The Lists

So I’m back!

For some reason I am fascinated with lists and completing them (or attempting to complete them). I am currently going through the entire book of bottled beers at The Trappist.
I am listening through all of This American Life from the beginning. There are many other smaller lists, such as restaurant lists, home to do lists, and mostly anything else that has a numbered list.

So the list continues. I am going to try and watch ALL of the Criterion Collection movies from 1 to what ever is current (I think at last tally it is currently at #543). If I watch a movie a week, then it will currently take me 10 years time to catch up. Hopefully I can watch more than that, time permitting. I have started with #1, so I will try my best about posting each film, if not, then at least tweet about them.

 

The Tadich Grill Cioppino

The Tadich Grill is a San Francisco institution, however, growing up in San Francisco, I had never been there. After asking my fellow long time San Franciscans, they too had never been there. Was this like Alcatraz, where locals know of the place but doesn’t bother going since it is a tourist destination? I guess if you don’t work in the financial district you wouldn’t really wouldn’t bother. Don’t be fooled. This place has been around for a reason, and it took me several years to finally realize it.

After hearing from a reliable friend about the cioppino, I had the occasion to meet him for lunch. Boy was I happy I did. If you have never had cioppino, then don’t bother with the Pier 49 places that advertise it, because I have found the one and only place to get it. I tomatoey based broth with garlic and all the seafood you can fit, this was a soup and a meal all in one. It was like an Italian fish gumbo without the roux mixed with French bouillabaisse and San Francisco seafood.

Now to take a break from the food, I must mention the decor. It is literally like walking into the past, with the long bar, the hustle and bustle of the working people trying to grab a quick business lunch. You now have iPhones and Blackberries with the power lunchers, but that is the only evidence of modernity. If you are in a rush, walk past the throne of people waiting for a table and continue along the wall midway through the bar to grab the next available seat. Sitting at the bar is also much more enjoyable since you get to interact with the servers.

Now back to the food. All the seafood in the cioppino was fresh. The scallops were light in texture. The fish was buttery. The clams were not rubbery but had the perfect amount of bounce when bitten into. The garlic bread served as the perfect spoon to sop up whatever broth remained after all the seafood was gone. It is not a cheap lunch but taking to account all the seafood, it is definitely worth it.

On a side note, Courtney and I stopped by for a drink in the evening. Don’t expect those oversized martini glasses, but the perfect old-school proportioned glass. The drinks were well concocted and fit perfectly with the atmosphere.

Go to The Tadich Grill. Although it is open for dinner, it is probably one of the best lunches around.

You can read about the history more at this SF gate article.

 

Countdown from 100 in movie quotes

Saw this nifty cut-together piece on YouTube. Can you name all the movies?

 

Sushi-cam

Sorry for the long lapse. I hope to start updating this blog again soon since I am back from vacation!

In the meantime, here is a fascinating video of a sushi cam on a conveyor belt sushi place in Hokkaido, Japan. Notice all the people saying “Nani Kore!?”, which translates as “What is that?!?”

 

EpiKorean blog

I’ve started a new blog on wordpress called EpiKorean. It is obviously a play on words of epicurean. It is devoted to all things Korean food related that is for the non-native speaker or those not as familiar with Korean food. Stop by and let me know what you think. Thanks.

 

Mua in Oakland

Mua

2442a Webster St.

Oakland, CA 94612

(510) 238-1100

I tried out a new place in Oakland the other day called Mua. It is in the real interesting Uptown area of Oakland, one that you would not expect for a restaurant but is slowly growing. It seems like they are trying to cater to the Oakland Murmur crowd, a monthly artist gallery get together that happens the first Friday of every month, and it looks like they have a good thing going.

This place is searching for an identity… or maybe not. Mixed in with asian fusion tapas is fried chicken, burgers, and lamb tagine, all with a choice of fries or kimchi as sides. It’s kind of representative of Oakland itself with it’s mix of ethnicities and cuisine. Oakland people are diverse, but it’s the food, the drinks, and now the art that brings people together.

The space is spacious, though you would never guess from the small doors that one can easily walk by on the street. Once you enter you are greeted with a beautiful long bar that opens up to a very open space of tables, with a second level of couches and tables that are reminiscent of a hip warehouse tea house. It’s simple with exposed walls and art all around the area. There was a DJ set up one end of the room as well.

I only sampled the hamburger and I have to say that it was surprisingly tasty. It came medium, like I ordered it. It was no frills (which is a good thing), with no chipotle ketchup or wasabi mayonnaise. Just simple ingredients like the patty, lettuce, a little onion, and some condiments. The burger was salty, moist, and most importantly stayed complete throughout the whole meal. Even though juicy tidbits dribbled onto the plate, not once did a fissure appear on the crust, threatening to soggy up the bread split into two. Aside from 900 Grayson, this has to be one of my favorite burgers around. The fries weren’t bad, but didn’t make an impression, which was a shame since it would have really completed the meal.

