In keeping with my tradition of posting photos a week or more after I take them, I now present the photos for the June 11 Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour.

This was the second Big Onion tour I’ve attended. It was was actually more a historical tour of the Lower East Side with various ethnic snacks thrown in at appropriate locations. I recommend it if you like history and snacks.

The evolution of the Lower East Side is very interesting. Over time many areas have had different ethnic groups take hold, evolve, and ultimately move onward. As such buildings such as the Delancy Church (site translated by Google from Spanish to English) and the Eldridge Street Synagogue are a showcase of a variety of different influences. The Eldridge Street Synagogue is peacefully and productively shared by different ethnic groups. In one of the pictures you can see a Jewish Gentleman sharing a table with some Asian folks. Several groups were interacting and presenting to visitors.

More on the inevitable migration of PC software to the Web from mainstream sources:

WSJ article on the Gates Transition, Q&A with Gates, Ozzie, Mundie

And from a mix of sources:

Tons of items on the Gates transition (old stuff from Friday)

Putt’s Law

“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”

(Thanks to Signal vs. Noise for the reference.)

I’m 34 today. 34 seems like a very adult age.

It’s been a good day. I had brunch with Amy and Dave, kicked around with Carlin a bit, and now I’m hanging out at Starbucks. (I’m happy to say I’m typing on my PowerBook, which has a new, bigger, and faster hard drive). I’m going to hang out with Audra later, and tomorrow I’m going to hit a Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour. All in all not a bad weekend.

I suppose I’ll get used to being 34.

…apparently a lot of people have experienced a PowerBook hard disk failure, many of them in the same amount of time (18 months to two years).

After last night’s rant on computer problems I got into the “limited test” of Google Spreadsheets. I’m already impressed.

I just learned I’m a pretty lightweight spreadsheet user. Google’s functionality is pretty basic, but it does most of what I need from a spreadsheet. It’s fast and easy to use.

I shared a spreadsheet with Alan and we were able to edit it together and communicate via Gmail Talk. Very slick. This is encouraging.

I promise I didn’t see this article on Google Spreadsheet before I wrote the rant this evening.

This is the second post in an as-yet-untitled series. I’m thinking of titling the series either “Tales of Petty Angst” or “Letting the Little Things Win”. (The first post in this series was “Who steals an Umbrella?“)

Today’s woeful tale is of my semi-beloved PowerBook, which fully let me down tonight when its hard disk went south. It now sounds like a coffee grinder. I’m in the process of wasting the next few hours of my life installing Mac OS X Tiger on my portable FireWire drive so I can boot the PowerBook and then (hopefully) grab my data off the soon-to-permanently-expire disk.

After all this I’ll have the privilege of blowing a couple hundred dollars on a new startup disk. Some additional dough will be required to have it installed, of course, because I checked into the installation process and I’m not going near it.

All of which reminds me how hot the thing has been running lately. Has it always run this hot? I don’t remember. Apparently, though, we’re all supposed to accept that laptop computers run hot. (Actually, we’re supposed to call them notebook computers now–we don’t call them laptops precisely because we don’t want to encourage people to scorch their laps). We might even consider being happy about this; it’s a small price to pay for faster and faster processors, right?

When I got my first Mac in 1993 I was firmly in love with computers. (Or Macs, at least.) This unconditional love evolved into a love-hate relationship following my foray into Windows use in the latter part of the ’90’s. (I gave up on the Mac for several years when it seemed like the old Mac OS would never be replaced. OS X brought me back a few years ago.)

As I experienced continual frustration with my computers I found myself more and more wanting to offload the processing complexity and software to the network. For a while this seemed imminent, but then the tech crash happened. Nirvana didn’t seem so near any more and I got tired of stressing about computers. The relative stability of Windows 2000 and XP also lulled me.

I got plain sick of Windows after a while and then started having feelings for Macs again when OS X matured a bit. I like Macs more than Windows again, but ultimately both of them disappoint me in the same ways.

I just don’t have the patience for all the overhead any more. Years ago I would have known my Mac inside out; tonight I had to reference a book to figure out how to boot my PowerBook from the install DVD. It used to be I would have spent an afternoon searching out software updates; now I get annoyed when the computer automatically prompts me to install them. At this point I have better things to do with my life than spend a bunch of time on the care and feeding of my computer. It should just work when I need it.

A lot of the time I don’t need even half the power of my computer. I expect most folks don’t. I love the promise of my computer, but I hate the reality of living with it.  

Will hosted applications that “outsource” the complexity to Web companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft fix all this? They’ve been doing this for a while on things like email and calendaring, of course. The next generation services are getting nearer and nearer. Will these services make our software and hardware-heavy Macs and PCs unnecessary? I don’t know, but I do know I’m ready for something simpler.

Seriously, who the hell steals an umbrella?

I parked my umbrella in a provided “umbrella bucket” while dining last night at Gabriela’s. When I returned to pick it up it was gone.

It was a tiny Totes umbrella, so I highly doubt someone mistook mine for theirs.

Gabriela’s isn’t a high end restaurant, per se, but it’s a pretty nice place. Just another reminder that class has nothing to do with how much money you have or where you eat.

Amy generously donated hers and she shared Dave’s umbrella with him, so I got home dry. Angry, but dry.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
  - Oscar Wilde