by cg on September 3, 2007
Dinner tonight consisted of (for the main dish) Chilean Sea Bass and Shitake mushrooms braised in a sauce of fresh diced tomatoes simmered for 40 minutes with water, and a little salt and pepper. I’ve made this dish a couple of times this summer: it is light, flavorful and completely correct both according to UCSF’s neuro-oncology dept. and the UCSF Osher Integrative (aka ‘alternative’) Medicine Center.
After dinner, I sat and finished sipping a Marsannay Pinot Noir Rosé that Linda and I picked up at K&L today and thought, for a change, about the good things that have happened in the past 11 months. One of the best, it occurs to me, was the trip to France that Linda put together last May.
When we got to Paris, it was clear that every good bistro and restaurant was focused on tomato tastes. Cuisine, especially in Paris, is a bit like the French fashion scene – news of this season’s la mode travels fast. Almost everywhere we ate, light, fresh, flavorful tomato flavors were apparent.
Back in the U.S., the New York Times and S.F. Chronicle’s culinary pages were soon full of tomato stories and recipes. It’s been fun this summer trying those, and creating a few of our own, especially with the fresh, flavorful tomatoes from Dotcom Garden.
The tomato, BTW, is a completely different creature in France and the US: no one in France will touch a tomato that doesn’t taste great. Americans buy tomatoes that look good (but are often near-flavorless). I think the French have the equation right.
So the trip to France was a great idea, even though I was a bit apprehensive about my first long trip since the cancer cropped up. Linda was smart about things like hiring cars to get us from airport to hotel: we would have sniffed at a hundred-Euro charge in the past and taken public transport, but now that makes a lot more sense, given circumstances…
by cg on September 3, 2007
Digging through one of my 2 main junk boxes, I came up with the ‘missing link,’ for the scanning workstation the all-important 2-prong to 3-prong adapter that will allow me to hook the spider box into the new scanning workstation set-up, thus allowing scanner and laptop power supply to be hooked into the system.
I was worried this would have to wait for a hardware store run, but, yay, saved by the bell (or box, in this case). So now we just need to do some clean up (dust in the garage will be an issue – hence the plastic sheet to keep everything covered) and rescue an old chair (also in need of clean-up), find an A to B USB cord and we’re ready to go. But, it’s Labor Day, so I think out of respect we’ll start serious scanning tomorrow…
by cg on September 3, 2007
John Markoff has a report in today’s Times about Microsoft’s move to online software delivery and hosting of customer data, a la Google. I am amazed at how quickly computing is moving off the PC: I’m even more amazed at how easily I now entrust even fairly sensitive data – like my medical records – to Google (I have a bunch of stuff on Google Docs).
Microsoft is countering with Windows Live, trying to move selected software and data for small-biz customers to their server ‘Cloud’ by leveraging the Windows user base (shades of the browser wars). I’m not sure MS is my preferred vendor here (nor sure why I trust Google so much) but it will be interesting to see how this plays out…
by cg on September 3, 2007
Sure enough, friends Bob McCrary and wife Carol dropped in on their way down from Sea Ranch, and Bob helped me set up a table, unpack the Epson GT-15000 scanner, and get power and lights set up in the garage.
Naturally, I’m missing one item: a 3-prong to 2-prong power adapter. I bought a 25-foot heavy duty extension cord a while back with the workstation in mind, but managed to buy a polarized 2-wire cord, rather than a 3-wire. Doh.
We have 2 reflectors with 30-watt CFL bulbs providing the equivalent of 200 watts of tungsten light, but balanced for daylight – good for making print quality judgments under consistent lighting (and very ‘green,’ too).
All we need to add is a laptop with a link to the house wireless’ LAN, and we’ll be ready to go. First project will be to calibrate the scanner- I have the standard Kodak Color and B&W targets, which should help us get everything set up. Lightroom’s ‘presets’ feature should help get scanner corrections set up for application to multiple files, if need be. And, I’ll need a chair…