A Cautionary Tale?

As I wait for it to get closer to time to get ready for New Year's festivities, I'm sitting here watching TV. As I scanned through the online "what's on" guide, I saw that National Geographic TV was running one of their Aftermath shows.

The series, as a whole, is based on some fairly far-fetched premises. However, those premises were, previously, ones that conceivably have the capability of having a "life goes on" outcome. The episode that's on,now, Population Explosion, doesn't really fit that mold. It has as its premise that (somehow) the earth's population has somehow managed to double overnight.

Yeah, I get that this is supposed to be a cautionary tale for our future that collapses the time-frame of whats to come as the Earth's population doubles on a more natural time-scale. However, doubling over a course of decades versus over the course of a day (or even months) results in a completely different set of stressors and outcomes. Population is an inherently self-limiting problem. Explosive population growth is even more self-limiting. I'm not seeing on this episode that people have somehow become immortal, so a lot of the problems they're positing seem unlikely. Long before we'd have to worry about creating new housing, beefing up infrastructure and finding more farmlands, energy and other resources, people would have already started to die, on a massive scale, from lack of food and environmental exposure. Let's face it: if you doubled the human population, overnight, and even had double the farmland (and seed-stock) available to plant new crops on, those crops aren't going to come online for a month or more - billions will have starved before then. Along with them starving (and running out of water), your doubled need for housing is going to disappear.

Oh well.. I guess National Geographic had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for this one. Seriously, this one borders on the mind-bendingly stupid. Would that doubled population still exist three (or more) years from the doubling-event? Don't think so. I have my doubts that, post doubling, we'd even have our current levels of populations surviving over the course of even half a year, let alone ofter three. The damage and deprivation caused by that doubling would be severe. Not only would all of the new population not survive, but a significant chunk of the incumbent population would die along with them.

Sorry, National Geographic, but gonna have to give you a big, fat "F" for this bit of shoddy programming. This is even worse than the A&E's Ancient Aliens shows.

Value Proposition of Movies

Last night, a buddy of mine and I went to go see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It wasn't a horrible movie but it was hardly "art". Two tickets for the non-3D version ran $24. Add in two 1qt bottles of water for $9 bucks (that's $18/gal. for water - even at its peak, gasoline wasn't that expensive) and you're at more than $30 for two hours of mid-grade entertainment.

Today, while at work, a box arrived from Amazon. In that box was the full, 8-movie BluRay set of Harry Potter movies. Sixteen or so hours of quality entertainment. Total price? $60. And that's $60 for unlimited viewings by me and any number of other people that might come over during our ownership of the discs (and, lets not forget loans/swaps with neighbors and friends).

So, tell me, again, why Hollywood thinks that piracy is why annual ticket sales are down by a half-billion seats?

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind spending money if I'm getting good value. But when every trip to the theatre becomes a $20-$40 gamble whose odds are worse than rolling a hard-8 in Vegas and it should be fairly self-evident why everyone's staying home.

FaceBook Timeline

A week or so ago, I disabled my FaceBook account. I'm almost tempted to reactivate it to see what my Timeline looks like. Unfortunately, it seems that FaceBook only is granting you seven days from activation to edit your Timeline contents.

Given how much data I generated since opening my FaceBook account, I don't think seven days is going to be enough time to do the requisite edits of my Timeline page. So, it kind of removes the desire to re-activate.

Oh well: I'm sure that FaceBook will eventually make activation of Timeline not an option, which will pretty much completely remove any desire to reactivate my account.

Quality Verizon Wireless Technical Support

Still kind of chapped at VZW. I'd done the OTA update of my phone to get the device and SD card encryption that was listed in the update's feature list (http://support.verizonwireless.com/pdf/system_update/droid_charge.pdf). Yet, when I looked through my phone, I couldn't find a method for enabling the encryption.

Initially, I opened a support case with VZW via the web portal. They took forever to get back to me, then, when they finally did, the instructions they gave me were wrong. When I pointed out that they were wrong, they eventually responded that I needed to call in and speak to a support rep to walk me through the procedure.

I then called in. The first-line support rep didn't know what I was talking about, so, she called one of her "back line" support folks. She was apparently informed that the encryption was automatic. Seemed unlikely. Seemed more likely they were just trying to get me off the phone.

A few days later, I decided to try sending a Tweet to VZW's twitter-based support account. We went back and forth. Finally, they asked where I saw that this feature was even available. I sent them the link at the Verizon site (quoted previously). After that, their Twitter team stopped responding to me.

