Blogs

Finding good sushi in London is more of a challenge than I expected. (Finding good food in London is more of a challenge than I expected.) Overall I've been disappointed with Japanese food in London because I can't find soba noodles in dashi and it's difficult to find udon or ramen. Most of the sushi places I've encountered don't have specialty fish or cuts such as aji or ingawa or oh-toro. Also, you can forget getting things like maguro nato with a raw quail egg on top. When it comes to sushi, most of the time it's overpriced and not always made by Japanese chefs. While neither are high quality, I find myself going to Wasabi and Itsu out of convenience. However the truth is I have some kind of moral problem with the amount of plastic wrap and garbage I produce when I eat at Wasabi. I also have a hard time with mass produced sushi because of my worry about overfishing tuna. Tuna fishing is one of my favorite hobbies when I'm in the US and even recreational fishing...

So like I said my first post is about office politics and not about the food and drink I plan to mainly focus on. In this cause, however, I just simply need to vent. I've been for all intents and purposes promoted at work today. Apparently it was decided last Thursday but I only found out today. Instead of being overjoyed, I'm frankly disappointed, nervous, and down right frustrated. Now I don't mean to be a whiner about something good happening to me but I think maybe this will shed some light on the situation: I work in IT on a agile project. We employ a development approach called Scrum and until this point I've been a Java lead. I was pretty proud of that fact since I've only really been doing Java development for the past 9 months. All my prior work experience was in C# to that point and, while they are similar, I was picked out of a lot of talented Java developers with many years of experience. I think that there are many reasons I got selected as a Java lead,...

As I mentioned in my previous posting about the MSI X340 the screen is highly reflective, so much so that you will never use it in an outdoor environment. With that said, I have been using a screen protector for my Toshiba M400.  Now on the M400 the screen protector is a little annoying since it does cut some of the brightness, but this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem on the X340, even at the lowest brightness setting. I will post a picture of my screen installation later but for now I just ordered a screen that is slightly larger in length and width of the X340’s screen and I trimmed the protector to fit.  Now I can see the screen with a bright background and reflection isn’t as distracting… When you order the screen you should find one that is 1/4 inch wider/longer that the visible portion of the screen.  The screen protector is attached using low-tack double sided tape.  In any case wander over to www.strongengineering.com to take a look. -Alex

The MacBook Air and the Lenovo x301 have really put ultra-thin notebooks in the lime light.  Unfortunately due to the price and the economic climate, the new media favorite are the low cost/light weight/and long life netbooks. (Netbooks typically have a low powered processor, have a 10” screen or smaller, 1GB to 2GB of RAM, No Optical Drive and cost less than $500) MSI has broken the trend of both netbooks and ultra expensive ultra-thin notebooks with their X series.  ( X320 , X340 , X600 ) Both the X320 and the X340 share the same thin chassis similar in size and weight to the MacBook Air, except that the X320 uses a netbook class processor and the X340 is using a Core 2 Solo 1.4GHz processor.  The X600 is a 15.6” ultra-thin notebook. Laptop Magazine has a MacBook Air vs. X340 comparison article.  They also did a very nice review of the X340. For me the most important characteristics for a new notebook was (1) Size and (2) Multimedia (HD) capability.  I have other...

After getting FIOS for my Internet and TV, I have nothing to say nothing but good things.  There was big issue issue with pixilation.  Since I used to have DirectTV I was used to some pixilation due to a storm, or something flying in front of the dish, but for FIOS, this was an un welcome problem. It took me a little time to speak to an support representative to get someone to come out and take a look.  But when the technician was out what he told me was interesting.  Verizon was pushing too much signal through the wires in my house.  I previously had ComCast internet and we had to run a direct homerun cable to the point on entry so that I had enough signal for a reasonable connection.  Go figure. In any case the tech installed an 6db attenuator on both my TIVO boxes and HD is not giving me any more issues.