Saturday, March 5, 2005

Slept in. Shower project. Breakfast: fruit smoothie (orange, apple, banana), blackberry scone, fruit leftover from an office event, cherry juice blend. Updated Sophos on home computers. Other computer maintenance. Dinner with Melissa and Patrick at Watergate (415-474-2000, 1177 California St, San Francisco, 94108). Melissa wanted to do something nice for me after I spent many hours helping her with her computer a month or two ago, so I suggested that we all go to a nice dinner. Patrick and I hadn't been back to Watergate since (I think) my birthday in 2002. It had changed locations since then, moving from the Mission to Nob Hill. The food was delicious as always. Starters: Patrick had tiger prawns, Melissa and I both had day boat scallops. Entrees: Patrick had filet mignon, Melissa and I both had ribeye steak with fries. Desserts: Patrick had ?, Melissa had ginger creme brulee, I had a Napoleon. The fixed price for 3 courses had gone up since last time—$33 now up from $25. Patrick also believes that some of the portions seem smaller than before. Service was attentive during our meal, but neglectful after dessert was delivered. Our server made one grievous error: as he pulled a plate from the table, a knife fell from the plate into Melissa's lap. Fortunately, her martial arts training enabled her to catch the knife on its handle, and the error became a slight inconvenience rather than a clothing or medical disaster. The root cause of this problem is the silverware—the handles are too weighty, resulting in poorly balanced pieces. However, I would expect a waiter working with this silverware every day to fully pull the silverware into the plate before removal. Our server also couldn't remember who ordered what upon delivery—a minor inconvenience, but in a fine restaurant don't you expect the server to remember? Finally, an assistant delivering coffee tried to deliver it to our table, but we hadn't ordered any—it was for the next table over. Despite these problems, we enjoyed our meal, and I have no complaints about the food. Valet parking for $9 was available off Jones. Added the SF restaurant health violations website to my bookmarks page. More work on (problems with) rebuilding my web server kernel, and I ended up deciding I'm no longer a fan of OpenBSD—it's just too hard to figure out, and the OpenBSD community seems too elite to help even smart newbies without snide remarks. I still like the principles behind OpenBSD, but I simply don't have the days it takes to read documentation just to keep my system updated. This is particularly disappointing because I've been able to get it to do a lot of the things I wanted: NAT, firewall, web server, scripting it so that the web site data is automatically backed up from the Rev drive on Windows. I've learned a lot from OpenBSD, but the new Mac Mini is starting to look like a much better option for me now, and I just happen to have an empty spot in my rack mount that's exactly 6.5 x 6.5 inches. And there just happens to be an extra KVM cable just waiting for something to plug into.