I can only surmise that Verizon's official company policy on support is to stop providing support as soon as someone has a question they don't know the answer to. Awesome, guys. That's a really great support model.

Even better: since doing the stupid OTA upgrade to get this feature that no one at VZW seems to know how to activate, my device's GPS and LTE antennae have become flaky.

Good work, Verizon Wireless. And, a hearty "fuck you" for your shoddy efforts.

Anniversaries

Not quite sure how it passed me by, until today, but it did. Maybe it's a good sign. Still, it did hit me,  that, two years ago, today, I woke up for the first time with no person of last resort to talk to.

Even given how much I write (or perhaps that's a proof of its own), I am a classic introvert. While I've got a number of people I'm friendly with,  I don't actually count many people as "friends". I'm one of those people for whom "friends" are people I share a deep connection with. Everyone else lies somewhere outside of that term. Hard to explain if you don't share a similar measure for what you refer to as "friends".

At any rate, my father was one of the few people I counted as a friend. He and I could talk about anything and everything. From the most cerebral to the most inane of topics. We could speak briefly. We could speak at length. We could convey volumes in very few words and we could spew volumes of words and say next to nothing. More importantly, we could exchange ideas without taking personally things that most others would take personally.

Really, my dad was one of the few, possible only people in my life that I could speak freely and fully with. Sadly, with him gone, I've no longer got such outlets. And, while I very rarely availed myself of that outlet after I moved out, I always knew that it was there if I ever really needed it. Now, that's gone. Now, I have no one really left to speak freely to.

I Don't Cry for Paterno

While I am a graduate from Penn State University (PsyBS. `92), I've never considered myself to be part of the "bleed blue&white" crowd. To me, Penn State was where I spent five falls, four springs and three summers collecting a piece of paper and getting a lot stuff out of my system.  My reduction of the experience to bland descriptions of my time there is not to be construed with me saying that I didn't enjoy my time at Penn State. It's not to say that I didn't go to a lot of football games, parties, etc. I'm simply putting it out there that I didn't have a lot of personal investment in being a "Penn Stater".

That said, it's hard to spend that significant a chunk of time, surrounded by a particular culture, and not absorb at least some of it. The lure of the cult and Blue&White is hard to resist. And, even if you don't end up bleeding Blue&White, you are changed for having been there.

I was also very fortunate to have been at Penn State when Joe Paterno was still looked upon by many as some kind of quasi-deity and/or paragon of virtue. It's hard not to buy into that. It's hard not to want to buy into that. And so, to a degree, I did.

In watching the current horror-show unfold in the news, I can't help but be saddened by it all. The rational me always knew that Paterno was human. The rational side of me always knew that, as a human, he had to have flaws. And, while being rational allows you to not be completely taken by surprised when those flaws come to light, it still doesn't stop that gut-punch feeling when they finally do.

In the end, though, I don't know what's sadder: that he didn't (and couldn't possibly) live up to the legend, or that there seem to be so many people eager to participate in the sadistically gleeful feeding frenzy around the destruction of that legend. Watching it all is like watching when a malicious older sibling takes special joy in the distress caused by telling a younger sibling, "Santa isn't." I take that back, I do know which is sadder.

It Tastes Like Winter

I think chestnuts are an underutilized nut in the American diet. Previous to this fall, it had been at least two decades since I'd had anything featuring chestnut. Last month, while Donna and I were celebrating our Anniversary down in Williamsburg, we were served a chestnut icecream with our dinner. Tonight, Donna made a brusselsprout (another under-used food) hash for dinner that featured a heavy use of chestnuts.

There's just something nifty about chestnuts. They've got this lovely, delicate, earthy-sweet flavor. It lends itself well to both sweets and to savory food-stuffs.

