The latest revision of Ubuntu, 7.10 aka ‘Gutsy Gibbon’, came out this week. I updated my home computer last night and am very pleased: Flash and Java are now included, both of which used to be huge hurdles. Also included in the new distro is Compiz Fusion which gives a slightly new aesthetic, 3-D effects, and some advanced desktop features (this Fusion demo will blow your mind!). Fusion requires a newer video card, but it plays very nice with older hardware. Most exciting, IMO, about Gutsy Gibbon is that you can print. Finally. It’s the simple things in life that make me happy, and successfully printing a page is a joyous event that has been absent in my previous experiences with Ubuntu.

Check out Brian DeLancy’s history and review of the new Ubuntu at O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com

The Apple Blog has a nice review of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). TAB covers the big and little, good and bad changes to Apple’s operating system. I’m particularly excited for the new Finder, which looks very iTunes-esque and even includes Cover Flow. Leopard ships October 26, ZingIT review to follow shortly thereafter. Get excited.

UPDATE: Paul Thurrot (yeah, the Windows guy) has a pretty sweet collection of screenshots from his recent upgrade to Leopard.

New York. Restaurants. Wow. Extremely well fed. Not enough time.

db Bistro Moderne Friday Night
Modern French-American bistro (duh)
Our ‘fanciest’ for the weekend - changed into nice shirts on the street after having been walking for a while.
What we had: The db Burger - stuffed with short ribs, foie gras, and black truffle, which is their trademark dish. Several of us had cocktails, great Old Fashioned. Other dishes included bacon wrapped salmon with roasted figs. Had some Madeira for dessert.

Otto Saturday Lunch
Mario Batali’s pizzeria
Billie’s favorite of the weekend. Most tables had young children. Lots of space.
What we had: Pizza Lardo (wow, texture), Pizza Vongole (mountain of clams, in the shells, atop the pizza), Pizza Quattro Stagioni, Spaghetti alla Carbonara. Alphonso Olives (purple). Good service.

LAN Saturday Dinner
Japanese Fusion
What we had: Sushi. Inventive. Fresh. Actually got Toro. They had a woman sushi chef! We were obviously the last people on the priority list for service, but they did a good job. Elph had a glass of Tokaj that he’d read about but never tried. Yummy desserts.

Shake Shack Saturday Afternoon
Union Square’s burger and shake joint in Madison Park
Billie stood in line for an hour and 40 minutes, waited another 20 minutes for food.
What she had: cheeseburger, rootbeer float

Union Square Cafe Sunday Brunch
Our second annual Sunday brunch at USC.
Our server Basha was great! They treated us very well. Love the service there!
What we had: raw oysters and champagne, grilled fillet mignon of tuna with wasabi mashed potatoes, black bean soup with Sherry, calamari, gnocci, USC french toast - they brought us several complimentary desserts. Had a nice cup of Sencha. We had a great window seat.

Little Giant Sunday Dinner
Friends of Zing, nice ambiance, music and light were great, it was getting cool and damp outside but it was warm inside, service was a little gruff
What we had: burrata, swine of the week - pork chops, egg cream with Stoli vanilla, short ribs, ginger mojito, cote du rhone (they had no Cab or Syrah). JoeG drank a Bee’s Knees - honey infused vodka, splash of ginger ale, twist.

More pics added to the NYC 2007 photo album.

As some of you know I have been in search of the perfect syncing tool for a while now. I’ve tried many and none are perfect. In fact, many of them screw up my data in creative ways. Plaxo may be not be an exception, it’s too early to tell, but it’s worth noting here because of a couple of properties. One it is a nicely designed web app. Two it integrates very nicely with iCal.app and Addressbook.app on my Mac. Though I have been too afraid to touch the iCal sync yet. Third, and the most interesting, it does a bit of social networking moves like LinkedIn and Jaiku.

What am I looking for? I would like to keep my Entourage and Mac apps in sync. That’s done nicely through Sync Services which Entourage integrates with. But, I also want to post my calendar to Google’s Calendar for others that use that system. That’s where it get’s wonky.

More on Plaxo later. Check the comments.

