Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

I used to carry a small moleskine notebook with me (I still use one of the larger A5 versions for taking notes at work) until I switched to 3″x5″ jotter cards, as featured in the hipster PDA. I went as far as having Crane make personalized jotter cards in a square grid pattern (Levenger’s are quite nice as well).

Interestingly, 3″x5″ index cards are actually 75mm x 125mm cards, as Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal classification and of the library card catalog system, was an advocate for the metric system.

I have just eaten what is hands-down my best meal of the year at r n m restaurant (their capitalization, not mine), on Haight & Steiner in the Duboce Park/Lower Haight district of San Francisco (not to be confused with the formerly raffish and now utterly commercialized Haight-Ashbury).

The restaurant is named after the chef-owner Justine Miner’s father, Robert Miner, a co-founder of Oracle. The food was so good I am almost ready to forgive Oracle for their sleazy extortion tactics…

I started with the Parisian style tuna tartare with waffle chips, microgreens and a quail egg, a very classic dish (and one too often botched by careless chefs), given a little pep with a slight acidity. It was followed by an absolutely outstanding pan-roasted local halibut on ricotta gnocchi with asparagus and morel mushroom ragout, meyer lemon vinaigrette and mâche. The halibut was crisp outside, flaky inside. The ragoût was simply wonderful, a deep, rich and tangy broth, also slightly acidulated, with a generous helping of precious black morels. To top it off, the dessert, a Peach and cherry crisp with home-made blueberry gelato combined two of my favorite summer fruit in an unbeatable combination.

Be advised the parking situation in that neighborhood is particularly nightmarish, even by SF standards. If I had realized they offer valet parking, I wouldn’t have had to park halt a mile away (after seeking a place in vain for nearly half an hour).

Update (2012-09-05)

Unfortunately, it closed at least a year ago.

On Friday I yielded to the hype, and after cursory testing, I purchased a copy of Delicious Library 2. The clincher was the new feature that allows you to inventory your physical posessions like electronics or cameras, and publish them in HTML format for insurance purposes.

Unfortunately, after some slightly less cursory use of the product, it is deeply unsuited to this purpose. To think I actually upgraded my home Powermac G5 from Tiger to Leopard just to use this software…

For starters, on my dual 2Ghz G5, when running in a window on my secondary 30″ monitor, the program is slow as molasses. With a library with only 3 items total, entering data fields is a one character per second tar pit. Moving the window back to the primary 23″ monitor helped only a bit.

Secondly, the data model is simplistic. For all practical purposes, gadgets are treated just like books, with some repurposing of fields. The all-important serial number can’t even be displayed in column view.

Third, even basic tasks are not handled properly. I have a Symbol CS1504 pocket scanner, which is one quarter the price or size of the Bluetooth scanner Delicious Monster sells, and has a 500 barcode memory, so you can actually use it away from your computer. Using my Python driver, I scanned some books’ bar codes, dumped a text file of ISBNs and imported it into DL2. The import mapper allows you to specify which fields of the tab-separated text file go into which field of the DL2 data model. You would expect it to retrieve book detail automatically, but it does not do so. Worse yet, the “retrieve book details from the Internet” menu is grayed out when you select one of the imported books.

There are also some fit-and-finish issues. Right-clicking to get the context menu and selecting the “View in Amazon” option does not do anything. Perhaps this is due to the fact Camino is set to be my default browser, but the other way to view book details on Amazon works (hovering the mouse over the book cover thumbnail, then clicking on the overlaid eye icon that appears when you hover).

On the plus side, the HTML export works quite well, and the loan manager probably does as well, but given the shortcomings of the current version, I would not advise using it unless all you want to manage is books, CDs and DVDs, and you can afford to buy their expensive Bluetooth scanner to use in wireless semi-tethered mode.