Tonight's hash was something that Donna just winged. Basically, she took her usual brusselsprout hash, and enhanced it with white wine and chestnuts:


Ingredients:
• 10 chestnuts
• 2 pints fresth brussel sprouts (trim, cut in half, then slice thin)
• 6-8oz crimini mushrooms (sliced)
• Penzeys Fox Point seasoning
• dry white wine (recommend a sauvignon blanc)
• extra virgin olive oil
• butter (a good, rich, European-style is best)


Chestnut prep:

1. Slice an X into the flat side of each chestnut
2. Scatter nuts onto flat baking sheet and roast at 425 degrees for 15-25 minutes
3. Let cool enough to handle, then peel.
4. Chop chestnut meat into crumbles and set aside

Mushroom prep:

1. Sauté sliced mushrooms in large skillet in a mixture of olive oil and butter
2. Season with fresh-ground black pepper and liberal dash of Fox Point seasoning as they cook
3. Cook till browned
4. Remove mushrooms to bowl and set aside

Cook:

1. In same skillet, heat and melt 1Tbsp. of butter and 1 Tbsp. of olive oil
2. Add brussel sprouts and saute till they edges begin to brown (about 8 minutes)
3. Add half cup of white wine and let cook till wine is mostly gone.
4. Season to taste with more Fox Point.
5. Add in chestnuts and mushrooms, stir well and heat through
6. Serve

The hash worked very well with a nice, rare sirloin (in our household, we generally use bison, but standard beef would likely do, as well. Garnished with some locally-sourced dark cherry tomatoes. Served the meal with red wine (the Vicious Petit Sirah's cranberry notes were a very nice complement both to the hash and to the sirloin).

Brusselsprout/Chestnut Hash with Bison Sirloin

Listening to the printer churn away on a thousand page document is like listening to trees scream.

Shared Spaces

In the enterprise I work for, there's more employees than there are desks to seat them all. This is resultant of a number of factors: frequent need for people to work at different locations, people that telecommute regularly, and just an overall short-fall of available office/desk space.

For the most part, this hasn't been a problem for me. If anything, it encourages me to work from home (and, I tend to get more done while working from home, at any rate). Unfortunately, when we have our meeting days, it causes a larger number of people, than normal, to concentrate in the meeting facility. This tends to create an acute shortfall in desk space. While I have an assigned seat in the building where our large-group meeting is held, most attendees don't. So, if I arrive other than ass-early the day of the meeting, I frequently find my desk occupied by visitors.

On days where I'm not going to be busy, elsewhere in the building (typically, when I'm stuck in one of the labs), I politely evict the visitor. If I know I'm going to be elsewhere most of the day, I typically just set my stuff in my cube and let the visitor continue borrowing my desk. Generally, it's not a problem - if I'm not using it, I don't care, overly much, if someone else does.

That said, there's always people that seem to feel compelled to abuse the courtesy. Most frequently, the abuse are merely annoying. Generally, it's limited to my stuff being moved out of their normal places or paperwork/trash being left behind. While annoying, it's not a big deal. What is a big deal, however, is when people "borrow" stuff from my desk (note to people who borrow desks: if you find things like plastic silverware, blank CDROMs, pens, etc, in the desk, those are not consumables there for use by all an sundry. I pay for the shit sitting in my desk and your use of it is petty-theft).

Oh... I also always love when visitors take it upon themselves to make themselves at home at my desk by adjusting my seat to their personal comfort. It's oh so lovely to come back and find my chair's settings completely jacked up. It's also nice when one of the visitors has been eating at my desk and left food debris ground into the chair's fabric.

EMS in The `Hood

Dunno what's going on in my neighborhood, this week, but it seems like there's been lots of EMS activity every day. While we live near a couple major routes used by the local EMS to get around, that traffic is usually just passing by our neighborhood. This week, they've actually been stopping in the neighborhood.

Today, when I came home from work, an ambulance was stopped in front of a house three houses down from mine. Unfortunately, they were parked in the middle of the street with no indication of moving. Further misfortune is the fact that my street is a long, curving, one-way street. So, my choices were to: wait for it to move, do the long reverse the wrong way down the long, curving narrow street, park and walk the rest of the way home.

I'd considered backing, given that there was another side-street I could reach my house from. However, the length and curving narrowness of my street, combined with the relatively short walk and temperate weather, made me opt to just park and walk home.

As I passed my next door neighbor's house, she'd asked why I was walking rather than driving as I usually do. I indicated the ambulance with a somewhat annoyed look on my face. She informed me that it had been there, like that, for at least half an hour.

As I'd walked by, I'd noted that there was an empty stretcher in front of the house the ambulance crew was attending to. The door had also been hanging open, with no real sign of activity. It struck me as odd, at the time. My neighbor's mention of when it had arrived made me think, "if the ambulance is there for over an hour and the stretcher's empty on the lawn, someone's probably died." I noticed more than an hour later, that the ambulance was still there (though, thankfully, they'd since chosen to move it enough for traffic to get by). Given my prior thoughts, I looked to see if there might also be a Coroner's vehicle nearby. None was in evidence, but, perhaps I'd missed its coming and going? At any rate, the ambulance finally left the scene a little more than two hours after I got home.

