Best raw oysters in Silicon Valley?

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for four years now and have yet to come across decent oysters for less than $2.50+ a pop, and even those are usually small and unmemorable. I realize I’m not going to be able to get them for a quarter (like on a good day back home), but seriously, there has to be a reasonable in-between somewhere in northern California. I’m growing a bit tired of this four-oyster appetizer crap (half dozen? not around here) and would like to make a full meal out of them for less than $70.

I’ve been told to check out Half Moon Bay, but haven’t been given the names of any specific restaurants there.

If you’re sitting on an oyster goldmine out here, please let me into the club (I promise to not give away your secret on this site).

Smart Archives v1.9.1

As a lot of people seem to know, WordPress v2.3 was released early this morning, and not an hour after the package went live was I flooded with e-mails about it breaking Smart Archives.

Looks like there are new “terms” tables that overwrite some of the older category tables, including post2cat, which is why the plugin was failing miserably under v2.3.

In any event, I’ve resolved the issue; after nailing down the problem, the solution was quite simple and required only a slight modification to the code.

Note that there are now three different versions of Smart Archives (one each for WP v2.0-, v2.1-2.2, and v2.3+).

Help, I need a point-and-shoot camera

I came to the realization a few months ago that my dSLR just wasn’t going to cut it for all occasions and that I needed a smaller option, something a little less cumbersome. I’ve been on the fence about the Leica D-LUX 3 for a while now, and just can’t seem to get myself over the hump. While I’m willing to spend $600 on a point-and-shoot, it’s hard for me to justify the cost in light of every reviewer’s warning that it produces noisy images. I’ve no doubt that mechanically, the D-LUX 3 is second to none, but if they can’t get the electronics right, I can’t spend that kind of money, despite its ability to save to RAW, which is rare for a compact camera and something I really want.

For the past few weeks I’ve had my eyes on the recently-announced (though not yet available) Canon SD950 IS, and just when I had somewhat resigned myself to pre-ordering it, Scott Beale got me thinking about companies other than Canon and Leica when last week he gushed about the brand new Fujifilm FinePix F50se.

There’s no question that I’ve a certain affinity for Canon — I’ve owned a few PowerShots, currently use a Canon dSLR, only buy Canon glass, recommend their products to everyone, etc. — and would love to add another of their models to my collection, but the FinePix has me doing a double-take; it’s at least $150 cheaper than the Canon and supports full manual and aperture priority shooting modes (I generally shoot in aperture priority mode on the dSLR, and would like similar control over the non-dSLR).

Thoughts?

Working too hard

You know you’ve been working too hard when you start writing a piece for your personal website and find yourself routinely checking the clock so as to figure out how much time to bill. Ha!

Dear media application developers, are you deaf?

Can someone, anyone, please tell me why 99% of the media players out there start at maximum volume (this goes for both native¹ and flash-based web players)? Surely the developers of these applications have started playing a song or video, been blasted out of their seats, and thought, “you know, maybe we should have the volume set to 50%, or less.”

I can promise you that if I start a song/video and can’t hear it well, I’ll turn up the volume. Yeah, really, I’ll just reach over and crank that bad boy up a bit. Trust me, your media won’t go unheard because you don’t initially blow my speakers.

Seriously, I’d love an answer from someone out there.

Google Reader, now with definite unread item counts

Update: It appears that the upper limit has simply been changed to 1000.

Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, it seems Google Reader is finally displaying the actual unread item count next to feeds and folders, instead of defaulting to the arbitrary “100+” indicator. I was flipping back and forth between tabs a few minutes ago when my mind’s eye happened to register the >100 item counts.

In the [mostly positive] Google Reader piece I put up a few weeks ago, I said the following: “‘100+’ is meaningless. This probably burns me up more than anything else. How hard is it to say 43423 unread items? Hint: it’s not hard at all.” Mission accomplished.

MarsEdit v2.0

Daniel Jalkut has just released the second version of the world’s best blog-publishing application, MarsEdit. In the hierarchy of my favorite Mac programs, this one sits near the top — I can’t imagine writing and/or publishing without it. I’ve been beta-testing v2.0 for a few months now, and can genuinely say that Daniel has put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this release — he truly cares about the application and its users.

