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Ice Cream Marathon

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

On Saturday August 14, 2010 the long planned Wednesday Night Dinner Ice Cream Marathon occurred from 1pm until 7:30pm. We followed and approximately 7 mile route from Boston’s North End to Harvard Square in Cambridge following this route:

View Ice Cream Marathon in a larger map

We stopped at each place marked in green. We skipped over duplicate stores, chains, and stores we didn’t know existed. We carried score cards. Here is the digital representation of mine:

Location	Time	Flavor	Size	Score (1-10)
1. Gelateria	1:20pm	Hazelnut / Vanilla	Small	5 / 8
2. Sprinkles	2:00pm	Butter Pecan	Child	7
3. Emack & Bolio’s	2:45pm	Cake Batter¹	One Scoop	3
4. Picco’s	3:25pm	Cinnamon²	One Size	9³
5. Bon Bon	4:25pm	Pineapple Sorbet	One Size	2
6. J. P. Licks	4:55pm	Cake Batter	Not Available⁴	0
7. Toscanini’s	5:55pm	Cake Batter	Kiddie	9
8. Christina’s	6:30pm	Corn⁵	Small	4
9. Lizzy’s	7:30pm	Vanilla Cookie Dough	Kiddie	6

¹Like most flavors at Emack and Bolio’s this cake batter is infused with chocolate. This is not an acceptable thing to do and still call it cake batter, but that is what they do.
²Also bread and water were provided at no cost at Picco’s.
³The flavor of the Cinnamon (and they Honey flavor that I tired) were so intense as to deserve top honors. However, we were unable to finish these flavors due to their intensity.
⁴J. P. Licks has suddenly, and without warning discontinued the cake batter flavor at all of their locations. This is not acceptable as it was the best cake batter flavor available in the city and my favorite ice cream overall. Until such a time as cake batter is returned to the menu I am forced to boycott J. P. Licks. I did get in line and ask for cake batter, only to be told they they don’t have it, to which I responded, “Ah, never mind then.”
⁵Bacon flavor was also available and I tried a spoonful of it. Someone got bacon flavor and was unable to finish the salty delicious treat. I had tired corn flavor earlier in the week and thought it quite good, but I was unable to finish my small size of it either.

The clear winner was Picco’s. Picco’s is a sit down pizza restaurant that also hand makes ice cream for their desert menu. They were great sports and sat a table for 13 who intended only to have ice cream. They also provided bread and water at no charge, which was most appreciated. Surprisingly appreciated was the bread! The flavors at Picco’s are intense, rich, and wonderful. I could taste the gainyness of the cinnamon in my ice cream! Everyone agreed this was the best place.

Clear runner up in my book Toscanini’s. Toscanini’s, since inciting me into their store for the first time in years with their ROFLCon inspired “Internet” Flavor (vanilla + grape nerds) has become my favorite ice cream parlor. The fact that J. P. Licks has recently committed seppuku has only help them reach the top. Other excellent recent flavors include Fig Newton, Ginger, and the best remaining cake batter flavor in town! Enough said!

Posted in Around Town, Cooking & Food, Fun, Maps, Wednesday Night Dinner | 1 Comment »

I Do Love My Phone

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Not having any food in the house and not feeling like spending any money I resigned to having chipotle again this week. Not so so much a resignment as a guilt; to aswauge that guilt I decided that I would walk the .75 miles. I began looking for something intersting to do with my walk. I picked up my new camera and my old bluetooth headphones to listen to music; not that I had anything new or interesting to listen to.

On my walk it hit me, the camera did not have its battery in it. Oh and I thought of something to listen to, that might be worthwhile: NPR. I waited until I got to chipotle where I could use the phone without freezing my hand, typed NPR into the market and I was listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me within a minute. I don’t normally listen to NPR, but with months of podcasts anywhere anytime, I think I’ll give it a try. Anything to be more interesting.

P.S: trying out a new blogging app too. The user comment was right, better than the brower (on the phone) for sure.

Posted in Purchases | No Comments »

Rockband

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Since my friend Sparky got a job at Harmonix Thursday night games has frequently involved playing Rockband. I was never very good at Guitar Hero, and I was never a huge fan of the songs it came with but Rockband is awesome for two reasons:

Lots of great songs as downloadable content, which Sparky picks up for us.
Singing!

I have never been very musical. DDR and Guitar Hero proved that rhythm is not my thing. We’ll, the amount of concentration it takes me to clap in rhythm proved that long ago, but they reinforce it well. I’ve also never been good enough at singing to earn any sort of accolades for it. Thanks to my elementary school drama teacher for making me an understudy every year to get that little lesson across. But I still enjoy it, and I can apparently fake it well enough to make a machine happy, which makes me happy.

