Kitty Atkins!

Let's have a grab bag of topics, shall we? Yes, we shall!

1) My weekend was fantastic, how was yours? We had a Game Day on Saturday and got to play some of the new games I received for Christmas and generally had a good time. We played Pandemic (we won!), Shadows Over Camelot (the good guys won!), and Give Me the Brain! (I won!). Huh. Just realized I was on the winning side in all three games that day. That doesnt' happen often. Both of the cooperative games were nailbiters though.

Then on Sunday Karin and I went to see the Monsters of Podcasting show with a live Jordan, Jesse Go! and You Look Nice Today. This was all part of the San Francisco Sketchfest which is a festival I can endorse. Both shows were hilarious. We were going to eat at Speisekammer in Alameda, which would have been a very fine thing indeed but then last week Paul and Storm mentioned eating at Great Eastern on Jackson Street, which was just four blocks from the MoP venue, so we tried it. It was stunningly good - the wonton soup with the crispy duck was just amazing. If you want Chinese food in San Franciso I'd highly recommend it. You may want to make a reservation, the place was packed on a Sunday night. Of course it was also the Lunar New Year so maybe it was abnormally packed. We had a reservation and the guy who came in right after us without a reservation didn't get a table until we were almost done eating.

2) The sucky thing about the weekend was Heisenberg's claws. He keeps getting something on his claws and if we don't clean them diligently they get infected. This time he got it really bad, so I had to take him to the vet on Monday. Which means he got sedated and generally had a bad day, he got an antibiotic shot and medicine we have to give him twice a day, and that was generally all around bad. The vet suggested we switch to a natural, organic litter, so we're trying a new litter made from corn instead of clay. While I was talking to the vet she wanted him to lose a bit more weight, so we're also going to try this fancy high-protetin, low-carb food. It's 50% protein and has no grains - just meat, fruit, and veggies. We'll see. Apparently cats do better if you don't feed them rice and wheat. Who knew?

Anyhow the claw thing has been a pain for quite a while, so here's hoping the organic corn-based litter fixes what ails the poor guy.

3) Random other tidbit that I've been sitting on for a while. Here's an interview with Robbie Bach at CES, where they asked him about Blu-Ray on a 360. What I love is that he has this whole list of reasons why Blu-Ray on a 360 is a bad idea, but if you search and replace "Blu-Ray" with "HD-DVD" they would all make the exact same amount of sense.

Personally I can only think of two reasons why MS is so opposed to Blu-Ray on a 360 and neither have anything to do with what the consumer wants or could benefit from. A ) Microsoft won't back a Sony-created format or B ) Microsoft wants to skip the HD disc media and move straight to download or streaming. As far as the latter goes - I've tried Netflix on the 360 and it's fine for old television shows but it's nowhere near HD. You can't stream HD in the US yet (bandwidth isn't there) and the 360 doesn't have the hard drive space for downloading real HD and it never will as long as they treat the hard drive as a profit center. Pushing for download is a bad move on their part because Sony can sell downloaded HD just as well on a PS3 but Sony gives you 3-4 times as much storage on the drive and uses a standard part you can upgrade yourself if you desire.

But anyway if a drive can't be used in gaming, costs money, and consumers don't want it then it won't be available on a 360. Unless it's a HD-DVD drive of course.

Seattle Dining

This is one of those things where I'm making a note more for my future Googling than for anyone else, but this information is not useless for other readers.

One thing about going to PAX is sorting out the food situation. The conference center itself has a lot of fast food options, but A ) none of them are very appealing and B ) they are all jam-packed with PAX attendees. (I heard the Subway in the convention center ran out of bread at one point during the weekend.) There's a Daily Grill across the street from the convention center which is just pricy enough to not be swamped, but still casual enough I feel OK about going there in jeans and a t-shirt; but that only covers one meal really. The convention center is downtown, so you know there are plenty of dining options nearby but you want to identify good choices and move efficiently, right?

Karin started using this site called Earthcomber.com to look for places to eat. If you go there in a regular browser it's sort of a weird site but it looks fine on an iPhone. There's a Yelp app for iPhone but A ) Yelp doesn't really work without a certain critical mass of reviews which Seattle didn't quite seem to have, and B ) it does searches centered on where you are which is usually great but sometimes you're at your hotel and searching for place for dinner and what you really want is next to the convention center.

Anyway, she found two fantastic places that I can recommend for downtown Seattle. The first is a place called The Oceanaire Seafood Room on 7th Avenue, and the second was The Islander on Union Street (down by the water). The Oceanaire was almost too nice for a t-shirt and it was certainly more expensive but it was great food. In particular they served a little tray of pickled veggies and some pickled herring that I quite liked. Karin didn't even want to try it so that was just more herring for me!

The Islander was a little more laid back. They had some nice tiki drinks and good polynesian-style dishes - I had a really good chicken coconut curry. The only downside to this place was we stuffed ourselves (had to get a Pu Pu Platter right?) and then had to walk like six blocks UPHILL back to our hotel.

Anyway, next year I'll probably want to go to both of these places again. And skip the mediocre breakfast we had the first day in the hotel restaurant. :-)