Quick Oakland Restaurant Update - October 2016

Okay, a few folks have mentioned to me recently that they've enjoyed read my blog, so now I feel shamed into posting some new content after a two-year hiatus.

The restaurant scene in Oakland continues to evolve nicely, though I have to admit I'm a little annoyed by all the hipster bars that are popping up left and right. Don't get me wrong...I'm all for a good bar scene but I think we're getting over saturated with bars and the City of Oakland seems to be handing out liquor licenses like they're going out of style. Would love to see a few less bars and a few more food-centric businesses in their place...but that's just me.

I'm also happy to say that most of the restaurants I've written about before are still going as strong as ever. However, there have been a few notable closings within the past year or so. B-Side BBQ, easily my favorite BBQ in the East Bay, sadly closed earlier this year because they were having a hard time making things work financially. I found it a little surprising, as every time I've gone there business seemed pretty good and they were also handling a lot of takeout orders. However, their location was admittedly a bit sketchy...I bet if they were in Uptown they would still be going gangbusters. Two of James Syabout's restaurants also fell victim in recent months. The first, Box and Bells, closed early last year. That location in Rockridge seems to be a huge jinx or something, as no restaurant has ever been able to make it work there long term. Also, I think everyone is so health conscious these days and weren't so keen on their heavier, gastropub style of food...of course I am a big exception! The Dock at Linden Street also just closed within the past few weeks, but will supposedly get relaunched in several months. I think one of their big challenges is location as well...it's a terrific space, but located in an area of West Oakland that is largely unknown and not well trafficked. Of course, with all the hipsters moving to West Oakland that could end up changing real soon! And lastly, Stag's Lunchette, my go to sandwich place in Uptown, abruptly closed a couple of months ago. I was pretty shocked to hear this, as the place was always slammed during lunch...this in spite of the fact that I felt they overcharged for their product.

Okay, now for some notable openings within the past year or so:

Calavera and Agave: Both of these Mexican joints are in Uptown...Calvaera in the Hive complex, and Agave on the ground floor of the new Kapor Center. I've enjoyed the meals and vibe at both places, though I still think the food quality is just a notch below that of Nido's.

Belotti: Located in a smallish location in the middle of Rockridge, I had lunch here one day recently and was simply blown away by the quality of their pasta...it definitely rivals Dopo for "best pasta in Oakland". Can't wait to go back and try some of their other dishes.

Drake's Dealership: Okay, so I ragged on all the drinking joints that have been opening up recently, but Drake's is an exception. Really cool location and use of the space, fantastic beer selection and surprisingly good food for a beer garden - I especially enjoy their pizza and ribs. And very kid/dog/family friendly to boot! The only drawback to this place is that it's uber popular and jam packed every night of the week.

Delage: The owner of B-Dama recently opened this sushi/omakase place right next door, and for $65 this is the best 9-course omakase deal around. Their fish is flown in from Japan, and oh...so fresh and tasty. Very happy to see more quality Japanese fare in Oaktown.

Parlour: Great neighborhood restaurant serving mostly Italian fare. Very solid pizzas and pastas, though I have to say that their pasta dishes are a tad overpriced compared to other quality Italian places in the area. And oh...their bar makes a terrific house gin and tonic!

Clove and Hoof: This combination restaurant/butcher shop makes THE best sandwiches in the city, even a notch or two higher than Stag's used to make. Nothing but high quality and freshest ingredients, and such attention to detail for a sandwich shop. Make sure you also save some room for their tasty hand cut beef tallow fries, and if you have the time then also enjoy watching them chop up a dead cow :) More recently they've started to serve dinner entrees, but I haven't had the opportunity to try them out yet.

Hina Yakitori: This cool yakitori joint opened up several months ago and the chefs came from Ippuku, one of my favorite places in all the Bay Area. So, as you might expect the quality is on par with that of Ippuku's, though the interior and ambiance don't have that same authentic Japanese feel. However, definitely the place to go if you're not up for the trek into downtown Berkeley and/or want to save a few bucks.

Sweet Belly: Belly Uptown's dessert spinoff recently took over the space of this incredibly shitty Chinese takeout place which surprisingly lasted for over a decade. Terrific made-to-order mini-donuts in 6 flavors that you can buy by the dozen or half dozen. Also some great soft serve ice cream in several flavors and your choice of toppings. Super delish...Alice and her team have another winner!

Itani Ramen: Oh, how I looked forward to the opening of this place, as it owned by Kyle Itani, co-owner of Hopscotch and one of my favorite restaurants in town. However, it's been really hit and miss during the course of my 8 or so visits there.  The first few times were very mediocre experiences as the ramen preparation was very inconsistent - sometimes the broth was not hot or flavorful enough, or the noodles were overcooked, or the chasu pork was not sliced correctly. However, my last couple of visits were a lot better, and I'm hoping this is a good sign for them going forward. Definitely can't compare to Ramen Shop, but on the other hand it's conveniently located, easy to get into and open late 7 days a week.

Happy eating!

