Posted
Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:00:39 GMT
to Posted in Reviews
Tags review, showdown, social, sushi
This is the Sushi Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
Good rolls, bad rolls, and assorted pieces of sashimi
and only one will survive, I wonder who it will be
this is the Sushi Showdown…
this is the Sushi Showdown…
this is the Sushi Showdown…
of Ultimate Destiny
It really just started off as a joke. Kate was torn between going to two restaurants (she had a gift certificate for one, but liked the other better), when I suggested the obvious solution: eat at both and compare the tastes! Better yet, eat at other sushi restaurants too and do a comparison across all of them! And thus the event ‘Sushi Crawl 2008’ was born.
Quickly, however, people began to think that a sushi analog to a pub crawl was not the greatest of ideas, due to amount of time sitting around for food preparation, and the fact that we would be ordering very little from each place in the grand scheme of things (you don’t want the sushi places you will potentially populate in the future to be mad at you). The event quickly evolved into a sushi potluck. Everyone would be responsible for a take out order from a restaurant, which would consist of no fewer than 4 items; spicy salmon roll, tuna sashimi, house roll, and whatever other item you wanted. Targets were selected, participants gathered, and we went off to do battle.
The original roll of opponents:
- Hamachi House (Eventually skipped)
- I Love Sushi
- Sushi Nami
- Dharma Sushi
- Sushi Shige
- Ichiban Sushi (Eventually skipped)
- Minato Sushi
- Doraku
- Momoya (Dismissed due to ‘suckitude’ long before the day of the event)
The day of the event, we ran into a few minor problems, such as a torrential downpour, last minute decision of who goes where, dead phones (which hampered ordering), power losses (Hamachi lost power due to the storm), restaurant closures (Ichiban doesn’t do dinner in March), and potentially sick people. Despite these issues, the event was oh so good. 10 participants * ~4 items * ~6 pieces per item = ~240 pieces of sushi to be delectably savored and compared. Long ago, friends of mine told me that the best way to eat sushi is to gather a group of people and all order various things on the menu and share, and I have to say, it certainly has its benefits. A healthy amount of ‘safe’ selection (that is, items you have tried and enjoyed previously), along with a variety of new stuff without the disadvantage of being stuck with additional rolls if you don’t like it.
At the end of the night, Sushi Shige was declared the overall winner. The sashimi was moist and rich in flavor, the spicy rolls weren’t overly spicy, the pieces were all well proportioned. Of course, Sushi Shige was also the most expensive overall, so you are paying for what you are getting. For more budget concious sushi goers, it was generally agreed that Doraku was also a very solid choice for a reasonable price. Ironically, the two places are just a block a part.
The overall loser of the night was I Love Sushi, which was generally below the quality of everything else. Whether it is the worst of all in Halifax is debatable, however, since Momoya is apparently so bad that it wasn’t even worthy of ordering from, and since Hamachi House (from my own experience in the last year) has been more of a hit or miss situation.
Obviously, this event needs to be repeated (for a proper data comparison set of course) and I am already looking forward to the next one.
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Posted
Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:50:14 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Reviews
Tags analytics, google
Like other people I know, I have been testing Google Analytics. There are some good things about it, but overall I am not really impressed.
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Posted
Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:48:29 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Reviews, Entertainment
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine showed off Metroid Prime: Hunters on his Nintendo DS. Playing it for a few minutes, I have to admit I was hooked. Using the stylus to aim and select things just seemed so SIMPLE, the gameplay itself was good, and it has multiplayer capability!
I picked up my own copy shortly after finishing up Compiler Construction, and I beat the game today. A few things of note:
- Short game – 7 hours game time got me to the end (66% of items/lore/etc)
- Hand cramps – Stylus good, holding the DS with other hand not so good (I suppose this is one of the reasons the DS Lite was created).
- ?? – That is an actual column in the ‘Records’ section. Yep, there is the regular bout of Nintendo unlockables. Awesome (and at least with the short game time, I don’t have to rewind through 20+ hours of gameplay
- Missiles – Really, I know they are in all the other games, but I felt that they were useless here. USELESS.
Haven’t really had a chance to try out multiplayer (don’t have wireless), so I can’t really comment on that. Overall, I am really liking the game though. Nice amount of exploration with some fast and furios bounty hunter on bountry hunter action. Now all I have to do is figure out what ???? is …....
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Posted
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 02:58:55 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Reviews
A few weeks back I bought myself a Nintendo DS for my birthday. Now, normally it is usually hard for me to play anything more than ‘twitch’ games on my main PC, due to my regular busy schedule. However, I noticed that I generally have down time between tasks that is spent just sitting around or aimlessly surfing the web. I figured I could use this time to play games with one of the current gen portable consoles. But why the DS and not the PSP? Several reasons really: I have fond memories of my old Nintendo products. Nintendo seems to innovate in gameplay more than the competitors (and dual screens seem cool). Oh, and Final Fantasy and Shining Force (in various incarnations) are/will be available for it. Coincidentally, the Mario Kart/DS bundle came out shortly before my birthday, and my friend has been going on about how awesome that game is, so I got that too.
