albany Armory, and had a great time (despite the dismal weather). It turned out to be the opposite of what happened last time, with Paramore actually opening for Jimmy Eat World (I had been under the impression it was going to be the other way around, not knowing much at all about Paramore). Oh, and the other difference was that Paramore didn’t totally suck. They were actually really good.

(Looking back at that post from 2005 about the last Jimmy Eat World show, I can’t get over some of those comments. Who were those people posting those crazy comments? Man, did they love Taking Back Sunday, and hated me for criticizing them.)

The one strange and obnoxious part of the show last night was that we retired to the bleachers toward the end of the night to sit down while watching the show. We ended up sitting behind a pair of journalists with their laptops open writing reviews of the performances. Except one of the journalists (the one with the ugly PC laptop and not the shiny MacBook, and I’m using the term “journalist” loosely here) actually didn’t appear to be basing his review on the actual performance. Instead, and it was hard not to glance over his shoulder and read what he was writing given how close and bright the screen was, he was writing his whole review of the show about specific songs before the band had even played them. During the entire time we were sitting behind him, I don’t think he was actually looking at the band for more than 30 seconds total. After finishing up his article about halfway through the show, he packed up his things, and left. So to you Mr. Singer, where ever you are, I say: you suck.

I’m still frustrated over an issue I ran into last week with Troy’s parking situation. I generally park on a side street right next to my apartment. This works out really well because there’s much less traffic, usually more parking space, and no scheduled street cleaning (meaning I don’t have to wake up early on Friday morning to move my car).

Unfortunately, I only thought there was no street cleaning. It turns out that once a year in the Spring the side streets of Troy are cleaned to remove all the stuff that’s accumulated over the winter. If you know to expect it, it turns out that the schedule is posted about a week in advance on the city website and in the local newspaper (which I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen in person). If you don’t know to expect it, about two wooden signs per block are set up indicating the upcoming parking restriction. These signs are about a foot and a half high (you wouldn’t be able to see them if a car was parked in the adjacent parking spot), and only appeared roughly 24 hours in advance of the street cleaning.

So that was the set up last week when I left my car parked on the side street for an entire day unchecked, and came out the next morning to find my car missing. Perhaps the worst part, though, was that since the street cleaning was now complete the signs indicating the parking restrictions were now gone. There was no indication, then, that my car had been improperly parked, and I was left to call the police to find out if it had been towed, why it had been towed, and trying not to lose my temper as they explained the seemingly-abrupt scheduling of street cleaning. The response I got was that since this has been going on in Troy for the past thirty years, I should have known about it.

So I’m out $108 for the towing fee and $35 for the parking ticket, and left wondering why this seems like an OK situation to anyone else.