CleverBlogName

It’s funny how different people can have such different experiences with a place. Wellingtonista are bitching about Esspresoholic; not in the normal fashion I encounter since I moved here 15 years ago because you get cool points for emphasising that you stopped going there when they moved from Willis Street to Courtney Place, but because, apparently, the service sucked for someone.

I will tempt fate by saying this is something I’ve never hit there. In fact, I’ve been rediscovering the place with some joy; a dozen or so years ago I’d hang out there at 3 or 4 in the morning when it was one of the few places still open, or go in during the evening for the delicious-but-pricey food.

Fast forward to now and the food is still delicious (mmmmmm, nachos), still arives in great mounds I struggle to finish (mmmmm, cheesecake), but since their prices don’t seem to have altered in the intervening decade they’ve moved from expensive-but-good to reasonable-but-good. Seriously, when “toast and spreads” in most of Wellington gets you a couple of hunks of bread, a gruding amount of butter, and one flavour of spreadable goo for your $4-$5, it’s nice to get half a dozen spreads and a pile of toast. And, like I say, best. cafe. nachos. ever. And their ever-delicious desserts.

And, most importantly, bonus points for being one of the select few cafes where the staff actually pay attention when I order a fluffy for my daughter, and grasp that an 18 month old does not have the abaility to drink them safely if the person behind the counter heats them to the point they’d blister skin. This is, sadly, an attribute that’s rarer than you’d think. Pointing out the unsuitability of scalding milk for toddlers and suggesting warm would be a better alternative produces annoying sulking at more than a few places.

I still love Esspressoholic even if the cool kids don’t.

When Christine abandoned ship for Canada, she left us some fabrics, including some cool space age silver fabric. Maire got sewing and behold:

…the future!

On the one hand Hotel California was one of the great bits of 70s rock. On the other hand, “twin-neck guitar instrumental” must surely sum up so many vices of an era.

In recent weeks I’ve been getting to grips with Solaris zones; they’re one of the features that shipped in Solaris 10 that are supposed to make Sol 10 Better, Stronger, Faster than the free Unix clones (particularly Linux) that have been eroding commercial Unix vendors out of house and home.

If you start reading up on zones in a casual way, you could be forgiven for thinking they’re like VMWare, only better. This is pretty much how Sun sell them, and definitely how Sun fans push them—if you were to go by what’s readily available on Google, you could be forgiven for thinking people should be panic selling their VMWare shares because zones are so good, so much easier and more efficient than hypervisor based virtualisation technology that VMWare will be out of business Real Soon Now.

Reality is a little different.

You may or may not be familiar with the term, which is used by some economists and social scientists to describe (amongst other things) what happens when people are able to vote themselves wealth at the expense of previous or future generations (for example, John Key’s suggestion to Baby Boomers that they can have tax cuts and massive infrastructure spending by voting up debt for their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to pay off; the last time we did this was the Muldoon years).

This rather madcap proposal would appear to take the notion to whole new heights; “give Granny your kidney, son, and you can have a sweetie.”