Still don't know what it was all about. Generally, when an ambulance is called, they arrive quickly, act quickly and depart quickly (that whole "critical first hour" thing usually driving the pace). If an ambulance lingers, it's generally a sign of something not - or no longer - being an emergency. If something's not an emergency, you generally don't summon an ambulance and incur the visit's expense, so, lingering ambulances are generally a sign that an emergency became a non-emergency. Typically, this is because there's nothing urgent the EMS crew can do for the summoners - in other words, someone has died.

I'd also noticed, as I'd passed the house, that there had been a "For Sale" sign planted on the front lawn. It kinda made me wonder if, perhaps, the owner had had financial difficulties resulting in an attempt to sell. I further wonder if, maybe due to the current housing market, the owner couldn't get it sold before panic/despair set in and that, perhaps, the ambulance was called for a suicide. Still don't know. And, while it's morbid to ponder it and write about it, I don't feel inclined to inquire further. Don't want to cross the line from merely morbid to ghoulish.

Loves Me Some Cheesery

This movie, if they ever get it made, will probably be utterly horrible. But it looks so cheeserifically awesome that I'm probably gonna have to go see it (or download it, if it's only available that way):

Moon-Troopers from Iron Sky

I mean, c'mon: NAZIS IN SPACE! As it is, you have zepplin-style mother-ships disgorgin swarms of flying saucers. Only way it gets better is if they sneak in some zombies.

Diminished Highs

There's good and bad to being goal-oriented (though, in truth, it more frequently seems to be bad than good).

The good is the sense of accomplishment you have when you finally reach that goal. To a lesser extent, there's also that sense of joyful anticipation when the achievement of the goal is imminent.

The bad: the impatience to achieve that goal; the frustration of things outside your control thwarting the accomplishment of that goal; people pestering you about when you're going to achieve that goal, especially when they are responsible, in no small part, with your inability to get it done; the "now what" feeling that immediately follows the sense of accomplishment of achieving a goal.

On balance, I just can't tell, any more, whether the high of reaching the goal is anywhere near enough to balance out all the other things. I guess what I loved about consulting was that the "high" I got from achieving goals came so much quicker and more frequently. And, before you could fall into the abyss of "what's next" and the frustration-cycle of the path up to the next achievement, you already had your marching-orders for what to do next.

Grimm Reality

It looks like NBC is playing with social media to promote new programming. If you follow their Twitter account for the soon-to-air series, Grimm, they'll private message you with a code that allows you to preview the show's pilot.

When I'd seen the commercials for the show, it had piqued my interest. So, I hit their "follow" button Twitter. A short while later, I got notification of the private message's arrival. Donna and I sat down and watched the episode. It wasn't horrible. Has a decent enough premise. However, it was a bit on the predictable side.

I can't say that I'll go out of my way to watch the show, but I won't avoid it, either. If I happen to hit the channel when it's on, I might watch. If the actual series is better than the opener, then I might seek to watch it. Who knows, it could get good. Star Trenk: Next Generation started out poorly, then eventually found its stride. But, for now, it's a bit weak.

Which Side of the Bed?

Frequently, I wake up before I really want to. Generally, my body seems to only want about 3-6 of continuous sleep. So, if I go to bed much more than five hours before my alarm is due to go off, there's a better than even chance I'll wake up before my alarm goes off. Unfortunately, that generally happens close enough to when I'm due to get up that it's not even worth trying to go back to sleep. Frequently, I just lay there, waiting for my alarm to go off, to actually get up out of bed.

This morning, I woke up before I wanted to. I'd gone to bed just after midnight, but, wasn't due to wake up till at least 8:30 (so we could make the regular pilgrimage to the Saturday farmers market in Falls Church). I spent a few hours memory-walking, while waiting for my alarm to go off and wake Donna.

 

When I say "memory-walking", it's basically just me sitting/laying there and letting my mind float over my past. I just sorta bounce from memory to memory, letting the threads of their interconnectedness play themselves out. The bouncing is rarely linear. I can find myself remembering things as far back as my first days of preschool or my earliest nightmares/dreams to things that have happened as recently as just a few hours' previous. They can come in any order. One recalled memory triggers the next. It's fascinating how the memories string themselves together; how they order themselves; and how vivid they tend to be - even the extraordinarily mundane ones.