We have a lovely new first flush darjeeling on the shelves from Rohini Estates and I’ve been drinking it for about a week now. I’ve been brewing it in a 16 oz pot with about two level teaspoons of tea with water at about 185 F for 5 minutes on the first steep and 4 minutes on the second steep.

The tea leaves are in pieces about the length of a staple and vary widely in color from whitish green to black and are lightly twisted.

Rohini is at an elevation of between 2500 and 5000 feet and is a relatively newly restored plantation with most of the plantings done since 1996.

The tew brews up a light golden brown color with a lightly fruity/floral aroma and a light clean taste with very low tannins and a nice lingering soft flavor.

I don’t take any pleasure in writing negative reviews. I’ve been using the iPhone for two weeks now, replacing my Treo 700, and I have discovered more things that I don’t like than those that I do. I’ll share some of them with you.

The iPhone has a lovely interface for Contacts, the scrolling rubber band feel is great. However, there is no way to search. On my Treo I could enter a partial bit of info, like an area code, and have it search everything in Contacts. Or some snippet of text I knew was in the Notes field. The only way to access my over 1000 Contacts is by scrolling a list of either All or a Group from my Addressbook. This is a frustrating limitation after having the ability to search on anything. My memory is not good enough to remember all the info in my Contacts by firstname or lastname.

The Calendar is another place where I feel the other side of the blade - beautiful, simple, clean interface - no customization, no view preferences, no modification. (more…)

The movie. I’m not a big Walt Disney fan so I had low expectations. I had heard good things about the movie from friends but honestly I don’t trust my friends taste in movies to match my own.

There’s a distinct lack of technology present in Ratatouille.

I was laughing by 10 minutes in and continued to enjoy the movie all the way through to the sickly sweet ending. It’s great. The references to food, food prep, and the back of house of restaurants was fun in a strange way - it was like our little arcane world of food service was being opened up for everyone to see.

If you are in the food service or a foodie, go see it.

Ari hooked us up with some new Japanese green teas from Rishi (thanks, Ari!). Yesterday we brewed up the Kukicha, and it was delicious! Tasting notes coming soon, in the meantime enjoy the copy:

“Kuki” means twin in Japanese, and kukicha is one of the most popular types of green tea. Twigs from green tea contain polysaccharides that lend a sweet flavor and smooth mouthfeel to our blend. Rishi’s unique kukicha blend is infused with matcha which is prized for its high content of antioxidant polyphenols and the amino acid L-theanine, a natural anti-stress agent and nervous system relaxant found in tea.

A blend of deep steamed first flush fukamushi sencha tea leaves and twigs from he distinctly flavored Yabukita tea bushes of the Makinohara lowlands. Infused with matcha, this unique blend has a bright emerald infusion with a complex floral aroma, creamy body and sweet flavor.

As my workmates now know, I’m not a big fan of receiving thank-you cards. On first hit it’s nice but then I feel obligated to hold on to them, to display them, to not throw them away… Argh. On the other hand, my workmates seem to love receiving them. Sigh.

So I made up some thank-you cards for the IT office to use. I came in on a Saturday and wandered around taking a gob of photos of things in and around the office that had some IT’ness to them. I then chose 5 of them and uploaded them to Shutterfly and ordered the Set of 12 Note Cards for $7.99 (now $9.99). I liked the fact that I could order matte or glossy and so I was able to choose the finish to match the photo but I was disappointed that I couldn’t add any text to the card like you can with the larger cards. I would have liked to add a caption for the photo on the inside. The quality of the product was stunning - much nicer than I expected. I then took my 5 orders and shuffled them together and distributed them to the 5 of us in IT.

Having the cards on my desk makes me think of opportunities to thank people, which is a good thing. I also bought some Pilot Petit1 fountain pens from JetPens for everyone to make it fun to write.

This week Mo wrote us with an excellent product review of a screen cleaner he tested on his MacBook. Here’s what he had to say:

From: Mo Frechette
To: IT Support
Subject: crappy wipes
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:44:38

make screen all streaky! no buy!

Solid work, Mo. Thanks!