2007_12_01_archive

Restaurant review: Gaslight

Last night Alli and I went out to dinner at Gaslight, a brasserie on

the edge of the South End in Boston. We had a great time!

The place has been getting positive press recently, and even my mom

raved about it to us. She's pretty picky, so if she liked it we knew

we had to check it out.

We got there and it was packed, but thankfully we had a reservation so

we sat down pretty quickly. The ambiance was great: warm and welcome,

busy but not too loud.

The food was delicious: Alli's skate was the best she's ever had, and

my swordfish was very good.

The wines we chose were mediocre, unfortunately, but the wine menu and

options were good. I was pretty disappointed by my glass of Duo

Mythique. It was light and watery up front, with nothing much in the

middle, just some faint fruit. It did have a pleasing after-taste, but

that's about it.

Nonetheless, the food was great, ambiance great, service good, and we

had a great time.

Posted by Yoav at 17:27 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: food, reviews

Book Review: Building Scalable Web Site (the Flickr way)

Readers of this blog know I'm a big fan of flickr and use it for all

my photos. Some readers also know that a big part of my job(s) for the

past few years has involved system architecture and design for

scalability. It's only natural that this book, Building Scalable Web

Sites (the Flickr way), by Cal Henderson, landed in my reading queue.

I've been wanting to read this book since it came out, but never quite

made the time for it. Fortunately the other day my colleague Todd just

put the book in my hands. That's exactly the kind of impetus needed to

vault a book into #1 on my reading list ;)

And earlier today I finished reading the book. It's an excellent book,

as I expected. It's clear and easy to read, has a nice flow, contains

the right balance of examples and theory, and smacks of the

concreteness that only someone who's done it before can convey. It's a

very, very refreshing contrast from many of the highly-academic

research efforts in this area that I also read. Kudos to Cal

Henderson, the author and chief flickr architect, on that.

The first seven chapters of the book are fairly general, I skimmed

them in one evening. But chapters eight, nine, and ten are gold even