Nacho Fries at Iguana Burritozilla
Known on their menu as “Nacho Fries” at the new Iguanas Burritozilla in Fremont. It has thin-cut fries, topped with oozy nacho cheese, your choice of meat (this one has carne asada of course), guacamole, and sour cream.
The carne asada at this place is pretty tasty. I’ll probably get this again if (a) I plan to work as a sherpa carrying a lock box full of Victorian dinnerware on an eighteen mile trek uphill during a snowstorm; or (b) plan to have my next meal forty-eight hours from now.
Everyone ordered these as “Carne Asada Fries” down in Southern California. San Diego taquerias served the best ones, on average. I’m a little surprised that this isn’t more popular in the Bay Area.
Topics: Culture, Restaurant Reviews | View Comments
Maiwand Market
Fremont, California has claim to the largest Afghan American population in the USA. On the corner of Fremont Boulevard and Bonde Way sits a nondescript building filled with delicious foods from the home country. Inside is a Halal butcher, who prepares the freshest lamb in the region.
Located in an otherwise “boring” Bay Area suburb, this market is renowned by the local Afghan community and beyond for their fresh-baked Barbari bread. People have been known to travel over a hundred miles to stock up on a couple of dozen loaves (which are frozen and taken out when needed). They are stacked bare on shelves and often still warm while you place them in bags yourself. It’s $2 per 3 square foot oval that’s one-inch thick. Yes, you will be given a quizzical look if you order only one loaf. You’ll often run into long lines for this bread on weekends and before Muslim holidays. My wife and I were lucky enough to get introduced to this bread by our generous Afghan neighbors, who happened to knock on our door one evening with a pair of loaves and several pounds of "leftover" kabobs.
Topics: Culture, Photography | View Comments
Blog Posts and Measuring Customer Abandonment?
My quick blog entry about uninstalling Evernote on the Mac has been seeing a small spike of hits in the last few days. It has been making me think about ways to measure customer abandonment.
Topics: Design, Software Development | View Comments
My Best Photo of 2009
Lake Sabrina, just west of Bishop, California. It was a late afternoon in early October, and the next round of the season’s first snowfall had started to arrive. Inside the Chevy, there’s a couple enjoying the lake, the fall colors, and hot coffee from a Thermos.
Click here to comment on Flickr. Otherwise, you can use the Disqus comment system below.
Topics: Photography | View Comments
Uninstalling Evernote (Mac)
I’m documenting my uninstall steps for Evernote build 62233 on OS X Snow Leopard
I tried Evernote for a week. Despite the decent user experience, the system didn’t catch on, so I wanted to remove it. Turns out that it doesn’t have an uninstaller, not even a command-line uninstall script. Neither the support website nor the online documentation has any information about uninstalling.
Deleting the application itself does not remove everything. I still found right-click menus in Safari, and entries for Evernote in Growl notifications.
Thus, I’m sharing what I did to clean this up. This is what worked for me. I make no guarantees for you.
- Quit the app up in the menu bar
- Deleted the application from the Applications folder
- Rebooted
- Deleted all of the following in the order listed (and made sure Safari wasn’t running):
./Library/Internet Plug-Ins/EvernoteSafariClipperPlugin.webplugin/Contents/MacOS/EvernoteSafariClipperPlugin
./Library/Internet Plug-Ins/EvernoteSafariClipperPlugin.webplugin
./Library/Application Support/Growl/Tickets/Evernote.growlTicket
./Library/Application Support/Evernote/data/<12345>/Evernote.sql
./Library/Application Support/Evernote
Update: some dude from Evernote left a comment about one more file that needs removing. Thanks, Andrew!
Topics: OS X, Technology | View Comments
Quickie Grand Marnier French Toast
This isn’t the fancy-schmancy version with heavy cream, tons of eggs, and soaked for hours and baked in the oven. This is quick morning routine version, or the post-party 3AM version… and takes only 20 minutes to prepare, and still seems pretty darn fancy.
- About six day-old 3/4″ slices of pugliese style bread
- 1 cup whole milk
- two large eggs
- 1/4 cup Grand Marnier
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 tablespoon orange zest
Mix the liquid ingredients and orange zest together and then soak the bread pieces in a cake pan (or ziplock bag) for at least five minutes. With a preheated pan and 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 tablespoon of butter, cook the pieces on each side until brown and crispy. Top with confectioner’s sugar if you wish. Goes well with orange butter, marmalade, or maple syrup… maybe even all of the above.
Topics: Recipes | View Comments
Maybe I’m Officially Pro
IMVU Prepaid Cards, originally uploaded by Robert Otani.
I’ve been acquiring more and more DSLR photography equipment over the past year or so, and apparently getting some decent shots these days. This provides me, a new dad, the ability to take thousands and thousands of photos of my super-awesome baby girl!
I often bring my camera to work, in the event there may be something cool to photograph, thus guaranteeing that I won’t have something cool to photograph. For example, I did not have my camera when rabbit-on-his-head-guy came to town to play his guitar.
Today was different. The brilliant design people at IMVU needed some shots of our pre-paid cards, and I had my camera. There were a bunch of outtakes, and so I saved them and played with one in Photoshop. With some more polish, I think this would make a cool promotional poster to hang in a retail store.
This means that I took pictures while being paid for my time. Technically this makes me a pro, right?
(Aaaaand… don’t forget, you can purchase IMVU Prepaid Cards at your nearest Best Buy, Target, Seven-Eleven, Speedway, and Blockbuster!)