I definitely have to come back to try the other items on the menu, but most importantly to see what the space is like during the night with the full bar going and some music playing. Either way, this has become a welcome discovery for a new lunch destination. I was trying to figure out what Mua meant, if it meant anything in Korea (the owner seems to be Korean), but a friend of mine had a good theory that it might be an onomatopoeia of the sound of one blowing a kissing the air – “mua”!

To find Mua, go to the Broadway Auto Row section of Oakland. It is across from God’s Gym (if you are familiar with Oakland, then you will know this gym).

 

Sunday Brunch in the Ferry Building

Though it is a little on the pricey end (and what isn’t) at the Ferry Building, Boulette’s Larder is definitely worth the money. You have many choices at the Ferry Building, such as a burger at Taylor’s Refresher or fresh oysters at Hog Island, but so far my favorite meal in the Ferry Building for lunch has to be at Boulette’s.

There is something about the freshness and the preparation. You feel like you are at a four star restaurant while sitting in the walkway next to an ATM machine, watching the tourists and locals walk by and check out the delicious looking food strewn across your table. Do not be fooled by the seemingly innocent starters. We had the fresh Acme bread with apple jam and the fresh beignets with apple pie spice and organic Japanese sugar, both which was way too much food for just two people.

I had the Roman Salad which featured some greens, fresh cheese, some dressing, and roasted pork, all of which I forgot the specifics of. The greens were sharp and slightly bitter, which the lemony vinaigrette acid cut through and the sweet and salty cheese complimented. Unfortunately they were running low on the roast pork so they substituted it with some of the pork tonkasu that was also on the menu. I didn’t mind one bit since I was torn between the “salad” and the tonkasu. Both pork were moist, but the roast pork was definitely the better of the two.

Courtney had the scrambled eggs which came with a delicious soft goat cheese wedge accompanied with sweet potato chips and fig and pears. A great way to suspend the fall flavors during the 60 degree plus weather right before December.

Definitely check out this place for breakfast or lunch. It is worth the trip. One of these days I will sample the private dining during the evening. They also validate parking.
As a side note, they also served Blue Bottle Coffee, which seems to be the defacto coffee of higher end eateries around the Bay Area. I’m not complaining.

 

Is Camino the Bar Jules of the the East Bay?

Work has been hectic so it’s been hard to update, so I apologize for the infrequency of my posts. Things are getting better so I hope to get more posts out in lesser intervals.

Anyways,

I was watching a show about cocktails on Hulu called Great Cocktails, getting ready for our cocktail party and they featured a bartender from SF, from a bar called Cantina. This reminded me of a new place in Oakland called Camino. From the website it seems like the restaurant is about local and fresh produce and not trying to have a huge menu, but just a few things, but done fresh and right. Similar to Bar Jules, one of my favorite new restaurants, I have high hopes for this place, although it seems to be getting some mixed reviews. Time will tell, and I must go check it out soon.

 

Halloween Scavenger Hunt

Now that Halloween is just around the corner, one of the things that I miss is the large Castro Street Halloween party. It was a time to gather friends and go costume watching. Well the city put a stop to it so no more Castro. The bad thing about the Castro was the huge crowds and the aimless wandering without a purpose, so I came up with an idea to have a purpose by having a Halloween Scavenger Hunt that will work for any place with lots of people in costume.

The rules are simple. People are divided into teams and set out with a list of costumes that they then must seek out and take a picture of. They were limited to 1 hour and could not use the same costume for multiple answers. After an hour everyone reconvened and shared answers. It helped that we had friends who lived within walking distance so we could meet up there and share our answers.

Here are the items that I came up with for the first Halloween Scavenger Hunt that we did with the answers that my team found below.

1st Halloween Scavenger Hunt Clue Sheet 2002.

The Questions

Teams must find each of the following.

