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It’s hard to remember life before this era of cheap air travel.. Even with fares starting to go up, it’s still only $500-600 at most to cross the country. When I first started working around 15 years ago, only the more senior execs or hot-shut consultants flew every week, for everyone else it was at most a few times a year for conferences and such.. Now it’s routine for even the most junior professionals (leaving out the much bigger group of local service-sector starbucks-type workers).. So now that it’s routine, a lot of people hate it, and I see an article a week about the hell of air travel.. So why do I still like it? Even after flying nearly 100k miles each year for the last decade? For some reason I never get tired of looking out the window..

A few weeks ago I attended a mini-conference hosted by Kraft Foods.. Today I got a big box from the mail guy, and inside was a care package from those nice folks at Kraft.. Planters Peanuts, Wheat Thins, Oreos, and yes-even a box of Macaroni and Cheese. Aww, guys, you shouldna…

Finally got a chance to try the omakase at Nobu last night. I wonder what percentage of their orders are from people who are too deep in conversation to want to take the time to look at the menu.. the big surprise (other than that it was actually very good) was that it was more like a kaiseki-type progression of dishes rather than a series of exotic sushi pieces. Here’s what I can remember:

• Chopped toro tartare in a wasabi broth with a bit of caviar on top, and a mountain berry on the side
• Oysters on the half-shell, but cooked, with a soy-miso sauce
• Mackerel tiradito, in a yuzu-based sauce
• Kobe beef (generous portion, at least 4oz), seared and then sliced, with asparagus
• A 6-piece plate of sushi, good but nothing exotic (mackerel, toro, etc.)
• Mountain-berry sorbet/granita, very fresh-tasting
• Warm chocolate cake with green tea ice cream

I think there was another dish in there somewhere.. no photos unfortunately, too dark for my iphone camera in there, and besides I always feel like a dork taking pictures of my food in restaurants (though I do it anyway).

Here it is so far, 90% furnished.. Still missing the sofa, which is still being assembled by gnomes somewhere in the English countryside.

Back online after a little hiatus, this is my first post using the new Wordpress app on the iPhone. Pretty painless to use, except that it entailed an upgrade of my Wordpress software (thank you to the wpau plugin authors, I promise I’ll donate!).

No more excuses now, time to rejoin the blog-o-sphere.

It’s a scene right out of Mad Max: someone pulls up to the back of a restaurant in the middle of the night, siphons off 300 gallons (gallons!) of used fryer grease into a tanker truck, and goes home to convert it into fuel for their rag-tag vehicles.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure?

Never mind $4 a gallon at the pump, you really know we’re screwed when people start stealing skunky grease out of restaurant garbage dumps. What’s next? Obese people kidnapped and drugged, waking up in a bathtub full of ice, 30 pounds lighter after thieves lipo’ed out their fat for conversion into biodiesel. You read it here first.

Online package tracking has been around for so long (a whole decade!) that we take it for granted that it works.. I actually get annoyed now when someone on ebay sends me something via USPS and is too cheap to pay for parcel tracking. So I got a little surprise when I checked on my latest amazon order…

If they did deliver it to St. Louis 18 months ago then amazon’s technology is even scarier than I think it is.. forget cloud computing, time travel anyone?

After many Sunday afternoons tramping around Manhattan, three unsuccessful bidding wars, and guessing games with slightly sketchy selling brokers, we finally nailed one down and are In Contract. You would think a recession would take a bit of the pep out of a real estate market, and maybe it has - two of the places we lost out on only had one other bidder, maybe in better times there’d be 3 or 4, but all it takes is one shmuck with more money than you and bye-bye charming brownstone apartment.

It actually looks like this, no retouching…

Now the fun begins - the co-op board. Let’s see your finances. What about your health records? How are your teeth? Can you provide us a family tree? Five generations back will suffice, though we’d prefer 10. Any pets? They’ll have to submit to a psychological exam, to make sure they’re stable and won’t growl at the neighbors. Ahh the dream of home ownership…

So speaking of different perspectives, I stumbled across the famous (for some) 1977 Eames short “Powers of Ten” that starts with an idyllic picnic scene, and then zooms all the way out to the limits of the known universe, and then zooms back in all the way into the subatomic particles in one of the picnickers’ hands. 

Part of this thought process feels very familiar to any engineer who has worked with computers or microchips, they’re inherently organized in hierarchies of small units that are grouped into bigger and bigger modules that perform more and more complex functions.. microscopic wires and silicon wells -> transistors -> logic gates -> arithmetic & memory modules -> chips -> circuit boards -> computers -> operating systems -> applications (i.e. final cut) -> digital films that get distributed on youTube.

My latest celeb sighting - Willem Dafoe, buying groceries at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon. It’s not often you run into an actor who’s done everything from playing Jesus to a soft-core sex scene with Asia Argento. I wish there was a way to sneak a photo without feeling like a celeb-stalking creep.

He looked good, skinny as ever, he was laughing and joking with the checkout clerk. He was buying a lot of green vegetables, very healthy-looking load of groceries. He looked exactly the same as he does on screen, which is rare for actors. I wonder if he’s a good cook.