Blessed by the Potato

On The Fork is a high-end restaurant on the Forks of the Thames inside Museum London. I was thrown by this when trying to find it, I wasn’t expecting it to be inside the museum, way in the back. Museum admission is free, so this actually gave me an excuse to run quickly through a floor or two of it while waiting for the rest of our party to arrive. The view out the back is quite good, overlooking the forks of the Thames (hence the name) out behind the museum.

The waiter warned us right away that the portion sizes were quite small, and that there weren’t separate appetizers and entrees: instead, we were expected to order two (or three) items off the menu, and whichever was faster/easier/lighter would be brought out first. Everything is roughly “appetizer” sized, with a focus on presentation and style over portion size, though even after two plates and a dessert, some of our group was still hungry. This plan does allow for some variety (in fact, it’s a favourite of ours at Kelsey’s, where we can just order 3 appetizers to share instead of a main course) but also can make a meal get really unexpectedly expensive. Each dish ranged from $7 to $16, which is about what an entree costs at a more casual restaurant, so plan on a night at the Forks being about 2-3 times as much (which is not out of line with other upscale restaurants).

There were only 4 vegetarian options: a “warm salad” with goat’s cheese that didn’t sound, smell, or look very appealing to me; the gnocchi and tomato sauce; a very heavy creamy soup; and a squash ravioli which I figured would either be quite nice or be really grody. I played it safe and stuck with the gnocchi, and ordered it again for my second course, much to the disparagement of the waiter, who was quite a character (and really pushed a second course on me, even though I wasn’t very hungry). He was also very pushy when dessert time came around, really trying to sell everyone on a dessert, even though he didn’t really know what each option comprised (it was the first day with the new dessert menu).

On the Fork is definitely out of my usual price and haughtiness range, so I wouldn’t ordinarily recommend it. I also don’t think I would recommend it for dinner: for a larger meal, you’d be looking at most likely 3 dishes to satisfy, and that would just be ridiculously pricey. Plus, at night, the view of the forks wouldn’t be as good (AFAIK, there are no lights on the river) so half the attraction of the restaurant would be gone. If you do go there and are driving, be sure to check out the municipal lot directly in front of the museum doors first: we saw that it was pretty full and just went across the street to the ImPark lot, which ended up costing us $7.50 — while the municipal lot was quite full, there were about 3 spaces left as we walked through, and it would have only been $2.50 for the same time period!

Wow, Portal was every bit as awesome as I heard. Neat new puzzle gameplay, hilarious computer, short but sweet. Add on cake and companion cubes and you’ve got a winner.

In fact, it took me longer to get my video card updated to a new set of drivers than it did to play through the game (about 3 hours, but I still have to play the bonus stages I unlocked). It’s an Asus made X1650 Pro (ATI) over AGP. And for some reason, ATI drivers don’t work on it. I install them, reboot, and then face a screen full of fuzz. Go into VGA mode, try another driver, repeat. When I last tried this, I ended up sticking with the out-of-date drivers that came on the CD (dated mid-2006 or so), which were good enough to run CivIV. Unfortunately, Portal just wouldn’t start up under those old drivers, so I had to try the process all over again. Fortunately, news of this stupid card’s incompatibility has spread enough that I found evidence of it when searching the web… just too bad it came too late to keep me from buying the stupid thing in the first place. To make a long story short, Asus has dropped the ball on this card, hard. Their drivers are really out of date for this card, and it is completely incompatible with other versions. I found two potential fixes: the first involved reflashing the BIOS on the card to make it think it was a Sapphire made X1650 Pro AGP. The other involved a custom version of the Catalyst drivers (“Warcat XG 7.4”) which properly recognizes this card.

A few months ago I got a coupon to buy some Becel Omega3Plus margarine, so I decided to give it a whirl. I’ve got to say I haven’t been very impressed. For the most part, it’s just like regular margarine (as you’d hope). You spread it on your toast, eat it, etc. But you get the benefit of having more variety of omega-3 fatty acids. While it seems to taste pretty much the same, it has what I find to be a really funny smell which often makes me change my mind and reach for the jam instead. My biggest complaint about it though is that it doesn’t seem to melt right when using it to cook with. Regular margarine (and butter) tend to melt and then bubble & foam when you have the frying pan at close to the right temperature, whereas this just seems to melt and then separate into a film with droplets in it, almost as if it were watered down or something.

Note that despite the marketing of this version as a source of Omega-3’s, original Becel margarine is also a source of Omega-3. In fact, both versions offer up 0.6 g per serving. The only difference is that the Omega3Plus version has all the different types of Omega 3 fats added in (ALA, DHA, EPA) which is probably better for you, while the original version doesn’t mention which source provides its Omega-3s (probably just ALA). The new Omega3Plus version also has fewer Omega-6 fatty acids (1.5 g vs 2 g) which is important; I believe the rule of thumb is that your diet overall should have about 4X as much Omega-6 as Omega-3, so a source of Omega-3’s (i.e.: something to bring the ratio back in line from our typical diet of 10X or more in favour of Omega-6) should have a lower ratio (here, 2.5X and 3.3X).

