Monthly Archives: January 2009

Ti Amo — Hoffman Estates

We had dinner at the new Ti Amo restaurant, in Hoffman Estates, tonight.

It took the place of Babaluci, which we liked a lot. We were very disappointed when we saw they had closed.

Unfortunately, I was not especially impressed with the replacement.

I ordered Gnocchi with a side dish of Pasta Fagioul soup.

The soup was kind of bland, and looked like someone had used a stick blender to mix it up. There was almost no pasta in it.

The Gnocchi was mushy, with bland-tasting sauce. When I ordered the same dish at Babaluci, the Gnocchi had nice texture and the sauce was chunky, with nice pieces of tomato.

Ginny had a duck & pasta dish with a minestrone soup. Her soup also looked like it had been mixed with a stick blender. The duck was a bit gamier than she was expecting, and the noodles were too wide to be eaten easily.

The atmosphere, while OK, wasn’t anything to write home about. We liked the homey feel that Babaluci had. Of course, we were fairly regular and were always greeted warmly.

I noticed a distinct lack of seafood dishes on the menu..which is a big disappointment for me.

Price wise they seem to be a bit higher than I would expect, but not overly so. Ginny and I spent about $40 for dinner with tea to drink.

Ti Amo is probably worth another shot, but we’ll wait a few months for them to find their legs.

Netgear ReadyNAS NV+

For quite some time I haven’t been happy with the level of data protection on my servers … a while ago I ran mirrored (RAID 1) IDE (PATA) drives on my system using a Arco Duplidisk adapter.   It seemed adequate, but after I upgraded my servers to the Dell PowerEdge systems, it didn’t seem to work quite right.   It was reporting failed drives when there were none.

So, after a fair bit of research, I decided to get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.   My criteria were a) had to support various RAID levels (1 & 5 at least), have hot swappable drives, and support NFS (the linux network file system).

The device I decided on is a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+.   The model I got came with 2 x 500gb drives, with bays for two more.   It wasn’t cheap, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

It supports various RAID levels … RAID 1 (mirroring, where the data on one drive is completely duplicated on the other), RAID 5 (where data is stored on two drives with a parity bit on the 3rd … if any one of the drives fails, the data can be reconstructed on the fly using two of the drives), and it’s own RAID X … which is an eXpandable and adaptive RAID variation … which will use RAID 1 if you only have two drives, and RAID 5 when you add more.

Although there were a few hiccups, I’m not displeased.

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whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

Jason Kottke pointed out that the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file was changed almost immediately after the inauguration …

It went from this …

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

… to this …

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

One small step towards the new attitude of openness and transparency.

Coincidence?

I was just reading Obama’s Inaugural address and one of the phrases he used jumped out at me …

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

… which reminded me of a line from the David Roth‘s (the folk singer) song “Dragon to Butterfly” which has the line …

A man can move mountains, a world can be turned, and the greatest of distances easily spanned, When the strength that’s invested in making a fist is transformed into shaking a hand.

I like the symbolism in both.

WBEZ Traffic made me laugh

I was listening to WBEZ this morning and the traffic report came on … The reporter indicated that a particular road was very icy, but the city was sending out a salt truck to “make it better”.

Immediately the Beatles song “Hey Jude” popped into my head with slightly altered lyrics …

“… take a salt truck … and make it better …”

OK, yeah, I am easily amused.