Both Evernote and Changes came in very handy for keeping track of and merging differences between versions 4.0 and 4.6.1 of Scott Wallick’s most excellent veryplaintxt. This upgrade also marks the return of Extended Live Archives (ELA) to my archive page, although that’s separate from the theme itself. (I plan to write up the patching adventure I went through to get ELA working again.)

But I wish that Changes could undo edits after you’ve saved files. I mean, hey, most other text editors can do that (e.g., Smultron, TextEdit and TextWrangler). Also, I really wish those CSS files used whitespace. (How much of a significant performance gain occurs by removing whitespace from CSS?)

Anyhow. As usual, let me know if you encounter new bugs on this site.

I don’t have recipes posted for all of these, but will add them as I find or write ‘em up.

Oh, we’re also not shy about eating leftovers, whether homemade or from take out. Praise freezing and refrigeration!

Savories

• BLT sandwich
• Caprese salad, or Caprese-style sandwich
• Cheese toasties, sometimes with added veggies like tomatoes or onions
• Chicken, roasted; sometimes use the bones in stock afterward
• Chicken sausages roasted with vegetables
• Chili spiced up with chocolate
• Eggs with toast, scrambled or soft-boiled
• Fish prepared in various ways:
  • Baked in a packet, whole or otherwise
  • Broiled, previously marinated or not
  • Pan-fried
  • Poached; great for making fish stock, too!
• Gyoza
• Hummus with chicken topping
• Kedgeree
• Moussaka
• Pasta, usually with tomato, pesto or some creamy cheese sauce
• Pizza
• Posole
• Quesadillas
• Quiche
• Rice (usually leftover) topped with egg (usually fried) and veggies (usually leftover, again)
• Risotto
• Soups, often based on puréed vegetables
• Stuffed vegetables
• Unagi (Japanese broiled eel) with rice
• Vegetables as sides, prepared in various ways:
  • Boiled: peas, beans, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, artichokes, etc.
  • Baked: sweet potatoes or nightshady potatoes
  • Sautéed: carrots, zucchini, chard, mustard greens, sprouts, etc.
  • Steamed: broccoli or cauliflower

Staples

• Apricot jam and chutney
• Bread
• Chicken stock
• Granola
• Some variant on boiled rice, e.g., with stock, herbs and/or spices

Sweets

• Apple galette
• Apple pie, sometimes topped with streusel (crumble)
• Fruit baked with either streusel or cake topping, such as apricots, nectarines, peaches, or plums
• Chocolate chip cookies
• Crêpes
• Ice creams
• Orange cake
• Yellow cake or cupcakes with frosting

Drinks

• Hot chocolate
• Iced tea with mint and cardamom
• Soda lemonade
• Tea, British style, daily

Shipping was damn fast when GreenCine had their warehouse in the Bay Area. Then last summer they moved to Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Over a period of two months, while they transitioned to their new location, delivery was painfully protracted —up to 3 weeks for some discs! Even without throttling, rental shipment now takes as long as Netflix.

As a partial solution, I’ve continued the habit of borrowing DVDs at my local libraries. I go through my Rental Queue, and if a disc exists at a library, I remove it from the queue. This works for mainstream films, TV series and moderately known documentaries.

What other DVD rental solutions are out there, which would better satisfy my video needs? I’d be keen to hear your suggestions.

Thinks I like about GreenCine

• Customer service: Upon receiving my email with concerns about the long-drawn-out shipment times during the warehouse move, they offered an apology, and even credited my account (partial month’s worth). Nice!
• I like how they have two lists for requests: the actual Rental Queue and a Request List. The Request List contains movies and series that are on order, but not yet available for rental. However, see the second item under Annoyances…
• Their Quick Return system. It doesn’t speed up the US Postal Service, but at least GreenCine can put the next disc into the mail, even before they receive a returned item.
• They still have more independent films than Netflix, AFAICT.