Topics: Design, Photography | View Comments
San Jose Japantown
So, it only took a decade for me to “discover” Japantown in San Jose. Yeah, it was right under my nose the whole time. If memory serves me right, over those years, I made two half-hearted attempts to find it without a map, and missed it by three blocks on both occasions.
Japantown appears to have fewer shops today than it did twenty or thirty years ago, but also has a vital core that is poised for growth. We enjoyed ramen at Kumako, which opened maybe about a year ago and is curiously the only dedicated Ramen shop in town. Shuei-do is a Japanese confection shop, remniscent of my trips to Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo home of Fugetsu-do and the gigantor Mikawaya.
The newest gem of a shop is Roy’s Station, which opened only a month ago, and is a fantastic re-use of an old thirties-era gas and service station, converted to a coffee shop. Alicia is a big fan of Shuei-do’s kinako mochi and Roy’s unsweetened tea latte. The both of us enjoyed Kumako’s Mabo Ramen.
This brings me to Mieko. She’s a coworker of mine from Japan, and remains politely confounded by my “Americanness.” She blogged about her lunch with us. We brought our DSLRs so I could share with her a few “ProTips.” Her entry just cracked me up! Translated from Japanese: she trips out about how my Japaneseness somehow does not include speaking the mother language. My relative hugeness also trips her out: I’m six feet tall and weigh well over 200 lbs. (I am lying about my weight so that her family and friends in Japan won’t faint). I think she had a good time, and was also happy to find Shuei-do, Roy’s Station and tasty ramen. Turned out that lattes and spicy ramen don’t mix well with her, so I hope she feels better. I’m not entirely sure she was satisfied with my ProTips, so I’ll have to work on improving myself in that area.
After some struggling with an online dictionary, I replied to her in Japanese.
実際、私は日本語を話すことはできません。これは非常にユーモラスです!
Roughly translated to English: “Indeed, I cannot speak Japanese. This is too funny!”
Topics: Unplugged | View Comments
Some Pasta to End the Day
It was a typical Friday at the office, with my spirits lifted higher by an afternoon visit from my wife and baby girl. I like to think I’m the main draw, but there’s also a fancy organic frozen yogurt place down the street from the office.
Later that night would be a company social, which I missed. This is because I threw myself into threatcon alpha and violated an embarassing number of traffic laws to get to my loved ones, in a disabled car, in the rain, in the middle of the highway. On the phone, the first thing I heard was our five-month old screaming. My wife calmly explained that she was “a bit freaked out” since she was stranded, and that the “smell of burning plastic” was lingering in the car…
In 2004, Nissan Motor Corp. fell from № 6 to № 11 in the J.D. Power quality survey. Five years prior to that, Nissan and French automaker Renault formed an alliance. Over two centuries ago, Americans fought a war to gain independence from England. Curiously, the French claimed victory.
A year after the Nissan-Renault alliance, Jean-Baptiste Claudine, assembly line worker № 373, fell in love with a young woman named Chloë. She was a masseusé he met in Amsterdam that spring. Smitten by her chams whilst assembling Idle Control Valve 3237731, he did not notice his cigarette butt fall into the casing. That part made its way into my wife’s 2001 Maxima.
Time for some pasta, and to share a recipe:
With a vat of lightly salted water heating, pan-fry the pork chops in olive oil; season with some sea salt and cook medium-high heat until nicely browned on both sides. Remove from the pan, and keep that tasty brown stuff; add a bit more olive oil and throw in a a bag’s worth of spinach and stir a bit. Add a splash of white wine — this will quick steam the spinach while de-glazing the lovely brown stuff off of the pan. Add some finely chopped garlic, pepper, red pepper flakes. Don’t forget to treat yourself to a glass of white wine.
Set-aside the spinach. Into the same pan, throw in that homemade tomato sauce made from my wife’s huge harvest of tomatoes last year.
The water should be boiling now. In goes the thin spaghetti; stir a tiny bit and turn the heat down just before it starts to boil again.
Oh, hey: Don’t knock powdered garlic; it’s perfect when the context is right, and this is it. Add some extra oregano and basil; maybe more black pepper. Hey, there’s some red wine saved; pour some of that in too. Reduce a bit. Drink the rest of the red wine.
The pasta should be ready and al dente, by now. Throw that into the pan, and toss with some Parmeseano; hey we also have Romano. Add to bowl. Stack the spinach. On top of all that sits the porky goodness.
That’s all…
Topics: Fiction | View Comments
Robert Otani, not “Roberto Tani”
Back around 2002, I lost the domain name robertotani.com. It was about to expire, but in the back of my mind, I guessed that the odds of losing this domain name to another “Robert Otani” was pretty low, and ended up not paying attention to it.
It turned out that a feng shui consultant in San Francisco, named “Roberto Tani” procured the domain. (Back then grace periods were not as generous). Fair enough: I dropped the ball.
After enduring nearly six years of ribbing by my friends for being a doofus, and checking every year for the domain’s expiration (Mr. Tani always renewed at the very last possible moment), I managed to get it back.
I don’t know what happened to Mr. Roberto Tani this year, though I hope he is well. I imagine that he simply forgot this time, like I did, guessing “The odds of another guy named ‘Roberto Tani’ getting this domain name is pretty low… I’ll just renew when I get back from vacation.”
(Footnote: Googling his name suggests his surname is Brazilian/Portugese or Italian, though it is also a Japanese one, like mine. He may also be Japanese-Brazilian).
Topics: WTF | View Comments