Jude is still adjusting to having Elinor alone for eight hours, sans Becca's mediating play influence.

<judith> oh man elinor just built the two block towers right next to eachother
<judith> she has the right blocks for each
<michael> ha, did she knock them over?
<judith> no, she's just yelling at them
<judith> there we go!
<judith> B B B
<judith> !
<judith> look at that
<judith> etc
<michael> haha
<judith> i think even last week she was having trouble with sizes
<judith> yeah she already knocked it down
<judith> oh man who put sugar in this girl's cheerio's
<judith> makes tower "oh look at that! i did it! i did it myself!" looks at bear chair "bear! look at that! come here bear" gets bear, pushes bear towards block towers..."look at that!" bear knocks down towers "what!? oh noooooo beeeeeaaaaar! bear push!!!!!!
<judith> bear is now upside down, and she is sitting on him
<michael> haha
<judith> i don't know if this is aspca sanctioned bear training technique

It's like a strange reversal of Legends of the Fall.

This was a pain in the ass, so perhaps I can save someone some time. Grabbed svn head of mediatomb for this.

1. Need to run autoreconf -i to generate correct configure scripts--naked autoconf or autoreconf will bail.


2. Need to have either taglib or libid3 installed from Fink/Darwinports/source.


3. If you're building against Fink or anything else that's 32-bit you're going to need to specify a 32-bit binary for building and linking.


4. Mediatomb's configure script doesn't seem to understand where Fink installs libid3 so you'll need to explicitly tell it where it is by overriding LDFLAGS; and then for some reason it doesn't link against /usr/lib, so, yeah, good times.

Thus my final configure script ended up looking like:

CXX='g++ -arch i386' CC='gcc -arch i386' LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib -L/sw/lib" ./configure --disable-taglib --enable-id3lib --with-id3lib-h=/sw/include --with-id3lib-libs=/sw/lib

No particular reason to favor libid3 over taglib, that's just the permutation I ended up using while I was figuring out what unsupported architecture from the linker meant.

Run mediatomb once and then open up ~/.mediatomb/config.xml, find <protocolInfo extend="no"/> and flip it to "yes", re-run mediatomb. Now you can either connect to the local web ui, or you can run it with, say, mediatomb -a ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music and let it churn for a while as it processes the ID3 tags on the serveral thousand MP3s you probably have. Then you should see Mediatomb show up in the XMB as a DLNA server for audio. You should be able to browse by artist, album, genre, etc. from the Audio menu. The PC Directory one will let you browse the directories but for whatever reason it doesn't list any files for me, but whatever, Audio works fine.

Yay.

Our home is sufficiently out in the woods to require a septic system. When we had it inspected before buying it, a guy came out to put a video scope down into the tank to check it out, make sure it was doing well, etc. This guy clearly loved his job, especially the part where he thought he was supposed to be doing a stand-up act. Turns out this isn't really specific to this one guy.

<judith> so looking up septic company's in the phone book, i have come to the conclusion that schtick is not the exception but the rule, cases in point:
<judith> Blow bros claims #1 in the #2 business
<michael> ha
<judith> George c libby brags "a royal flush beats a full house"
<judith> etc
<judith> oh god, Royal Flush: we pick up where you left off
<michael> haha

I suppose if you didn't laugh you'd have to cry--it's a living.

Another of the NYT's delicious "we hate our subject" articles, this one about over-achieving parents with too much money and far too little sense. Good times, it's a nice match for yesterday's article about mothers who like vodka, although that one was quite a bit more sympathetic.

Jude tossed me this article on ticks/Lyme disease. Here in Maine, especially with the insane rain we're getting, insects are weighing heavily on our mind.

<michael> man we are in the tick danger zone
<michael> time to start inspecting the kids every night as part of the bath time ritual
<judith> no shit
<judith> why do we hate deet?
<judith> i'm thinking i would eat a deet sandwich right about now

At least we have owls. Who eat squirrels. Whole.

Good times:

<judith> isabel and becca are playing bank
<michael> oh?
<judith> i was told to hand them some blocks and playing cards to deposit
<judith> then i asked for a receipt and they were all like "what? receipt, you don't get one... what's a receipt?"
<michael> ha
<judith> so i told them i wanted to know how much money i deposited and they conferred for a bit, then they told me to go shopping and when i came back they would tell me how much money i had
<michael> ha
<judith> so i just got my printed reciept, which is an 8X10 piece of paper which says "you have 5 coins and 30 dollars, pick them up tomorrow"
<michael> good to know
<judith> isabel said she would let me know when tomorrow was
<judith> you know, i can't honestly say whether they are doing better or worse then today's banks
<judith> haha, i just went to pick my money up...apparently i can only take some of it out, because they have to make the rest "grow and grow and grow and GROW!"
<michael> haha
<judith> i think they just started their first ponzi scheme

I hope they were throwing the dollars up in the air when they said that.

