Posts Tagged With ‘Food’
Updated: 28 Jan 2010 10:21 pm by Ron
Filed: Food • Life in General
Tagged: Food • Ian • St. Louis
Teagan (l) and Ian (r) at the top of the Arch on Wednesday afternoon (01/2010)
… and I think we are all ready to be home again.
Ian and Teagan’s presentation on Wednesday morning went really well, striking a nice blend of the geek stuff. They seemed comfortable doing it, and seemed to have fun in doing it. Very well-received by the audience, and I think it was more than just being polite; a number of them were genuinely impressed with what these guys had accomplished. As a dad, to say I was a little proud of these guys would be a big understatement.
They had a bit of time in the afternoon when there wasn’t anything on the conference agenda that appealed to them during the afternoon, so we wandered down to the arch (our hotel is less than a mile from the park with the arch, or “The Arch”, I suppose). I have to admit I was not expecting all that much, but it was way cooler than I had anticipated… and not just the weather, although it did start snowing while we were up at the top. I knew it was big, but I really didn’t have a sense of its scale and it really is pretty impressive. We walked back to the hotel in an increasingly-dense snow shower.
A rare splash of color in St. Louis: cool jazz sculpture in the snow near Laclede's Landing in downtown St. Louis (01/2010)
Food has been a pleasant surprise here in St. Louis, to put it mildly. We had excellent Indian on Wednesday evening at India’s Rasoi on Euclid with Bryan (Ian’s and Teagan’s mentor); it was exceptional and we all came home impressed and stuffed. We went a little lighter this evening with very good sushi (edamame, nagiri, and a couple different rolls) from Wasabi on Washington, then we wandered around in a cool foodie grocery/deli called Culinaria on 9th and came back to the hotel with ice cream.
Tomorrow we head for home, and we’re all ready — at least mentally — to be home again. Likely to be a long day, given that we aren’t scheduled to get back into IF until almost 11pm… I can’t say I will feel bad about leaving St. Louis. It has been cold, almost exclusively grey, and damp the whole time. Aside from the food and the Arch, there just really isn’t much here that we’ve seen that would make me want to come back but I also recognize that we haven’t had much of a chance to get out and do much and January in the midwest really hasn’t given St. Louis much of a chance to impress.
Updated: 28 Jan 2010 09:49 pm by Ron
Filed: Food • Life in General
Tagged: Food • St. Louis • travel
Ian (l) and Teagan (r) on the train into St. Louis Monday afternoon (01/2010)
… is kind of a mixed bag. Ian, Teagan (a friend of Ian’s), and I are back here for the week for a conference (more on that in a bit), but I don’t yet really have much of an opinion aside from initial impressions. We flew in on Monday and rode the train from the airport into the downtown area to the hotel. The train ride was grey, brown, and rust: a grey blustery day, nothing green in sight, and passing through areas of run-down industrial and urban decay on the west side of the city. I’m a little surprised at the lack of effort on the part of the city to do anything to clean up the area, given the impression it leaves on someone new to town. Depressing.
The hotel where we are staying and where the conference is being hosted is pretty decent and is big enough that it doesn’t seem stretched to hold us all. Decent food within walking distance (very good Italian at J.F. Sanfilippo’s on Monday — made even better by great service — and decent Med last night at Nara’s). Looks like several sushi and Irish places close to us, too. We’ll probably check those out the next couple evenings. We haven’t really had much of a chance to get out and see anything, but the food and the hotel have been a bit of a counterpoint to the ride in…
Ian and Teagan were presented their awards at the conference yesterday morning in one of the plenary sessions, following a great presentation by Alan Paller of the SANS Institute. I’ll post a picture or two if I can track them down. They have their presentation this morning; I’m sure both of them will be glad to be past that so they can just enjoy the rest of the conference.
