SimpleWeblog

Restaurant Review: Korea Bistro

Located near the biggest Korean grocery store we've found in the Dallas area, this place looked pretty nice on the outside. We went in, got seated, and quickly learned most of the staff didn't know too much english. Good thing I am with someone who knows her Korean food! The atmosphere was a little strange, with the upscale decor and korean TV playing on one side. We got a pretty standard tofu stew and bi bim bop. The opening dishes were mixed - no potato, but a tasty whole fish - but both entrees were good. Not the best ever, but it does the job, a reasonable mixture of flavor and spiciness. The tofu stew came with some very tasty rice. There were plenty of other things on the menu to try, although it seems like we'll have to do a lot of experimenting since we couldn't get any more explanation than what the menu said. But we did get a sweet ginger and rice soup for dessert, which was good. Worth going back to try again, although we may try some of the other Korean restaurants first.

Restaurant Review: Paris Vendome

I know everyone is eagerly anticipating hearing about Dallas. And what better way to start things off than talking about brunch at a French restaurant? I know, so stereotypical.

And, actually, the brunch was fairly disappointing. The brunch menu was a short list of breakfast items and the full regular menu. None of the breakfast items sounded particularly special. We got pancakes with fruit and an omelette with asparagus. Neither were very special, although the pancakes came with a nice side of crispy applewood smoked bacon. The pancakes were a little heavy and the fruit and plain syrup were not enough to make up for it. The asparagus was fine but the omelette was lacking any excitement - just some not-particularly-flavorful cheese and eggs. And the coffee was terrible. The orange juice was not fresh. The service was slow. Absolutely no reason to go back.

I won't get sued for writing a negative review, right?

Goodbye, Tivo!

I removed all my season passes and wishlists from the tivo! It felt so final. Bloop bloop bloop, goodbye!

Sleeping is easier than dieting

OK, it is still just at the correlation level, but it looks like people who sleep more are less likely to be obese. I will add this to my list of things to rbing up when defending the importance of a good night's sleep!

Another essay topic or two

And this one is simpler:

Money vs. Quality

I am an engineer at heart, so I can't fight my desire for quality for too long. But money seems to be a bigger motivating factor these days. (See also: wal-mart, success of.) But is the window that is being optimized too short? Is it creating a long term loss of value for society?

And then:

The Value of Piracy

Sure, intellectual property theft has a cost to society if it reduces sales and eventually innovation. But do lost sales reduce innovation more than the a wider distribution of the intellectual property would increase innovation? How could you even test this? It seems like now that we live in an age where lots more "goods" can be replicated without any loss to the original owner, some basic property rights may need to be rethought. Yeah, yeah, this all has been discussed as part of music piracy and online publishing and all that, but those arguments tend to be focused on economic value, not overall innovation. But usually people with a broader exposure to inputs will produce better outputs.

Maybe those two topics do tie in together, after all.

Late night notes

I'm waiting for an upload to finish, and I realized I'm falling behind on posts here all too quickly.

I want to take the time and write something about individualism in a world of demographics, but I will probably never take the time to do it so let's try a one-sentence summary. I really don't have the background understanding of identity politics and everything else necessary to have this really work yet, but we'll give it a shot anyways. Yeah, I know this is too oversimplified, but I will never work this out without trying to write it down.

Well, actually, let's just start with a list:

• Rise of demographic thinking
• Individual vs. group
• Benefit to society (beyond a dollar value)
• Self-interest vs. the world
• Debt to society
• Ask not what your country can do for you
• Absolute morality
• Selecting for electibility
• The Great Compromiser

Somewhere, if you connect the dots in some order, there is an essay hiding in there.

Excuses

I was going to put up an entry and then I spent an hour deleting spam from another site. Frustrating, and a good reminder that I intend to upgrade/change software here, but I will just put up some links and get out of here.

I want to share a couple of friend's stories that started me thinking about what I want to do with myself next. A friend's story about climbing a mountain in Ecuador and another friend's log entry about sailing to Palmerston, a remote island near New Zealand, reminded me of my limited range of experience, especially recently. I'm not sure those are the kinds of things I want to go do, but I respect their ability to go and actually do things that most people would say are crazy.

Rhetoric and Power

Top 100 American Speeches, including text and audio links where available. Discussion of George Washington, inclusing comments about how his most impressive character trait was his ability to walk away from power, which is a nearly unique trait among people who have led succesful revolutions (The other example the biographer could think of: Nelson Mandela.)

Just in case you need some reminders of why this country can be great, but continually needs people who want it to be even better.

(I may need to start a politics category if this keeps up!)

Politics

Well, I guess it is time to re-evaluate my basic beliefs about people. How can I be so disconnected from what so many people think? You'd think I would be used to this idea. I'm sure lots of people will talk about trying to improve get out the vote efforts, increasing the young voter turnout, countering media spin more effectively, and all sorts of other things, but that is all dealing with symptoms instead of root causes. At this point it seems like people should be focused on better education of people about interpreting complex issues and trying to create better understanding of moral issues. How can you not convince people that are opposed to abortions to not see the problem with unnecessary civilian casualties? Of course, if it were so easy, you could probably convince more people to be opposed to the death penalty, too.

I'm having another one of those "I wish I could be a pacifist" moments...