Since I’m really picky about my food having even slightly strange smells, I don’t think I’ll be buying the Omega3Plus version again, but if you don’t usually use your margarine for cooking with, you may not have any problem with it.

I swear I’ve ranted about the mad proliferation of power adaptors, power bricks, AC-DC transformers or whatever you want to call them before, but I can’t find it in my archives. My search function is not quite as helpful as I would have hoped.

Anyhow, this was a pretty good Potatomas for me, with lots of toys to haul in: a Nintendo DS, some Wii games, and a new camera to replace the one that was stolen. The camera looks pretty keen: a Canon SD850 8-megapixel unit that’s quite small and sleek. So far I only have two complaints about it. The first is that the flash is way too bright, and that it could really use a half-flash setting, or even a low, med, high flash like my old, old 3-MP camera had. The second is that it doesn’t take AA batteries, so I have to remember to charge it when going places, and also to take the proprietary charger. Likewise, the DS has its own charging dongle. My old Sony camera also had its charger, but it used rechargeable AA-batteries, so when I inevitably ran out of juice in the middle of a trip or a party, I could just run into a convenience store or bum some batteries from somewhere else and I was good to go.

My cell phone (motorola Razr V3c) has a mini-USB slot to charge, which I find quite handy. I don’t need to pack a charger, just my laptop. Of course, that stupid thing needs a specific driver for my laptop in order for it to charge properly, so it was of no help when my phone died over at a friend’s place last night, and I had no way of charging it.

Another device I have is useless for the moment as I’ve lost its charging brick, and am trying to figure out how to get another. At Wayfare’s house, her mom has a bag of power bricks and no one knows what they’re for, so they’re afraid to throw them out just yet (in a sign of inspired organisation, they’re labelled with the date they were found so that they can eventually be declared orphan bricks and thrown out/recycled).

I think about now I would kill for someone (ISO? ANSI? IEEE? The government?) to come out with a couple (even a couple dozen) standardized power brick/battery charger configurations. A few DC voltages, a few different max current/wattage ratings, a few different plug geometries, and we’d be off to the races. Sure, we might have a whole alphabet of charger types A through Z, but even narrowing it down just that much would help if it ever becomes necessary to replace one. At work we have “universal” power adapters that are giant and have selectors for 3, 6, 9, 12, or 15 V and 4 or 5 different plugs, and while we use those for a number of different pieces of lab equipment/prototypes, I don’t think there’s a single laptop that they could run. The desktop replacement ones need too much power, and the smaller Dells have a weird square 3-pronged plug.

Plus, my understanding is that there is a certain amount of inefficiency inherent to these transformer power bricks. People simply aren’t going to pay the price for a more efficient version for every device they have; in some cases, the power bricks might end up costing more than what they power! However, if there were only so many power brick types needed in a home, then a person could spring for a more efficient one, and then use it to power a couple of different devices…

For some portable devices, like my camera and DS, it does make sense that the AC-DC converter is in a separate power brick, even if the non-standard adapters drive me crazy. Other devices, such as my PS2 and computer have the power supply internal, and then have a fairly standard plug on the back. I don’t know why that’s not the case for the Wii and the TV — it’s not like they’re portable, and they don’t have batteries so they can’t be used separately from the power supply. While it would be more weight to put on my lap, I would even prefer to have the power brick internal on my laptop, since I can never travel far without it anyway (note that I don’t think this should be true of most laptops: mine is already heavy and hot enough that it’s never on my lap anyway, and the battery life is so short that I never carry it anywhere without the power brick).

We saw I Am Legend tonight, and we’re not thrilled. First Markham Place has really comfy chairs (much better than the blue chairs of the formerly Famous Players theatres, especially for short people like Wayfare), but the non-stadium seating meant it was kind of annoying when a tall guy sat in front of us. We also had a very chatty couple behind us, and the film quality was really awful: there were a half-dozen black vertical lines through the whole thing. I don’t know how the film got that scratched up, that systematically (every reel?!), but I would have left and complained if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the movie was dark, so it was harder to see that.

The movie is only very loosely based on the book. In fact, they have the same concept, and the main character has the same name, but not the same plots at all. No more battling with depression and creeping alcoholism, now Neville simply tries to hold on to his sanity as he faces being the last man on earth. No longer a hapless joe schmo victim trying to piece things together, he’s now a top-notch army scientist who knew about the virus since the beginning. And the big part of the end of the novella? Gone entirely, though oddly enough there were a number of weird touches (what we thought were elements of foreshadowing) through the movie that made us think they were following the original plot, only to see them go wildly off into a completely different direction entirely.

While the camera work got quite dizzying at points, the movie is pretty decent and worth a watch. If you’ve read the novella and were expecting to see a film adaptation of it, however, don’t bother: this is a completely different story they’re telling.