Finished the evening with some Mass Effect (almost done!) and a bottle of Mother Earth Endless River which one of Emily’s coworkers sent over. I have to admit I wasn’t crazy about this one. Maybe it’s the fruit, or perhaps it’s because it was paired with Goldfish crackers.
Hit a breakthrough in my software research thanks to some kind folks on IRC. A little more testing to do before I move on to the next task.
Dinner at Blue Dust. Portabella wrap is awesome, as is fried zucchini with horseradish sauce. Had a Duck-Rabbit Imperial Brown IPA. I always end up going for the beers that come in the little fancy glasses.
Spent the rest of the evening cleaning up the basement, going through boxes of stuff that I mostly don’t need or want anymore. The pile of stuff heading to Goodwill is daunting. On the plus side, I now have room for the love seat that my parents are hopefully bringing over this weekend.
Still fighting with driver performance. Moving buffers around did not have the desired effect. Running low on options and time, as customer has a looming factory deadline. Have to look at DMA settings and see if some improvements can be made there.
Home then out to dinner. Tried the new How Lee. It was much more crowded than I ever saw it in its previous incarnation, which might be explained by the transformation of the food from “random greasy Chinese-ish food” to “only sort of greasy Chinese food that maybe had some thought and effort behind it”. Also some may have been there to view the men’s room artwork.
Returned to the Squirrel Cage (a.k.a. Squirrel Hill Cafe, a.k.a. the bar I frequented throughout my early-to-mid-20s) for the first time in a few years. It’s one of the few bars that still allows smoking, which is why I’d been gone so long. It’s still smoky, but the beer selection is still solid. Unfortunately for it there are now moreoptions with equal or better selections and no smoke. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.
My parents bought us patio furniture as a joint early birthday present.
As thanks we took them out to dinner at Blue Dust. Dad reminisced about when that place was a “shot and a beer joint” sitting conveniently at the entrance to the Homestead Works steel mill.
Took Emily out to see The Adjustment Bureau. Good movie with an interesting premise, but it seemed too short to me.
Finally managed to get Linux Mint Debian Edition running on my laptop. The secret was apparently using the usually dormant Windows (gasp!) partition on Emily’s computer to run some SanDisk software to remove the weird read-only partition on my flash drive. LMDE definitely boots faster than the traditional Ubuntu-based versions. I’ll have to play around with it a bit more before I can say for sure which I prefer.
