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A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of eating at Le Bernardin, Eric Ripert’s restaurant in New York. I think this is the first time I’ve eaten at a 3-Michelin star establishment, so I was pretty excited.

And indeed my first impression didn’t disappoint, as literally the first thing I saw when I walked in was Woody Allen. I discreetly alerted my Dad, and when he didn’t immediately confirm, I thought I perhaps I was mistaken…until I looked across Woody’s table and saw Soon-Yi. I had no intentions of trying to talk with them or anything, but still it was kinda cool.

My shameless star-gawking was interrupted by a stylish hostess, who greeted us with a charming “hello, gentlemen”. I tried to give her my most winning smile, only to be deflated by her slipping a suit jacket on me while whispering “We require jackets in the dining room, sir”. Yeesh! Somehow that detail had escaped me when I read up on the place earlier. Yeah, just a wee bit embarrassing there. The jacket fit perfectly, though that offered little comfort, but my mortification soon subsided as we were led off to our table.

Before long the amuse-bouche arrived — a fantastic bluefin tuna sashimi. Definitely lived up to my high expectations for the meal.

When the menus arrived, we took our time poring over the options, savoring the possibilities and trying to construct the best combination of courses. The all-seafood menu is composed of three sections: “Almost Raw”, “Barely Touched”, and “Lightly Cooked”, and we were to select two courses from the first two and one from the latter.

I chose

• Thinly Sliced Geoduck Marinated Peruvian Style; Freeze-Dried Corn
• Bacalao: Grilled Salted Cod Salad; Arugula — Lemon Confit Pesto; Almond and Chorizo Oil
• Pan Roasted Monkfish; Israeli Couscous Tabbouleh; Black Garlic and Perisan Lemon Sauce

Dad had

• Seafood Salad of Marinated Shrimp, Calamari, Octopus and Lobster in Citrus Vinaigrette; Honeydew–Cucumber Gelee; Wasabi Emulsion
• Sea Urchin Risotto; Toasted Nori; Urchin–Citrus Emulsion
• Baked Langoustine and Wild Striped Bass; Confit Tomato Agnelotti; Bouilabaise Consommé and Curry Emulsion

We both tried some of everything. My favorites were the geoduck and the risotto, I think. I’ve never had geoduck, and it was prepared almost as a ceviche here, with some toast points. Amazing. And the risotto was so smooth and rich and flavorful. I was a little disappointed in the monkfish — compared with the earlier dishes it seemed to lack a real “wow” flavor — but it was the first time I’ve tried monkfish, too (had to, didn’t I, after watching so much Iron Chef?), and perhaps the delicacy of the taste was lost on me.

Overall, it was a spectacular experience, and I had a wonderful time sharing it with my Dad. Not something I’ll soon forget.

Apartment Therapy takes a look at an amazing example of a mid-century modern home in Los Angeles.

Paging through the slideshow, I’m struck by how the changes in depth and texture and the attention to detail show how an open-plan design, even a busier, more complicated one like this, can be warm and inviting.

Sure, some of the color choices don’t age well (although I think alot of that comes from the age of the fabrics), but those could easily be changed out for more modern selections without killing the vibe.

The architect and owner is Ray Kappe — I’ll have to look up some of his other work when I get the chance.

So after a long year’s wait, the iPhone finally came to Sweden, and thus to me.

Was I one of those crazies who waited in line the first night to get one?

Uh, yep.

Was that a wee bit of overkill?

Maybe, but much of the world is sold out of the 16 GB black ones, so that’s somewhat mitigating (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.)

But what does this mean for you, dear reader? Well hopefully, it might mean a few more blog posts from me, now that WordPress has come out with an iPhone app and I can do it on the go.

In fact, I wrote this post on my iPhone (albeit from a rather immobile supine position on my bed).

The help system on my Leopard installation has lost track of most of its help files. Even the Help help can’t help:

The ol’ Repair Permissions trick to fix this didn’t work, and a quick Goog came up empty, too. Anyone out there know what to do?

Today my good friend Todd pointed me to Swivel, apparently being touted as “YouTube for data”.

Seems promising, although most of the datasets are vanishingly small, and too “munged” — not raw enough for reanalysis. For instance, there seems to be a lot of stuff like this:

Billion Dollar Climate and Weather Diasasters, 1980-2006

which comes straight off a website and is already heavily processed. To their credit, you can download their technical paper on this analysis, but it’s scant on methodology and the source data is unavailable.

I guess there’s value in trying to centralize all of these bits of data, analyzed or not, and the already-analyzed stuff is of course far more interesting:

average trans fat in grams by fast food restaurant

But still: where’s the everyone-can-edit part, like Wikipedia? It’s one thing to be able to leave a comment, but the strength of this site could be the ability for those knowledgeable in data analysis, a subject area, or both to come in, review, and actually correct or reinterpret the data. Letting people simply throw up whatever crap they happen to believe could make the problem of data-and-statistics misuse even worse, because there will be no way to evaluate the findings.

I can’t wait to see what Edward Tufte has to say about this.

Update 13 nov 11:46a GMT+1:
I checked out the Swivel blog and (unsurprisingly) it gave me a better idea of the creators’ vision. And some cool links, too, to other data-related sites.

[image courtesy of twid]

That’s who I really look like (or used to, much to my eternal shame). Who the heck are these people?

These days I pretty much always use Subversion — I have come to rely on it to save me when I manage to mangle, delete, or otherwise befoul previously working code. I have also come to rely on FileMerge, Apple’s graphical diff tool. Mmmm, shiny. Unfortunately, FileMerge doesn’t conform to the interface of the long-standard diff and diff3, so even though svn can accept external diff tools, FileMerge couldn’t be used.

I figured there was a way to overcome this problem, but my initial pokes and prods weren’t fruitful and so I abandoned my attempt. This seems to have been a good idea, because in the meantime someone else has solved the problem for me. Bruno De Fraine has posted wrapper scripts which make FileMerge svn-compatible: fmdiff, fmdiff3, and fmresolve.

By the way, I found out about fmdiff because for some reason my installation of TextMate isn’t correctly picking up my PATH variable, so it can’t see that I have subversion installed. TextMate’s documentation says that it gets its environment from the Finder.

Do any of you know how to fix this?

Wow, has it really been over 2 months since I’ve posted? Shameful. As most of you know, I’ve moved to Stockholm, Sweden. I’ve been here for about a month now, and it’s been wonderful so far.

The biggest surprise has been how excellent the summer climate is. Typical is 72 and partly sunny during the day, dropping to about 60 in the evening. This is perfect weather. Los Angeles weather. Of course, that’s all over…it’s now decidedly autumn.

Overall, though, it hasn’t taken me too long to feel “at home” here. Or closer to it than I expected anyway. Occasionally I have to remind myself that I’m living in a foreign country. I thought I’d still feel like a tourist at this point, and yet it’s still kinda like I’m on vacation.

That seems silly to say, but really, nearly everyone speaks English here. While this has kept away the feeling of isolation, it has contributed to my greatest challenge: learning Swedish. Yeah, big surprise, right? I’m finding it rather difficult to learn. Sure, I can tell I’m getting better, albeit slowly. But dammit I’m impatient.

All right, well that’s enough blathering on about myself. I know this is a blog — self-absorbed by definition — but really…

Hey everyone (all 3 of you),

My apologies for being slow with moderating comments — for some reason I’m not getting emailed when a comment is submitted like I should be. Consequently, I’m opening up comments to be unmoderated. Unless comment spam becomes a problem, I’ll keep it that way.

So there, now you have no excuse for not saying your piece…