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In just a few days, I’ll be headed out with the guys for a little Okay Samurai reunion out in San Francisco, where Dave lives. Also, my paper that was due on the Monday after we get back, got pushed to the following Monday. A whole 7 more days to procrastinate! It’s just nice because I won’t have to be worrying about it all weekend. We’ll be out there Thursday night through Sunday, and I can’t wait to get out there. There are so many things to do, but here’s a list of things I really hope we get to do:

• Visit Alcatraz
• Watch Dave perform at O’Neill’s Irish Pub
• Visit Minor Studios‘ office on Fremont
• Rent bikes and ride across the Golden Gate Bridge over to Sausalito or Tiburon
• Wii Sports showdown
• Burritos from La Taqueria the Mission District
• Ride a cable car at Powell St, have a Beard Papa creampuff in the food court

Those last two bullet items, I have no idea anything about, but Dave put it in the list of possible things to do, so we’ll see what happens! You can bet that Dave and I will be taking tons of pictures and videos to document the weekend…

It was like watching Pee Wee kids versus…well, the Patriots.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/recap?gameId=271028017

The growth of new restaurants in the N. Arlington area has somewhat slowed down as builders continue to put up new condos and apartments. Welcome Restaurant 3 to the Clarendon night scene. Restaurant 3 is the latest creation of involving the owner of one of my favorite burger and beer spots - Whitlow’s. It occupies the lot that, thankfully now defunct neon-green eyesore Mama Quan’s used to claim. The old building was knocked down, and a new, very nice looking structure was put in its place about a month and a half ago.

I finally got around to meeting with some friends for dinner there, and so far it got off on the wrong foot…At first sight, the place looks very nice, the menu a little sparse, but all the essentials were represented (beef, chicken, vegetarian, duck, etc.). We sat in the bar dining area, which turned out to be very loud, but bearable. Average entree price ranged from $14-$28, pretty standard. I started with the grilled Brie platter for the table, and noticed a very strong charcoal taste. It wasn’t bad, but turned out to be a theme with everyone’s dinner later…

It turns out that I’ve become a huge fan of pork chops. It’s such a simple thing to order at restaurants, but when you get a pork chop done right, it’s amazing. (yeah, I said it - amazing.) I ordered it medium as usual, and it came with a side of mashed potatoes, and diced apples. Here starts the bad news, the chops were dry. Nowhere near medium, and also had the strong charcoal taste. Two strikes. It wasn’t just me, the fillet mignon that was ordered was cooked correctly, but had the same overpowering smoky taste. Not good.

I’ll have to give it a “just ok” and temporarily withhold judgment as it’s less than two months old and they still have some kinks to work out, but in the highly competitive N. Arlington restaurant business, you don’t have that long to get things working right. Some suggestions: clean the excess residue off your grill, check the temperature of your meat before you serve it, and put in some noise muffling in the bar area somehow and you’ll be ahead of the game. Until then, for those in the Arlington area, I’d recommend another favorite of mine, Tallula. It has similar prices, superior pork chops and better ambiance. If you’ve been to Restaurant 3 and disagree, let me know what you thought!

Website: Restaurant Three

NY Times: AOL to Trim 2,000 Jobs in a Continuing Overhaul

I’m still here.  The next few months should be interesting.

This weekend was a busy one with both my Mom and Amanda’s birthdays to celebrate.
For my Mom’s birthday we met at Bangkok 54 in South Arlington. I’ve heard good things about it, and passed it many times on the way to the Arlington Cinema n’ Drafthouse but never eaten there. The food was good, above average for some of the Thai places that I’ve eaten. On the other hand, I can confirm the common complaint that the restaurant is on the noisy side, and it wouldn’t hurt to investigate some noise dampening.

Amanda’s birthday celebration spanned two weekends. If you haven’t checked out my Flickr photostream, pictures from last weekend’s limo excursion out to the Leesburg wineries is up here. Last night we celebrated again with more friends in DC at one of our favorite places, Matchbox. Of course we got our favorite sliders with addictive onion strings, washed it down with a few De Koninck beers, and followed it up with a few more at Buffalo Billiards in Dupont. Busy weekend, but ready for this week to get started.

I did it. I completed the Army Ten Miler for the second straight year in a row. This time was much more challenging than last year mostly due to my lack of sticking to a training schedule. Despite my best efforts to post here in order to force myself to run more frequently - work, school, sleep, TV, and basically anything trumped training days. This time around I only ran 136.6 miles over 22.4 hours in 6 months. The breaks in the chart below is when I was lazy.

Unlike last year, the weather was brutally hot. You know you’re in for a long day when you’re hot before you even start running. Last year the temperature was nice and cool, almost cold, which is good because you heat up a ton over the course of 10 miles. Unofficially, I finished in 103 minutes, which works out to be 10:18 per mile. Not great, since last year I finished in ~95 mins, but I was just happy to finish at all. Unfortunately one person didn’t make it through the oppressive heat and passed away at GW Hospital. You can read about that here.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m up to running it three times in a row. I have 6 months to sit around, get fat and decide later I suppose.

Update: Official Results are in - 92:56 total time!

Vimeo

It’s old, but I stumbled on it again today. Love the piano.

Yesterday proved to be a very successful day for this little site o’ mine, primarily because of the India video that I posted on Vimeo. As much as I’ve tried to not talk about my site in public, mention it in passing at work, or just shamelessly promote it - it really is exciting to have more people to interact with. Yesterday I received about 7-8 times as much traffic as normal which garnered 2 random comments. I never get random comments.

Anyways, this is as good a time as any to draw attention to some additions to the info intensive sidebar of mine. I’ve added in an “I Like Music” section, which is a feed of the songs that I stumble upon while listening to my favorite internet radio site, Pandora. My Pandora profile is here, and my personalized station that you can listen to is here. Pandora has a great database of information about any artist, song or album along with links to buy the songs on Amazon or iTunes.

I’d also like to call attention to 2 new additions to my blogroll. Two friends from JMU and Luray, Ben Markowitz and Chuck Bowen. Ben’s site is a blog with a link to his portfolio, and Chuck’s is a frequently updated movie review site. C-bo is extremely knowledgeable about movie history, directing and always has a eye for a good movie.

Anyways, check out those two sites and keep an eye out for what I’m digging on Pandora. Thanks for reading!