WombatNation

The top Presidential mullet of all time has to be the thing that appears to be attacking the back of James K. Polk’s neck. Clearly a trendsetter, Polk made the move for the mullet about 150 years before it became the hot style of the 1970’s. Polk’s many other amazing feats included, …, uh, being elected President, I guess. Maybe he did other amazing stuff that rivals the invention of the mullet, but I was apparently absent from school the day they must have checked Polk off the list.

I discovered the majesty that was Polk’s stunning, keratinous mop while browsing through the beauties at Rate My Mullet. While Rate My Mullet has a nice array of mullets, my favorite site for juicy mullets is still the classic Mullets Galore.

Like most technical specialties, the speech applications industry has a large number of official standards. Fortunately, many of these standards are widely implemented. The implementations aren’t perfectly consistent, of course, but they’re close enough that at Voxify we’ve been able to get our speech applications platform to run on different VoiceXML browsers and ASR and TTS engines with relative ease.

Deborah Dahl recently wrote an article on speech standards and specifications for Speech Technology magazine that does an excellent job of organizing and describing the relevant standards. Deborah has been very active in the speech industry, especially in the multimodal interaction area. She’s currently the chair of the W3C’s Multimodal Interaction Working Group, in which my friend and former colleague, Wu Chou, is a key participant.

It’s not exactly Schoolhouse Rock, okay, it’s not remotely as snappy as Conjunction Junction, but there’s something you gotta like about the Singing Physics Professor. Listen to his off key, falsetto, baritone voice accompanied by baritone ukele in an interview on NPR.org. Many more songs are available at his website.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t stop myself from clapping along to the Kronecker Delta Function Song. Maybe if this site had been available when I was in college, I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time studying droll books on quantum mechanics.

Downtown Oakland is really turning into a vibrant area with great restaurants and bars. It’s always had a couple good restaurants and bars, as well as the Paramount Theater, but lately it seems like a new, great place has opened everytime I go down there.

Last night, we discovered the Crown Wok Restaurant. It recently appeared on the same block as Mexican, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants. Two good signs - 1) most of the patrons were Asian, and 2) the tanks holding the live fish and crabs were clean. We ended up having potstickers, the Hong Kong style crispy soy sauce chicken, and the salt and pepper prawns. The potstickers were very good and the chicken was fantastic. It was roasted perfectly, with a slightly sweet soy coating on the skin.

The salt and pepper prawns were pretty good, though slightly over cooked. Also, they didn’t bring us a bowl of warm tea and lemon to clean our hands at the end. They did bring us a second set of clean plates halfway through the meal, but I always enjoy the ritual hand soaking at the end of our meals at Yuet Lee.

My cookie had a groovy, 70’s-style fortune:

“Change is happening in your life, so go with the flow.”

After dinner, we walked over to Pacific Coast Brewing for beer (Arrogant Bastard ale, yum), cider, and free WiFi. We had originally planned to eat at Pacific Coast, but they’re still renovating their kitchen. Their menu has always been limited due to their tiny kitchen. It’s even more limited, now, since the menu are restricted to what they can grill on their patio. Since the glass and plate washing area is also under construction, everything is served in plastic glasses and on plastic plates. It’s certainly not ideal, but I don’t mind supporting them while they improve the place.

In addition to the bonus of offering free WiFi, Pacific Coast has a great collection of framed magazine covers in the men’s bathroom. One timely cover was an issue of Sports Illustrated with Jose Canseco. Because of the way he is turned as he’s swinging his baseball bat, it looks like he has a 26 inch waist and a 46 inch chest. Even if you ignore the illusion, he does have some unnaturally burly looking forearms and shoulders. If he hadn’t already admitted he used steroids, that photo would certainly suggest it. Other choice covers include some San Francisco 49ers program guides and Cal-Stanford Big Game program guides going back to the 1960’s. One special treat was something I had never seen before - a copy of the Oakland Stompers Grapevine. The Stompers were a soccer team that played in the NASL for all of one year, 1978.

After we left Pacific Coast, we spotted a movie being filmed on Washington Street. I took a photo with my Treo, but the bright lights for filming, surrounded by the dark evening, were sort of a worst case scenario for the Treo 600’s already mediocre camera. The actress was a young Indian woman dressed in what appeared to be a traditional sari, but what do I know. After they wrapped the shooting, several other Indians came up to have their photos taken with her.

Finally, we drove a relatively short, but a bit too far to walk with my somewhat heavy laptop, distance to Soizic for dessert (pecan tart with white pepper ice cream and apple-strawberry fruit crisp). Soizic is a great bistro and is excellent for lunch and dinner. They also have a well balanced wine list.

Crown Wok
1019 Clay St. at 11th
Oakland
(510) 625-1005
Open 7 days 11 am - 10 pm

Pacific Coast Brewing
906 Washington St. between 9th and 10th
Oakland
(510) 836-2739

Soizic
3rd & Broadway near Jack London  Square
Oakland
(510) 251-8100

[via Boing Boing RIP: Judy Scott, amazing sculptor with Downs’ Syndrome.