Seriously, why even bother writing fiction when you have material like this? The ref is that Sanford name-dropped these guys during his tearjerker. Crazy!

Multi-player games aren't just more fun because they're social experiences, but also because they often lack shelf-events which halt progression and cause frustration with the game. Or they provide mechanisms for more easily bypassing them through force-multiplication.

I've been trying to analyze why I have such little interest in playing my single player console games, almost to the point where I'm forcing myself to play them these days just to get some sense of ROI for their cost. Mostly it's because I dread the shelf-level event--a point in the game where difficulty spikes in a weird way and it becomes frustrating to try to advance. I'm at this point in Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Resistance right now after a weekend of playing console games. What did I play when I wanted to take a break from this?

• World of Warcraft - still playing this casually (no raiding) and still enjoying myself. Collecting mounts and pets, doing dailies, building rep, running classic content. Completely non-linear, and when I run into problems I just round up a few friends and we go hammer on something together.


• Resistance 2 - only the multi-player in cooperative mode, I still haven't touched the single-player (was waiting until I had beat Resistance 1, which seems unlikely now). This is great fun running through maps, working on teamwork, doing some RPG-lite stuff with your profile, etc. We wiped twice on a particularly difficult part of Bryce Canyon but the forward progress isn't really what this is about so it doesn't really get frustrating. It's more about becoming a better player in your role (which I'm actually doing, surprisingly, given how little framework for educating the player exists in the game).


• Dawn of War - the first one, still a blast to just fire this up for some instant play 2 on 2 or whatever with random races and try to put together a base and army and push for a win on the map. Sure I get creamed sometimes (I'm terrible with Orks for instance) but I can just reload a map and try another setup. Again, no linearity to get blocked.

Corollary: the other genre I spend a ton of time on is single-player RPGs, and I think they have a slightly modified but similar quality to the MP games, in that you can grind in them. If some particular section is too difficult, well I can just grind for XP and gold for a few hours and go level up and get better equipment, and suddenly that shelf event is no longer so difficult.

Been trying to finish off my pile of games, pocket reviews follow.

• Dragon Quest 8 - the classic Level 5 RPG, I played this game an insane number of hours over the years, most of it in the first few months of buying a copy, and then trickling in over the years. It's the classic syndrome: "JRPG Last Boss Anxiety", where you get to find out whether all your grinding has put you at an adequate level such that the final boss encounter isn't a 30 minute affair of depressing inadequacy. I finally summoned the gumption to take a swing at him a month or two ago and discovered that I was vastly over qualified for the fight, beating him the first time round. My guess is the battle took 12 minutes or so, hard to judge accurately when the adrenaline is going. The amusing thing about finishing DQ9 is that the post-final boss sequence is like another 30 minutes of gameplay while you go through the resolution of all the characters and plot. Anyway, highly recommended if you grew up loving JRPGs, or want something your kids can watch. My daughter almost cried she was so sad that I finally beat the game, so I juarezed a copy of the OST and burned her some CDs to keep her company.


• Super Paper Mario - the Wii incarnation of the Mario RPG "franchise", this is just a weird game. Really odd stuff. The conceit, that you're 2D characters but can flip into a 3D world, and various other gimmicks built around depth/layer tricks witih sprites, is sometimes done with astounding cleverness. The graphic design is almost always interesting, bounding between garish and sublime. The humor can actually be... funny, although sometimes it's simply belabored. As to the game itself... well it's a crapshoot, not much complex going on here, sometimes its repetitive, but most of all its just... forgettable. In fact the entire game's story and what not is so cock-a-mamie that I couldn't even tell you what the hell is going on after having played 2/3 of it. Every time I pick it back up it's an exercise in trying to remember where I am, where I'm supposed to be going, re-learning the various little powers each pixie gives you, etc. In the final analysis, probably yet another game I'd rather watch someone play than play myself. Probably won't finish.


