I'm starting to realize that my body has an upper limit on how much raw food I can take before feeling sick. I experienced this effect earlier tonight when I started to feel sick in the middle of a sashimi combo dinner. Luckily, I was able to finish by slowing down & spacing the sashimi between water & rice. However, this was not the first time I had this problem - this queasy feeling also surfaces when eating bun. In retrospect, it seems only like certain foods like fish & mung bean sprouts do it - I can chow down raw carrots & fruit no problemo. I guess either my my digestive system isn't used to vast amounts of those foods in uncooked forms and/or it's becoming more sensitive as I grow closer to geezerdom one day at a time. I suppose I'll just have to be careful in the future & conduct "experiments" to see what's acceptable vs. what's not, if tolerance can be built up, etc.

After close to 3/4th's of a year living in my new hometown, I've finally gotten my hands on a library card. I took the trip downtown to the main branch to activate my card & to check out my first batch of books: random sci-fi/fantasy because I don't really know any good straight fiction authors any more, a book on the Knights Templar and one about the Pagan -> Christianity conversion in Europe by the author of Moorish Spain. The trip ended up being a bit of an experience because the main branch is quite the interesting piece of architecture: uniquely shaped glass + metal exterior that lets lots of light in, very open first three floors with fiction + featured books + computers + library services, yellow escalators and a spiral stack. I'm sure those of you with the photo fetish would love wandering about getting interesting shots out of the place; the rest of us will try to figure out where everything is before giving up and looking at the map.

I got to see Interpol yesterday, and they put on an amazing show. (Just to get it out of the way: the only downer of the night was the security guards that decided to magically bust people for pot in the middle of the show. It's really annoying when everyone's sitting down trying to watch while these two flashlight-armed white shirted people corner someone and escort them out.) The albums only really capture a part of the energy that the band puts out when they perform live - I don't think their intensity dropped at any stage of the concert, and only seemed to snowball as the crowd grew more into it. Probably the best part was the light show, which matched up perfectly with the mood & the beat of each song. I definitely have a new appreciation for Interpol's work now. Now to go get a copy of "The Specialist" from somewhere...

Those of you Apple folk probably know that the latest Powerbooks have a trackpad that interprets two finger movements as scrolling instead of mouse movement. Well, someone has been kind enough to put together a mouse driver implements that functionality for older Apple portables as well as adding a shortcut for contextual clicking. You can find the driver here. WARNING: it does require that your machine has a "W Enhanced Trackpad", you do not fear the command line and you actually know your root password for the machine. However I think it's more than worth it - the end-result is a far more useful trackpad without the worries of accidentally hitting hot-zones.

Now if the author of the driver could implement middle click somehow...*hargle*

Tonight's dinner theatre was my very first attempt at making bo luc lac aka shaking beef. It's a fairly simple recipe - oyster & soy sauce marinated cubed beef cooked in a pan, further dressed up with lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, serrano chile blend and finished with thinly sliced red onion & cilantro. (Yes, there are a lot of ingredients, but the total prep & cook time is under an hour. Trust me it's not that hard.) It was rather tasty and reminded me a lot my variation of bulgogi, but it seemed a bit off compared to what I remember having in restaurants. I think I need to go to a Vietnamese place to reacquaint myself with the dish. Anyone want to come with?

I'm putting together another set of mix cd's. Anyone that's interested should contact me by next Friday, February 11th. Those not local should also provide mailing info.

UPDATE: In the course of boning up on XML/XSL, I've put together XML/XSL versions of the track listings for landslide inspiration (html) and trip (edited) (html).