tintedpane.com

Bans against passenger liquids may not include screening of foodstuffs served on board nor does it ban liquids brought on by aircraft personnel…

FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Scare tactics.

Location: Plano
Service: Good
Go there again?: Probably not.

My sister placed a reservation at this place for my birthday dinner tonight. Incidentally, they extended the Restaurant Week menu so we were able to take advantage of it. Unfortunately things didn’t fair so well after that. The appetizers (Crab Cake and Calamari) were decent enough, and the salads were well prepared. However when it came time for the main course, I was very disappointed. The place claims to be a steakhouse. With aged prime grade beef. It fell quite short in my opinion. I had their prime rib, which really didn’t have any merit being called prime rib. If it’s not even in the same ballpark as Lawry’s, then they shouldn’t dare charge nearly the same prices. The meat just didn’t have much flavor. When I had a bite of the crust, it was overly salty and gave me the impression that they didn’t let it marinate it very long at all. The au jus barely hinted at the flavor of prime rib. My sister’s filet mignon was no better. Granted, filet is a very lean cut, but there simply wasn’t much depth to it. I’m also not a big fan of their broiler technique. If I were to have a steakhouse, steaks would be grilled, not over broiled. It might be more consistent, but just not as flavorful. Fortunately the dessert chef was competent enough. All three desserts (cheesecake, chocolate cake, crème brule) were very tasty. The waitstaff was amicable enough to deduct the charge for my portion of the meal, but unfortunately that doesn’t make up for the poor main course.

Location: Uptown Dallas
Service: Good
Go there again?: Yes

ACouple of friends took me to this steakhouse for Restaurant Week. Atmosphere was semi-formal and quite dimmly lit. The food was quite good, well worth the $35 asking price. The main course was a prime ribeye, ordered rare. The cut of meat was quite good, however I was expecting a bit more char on the outside. Wine pairings matched well with the three courses. Overall a pretty decent place. Pricy. Thanks for dinner guys!

Let’s see what other historical events happened today:

• 1814 - Washington, D.C. burns down during the War of 1812
• 1912 - Our beloved Kuomingtang is founded
• 1949 - Gene Simmons is born (Thank you Family Guy for teaching me!)
• 1980 - 42nd Street opens in Broadway
• 1984 - Truman Capote dies
• 2004 - tintedpane entry

And a few days ago, we lost Pluto as an official planet.

Party on!

An upgrade to my body has been announced:

New additions:

• 10MP sensor, with same sensitivity due to smaller microlens gap
• Integrated sensor dust cleaner and mapping routing for more stubborn dirt
• 9pt higher precision AF from 30D
• 2.5″ screen and removal of old monochrome status LCD
• larger burst buffer — 27 frames JPG, 10 frames RAW, 8 frames RAW+JPG
• High Speed Sync using built-in flash (according to RG.com)
• RGB Histogram in addition to Luminescence

I think the new AF will be nice, along with the burst and HSS. Don’t know about the removal of the status LCD. In either case, I’m still bummed Pixmantec stopped supporting my RawShooter software. Adobe still isn’t ready with Lightroom so I don’t know what I’d use if I upgraded right now.

Two new lenses were also announced:

The 70-200 f/4 IS and the 50mm f/1.2. Both should be pretty sweet. The 70-200 has the same dimensions as the non-IS but weighs about 50grams more. It also has a slightly better MTF score.

The 50mm will be real nice when I get a full-frame camera, e.g. the 5D. Unfortunately both are quite pricey, with the 70-200 asking $1200 and the 50 asking $1500. Not any time soon :-(.

edit: I just found out both are weather sealed. Sweet! I’ll be more comfortable shooting at the track and autocrosses when it’s raining now. Last time I had to shoot and then dry off my lens between sessions.

Old story (2003) about a single wheeled bike(?) using the same gyro principle as the Segway. Wheelie anyone?

Have been removed. The intake was stuck due to an oil soaked gasket. Rubber mallet (deadblow hammer) worked well with light taps in getting it off. The exhaust came out without much fanfare to my surprise. The only snag was that two of the studs decided to come out instead of just the nuts. From the looks of it, oil was leaking from the camshaft/cylinder seals and running down to the exhaust headers where it slowly ate at the gasket and eventually worked through and started leaking into the exhaust valves. You can see the oil on the 6th (leftmost) cylinder.

Notes:

• Next time it would probably be easier to first remove the intake manifold. But only after first removing the thermostat cap, which interferes with the fuel rail on the intake. This way one can inspect more closely the hoses and electrical connections still remaining on the cylinder head.
• I remember now how I got the distributor rotor off last time I changed the timing belt — I used my bicycle toolkit’s 3mm hex bit, in a 1/4 inch size socket with a 1/4″ drive to 3/8″ drive adapter in order to use the torque wrench.