Link: Skate & Destroy. Just had to reblog because of the beauty of the sculptures (via http://tumble.blagspot.com/):

How often do you go to a restaurant and the waiter/waitress brings you a glass of water with ice in it? How often are you so hot that you really need ice water to cool you down?

Here in San Francisco, I've been in air-conditioned restaurants in the winter where they're served ice-water. Since returning to the States from Austria three years ago (where it is uncommon to serve ice in water at restaurants,) I almost always ask for 'water, no ice' at the beginning of a meal. Surprisingly, several waiters or waitresses have asked me why and ice water is simply no longer my preference. I find that room-temperature water with a bit of lemon does the trick if I'm parched, much more so than ice-water.

While walking down the street today, I thought "since it's the standard at practically every restaurant in the US to bring you a glass of ice water when you patronize their establishment, what if the next time the waiter/waitress asked 'Something to drink?', everyone in the US responded with 'water, no ice please.' Wouldn't restaurants, reacting to less demand, use ice-makers less frequently and thereby save vast amounts of energy?"

I don't have any reliable statistics at hand, but let's assume a rate of 3 restaurant visits per month per person in the US (population ~307M people.) If one glass of ice-water is served during those visits, that's a lot of ice cubes.

Several months ago, my brother came to town. He wanted a good steak dinner so we went to one of the best steakhouses in town.

Our table wasn't quite ready when we arrived so we sat at the bar for a drink. When it was time to be seated we made our way into the dining room but as we were leaving the lounge area, a trio of jazz musicians were setting up. As I was leaving, I noticed and immediately recognized the drummer: Peter Magadini of polyrhythm fame. Unbelievable after all these years; Peter was setting up to play in the steakhouse where we were about to have dinner!

The trio played a set and when they took a break, I rushed up to greet Peter and tell him my story of having met him years previously. What a rush to meet a musician I so admire in a steakhouse in SF.

And yes, the steaks were fantastic. The best I've ever had, actually.

I created a Flickr account a long time ago. I then created a Yahoo account and tied that to my Flickr account. I then created another Yahoo account and wanted to replace my previous Yahoo account with the new one but couldn't do it!

I just discovered that I could swap out my old Yahoo handle with my new one and tie my Flickr account to the Yahoo account I use most. Nicely done, Flickr.

• clean my blog
• swim twice a week
• lift weights twice a week
• play basketball once a week
• spend more time with my wife
• walk to work occasionally
• walk home from work occasionally
• cook
• write a book/series of blog posts (maybe both) about the nightmare that has been our first home purchase
• go out with people from work for happy hour
• read the news
• woodshed on all the technologies I have been meaning to learn
• call people

In my early 20s, my father and I traveled from Michigan to the west for a combo train/bus ride. We landed in Spokane, WA, and rode a train to Bozeman, Montana. Along the way, we made a stop in Missoula and took a spin on the merry-go-round with both of us being on horses on the outside of the ride.

As we spun around, he would occasionally reach up and grab a white, plastic ring from a dispenser shaped like a dragon's mouth. That was fairly entertaining and I tried it a couple of times; the dispenser was just high enough and offset from the ride to require a good sense of timing and a good stretch to get the ring.

At some point, my father sensed that the ride was coming to an end and said "go for the brass ring!" I was a bit confused; the brass ring? What did he mean?

After one or two more turns, I could see him going for the dispenser again but this time, there wasn't a white ring in the dragon's mouth but rather something darker. As I watched from behind, he reached up and snagged the darker, brownish ring and let out a laugh. He shook it all about and sported a big, Cheshire grin on his face.

"Go for the brass ring!" has become my mantra as a result; I thought it when I moved to Vienna after grad school instead of moving to California, when I eventually moved to California after living and working in Vienna, when I took a job with Yahoo, and when I moved to SOMA.

Roughly two years ago and in preparation for the move back to the States, I bought an external hard drive (120 GB.) I was running WinXP at the time and had also just purchased Norton Ghost. My plan was to store a Norton image on the drive, bring the drive back to the US, and restore to new hardware so that I would have the same computer as I had been using 6,000 miles away.

After I returned to the US, I bought an HP desktop and swapped my WinXP image for the Vista OS that was on the box. I no longer needed the 120 GB external hard drive as a vault so I started using it as a briefcase and shuttled my music back and forth to work where I was (am) using a Macbook Pro.

I offloaded all of the content off the drive, reformatted it with Extended (HFS Plus,) and dumped everything back onto it.

Then, I discovered Ubuntu at home. I wiped my desktop clean of WinXP (all of my content was on the external hard drive of course,) and dropped Hardy Heron onto my desktop. I kept on saying "someday soon, I'll backup all of my digital content from the external hard drive to my desktop, but it's a pain to split it out now so I'll just keep it where it is" - on the external hard drive.

One day, back in November, I plugged in my digital briefcase and was horrified; the drive could not be read. I can't remember the exact error but I couldn't see the contents of the drive. I unplugged it, plugged it back in again, nothing. Tried again. Nothing. Tried it on different machines. Nothing. Tried running some diagnostics on it: no space left, no space being used.

Slowly it sank in; the drive was probably ... corrupt. All of my photos and music and documents and everything; all of my digital content - gone. Despair, to say the least. I started searching for a way to recover the data. I had heard that it was possible, even after catastrophes like unintentionally formatting a hard drive.

During my search, I found "data recovery services" and "data recovery software." Given the cost of data recovery services, which might run into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, I tried a couple of different data recovery software options and have only one worth mentioning because it was the only one that (mostly) worked: Data Rescue II.

I say "mostly" because it was able to restore all of my content (I think,) but it couldn't restore their names, so now I have a bunch of DOC, PDF, MP3, and JPG files with unintelligible names like "J900x1200-03236.jpg." I'm happy to have the files back (especially my wedding photos - but I had those on CD anyway. Can you imagine what my wife would have done to me?)

I have to dig through thousands of files and recategorize them. I don't think I'll be able to rename them all, but at least if I can get them regrouped in some relevant manner, I'll be better off. I've learned my lesson. Now I use rsync to backup files offsite,

This evening, while I was out, I stopped to pick up some Thyme and Oregano. I had to marvel at how nice it is that that's all we needed at home.

Over the last five years, I've gained a new appreciation for the effort it takes to build a life, having had to do so from scratch twice in that time. When I arrived both in Vienna and then San Francisco, I had nothing but suitcases of clothes.

In time, in both places, I/we acquired what was necessary for a household, and it's so easy to take for granted things like shampoo, a bed, twisty-ties, a computer monitor, or a screwdriver.

When on every trip out-of-the-house, you have to think about what essentials are still missing, it's nice that the day comes that all you need is some Thyme and Oregano.