masimuddy

Hidden on a quiet street near downtown Mountain View lies a 2 star Michelin rated restaurant named Chez TJ. Most of the restaurants of this caliber seem to be in San Francisco (I’m new to the area and I’m still exploring) so a friend and I decided to sample the local establishment. The atmosphere is relaxed and quiet, and rather romantic in this old Victorian house. The service is prompt and friendly.

You can choose between the 4 course gastronomic menu or the 12 course tasting menu. I chose the tasting menu, to experience a larger range of offerings, and had a very pleasant evening as a result. The food was presented beautifully and the wine pairing with the food was excellent.

The meal started with more simple and subtle tastes and progressively got more adventurous. Some items that stood out for me were:

Glazed sweet potato soup with a vandouvan marshmallow - the soup was perfect velvety texture, and being complimented by a marshmallow was quite surprise but very enjoyable.

Artisan fois gras and apple smoked custard - Fois gras is on of my favorites, but the the pairing with the apple flavouring was magnificent.

Lobster and sweetbread ravioli - Cooked perfectly and flavored with truffles which made the dish absolutely exquisite.

The staff mentioned they change one dish fairly often, so there can always be something new to try.

Chez TJ is great for a quiet dinner of exceptional food and wine, and if you aren’t to concerned with the upper limit of your bill.

see more info at >

My friend and former Ivrea colleague Noel Perlas is giving away a moleskin. You can check out the post on his blog. He regularly blogs on Interaction Design related topics.

Video : Bad Day at the office!

I saw this video, which in itself was amusing, of people mad and angry at their computers, probably because they didn’t work “appropriately”. Interestingly in most cases, the human took out their frustration with the monitor. Of course, the monitor is only the output of the computer. The evil brains of the computer are in the little beige box where the conspiring CPU lies. It seems that people attribute the characteristics of the computer with the output device, and not surprisingly, that’s where they take out their frustrations.Apple has for a long while been creating integrated desktop computers. Physically merging the monitor and the other guts. This of course more closely mimics the mental model users have of the computer, and so if they take out their frustrations, the evil brain parts will go along with the monitor.

No more innocent monitors will die, while CPUs go unpunished.

Though, I don’t have any proof that someone got that angry with their mac.

A really nice video that helps communicate the idea of the 10 dimensions. It’s a great piece of communication that simplifies a rather difficult concept.

Nokia’s Ovi is Nokia’s newly announced internet service brand. While starting as a Music store and a Gaming store the brand promise seems to be much more - “It will also be an open door to web communities, enabling people to access their content, communities and contacts from a single place, either directly from a compatible Nokia device or from a PC.”

It will be interesting to see how this service will evolve and what they have planned. It seems to have some aspects of a content network I spoke of in my thesis, and allowing people’s digital content to be more accessible on their different devices.
(For full disclosure, I used to work at Nokia’s Research Group as a concept designer)

The newest patch to the popular World of Warcraft will include integrated voice chat. This will provide a big change to the way players with socially interact with each other.

It’s true that players have long used 3rd party applications to receive what many believed to be a missing features. I believe that this was usually done with people that were in a raid or guild, meaning there is a good chance you already knew them. It will be very diffierent when everyone can voice chat with everyone else - until you mute them.

Will people be more polite or cautious when they communicate with strangers? Will people be apprehensive to voice chat as it may remove their anonymity? What are the new etiquettes that will emerge? (Certainly, I won’t say “LFG lvl56 LBRS pst!”) Will it freak people out to hear my voice when they are playing with a female gnome mage?

Only time will tell, but I’m sure it will have an effect.

In game terms it makes total sense of course. It’s much better to “say” you being attacked, instead of tying “Supermage! I do believe I see an Ogre heading our way!” - I’ve died many times in the middle of typing something and I have no doubt this feature will help.
They updated other communication management features … I will look at those once the patch goes live.
WoW patch notes here

I just came back from Guy Kawasaki’s talk at BayChi. He presented “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09″ where he talked about how he created the Truemors website (and he insists it’s a website). This is the first time I’ve heard him speak, but it was a really great, and a very entertaining talk. I hope to learn a little and improve my presentation techniques. In his talk, he mostly talked about what he had to do to create the site, and I thought it as a great point that a decent idea, with the passion to implement it and see it through is a great combination.
The service itself is interesting. It makes it easy to upload content to the web (really text snippets) - kinda like twitter, for no user stream But people tend to post news stories and links. Two things in my mind make this site interesting.

Firstly, allowing many ways for anyone to post content, online, sms, email and speech to text technology that lets people upload via calling . Secondly, that it’s sort of a free for-all-all posting site that relies on community moderators (less interesting) and newly introduced community management tools (more interesting). WoW recently introduced such features and it really seems to reduce the amount of spam.

As for the service, we’ll see how it does. Good luck Guy!

To my friends in Helsinki, may you never run fort he bus again. I found this mashup online http://transport.wspgroup.fi/hklkartta/ which merges realtime public transport locations on a google map. A great way to visualize the service where real-time is so very important. [thanks > ThreeDimensionalPeople]

Jeff Han at NYU has done more work on the multi-touch UI concept. It seems they’ve explored how to extend the metaphor s they developed to more everyday tasks such as surfing, searching and Google-mapping. A lot of nice examples in the video. The metaphor looks very promising indeed.

It was only a matter of time : ) I wouldn’t have loved this as a kid .. wait, i love it now!
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/11/wiisaber-star-wars-kid-do-your-thing/ via [gizmodo]
I played the Wii this past weekend. I’ve seen a lot of work done in the area of gestures in interaction design, and a lot of very good ideas. The Wii, however, brings these kinds of interactions to the mainstream. and what amazed me is how well it worked, and how accurate it was.

Well done Nintendo! (again)

Now I just need to find one for sale …

UPDATE: I was able to get my hand on a Wii