Monday, September 17, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped Joel with the PharmAdMIT 2008 import update log. Met with student DE about hard drive upgrading. Shuttled to Laurel Heights. Met with Susie and Eric about digital asset management (DAM) and other web issues. Chatted with Susie after. Chatted with Eric and Susan H after. Called Carol to reschedule. Very late lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. My fortune: Love is the law, love under will. Met with student DN who is unable to install Sophos. Sophos appears to install successfully but no blue shield icon appears in the system tray, and no program files appear in the Sophos folder except for an AutoUpdate folder with 6 configuration files in it. Called it in to OAAIS—they bumped it up to Rick. Stayed late at work trying to beat back the inbox. Did a favor for Joel: paper pushing. Late dinner at Sandy's Cafe & Deli (415-682-9683, 1382--9th Avenue at Judah), a new Vietnamese food cafe at 9th and Judah. The cafe was getting a lot of business even at 8:00 PM that the waitron was simply turning away because they didn't have a large number of items on the menu and they also ran out of a lot of items such as sandwiches. Shortly after I sat down, about 10 customers came in. About half were turned away, 1 was seated, and another 2 or 3 successfully placed and received to go orders. I had the chicken pho with rice noodles, and it was unimpressive. The soup seemed to be seasoned only with 3 kinds of onion: thinly sliced white onion, scallions, and dried onion bits. The chicken was still with skin and on the bone, making eating difficult. Parts of the chicken were juicy and tender, but other parts were tough and rubbery. A piece of chicken wing was not plucked properly and had many strands sticking out of it making it rather unpleasant to look at. I had ordered spring rolls as well, but the very busy waitron forgot to bring them to me, so near the end of my meal I told her to forget it—I didn't need it. She indicated that they were right there on the counter wrapped in plastic ready for to go orders—it would appear that my spring rolls order would not have been prepared to order. My tea pot was filled only halfway, and when it ran out the waitron did not think to check it or refill it even though she had nothing else to do. The prices are very inexpensive, though. I probably won't go back. Sandy's could improve by actually having the items they claim to have on their menu (the to go menu did not match the actual menu of items available), adding one or two wait staff, and preparing pho with boneless meats. If they cannot do boneless meats, they should at least give people a small bowl or plate upon which they can leave the bones. I felt like a barbarian leaving them on an opened napkin on the the table surface, but I saw another customer doing the same and then I didn't feel so bad. Chatted late with Patrick on Skype. We discovered that Flickr is blocked for him in China, or rather, he cannot see images from Flickr. After some searching, I had him install Access Flickr! 1.5 by Hamed Saber and that worked around the problem. Before that, however, it did cause Patrick a fair amount of grief, and I was beginning to think it might make him reconsider his sympathetic position toward China, but I guess not.