inequality

Sheila Bair, the former head of the FDIC, continues to be one of my favorite Republicans with her op-ed in the Times today on income inequality. While I've read some negative commentary on her book I think the FDIC was the best run of the banking regulators---perhaps damning with faint praise---and that's a credit to her. (Why we have 3 different federal banking regulators? Beats me!) The fact that she's willing to try to buck some amount of Republican craziness is even more impressive.

txikito

Carla and I went to Txikito yesterday and ate at the bar. We had a white Txakoli wine, the slightly effervescent wine poured from a distance and some food. By far the dish that stood out was a special, a mushroom carpaccio. This was, I believe, a king oyster mushroom, but I've previously had something quite similar there with a trumpet mushroom. OK, there's a reason it was similar: it turns out that king oyster and trumpet are the same mushroom, the Pleurotus eryngii. See, writing blog entries is an educational experience. Anyway, the dish has thinly sliced mushroom drenched in olive oil. Hard to complain.

Well, I didn't get around to any programming today. I hardly could remember why I had a failed unit test up on my screen when I unlocked it this morning and I never really got back to it. I did do several code reviews.

We had more than an average amount of "what exactly are folks in Mountain View thinking" today, which is never a fun topic. I suppose I should really either pick up a phone or just travel more, because it's silly to feel out of touch when we have such magnificent technology.

I'm way behind writing up the interview feedback from my interviews in Pittsburgh on Thursday.

Yesterday I saw a Gannet on a NYC Audubon cruise around New York harbor. It's a very large seagull. I also saw a number of harbor seals. Who knew that there were marine mammals cool enough to winter in NYC?

Anyway, it was a great little trip, 2 hours long, visiting a couple of man-made islands past the Verrazono-Narrows Bridge as well as an area next to Red Hook. There were many different gulls and other seabirds as well as the Gannet and the harbor seals. Fun!

Lacking a home printer and needing to print out a couple of tickets, I tried Google Cloud Print to a fedex office today. I ran into a number of annoyances. Some seem fixable, some were one-offs. The fixable stuff:

• Why doesn't the fedex claim number appear in my confirmation e-mail?
• Why is the fedex interface so damn slow? I was trying to print 2 one page documents and the display printer-side was extremely slow to show my preview and to move through the menus.

Today's one-off annoyances:

• After I hit print on the first document I realize the printer is saying it's out of paper. The store is empty and the employees are all in the back. I find an employee and wait a few minutes for her to come look at it; she realizes that I could've told the printer to use the other paper tray, hits those buttons, and the printer starts spitting out pages.
• Of course, it starts spitting out someone else's pages. Specifically, they looked like wedding invitations. I see some groom-to-be getting in hot water tonight when it's realized that most of the invitations were left at Kinkos.
• Since I've already paid by 24 cents (via credit card!), I wait, stacking up the invitations. Finally my first page prints out. Of course, the printer promptly runs out of paper.
• By now there are other customers and I need to wait to get someone to actually refill the printer.

It wasn't a bad experience, but it sure took a lot longer than I'd like to get 2 pages printed out.

The TSA pre-check program worked well when I flew out of Pittsburgh yesterday. There was a reasonably long line snaking towards security, but there was a dedicated and empty pre-check line with a dedicated and empty x-ray machine and magnetometer. No taking off shoes, no futzing with laptops, it felt like 2000 again. 

It's ridiculous that isn't the standard treatment, but I guess it's nice to feel special.