Yesterday we went to a new IKEA in Brooklyn, for the 2nd time — we wanted to get a couple of things for our apartment, but as always most were out of stock.

Either way, by the time we were passing the restaurant for the 5th time or so I couldn’t resist my hunger anymore. We went in and got ourselves one set of meatballs and one set of chicken tenders.

For about $5 each we had a decent dinner, which even seemed delicious at the time. However I don’t think we’ll go there any time soon again. Cheap food is cheap food after all.

1

Alena says:
August 18, 2008 @ 22:58

I also really like Ikea’s jams. This time we bought lingonberry, blueberry and cloudberry preserves, and last time — 3 jars of gooseberry preserves (2 of them are gone already).

Funny thing — when I was little, I read about sweet yellow cloudberry (морошка) in some children’s book (can’t remember the title now). I always wanted to try it — this berry clouded my imagination with its wonderful and unknown flavor. And now I finally got an opportunity to taste it (even if in the processed form). My verdict — nice, but not exactly what I expected.

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I still have a lot of development to do to finish this app up, but here’s a short update on progress.

The check creation (list display + price entering) screens are ready, so is the screen to set up tip and tax values with persistent data storage. The split itself is the last thing that needs implementation, but it’s probably going to be the easiest step now.

On Saturday we gave it a real life test on entering information only to find out that the original idea was flawed. Read more…

1

ufly says:
August 13, 2008 @ 15:56

Great, dude! So when is next real life testing?

2

Eldar says:
August 13, 2008 @ 17:44

Hehe sounds like a good little app, too bad that majority of waiters/waitresses we encountered are so bad at math that people have to come out with such utilities.

3

Daniel says:
August 13, 2008 @ 17:51

Yeah, it’s impossible to get them to do the math for you. And it becomes even more complicated if people shared an appetizer or something.

Strangely enough when we were in Canada waiters would ALWAYS ask if we want to have the check split or we want a single check.

4

Daniel says:
August 13, 2008 @ 17:51

Oh yeah, and the next test probably will be this Saturday and hopefully with a fully working version already.

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We have the weirdest vending machine in our office. That’s what I call a good idea and a horrible execution.

It runs on nothing else than Linux. It’s able to read your finger print and based on that know how much money you have on your account and if it can dispense drinks for you or if it needs to recharge your credit card. And if something gets stuck while dispensing it generally can sense it and give you an option to select something else or try to drop the item again. Read more…

1

ufly says:
August 12, 2008 @ 12:30

Вот во что может превратиться Линукс в неумелых руках разработчика

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Yesterday we went to our local Best Buy and bought¹ a whole bunch of mice. I wanted something for my Mac, since some development tasks with a touch pad are much harder to perform than they should be. A natural choice was Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse — Apple design and bluetooth technology in one package. So far I like it.

Another one was for Alena’s office. Apparently they still use non-laser, non-optical mice at her company, and since she spends all day holding that thing in hand it makes sense to get something nice, comfortable and wireless. We went with Logitech MX™ Revolution. It feels good in hand, has additional buttons to speed up certain tasks and comes with a charger — she doesn’t need to worry about replacing batteries.

Last night we watched a translation of 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremony which took place earlier that day (08/08/08) in Beijing. I was REALLY impressed with artistic ideas, their implementation, and the sheer scale of the whole thing. Around 15,000!!! performers participated in the show. There is a good article in The New York Times on the subject.

I enjoyed feeling national pride that permeated different elements of the ceremony, I was amazed by how synchronized movements of so many people were! I also really liked how the last torch-carrier was “running” in the air to light up the grand Olympic torch. Undoubtedly Zhang Yimou did a superb job orchestrating the ceremony.

Well, this past weekend we finally decided to do something that we haven’t gotten to in over a year that we’ve been living here — add some shelves to our office closet.

The thing is that the guy we bought the place from mean for this room to be a bedroom I guess, and he made the closet for hanging clothes. We, instead, piled up a bunch of our photo and computer bags in there, and then more then half of that space was wasted, because you can’t store anything on top of the bags.

We carefully measured the size of the shelves that we would need and went to a local hardware store — Doody Home Center. Now this place might not be as big as Home Depot or Lowes, but it’s by far the best hardware store I’ve been to. This wasn’t the first time experience either. Basically we just asked a guy working there where we could find the boards for the shelves. Not only did he help us find the boards, he cut them for us precisely to the right size. Go get someone to do that at Home Depot.

Went home, drilled some holes, installed the pins, the shelves, attached the moldings, done! Came out rather nice.

Last week was Daniel’s mom birthday. She cooked a lot of yummy stuff which included old time favorites like funchoza. I humbly participated by adding mango salad and herring appetizer to the table.

I found the mango salad recipe on Sweetlady’s blog. My salad looks a bit different than hers, but it still was pretty good and refreshing.

Ingredients:

• 2 medium cucumbers
• 1 mango
• 1 avocado
• 2-3 tablespoons of oil
• Juice from 1/2 lime
• Red pepper flakes
• Salt

1

SweetLady says:
August 5, 2008 @ 11:40

Рада, что попробовала салатик, мне он очень понравился, надо бы его опять повторить. А селедка с киви интересное сочетание, не очень могу представить как это на вкус… Попробую как-нибудь

2

Alena says:
August 6, 2008 @ 06:07

Селедка с киви неплохо — гости даже не сразу поняли что это такое. Но! только если тебе нравится селедка. Мужу это блюдо, например, как-то не очень пошло.

3

Marina says:
August 6, 2008 @ 12:20

tasty dish,thanks!

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