Windows 7 - Nothing to Write Home About

A few of my co-workers had been playing around with Windows 7 for the past few months, so I finally bit the bullet myself and upgraded one of my machines to the RTM code, specifically the 32-bit Ultimate version. Before the install I had to make the always difficult choice of performing a fresh install or upgrading from my current OS (Vista Ultimate). I decided on the latter, because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to bother with figuring out all the apps that needed to be re-installed, configuring them correct post-install, etc. This actually turned out to be a mistake, which I will talk more about in a second. I was also disappointed to discover that there was no option to upgrade directly to the 64-bit version of Windows 7 from my 32-bit Vista, although I guess in putting on my techie hat and thinking about this more I have to admit it would be a difficult process for Microsoft to pull off.

The actual upgrade process itself is easily the most straightforward and hassle-free upgrade that Microsoft has ever come up with for any of its operating systems, so congratulations are in order here. Once the upgrade begins you're asked just a minimal amount of questions and once the process gets going it's pretty much hands-off until it completes. One of the really nice things it does right at the beginning of the process is take inventory of all your applications and tells you which ones it thinks has known issues and what the workarounds might be, along with other warnings. For example, even though iTunes is compatible with Windows 7 it reminded me that I should deauthorize my machine from iTunes before the upgrade and reauthorize it afterwards. I've often forgotten to do this, so that was a great reminder!

Anyway, I began the upgrade around 11pm and things were chugging along pretty well, but at around midnight or so I hit upon what I thought was a major snag. The upgrade was in the final step, which was titled something like "transferring program files and settings". The progress bar had gotten "stuck" at 42%, and didn't move at all for the next hour and a half or so, though you could still hear constant disk activity on my machine. Feeling a bit panicked I did a bunch of Google searches on the problem and found that a number of other users had come across the same issue. Some of them decided to just abandon the process and reboot their machines...fortunately, the install process detects this and restores the prior OS properly, according to the reports I read. Others claimed that the upgrade will actually complete given enough time and patience. Since it was nearly 2am by now and I was getting sleepy, I decided to take the "hope and pray" approach and went to bed.

Fortunately, when I got up the next morning my prayers were answered and the install completed successfully - all I needed to perform was one final reboot. So now this begs the question...Is Windows 7 really worth the upgrade? I would have to say that generally speaking the answer is no. Probably the biggest benefit I've seen so far is that fact that the OS loads a fair amount quicker and generally speaking apps seem to be more responsive when compared to running under Vista. It seems like Microsoft devoted much of its efforts to streamlining the OS and making it less resource intensive. Outside of the performance improvements I think the other changes are relatively minor and are mainly UI tweaks...In fact, I can't even think of a single "must have" feature that the OS provides. Check out Engadget's Windows 7 review for more specifics on all the new features.

The other problem I ran into is that several of my applications no longer worked correctly post-upgrade. These were mainly shareware-type applications that installed their own device drivers, and for the most part all it took was a simple uninstall/reinstall for the app to begin working correctly again. Some apps require being run in "compatibility mode" in order to work correctly, and Windows 7 provides a nice wizard to help you select which mode to run in. I only have one application, Acronis TruImage, that doesn't run 100% correctly.

In conclusion, here are my recommendations for those of you considering the upgrade:

• If you are already running Vista and are happy with its performance, stick with it unless you just need to have the latest and greatest.
• If you're stuck on XP and haven't upgraded to Vista because of its stiff hardware requirements and/or were concerned about performance, Windows 7 might be the ticket here.
• If you do decided to upgrade, do so by performing a fresh install. Even though you'll have to hassle with reinstalling your applications, I think at the end of the day it will be less time consuming for you.
  

Oh Slingbox, How I Love Thee

I've got to say that my Slingbox has turned out to be one of the most useful gadgets I've picked up over the past several years. By now most of you know what a Slingox is - basically it's a small device that sits between your television and one or more video devices, typically a Tivo or some sort of DVR. Using a small piece of software (SlingPlayer) that you load onto your PC, Mac or Smartphone you are able to view video content located in your home (or wherever you have your Slingbox device located) from anywhere on the internet. I've traveled quite a bit these past few years, much of it internationally, and I can't count the number of times I've watched my favorite TV shows from thousands of miles away while traveling in Europe or Asia. I happen to be a fanatic of The Sopranos, but it just so happens that I was in Shanghai during the much discussed the series finale. I just had to watch the episode while it was showing "live" in the States. No problem...just fired up the SlingPlayer software at 9am in Shanghai and watched it along with everyone else. And as I write this posting I am sitting here up in Lake Tahoe watching my favorite sporting event of the year, the Tour de France, using the SlingPlayer since I have limited television access from up here...very cool!

Surprisingly, though, what I found to be even more useful than accessing my video content remotely was accessing the content while at home. I do most of my work from home, and before my Slingbox I used to frequently turn on the TV and tune into CNN or one of the other news channels while working so that I could listen in on the news of the day. But now with Slingbox I have no need to turn the TV on at all. Instead I just keep a small Slingplayer window open on my PC during the day so I can monitor the latest news while I work. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I actually turned on the TV in my bedroom. So, in my case the Slingbox can actually take the place of one of my TV's, and I'm sure if there was a way to calculate it you can even quantify the savings in my electric bill by not having to turn the TV on at all.