<!-more->
Initial impressions:
Right now the dual screen doesn’t do much (in Mario Kart). Then again, I used to hate pausing to view a map, so we will see how future games handle it.
I hate the fact that there is no battery indication. I hate playing a game and all of a sudden my DS going dead. I mean, they have a flashing light for testing Wi-fi connectivity, why not have one of them flash steadily when the battery is low? At least then I would know that I need to wrap things up, maybe save, and then exit gracefully.
Range of the Wi-fi connection seems a little slow, and I have had some problems getting connectivity over the internet, but some of that might have to do with the set up of the access points I have been connecting to over the DS itself.
Doesn’t support the GBA link mode. For example, in Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced you could link two GBA units and do co-operative and competitive missions and get extra stuff. Not so with the DS. The rest of the backward compatibility works fine, but I thought doing this for the DS over WiFi for GBA games would have been a no brainer. I suppose the most likely cause is hard coded hardware information in the GBA cartridged, but it still would have been nice to have.
All in all I am enjoying my purchase. Mario Kart is a blast and I am loving going retro and playing some of my favorite older games. The fact that Final Fantasy 3-6 are coming out (4 is already out) only strengthens my decision in my own mind. Suddenly, waiting doesn’t seem as boring any more…......
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Posted
Tue, 03 Jan 2006 17:39:34 GMT
to Posted in Reviews
Tags oreilly, project management
O’Reilly has recently begun a new line of books called ”/Theory/In/Practice” (and no, I don’t know why it isn’t listed on their web page). These books cover such topics as “Essential Business Process Modeling” and “Applied Software Project Management”. It was my pleasure to secure a copy of “Applied Software Project Management” right before I left for the holidays. Since I am doing some project management now, I figured doing some reading certainly couldn’t hurt, right?
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Posted
Wed, 24 Aug 2005 07:10:42 GMT
to Posted in Geek, Reviews
Tags linux, scientific linux, upgrades
For my trip to New Jersey, my boss dropped off an old Dell Inspiron 2500 and a set of Scientific Linux 4.0 CDs. Since I didn’t have any other install CDs except Fedora Core 3, I figured I would give this new distro a try. The first thing I noticed is that it appears to be based on Fedora (a deeper inspection seems to indicate it is actually based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The second thing I noticed is that it had zero problems installing on this laptop. Some small problems have been encountered, such as not initially being able to set resolution to 1024×768 (fixed by changing the default monitor to a Dell 1024×768 Laptop Display Panel), not being able to put the laptop into hibernate or standby, and the media buttons not working (though do any of those special buttons work properly out of the box on any distro?). So far so good.
Going to their site, I noticed that Scientific Linux 4.1 has been released. Also, they have instructions (though kinda out of date) of how to upgrade from one minor revision to another. This I must try. Step 1) Set up proxy access at work. Step 2) Realize that the proxy is screwing up the compressed yum metadata files. Step 3) Hey, it’s a laptop, I can take it home. Step 4) Start updating.
Final verdict: After rebooting, I have an updated system behaving as expected! A big difference over my botched Fedora upgrades. If only more distros had such a well defined, documented, and tested transition between minor revisions, instead of primarily through downloading the latest 4 (and becoming 5) CDs, I am sure a lot of users would be happy.
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Posted
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 08:46:34 GMT
to Posted in Life, Reviews, Entertainment
Tags buskers, review
Halifax International Buskerfest is once again in motion. Quite a few interesting shows were performed this year. On the first day I went down, I basically ended up watching a series of finales, so I really don’t know how good the entire acts were. As always, the waterfront areas were PACKED with people.
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Posted
Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:32:56 GMT
to Posted in Reviews
Tags networks, oreilly, review, security
Security Warrior labels itself as the “most comprehensive, up-to-date book covering the art of computer war�?. Having been on my To-Read list since it was initially released a year and a half ago, I was interested to see how accurate this claim remains.
Obviously, some topics you might expect to be covered in a comprehensive security handbook are missing. No where to be seen is discussion of vulnerabilities in MD5 and SHA, as these hadn’t been published yet. Also missing is any reference to the Linux 2.6 kernel, as the first version of that was released barely a month before the first publishing.
However, this items discussed in this book are general enough that they are still valid and highly valuable. Discussion is platform neutral where possible, with further discussion on platform dependencies where needed. There are some very nice examples and case studies, which make the book a more interesting read than strict discussion. The Advanced Defense subsection is spectacular and well deserving of the designation Advanced. A lot of the ideas there, while simple in nature, are things that I haven’t come across before, or even thought of, especially their discussion on intrusion detection and log aggregation.
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