 

It accomplishes very little, but, it's good existential-wanking, I suppose. It's a far better way to while away the time than the ones spent contemplating darker thoughts.

Money vs. Happiness

Just saw an infographic claiming the median household income for Fairfax county in 2010 was $113K.

Back in the 2005-2006 timeframe, there was a global income study that supposedly concluded that $75K was some kind of magic income number beyond which you reached a point of diminishing returns for increased happiness. Presumably, since that figure was shown in USD and was a global study, that magic number was normalized against some other measures. I would presume that they chose to normalize against each studied country's median household income at the time (about $48K in the US in 2006). That means that $75K figure would represent a figure that was 150% of the US median household income.

Given the number in the infographic and the presumed method for deriving that $75K figure, I would have had to have been earning just shy of $177K in 2010 to be making the normalized equivalent of that magic $75K figure. On the plus side, I guess that means I've not crossed that diminishing returns threshold. However, there are definitely days where it feels like it.

Even though I now make several times more than I did when I was much earlier in my career, I'm not sure the salary improvement is  linearly-reflected in overall life-happiness. I'm not sure there's even some kind of parabolic curve I could chart (passing through the peaks and valleys of life-happiness).

Maybe times have changed. Maybe it's not (or never was) the kind of statistically meaningful figure that some people like to quote. Maybe it wasn't so much a diminishing-returns point but a peak-return point. Dunno.

Police Games

Had the news on, this morning, as I readied myself for work. There was a story on about the turmoil in Greece related to the austerity measures. Protesters were hurling rocks and such at the police and government buildings. The police were responding by hurling smoking tear-gas canisters at the protestors. All I could think was, "so the Greeks were playing rock/paper/tear-gas, today?"

Placement Is Key

At the office building I frequently work at, the restroom doors are all on hydraulic openers. Several paces from each such door, is a pressure plate you smack to activate the doors (they look just like the ones you see at hospitals for their big, swinging automated doors).

I will admit that I tend to walk faster, from place to place, than a lot of people do. I'm fairly no-nonsense when I'm going places. I want to get from point A to point B as directly and quickly as possible. So, I frequently find myself having to wait whenever I encounter automated doors.

This week, some of the bathroom doors at work had signs on them saying something to the effect of "automatic door: do not manually open". Well, that's fine in theory. However, if you don't want me yanking the door open, you need to make sure that, by the time I reach the door after hitting the pressure plate, the door is open far enough for me to pass through it. The bathroom doors at work just don't manage that "trick".

Seriously: if an automated door opens slower than a bank vault, and you don't want people manually opening it, set the activator button further from the door!

Not Quite Integrated

Google is trying to link together their various services (Picasa, BlogSpot/Blogger, Plus, etc.). It's sort of a Good Idea™, but it's "not quite there," yet.

I'm one of those people who uses online services like Picasa as a cloud-based backup of my home storage. I use BackBlaze for my general data (really sweet service: I recommend it to anyone that has a good up-stream connection and gives a crap about protecting important electronic documents, images, etc. against hard drive failures or home disasters) and I (currently) use Picasa for my photo memories (Flickr has better storage pricing, but, when I was making the decision, Picasa had the better management software).

When I first opened my Picasa account, it was very much a stand-alone service. This was reflective of it being one of Google's many acquired services. Eventually, I noticed that images I'd posted via my BlogSpot account were automagically showing up in my Picasa account.

When I cashed in my Plus beta invite, one of the things I had to do was link my Picasa account to my Plus profile (no choice was given: if I wanted to try out Plus, I either clicked on the "accept" button or I couldn't do Plus - in retrospect, the latter might have been the better option). It didn't seem like too big of a deal at the time, so, I clicked "yes". I didn't post my first photo to Plus for several days after joining up (might have even been a couple weeks). It was several days, after that, that I noticed Plus-posted photos were showing up in my Picasa account.

Honestly, I think what alerted me to that fact was that Donna and I were out and wanted me to show some pix of our dogs to friends. So, I fired up my Android phone's "Gallery" application and noticed there were photos showing up that were from Plus. When I got home, I logged into Picasa and, sure enough, there was an album (tree) of my Plus-originated photos.

