I had the last of the left over spinach ravioli and an Italian sausage for lunch.

I made a turkey pot pie for dinner. Used a pastry crust that I found in the freezer a few days ago on it. It was a tad too sweet for the pie (would have been fine if it was single layer, but I had crust left over, so I double layered the top…)

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What I Ate: January 7, 2009

So, I was bringing up another hard drive for backups on one of my Vista machines and had to decide if I was to format/partition it as a Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk. I found myself asking what the differences between MBR and GPT are. I knew GPT let me make partitions larger than 2 TB (not a problem with a single drive, but easily a problem on RAIDs), but what else did it (or didn't it do)?

I threw together this quick comparison table (for Windows): Click here to read the rest of
MBR vs. GPT comparison (Windows Vista)

I originally wanted to call this photo Lady & Hawk (a play on Ladyhawke) but then I realized that in the context of the Rennaissance Faire (where I took this photo) this woman was a peasant and not a Lady.

Handheld, 1/200 sec at f/2.8 on ISO 100, 105mm f/2.8 macro lens

This is one of those photos where it's all in the details. The web sized version of the picture loses some of the more interesting details. Here's a close up of what the face looks like.

Papa and I walked over to Mehfil's Indian near 2nd and Folsom in San Francisco. This is a common lunch destination for us since they have $5-6 lunch specials (which pretty much involve rice covered by a tasty long cooked sauce/curry) and the take-out menu changes daily. First Indian food of the year for me… tasty! Unfortunately, I forgot to record what it was exactly - chicken something.

For dinner, I boiled ruote pasta to al dente and then cooked briefly with some of the meat sauce I made earlier. I also cooked some broccoli to go with it.

There's something interesting in a set table. Sometimes I never notice it, but sometimes my mind starts to race when I see a table that's set and prepared just so. Soon people will be sitting down and ordering some food. They'll like the food, or dislike it. Take the time to enjoy the food, experience it, and wonder about how it was made or what that taste it - or maybe they'll miss the food entirely and focus their attention on conversation or trying to make a good impression or just getting the chore of not being hungry over with. Maybe the table will be witness to flirting, an argument, or the silence of a single diner. For now, however, the empty table setting is still - just a potential foundation on which a meal might be laid out - or might not.

Handheld, 1/30 sec at f/4 on ISO 400, 17-35mm f/2.8 lens

For lunch I ate with the other guys at Fanpop at South Beach Cafe. I had a caprese pizza with a hot chocolate. I still think that even though they are sometimes a little inconsistent, the South Beach Cafe pizzas are the best thin crust pizza that you can buy.

There were a couple comments on the Photo of the Day: My Kind of Burger post from a couple days ago. I looked at the photo so many times that I had a craving for The Counter so off we went to the one at Santana Row in San Jose. I ordered a 2/3 pound beef patty (cooked medium-well) topped with gruyere, Bermuda red onions, grilled onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and a fried egg served on a hamburger bun with Southwest Caesar dressing on the side which Tina and I shared.

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What I Ate: January 5, 2009 (South Beach Cafe; The Counter)

Here's a backlit shot of Christchurch Cathedral (in the heart of Christchurch, South Island, New Zealand). If your monitor's brightness and contrast are set properly, you'll be able to see the details of the church (including a man standing outside of the church yelling scripture at passersby).

Handheld, 1/125 sec at f/11 on ISO 100, 17-35mm f/2.8 lens

I'm beginning to realize that I might not be able to do both What I Ate and Photo of the Day. I'm not sure which you guys (my readers) would like to see more - pictures and descriptions of the food that I'm eating or a photo that I like picked out from my library. Last year, I did about 90 to 100 entries of each of these (What I Ate at the beginning of the year; Photo of the Day at the end of the year) and I don't know which you'd like to see going forward. Leave a comment so I know which you'd like for me to keep going.

Lunch was quick and dirty - more left over taquitos and some more of the appetizer things from Olive Street Table. Heated them up in the toaster oven on a sheet of parchment paper. Ate them while playing Civilization Revolution!.

Before dinner, I cooked some pasta sauce (to consume over the next week or so) - jarred some and tupperware'd the rest (for consumption in the next several days). Heated some of the left over ravioli, grilled an Italian sausage (left over from the pasta sauce making) topped with some of the sauce (I can't spend an hour making the sauce without eating any can I?) and bread.

Friday night, we wet out running some errands and Tina realized that there was something at Macy's she wanted to look for. It was 9:00pm, and we were in the Mountain View Best Buy (looking for Civilization Revolution (PS3) which, by the way, Best Buy no longer carries). Tina's Google Maps on her phone was acting up and couldn't get the telephone number of the Macy's in Sunnyvale and looked a little worried so I asked her what the problem was. She said Google Maps on her Palm Centro wasn't working properly and I poked around on it a little and couldn't get it to find the Macy's closest to us. I was about to pull out my phone and do a search when I asked why she needed the Macy's location when we knew very well where it was. She said she wanted Macy's telephone number and I said, "Duh, why didn't you ask me???" (For the last five years our home phone number has been just one digit off from Macy's so for about 50% of the calls we receive it's actually for Macy's and I try to provide the number to those callers - unfortunately for them, they usually hang up without saying anything.) I told her the number to call (which is actually the number to Macy's at Valley Fair) and we found out they were to close at 9:30.

I said, no problem, we could get to the Macy's in Sunnyvale Town Center with plenty of time to spare. I drive over and we walk up to the door and look at the store hours posted there. Yep, they have special holiday hours and they close at 9:30 instead of the usual 9:00pm. Fifteen minutes would be plenty since Tina knew what she wanted to look at. In we went and got about 10 yards into the store when I realized that the few employees behind the counter and near that entrance were staring at us. My brain kicked in and I rewound the conversations I heard while walking into the store - the employees had been talking about what time it was and something about closing. One of the employees said to us, "We're closed!" I said, "No, it's not yet 9:30."

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The Macy's That Doesn't Know What Time It's Open