Blessed by the Potato

For years my parents have raved about “Oliver’s” (Oliver & Bonacini) at Bayview Village [Sheppard & Bayview, North York]; my mom goes there for lunch so often the staff come up to her to say hi when she’s out shopping (or when they’re on their way out if she goes for dinner). Today they dragged me there for a nice family dinner (which the siblings were smart enough to duck out of at the last minute).

I have to say I wasn’t very impressed with the place. Well, the place was actually quite nice: it was quiet, well lit, and had inoffensive decor. The staff was nice and friendly, though we happened to arrive right between the lunch and dinner rush so they were short-handed and didn’t have a clean table ready for us (even though it was only about 10% full). Once seated we had to wait a long while before our waiter came onto his shift, too.

The food all looked excellent, but didn’t seem all that tasty. My dad had the halibut special, and said it was a very good piece of fish that was cooked well, but just didn’t have any outstanding flavour. It was just fish with lemon. I had spring rolls and bruscetta, usually a safe choice for my very limited palette. Both were very oily and relatively tasteless (there weren’t even any onions in the bruscetta!). I was also a little miffed at the pizza: we ordered a “Prosciutto” which has “vine ripened tomatoes, bocconcini & tomato sauce” sounded like a nice, plain pizza for me. It sounded just like the “Margherita” above it, except it also had tomato sauce (and how I hate “gourmet” pizza that just puts globs of cheese down amongst tomatoes and considers it worthy of the name “pizza”). I knew already that bocconcini is a type of soft cheese similiar to that holiest of pizza holies, mozzarella; while I tend to prefer old-fashioned mozzarella, this would probably be a type of pizza I could eat. When it came, it was absolutely smothered in ham: turns out “Prosciutto” is a type of ham. Who knew? It’s something that I’ve found annoying in the pizza world: giving pizzas names on the menu, and then just hoping that you can get the kind you want. Often people will get extra things added or something held off, and in this case what seems like a name (“Margherita”, “Roma”, “Tuscan”, “Sofia”, “Prosciutto”) is actually one of the ingredients, but not included in the list of ingredients below the name. Though I suppose it can help indecisive people put together a set of toppings, and suggest extra toppings for adventurous people to put together (which usually helps the pizza place push more toppings).

Something else that really grated me was the notice on the bottom of the menu that “for the sake of all our customers, we cannot allow substitutions”. It just seems so arrogant to me that the chefs could think that the dish they put together would be absolutely perfect for everyone, and that they aren’t willing to go to the extra work to customize it for each person. It’s like the restaurant is saying that the ego of the chefs is more important than the preference of the customer. And oddly enough, it tends to only be these hoity-toity places that have those sorts of rules. You can almost imagine one of the annoying chefs from the food network (there are lots of good hosts on TV too, don’t get me wrong, but you all know there are a few chefs on that network that just make you cringe and your stomach turn at what they throw together) coming out to lecture you about how the saltiness of the anchovies will play nicely against the bitterness of the balsamic vinegar and refuse to take no for an answer, no matter how much you try to tell them that anchovies and vinegar in pasta is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

While I’m on the subject of poor menu descriptions, I’ll talk about Symposium, a cute little place in London where you eat from these big armchairs. They have fairly good bruscetta (or they did 2 out of 3 times I was there), but you can find it in two different places in the menu. In the appetizers section, it’s billed as tomatoes and goat cheese on bread, which is sort of… ugh. Later on, with their pastas, it’s billed as garlic, tomatoes, and onions lightly covered in mozzarella and parmasean, which sounds much better. I don’t know if they have two different types, or if it’s just a mistake on the menu, or what the story is, but I’m always careful to point to the one in the pasta section, just in case.

Anyhow, to finish off my review of Oliver’s, I’d have to say that if you want to go to a swanky/trendy, downtown restaurant with decent (though not great) food, and show off big bills ($90 for the three of us) without actually having to go downtown, then Oliver’s is the place for you.

It is a fact of life:

• Anything invented before you were born is old and cruddy.
• Anything invented while you’re young is exciting and the way of the future.
• Anything invented after that is against the natural order of things and will doubtlessly kill us all.

[modified from Douglas Adams]

I find I’m feeling very old lately, and that’s partly due to experiencing a lot of that “this new technology just isn’t right” lately when it comes to TVs/monitors, particularly widescreen ones.

