overt.org

2512 San Pablo Ave. Berkeley, CA 94702

We arrived at Sea Salt early (about quarter to 6) to take advantage of the $1 oysters they offer from 4-6. The restaurant was well put together and felt new, though Les assured me that it has been around in Berkeley since before we arrived. We ordered a dozen oysters (chef’s choice, we ended up with “calm cove”), which were very tasty and came along with the usual horseradish/red sauce and also with a citrus and onion concoction that was quite tasty. We paired them with pints of Scrimshaw pilsner, which was crisp and light with the bready finish I like to see in good pilsners, and which was a great match for sea food. Things only got better from there.

We started with slices of monkfish liver topped with sea urchin (a.k.a. uni) and sturgeon caviar, resting in a pool of cucumber puree with cilantro sprouts. We spent about 20 minutes savoring two slices; it was absurdly good. It pushed all of my “this is awesome sushi” buttons without being corralled into the usual settings you would see these ingredients in at a Japanese place. In our opinion, the combination was transcendent.

We followed this up with a pair of crabcakes coated in a layer of cioppino and another of a rich rouille. The cioppino probably wouldn’t have stood on its own, but that was alright because these crab cakes were definitely in my top-five-ever category. Heavy on the crab, light on filler, perfectly put together (not too dense) and lightly fried, we teased out every bite. The acid in the cioppino was right there to cut the richness when it threatened to be too much.

For the main course we had a vietnamese-style barbecue eel sandwich and grilled walu. We knew we would like the eel, and were pleasantly suprised to be assured when we asked that it was cooked on-site (often it’s just reheated from frozen). The sandwich was filled with onion cilantro, shredded carrots, and slices of jalepeno pepper. It made a great combination, except for the jalepeno. It was raw and quite spicy, and Leslie and I both thought there was too much of it. Leslie got a bite with a huge slice and spent the next five minutes just trying to cool things down enough to appreciate the walu.

We’ve had walu before, but only raw. Another name for it in the sushi world is “butterfish,” which I think gives you the right idea of its essential properties. I was skeptical about subjecting such a great raw fish to the flame, but we were astounded by the characteristics it took on when (absolutely perfectly) grilled. It had a nice metallic meatiness of a carnivorous fish, a perfect amount of char, and was flaky and moist throughout. I dream of someday having the timing and equipment to cook fish so appropriately. Surrounding the walu were some large slabs of “sunchokes,” which I would describe as a mix between an artichoke heart and a potato, and baby leeks, all resting on a puddle of “sauce americaine.” I wouldn’t have thought much of this sauce looking at it or reading it’s name, but it turns out that it’s basically a reduction of lobster, butter, and a bit of flour, and it just kept giving and giving. It helped out the veggies and the fish equally. It was the third example (after the liver and the crab cakes) of the right sauce in the right place to perfect the dish.

Overall, the dinner was outstanding. It definitely outshone the experience I had at its mother restaurant, Lalime’s. Not cheap, but so great that I’m sure we’ll come again on our own dime.

It was only a matter of time. The newest addition to my console collection, the Wii, was mercilessly chipped this week, allowing me to boot “back-up” games on it as I can with the PS2 and the Xbox. The device that enabled it is called the “wiikey,” and we were able to install it in about 15 minutes with no headaches at all. I’ve been messing around with the new SSX and Trauma Center games, but I’m really looking forward to the new Mario game coming out in a week or so.

This weekend I rounded-out spring break with an overnight trip to Big Basin state park, a bit south of San Jose. I went with Jacob and some of his friends. I was told we would mostly be relaxing, but after we got there and set up camp, we promptly embarked on a 12-mile hike. Hiking is not my favorite activity but I was resigned to give it a shot with the group. It turned out to be tolerable, and there was even a nice waterfall toward the end of it:

Click on the picture to see a few more shots including a lizard and a huge banana slug. We rounded out the night with a fire and some sausages, and drove home early today.

Things will be pretty crazy this month as I work on a paper submission (due the 25th), and then they will just stay crazy until I wake up in Berlin in mid-June, married and probably moved out of Berkeley.

At last, finally, and after months of searching and much hand-wringing, we have a plan for the summer. Thanks to an introduction from James, I have an invitation to visit Marc Alexa’s group at the Technical University, Berlin. Yay! I’ll be there, getting to know people, doing some of my work, hopefully collaborating some with people there. The position should offer plenty of flexibility about when I’m in the office, which should be great for all of our plans to explore Germany and the rest of The Continent as much as our budgets will allow.

TU is nicely situated at the west end of Tiergarten, a huge park in the middle of Berlin. We’ll probably live in Mitte (“midtown”), which seems to be the cultural heart of the city. Here’s a cheesy little map I stole from Lonely Planet to give you an idea:

I very excited that we ended up with a big city. Hopefully, this will give us a taste of what life in Germany could be like for a longer stay, and also serve as just a cool adventure. Coincidentally, we also just finished the final lesson (90 total) of our German tapes. Hopefully by the end of the summer we’ll be making some real progress on that front, too.

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Comments

Debbie — 2007-04-11 15:03:38

You know the Tiergarten has a few naked sunbathing spots. Might be a nice way to relax on a sunny July afternoon. :-)

A few months ago I wrote a python script based on unison for synchronizing the iTunes libraries between my computer and Leslie’s. Although you can’t actually merge changes from both libraries, you can push or pull updates, which works well when one computer is a “master” where changes are made and the other is a “slave” where music is usually just played, but the library isn’t added to. You are able to manually push updates from the slave to the master if you like.

Anyway, I finally got around to commenting it a bit and I present it here for download in case others might find it useful: itunes_sync_0.1.tar.gz

I run it from a cron script hourly right now, which is maybe a bit excessive, but it’s all on the local network, so who cares? A better way of doing things would be to only sync when changes have been made, but I haven’t had time to fancy things up like that yet. I run the script only on OS X boxes, but I’m sure if you’re enterprising enough to get unison running on a windows machine it would work fine there too.

Today Ali and I completed what has become the biennial server upgrade. We added a pair of 500GB drives that should slake the endless thirst of our users for ever more space to put their photos and email. This was stressful for me, but even more of a pain for Ali who has to drive a couple of hours out to where the server is stuck in a data center. I imagine the thing had gotten pretty lonely sitting there in its little cage for the last two years, and appreciated the visit and TLC. Anyway, things seem to be mostly back to normal now. Let me know if you see any problems.

On a somewhat related note, I fixed gallery up so that you can post comments again. I’m glad I got this taken care of because I get about 20 emails a day from irate gallery browsers who want to chip in their two cents. Ok, not really.