Updated: 30 Jul 2009 04:25 am by Ron
Filed: Food • Life in General
Tagged: Chicago • conferences • Food • travel
I head for home later today, and with any luck will be back in my own bed this evening…
It’s been a really full week here in Chicago. Three of the four presentations we’re involved in are now past — I Â have one left that I am leading today — and one of them went well, the others not so much. That’s fodder for another post (or not). At any rate, it has been a good week here in Chicago:
- We’ve been able to connect (or re-connect in some cases) with people we work with and rarely get to talk to face-to-face
- A couple of very interesting sessions at the conference itself
- Great weather, good food (had good deep-dish pizza at Gino’s East on Superior on Tuesday, and a pretty good filet at Shula’s steakhouse last night), and a pretty decent conference facility
Now if we can just make it out of O’Hare on time this afternoon. I was amazed at how quickly we got out of O’Hare when we came in Sunday evening (under 15 minutes between when we stepped off the plane and when the shuttle pulled away from the curb), but I think this will likely be a different story.
I am missing Deb, Li, and Ian. This post from Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog yesterday hit home; I just wonder if the postscript is a noun, a verb, or just an exclamation…
Updated: 15 Nov 2008 09:23 am by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Food • Geek Stuff • Life in General
Tagged: ColdFusion • Food • open source • travel • work
I spent this past week in Washington, DC for work and I’m headed to San Francisco next week for a work-related conference. After only being gone once since we got home with Li, being gone two weeks in a row is tough (tough on Deb, too). The timing of the two trips was coincidental as well as bad, but I’d put off traveling to DC for a couple of requests, and had swapped with Jeff at work one, so it really couldn’t be avoided.
I found som good food in DC, which I still think is probably the best thing about getting to travel occasionally for work. In a wierd twist, it was Jeff — who used to be very reluctant to try different things to eat — that gave me the recommendation for the best place I ate this time in DC: Rasika, an Indian restaurant in the 600 block of D Street down just off the Mall. I also had very good Mexican with Cynthia and Temo on evening.
The trip to SF this next week is for a conference (Adobe’s MAX conference, actually). It will be good to get to soak up some technical stuff for a few days. The single most interesting thing to me will be to see if Adobe says anything about a long-rumored IDE for ColdFusion (likely to be Eclipse-based). Lots of indicators around, including hints from leading figures within the CF community at Adobe, and a strong silence from the developer of CFEclipse when questioned. The big question seems to be price for such an IDE, and as an open source advocate (personnally and at work), my hope is that such an effort would be both open and free, but I realize that from Adobe, that’s not likely.
Updated: 01 Mar 2008 10:01 am by
Filed: Books & Reading • Food
Tagged: Barca • Food • Ivan Doig • reading
I haven’t really kept up on posting anything about what’s on my reading stack, but I actually have been reading quite a bit lately. Part of it is a release from the stress of work (and specifically, the stress of trying to make sure that when I disappear to go to China in the immediate future that I don’t leave a mess of unfinished major tasks for Jeff) and part of it is to keep from going crazy as we wait…
I’m currently in the middle of two books: Barça: A People’s Passion by Jimmy Burns (an unexpected Christmas gift from Chuck) and The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten (loaned to me by Mark). Steingarten is hilarious, and I knew I was in for a treat when he opens the book by touching on his food aversions and how he (mostly) got past them — those aversions include some of my favorites: Greek food, anchovies, Indian desserts, and clams. Right now, however, Steingarten is playing second fiddle to Burns. Barça is rich in the history of one of the great football clubs in the world, a club with a unique history interwoven with the politics of Spain and a club whose history is populated with some of the greatest players in the history of the game. The book is about much more than just the sporting side of the club, and has been a real eye-opener. Understanding the history of the club within the 20th century history of Spain and Catalonia puts a completely different stamp on the nature of the rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. I am within 25 pages of the end of the book and, although it has not necessarily been an easy read, it has been both worthwhile and very enjoyable in terms of both the history and the football.
Over Christmas, I also read The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig (probably my favorite contemporary writer) and Playing for Pizza by John Grisham. Pizza is fluff but enjoyable; sort of the the futbol Americano version of Joe McGinness’ The Miracle of Castel di Sangro but not as filling and without the twist at the end. The Whistling Season did not disappoint at all; it had been a couple of years since I last read anything by Doig, so this was a real treat. Vintage Doig, but with a touch more humor (or perhaps the humor is closer to the surface?); I don’t remember laughing out loud with Doig in the past, but I did in several passages here. The book follows a pair of threads separated in time by 40-ish years in the life of a young man in western Montana and more than just touches on the ways in which school and teachers can influence life. Definitely worth reading, and if you aren’t yet a fan of Doig, this one would serve as a great introduction to an extraordinary Western US writer.