Burlington = Great Food

I figure a little log of my recent vacationlets is in order.

The first weekend in October, we drove up to Burlington, VT, to see Lou Barlow in concert. It's difficult to describe how good he was without feeling that I'm somehow dishonoring my memory of the performance. Suffice it to say, he sang, played acoustic guitar and a very small, old-school synth, which was set up to sound something like a reverberating french horn, and occasionally used a lo-fi mic for effect. The mic was cool, as it seemed a nod to his lo-fi recording days (which have been all of them, save for the most recent album). He also used a record-and-loop device to record a bit of his guitar playing, and then play it back over and over, so that he could do more intricate guitar work or play his synth over it. It sounds cumbersome, but it really was seamless to the listener. He was a veritable one-man-band, and his voice was like velvet, with just the . I don't usually think of singer-songwriters as fantastic vocalists, but this guy knows how to do it right. He looked a bit uncomfortable at first on stage, but he soon played it up to the audience, with little self-depricating anecdotes which had us in stitches. To make a long story short, Lou Barlow, I wanna have your baby.

As for Burlington, it's a cool little town, but didn't really strike me as being a truly functional city. It's got a nice pedestrian street, but it's full of middle-aged, granola yuppies and tourists. That place is so crunchy, I almost broke a tooth. (Sorry about all the bad jokes tonight!) But seriously, the food there was some of the best I've had in ages. We ate at the Five Spice Cafe and Leunig's Bistro. At the Five Spice, I learned first-hand about the different nuances of flavor which can go into such a simple thing as noodles, and I had a delicious, maple-infused Scotch for an after-dinner drink. Yum. The service was friendly and attentive, as well. Top-notch. Leunig's had a great European atmosphere. I had French Toast over a homemade sauce of fresh strawberries, topped with fresh raspberries and blueberries, and a dollop of unsweetened whipped cream. Yowza.

On our second and last night there, we dropped into a totally classy bar, called Wine Works. They had about seven kinds of wine on tap, but the best part about it was that they had a pianist at a baby grand, playing classical music, of all things. When I saw they had a piano, I thought I would be in for a night of "Piano Man" soundalikes. But no... I heard Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy... and then a little Joplin, to top it all off with some ragtime.

Holy schmoly, them were some lip-schmackin' vittles!

(I was going to post about our last trip, as well, but I think I'll save that for another time and spare you any more of my weird sense of humor tonight.)

Computers for Kids

It's been a while, eh? I've been keeping quite busy, despite my new "graduate" status. All the way back in late July, I embarked on a project for my fiance's non-profit, to build a Linux computer lab for a classroom in a public school in the Harlem area of Manhattan. I had to procure equipment (eBay... oy vey!), which included hurdling various difficulties with crappy/faulty computers and not-completely-above-the-board sellers. But in the end, I got ahold of five good, used mini-computers, five nifty, HP flat-panel monitors, a flashy, brand-new Dell server, and all the various peripherals and networking equipment to go with them. I set them up so that the "clients" could boot Linux from the server, over the network. It was pretty cool, in the end, after all the tears and hassle. My progeny was shipped off to the school one week ago. It was supposed to be done, originally, in late August, but for various reasons, both my fault and the sponsor and school's, the deadline was pushed back several times. Bad communication was to blame for many of the trip-ups in the timeframe. And for the record, I have said that I never want to do this again. But time will tell.

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