When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · June
· · · · 22 (3 entries)
Arms Reach · A friend had an opening in a gallery out in Deep Cove and it was my birthday, so we drove out and went looking for dinner after. At the gallery, the jazz trio (combined age well over 200) played old-fashioned clarinet tunes, so weirdly slow that the flavor was more Twin Peaks than Benny Goodman. Down at the end of the road the Arms Reach Bistro overlooks the cove, and I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind the trip. With two high-pressure jobs in the family we eat out once or twice most weeks: Japanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Thai, Indian, uh, can you spot a pattern? Very Vancouver, but we realized that it had been a long time since we’d dined out à la round-eye. The carpaccio appetizer was very good and my chicken penne with aioli was maybe the best dish I’ve eaten this year. The room was nice, the view beautiful, they had a very fine local Pale Ale on tap, and the bill was reasonable. The jazz trio (combined age maybe 75) covered Freddy Freeloader with real grace, stretching it out and even playing gently outside; what a nice evening.
Oceanspray, Creambush, Ironwood · These are all names for Holodiscus discolor; it’s a Pacific-Northwest native and the last of the names is a translation of what the aboriginal people called them, apparently the wood is hard enough to make knitting needles and so on. It’s three years since we put it in, and the first year it’s flowered ...
Puzzling Search Study · I glanced at Tristan Louis’ Search Engine Comparison, thinking it was interesting but not very useful. I was surprised to see a few other bloggers discussing it as though it meant something. The number of pages that the various engines claim to have indexed, and the number they claim to return for any search, really don’t mean much. First of all, nobody’s got the time to look at more than a few dozen results—studies show that most people will never look past the first page. Secondly, even if you wanted to look at all the results, the engines probably couldn’t show them to you anyhow. Third, what matters is whether you get what you’re looking for. Almost all the modern engines do a pretty damn good job of getting you something appropriate and useful in the first handful of results. Who cares about the next million?
