phik

Some friends came over last weekend, and said that the inner courtyard of my apartment building reminds them of a prison cell block. Of course they’re completely right, and now it’s all I can think about when I step outside.

I’m willing to put up with it for these few months — though Milhouse’s father would not look out of place in this apartment — but one thing I could tolerate no longer: the knives.

After enduring for weeks knives that were so dull that they were long past being dangerous, I discovered that they could not cut cold butter and my bottomless patience was exhausted.

It was suggested that if I were limiting myself to exactly one knife, it should be this 18cm santoku:

Using the Global santoku is like watching girls make out. I thought that I was keeping my knives sharp in Boston, but I was badly mistaken, and I cannot rest until I’ve learned to replicate this factory edge.

I bought a bushel of tomatoes, just to cut them up.

I sang a song while I did it.

Back in the heady days when Cluster File Systems was not a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, a near-constant thorn in my side were people who did not come anywhere close to understanding the protections (not) provided by copyright.

One partner got so worked up that I think they’d have actually sued if we weren’t so valuable to them, essentially because we reimplemented one of their APIs (and naturally, they wanted to claim copyright on our code). That they managed to find lawyers willing to litigate that claim was, I thought, impressive enough to let it go forward, but even a frivolous lawsuit costs so much in the United States that I never could have. In the end they decided it was not worth it.

Reading Wendy Seltzer’s “No Copyright for Games” today took me back to those days. Not exactly the same issues, but I feel for the Scrabulous guys.

It’s very rarely that I eat Chinese food any more, now that I’ve been so thoroughly spoiled by years of traveling to China; it’s an order of magnitude yet rarer that I enjoy it.

Sydney’s fu manchu, I am pleased to report, serves what I would call “contemporary Chinese” dishes that are both delicious and inexpensive. Its dining area is small, simple, and modern, bearing none of the gaudy trappings that we’ve come to associate with Chinese restaurants in the English-speaking world.

I recommend that you attend to their premises and put food in your mouth. Not too much. Mostly plants.

fu manchu
249 Victoria Street
Darlinghurst, Sydney

Watching the new Indian Premier League cricket has been a bit of a mixed bag for me.

It’s great to see more of McGrath, Gilchrist, and Warnie, whom I’ve particularly missed. And the mixed-nation teams can’t help but improve international cricketing relations after that disastrous Australian summer.

It’s also been a pleasant opportunity to put the lie to the conventional wisdom that Twenty20 is entirely a batsman’s game. I still think it might be more balanced with 6-wicket innings, but balance doesn’t seem to be exactly what they’re striving for.

On the other hand, there’s substantially more spectacle than I care for in my cricket. The atmosphere at the ground seems to include everything that’s wrong with attending American sporting events: being bombarded with loud music after every ball; being treated like you’re too retarded to figure out for yourself when the game is exciting; the general unwillingness to just let the game stand on its own.

Cricket does not require cheerleaders, no matter how scantily clad they may be.

On yet another hand, I love the barbed wired fences between the spectators and the field of play in India. That is how you stop ground invasions.

Well, maybe not entirely.