1. – Any character from the a Wes Anderson film
2. – Any Lord of the Rings character
3. – Any animated character
4. – Any Pixar character
5. – Any secondary Simpsons character (no one from the immediate Simpson’s family)
6. – Any notable musician (has to be specific).
7 .– Any literary character (has to be specific).
8. – Any Nobel Prize winner
9. – Anything with a Hitchcockian theme
10. – Any comic book villain
11. – Any corporate logo
12. – Any group coordinated costume
13. – Any costume based on a play on words (i.e. cereal killer)
14. – Any costume that requires batteries or is power driven.
15. – Any food related costume.
16. – Any famous athlete (must be specific, not just someone wearing a jersey)
17. – Any costume that incorporates the use of ones own genitalia.
18. – Any famous artist or work of art. (must be specific)
19. – Any ethnic themed costume.
20. – Any television personality (i.e. Donahue, the Crocodile hunter, Oprah)

The Answers:

Starting from the top row then across.
1. we found 2 people dressed up from the Royal Tennebaums.
2. I assume they guy dressed up as Gandalf
3. Scooby Dooby Doo!
4. Sully (& Mike) from Monster’s Inc.
5. Duff man!
6. Slash from Guns N’ Roses
7. Pinocchio from the book, right?
8. We all guessed that he dress up as Yasser Arafat
9. Another team saw a person with birds on a wire chasing them ala Birds, but we didn’t see anyone.
10. Catwoman
11. Boy’s Big Boy
12. more that one = a group so Teletubbies count.
13. Dr. Pepper. (*groan*)
14. As you can see in the picture the guy was wearing some sort of fiber optic suit.
15. McD’s french fry super super super sized.
16. Dennis Rodman
17. No quite there own genitalia, but close enough.
18. Van Gough
19. An Indian (of the Land O’ Lakes tribe) and the St. Pauli girl.
20. In a stroke of luck we ran across Sally Jessie Rafael AND Geraldo Rivera AKA Gerry Rivers.

If you are interested, here were the clues for the 2nd and 3rd Halloween Scavenger Hunts.

2nd Halloween Scavenger Hunt Clue Sheet 2003.

Teams must find each of the following.

1. – Any Johnny Depp character
2. – Fighter Pilot Dubya
3. – Common household item
4. – A Nemo character
5. – Mexican wrester
6. – Any 2002 California Gubernatorial candidate
7. – Any Stephan King character.
8. – Anyone of the Forbes.com Billionaires
9. – Frank Chu
10. – Fast Food mascot
11. – Any dead famous musician that is not Elvis.
12. – Any group coordinated costume
13. – Any costume based on a play on words (i.e. cereal killer or bargain hunter)
14. – Any video game character
15. – Costume incorporating a pet.
16. – Any participant of the 2003 World Series, ALCS or NLCS.
17. – Any Non-American celebrity.
18. – Any famous work of art. (must be specific)
19. – Any Quentin Tarantino character.
20. – Any Internet icon or sponsor.

3rd Halloween Scavenger Hunt Clue Sheet 2004.

Teams must find each of the following.

1. – Tom Hanks character
2. – Vice-President or Vice-Presidential Candidate
3. – Charles Dickens character
4. – 2004 Olympic participant
5. – Reality TV icon
6. – 80’s music icon
7. – Michael Moore
8. – Non-Pixar CG animated character
9. – Historical Military Figure
10.– Any original trilogy Star Wars character (not Luke, Han, Leia, or Darth Vader, and must be specific. Will not accept generic soldiers)
11. – Costume thats incorporating a cape.
12. – Talk show host
13. – Costume based on a play on words (i.e. cereal killer or bargain hunter)
14. – Video game character
15. – Alien
16. – Red Sox player or fan.
17. – Non-American television or movie celebrity.
18. – Famous work of art. (must be specific)
19. – Food industry character that is not restaurant or fast food chain related.
20. – Anyone with a similar costume as a team member. (must take photo together)

Enjoy and Happy Halloween.

 

Consolidating Your iTunes Library

I’ve been struggling with my iTunes library for some time. I have about 500 GB of mp3s, all from various sources and it has gotten out of hand. For the most part I was fine with my sloppy, unorganized library, thinking that one day I would clean it up and it would be easy but it wasn’t needed right now. This really didn’t become apparent till I finally got an ipod controller for my car and while trying to go through my artists, it took forever just to scroll through the “B”‘s . The problem was the following:

for one artist I had multiple entries.

Example:

Ella Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald, Ella
Ella Fitzgerald & the Cotton Club Orchestra
Ella Fitzgerald & her Cotton Club Orchestra
Ella Fitzgerald and the Cotton Club Orchestra
etc. You get the point, not to mention all the misspellings.

After searching and searching for various programs my approach was a three fold fix. I was told that TuneUp was probably the program that I was looking for, but unfortunately it only works for a PC and not a Mac, though a Mac version is forthcoming. I’m a little reticent of the fact that it is a monthly fee based program rather than regular pay and play type one. Until I get to actually play around with it, I have to rely on what is currently available for me.

iTunes

I first started in iTunes by going through all my artists and manually fixing all the multiple entries. I already decided that I would sacrifice accuracy for condensing some artist names. I also decided that I would have to move guests and featured artists to the song title instead of the artists field, also to consolidate the artists down. This is the most tedious part of the job.