GreenCine Annoyances

• Prolonged delivery times, though due to distance rather than throttling.
• My Request List remains filled with unfufilled items. Out of nearly seventy items in my Request List, only one has moved (as available) to my Rental Queue over the past year. (They do send an email notification when such a move occurs.) So the Request List seems like a good idea, but is mostly a disappointment since nothing ever seems to become available from it.
• I have sent in dozens of suggestions for DVD purchases. GreenCine have neither acknowledged nor obtain any of them. Okay, three were acquired, two of which are stuck eternally in the Request List. In fact, I’ve had faster service requesting DVD purchases at my local libraries!
• To my surprise, they still lack some animation, animé and documentary titles: A couple famous David Attenborough series (no Life of Birds, no Life of Mammals), the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender aren’t available for rental yet, even though the second season is.
• My previously enumerated annoyances still hold, with the exception that search response has improved.

Sigh. I think I’ll stick with GreenCine for the time being. I really don’t want to return to the unnecessarily throttled service at Netflix, especially since the ridiculous limitation has been upheld in court.

Update (5 May 2008): In response to this post, GreenCine’s catalog manager recently contacted me. Turns out that the email address for requesting DVD additions is actually catalog (at) greencine (dot) com, instead of dvdrequest (at) greencine (dot) com, as seen on their rental help page. (Hopefully that page will be updated soon.) According to the manager, requests are reviewed monthly, and become likely purchases if popular by customer demand. It’ll be interesting to see if my suggestions will be accepted (or rejected) more quickly…

This is a popular blogging meme, yet none of the blogs (mostly on LiveJournal) include a link to the actual list —perhaps because it’s dynamically generated based on LibraryThing users. For your curiosity, here it is.

I limit my responses to the top 100 books; the algorithm generates 10,000 books, which is a bit too long for this exercise.

• A boldface title means I’ve read the book.
• An italicized title means I didn’t finish reading the book.
• A title that’s been struck through means I couldn’t stand the book, or really have no interest in reading it.
• An unadorned title means I haven’t read the book, for no particular reason.

Listy below ze cutte. Thanks to Kathleen and Thida for the inspiration!

Based on LibraryThing’s (LT) top unread books as of 4 October 2007. The numbers in parentheses are a tally of LT users who tagged the book as unread.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (149)
2. Anna Karenina (132)
3. Crime and Punishment (121)
4. Catch-22 (117)
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude (115): I just couldn’t make my way through this brick; it was too much like a dry history textbook.
6. Wuthering Heights (110)
7. The Hobbit (104)
8. Life of Pi (94): Unlike to the vast majority of the world’s reading population, I hated this book. Tedious and insulting to my philosophical tendencies. I wanted to hurl it across the room many times —but I didn’t, ‘coz I’m nice to library books.
9. The Name of the Rose (91)
10. Don Quixote (91): Read excerpts during high school.
11. Moby Dick (86)
12. Ulysses (84)
13. Madame Bovary (83)
14. The Odyssey (83) I read a highly abridged version of this while in middle and high school.
15. Pride and Prejudice (83): One of my faves, but sadly made into so many disappointing derivatives. (Yes, I loathed the Bridget Jones’ Diary film.)
16. Jane Eyre (80)
17. A Tale of Two Cities (80)
18. The Brothers Karamazov (80)
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (79): On the to-read list.
20. War and Peace (78)
21. Vanity Fair (74)
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife (73)
23. The Iliad (73): As with the Odyssey, only managed to read excerpts during school.
24. Emma (73)
25. The Blind Assassin (73): Another disappointment; I think I prefer Atwood’s short stories over her longer works.
26. The Kite Runner (71)
27. Mrs. Dalloway (70)
28. Great Expectations (70)
29. American Gods (68): Fun! Reminds me why I enjoy Gaiman’s writing.
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
31. Atlas Shrugged (67): Anthem is a shorter, more easily digestable Rand work.
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books (66)
33. Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
34. Middlesex (66)
35. Quicksilver (66)
36. Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65): Another disappointing derivative. Not all derivative works are this mediocre.
37. The Canterbury Tales (64)
38. The Historian (63)
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
40. Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
41. Brave New World (61): Another favorite.
42. The Fountainhead (61): See comment for Atlas Shrugged.
43. Foucault’s Pendulum (61)
44. Middlemarch (61)
45. Frankenstein (59)
46. The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
47. Dracula (59)
48. A Clockwork Orange (59)
49. Anansi Boys (58)
50. The Once and Future King (57)
51. The Grapes of Wrath (57): I remember the sense of trepidation I had in high school when starting to read this, especially since I couldn’t stand The Red Pony or The Pearl during middle school. But I ended up really liking it!
52. The Poisonwood Bible (57)
53. 1984 (57)
54. Angels & Demons (56)
55. The Inferno (56)
56. The Satanic Verses (55): On my to-read list, sitting on the bookshelf for years…
57. Sense and Sensibility (55)
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
59. Mansfield Park (55)
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (54)
61. To the Lighthouse (54)
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
63. Oliver Twist (54)
64. Gulliver’s Travels (53)
65. Les Misérables (53)
66. The Corrections (53)
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52): A fun read, except for the last third of the book. Sigh.
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (52): Had potential, but, hmmm, meh.
69. Dune (51): I’ve been told to put aside the abomination that was the David Lynch film…but I can’t. There are so many other books I’d rather read.
70. The Prince (51)
71. The Sound and the Fury (51): Another high school book where fellow students had warned me about its difficulty. But as with Steinbeck books, I came to like it.
72. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (51)
73. The God of Small Things (51)
74. A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – present (51)
75. Cryptonomicon (50)
76. Neverwhere (50)
77. A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
79. Dubliners (50): I was a teenager when I read this, and was left rather unimpressed. It wasn’t dreadful, but was rather forgettable, enough so that I’m disinclined to finish it.
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
81. Beloved (49)
82. Slaughterhouse-five (49)
83. The Scarlet Letter (48)
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48): On the long to-read list.
85. The Mists of Avalon (47)
86. Oryx and Crake (47)
87. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
88. Cloud Atlas (47)
89. The Confusion (46)
90. Lolita (46)
91. Persuasion (46)
92. Northanger Abbey (46)
93. The Catcher in the Rye (46): Not bad, though wasn’t terribly groundbreaking, which speaks of my generation, perhaps.
94. On the Road (46)
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
96. Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (45): This was a gift from one of my favorite managers, many years ago. Alas, it’s another one on my bookshelf waiting to be read.
98. The Aeneid (45)
99. Watership Down (44) Another childhood favorite.
100. Gravity’s Rainbow (44)

