Too Much Food!

Trish drove (since I drove us to our dinner spot on Tuesday) (and since I strong-armed her into it!), and we fought our way through the Redwood City traffic on I-280, finally getting near the restaurant at 7:30 (we left Apple at 6:15). Then we drove around looking for a parking space. We had no luck in the residential streets around Haight, but through pure luck I noticed that one of the arteries heading into Golden Gate Park a block away had parking, so we went in there, and lo and behold there was all kinds of parking about four blocks' walk from the restaurant. Yay! I collect "secret weapon" parking strategies in different cities (my other such weapon in SF is the Fifth-and-Mission garage near the convention center), so I'll keep this one in mind.

(Trish and I talked about sometime driving up to the city and spending an afternoon just walking down Haight Street, which is a major commercial district of some eccentricity.)

(On the other hand, we soon learned that everyone else having dinner with us lucked into parking within a block of the restaurant. Argh!)

The restaurant, Cha Cha Cha, is a dark restaurant/bar place, apparently catering to some combination of yuppies and students. Michael and Paula were already there, as was Susan, another Bay Area journaller, whom I've read occasionally but never met, and Susan's boyfriend, whose name I forget. Everyone was quite pleasant, though Paula seemed kind of quiet compared to the rest of us. We all had sangria to warm up. And we actually got a table in the crowded place pretty quickly.

The food was pretty tasty, although I was a little disappointed in the jerk chicken (which wasn't jerky enough; Jolly Bob's Jerk Joint in Madison has better). However, I learned why I generally try to avoid going to dinner with friends where we order a number of dishes and share among ourselves: Because most people stop eating before I do, and I keep eating as long as there's food on the table and I'm not yet stuffed. Normally I control my eating at the point of purchase, just trying not to buy more food than I should. So I kept eating until I was pretty full.

And then Michael brought out the cake.

Oof.

Paula baked it. It was very good. I actually ate until I actually could not finish the slice of cake I had on my plate. Urgh. Bad Michael!

A little after 9:00, the lovely Eleanor (swoon, swoon) showed up, too. (We made jokes at first about how "everyone wants Eleanor".) Somehow the conversation eventually turned to 1980s music and television shows, and Michael demonstrated his rather chilling command of dumb 80s television ("No, Tom Hanks wasn't on Perfect Strangers, that was X and Y. Hanks was on this other show...").

Trish and I left around 11:00. Eleanor saw us out before heading back in, where we had a slightly odd exchange: She hugged Trish, but put her hand on my shoulder. I must have looked a bit put out (okay, I'm definitely absorbing too much from these British Peter Wimsey novels if I'm using phrases like "put out"), and she said that she's been sensitive ever since I wrote about her being a "touchy-feely" person. I can understand this (I think an on-line journal might not be the best place to try to explain what I was trying to explain about that...), but I certainly don't object to a good-bye hug! So I leaned over and we hugged.

(Does this sound really lame, or what? Maybe you had to be there.)

But it was a good time all around. San Francisco is pretty neat. Too bad I work so far away from it.

Today I had one of those days at work.

Actually, it wasn't a bad day at all. In fact, I stayed until 7:00 because I was into what I was working on. But things didn't go as planned.

I decided to fix a couple of simple bugs this morning. Each should have taken 10 minutes in the best case, and 30 minutes in the "okay, I just don't understand how this code works, it's not critical to do right now, so I'll put them off 'til later" worst case. Neither was very important, but they are kind of silly bugs which should be fixed.

Instead, I ended up getting mired in the middle of a linker error having nothing to do with what I was fixing, but which prevented me from testing my fixes. I spent most of the afternoon untangling this issue, and fortunately remembered something a cow-orker had said to me which pointed me to another cow-orker who was able to diagnose the problem and fix it. Whew!

Still, even though I felt I had discovered a genuine problem, and had gotten it fixed, and knowing it was a problem that would affect many people other than me, it was frustrating that this 10-minute big fix turned into such a boondoggle. What can you do, right? But it's still not very satisfying.

Oh, well. I did actually get my bug fixed, so I can take comfort in that. And next week is a new week!

I received a copy of Ken MacLeod's first novel The Star Fraction from a British used book dealer yesterday. It's not yet available in a US edition, so I broke down and bought one that I located through BookFinder. It had an annoying "special price: 10 pounds" sticker on the cover which I took off, but which left sticky residue on the dust jacket. I'm trying to figure out the best way to get the stickum off. Any ideas? My best guess is rubbing alcohol, but I'm afraid of using something that might damage the jacket.

Meanwhile, I continued my pace of reading a book a week by finishing Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, which I actually re-read, as it was the first Peter Wimsey mystery I ever read. I liked it much better the second time around; I think it can be enjoyed as a light parody of earlier Wimsey stories once you've read some of the earlier books. It's definitely more lighthearted than many of the others.

(A book a week is a good reading pace for me. And it's slightly misleading because I also read the week's comic book haul as well as other odds-and-ends such as newspapers, magazines, and any humor collections I've picked up recently.)

The Star Fraction is up next because Subrata already wants to borrow it.