• Star Wars: The Force Unleased - Occasionally you lust after something for its pure aesthetics, only to find it vacuous and empty. Unfortunately The Force Unleased falls under this rubric. The rendering is very pretty, frequently gorgeous, and the combat is initially highly satisfying in the sense of empowerment that it gives you, the variety of force abilities, etc. However after a couple of hours you find yourself alternately bored and frustrated. The enemies seem to fall at either end of the difficulty pole, trivial to destroy, or immune to a variety of force powers as an attempt to force some combat variety. Unfortunately there are rarely useful cues on what to do so it becomes a spastic flailing of jumping, force powers, saber slashing, etc. You can muddle through it all but it just feels like work. Finished this but in hindsight it wasn't worth the effort.


• Mirrors's Edge - Sigh. A game with perhaps the most exciting premise in some time, a magnitude matched only by how deeply unsatisfying the actual gameplay experience turned out to be. Much has been written about this game and the bad decisions that were made of intermixing traditional gunplay and combat into what should be a pure running game, and it all bears out in the playing. One could forgive the overly touchy controls, especially with respect to wall running, if the fluidity of the movement experience wasn't being constantly interrupted by the need to punch guys in the nuts--either to get by them, or to get them to stop shooting you so you can engage in the game's primary mechanical loop of climbing, running, rolling. One could also forgive the cutscenes as well, and the hackeneyed, cliched dystopian corporations-are-bad storyline. But all together the poor controls, combat, and cutscenes are a trifecta which robs this game of its chance at being good, much less great. I'm a little over halfway through and doubt I'll bother finishing it.


• Dead Space - As someone who doesn't find horror interesting, and who has never undestood the appeal of Resident Evil, I wasn't expecting much from this. But I actually really, really enjoyed it. The production is super slick, the story is fine, and the voice acting is actually quite good. The pace of combat is well measured, there's a nice customization feedback loop with buying and upgrading items, etc. The sequences in vacuum are a little tedious but not overly so (at least so far), and while some abilities seem beside the point to me (I only use stasis when required, and have never used kinesis--I suspect these were added late as a nod to Bioshock), they haven't interfered with the main game experience. Ah, but then my dreamy enjoyment was smashed as I trundled into an.. arcade sequence? Seriously, someone grafted a really poor Missile Command clone into the game--protect the ship from asteroids, etc. It's completely orthogonal, no similarities in mechanics, controls, etc. It makes no sense whatsoever. And to top it off, it's really difficult and incredibly frustrating. Normally I'd pin this on my anemic skills but after looking it up on the web it appears that this sequence is rage inducing for everyone. Good show EA, you managed to ruin the first game of yours I've enjoyed in many years with a sequence that any kleenex testing should have revealed as unnecessary. I'll probably get around to pushing past this at some point but the game will be going into hibernation for a few weeks until I'm less irritated at it.


• Resistance: Fall of Man - a capable shooter, completely forgettable storyline but some decent AI that keeps things interesting with cover utilization. I can't actually tell you why I keep playing every couple of weeks, but for some reason I'm really determined to complete this before I start in on the single player campaign of the sequel. I suppose it's that the game is decent and I'm a sucker for any shooter that doesn't stray too far from the basic mechanics of the genre. That said it does have some frustratingly cheap moments with enemies that can shoot through walls, but slowly but surely I'm creeping through it all.

These are the things I know I know, these are things I know. Except maybe I don't know them correctly.

• Added something to the index and want to get it out? git reset FILE. There's also git rm --cached FILE which maybe does something similar, but maybe not. Let's not tempt fate, eh?


• git fetch seems quite temperamental, but git pull origin seems to do what I want every time. No complaining about the other end hanging up or other weird stuff.


• Similarly git push origin master gets my changes up to our bare repository.


• Don't make the mistake of git pull git://REPO/DIR into your local when you really wanted a git pull origin, it makes things very messy. And whatever you do, don't do that into a non-master branch, it makes things very confused.


• While you might think git stash in a branch, switching branches, making changes, stashing that, then switching back and unstashing does the right thing, it doesn't. Make sure you specify the specific stash you want when you do your git stash apply lest you suddenly get very confused as the other branch's stashed changes get merged and resolved into the wrong branch. I think the stash list is a stack. Pretty sure.


• git stash show -p is useful for looking at that patch you just stashed.


• You can't always trust the refresh of gitk, sometimes it just doesn't seem to know what's going on.


• Remember that git is state-ful, not transactional. If some previous command wrote some weird shit into your DIR/.git then git may think it's in some weird state from command to command that you don't know how to get out of.


• While git bisect is super-cool, it gets more complicated when you realize not all of your discrete changes build correctly.


