(no subject)
Back from Miami. Fun time. Equipment installed. I ate tuna.
Will post more tonight.
Will post more tonight.
2004-04-24
(no subject)
I love Cuban women. They cover the full range of exotica, from pale-skinned blonde hair and blue eyes, to the complete opposite. My tastes on a superficial, aesthetic level tend toward the dark; the warm mocha of skin, the long cascade of black hair, the eyes the color of smoke that drift and waft languidly around the room. The Cuban accent -- in English, Spanish, or Miami Spanglish -- is like no other; a soft, slow laziness of syllables so unlike the rapid staccato of, say, Puerto Rico.
Miami -- downtown. The data center at which I installed my servers was located on 2nd street. Street signs, billboards, store fronts, all in Spanish. The parking attendant knew four words of English: "Five dollars, all day." It took me a little over four hours to drive in from St Pete. I was in and out in an hour. Mission accomplished.
Miami -- South Beach. If I'm going to spend the night in Miami, I'm not going to stay in the Airport Marriott. I got a hotel just north of the Art Deco district, with a geographically challenged name: The Caribbean Ocean Hotel. I was a walk-in, no reservation, and the guy gives me a king bed, with a 5th-floor panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean in its billion shades of white, green, and blue.
A work emergency arose, and I was on my cellphone for a little over an hour, drinking Presidente beer at the hotel tiki bar. It was 88 degrees and the salt breeze was perfect.
Dinner -- South Beach. Nemo Restaurant, a combo indoor/outdoor place coated in hammered copper down to the menus, in the same area of town where Madonna and Lestat have their beach homes. The martini comes half-full in a standard size glass, accompanied by the rest of the martini in a flask the size of a betta goldfish bowl and sitting in a pan of ice. It's warm outside, and as one finishes the half-glass, one refills the glass from the ice-chilled flask to maintain a steady supply of crisp vodka. I think I counted six half-glass refills. I may have lost count. It was a lot of vodka. By the end of the martini, I don't think accurate math was an option.
Tuna. Take a slab the size of a baseball, coat in with nori/seaweed flakes and spices, and flash-fry the first quarter-inch on all sides. The outside is warm and fragrant, the inside is cool and red. Add an herbed rice ball of about the same size, rolled in sesame and ginger, and flash-fried as well. Place both near a wasabi cream sauce, and a soya ginger sauce, and I could probably eat it six times a week.
That evening, I strolled the boardwalk, stopping in a bar or two along the beach. There were some enthusiastic lounge singers who probably will have a long career of enthusiastic lounge singing. The night was balmy and humid -- a 12 oz beer generated about 16 oz of condensation before the beer was complete. When my bartender heard I had just moved to Florida from Atlanta, he asked me to write down a couple restaurant names -- he is moving there next week and doesn't have a job. I smiled nostalgically as I jotted down at least a dozen, plus the address of a website polling the 100-best restaurants in Atlanta. The nostalgia was fleeting -- it's hard to remember that city with the surf crashing pleasantly in the background.
The night in the hotel was pleasant, minus the enthusiastically vocal amorous couple in the room next to me. The sun rising over the Atlantic woke me at daybreak. I closed the drapes and got another three hours.
I fished a bit this morning. I saw a lot of them in the water, but nothing was biting, and I had to get back to work. I drove west through the Glades, retracing my trip down. It's still the tail-end of the dry season, and plumes of smoke dotted the yellow sawgrass clear to the horizon. All told, I saw perhaps 25-30 alligators, coming and going.
I have a mongo load of work to do in the next couple days -- I leave early Thursday morning from Orlando, which means I'll probably drive there Wednesday and spend the night. That gives me three days to finish this code before I have to install the second half of the equipment in Costa Rica. It's going to be tight.
Miami -- downtown. The data center at which I installed my servers was located on 2nd street. Street signs, billboards, store fronts, all in Spanish. The parking attendant knew four words of English: "Five dollars, all day." It took me a little over four hours to drive in from St Pete. I was in and out in an hour. Mission accomplished.
Miami -- South Beach. If I'm going to spend the night in Miami, I'm not going to stay in the Airport Marriott. I got a hotel just north of the Art Deco district, with a geographically challenged name: The Caribbean Ocean Hotel. I was a walk-in, no reservation, and the guy gives me a king bed, with a 5th-floor panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean in its billion shades of white, green, and blue.
A work emergency arose, and I was on my cellphone for a little over an hour, drinking Presidente beer at the hotel tiki bar. It was 88 degrees and the salt breeze was perfect.
Dinner -- South Beach. Nemo Restaurant, a combo indoor/outdoor place coated in hammered copper down to the menus, in the same area of town where Madonna and Lestat have their beach homes. The martini comes half-full in a standard size glass, accompanied by the rest of the martini in a flask the size of a betta goldfish bowl and sitting in a pan of ice. It's warm outside, and as one finishes the half-glass, one refills the glass from the ice-chilled flask to maintain a steady supply of crisp vodka. I think I counted six half-glass refills. I may have lost count. It was a lot of vodka. By the end of the martini, I don't think accurate math was an option.
Tuna. Take a slab the size of a baseball, coat in with nori/seaweed flakes and spices, and flash-fry the first quarter-inch on all sides. The outside is warm and fragrant, the inside is cool and red. Add an herbed rice ball of about the same size, rolled in sesame and ginger, and flash-fried as well. Place both near a wasabi cream sauce, and a soya ginger sauce, and I could probably eat it six times a week.
That evening, I strolled the boardwalk, stopping in a bar or two along the beach. There were some enthusiastic lounge singers who probably will have a long career of enthusiastic lounge singing. The night was balmy and humid -- a 12 oz beer generated about 16 oz of condensation before the beer was complete. When my bartender heard I had just moved to Florida from Atlanta, he asked me to write down a couple restaurant names -- he is moving there next week and doesn't have a job. I smiled nostalgically as I jotted down at least a dozen, plus the address of a website polling the 100-best restaurants in Atlanta. The nostalgia was fleeting -- it's hard to remember that city with the surf crashing pleasantly in the background.
The night in the hotel was pleasant, minus the enthusiastically vocal amorous couple in the room next to me. The sun rising over the Atlantic woke me at daybreak. I closed the drapes and got another three hours.
I fished a bit this morning. I saw a lot of them in the water, but nothing was biting, and I had to get back to work. I drove west through the Glades, retracing my trip down. It's still the tail-end of the dry season, and plumes of smoke dotted the yellow sawgrass clear to the horizon. All told, I saw perhaps 25-30 alligators, coming and going.
I have a mongo load of work to do in the next couple days -- I leave early Thursday morning from Orlando, which means I'll probably drive there Wednesday and spend the night. That gives me three days to finish this code before I have to install the second half of the equipment in Costa Rica. It's going to be tight.