Widescreen, as much as I hate it, seems to be the way of the future. Its proponents claim that it is more immersive, that looking at something in a “landscape” format makes you feel more like you’re actually there than if you spread your screen area around more evenly. Perhaps I spent too much time as a kid inside watching TV rather than outside tracking antelope across the horizon, but I just don’t really find that’s the case. I have terrible peripheral vision, so that may play a large role in that. I have to constantly track my eyes across the screen, and when it’s nicely compact around the centre, then I can keep my eyes roughly near the centre with less movement overall to follow the action — widescreen stretches things out so I have to track further horizontally (though less up&down) which I just don’t care for quite as much.

A lot of this is because I deal with a lot of text, or small detailed graphics (ship icons, etc). Perversely, it was the immersive wide-screen movies that really drove the recent widescreen craze, and you can probably still see a number of demonstrations of why watching a movie in widescreen (as it was meant to be) is better, showing the action that was cut out by fitting to your 4:3 TV screen. I say this is perverse because many of those movies were actually shot on cameras with 4:3 aspect ratios, and they simply used fancy lenses to get a wide picture (typically compressing the horizontal, so that even though you get more scenery side-to-side, the resolution is worse), or crudely cut away the top and bottom (which reminds me of a counter-ad I thought of a long time ago: rather than showing the two bad guys on either side of Jackie Chan that would be cut out if widescreen were adapted for 4:3, instead show a picture of an actress in a close-up that only goes down to the collarbone, and how if it had been in 4:3 rather than letterboxed, you could have had cleavage in the shot).

Anyhow, the point is made: I have some reservations about the widescreen craze, and kind of like my 4:3 monitor, particularly for all the text work I do (such as writing my website here). Recently though, I’ve thought about getting a new monitor, and it might just make a weird kind of sense to get a widescreen one, since that seems to be where everything is going nowadays. My reservations, aside from a personal and partially irrational distaste for the format, is that a lot of old content just doesn’t look very good on a widescreen monitor (many games are simply stretched to fit, rather than resizing or adding black bars at the side), and more bafflingly, that there seem to be multiple widescreen aspect ratios (16:9, 2.35:1, 1.85:1, and I’m sure, somehow, the French have invented a metric one like 2:1. Bloody French).

Why you ask, would I be interested in a new monitor when my gianormous flat screen CRT monitor is still in good shape and produces rather excellent pictures in my antiquated yet preferred aspect ratio? Partly, to have something new and cool (both in the sense of being nifty and in producing less heat). Partly because I would get a bigger screen than the one I have now (even if just off to the sides). And partly because of this awesome boxing day sale. A 22″ monitor with <8 ms response time for $300 with free shipping? Hell, yes. Plus I can get a… relatively paltry, in comparison to the cost of the monitor… bonus 33 Air Miles by going via airmilesshops.ca. Plus, 22″ (widescreen) is just about the perfect size for me because the vertical dimension is just about exactly the same as my 19″ (18″ viewable) CRT, which means that it’s really just getting wider, instead of trading height for width like I would have if I went for the 20″ one I was initially looking at.

For a while now, I’ve had my “price point” for a new monitor set at about $300, so this looks like the time, even if I may not be completely ready for widescreen (luddite that I am). I’ve also been really impressed with the Dell monitors at work. While I’ve had some serious reservations about Dell in the past for their computers (proprietary parts, skimping on certain things, tech support, etc.), their monitors have always been decent, and their LCD panels seem to be top-of-the-line, so I’m hoping that’ll be the case with this screen. Look for a review after it arrives.

Update: After sucumbing to Boxing Day fever and placing the order for the laptop, I noticed a comment about it: it’s in a strange 16:10 aspect ratio. For the love of… Ah well, we’ll see what happens when it gets here. Also, one thing I was looking forward to with a Dell is that their monitors have USB ports and the ability to swivel 90 degrees into portrait mode, both nice “plus” features that really helped sell it, but this one doesn’t mention those on its details page. Hopefully they’ll be there anyway, but I’ll have to wait a week or so for it to get here…

One of the most amazing things about the SETI project is that there may be any hope at all of understanding alien transmissions that are anything beyond prime numbers blipped out the long way. After all, we can barely get our TVs to talk to each other. NTSC vs PAL, cable/HDMI/DVI/VGA/S-video/and two different types of RCA-like connections (composite and this newfangled Y/Pr/Pb component stuff). Who knows what sort of format an alien signal may arrive in?