Sadly, Judith Scott has apparently passed away recently. She was a very talented sculptor who worked on her art at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland. Judith wrapped yarn and fabric around ordinary objects to create large, mysteriously shaped creations. Like many of the works we have bought at the Creative Growth Art Center, Judith’s sculptures reflected the intense, obsessive hand and mind of the artist.

More about Judith at :

After nine weeks at the Audi dealership, my TT has finally come home. On January 5, I dropped off my car at the dealership because the check engine light was staying on , the car was running rough, and at the very end, the engine wouldn’t start at all. The diagnosis - mice had eaten through a lare number of critical wires in the engine compartment.

Each week I would learn about new parts that had been discovered to have been gnawed through by the mice (or perhaps a single, very industrious, mouse). Each week I was told that it would be at least one more week before I got my car back. Even more time was added as they waited for parts to be shipped from Germany.

Fortunately, the comprehensive part of my insurance covered the cost. I say fortunately, because the final bill was for just over $18,000!! 70 different parts were replaced. If you count multiple numbers of the same part, a grand total of 114 parts were placed. The cost of the parts was about $8,200 and the labor came to a little over $9,000. The rest was tax.

I wouldn’t have believed the scope of the problem could have been that massive if it hadn’t been for the fact that representatives from my insurance company made several visits to the dealership while my car was under the knife, inspecting the damage and approving the proposed work.

For the last two months, I’ve had six mouse traps arrayed throughout my garage. Though I would have been happier if I had caught at least one mouse, there’s certainly no shortage of mice in the world to replace any that I might have caught. This evening, I securely boarded over the last opening where I think a mouse could have gotten into the garage. Very soon, I will have the garage door replaced and I will make sure there are no gaps around the edges or grates that a mouse could slip through.

Mmmm, toasted French oak barrels. A little bit woody on the finish and a tad fibrous, but still … No, we didn’t taste the barrels at the Russian River Wine Road Barrel Tasting, but we did taste an exceedingly large number of delicious wines that were still in the barrels. At David Coffaro’s winery, the wines were actually in mylar bags in boxes, but those samples had very recently come from barrels (maybe I had had too much to drink at that point, as the wine was being siphoned directly from barrel, and the boxes merely held the spigots). Speaking of Coffaro’s, there’s nothing like drinking their fine Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, late harvest Sauvignon Blanc, Carignan, Terre Melange, and many other fine varietals and blends while watching Woodstock on a huge screen in the barrel room. Another cool thing about Coffaro is that he’s a blogger.

On Saturday, we stopped at eight wineries - Lake Sonoma Winery, David Coffaro, de Lorimier, Murphy-Goode, Trentadue, Stryker Sonoma, Foppiano (Lou autographed a bottle for me), and Christopher Creek. On Sunday, we also made stops at Amphora and Chateau Souverain. When all was said and done, I had purchased just under four cases of wine. Most of it was already bottled, except for the futures I purchased from Coffaro.

Some of my favorites from the weekend were the Stryker Sonoma 2002 Dry Creek Zinfandel, Coffaro 2004 Estate Cuvee, Amphora 2003 Zinfandel, and the Chateau Souverain 2002 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

I highly recommend attending a barrel tasting event like this one. You get to taste a large number of wines, snack on yummy bits of food (not just cheese and crackers or bread), meet lots of interesting people, learn a lot about how wines develop in the bottle, and get great discounts. I do at least 75% of my annual wine purchases at this event, with a fair number of these bottles ending up as gifts.

Saturday evening, we also made it over to the Sonoma County Fairgrounds for the Crab & Fennel Fest. While, I’m not really a big fan of fennel, it did make for a nice accompaniment to the crab in small volumes. There was nothing small about the volume of crab I consumed, though. This photo shows maybe half of the remains from the Dungeness crabs that I devoured that evening.

Thanks to my brother, who always has his finger on the pulse of amusing things drifting across the internet, I’m able to share a link to a video of possibly the greatest moment in curling history. Or maybe not. Hell, I don’t know. I’m an American. All I know is that it’s pretty funny listening to the thrower yell at the sweepers and the the thrower and the sweepers yell at the rock. On top of that, it’s an amazing long distance bank shot. The full story and an interview with the thrower, Jennifer Jones, is on the NPR site. Good for her.

I’m a relatively recent convert to taco truck cuisine. Now that I dine at least twice a month on tasty meals obtained from taco trucks, I wish I had started eating at them long ago.

A story appeared today in the Oakland Tribune hailing some of my new, favorite dining spots. Two, in particular are El Ojo de Agua and Guadalajara. Mmmmm, carnitas and al pastor. You can find those two trucks on Fruitvale Avenue on either side of the BART tracks. I like El Ojo de Agua for the al pastor tacos and tortas and Guadalajara for the carnitas tacos. Guadalajara’s al pastor tacos are pretty good, too.

Although it hasn’t been updated in a while, TacoTrucks.net has detailed reviews of ten of the forty-eight taco trucks in Oakland. So many trucks, so little time.