Sidenote to Google: data aggregation is great, in theory, but the way you're doing it for me - and not giving me any good method to manage or override - makes my data utterly chaotic: not good. At least give me options to determine what things appear in multiple applications. The first time I end up embarrased by your "helpful" stream-crossing, you can expect a subpoena. 

It was mostly a shrug-worthy moment. I mean, at least I knew how to get at photos after I'd posted them via Plus. It did raise the concern of, "do Plus photos count against the Picasa quota I bought"? I'm hoping that what I discovered today indicates that the Plus folder-tree doesn't count against that quota: 1) it's the only album that seems to allow sub-albums; 2) unlike all of my Picasa-originated albums' photos, the Plus originated photos don't seem to be online-editable the way my Picasa-originated ones are. Dunno. It might be buried in a Google FAQ (or similar document) somewhere, but there's no quick indication of it.

I'll give Google kudos for making data available. Unfortunately, what Google really doesn't seem to get is that masses of data suck if you don't have good tools for logically-ordering them. And, no, I don't consider having a search engine to plow through the data-heap to be a good organizational method or solution for masses of data.

Damage to Program Reputation

Yesterday, Twitter was flying the Fail-Whale  (at intervals) due, in part, to Steve Jobs's death. Many of my friends were posting their condolences messages to FaceBook and/or Plus. I suppose it's all a nice tribute to someone whose singular vision helped shape an industry. But, at the same time, there's that part of me that was pissed by it all.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating the man's professional accomplishments. I'd be a fool to try to claim that he didn't have profound influences in a number of technical areas. My main beef is that, much like many people who had power derived from their mone and success, the man used that power to cheat. Worse, where he cheated helped to further damage an already problematic system - the organ donor program.

I've long had a problem with the whole organ donor program. The people who give their organs typically see nothing in return. The organ donor programs try to spin the whole thing as an enobling endeavor where a senseless death can be made meaningful.

Bullshit. While the families of the deceased are being fed this bullshit message, everyone else involved in the process are moving around piles of money. It's not like the doctors, nurses, hospitals (etc.) are working for free. It's not like donor recipients are getting the organs for free. And, worse, people with money and power are able to shove piles of money (or maybe just influence) and get themselves jumped ahead in line. 

The first memorable instance of this for me was when former PA governor Casey did it in 1993. Within a day of the need for a multi-organ transplant being determined, he "somehow" ended up at the head of the line for the procedure.

Jobs's instance wasn't quite so glaring. He actually set up temporary residence in state with favorable waitlist times. Thus, instead of waiting the best part of a year for a transplant, he only had to wait two months. By itself, this could just be chalked up to exercising one's money to move where the wait lists are shortest (Tennessee is a short-wait state for livers, for some reason). And, I could deal with that. However, Jobs's health history made him a sub-ideal candidate. With the organ transplant triage systems, people with a history of cancer - particularly a recent and/or active history - are generally given low to no priority on transplant waitlists.

Given the scarcity of available organs, it only makes sense: not only do you want an organ to go to someone with the best tissue-match, you want it to go to someone with the best, overall, prosspects for long-term survival. Cancer patients - particularly ones with recent and/or active history of the diease - generally aren't considered a good, long-term risk for an organ transplant. Judging by the time displacement between Jobs' transplant and his eventual death, he bore out this poor-risk rationale.

I can't help but think that, had Jobs not used his money to put himself someplace where he could jump the line, someone else might have gotten that liver. Further, "someone else" would likely have not been given special consideration in spite of a sub-ideal health history. The liver that died with Jobs might still be acting as a life-saver for someone else.

Yeah, that's a lot of mights. It's a lot of speculation. But, it just reinforces my whole distaste for the organ transplant system in the US. It contributes to my desire to not donate my organs were I eligible to do so. I mean, we have a system that essentially supports organ-selling where everyone but the organs' prior owners profits, but the donors' survivors see nothing of it but "nobility". Screw that. The "nobility" just strikes me as a very cynical method to get people to part with things for free that have a high, real-dollar value. And, at the end of the day, the people most likely to give out of charity are also the least likely to ever benefit from such charity (i.e., they aren't the class of people that will get preferential treatment due to social positioning).

For now, if anyone wants my organs, feel free to bid for them. If I pre-decease my "family", they're gonna be in a sub-ideal economic state. The least I can do for them is try to get them the last dollars my corpse can yield. And, if I can't do that, then there's no way I'm risking some monied line-jumper benefitting from my death. My organs die with me unless I'm able to put stipulations in place for who they may be "given" to (i.e., someone in the same or lower economic class and who have financial dependents that would face genuine hardship were they to die). Without those kinds of assurances on who can have them, no one can have them.