• Some times it's easiest to just git diff -u > /tmp/BRANCH.patch, walk away from things with a fresh clone, and then reapply the patch (unlike Perforce, git diffs apply cleanly). You can preserve your old repo dir if you really feel like it.

Just getting this down so I don't forget it all.

Was reading this article on the NYT about the cost/benefit of various schools. Started looking up tuition of the various schools I've been visiting.

• Carnegie Mellon - $40,300/yr


• Harvard - $50,250/yr


• MIT - $36,390/yr


• Northeastern - $34,950/yr

Obviously many of these schools have generous financial aid for middle class parents based on their large endowments. However I went to a public school, Penn State, and I remember paying about $5,200/yr for my tuition, and when you include various other books and cost of living, I got out of there with about $17k in loans, which seemed enormous at the time. And yet, less than half a semester at the cheapest school above, and trivial to pay off compared with some of the debt discussed in the NYT article.

The postscript to this is that PSU's tuition has been skyrocketing the last decade. They have the historical tuition on file, actually, and you can see that I was indeed paying about $5,200/yr. But current rates are at an astounding $12,284/yr now. Wow! You can actually find an interesting budget task force report from 2002, whose recommendations were to start phasing in large tuition increases for incoming students, with attention to campus differentials to manage costs vs. student demand. Interesting stuff.

Just yesterday I was telling her she should have Becca ask me these questions in the future.

<judith> i remember what becca was asking me now, to whit: she asked me about eye balls and somehow i went yammering on about how our eyes just reflect light and our brain interprets the images and that's how we see, so a couple days later she asks why she can't see her own eyeballs and i was like, well, um... what? and then she clarifies that because your brain is what is actually "seeing" why couldn't her brain see her eyeballs.
<judith> and i secretly vow to look shit up on wikipedia before yammering on figuring she'll jsut forget everything anyway
<michael> haha
<michael> our eyes reflect light? what?
<judith> i don't even know
<judith> she kept asking questions about eyeballs, i don't remember shit about eyeballs

Oh well.

From this article on the diamond industry:

Diamonds are an exception. “If you don’t support the price,” Andrei V. Polyakov, a spokesman for Alrosa, said, “a diamond becomes a mere piece of carbon.”

And:

“We have to tell people that diamonds are valuable,” he said. “We are trying to maintain the price, just as De Beers did, as all diamond producing countries do. But what we are doing is selling an illusion,” meaning a product with no utility and a price that depends on the continued sense of scarcity where there is none.

Good times.

While doing the morning paper's puzzles:

<michael> wow... look at TLC's programming.... 7PM "Pregnant for 46 Years", 8PM "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant", 9PM "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant", 10PM "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant"
<michael> that's just sad
<judith> they made a show about people who didn't know they were pregnant?
<michael> well what about "Pregnant for 46 Years", what does that mean?
<judith> that's the one show, you know, "your vagina is not a clown car", the family who has like 18 kids
<michael> what... what did you just say?
<judith> you know... they say that... about that show
<michael> ...

I went back to my Sudoku.

Becca has taken an intense interest in writing/spelling based on phonetic understanding of speech. Some recent examples:

• BECCA N MOMY - "Becca and Mommy"; two thumbprint people paired with this.


• ILLUSTR - "Illustration"; aborted halfway, think she must have been copying this one.


• I M SUPR KA BODERFL - "I am super catching butterflies"; a young lady capturing a butterfly with a net.


• I M A XR! - "I am an expert!"; similar to above.


• O I M TO DSS! - "Oh, I am too dizzy!"; next to a drawing of a ballerina doing a pirouette.


• GKGGKK! - "Giggle!"; said by a drawing of Elinor standing next to aforementioned illustration.

It's been fun watching these evolve over the last three or four days. There's another one somewhere in the house with her spelling 'awesome' which is pretty interesting, too, hopefully I can find it.

Sundry food notes continue.

• Arabica - In some sense it's sad that the first coffee shop I ever stopped at in Maine was Arabica in the Old Port. I consider myself as having tasted some truly stunning lattes in my travels, most of them at Espresso Vivace in Seattle, which is really the high watermark. Their flavor is consistently superb, their presentation in terms of leaf and other artwork in foamed milk is amazing, and they had a great location in Capitol Hill. So I hope you'll take it as no faint praise when I say that Arabica is almost as good as Vivace. Sometimes (not always!), depending on who is pulling the shot, it's actually equal to Vivace. I think that getting a latte there while we were scoping out Portland ended up being one of the deciding factors in my wife agreeing to move out here. Regardless, I haven't bothered trying any other coffee shops as it's hard to imagine there's any point given how good Arabica is.


