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Last night, jean and I went to Aquavit in Manhattan. The food was phenomenal. The service was great. The decor was good. So why was the place more than half empty at 9pm on a friday night?

There is a sadness to eating delicious food in a half empty restaurant, which is preferable to the indignation I feel when eating lousy food in a crowded restaurant. (Actually, let me correct that. Half empty restaurants don’t have to be sad. The most joyful experience is to eat great food at a place that is half empty because it hasn’t been discovered yet. Why is that? Is it the snobbish joy of being “in”?)

The whole experience left us shaking our heads wondering what went wrong. Are new yorkers just over the herring and lingonberries? Is itthe lack of foam and xanthan gum? To be fair, the place has been arpund for 20 years and maybe people just want something new.

Was it worth it? I think so. For us San Francisco hicks, a chance to eat upscale Swedish like this is a treat. All of the dishes were great, and some were mind-blowing. One of the standout dishes was a combination of foie gras, duck confit covered in crisped rice, arugula sorbet, and apple puree.

Tonight, we eat at Degustation, which, being a 16 seat restaurant, had better not be half empty!

Finally updated my bio. It has been… what… eight months since I left Adobe? Man.. time flies!

I know I haven’t posted in a long time, but something kind of funny happened recently and I couldn’t resist.

Ever since leaving Adobe, I’ve been tinkering around with various projects at home. In the mornings, I usually sit on my downstairs deck, drink my coffee, and work on my laptop. The other day, I went down to my usual hangout to find…

Hmm…. is this animal dung? A cat? No.. A bird? Maybe a big bird…

Well, it turns out our neighbors have bought chickens and have not had their wings clipped yet. I snapped a photo of one of the chickens hanging out at my favorite morning spot. (The broom and hose are for cleaning up the chicken poop).

I kind of like the thought of having chickens in our neighborhood, but I was worried our neighbor was going to get in some kind of trouble. After doing a bit of research, it turns out that it is legal to own chickens in San Francisco as long as you have fewer than four.

Who knew?

Just a quick note to say that this album.. whoa. Really good. Lush, but not overblown. Moody but not morose.

Musically, it’s a cross between Wilco, Joy Division, and Lou Reed, and is fronted by Matt Berninger’s deep, rich vocals which wrap around your mind and make you question why you spend your time listening to other bands which, in retrospect, sound a bit like whiny teenagers. If anything, maybe the vocals are a little too prominent, but for me, it works.

The first track, “Fake Empire”, gives a sense of what the album is all about. It starts out with spare vocals accompanied by a piano playing what starts out sounding like a badly played three against two pattern, which reveals itself to be a much more complex pattern once the percussion kicks in. The song builds and swells, adding horns (without sounding like a carnival or a mariachi band, which almost all bands that include horns end up doing..)

And all of this without sounding pretentious or showy.

Since starting this blog, I have focused almost exclusively on Flex. Now that I have left Adobe, I have a couple options.

1. Continue writing about Flex.
2. Write about something else, but at a new URL.
3. Stop writing.
4. Write about whatever I want and keep the URL.

I’ve decided on 4. If the URL weren’t so closely tied to my name, I might just start a new blog, but it seems a bit silly for me to give up my name. For those of you who want to stop reading, please feel free. I may or may not talk about Flex from time to time, but I will not focus on it anymore.

Of course, given how infrequently I’ve been writing lately, who knows if anyone is reading anyway!!?!