Mark L. Van Name's Blog, page 70

Heading out soon

Saturday morning, I begin a three-week trip to some interesting places and events.

First up is TED in Vancouver.  If you don't know about TED, you need to; check out its site and the amazing talks on it.  I've gone to a satellite show, TEDActive, for many years, but this marks my first time at the main event.  I'm quite excited to be going, and I expect to have a mind-blowing time there.

From Vancouver, I head to a very different type of show, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Barcelona is a fantastic city that I first visited with Scott, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.  The show itself promises to be interesting, educational, and tiring--it's rather large.  I do love tech gadgets, though, so it should be fun.

I then jump over to London, where I plan to spend a week doing, well, whatever looks good.  I'm probably going to eat at a few fantastic places, take in some great live theater, renew my love affair with Pre-Raphaelite art at the Tate, visit other museums, and generally enjoy one of the world's greatest cities.

If you're going to be in any of these places at the same time and want to get together, drop me a note, and maybe we can work it out.  I'm certainly up for unexpected adventure of the fun kind (as opposed to, oh, losing my baggage).

Three weeks is a long time on the road, and a long time away from home, but I'm still excited at all that's ahead of me.

Sure, Portland is known for great chefs

who create great food from all the best local ingredients, but that's not all you can eat in Portland.  Oh, no.  At the airport, for example, you order this crazy bastard of a dish.

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Yup, that is the Mac-n-Cheese Burger, which comes with bacon, of course, because once you're this deep into the food insanity, how could you hold back the bacon?

Don't worry about me, though.  I made it all healthy by choosing a salad--the inimitable lettuce wedge, which itself comes with bacon and bleu cheese dressing--in lieu of the gorgonzola fries that one normally gets with the burger.

"Gorgonzola fries."  Even saying it tastes good.

As you might expect, this burger stayed with me for the rest of the day.

It's good to be home.

It's local chocolatier month

at Salt and Straw, a wonderful ice cream shop here in Portland, so after a sushi dinner at next-door restaurant, Bamboo Sushi, I had to check out what was on the big (ice cream) board.

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Two of us decided to share a flight of four kiddie scoops of four different flavors.  All were delicious.

Tomorrow, I fly home.

It's not always sunny in Portland

but today the sun shined all day, the skies stayed clear, and the weather proved to be fabulous.  One could not have asked for a nicer winter day.  I enjoyed all of the few moments I was outside.

Dinner tonight took me to one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon.  The menu was as inventive--and fattening--as always.

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If you know me well, you can already be sure what I ordered.  I started with the foie gras and uni.


This dish proved to be a riff on bacon, eggs, and pancakes, with the uni sitting atop the sour cream filling the role of the egg, the foie gras acting as the bacon, and the amazing pancake and soy maple syrup supporting it all.  Foie and uni together are so good and so bad--for health--that they should be an illegal and yet widely available couple.

My main course was an equally obvious choice:  the Kobe salisbury steak--with foie--with mushroom gravy.


In some ways, this plate of food was simply an interpretation of the Stouffer's frozen-foods classic--until I took a bite of it.  Then it proved to be so sinfully rich and good that it, like the previous course, should be illegal and highly coveted.

Out came the dessert menu.


I'd like to be able to tell you that I resisted, that I considered all I had eaten, pushed away the single sheet, and told the dessert temptation to get behind me.

I didn't, though, do any of that.

Instead, I ordered the truffled chocolate chip ice cream sandwich, because truffles!  Chocolate!  Ice cream sandwich!


Oh, my, was it delicious!  Rich and wonderful, the blending of truffles and chocolate was more grand than I would have believed.

If you live anywhere near Le Pigeon, hurry over and try these dishes before they leave the menu.

Then, plan to walk a lot.  A whole damn lot.  You won't want to stop until you've burned off a great may of these calories, because if you do stop, you might fall, and if you fall, you won't easily get up.

I actually watched the Super Bowl game

Not just the commercials, which I traditionally try to catch.  No, this time I sat in my hotel room and stared at the football game, because a local team, the Carolina Panthers, were playing.  I felt I should root for them.

Mistake.

The game was ugly, mostly because the defense of the Denver Broncos was simply better than the offense of the Carolina Panthers.  Poor Cam Newton, the Panthers' quarterback, spent a lot of time either being tackled by the defense or trying to avoid that happening.