• Olive Cafe - This Lebanese restaurant just opened up down on the east end of Commercial St, sandwiched between two bars. An officemate tells me the location is somewhat cursed and has high turnover; I hope not, we're enjoying eating there regularly. I first saw this place during one of my treks down Colorado to Flatbread (oh common pilgrimage) and one day Johan and I decided to stop in and see what they had. It's run by a husband and wife team, she works the front of the house and he is the cook (and Lebanese). On our first stop we were informed they doing a local business discount to get people in the door so our meals would actually be 15% off. Johan was craving a regular old burger and ordered one, the waitress told me the special sandwich of the day was a Lebanese treat. Baba ghanoush, sauteed cauliflower, french fries (!), lettuce, diced tomatoes, etc., wrapped in a lavash. Frankly I'm not sure you could describe a more appealing street food to me.
  

  
  Before the meal we were served hummus and chips--hummus was good although slightly more tahini than I usually enjoy. Chips were homemade deep fried pita--oh frabulous joy. Sandwiches were delivered and mine was as awesome as I'd hoped. Since then I've been back several times and had various vegetarian platters, falafel, and a lovely pureed soup whose ingredients suddenly escape me (fava beans and rosemary I think). Most everything has been well prepared and tasty, the only mis-step I see is that they're not consistently preparing their french fries (which I never order, but other people have complained about them being undercooked sometimes). They're also incredibly busy it looks like, I actually couldn't get a table once, and I saw on a weekend when we stopped in that it looked like they had hired another waitress.



• Big Sky - Whenever I'm running errands up by Congress I'll usually make a quick stop into Longfellow Books (gotta keep those independent book stores solvent) and then head on over to Big Sky to get a soup and sandwich. Much has been written about this specialty shop, their good cheese selection, sweets, and excellent bread. It is all true, and it's great to have a place like this within easy walking distance of the office. I'll usually get a cup of whatever vegetarian soup they have for the day (carrot ginger and black bean recently) and then a grilled cheese with roasted mozzarella and tomato on three seed bread. I believe the cost of the sandwich is about $4, which is an absolute steal, the whole thing together comes to like $7.50. When I'm feeling especially hungry I'll buy two sandwiches which comes to just over $8, which is what a single sandwich can cost at many shops! Then when I get back to the office and sit down to eat the office dog, Zephyr, will anxiously pace by my chair hoping to get some scraps. Poor guy, that's a lot of endless disappointment to endure.


• Black Cow Bistro - we stop in here for a quick meal occasionally when we don't feel like walking up to Big Sky. So far I've tried the portabello mushroom panini and their eggplant sandwich. The former is pretty good, they grill them well, with a nice charred flavor. The slices are almost too thick though, especially given there isn't a lot of marinading going on from what I can taste. Still a tasty sandwich. They have fresh fruit on hand, too, so I'll often grab a pear to round out the meal. The eggplant sandwich, though... let's just say I was disappointed. It was pretty much a mess all around, not much of it I enjoyed eating. As a counterpoint, I actually prefer the eggplant parmigiano with provoline at Amato's to their sandwich here. An upscale deli/bistro should probably be able to beat Amato's any day of the week.

More Portland food reviews. Writing these up in case anyone else who moves here is desperate for some food reviews like I've been.

• Becky's Diner - This is the other "standard" in Portland next to the Miss Portland Diner. Becky's is on the wharf though and opens at 4am to serve dockworkers, etc., so it has a more working class, less retro vibe to it. Potatoes are much better than Miss Portland's, real honest to goodness home fries. Omelette was pretty good, broccoli and cheddar, they actual sautee the broccoli beforehand so it ends up pretty rich. French Toast was good, fruit cup was high quality (berries) which it should be for the price they charge. Snappy service. All-in-all good effort. Parking is sort of a bitch though, not fun getting small children out of the car on Commercial St. if the lot is full.


• Sapporo - Apparently the only place in town that serves Japanese curry, which Johan and I had a yen for at the time. It looks like your average mid-range sushi place that you'd find in a regular strip mall or whatever in LA (hello wood veneer), but happily they actually have a pretty good selection of curries, cutlets, and sushi. They even had natto, which I find quite surprising (and heartening). However I didn't try any of the sushi but I'll probably go back sometime soon for that. The vegetable curry itself was decent. Carrots, green beans, asparagus (?), and snap peas, the curry sauce itself had good flavor but was a little too thin for my tastes. Also a bit sad that they didn't put potatoes in it.