But I’m only any good on songs that I’ve heard before, so I have added the Rockband 1 & 2 songs to my usual playlist, so that I get used to them and learn what they sound like. I’ve been consequently paying more attention to all of the songs on my playlist and thinking about them in the same way as the songs that I’ll someday have to perform in from my friends to the satisfaction of the machine. It’s a lot of fun. I just wish that you could take any old song and play it in Rockband, as there are pleary of songs I already love to sing that aren’t options (pretty much all of Avril).

The other good thing about Rockband is that its introduced me to some new music. Avoiding advertising really cuts down on access to music pop culture. Well for those of us too cheap for satellite radio, and whose musical tastes are not well captured by Pandora. Anyways so lots of the new songs on the latest revision of my car mp3cd are from rock band. You know, i should really put my car mp3cd under subversion control. Anyways some of them are:

Panic at the Disco – Nine in the Afternoon
Weezer – Say it Ain’t So
The Main Drag – A Jagged Gorgeous Winter
Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye

But my two favorite songs these days, both oldies from the ’90s, that I really wish were in Rockband are:

Alanis Morissette – That I Would be Good: I’ve had a cropped short version of this song for a long time, but the full length one is even better.
Aimee Mann – You Could Make a Killing:This is the only Aimee Mann song that I even approach to liking, but it is great. She was in an episode of Buffy and even that association couldn’t make me like the song she sang in the show.

Speaking of oldies, Beatles Rockband. I’ve always had an issue with the Beatles. I love the parts of their songs that I remember from my childhood, listening to oldies radio, but the songs I never heard, and even the non-choruses that I don’t remember I don’t like very much. A couple weeks ago I went to Beatles Rockband night at Improv Boston, entirely because of a girl, but while I was there I noticed that I like a lot more of the Beatles catalog than I realized. Last week at Thursday night games we had an actual singer, Ethan, and so I eventually settled into providing some harmonies while playing the drums. I can actually drum to the Beatles with some sort of competence on easy mode! It was way more fun to drum when I didn’t suck at it.

Posted in Buffy: Vampire Slayer & Angel, Dating, Fun, Rants, Reviews | No Comments »

Congradulations Kim Clijsters

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Congradulations to Kim Clijsters for making women’s tennis interesting again. Finally, there is once again a woman playing tennis who is not named Williams when it comes time to hand out trophies. Not that Clisters is newbie, but hey anything that prevents Williams vs. Williams matches is welcomed.

I would have watched, but for some reason the U.S. Open Finals were not on broadcast television and not on basic cable, but on some channel no one gets, WTF?! That is almost as bad as there not being a single College Football game on broadcast television last Saturday night! But hey, one problem at a time.

Posted in Rants, Reviews, TV | 3 Comments »

I Guess I Know Enough People Now

Monday, September 14th, 2009

The last two times I’ve gone out to bar in Boston I’ve run into people I know randomly. Now, granted, it was 2 months between consecutive bar trips, and the bars were actually in Somerville and Cambridge, but still. The first trip was to Joshua Tree in Davis Square on July 18th for my birthday. Across the bar I spotted some coworkers. Well actually, I first spotted a cute girl, and then I later noticed she was with my coworkers. Unfortunately for me, she’s recently married to one of them. Previous to entering the bar I’d seen Krishna, a gaming buddy & coworker, and his girlfriend out on the street. To be fair they live within a 500 yards or so of the bar.

This time we were out last Friday for my room mate Sriram’s birthday. We were at Daedalus in Harvard square on a stormy night. We were the first of our group to arrive. Scoping out the room, I saw a guy I vaguely recognized, but did not know from where. Surprisingly, Sriram walked toward him, but that was just a coincidence. His name I found out is Doug, and I knew him as a 3 hop friend via Sparky and his friend Lilly. I met Doug at the 4th of July and a BBQ in August. Doug was there for a friend of a friend’s (2 hop) birthday. As it turns out, the birthday boy was Sriram. Doug recently became room mates with one of Sriram’s friends. Small world! Later on, one of my former room mate Biran’s friends, whom I know from Hog Island parties showed up.

It was a pretty fun night. Very similar to my birthday, there was Indian food followed by drinks. Lacking anything else interesting to try I had two Absolute Boston, yes that is a variety of vodka now, & Lemonades. The first one was very good, but the second one got old.

Posted in Around Town, Fun, Rants, Reviews | No Comments »

RIP Jeff Goldblum

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Following the tragic death of Jeff Goldblum this past weekend, I feel now is the time to share a small revelation I had this weekend while watching one of his greatest works.