For the second step I needed a little extra help. Some files had no tag information but had them inherent in the file names. I took a twofold approach. I decided to use Media Rage for this part. CDDB is a great resource IF you have the CD with you. Luckily there is FreeDB which is the CDDB equivalent but has a searchable field to look up albums under artist name and album title. With Media Rage, I was able to look some of these albums up then transfer the id3 tag information to the proper files. Media Rage is also smart in the fact that if I was missing some songs in the album I could pick and choose the right tag information to be transferred over. This worked for the most part, but some compilations had artist as “Various Artists” and had the artist information as part of the song name, i.e “Save A Prayer – Duran Duran” as the song name. For these albums I used an iTunes applescript called Track Parser to correctly move the proper information to where it should be. This is a great script that can also move track number, album year, and any other information granted that they start in a single field and can be parsed out to other ones. Media Rage was also a great way just to see groups of files easily and batch change certain fields. It is lacking a slick interface and can get a little clunky since it is more a collection of miniprograms than a collective whole, so it takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t load from your iTunes library file so you can load what ever files you want, though it if is a lot of files, it takes a while to process.

The final great part of Media Rage is it’s ability to move files to an organized structure of your choosing. I’m not a big fan of how iTunes organizes it’s library. I tend to think in terms of genres instead of one lump sum. I like to organize my music like a record store where it is first split up by genres, then artists, then albums. The only tricky part about this structure are albums that do not necessarily fit into one genre or the other and how specialized a genre you want to create. For my sake I just split it up into Rock (encompassing the bulk of my files), Hip Hop, Dance, Soundtracks, Jazz, International, Reggae. The other tricky genres I picked were Oldies, Vocals, Lounge, and R&B. Vocals tend to be like Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, where it is not necessarily Jazz but more Pop. Oldies are also a little on the fuzzy side, but for the most part they encompass non-Jazz, pre 1960’s music. Lounge is reserved for artists like Esquivel, or Moog music. R&B is the most fuzzy, but so far I choose my Funk, Soul, and Blues artist to go there. Media rage will copy, move, or create aliases based on tag information to an organized folder structure. Therefore if I have The Beatles’ Rubber Soul floating on a temporary folder, I could then automatically move them to the Rock>The Beatles> and newly created Rubber Soul subfolder.

Since I have done a proper pass on existing tag information and have added new tag information I now have to take another pass through the Artist field once more.

My third step is to get album covers for the ones that were missing. I first noticed that a few album covers showed up for every song on the same album in Cover Flow view. This was due to a compilation album not being set as such in iTunes. So step one is to go through all compilations and making sure that they where tagged as such in iTunes. Unfortunately, while you can see if they have the proper tag information in Media Rage, there seems to be a bug where if you try and change it as a batch it actually does not stick change the files, so you need to manually go through each song one by one to mark it as a compilation. The faster way is to see which albums are missing this information then finding them back in iTunes to then changing them as a group there. Very frustrating! Now onto the album covers. After trying out a few programs, such as Amazon Cover widget, Fixtunes, Media Rage, and even iTunes itself, with each having it’s pros and cons, I went with Cover Scout. Media Rage did an okay job, but only looked at Amazon and it’s international sites to find album covers. Others worked only on the song that was currently playing in iTunes. In Cover Scout you can do batch runs to find the proper album covers AND choose to see if it is indeed the correct one or correct size before applying it. The other great thing is that you can also search using google images or any web page for that manner. You can also use your isight camera for a self made cover. One thing to note is that by adding covers to all of my files, my library has gotten bigger in size, though I do not know by how much.

All in all, with media storage being cheaper and cheaper and more people like me having large libraries, there needs to be an all encompassing program for these mundane tasks. TuneUp seems to be the forerunner in the field, and FixTunes also has promise (although buggy and not quite the interface I was looking for). For the time being I will continue to consolidate my library using this method unless anyone has a better way.

UPDATE: 3/17/09

Looks like TuneUp is available for the Mac finally. I’ve tried it out and it found some things, but didn’t find others. 3 annoying things about it is that is it a subscription service, so unless you constantly are getting new music and want to keep it organized, it is hard to justify the on going cost. The 2nd thing is that you must register for the program to work, not a huge gripe, but yet another place for a registration name and password. Finally, there is no launch options. Whenever you have iTunes up, TuneUp also automatically launches and creates a side bar next to your iTunes window. It is highly annoying and I wish that you had to option to turn off automatic launch.

Although I haven’t been aggressively attacking my iTunes library as before, I’m still using the same methods. Although I did hear of a friend using Shazaam on his iPhone to help find songs with absolutely no id tag information. YMMV.