Binary Tuberculosis

Hung out with Daisy today, it was fun and delicious. We got some lunch at the Sherman Cafe in Union Square. We both got some Gruyère sandwiches, which were amazing. It was the first time I had scali bread and dude…best sandwich bread ever. I also got some spinach soup which was alright, but then we also split a lemon scone which was a bit sweet but a good finish to the lunch.

After that we headed to Capone Foods (this Italian grocery shop) and Daisy got this squid ink pasta, yeah, awesome huh? I got some Hot Masala Milk Chocolate (haven’t tried it yet) and some cheese, Port Salut and …something else (little help Daisy?). Tasted the latter, it had a creamy texture, not like brie, but more cream cheese creamy, probably try that tonight sometime.

Then lastly we headed to this asian grocery store where I got a shload of ramen (good ramen, none of that Top Ramen junk), some Yakult, and the best gum in the world…Fusen.

Got tix to see Andrew Bird in May too with the Chows, that should be cool.

Just got back from The Capital Grille. Went there with a few friends, which is always fun. It’s primarily a steakhouse and apparently their steaks are well done (no pun intended…OK, maybe slightly intended).

I got the calamari, parmesan truffle fries, and salmon with the two mustard sauce. Calamari was well prepared, but slightly oily but the highlights were the peppers. No complaints about the parmesan fries (well, I didn’t see or taste any truffles actually), they were perfect, and I don’t even like parmesan. The salmon entree was definitely a good choice (for a non-steak eater), but it wasn’t exceptional, plus the two-mustard sauce was barely tasted. I should start eating steak and stop complaining about a steakhouse when I don’t order one I guess.

Also, earlier in the day I got some Guitar Hero II on at a friend’s place. This game is amazing. The End. Check Please.

I’m watching the most amazing show right now. I was watching The Science Channel earlier today and got a little clip of “watch this show” during a commercial break for the Travel Channel’s new show, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. TiVo-ed it right away, it looked awesome.

This episode is focusing on Asia and I gotta tell you, I need to visit Japan (they eat 1/3 of the seafood consumed per year) and Bangkok (grubs and chicken, a million different types). Show isn’t done yet, but it’s going on my season pass.

Andrew Zimmern is a chef so he can actually appreciate all the food and even describe why people eat it and why it’s a delicacy or unusual and he doesn’t seem to poke fun at the people or the dishes, which I half-expected since…well…he’s American. He sure does eat tons of different food, best job in the world, but he’s only gonna get fatter. Just as well, never trust a thin chef! That’s my new motto, I think I just made it up, I hope it didn’t stay in subconscious from reading it somewhere 10 years ago.

Anybody want to go all over Asia with me sometime this year or next? or at least Japan?

By the way, I wanna be a cow from Kobe that gets slaughtered for its meat, man, those things get pampered, at least until they come to your plate…for $200 a steak! And I want to eat bats, turtles (best soup ever), and wash it all down with some lizard sake.

Now I’m gonna go Google for some spirulina supplements in the US, I’ve got my money on Chinatown, probably not GNC. Actually, I wanna try the spirulina chili paste and drinks, but I doubt they’ll be as fresh in this hemisphere.

This year should be a good one for music, I hope anyway. Why you say? Well…

Rage Against The Machine is reuniting for Coachella (just as well, Audioslave lost its touch after the initial release, or maybe people just got used to their strange appeal, shrug)

Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero comes out April. I hope this one is better than Reznor’s last With Teeth, which was a good album, but I consider it last on the list of Nine Inch Nail’s albums.

The Smashing Pumpkins have reunited and are apparently going to release some stuff and go on tour this year (according to what Corgan said just a few weeks ago). The Future Embrace and Zwan…I really hope Corgan still has it, cause the last two…

Garbage with some things this year…honestly, their last one was a rehash of their first couple albums, which were amazing, but this past one just seemed so…generic. Hopefully this next one won’t suffer as much.

The Shins have released Wincing The Night Away. It really is well done, but I need to give it a few more listens, just like their last couple albums, I don’t know why, but their albums need to grow on me, but they always do and with an avalanche of frightening proportions.

