Wing contest at Quarry House

My first order of Quarry House wings was “medium.” The waitress had told me that they ran one level hot, and the medium were actually hotter than an standard “hot.” My nose was stuffed and my eyes were fully watered up at the end of twelve.

We decided to set up a trip with Andrew, Rich, myself, and my sister. I realized that Aman loves hot food too, so I invited him as well. We formally decided to go the night that Young Frankenstein played at the AFI. The final group was myself, Simon, Andrew, Rich, Alissa, Cathy, Shveta, and Aman.

The order came out, 9 wings each of the mild, medium, hot, and 4 alarm. As my sister said later, we probably should have started with the mild and worked our way up… but instead we each went to the 4 alarm. Lips started to burn, glasses (Rich’s) came off, and instead of laughter, yelling, or anything positive, we all spent time making sure we were physically ok. When the burning stopped, we could taste a familiar sweet habanero flavor.

Aman had three, Cathy and myself two each, and Andrew and Rich one. Shveta took one bite and gave hers to Aman, while continuing to enjoy her Fin du Monde. Cathy had her first Dogfish Head Palo Santo (and enjoyed it).

Young Frankenstein was amazing as usual. Where wolf? There. There wolf.

Review of Learning jQuery 1.3

Learning jQuery 1.3 has a writing style that is very dry for a book written in a semi-conversational voice. I prefer a writing style with a little more personality to it, but acknowledge that’s not for everyone.

I did have two small complaints. First, I like to see the API list out at the top of the chapters. Appendix D contains a complete reference, but I like having a list of methods to be covered at the beginning of the chapter. While I’m at it, I may mention that the “complete” reference is little more than a cheetsheet style list. Perhaps a little more would have been useful.

My second complaint is about the poor code syntax highlighting. Just for record, this has nothing to do with the content, it’s just a complaint against the publisher. Take page 145, where three-quarters of the page is example code, but contains only bold line at the top showing the emphasized line. First, the bold often wasn’t enough to draw the eye… especially at the beginning of the book when a novice reader has to mentally separate standard JavaScript from jQuery code. Second, I understand that the example code is included, but couldn’t it have simply been excerpted here? I don’t understand wasting an entire page, when much less would do.

Based on the overall quality of the book, I recommend it for jQuery beginners.

Update to some random thoughts

1) I took a look at the book on Processing, and it does look quite nice. That being said, I’m not quite sure what I’d use it for. So it fell a bit on my list.

2) Letterman is still pretty much the same. I haven’t seen Leno. Jon Stewart, however, looked TOTALLY crazy last night. It was really quite scary.

3) Rob Coburn, you had better hang out with Raluca and I pretty darned soon….

4) Despite ordering the Python in a Nutshell book, I have semi-officially decided to put off learning Python for a bit. I think that I am going to re-focus my attentions on Scheme, and work my way through the Little Schemer, The Scheme Programming Language, and SICP. I’ve been through some of them, but haven’t gotten to the end of any of them.

5) The Giants won! Beat the Bucs, and are going to play the Cowboys next week. I hate the Cowboys, so this is going to be a big deal. I’ll probably try to watch it.

6) Steve, congrats on the potential new-old gig!