Greg

Worst "nice" restaurant in Seattle

One of my friends who has recently moved away was back in town as of Sunday for some corporate training, so a group of us went out to dinner at the Earth and Ocean at the W Hotel.  And no, that's not where he was staying, this was a concious choice to go to that restaurant.  NWSource has a program they've put together with a bunch of restaurants to do a prix-fix menu for $25.  The 25 for 25 program.  I will give the disclaimer that I'm not a big set-menu kind of guy.

So we ended up at Earth and Ocean, which I would never recommend to anyone.  Brief recap of the things that went well:

• The bread was nice.  But, I'm fairly sure that it was La Brea bakery bread which I've been buying for a while now.
• They did throw in extra desserts because they knew we were angry.  Because Anupa bitched at them for not getting her entree before the rest of us finished our entrees.

The things that weren't good?

• A few of us ordered a "wine flight" which was 1/2 a glass of the recommended wine with each course.  The first one came out at the right time, we got a little spiel about it, etc.  We got the glasses for the second wine when we were partway done with the entree.  And the wine when we were basically done with the entree.  Hassan actually just told them not to bring it because he had already finished.
• The entree I ordered was cold.  And small.  And, more importantly cold.  Even if it had been warm, the best it could have been was 'ok'.
• The service just sucked.  They didn't really check back on us to find out how things were going.  Maybe because they knew we were pissed.
• As mentioned above, because they had gotten her order mixed up Anupa didn't get her entree until all of us had finished ours.  Seriously, there were only three choices, how hard would it be to be able to whip up one of the others quickly?
• The room/table was cold.  I'm convinced it's because we were right next to the wall of doors/windows that overlooked the street and air was probably coming through.  Seriously people, it's coming into winter - turn on your heating.

Even if the rest of everything hadn't gone wrong, the food was only 'ok' and wouldn't have enticed me to come back to a normally priced place - much less to a place where the entrees averaged $25-40 if they weren't doing this program.

Sometimes customer service gives OK advice

Update on the cable-modem situation.  I ended up getting a new Motorola last week and it has actually allowed me to get faster connection speeds.  Who knew!?!?!?

Also, I haven't had problems with the connection being down - but I'm unconvinced that's completely because of the new cable-modem rather than the problems with the infrastructure being resolved, but hey because of the faster speeds I'm still happy.

Flaky network connection

We've been having a lot of problems with our internet service over the last week or so - everything from pure unavailability to seeing 5-25% packet loss.  I talked with the Comcast folks a couple days ago and while I was in the middle of enjoying hold music things suddenly started working again.

Last night's service call led the guy to recommending I get a new cable-modem as the one I have is "having a lot of trouble syncing up".  I'm not 100% convinced that that wasn't a way to get me to become someone else's problem tonight instead of having to talk with him...  Particularly since the connection is having no problems this morning.  Anyone remember the old SBC DSL commercials where a neighborhood turns on itself because of the shared nature of cable-based internet service?  Wondering if that might be the problem.

Either way, I'll get a new cable-modem tonight - been meaning to for the last couple weeks after I realized that it will help me get faster connection speeds (my model is a few years old and Comcast has been "upgrading" their service over the last few months).

Another Sunday, another day-trip in the area

Continuing in the "visiting cool stuff in the area" vein, Clodagh and I took a Sunday drive to check out Deception Pass on Sunday.  Originally we had thought to go up and see the snow at one of the passes, but since Snoqualmie was closed due to rockslide (SeattleTimes article), we figured that something not likely to have heavy traffic would be better.

This is actually a pretty nice area to walk around and spend an afternoon walking along the beaches or in the path-way in the forest.  Nothing too strenuous, but some nice fresh air.  Random thoughts from being there:

• I-5 is a really boring drive
• Jason's "Good food and cocktails" cafe in Oak Harbor actually has reasonably decent food.  Too late I realized that the ribs are smoked there each morning and likely would have been good :(  Oh well.  We chose it over Franks cafe which was right next door because Frank's was painted to look like an American flag.  I have a theory that anyone who has to stoop to that to get customers is trying to cover for something in the way of the food...
• If there's a place that would give you height-induced vertigo, it'd be the bridge.  Walking out onto the pedistrian sidewalk of the bridge and looking down is a bit freaky - something like 180 ft to the water.
• There's all sorts of random sea-weed looking things around the beaches.  That look plastic.  It was only after Clodagh noticed some weird growth on the end of one (unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture of it) that we decided they were natural.
• It's important to notice when the tide seems to be coming in when you're walking along a beach.  We almost got "trapped" (just meaning we would have gotten our shoes wet) during the walk from West Beach to North Beach.
• Ferry rides are cool.  Probably they become far less cool when it's a regular part of your commute, but hey, it's still a novelty to me :)

My photos are online here.

Some Deception Pass related links:

• Washington State Parks info page
• Online Highways info page
• Virtua-Panorama of the straight

Software you should own (maybe)

I finally broke down this week and bought a copy of Partion Commander (I was actually looking for Partition Magic, but the store didn't carry it).  I was trying to resize the partition on my hard drive so that I could install another version of Windows on the new partition.  It's something that I find myself wanting/needing to do often enough that I should have just bought the software a while ago, but infrequently enough that I've put it off for a couple of years.  Which leads me to thinking, what other pieces of software are like that?  Something you really should buy but nobody really wants to?  Off the top of my head the most important one would be a good anti-virus program.

There's another class of similar things which are 'software that's really useful and you should pay for it but it's unlimited beta or shareware'.  WinZip was the classic example that very few people I knew ever bothered to register and pay for, but they used it all of the time.  Other ones that are more relevant today would be the anti-spyware programs around (Spy-bot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, etc.). 

On a tangent, since I've mentioned AV programs and anti-spyware programs, you should go try out the http://safety.live.com site - it's a new service that Microsoft is offering that will scan your computer for malware, checks your hard-drive to see if it should be defragmented, etc.

Gee, thanks for the update

Verbatim traffic report from this morning's commute:

<anchor>: OK, now let's check in on your morning commute.  How is the traffic looking?

<traffic guy>: Terrible, just terrible.  There's no point in telling you about the incidents, there are just too many.

Depressing thing to hear to start the morning drive into work.