I’ve a feeling current users will jump at the chance to upgrade (it’s only $10), but if you’re a prospective customer still on the fence, let me assure you that $30 is a steal if you spend more than a trivial amount of time writing and editing weblog entries.

SuperDuper! automatically mounts/unmounts external drives

As many are aware, external drives tend to spin up even when they aren’t necessarily needed. For example, on Mac OS X, they start whizzing away whenever you try to save something locally, even if you’ve made no indication that you wish to save that something to the external drive. If you are like me, and only use your external drive(s) to mirror the hard drive(s) in your machine during the wee hours of the morning, you likely find this spin-up process very annoying, not least because it always takes a few machine-immobilizing seconds.

After having been irritated by this nonsense one too many times, I set out to solve the “problem.” My first thought was to crontab a couple of shell scripts to run just before and after SuperDuper! did its thing; the shell scripts would mount and unmount the drive. Soon after I started whipping up the scripts, I noticed that SuperDuper! had the native ability to launch scripts before and after a scheduled backup — no crontab needed. Nice.

With this little bit of fortuitous knowledge bouncing around in my head, I decided to go a step further and see what would happen if a scheduled backup began while my external drive was unmounted and no scripts were defined. I’ll tell you what happened — SuperDuper! didn’t miss a beat. It mounted the drive, did its backup thing, and then unmounted the drive. Very nice.

Now, did I half-expect it to do that? Yes, because it’s so obvious. But, let’s be honest, how often do you expect something to work a certain way (because it’s the only logical way to do it) and it doesn’t? Yeah, all the time.

Anyway, I guess this is just a long-winded way of acknowledging that even though SuperDuper! and I have had our issues¹, it’s nevertheless a great program to which I still entrust my data.

A week with the new Apple keyboard

I take keyboards very seriously and have been known to religiously stick by the models I like. I previously expounded on my efforts to find a good keyboard for the Mac after having used Apple’s previous model for a couple of days (I had just purchased a new Apple monitor and needed a keyboard for the PowerBook). I hated that keyboard:

Anyone who thinks this is a good keyboard has never typed on a good keyboard. Period. Every time I use this thing for more than 5-10 minutes my fingers start to hurt. I constantly feel like I’m pressing the keys harder than I should have to — they’re much too “mushy.” It’s very tiring. The only thing I can say I really like about it are the USB slots on the back, but a lot of keyboards come with these now.

After that post, and after having tried both the Matias Tactile Pro, and the macally iceKey, I wrote another post discussing my experiences with both. Regarding the iceKey, the model I’ve been using for the last year and a half, I said the following:

I’m not going to sit here and say that the iceKey is the greatest keyboard I’ve ever used, because it’s not, but it is a good keyboard and one that I plan on using for a while. It’s relatively cheap (~$50), really well-built, and a joy to type on. It reminds me a lot of my aluminum PowerBook’s keyboard, with its low-profile, short-travel “scissor” switches. I highly recommend it, especially if you like typing on a PowerBook.

What I failed to mention in both the above-referenced posts is how great the aluminum PowerBook G4’s keyboard was. At this point I can confidently say that it’s the best keyboard I’ve ever used. In fact, after I purchased the Mac Pro, I had more than half a mind to tear the display off the PowerBook and do some hardware hacking to enable it to function as just a keyboard for the new machine.

All of this finally brings me to the very simple point of this post, namely that the new Apple keyboard is wonderful. It obviously looks great and now matches my tower and monitor (as ever, make it out of metal or carbon fiber and I’ll likely want it), but it feels even better than it looks and were it not for the spacing between the keys, I could probably mistake it for the PowerBook’s keyboard if I closed my eyes (not sure I can give it a better compliment than that). I like it so much in fact, that a few days ago I bought another one for my office. Moreover, I’ve recommended it to a few friends of mine over the last week, and everyone agrees — it’s awesome.

Now that Apple has finally figured out the [non-notebook] keyboard, I’m hoping they can fix their mouse sometime this decade, but then again I don’t really care so long as Razer continues to give me what I want.