Week 1 in Big D

I've now been in Dallas for a little over a week, long enough to get somewhat settled in, go to my first day of class and an orientation day at work. My schedule seems manageable for now: work on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with classes on Tuesday and Thursday. Monday is a bit of a pain since I have an evening lecture from 7:00-10:00, but it seems fine otherwise. We'll see if I say the same thing in a few weeks as both classes and work ramp up.

In the meantime, this post will focus on food since I like to eat all sorts of good food. After driving here over a grueling two days with Felix, we arrived in time for Restaurant Week which showcases a lot of fancy restaurants at the relatively cheap price of $35 a head for a three-course meal. A portion of the proceeds goes to charity while we get to enjoy partaking in some nice restaurants.

Since we had guests visiting, the first stop was a steakhouse last Monday. Ruth and I had been to Del Frisco a while back on Jeremy's recommendation, so we all went this time for restaurant week. The steak was flavorful and the prime rib was tender so we were satisfied:



Ruth has been getting through her first rotation and to celebrate the completion of her presentation for family practice, we went to Nobu. It was amazing: wakame/cucumber salad followed by an entree (I got the wasabe steak while Roothie got the seared shrimp) accompanied with sushi, and ending with some yummy mousse. I wanted to go again the next day to try the other entree selections, but that would have been excessive :(



Without the provision of Google food and the promise of a regular Silicon Valley paycheck to fund eating out, we eventually had to cook. Yedeh and I cooked up a storm on Sunday, raiding the Chinese supermarket, consulting cookbooks, the Internet, and my relatives in San Francisco to produce: broccoli and mushroom with oyster sauce, steamed fish, some stewed beef shank, and a spare rib soup.



It actually went pretty well, except of course taking us like the entire afternoon. I think we might try cook every Sunday to get us through a few days and once more mid week for the rest of the week, but we'll see if that actually happens!

Hi, I'm a Mac

In very big news, I am now a Mac user instead of PC. I never really liked Macs all that much when we had to use them in middle school mostly due to the single click mouse. It was also a royal pain to try and help residents who had Macs when I was an RCC because I knew virtually nothing about them nor how to fix them. These days the annoyances are keyboard shortcuts that I am used to no longer working, web pages rendering funny on Firefox, and generally being treated like a second class citizen when it comes to client software (like Picasa, for example).

But it sure looks cool :) The keyboard is backlit, the Apple logo on the cover lights up, and those shortcuts that re-arrange the desktop are super slick.

Working at Google for four years has turned me into a web application freak so I spend like 95% of my time on the computer just using a web browser. I suppose it might come down a bit if I ever end up learning/using iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie, but this transition should probably be okay.

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In other news, since my recent marriage, I have: moved out of my house, moved out of the state, currently en route to Dallas, quit my job, preparing to take classes, and switching careers.

It's hard to devote attention to such minor things when I'm no longer a PC user! Fine, my real reason for switching is that the Mac commercial dude is such a stud, especially in Die Hard 4.