We Should See Other Blogs

You know sometimes you go somewhere and get really great service and good food? The Keg is like that. We save up money to go out to The Keg every once in a while; it’s pretty much a guaranteed good time all round. Expensive… but good.

Milestones, however, is pretty much the exact opposite. I’ve had a really, really bad experience there (and vowed I would never go back), and it turns out that just about everyone I know has had a bad experience there of some kind.

And it’s not just one thing. You go to Kelsey’s or something and you get what you expect. The service isn’t great and the food isn’t great, but the prices aren’t bad either. Kelsey’s is what it is. It’s authentically itself; it doesn’t have any pretences of being anything other than itself. And this is good. You don’t feel like you’re being deceived when you eat at Kelsey’s. (McDonalds is the same way; we all know it’s crap, but it is what it is and doesn’t pretend to be something else.)

Milestones on the other hand is all about the upscale. It’s like they took The Keg, changed a few wall hangings, and prayed very hard that things would go well.

They haven’t.

Milestones is Kelsey’s with inflated prices. The service still isn’t good, the food is still sub-par, the atmosphere is alright but nothing special, yet we are being asked to pay a premium to eat there.

Everyone I know will say the same thing: The Keg is worth it, Milestones is not. The Keg is somewhere you plan to go to eat. Milestones is where you go to eat when all other plans have been exhausted and you just don’t care.

• It’s rare that I blog in the evening, much less that I assemble a list of bullet points in the evening, but I haven’t had a moment to slow down today.
• The economy may be slowing down, but business is heating up at work. We’ve had several really solid sales days. If we could keep that up — by getting the salesmen to actually be on the road selling things! — we’d be rolling in it. Part of our current success is several new contracts with Bombardier and Heroux Devtek. Our tooling is knocking them dead. Though not literally, I hope.
• Listening to Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm is an exercise in noticing they used to be fun and interesting to listen to but are no longer fun or interesting. Several big producers and big albums later and they’re just well-coordinated noise. Remember “Positive Tension”? Great song.
• Nathan was playing a Collective Soul song at work today. It reminded me of a more innocent time, when the Mix 99.9 played actual music, and I was dating Laura #1. Not a particularly great time in my life, but still, a more innocent time. I drove a blue Saturn! (Was it blue?) It had those seatbelts that automatically sealed you into your seat but annoyingly required the lap belt to be done up manually. In any case, the point of this point is: Collective Soul sucks. They always have, and they always will. They aren’t innovative. They’re bland. They aren’t interesting. They’re stale. If you like them, that’s fine; just don’t expect me to share your excitement.
• How I Met Your Mother is in the download queue! Yes!
• It strikes me that morality is, after all, innate. A priori. Arts and Letters is right on that count.
• Part of me wants the US government to bail out the banks. Another part of me wants the US government to nuke the banks from space. I’m torn.
• Cats can really smell up a place real quick. Especially younger cats.
• I’m reading “Dune” again right now. It’s a lot more interesting than I remember. But it’s still ruined by its surrounding novels, the prequels especially but also the sequels. Neither Herbert’s continuing vision or his son’s diving into its past have added anything to “Dune” but taken much away. It should be the only book in the canon.
• I got something like 4 hours of sleep last night. I rather hope some of my friends’ sleep problems aren’t catching or anything like that.
• People using the laptop on the toilet really freaks me out. What if, right now, you were talking to someone and you had no idea they were sitting on the can? That’s uncool!
• I’m making a main course for a thing our church does. It’s called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and it’s a basically a way for people to meet other people they might not know. It’s pretty much awesome, but I haven’t the foggiest clue what to make for it. Do you people have any good recipes I should make? Keep in mind I can do multiple dishes!

• How do you motivate people to do something they don’t want to do? Say you’re moving someone from an executive to a more sales-oriented role. And they don’t want to do it. Let’s say they use every possible excuse to avoid their new job, keep finding ways to do their old job despite access restrictions, and in the meantime generally get in the way. Oh, and let’s say it’s in a company with only one level of management and that level of management is afraid of conflict. One more thing… it’s all family. How do you do that?
• Hiring family is generally a mistake. Nepotism has no place in business, not simply because it’s unfair, but because it’s destructive. Hiring family makes you weak: You have to choose, sometimes, between your family and your business. And of course you choose family. Hiring family makes hard choices much, much harder.
• I feel like playing Monopoly sometime soon. I don’t know why. I just developed a hankering for the game.
• Do you find that in-line spell checking makes you spell better? I don’t mean, does it help you make fewer mistakes. That’s pretty obvious. I mean, does it make you more likely to spell things right the first time? Do you dread that little wavy red line?
• I’ve finished drinking some coffee that John at church gave me. I’m not sure if it’s Panamanian or Columbian or what, but it’s pretty good stuff. My favourite by far is still the coffee I bought in Cuba, of all places. Who ever heard of good Cuban coffee?
• Speaking of good Cuban coffee, the cappuccinos Laura and I had in Cuba… wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had better coffee anywhere. I’m not kidding. We got up in the morning and stumbled bleary-eyed into the heat just to enjoy one of those bad boys. And it was worth it. No matter how swelteringly hot it was outside.
• I have been married for a year and one month. That’s… crazy. But awesome at the same time.
• God’s plans are so much better than my plans are. Even when he works through hard means. I can attest to this personally. He turns things to good.
• Mom just showed up at the office and is now fetching me a coffee — I hope. Either that or she forgot totally and I shall remain with no coffee left.
• How do you make a really good pulled pork dish anyways? I’ve made a few educated guesses, but I don’t really know.

• Romaine lettuce with a balsamic vinegar + olive oil + honey + goat’s cheese = awesome dressing
• Boiled potatoes
• Rye bread with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dipping sauce
• Tabbouleh (Note to self, needs finer chopped parsley, fewer pieces of onion, more lemon juice, and more fresh ground pepper, plus some tomatoes and red peppers)
• Red wine from France (but not good red wine from France, mind you

That was delicious..

This is going to be one of those posts. Basically I’m killing time waiting for Laura to arrive so we can do lunch together; she should be here in a half hour, leaving me a short while in which to write about anything that comes to mind.

She come to mind. But I won’t gross you all out. Just this: I thank God for her every day.

I got Notion yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a notation and playback program. And of course my problem has always been reading sheet music: I’ve got some sort of mental bock against it. You can imagine, then, that actually scoring anything is difficult for me. I have no background in scoring, dynamics, articulation, time signatures, and the like. The piano music I play is all in my head in a way that doesn’t translate in any real way to paper. Wrapping that music in a specific type of notation is like learning to write again, and I’m certainly not at all fluent.

There’s nothing quite like white chocolate. For those of you who know, I dislike regular milk chocolate passionately (unless it’s very mild). But white chocolate: that’s the stuff. Disgustingly good, if you will.

My main computer keeps shutting off randomly. I think Ye Olde Power Supply is slowly giving up the ghost, but the thought of perhaps having a hard drive failure has had me wondering about smooth, swift change-overs from computer to computer. Would it be practical to find a way to do this? To compile a list of programs, settings, and whatnot? To move it to a new computer regardless of operating system? I know; it’s a crazy pipe dream.

Christmas is upon us. But don’t make me watch Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Christmas is All in the Heart”. If I wanted to listen to soporific, banal, pedestrian, vapid, clichéd, asinine tripe, I’d already own the disc.

That’s all, folks.

I would like to take moment to thank God for perogies, and their constituent ingredients.