Windows Live Writer

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Wow – it sounds like someone heard my private rants on the state of blogging tools. The blogosphere is awash with the news that Windows Live Writer Beta was released today. I’ve just downloaded it and it less than 2 minutes managed to set it up to publish to my blog. It’s surprisingly lightweight and responsive, even on my aging Tablet PC.

I’m not going to review it in any detail since it’s been praised and bashed all over the web, but i get the feeling I’ll have to break the ‘No-betas’ rule on my home laptop for this one.

Reviews:

ZDNet: Writer is Microsoft’s first Live killer app

Om Malik: Windows Live Writer, Write On!

Seattle PI: Assessing Windows Live Writer

Paul Kedrowski: Windows Live Writer … Huh?

Update:

Wow – Windows Live Writer is the top search on technorati today:

Perfomancing Firefox

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I've started using Word 2007 Beta as my main blogging client, but I also wanted a light weight blogging tool on my no-Betas-allowed laptop. I tried out BlogJet for a couple of weeks till it's trial expired and then concluded that it wasn't really worth the 30 bucks. Not that it crashing a couple of times and eating my blog posts has anything to do with it. I've been trying to get my hands on w.bloggar, but their website's been down for weeks (doesn't anyone in the blogosphere care?). So a quick web search later, I settled on a lightweight firefox extension that seems pretty popular.

Introducing… Perfomancing Firefox. It seems to have all the basic features: support for multiple blogging services, a rich text and HTML editors, technorati tagging, pings etc. It's got a handful of bells and whistles – support for directly bookmarking a post to del.icio.us (why?), image upload and so on. I guess this will do for any quick and dirty posts that I would have used post-by-email for before I moved to CS2.1.
The only weird thing about performancing (other than its name) is the fact that it, by default, splits your Firefox browser window into two and takes up the bottom half. Like I said earlier, it's main use-case is probably the quick and dirty blog post on something you saw while browsing some other site.

Some recent restaurants…

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I’ve been too busy to write up reviews of every restaurant I’ve been to lately, so I thought I’d write up a quick note on each of them:
1. Benihana’s:- 1200 5th Ave, Seattle, WA Japanese Hibachi Grill. Food was ok. Ambience was pretty good. They seem to have a long list of celebrity clientele looking at the photos at their door. We weren’t really amused by the ‘shrimp the fly’ and other tricks that the cook had on display. Worth a visit.
2. Pogacha: 120 NW Gilman Blvd, Issaquah, WA. “Northwest Cuisine with an Adriatic Flair”: Hmmm… yeah whatever.. Decent food and ambience. Small portions.. the prime card discount made it worth it, though.
3. Wild Ginger: 1401 3rd Ave, Seattle, WA.  Upscale Pan-asian place. Excellent service, decent food. The waiter spent over 10 minutes with us going over the menu… considering we had to wait 30 minutes for a table, that was bearable.

My Blog is moving…

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I totally hate doing this… but I guess this is the way it’s meant to be 🙂

I’m moving my blog from its current home on MSN (nee Windows Live) Spaces to its new home on my own server at blog.umeshunni.com. It took a bit of work over the past couple of weekends, but I’ve finally got it up and running with the latest build of Community Server (CS 2.1) with a bunch of customizations thrown in.

I was wondering what to do about all the existing posts I had on the Spaces blog… should I just let them die? Should I user Community Server’s blog mirroring feature to move everything over? Should I write some code to move them over?

I didn’t want to let them die because I had some good stuff in there and I’d hate for all that stuff to just disappear into the sands tubes of the internet never to be seen again.

Blog mirroring seemed simple enough but I knew I wanted to tweak some of the older posts to take advantage of the more liberal formatting options I had with CS.

It’s too late at night to write new code and again, I wanted some flexibility with what was going into the new blog.

Soo…. I fired up Word 2007, set up my Windows Live Space and my Community Server blog as my blog accounts and clicked on ‘Open existing’. This gave me a list of all the entries I had in the WL space. I clicked on each one, set the account to my CS blog and clicked on Publish as Draft. This published the entry into Community Server. Now all I had to do was to open the entry in the CS blog editor, make the required formatting and tag changes, set the old publish time and re-publish the entry.

A little more involved than blog mirroring or using the MetaWebLog API, but this way I had full control over each entry that was moved over and didn’t have to resort to copying HTML by hand.

Since CS doesn’t support publish-by-email, I guess I’ll be using Word for blogging from now on.

My domain is up and running!