This past weekend I had to work on Saturday. We are trying to get some test flights of a new airplane based radar I’ve been working on in amid the rain showers. Don’t ask me why, but they don’t like to fly in the rain. This has been difficult and no sunny day can be wasted. I was not scheduled to fly originally, but following a flight on Friday in which no data was collected for mysterious reasons, the powers that be decided I should fly, with 2 coworkers because we were the ones who wrote most of the software involved. If we flew we would be there to diagnose and solve the problem on the fly, if needed. Everything worked perfectly on the flight so my presence was not particularly needed, but it could have been. I also did manage to get a little air sick while sitting on the floor, out of my seat, but in a position to see the control screen.

Upon returning home I found my room mate Sriram about ten minutes into the film Independence Day. This film, long one of my favorites, possibly my favorite action film of all time, is an oddity among my usual tastes in movies. Now, it does have, quite possibly, the best speech in a movie by an American president, but the events of last Saturday shed some more personal light on why I enjoy the film so much. I remember seeing it on July 3rd (or 4th) in Louisville, KY with my family the year it came out; I was 12 years old.
That same year, 1996, was also the year in which I first learned how to program, in qbasic with my buddy Greg.

In the movie Jeff Goldblum plays an MIT educated cable/satellite guru who looks into the alien television disturbance and finds something no one else bothered to see. Later, he creates a virus for the alien computer and flies up to the mother ship with the Will Smith character to deliver it, despite chronic air sickness. Why did he have to fly? He explains in the flim, “If anything goes wrong I’ll have to think quickly, adjust the signal, who knows?”

Now, my air sickness was nothing like his, and its all a different scale, but that’s essentially the same reason I was flying. Upon landing, while I helping to preparing for the next flight, some of the binary files used to setup the flight were found to have errors, errors so sever as to crash the program using them. I encounter problems like this, that require manually examining difficult to read binary files on a frequent basis at work. I enjoy it. Despite having a call in to the person who created the files, I couldn’t help but dive in and find the problem myself. Now that was easy, because I had the rubric for how the file was laid out. Goldblum’s character didn’t have that. I really wish there was more of a need to reverse engineer stuff like that at work. It is so much more challenging when one is not provided with a key.

This may also help explain why upon much self analysis, I consistently find myself thinking that if I go back to school, the only place to go, where it would be worth my while, is MIT (or possibly Harvard if I decide to go back for an economics degree). Clearly, everything in my life so far has put me on the path to become Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day. At least, that is one way to interpret the facts.

Posted in From the Internet, Movies | No Comments »

Google Reader Sharing Via Facebook

Monday, June 8th, 2009

A few weeks ago I saw on facebook that a college buddy of mine, Ed, shared a blog post he read in Google Reader. That is, he read a blog post someone wrote, via Google Reader and hit the share button on there and because it had been instructed to do so facebook add it to his news feed. I just had to have it. A few minutes later I found out how, and it’s been great.

It’s great for three reasons. First is how it works. Google Reader makes up a web page, that essentially looks like a blog, but it is of the posts that one has read instead of one has written. This page is public, and mine is here (for those of you who want to see what I share but don’t use Google Reader of Facebook. Now, that is pretty nice right there. What facebook does, is subscribe to the rss feed from that page. That means they didn’t have to contact or work with Google directly at all to get this to work. This was initially confusing, because I couldn’t figure out where to go to enable this magic. It turns out that you go to your own profile and click on “settings” below the big share button. They have similar setups for other sites too. Anyways, this is the wonderful kind of thing that open standards can buy!

But why is it so wonderful? Well that’s the second reason. Only like 2 people see what I share on Google Reader, and maybe one third of the time it’s stuff I’ve found because they shared it that I also agree is worth sharing. I also often ran across things that I wanted to share, but not with them; stories I knew they didn’t care about. I occasionally would use the built in email this option to share very cool things with the one person I knew would be interested. There were, however, still many interesting things that I wanted to share, but had no audience for. This little open standards miracle provides an audience. When it is as simple as clicking a button to share something cool with an audience, it drives one to share cool things.

The final reason builds on the second. Because now, I can easily share cool things, I have started reading more blogs. At least part of this is so that I can have more cool stuff to share. The other reason is that I found some other good ones on other strange topics I like, such as strange maps. Anyways, I’m a big fan, but it may mean less “From the Internet” posts on here.

Posted in From the Internet, Reviews | No Comments »

Inkheart & Bridge to Terabithia

Monday, May 4th, 2009

The other thing I did this weekend, besides the Derby party, was watch some high quality children’s movies. On Friday, due to a canceled date, I stayed in to hang out with my roommate Sriram and watch Inkheart, which is about a man who, when he reads aloud, causes people and things to jump into and out of books. He loses his wife in this way and gains a gang of bandits for his trouble. The graphics are pretty good on the many fantastical things that get read out of the books. The story also winds its way around a bit, and keeps some suspense for a movie with a foregone conclusion.