1. What are your favorite foods? So many! I’ll cheat and list (some of) my favorite cuisines: Californian, French, Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Middle Eastern (e.g., Lebanese, Persian), Vietnamese. I also love appetizers and snackie sized foods; yes, I’m a sucker for small plate menus.
2. What foods do you hate? I am a picky omnivore, so this list also would be rather long. :-/ The most obvious is beef, and most any (mammalian based) meat.
3. Foods you like but are embarrassed to admit? Cheese puffs, crunchy chicken skin, and, sometimes, bacon (crispy, please; notice the pattern?).
4. Strangest food you’ve eaten and enjoyed? Fresh sea urchin roe (uni, in Japanese). Pastries filled with durian; I think it was durian at the time…
5. Cooking failures that still rankle? I still cannot make the Ultimate Butter Chicken Curry (makhani murgh, if you’re familiar with Indian menus). At least not consistently. The same goes for chocolate ice cream, which often ends up too hard or too greasy.
6. Ingredients you don’t want to consider living without? Fresh produce, fresh seafood, tea, cheese, durable goods (pasta, flour)… Er, should I just say food?
7. Cuisine you’d like to know more about? Another long list. I really enjoy Moroccan and Ethiopian food, and would love to learn more about African cuisines. More interesting, and/or unconventional uses of legumes, nuts and grains. Also, discovering more fruits, vegetables and herbs. Okay, so the latter two sentences aren’t cuisines (cheating!).
8. Foods you hated but have grown to love? Do beer and wine count? Also cilantro, lemongrass and ginger. Although I wouldn’t say I love those —mostly that I’ve adapted to their flavors and appreciate how intrinsic they are to cooking.

While it’s great that I could export my rental history from Netflix (i.e., download the webpage), I’m disappointed that I could not easily download my 1600+ ratings. One can view them only 20… items… at… a… time. I’ve got better things to do than spending time paging through all of that data. Customer support offered no helpful advice on this, alas. (They kept confusing “rental history” with “rating history”; it became exasperating.)

I like GreenCine’s catalog, and I like that they’re (another) local company. I love how they don’t slow down their delivery service.

GreenCine isn’t perfect, of course. Not all of my DVD requests have been fulfilled, although a few have been added to their collection. (Whether those were due to my requests, or those of other customers, or selections initially made from their employees, I wouldn’t know.) I have yet to contact customer support at GreenCine. I don’t know how that experience will compare with Netflix.

We’ll see. But for now, the change has been for the better.

Timewarp…

When I was a little kid, I used to have a subscription to Safari Animal Wildlife Cards —a mail order service suspiciously similar to those recipe card subscriptions from the 1970s. Nice, easy to read, tabular descriptions, color-coded habitats and maps, with, of course, lovely color pictures. Oh, yes! How I wanted to collect a card for every single animal species, to look over, read, absorb…

Needless to say, the subscription didn’t last forever, only for a few years O:-) and, heh, after filling several trays of cards. Nor did I experience a long-term career in biology. But the advent of the Web roused an old fantasy: To develop an online library detailing each animal, each plant, each mineral, each naturally occurring thingie. Cross-referenced to other sites, other publications, even differing, conflicting viewpoints, if relevant and respectfully presented. Chock full of gorgeous, useful pictures, drawings, charts, clear descriptions, sound files (bird calls!), video clips, and, and, and.

Let’s return to recent reality, with the Encyclopedia of Life, a potentially useful and terrific undertaking. Because there’ll always be a special place in my heart for natural history, and because I’m Deadly Question Grrl, I’m filled with both interest and skepticism about the EoL.

So…?

The Encyclopedia of Life will be a freely accessible site. The organizers claim that it’ll become usable by the middle of 2008 (1). However, they estimate it’ll take about a decade to input information on all of our planet’s species.

In addition, the EoL aims for a wiki-esque, moderated system (2). I wonder how disputes will be handled? (“Do you prefer a side of cladistic or phenetic systematics with your order?” —a question which semi-humorously sprang up during a botanical taxonomy course.) The home page claims they’ll accept contributions “from scientists and amateurs alike.” Will there be the exclusionary oligarchy, often seen in academia? (True, that attitude can be found in any field.) Or will it be more open like Wikipedia?

Let the interrogation continue!

They claim a desire to become “an ecosystem of websites,” which tickles my intellectual fancy. I wonder how cross-referencing to other sources will work? For example, would a bird entry refer to relevant webpages at, say, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology? Or, how about links to online identification keys? How judicious would they be about the selection of references and bibliographic links?

They wish to document the 1.8+ million species. Daunting! But, with collection obsessive in mind, I wonder how they’ll also describe (or, perhaps more sanely, list or refer to) the variants, varieties, subspecies, and cultivars?

Speaking of (technical) obsession, I wonder how navigable and accessible the site will become? They haven’t fleshed out an accessibility policy but EoL’s FAQ mentions future support for mobile devices. The home page has a Flash video. But what if you don’t or can’t have Flash? Have poor vision, movement disabilities, or hard of hearing? Will there be a decent glossary, searching, etc.? There are certainly no-brainer techniques they could implement (e.g., sensible use of alt and title attributes, abbr tags, breadcrumbing, and so forth), but giant sites (and networks of sites) are notorious for being inconsistent, awkward, slow, or confusing. Again, daunting.

I wonder if they’ll survive? Look at the All Species Foundation (3), which stopped activity in 2004. Sad, considering how respected organizations participated, including the National Science Foundation and the California Academy of Sciences. I hope the EoL won’t ignore currently inactive resources, seemingly redundant ones like WikiSpecies, or the many other online encyclopedias. No point reinventing the wheel of research, when it’s unnecessary.

I wonder if they’ll do more than survive? (4) As an information (not merely data) provider and reference authority, I wonder if they’ll grow to have as big an influence and as high usage as Wikipedia or even Google? If funding shrinks, will they be able to maintain momentum, either by professional biologists or volunteers?

In response to questions about how the Encyclopedia of Life will do better than previous online biology resource, they cite modern search engine and mashup technology as the keys. Sounds reasonable to utilize such tools, but I hope a dependence on them doesn’t become limiting or overwhelming to users. The bottom line, as with most projects (software or otherwise), is that a human (or a group of them) has ultimate authority and responsibility over the content, and how it’s presented (language-wise, not necessarily layout). Don’t disregard that.

Impressions

The EoL is, like most of the Internet, under construction. Their FAQs respond to many questions earnestly. Some of the responses seem vague, sometimes a bit heavy on the hand-waving jargon-speak. Policy development (for use, contribution and access) can be tricky, and should be as well considered and constructed as the technical aspects of any site. Although, keep in mind that they are literally starting construction.

There are a few demonstration pages, available in both HTML and PDF. Unfortunately, there’s hardly any webpage interaction, not even the links. The entire entry content consists of a single image. Try reading that with a PDA or screenreader. On the other hand, actual text is presented only in descriptive popups, which appear while mousing over the page sections. Useful definitions, but difficult to read. Honestly, the demos ought to be real webpages. It’s okay if the links haven’t been all verified, we accept graceful degradation in many forms ; they should at least have some expected behavior.

A particularly ambitious aspect of each entry is the Novice to Expert View scale in the sample entries, located on the left side above the Table of Contents. Selecting a view level will dynamically change the content displayed in the central column, as well toggle the Expert References section. Check out the novice and expert polar bear pages, as examples. The demos show four levels of viewing, but will there be a demand for such a range? What determines the middle ranges of granularity, anyhow? Would even having only two (novice and expect) levels for every entry be excessive data and effort? Perhaps allowing varying levels of information from species to species would be a more reasonable and flexible approach, depending on the level of contributions and resources.

In addition, the EoL provides detailed lists of sources and partners (including the Wikimedia Foundation). It’ll interesting to see who else joins the project, or leaves. (Ideally, the latter would occur as mutually beneficial and improved mergings.)

A couple nights ago I was a bit bleary while Simon told me about the EurekAlert article, and misread the title as “World’s leading scientists renounce Creationists’ Encyclopedia of Life.” Ugh, the intelligent design people wasting resources and spreading misinformation, yet again —Good thing sensible folks are against it, but it causes a drain away from worthwhile endeavors —D’oh! That’s not what the article actually says. Whew. Hey, this really looks intriguing… And that’s what sparked this post. Odd where writing ideas come from, in this case, a near misinterpretation followed by keen curiosity.

I look forward to watching and reading the Encyclopedia of Life. I hope this ambitious project succeeds and grows well. (Cue Star Trek: The Next Generation opening theme.)

References

1. “World’s leading scientists announce creation of ‘Encyclopedia of Life’“, EurekAlert, 8 May 2007.
2. “Encyclopedia of Life,” Wikipedia.
3. “E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life gets over $50M in funding,” Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing, 9 May 2007.
4. “New online encyclopedia to catalog all the world’s species,” John Timmer, Ars Technica, 9 May 2007.

I rarely post about personal things, but after the event happened I kept thinking of writing about our vendor experiences. So after a year of mulling it over, here it is. >:-)

Most notably, I recommend the photographer and florist we worked with, without reservation.

“Erm, all you can think about are the services, not the people, your guests?” Ah, please, read on.

Photograph copyright © 2006 Rhee Bevere.

Photography

Our photographer, Rhee Bevere (formerly texture&color), was the one who captured the memories of the reception so perfectly. The place, the food, and most especially, the people. Moreover, these images elicit fond feelings for folks who nowadays I rarely have a chance to see.

Rhee’s humor, warm and direct manner made her a joy to work with. We wanted a candid, journalistic tone to the photography, and her style matched perfectly with our wishes. If I try to recall specific moments from our reception, all I come up with is, admittedly, usually a blur. But my memory is refreshed and filled with delight whenever I look through the pictures, and see the expressions and gestures of our friends, family and ourselves. Her pictures are at my gallery, under the events section.

Floral decorations

Florist Carol Ralles of Design with Flowers captured our taste in gardens with her superb floral decorations. We wanted to focus on table arrangements, with an emphasis on a Mediterranean, English garden feel. Casual, natural, with a touch of elegance. Too many contradictory adjectives there, you think? Nope. Her work was an excellent combination of creativity and flexibility. Marvelous.

Photograph copyright © 2006 Rhee Bevere.

Music

Arranging the auditory environment for a Sunday afternoon tea was tricky. We wanted to avoid vocals (too disruptive to conversation), so a DJ was out of the question. There wasn’t enough room for dancing, and we had little interest in dancing at the event. (Good conversation and food have much higher priority than dance, IMHO). Friendly background music, like, I’ll confess, the music in the movie Amélie. O:-) Gentle, somewhat whimsical bistro music. Picky, hunh? Our caterers pleasantly surprised us, and found them: the Baguette Quartette.