The Broncos clearly were the better team, though, so I certainly don't begrudge them winning.  I also have no real room to complain, seeing as how I'm about as fair weather a fan as one could be; after all, this is the only football game I've watched all year.

Next year, regardless of which teams are playing, I'm returning to my practice of watching the commercials.  I find them often more entertaining than the game itself, and I'm certainly more interested in effective advertising than in football.

Oh, yeah:  I'm in Portland now for a couple of days.  Due to early meetings and some junk food I ate during the game--continuing a longstanding tradition--I ate a room-service salad for dinner, so I have no great food news to report.

Tomorrow, though, will be different.

Life without the tubes

Thanks to an AT&T crew that cut my Time Warner Cable line, I'm living without Internet connectivity (and live TV) at home right now.  A TWC crew is supposed to fix the problem in the morning, but I fly to Portland then, so the fix won't help me.

This trouble is why I didn't blog last night.  (Yes, I could have gone to the house of a friend to blog, but I didn't feel like going out again.)  It's also why I've been slow to respond to email, and why I won't blog again today or respond to more email today.

Tomorrow (Sunday), I'll be in a hotel in Portland and enjoying (probably crappy) bandwidth again.

I do not heart that AT&T team, and I definitely do not like living without constant, high-speed Internet connectivity.

When you learn

that the redoubtable Jeni Britton Bauer, the ice cream genius behind Jeni's, has created a new collection, American Licks, whose goal is to capture the flavors of how ice creams of the past tasted in our memories, and if you're me, you have only one choice, of course:  you order them.

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Then, you and anyone around must grab spoons and have an ice cream tasting party.

It's the only logical choice.

All of the flavors I tasted--I passed on the mint, of course--were delicious.  The standout, to my surprise, proved to be the orange sherbet, which was richer and better than any I've ever tasted.  It was, in fact, as good as my idealized memory of a few precious spoons of orange sherbet on a hot Florida summer day.

If you're an ice cream lover, I heartily recommend this collection.

A peek inside my head

I walk into the restroom at work today, and as the door closes, the Beatles begin singing "Ticket To Ride" on the building's music system that feeds our bathrooms.

I pause a second to let the music flow over and into me, and in that moment...

...I am a kid again, going into the Florida theater in St. Petersburg on a Saturday afternoon for the RC Cola six-bottle-cap movie extravaganza--cartoons and a double feature.  I'm about to see Help for the first time.

John Lennon is singing that I've got to hide my love away, and I ache with pain even as I realize that I have no real clue what love is, I just know that I better hide mine away, because every time I smile at a girl she reacts like she's eaten a bug.

I'm sixteen and my first love has dumped me because I loved her too much, and I don't understand how that is possible, how can I love someone and not love them that much?

I'm myself again, and I know I'm less intense now, and I wonder for a spring sigh of an instant if sixteen-year-old me didn't learn that lesson too well.

I shake my head, because I'm at work, I'm late to present at a vision meeting, and I have to focus on that task, not love, not the Beatles, not "Ticket To Ride," not what I lost, not any of that.



It's late now, and I'm playing the Help album.  Alone in my office, the music transporting me and melting away the years, it all comes back to me, and my heart aches again, aches so much I fear my chest might split, though I can't even list all that it aches for.

My spam wants me to go shopping

This evening, in a four-hour time period, my spam messages told me I needed to shop for all of the following items:
windowssidingwomen (via a senior dating site)sheetsflooringa carFrankly, I remain disappointed in my spam.  It doesn't know me at all.  It has no comprehension of what I might like or need.

My spam needs work.

Something cool PT is involved in

As I've observed in past entries, my company, Principled Technologies, gets involved with a lot of cool projects and activities.  One of the latest is the XPRT Women Code-a-thon in Seattle the weekend of March 12 and 13.  Rather than repeat the details here, I'll refer you to the PT page on the event and to the EventBrite page where you can sign up.

With this event, PT and its partner, ChickTech, are trying to do two worthy things:  help the BenchmarkXPRT performance evaluation tools represent a broader range of diverse interests, and encourage the participation of women in computing.

Please check it out, and spread the news to any interested friends in the Seattle area.