An old friend from my college days is performing in a one man show called “Man of the Heart”, where he embodies the Bengali mystic Lalon Pkokir. My friend now is an assistant professor of theater at UC Berkeley. By all means check out his website and go to his performances this weekend and next: http://www.lalon.org/. I’m going this Friday.
Author: F C
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Meal or No Meal
When you’re coasting until the next payday, you do what you can to budget your meal expenses, not just to stretch the paycheck, but so that you can afford to splurge a little for something better.
Half of the dinners in the past week were home cooked. Wednesday was free dinner at work provided by the student government. Friday was free dinner at NYU’s Asian Pacific American Studies Institute, which celebrated its 10th anniversary by bringing back many of its former faculty and resident artists, and recently moved to the newly formed Department of Social and Cultural Studies.
Tuesday’s splurge: prix fixe at the French Culinary Institute. $35 for 5 courses – a big steal, especially for French food. There are some flaws because they are students: the menu had way too many rice dishes (thai rice, rissoto, then chicken and rice – enough already), our server had to juggle 9 tables by herself and her classmate wasn’t doing buptkus. One of the student chefs blew the budget by putting on 2-5mm slices of truffles on the side of the dish instead of shaving them. The deserts all had custard in them as the theme. Mind you, the dishes were well-executed, but they didn’t get the harmony down pat.
Saturday’s budget eats: The Taste of Chinatown – $1 and $2 dishes of tasty Asian cuisine. The ultimate was the $2 Peking duck – the line went down the block for half an hour. Recommended.
Sunday’s splurge: dimsum in Flushing at Ocean Jewels Seafood Restaurant
133-30 39th Ave. This is how dim sum used to be. Good, attentive service, no plate more than $3, and very inventive and well-executed dishes. Recommended. -
Haiku
From watching too much Ghost in the Shell on Adult Swim at 3 in the morning:
towards the end of spring
existentialist complex
stands alone with you -
Action
After a long time away, I’m involved again in a small thespian production. I actually only have about 4 lines, but I do a lot of behind the scenes stuff. The good things about a theater production are that they tend to bring people together, and I think that it will do that here. I really do miss it.
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Mighty Morphin’ Macs (and virtualization)
The big news this week in the computer world was on the Intel Mac’s Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on a Mac natively for the first time, if you don’t mind repartitioning your computer.
The behind-the-scenes news is virtualization. Microsoft is giving away for free their Virtual Server (which is really their repackaged versionof VirtualPC). To top that, also for free, I ran VMWare Player and the Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 virtual appliance on Windows XP. You need like 6 GB of space on your hard drive, and the more memory, the better, but I got about 3400 bogomips on a 1.5 GHZ Pentium 4, which isn’t fantastic, but it’s way more than enough to get the GUI fully operational and browing the X Windows version of Firefox without hesitation, without messing up my partitions, and with full sound support. This is the new frontier in computing!
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Last Suppers and the Gospel According to Ghengis
This weekend was a variety of free and cheap meals curtesy of work, events and Brooklyn Restaurant Week (which goes on until Tuesday, so catch up!). Atlantic ChipShop has a three course meal for 2 for 20.06. Blue Ribbon Sushi has a magnificient sushi/shashimi combo for the 20.06 (get the combo, not the sushi alone or the shashimi alone – they are all regular portions). Free work food at Tavern on the Green – can’t complain about the rare tuna, the shrimp cocktail or the desserts. Fine food and drink at Southwest NY at AS’s Baptism party for Ghengis, aka Mini-AS.
The baptism was held at St. Joseph’s Chapel, which is also the Catholic 9/11 memorial. Haunting cast statues of the site’s patron saints take up most of the left side of the chapel. New life is represented by the gurguling baptismal font, whose moving water represents cleaning and renewal. AS’s cousin performed the ceremony, which was nice and furfilling.
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Blue and Borderlined
The architectural wonders of Meji Mura that we visited last year were described by the New York Times in their coverage of this year’s exchange musical exchange program between Brooklyn, and Inuyuma, a suburb of Nagoya in Japan.
Had a satisfying meal at the alumni dinner with SSW and P this past night. The new space is twice as big and twice as spectacular as the prior space. Chicago singer-songwriter Cynthia Lin made a soulful guitar performance during the intermission – I bought her CD. She will be performing again at the APA festival in Union Square the first Sunday in May.
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Snow Day
We’re having a blizzard in the City right now! Gorgeous flakes of snow, many of them the size of a quarter, are completely making the sky white. Check out some photos from my phone cam on the flickr bar!
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Redesign Fatigue
Two changes to two major websites, one temporary and one permanent:
- Slashdot as an April Fool’s joke turned their frontpage pink and changed their motto to “OMG!!! PONIES!!!”, starting a bloggersphere catchphrase craze not heard of since “All your base are belong to us!“. Funny while it lasted.
- The New York Times changed their website into something kind of, sort of like the printed version, with multiple colums of stuff to peruse. It is going to take come getting used to. It’s hard for me to scroll around – I rather like the setup in their “Today’s Paper” version instead, where everything is in one column.
Looking forward to the annual asian alumni dinner at school on Wednesday. It’s going to be at the new conference center, so that should be great.
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April Flu’s
The cold that I picked up on Thursday is finally abating, just in time for the weather to warm up. Just about everything is budding, which just made my recovery that much longer. Saturday, I practically spent the entire day in bed – probably more than 15 hours of sleep. Amazingly, P hasn’t caught anything from me, probably because of the antibiotics she’s taking while recovering from her oral surgery.
The angry flood girl from upstairs finally got herself kicked out this weekend. Apparently she also wasn’t paying her share of the rent with the other woman in the apartment. Most of the afternoon was spent with her stomping up and down the stairs with her bags. Good riddance! Hopefully the flood waters will finally stop.