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My domain and website are finally up and running. It's hosted at a free private hosting service and the website itself is just a couple of handwritten asp.net scripts that take my MSN spaces and Flickr RSS feeds and render them on the same page. I've just signed up for google adsense and analytics to get an idea of what the traffic to the site's gonna be like.
Ideas/Thoughts on how to make the site better? Add comments here or send me mail at my domainname@domainname.com.
Check it out: http://www.umeshunni.com/

Sushiman of Issaquah

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It’s been a while since I did a restaurant rant. It’s certainly not been due to a lack of opportunity, but more due to lack of time and enthu to write something up. So, here goes…

Yesterday, the Wife & I decided to try out Sushiman of Issaquah. Located in a nondescript strip mall in Issaquah’s Gilman Village, we went there expecting to find a run of the mill teriyaki/sushi place; So, we were pretty surprised by the modern ambiance and decor inside.

Name: Sushiman of Issaquah

Location:  670 NW Gilman BLVD, Issaquah, WA 98027

Our Order: The Sake Sampler, Sushi Platter w/ the Miso soup. Beef Sukiyaki w/ the Crisp Green Salad.

Pros:

1. The Ambiance: We were pleasantly surprised by the restaurant’s modern decor and warm ambiance. We chose to sit at a table rather than at the Sushi Bar but the tables were a bit too wide for two people to comfortably sit and have a conversation at.

2. The Sake Sampler: At 3 Sakes for $10, this was a pretty good deal. At the time we visited, they had only 3 of their 4 Sakes available, but these three were pretty varied, both in flavor and consistency. I don’t recall their names, but the coconut flavored one was certainly different from anything I had ever tasted before.

3. Fresh Sushi: The sushi platter was fresh and filling. I think they had 6 rolls and 6 nigiri’s.

4. The Miso Soup: The soup was hot and excellent. The only places I had Miso soup before were at local Teriyaki joints and Sushiman’s miso was a cut about the rest. Not to mention the fact that it was served in lacquer bowl and drunk directly from the bowl.

Cons:

1. The salad was lousy and the Sukiyaki was average at best. I didn’t mind the Sukiyaki, but the Wife found it too mild and sweet.

2. The price: The prices were definitely higher than I expected, but not too bad. Not the most expensive sushi I’ve had, but not the best either.

Overall, the food was good , the decor was interesting and it was worth the time. I’d give it ‘B’, will probably visit again.

DC

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DC was so freaking hot! It was 93F on Saturday and we spent the whole day walking from the Union Station/Capitol Hill end of the DC Mall to the Monument/Lincoln Memorial end. Some observations:

  • DC was a lot cleaner, neater and prettier than I expected. Somehow I was expecting a smaller version on Downtown LA there.
  • Everything in DC is Free! All the attractions, all the museums… everything. Quite a contrast from other towns where you pay 30 bucks a pop to go up a freaking mountain or walk on a bridge.
  • DC gets pretty hot in Summer.
  • Lots n lots of fountains along the mall.. I saw down at them with my feet in the water to cool down:

Dipping into a fountain

  • The White House is lame. All you can do there is to take photos from outside the gate:

White House

  • Indique: Great mango lassis! They had a stall at the Smithsonian folk life festival.

Indique

  • The Smithsonian Museum(s) rock! I’ll probably spend a day or two visiting them the next time I’m in DC. This time, I got to see only the Museum of Natural History.

Ichysaurus ?

  • What’s with the goat? One of those ‘what were they thinking when they put this exhibit up’ moments…

Taming a goat

  • That’s some pretty exclusing parking spots they’ve got here…

Pretty exclusive parking

  • Did I mention that it was HOT! It’s good to be back in the Northwest where it’s (at least slightly) cooler.

 

 

Yellowstone Road Trip Day 3: The Lake and more springs

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By Day 3, we were all worn out and eager to get back… Nevertheless, we did drive out to Yellowstone Lake, stopping in between at the Grand Prismatic Spring area where we saw more springs and pools…

The multicoloured Prismatic Spring

   

The Opal and Sapphire pools:

   

The lake itself had nothing to do as we reached there well after all the neighbouring businesses had closed. Gull Point was a good place to get down and walk about… some interesting wildlife and birds around.

   

   

Finally, we drove back to the park entrance via the Mud Cauldron where we saw more bison.

   

Tiring day and we couldn’t wait to head back the next day.

We ended up getting up pretty early on the 30th and driving straight all the way back to Seattle. 770 miles in around 12 hours – stopping only for lunch, gas and coffee 🙂

Yellowstone Road Trip Day 2: The other Grand Canyon, wacky weather and more animals

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Wow – I’ve soo not been able to write up the rest of trip given how busy I’ve been after getting back. But here’s the quick run down:

   

We went to the Grand Canyon at Yellowstone in the midst of some totally wacky weather… it was bright and sunny one moment and snowing 5 minutes later!

   

 

The Lower falls were awesome… especially the view from the brink:

 

   

The upper falls, somewhat less impressive.

Along the day, we saw more animals…

The Elk:

   

 

And the black bear:

 

And as I said earlier, some snow did fall while we were there: