Servusamanu.com

I remade my portfolio website: RobertDrake.net.  For the last year or so there’s been nothing there; I’ve had a redesign on my list for quite some time, but it never happened.  With a few snow days trapping me indoors (and away from work), I finally got around to doing a few things.

Now, RobertDrake.net is not ‘finished’ per se.  I’ve got plenty of content that I want to drop on there, a growing list of design tweaks, but overall I’m happy to reintroduce it to the world.

As part of this redesign, I’m making a few changes to Servusamanu as well.  As you can tell, I’ve already done some design tweaks.  Now, I’m making changes to the ‘process’.

Back when I started this website, I was updating daily.  In theory, I was writing something new everyday, but in reality I was throwing up the first interesting article that appeared whether I had something to say about it or not.  I’d like to think that I spent a little more time on quality once I changed to three updates a week, but I’ve never been especially happy with the quality.

In fact, the website has at times been more of a distraction.   With that in mind, I’m planning on going down to a single ‘change’ a week.  Possibly a bit of content, possibly a tweak to the web-design.  I’ll be doing the same with RobertDrake.net so neither site falls into complete abeyance.  If something especially interesting crosses my path, I might still toss it online, but I don’t intend to update with quite the same regularity as I have.   Hopefully, with less emphasis put on meeting my regular quota, I’ll be a little more active in making things ‘good’.  We’ll see how that actually works out, but here’s to planning!

Cheers and thanks for reading.

I finally broke down and picked up a new theme for Servusamanu. As much as I’d like to take credit, this design isn’t my own. It’s a stock wordpress template called parchment draft with some modifications. I’m trying to really concentrate on writing (and reading) and, well, I wasn’t going to make anything much better than this.

The redesign also let me clean up a lot of things on the back-end that should make everything better overall. The downside: all the registered users were deleted so if you registered for any reason, you’d have to do so again. At the moment, I’ve got anonymous commenting turned on so for the moment there’s not much benefit to signing up really.

I hope everyone enjoys the redesign. More things to come.

I’ve recently hit up a few more restaurants in New Paltz.  I’ve got 6 or 7 left to hit.

Gomen Kudasai

Gomen Kudasai is located within the antique store located opposite the middle school and short ways up the road toward the highway.  You could be forgiven for not knowing where it is or what it’s called, because until recently the only sign was a small post-in-the-ground flyer that said ‘Japanese Noodle Place’.

The name ‘Gomen Kudasai’ is apparently a colloquial term roughly corresponding to ‘noodles please’.  Being the contrarian that I am, I didn’t actually have noodles.  I ordered turkey dumplings, which came with a mound of rice, house pickles, a bowl of miso soup, and a salad in a sort of sour vinaigrette.  I had a cup of oolong tea to wash it down and finished the meal with Mochi ice cream, a rice based desert that almost looks like a dough mushroom.

The building itself is a bit haphazard, so I wasn’t sure whether to expect overly formal or chaos.  Instead, I found the atmosphere quiet, but functional.  The service was excellent and the food even better.  My oolong tea was appropriatelystrong with a subtle sweetness in the aftertaste.  The turkey dumpling were more filling than their ornate arrangement would have suggested.  I wasn’t quite sure how to take the desert, there is a rather particular texture to mochi ice cream, but after dutifully trying to cuisine, I wasn’t going to botch the trip with a slice of apple pie.

In relation to a national average, Gomen Kudasai is maybe a bit expensive, but in relation to New Paltz it is actually quite competitive.  My meal, with tea and desert, came to $25, which gave me some amount of sticker shock, considering the environment, the food, and presentation it was actually very reasonable.   I won’t be making this noodle place a day adventure, but it’s a solid addition to my dinner retinue.

Main Course

I can’t seem to find a proper link for Main Course.  The website goes to their catering business and doesn’t seem to include their current menu.  Main Course used to be located next to Subway, which has recently been taken over by the 8th pizza place in town.  Main Course’s new location right near The Indian Restaurant is much more inviting.

Entering Main Course, I found myself somewhat confused.  There is a counter directly ahead and a spattering of small tables, but no waiters or waitresses to be found.  Instead, the counter area is a segmented portion of a larger cooking area where they have their ingredients and dishes in various states of preparation.  A cook with full chef regalia frits about making the orders directly as they come in.

In final tally, Main Course has become a sandwich shop, albeit a classy sandwich shop.  I had the Northwind which was salad and grilled portabello on a panini with a side salad garnished in a house dressing that I should remember, but don’t.  The whole thing came to about $8.  More expensive than subway, yes.  Excellent price for what you get: definitely.  I’ve never had a fairly fancier meal any cheaper.   I suppose ditching the waiters paid off…for me, it also saves on the tip.

Ahh, and I think I have the right menu! That’s a great way to end my review.

Both restaurants were phenomenal.  At current the remaining list is:

Beso
Harvest Cafe
Mudd Puddle
Picnic Pizza
Hokkaido
New Paltz Tea House
Locust Tree

This version of the website has been running one year!  What should I do for next year?  Write better articles or redesign the artwork?  Hmm!

For some statistics, I get between 300-400 hits a month and about 250 RSS feed hits. A little over 90% of the visitors are new people.  I’d like to retain a few more than I have, but at the moment there’s nothing to really keep a person coming here (other than my constant twitter reminders.)  Now if I could just get this damn book published…

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Servusamanu has received a ton of visitors lately. I’m not really sure where they’re coming from, but here’s a list of recent searches that brought people here.

decline and fall of the roman empire
historical views on decline of roman empire
thrones hbo
kirk and spock friendship
empire total war no writing

Hmm? Something tells me a half-hearted review of Rome didn’t get me 1400 page views in two days. I’ve now got an idea of what I should be writing about though. Whoever was and is showing up here…thanks!

I’ve been tweaking the website all day. Right now I’m using Yslow to optimize the site.

I got a C grade overall.

Time to use gzip and add expires headers.

This article ‘Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times‘ has been very helpful.

Cheers!

I’m trying out two wordpress plugins.

Twitter Widget

and

Wp to Twitter

Twitter Widget gives me that nice little Twitter box on the side. It should update whenever I make a new tweet, which is actually fairly often. I usually hit up a few times every day, usually with a writing update of some kind.

Wp to Twitter will update my twitter whenever I have a wordpress post. The hope is to integrate twitter with facebook, one giant happy social networking family.

This morning I was all about social networking. I threw a couple of status messages at facebook. Over the course of the day I probably assaulted twitter two or three dozen times with assorted minutae. This blog got a post. I was reading other people’s blogs, twitters, and facebook. Basically, I spent the day enjoying the sights and sounds of our mirror, digitized, society. I should probably be writing, but, hey, my story is set in the future. I have to have a healthy grasp of the current…

Anyway, via twitter, I was informed of Audioboo. (Specially via StephenFry. (Yep, of Jeeves and Wooster fame, among other things.))

AudioBoo is an application for the iphone that lets you record short messages and post them to audioboo. It’s a form of audioblogging, similar to twitter for recorded voice. It seems to be a happy medium between the lillipution delivery of twitter, increasingly commercialized facebook, and vain absurdly of videoblogging.

Already, audioblogging seems to be a positive direction for authors and people in general to communicate. StephenFry has his AudioBoo. Michael Stackpole has The Secrets Podcast and some other things.

Web 2.0 has been the catch all cliche for new technology, but…it’s exciting. I’m all about democratizing media. The days of New York Times and the Evening News have ended and a new world of open communication is taking place. The worst critics of social media deplore the overall quality of the writing. A valid criticism, one I fall under, but social media also solves its own problem. There are pieces of quality out there to be found. Compare: the number of tv channels with uninteresting content vs. the number of websites with uninteresting content. By percentage tv might win (5 channels out of 50, 10%, 100 websites: billions <1%), but by sheer number the internet wins handily. It’s not the medium, internet carries video just fine, but the openess. WordPress, twitter, myspace, facebook, xanga, now audioboo are all opening up the available mediums that can be utilized. The popularity of forums and newsgroups, even in the early days of the internet, show the general desire for open communication, regardless of ‘quality,’ and these new technologies are only giving greater means to an already present market.

Sadly, I don’t have an iphone, but Servusamanu might dabble with audioblogging in the future. I’ll be on the look out for other interesting programs that might pop up.