Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

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.

A few months ago, a new chocolate shop opened in Hayes Valley. Christopher Elbow chocolates is based in Kansas City, not a place that immediately springs to mind when the Great American Chocolate Renaissance is discussed. I had bought some of their products from Cocoa Bella, however, and knew they were good, if pricey.

They sell moderately expensive chocolate bars (the No. 10 41% milk chocolate with hazelnuts is pretty good), drinking chocolate, and bouchéees. The latter are a little too bleeding edge for my taste (spices do not belong in chocolate), but the Bourbon Pecan is to die for, a light and moist, pecan marzipan, almost creamy despite the deliberately roughly chopped texture, and topped with ganache. Not surprisingly, it is usually sold out at the other outlets..

The real draw, as far as I am concerned, is the hot chocolate. Dark, rich, creamy and thick, specially if you ask them to blend it with genuine praline, it is absolutely delicious. You can enjoy it in the twee little salon in the corner of the store before a concert at the nearby Symphony, or shopping in Hayes valley. If you are in the neighborhood, try also Miette Confiserie.

My primary computer is a dual 2GHz PowerMac G5 until I can upgrade it with a Nehalem Mac Pro, most likely around the end of the year or early next year. I bought it in 2004, along with a 23″ Apple Cinema HD (the old pinstripe plastic bezel kind with an ADC connector). Unfortunately, about a year ago the CCFL backlight on the monitor started turning pink from old age, and thus unusable in a properly color-managed photographic workflow.

I used that as an excuse to splurge on a humongous (and agoraphobia-inducing) HP LP3065 30 inch LCD monitor after reading the glowing reviews. The two features that sold me were the enhanced color gamut (the only way to improve that would be to get a $6000 Samsung XL30, something I am not quite prepared to do), and the fact it has 3 built-in DVI ports, so it can easily be shared by multiple computers (assuming they support dual-link DVI, which unfortunately my basic spec Sun Ultra 40 M2 does not). The fact it was 25% less expensive than the Apple 30″ Cinema Display helped, of course.

About 6 months ago, I discovered there was a fine pink vertical line running across the entire height of the monitor, roughly 25 centimeters from the left. Since I primarily use that monitor for photo (the primary monitor for Mail, web browsing or terminals remains the Apple), at first I worried there was a defect with my camera. I managed to reproduce the problem with my MacBook Pro (they have dual-link DVI, unlike lesser laptops), and called HP support (the 3 year HP warranty was also an important consideration when I purchased).

My first support call in November 2007 went well, and the tech told me I would be contacted to arrange for an on-site exchange. This is a seriously heavy monitor and I did not relish the idea of lugging it back to FedEx, so getting premium support for a business-class monitor sounded an attractive proposition. Unfortunately, they never did call back, and as I had other pressing matters to attend to involving international travel, I just put it out of my mind (it is a very subtle flaw that is not even always visible).

I only got around to calling them back a few weeks ago. Unlike in November, I was given the run-around with various customer service reps in India until I was finally routed to a pleasant (and competent) tech in a suburb of Vancouver (the US dollar going in the direction it is, you have to wonder how much longer before HP outsources those call centers back to the US). The problem is not with Indian call centers, in any case, all but one of the CSRs were very polite (I suspect Indians learn more patience as they grow up than pampered Americans or Europeans would). The problem is poorly organized support processes and asinine scripts they are required to go through if they want to keep their jobs. In any case, the Canadian rep managed to find the FRU number and also told me someone would call to schedule an appointment. Someone did call this time, to let me know the part was back-ordered and they would call me when it becomes available.

This morning, as I was heading for the shower, my intercom buzzed. It was a DHL delivery man with the replacement monitor. I had to open the door to him in my bath robe. Naturally, nobody at HP bothered to notify me and had I left earlier, I would have missed him altogether.

One of the great things about Apple products is that if you live near an Apple store, you can just stop by their pretentiously-named Genius bars and get support for free (though not free repairs for out-of-warranty products, obviously). I now have a fully working HP monitor again, so I suppose I can’t complain too loudly, but the Apple monitor with the sterling support looks like the true bargain in hindsight.