Photograph copyright © 2006 Rhee Bevere.

Ring-a-ding

Both Simon and I would like to thank Karen Parrish and Kathy Holm of the Jeweler’s Bench for helping us design and order our rings from James Binnion. Sadly, this jewelry shop is closed: a visit to downtown Los Gatos last month revealed another business at the location. They have run it for over three decades, and there was an article from 2002 about their mother’s impending retirement. So it looks like they finally shut their doors. Karen and Kathy were so easy to work with, amicable and able to comprehend our desire for elemental yet refined objets d’art.

Correction (10-Sept-2007): The Jeweler’s Bench is still open. (See comments.) Yay!

Cake

La Patisserie in Cupertino makes awesome cakes and pastries. While their baker does apply some amount of artistic license (e.g., he didn’t use a particular color we requested, a trivial yet noticeable thing), the cake turned out beautiful and tasty. Delicate génoise sponge, not a heavy, trite buttercake. (I do like buttercake in some applications, like a good poundcake, but not in a wedding cake.) Filled with luscious chocolate mousse in the bottom tier, and nummy lemon mousse in the middle one. They even made the top tier with mocha and chocolate mousse fillings, which Simon and I gobbled up gleefully days later. I’m also glad that they have a retail store from which to purchase delicacies six days a week.

Photograph copyright © 2006 Rhee Bevere.

Minor minuses

Nothing is completely perfect, of course. While the food, waitstaff and decorations were excellent, we had a few issues with the caterer, Delectables. The caterer, after all, takes up the lion’s share of one’s budget for this type of event.

• Our theme was afternoon tea. Unfortunately, they failed to prepare the tea properly. Even though they got the tea we wanted (a nice Assam from Peet’s —I hadn’t discovered Upton’s Tea Imports yet), we asked them if they knew how to make hot tea (to which they responded positively and confidently), the end result was disappointing. Somehow they managed to make incredibly bitter tea. I found it nearly undrinkable. They claimed they timed it and didn’t over-steep. But perhaps they put too much tea into each pot they made? It tasted as if they placed an entire tin of leaves per quart-sized pot. (A few tablespoons would’ve sufficed.) Perhaps we should’ve given them a tea brewing recipe (or demonstration?) during our meetings, just to be clear.
• We weren’t told the name of the waitstaff captain (head waiter) before the party, who coordinated the event onsite from beginning to end. We had thought it would be the event coordinator herself. But she was present for only part of the time. She had given us her cellphone number, but it was out of service on the day of the reception. Things worked out in the end, but more upfront communication of who’d be where and when would’ve set our expectations more realistically, and lower the stress of a naturally stressful event.
• They made a wonderful effort to find the Baguette Quartette for us. However, the event coordinator seemed quite cagey about giving us any info about the musicians, even avoiding telling us the band’s name after several inquiries. Were they afraid that they’d lose money? We would’ve still been willing to go through Delectables to have that band. Fortunately, we got a business card directly from the musicians at the party.
• Delectables’ liquor policy was to purchase the wine themselves. Otherwise, they’d charge a corkage fee. Their wine advice wasn’t as helpful as I would’ve expected with that practice: the beer they provided was good (Hoegaarden Witbier), but the wine was mediocre (Banrock Station Chardonnay). I’m hardly a drink connoisseur, but I know when I like or dislike something. I would’ve preferred obtaining the wine and beer ourselves, without a corkage “penalty,” in order to get something we wanted.

Another awkward aspect of our reception adventure was the venue. The Saratoga Foothill Club is a lovely, Arts and Crafts building, designed by Julia Morgan. Being a historic monument, they have understandably strict rules in order to preserve it. However, both we and the caterer encountered confusion when trying to get clarification on some practical matters, like insurance. Sometimes communication with the site manager was unclear. For example, at one point Simon asked about some legal points in the contract, which the manager was unable to explain. In the end, though, all the i’s became properly dotted, and we enjoyed having our party at such a charming place.