• Tu Casa - Finally had my first major case of the shakes from LA food withdrawal. My body craved an excellent bean, rice and cheese burrito. Oh Cuca's, oh Tacos La Flama, how I long for you! Doing a little searching it looked like Tu Casa up on Washington Ave was one of the best places to get some decent food, although they're an El Salvadoran and not a Mexican joint. The interior is definitely LA taquiera, tables, chairs, Univision, no frills. Ordered their veggie burrito (yeah yeah) and a cheese papusa on the side. Burrito was totally mediocre but I'm not surprised, really; all full of squash and what not. Next time I'll just ask for a straight-up BRC. The papusa, however... that was *awesome*. Worth the trip just to find out those are awesome. But the burrito craving is unfulfilled. I think I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands and figure out how to ape the Cuca's BRC in order to satisfy myself.


• The Italian Place Around The Corner From My Office - No idea what the name of this place is despite having eaten there a few times. This place is a little odd. I have no idea why people alter the well-established and orderly "sit down, order, get food, pay" scheme but these guys like to pretend they're not "really" a restaurant and so you order your pasta at a "counter", pay, then sit down and get served. It's pretty goofy because if you don't have cash you have to tip before you get service. I wish they'd stop mucking around and set things straight up. Anyway, the food is pretty good. All the pasta is made fresh (and apparently they teach classes on it out of the kitchen) and they only offer five or so dishes a day, which is perfect for a small place with only one cook and approximately seven tables. Also they serve a decent bread and pate/sauce plate before the meal, the one today had a nice garlic puree with some sauces and cured olives. Tasty. I ordered an eggplant-filled ravioli in a butter and sage sauce that was quite enjoyable, and in just the right quantity. For dessert I ordered the tiramisu. Now, I love me some tiramisu, and that works out well because Jude makes a stellar one. This one was... decent, but not up to standards. The ladyfingers were incredibly oversoaked such that each bite was like drinking a small caraffe of espresso. The mascarpone was quite good, though, but the entire texture and feel in the mouth was ruined by the soggy biscuits. A bit disappointing.

Next up: more wine reviews, some sandwich shop reviews.

Started reading this SEC document based on a link from that Wired article many people are reading and commenting on now. It's quite a fun read, the author, Janet Tavakoli, is a bit of an imp in the Camille Paglia mold. She released a few books recently one of which has a chapter excerpted on Amazon. The SEC doc has this quote near the end:

If I had a large bonus in my sights and mischief on my mind, it would be very easy to
manipulate the hedge ratio so that I would sell more credit default protection and increase
my income without a perceived increase in risk. This is source of the extreme moral
hazard of the delta hedging strategy.

All good reads on how hopelessly broken the financial markets have been for a few years based on obviously intentional malfeasance on the part of these pigfuckers.

<becca> I saw your favorite part of the muppets
<mike> bork bork bork?
<becca> yeah
<becca> he tried to put a lobster in the pot
<becca> and then some talking lobsters came
<becca> and tried to shoot him
<mike> oh dear
<becca> yeah!

The state of things so far:

• Marcy's - Located in downtown Portland's business district, Marcy's is a no-nonsense diner with a mild biker aesthetic and cheap prices. There's almost zero diner pretension here, and you can't beat the value. Food was average, nothing spectacular. Service is attentive and snappy, like you imagine a local joint to be. Parking is typical downtown stuff.


• The Porthouse - Situated on the wharf in Old Port this place doubles as a bar in the evenings and has a comedy club attached to it. Nice cozy space with a view of the docks, fireplace in the common room. Very good bread, good cheese in the omelette. Rosemary potatos unfortunately burnt beyond enjoyment. Looks like a favorite of the dockworkers so it has good local color. Parking is a bit annoying because it's a ways off Commercial and damn it's a cold walk on the waterfront.


• Miss Portland Diner - Just off I-295 on the north end of the Portland downtown, this diner was recently re-opened after a long dormant period. The dining car it takes its name from was completely refurbished and they also added an overflow seating room, which is needed because the place is packed by 8am. Service was mediocre, I can't tell if it's because they're swamped or because the five guys sitting behind us waited till the end of the meal to tell our waitress they wanted separate checks. Food was decent, had an Eggs Benedict Florentine with a very aggressive dijon hollandaise, quite good. Pancakes were pleasantly sour (buttermilk!) although the omelette had way too much cheese in it. Huge parking lot adjacent makes it very easy to deal with.

More as we eat at them...