Yeah, that's selfish - I'm just making sure I'm not participating in a sham.

Restaurant Reviews

Recently, Donna and I took a mini-vacation to Williamsburg, VA. While there, we stayed at an "inn" at the Williamsburg Winery. It was a nice experience. We toured the winery and had a really nice dinner at Café Provençal, the inn's on-sit, gourmet restaurant.

We'd scheduled our trip a bit oddly: Sunday arrival with Tuesday departure. We'd done this mostly to try to avoid weekend crowds. Unfortunately, it also meant that a lot of things that would be open during a summer stay were closed.

While we would have gladly eaten a second time at Café Provençal, that wasn't an option. They were closed on Mondays. So, Monday night, we drove into Williamsburg to "forage".

We came to a restaurant named Opus 9. It was a higher-end chop house, probably designed to compete with places like Ruth's Chris. They had decent food and decent wine selection. And, they were priced in a similar bracket to Ruth's Chris (two people with meal, desert, cocktails and wine came to a little over $200 before tip).

In general, I don't so much care how much a given dining experience costs. That said, I do judge a place on value for the money spent. To whit, I've been to places where a $600 meal for two was a bargain and places where a $20 bill for two was an absolute rip-off.

Opus 9 was competent, but not a superlative value - particularly not when compared to what I get at home or what I'd had, the night prior, at Café Provençal. 

A few days after we got back, I got an email from US Air's "Rewards Dining" program. Turns out the Opus 9 was a program participant, thus I'd earned miles from having eaten there. So, "bonus." To get the extra points for the dine, I submitted a review. Overall, I gave Opus 9 a positive review. However, I'd noted in the comments section of the review:

The food wasn't awful, it was simply unremarkable. I don't have a problem with expensive restaurants, but I do expect to receive a good value for money spent (whether my tab comes to $20 or $200). The experience and food while "ok" simply weren't worth the extreme premium (especially for the overall area's cost of living) prices."

In retrospect, that comment probably seemed more negative than intended. It wasn't meant as a "don't go here" type of review, and I wasn't trying to trash the place. I was just expressing that, while what I got was good, I felt it was overpriced for what was delivered.

Today, I got an email back from the restaurant regarding my review. It was a nice, polite response, basically asking what could be done to improve the experience so as to raise the value proposition. So, I replied back:

The review may have been received as more negative than it was intended. I'm not saying that the meal or the experience were bad. Indeed, the menu had a good selection, the ordered food was competently prepared, the restaurant's facilities were rather nice, and the service was good - particularly given our server's experience level. That said, given the food quality/preparation, I would have expected a bill that was 65% of our total.

Overall, you probably suffered from two things: 1) my wife and I are probably overly particular about our food - when eating at home, we eat (almost exclusively) locally-sourced, seasonal foods and my wife is an a rather good cook; and, 2) we'd eaten at another, similarly-priced restaurant, the night before that had both better quality food and more-personalized preparation. So, we may have not been coming from a "fair" starting point. That said, once a two-person meal gets into the $200+ range, that kind of comparison is inevitable.

My overall suggestion for improvement of the food might be to make your menu selections more seasonal and, even if you can't alter your menu to be fully-local, create some selections that emphasize local food. Williamsburg is local to some really great food sources (there's really local produce and meat sources within a 100mi radius). It would be awesome if those local products could be played up and showcased.

In reading it, it felt kinda snotty. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to give a critique of my experience without coming off that way.

It's episodes like this that really makes me question what I've become. I mean, it's not like I'm the offspring of monied parents. I wasn't one of the preppie kids, growing up. Hell, at one point in my life, I sorta lumped myself in the category that my punkier friends were in. Yet, somehow, as an adult, I've become a yuppy - and the whole exchange made me feel like a yuppy-tool.

At the same time, looking back, most of those tendencies have always been there. In general, I've preferred to do without rather than do with less than I wanted. I've always been a bit of an elitist - which, I might even be able to justify to myself, if I had some basis from which to be elitist. But, in reality, I don't. I owe a great deal of where I am to a fortunate set of circumstances and a willingness to exploit the opportunities that presented themselves. So, "what am I," and "how did I get this way" (and, yeah, you can set that to the tune of Once in a Lifetime).