I bet the makers of Slingox never realized its potential for being a green solution :-)

My Quickie Review of the T-Mobile Dash

I recently decided to give the T-Mobile Dash a trial run, as I've been a devoted Blackberry users for the past 8 years but have been dying to try one of the new Windows Mobile devices. Prior to the Dash I was using a Blackberry 8700, a device which had worked really well for me and which I have no major issues with. Most of my feedback on the Dash is based on comparisons with my trusty 8700.

To make a long story short, I ended up returning the Dash after one week, as I found it to be severely limiting in certain key areas, despite some of the great features of Windows Mobile. Some of the highlights/lowlights were:

• The unit itself was very, very nice, and its form factor (from a phone perspective) was far better than any Blackberry I've ever used that had a full keyboard. Nice rubberized back and sides, and rounded edges at all the right places. Although I never dropped the device, it felt very sturdy and could probably survive a fair amount of abuse.
• The screen was crisp and very bright, and was even viewable under direct sunlight. However, it's still not quite as bright as the 8700's screen.
• The plethora of available Windows Mobile software is staggering, especially when compared to the Blackberry Lots of great utilities and programs written by individuals as well as ISV's. I installed the Skype beta for WM Smartphone and it worked quite well while connected to a T-Mobile Hotspot. And the Slingplayer for WM is perhaps the single coolest application I've seen for a WM device. Practically speaking, though, I wonder how much I'd really use it on a day-to-day basis versus just as a way to show off to my friends :-)
• The built-in wi-fi generally worked well, both when connected to my home network as well as when I used T-Mobile HotSpot. I did encounter a strange problem, though, in that every once in awhle the wi-fi just stopped working as I was browsing around sites. I played around with some of the wi-fi power mode settings, and found out that if I switched the power mode from "auto" to "best performance" that the problem went away. Looks like this might be some type of WM bug
• The built-in IE browser does a much better job of rendering standard web pages than the Blackberry, and over wi-fi does this fairly quickly as well.
• Setting up email access via POP (I'm not able to setup direct push) was fairly straightforward, although T-Mobile makes this a bit confusing too. You can setup POP accounts through WM one by one, but T-Mobile also makes available something they call "My Email" which is a way to centrally manage all your POP accounts through its web-based portal. They say nothing about why you would do this vs. settting up individual POP accounts, and so it left me scratching my head a bit. One advantage of using the My Email service is that when new messages arrive at your POP account that this will automatically trigger a background SMS message to your WM device, and then your device will use this trigger to download the actual message. In theory I suppose this makes My Email a quasi-push type technology, but having setup email both ways I couldn't really tell if this method utlimately delivered messages to me any faster than setting up the POP account to automatically retrieve messages every 15 mins (the shortest frequency allowed by WM).
• I ran into a strange problem midway through the week. WM has a "messaging" screen which lists all of your messaging accounts - SMS, MMS, POP, etc. For some inexplicable reason WM deleted all but one of my accounts from this screen, making email and messaging totally unusable. The messaging accounts were still active, though. I could see myself receiving new SMS messages, but I has absolutely no way to view any of them because of this problem. When I contacted T-Mobile technical support the only thing they could suggest was to wipe my device clean and start fresh again with the factory defaults. Later, when I returned the device, the salesperson who sold it to me said that he's heard of other users also experiencing this problem. This is a major bug that needs to be fixed!
• I found no way to selectively filter messages based on subject, sender, etc. With my 8700 I could logon to the T-Mobile site and apply filtering rules for each POP email account, but no similar function seems to exist when using WM and the Dash.
• I fully expected the Dash to provide much better handling and UI for basic PIM stuff - messaging, calendar, contacts, etc. However, I did not find this to be true at all. Calendar views were extremely limited and inferior to what BB provides (which I also consider to be mediocre), contact management was also a disappointment, and messaging lacked some very basic functions such as the ability to select multiple messages for a delete operation.
• Profile management in WM just plain sucks. Though they allow you to modify any of the existing profiles, they do not allow you to create your own. I use the "phone only" profile on my 8700 quite a bit, but no such equivalent exists on the Dash. The other thing that annoys me is that the alarm sound for the built-in alarm clock is not independent but is tied to the currently active profile. So, if you happen to be using the "silent" profile you'll never hear the alarm go off.
• Bluetooth seems to work fairly well, and I was succefully able to pair the Dash with a couple of different BT headsets as well as with my car. For the latter, however, it would not send signal strenght information to the car, which my 8700 could do and which I found to be quite handy since I could quickly view the car's on-screen display to check signal strength vs. having to look at the device.
• The Dash seemed to lose EDGE connectivity periodically, and the only way I seemed to be able to get it back was to power off/power on the unit. This behavior is similar to problems I had a couple of years back with my old BB 7100T.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed with the Dash and decided to return it. Unless you really need to use a lot of 3rd-party apps or some of its other features (e.g. built-in camera with the worst UI known to mankind) you're better off sticking with your Blackberry.