Anyhow, as you can probably tell we’re having some issues with our new HDTV over here. The whole thing really makes me think that the technology was released to the market prematurely; couldn’t take an extra few months to hammer out a standard? Or a few years to develop the technology enough to have a single resolution for “HD” rather than this crazy hodgepodge of incremental improvements?. Or get some better widescreen vs. not detection or broadcasting so I’m not staring at grey bars on the side of the TV to square it off to 4:3, then black bars within that because the TV station is broadcasting its “widescreen” format with the black bars as part of the content, leaving me watching a 27″ picture on a 42″ screen…

The first issue is a matter of a defective box: our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box has a wonky Pb out channel, which means that when we use the component input to the TV, every now and then the picture turns pink (since the only colour channel left is the red one). It can stay this way for a really long time… I wasn’t home when this happened, but my parents did call someone in to fix it. Their solution was to change to using the HDMI connection, which worked rather well… for a time. Then if the TV is turned off, the cable box will turn itself off (which loses the channel you were just on). Fortunately, there is a (rather deeply hidden) setting to get the box to remember which channel you were last on and restart to that one, but it’s still a bit of a pain. However, for some reason with that connector the cable box thinks that my parents’ brand new 1080i TV is only capable of standard definition (over an HDMI connection no less!). We can force it to go back into 1080i (i.e. HD) mode by going back to the initial setup menu, but the bloody thing forgets that setting every time it turns off — which is every time the TV turns off! It’s so frustrating. Even if I could figure a way to make the cable box stay on past the TV’s power-down, I noticed that it has an automatic sleep-mode “feature” so it would turn off an hour after I left it alone anyway.

I’m freaking loving analog cable back in London at the moment.

Anyhow, tomorrow is Christmas Eve and a Sunday to boot, so I don’t know if we can do much at the moment, but I think sometime next week we’ll be trading this puppy in for a replacement.

Update: Well, we called Rogers and they told me that the HDMI signals are buggy that way and that they don’t support them on many of their HD boxes. After power cycling the tuner/DVR a few times the component input went back to showing colours, and I’ll just have to call back later if it goes on the fritz again. For now though, it looks pretty good!

Update 2: The display went pink again. A hard power cycle seems to fix it for a short while, but nevertheless, we’ll be exchanging the HD tuner at a Rogers store in a few days.

Life in the new house has been pretty good so far. Our first few utility bills have been pretty sobering though. The gas bill came first, and it was quite a bit higher than we were expecting, especially since it only covered a few days where we actually lived in the house, and most of that time was unseasonably warm so the heat was barely on.

Our electricity bill came yesterday, and it was even more of a shock. We really weren’t expecting the hydro bill to be too much more than it was in our old place. We have a few more lights, and a few more appliances (dishwasher, clothes washer/dryer), but other than that all our stuff is the same (computers, lamps, microwave, etc.) and the fridge and stove are pretty similar to our old ones. All the other new things in the house run on gas (water heater, heat). Yet somehow we roughly tripled our electricity consumption. And this was for a 12-day period where we only lived in the house for 4 of them!

It’s driving me batty trying to figure out what’s eating all the juice. Is it a faulty device somewhere? Does the fan on the otherwise gas-powered furnace really use that much electricity? Is the change from using mostly natural light in the day and having 4-5 incandescents on at night to using 1-2 incandescents during the day (the house doesn’t get as much natural light) and 6-10 at night really use that much more? (A quick calculation says that lights alone, especially since we’re good at turning them off when not in the room, should only be an extra 6 kWh/day or so; we’re trying to account for a difference of more like 30 kWh/day). Does a once-weekly run through of the dishwasher and washing machine really bump the daily average up that much? I happened to have a load of dishes to do so I checked: I ran the oven for about 20 minutes, and then the dishwasher plus whatever else in the house was on (a few lights, computers, but no TV or anything) and checked the meter on the side of the house. 3 hours with that consumption ran me 8 kWh, as compared to an average of 15 kWh for the whole day in the apartment…

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to keep up the morale to conserve when the bill is going to be astronomical no matter what. Why save 30 cents a day by turning off the lights when some mystery device in the house is just going to burn through $1.50 no matter what we do?

So I got home tonight in advance of my dentist appointment in the morning (stupid broken tooth) and find a brand new Sony Bravia HDTV in the living room. It was quite a surprise since, as far as I knew, my parents weren’t in the market for a new TV. Typically, they would have consulted me on something like that (and most likely, would have waited until I was home to connect the wires for them). It’s not as though anyone would have actually bought them a TV as a gift, but it just goes to show how very difficult my parents are to buy for around the holidays. Here we are, not 10 days from Christmas, and they run off to make an impulse buy like that. They do that for everything: ask them what they want, and they can’t think of a thing. If they do think of something, they’ll just go out and buy it then and there…