Food

I want to reiterate that the food was fabulous, and Delectables did a great job at the presentation and preparation. They included gorgeous displays of carved fruit and molded pastries, at no additional cost. They very patiently and smoothly organized a highly fiddly menu of multiple phases: passed hors d’oeuvres with alcoholic drinks, a buffet consisting of amazing finger sandwiches and other savories, another buffet of scones and mini-sweets, readying for the toast stage, as well as serving the cake.

Photograph copyright © 2006 Rhee Bevere.

The waitstaff thoughtfully prepared plates of hors d’oeuvres, savories and cake, although sadly they didn’t manage to save us scones or mini-sweets. (We knew their scones would be good, though, as we had a test meal during the caterer selection process months earlier). Delectables also saved and packaged up leftovers and unopened bottles of drinks for us. We ate well for several days!

Photograph copyright © 2006 Rhee Bevere.

Selecting a caterer or event coordinator for a big, complex party ain’t easy. We deliberated over Delectables and another organization. I don’t know if that other group would’ve fared better, to be honest. (The key point was that their estimate was 30% to 40% higher than Delectables. Everyone has their budget and limits.) The regrets were small in comparison to the fun we had, which is really what matters.

Perhaps my criticism of the caterer and venue seems harsh, but it’s here because they didn’t solicit feedback, compared with a couple of vendors who did. (Not that each and every vendor should actively seek out customer opinions, of course. But I feel that those who perform complicated, costly tasks should be open to review.) The lesson from this is to have the courage to discuss any aspect of an elaborate event which might encounter hitches. Even something as seemingly simple as making a pot of tea.

Needless to say, the newer, slower service disappointed me.

I heard about GreenCine last year. They’re located in the Bay Area, and their collection overlaps more with my own video preferences: independent and international films, animé, documentaries. I recently started a subscription there, so will be comparing their service with Netflix’s (both at the 2-disc at a time level) over the next several months.

Current observations

Netflix’s advantages:

• Huge collection. Distribution centers throughout the United States.
• They list the contents of each disc for each DVD series.
• Overall clear, straightforward webpage design and navigation, except as noted below.

Netflix’s disadvantages:

• Nasty throttling, resulting in delivery delays.
• No more Saturday delivery.
• Don’t carry some hard to find independent, non-domestic or animation pieces.
• RSS feeds behave badly (at least the one I had used for new DVD releases): Kept updating the same articles over and over, which applied to dozens (sometimes 100+) at a time. It didn’t matter if I removed the articles from my reader, they just…kept…coming…back. Seems like they programmed the feed incorrectly (e.g., messed up pubDates?). Had to delete the feed to keep myself sane, so lost an easy way to hear about new releases.
• Annoying Ajaxy “lightbox” whenever I add a disc to my queue.
• Annoyingly huge titletips (like Snap) when mousing over disc titles, although this can be turned off.

GreenCine’s advantages:

• No throttling!
• Saturday delivery.
• Catalog includes many hard to find independent, non-domestic or animation works. Yet they also carry some mainstream movies and series.
• Nicely detailed form for advanced searches.
• Easy to navigate website, except as noted below.

GreenCine’s disadvantages:

• Aggravating navigation menu at the top of the page keeps dropping down whenever my mouse moves over it. Why do online vendors persist in using this frustrating structure? Even Amazon does this, sadly. They should realize that DOM (formerly known as DHTML) bits can be designed in more elegant, accessible ways. Dropdown or flyout menus should activate on click (on focus), not on mouseover.
• Sometimes quick search seems very slow (e.g., 1 to 3 minutes). The advanced search, oddly, doesn’t seem as slow.
• They don’t list the contents of each disc within a DVD series.
• They don’t carry as many old television series DVDs as Netflix. Will need to see how their request system responds here.
• Emails are in full HTML. So far cannot find a plain text alternative.
• Annoying Flash banners. Netflix used to do this but then stopped, AFAICT (unless it’s seasonal?). I wish GreenCine would lose them.
• A popup window appears whenever I add a disc to my queue. I’d prefer to see such updates on the current page (inline), rather than opening another one.
• Only one distribution center in the Bay Area, which is fine by me, but might result in slower shipments for customers outside of California.
• If you get three or more discs at a time, the service rate is more expensive than Netflix, by an additional $2 to $4 more per month.

[via BoingBoing]