The foregone conclusion is what I forgot about with Bridge to Terabithia. I ended up spending Sunday night relaxing with the house to myself and rain threatening outside. Inkheart at put me in the mood for another imaginative tale, and imaginative it was! They did a great job with the subtle use of special graphics to reinforce that Terabithia exists only in the minds of the two main children. The little girl, by the way, AnnaSophia Robb, is a dead ringer, at least in the movie makeup, for a 14 year old Keira Knightley. I had forgotten how the movie came to be on my watch list in the first place, but was reminded in the credits that its because the always wonderful Zooey Deschanel is in it. She plays a music teacher with an interesting take on teaching, and an arbitrarily invitation to take one student to a museum in the city. This suddenly leads the movie down an unexpected road. In retrospect, I remember Richard Roper warning parents about this in his review, but I had forgotten. This only helped my appreciation for the film, however.

Bridge to Terabithia sits somewhere on the same scale as Pan’s Labyrinth. That is a scale between realism and fantasy. Pan’s Labyrinth spends far too much time in the real world, but it’s fantasy world is quite vivid. Bridge to Terabithia spends less time in the real world; well, maybe not film time, but the real world is less harsh and so that counts for it. However the fantasy world is not quite as beautiful, and again, like Pan’s it is but a taste. Somewhere on this scale exists a perfect escapist fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia movies had a shot at this, but they screwed the pooch with the bland interpretation of the fantasy world.

Posted in Movies | No Comments »

Star Trek @ Brattle

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I’ve been in a Star Trek mood since seeing the movie last week and subsequent debates about it’s merits with the handful of people who I saw it with. So when I heard that the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square was going to show six episodes of the original series on their big screen tonight for cheap, I decided to go and see two of them. I just got back.

Wow, am I glad that I didn’t pay to see all six. I mean I know there is a reason why I’ve not bothered to ever watch them (I have them all), but they were pretty bad. Although, as with Indiana Jones, seeing them with an enthusiastic audience probably did help. Also, the source material was the remastered DVDs, so the quality was much improved over my recorded from the G4 channel reruns. In any case, I saw:

Star Trek – 118 – Arena
Star Trek – 126 – Errand of Mercy

I feel that perhaps I’ve been too hard on Star Trek 11, it was much improved over the originals. But then I suppose the next level up is to compare it to the original movies, which I haven’t seen in many years.

Posted in Around Town, Reviews, Star Trek | No Comments »

Star Trek (11)

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

I just got back from seeing the new Star Trek movie! How do you ask, well Celeste, told the xkcd forums, who told me. It seemes the Internet and the theater knew nothing about it otherwise. I still don’t know how she found out about it, but not many people did. It was not packed. I don’t quite understand why you wouldn’t promote a sneak preview enough to pack one showing. Anyways. I don’t want to give away any spoilers so the rest will be quite generic.

The movie started out strong, and quickly established a great action drama balance. I was drawn in well before the opening credits. The opening credits lacked a certain familiar tune. I mean, what they had, it’s similar, but it did not fulfill my desire to hear the music. The closing credits did so that was good.

So the movies going along just great and then there is a major plot point, something bad happens, and after that the movies just not the same. However, due to the continuities involved, there was a choice the writers could have made; that I would have made, but they did not. This takes them down a road towards a disappointing conclusion.

There is one gripe I can be specific about, because it was in the trailer. In the trailer they show a starship being constructed on the ground, on pylons. This utterly ridiculous. First, it is not consistent; all other star trek ships have been built in space. Second, if NASA didn’t even want to launch all of the international space station at once cause it weighted too much, imagine a star ship. Finally, star ships are not made to fly in the atmosphere, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be rocketed up there, and they don’t have that kind of transporter capability at that point in the timeline; so how the hell does it get off the damn planet! I’m sorry there’s just no way that is realistic at all.

So this movie, being an odd one (11) was bound to suck (as all the odd numbered ones do), and so it did, although I will continue to applaud the strong start it had. And if you claim that this was really a different movie sequence then the other one then it is number 1, also odd, also bound to suck. This movie will not reboot the franchise. I’m not even sure the tag line “The future begins” is appropriate.

I do want to end on a high note. I really liked all of the new actors for the major characters, and they really did a good job of working in everyone’s lines from the show. They also hit all the classic elements but they did some of them in different ways. This is very similar to how Get Smart did things, and is applaudable. I would see a squeal involving them, but not in the time-line that extends from this film, which is the real problem with it.

Posted in Around Town, Movies, Star Trek, xkcd | 1 Comment »

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