Air’s new album, Pocket Symphony, comes out in March I think. I’ve only listened to their Talkie Walkie, which by the way is a nicely dubbed electronic-softcore-rock type of mixture. Think Mogwai with lyrics I guess, that’s as close as I can get to describe it. I’m going to see if I can grab a copy beforehand from my “sources” (read: Satan).

Bloc Party - Weekend In The City…February 6th! This one I did get a hold of a day ago, have yet to listen to it, will remember to let you guys know how it fares.

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible….YES! This one my friends is what I have been cutting myself for. Funeral is one of the greatest albums and has great repeatability as well, I still listen to it without tiring of it. March 6th my friends, March 6th.

I should be studying for my finals this week, but I’m an idiotic procrastinator so I watched Clerks II instead. Kevin Smith is back in his element (we won’t mention Jersey Girl, ever), dialogue…damn, he shines when it comes to writing good dialogue.

I was impressed by Rosario Dawson in the movie, the character in her role had a very attractive personality, much like Lucy Liu did in Lucky Number Slevin. Honestly, if I ever meet any girls with personalities like that in real life, I don’t think I’ll be able to function. So. Amazingly. Alluring.

And of course…You never go ass-to-mouth.

So I dropped using Mozilla Sunbird as my calendaring application. It has some great features (iCal support, WebDAV syncing, email/sms notifications, etc) but it was just too unstable. I had gotten used to the instability in the program since I had been using it since the 0.1x versions, started making own backups and whatever, but the last straw? The removal of features for “ease of use” and the stability just kept getting worse as the versions went up, isn’t that an oxymoron?

So I wanted to switch to a calendaring application that could import an iCal calendar (most do nowadays, thanks to Apple and Mozilla using such an open standard). I also required synchronization, so that I could access the same information from my laptop (or from any PC in the world if possible). I finally ended up just going for a web-based calendar solution, just because the desktop applications were either too big/bloated or just didn’t have what I required. My final two choices? The built-in calendar in my webmail solution, Horde, or the Google Calendar*.

Horde’s calendar was pretty good, had everything I wanted plus it was mature enough in it’s release for everyday use. Since I also use it’s webmail features occasionally (when not using Mozilla Thunderbird on my laptop and desktop) this would have been perfect. Alas, it got beat by Google’s Calendar.

Google’s Calendar, very impressive, I love the way that it uses Ajax like many of Google’s online services, it just feels like I’m using an application instead of browsing a web page, plus it just feels a lot faster and smoother, not to mention it looks better than Horde’s solution. Plus it has public calendars that I can subscribe to for Holidays and such, they’re all color-coded differently and can be enabled/disabled on the fly. Plus reminders and ability to import/export to almost anything (RSS even).

I’ve been using Google’s Calendar for a while now and have absolutely no regrets, plus today I just started using GCalSync. It’s a free app for your cell phone that syncs your phone’s built-in calendar feature with whatever you have on your Google Calendar. It’s pretty handy for those times when you need to know what time the appointment was or when exactly you have a meeting.

*I looooooove Firefox 2. I was typing out this post and I accidentally closed the tab that contained the write page, BAM, everything I typed lost…Firefox 2 to the rescue! I clicked on the menu, selected “Undo Close Tab” and everything came back up perfectly sexily, even all the junk I had typed in the text box, now that’s impressive. Not to mention the amazing built-in spell checker that shows red lines under misspelled words you type (like Microsoft Word).

Buddy of mine bought a PS3 so a few of us had our time with it yesterday. Overall I wasn’t impressed, especially with Gears of War for the Xbox 360 right next to it (which was amazing). But the console just launched and all the games were pretty much rushed out for it, but still, not impressive as of yet.

So if you’re looking for the cheapest Blu-ray player out there, try and get the PS3 (once they’re in stock anywhere), otherwise just go for the Nintendo Wii or the Microsoft Xbox 360. 6 months from now it could all be different obviously.

I’ll post a couple pictures I took in the photos section later when I’m not so lazy.