Avi's Friends

(more) restaurant & wedding-related questions, from moi.
Please, folks, indulge me and help out a bit with the following!

1.) If you were taking a group of approx 5-18 out-of-state visitors out to dinner, and wanted to impress them a bit, as well as sort of "show off" some nifty aspect(s) of the city of Pittsburgh, where would you take them?

One very important consideration is that I'm seeking someplace that is quiet enough to have good long conversations with old friends and spend quality time, but not so quiet/stuffy that if we have a little uproarious laughter at our table we'd be a nuisance.
Excellent food and good drinks needed, too, obviously.
While I won't say that "money is no object"-- I am definitely willing to spend enough to make sure it's the right kind of pleasantly memorable experience/setting.
Some places I have considered: I last was at the LeMont about 20 years ago, but not sure what it's like there, lately. Have been to Lidia's and enjoyed it, although it was only lunch service. I have been to The Carlton and found the food dreadful and overrated. Also, my last two visits to The Church Brew Works were tremendous disappointments; I don't know when they went so far downhill, but, wow, did they ever!
Have been reading good things about: Eleven, Le Pommier, Six Penn, Sunnyledge, & the Shiloh, but have never been to any of these.
If many more people RSVP "yes" than I'm expecting, then due to budget I might need to scale back expectations a bit and we'll be headed for more affordable sites like Primanti's or the BBT. (Also, what is Gooski's like, inside, tables-and-seating-and-atmosphere-and-food-wise?)

2.) If you only had 2-3 days for an inexpensive-ish honeymoon and didn't want to go more than 3 hours' drive from Pittsburgh, where would you go? Where would you stay, what would you do? (Nothing gambling-related, please.)

3.) The bakery that I had planned to ask to do our wedding cake has been disappointing me lately. Suggestions on a good wedding cake source that will make something custom without costing an arm and both legs?

4.) Suggestions for a local, old-fashioned, highly-skilled seamstress/dressmaker? Bonus points if you know that they are good at plus-size formal-ish dresses. Not entirely sure at this point if I will be asking to make something (from pattern) from scratch, or simply getting an existing dress altered.

Current Mood: hyper

presidential debate watch party
hi everyone,

a group of us cmu-ers would like to go to a bar to watch the debate tonight... i know it's only an hr away but does anyone know of any bars broadcasting it? ava lounge is expected to be at capacity so are there any other places w/in the area that are going to show it?

Food and photography questions!
Since this community is so good about "where to find things" questions, I've got two big ones:

First, has anyone seen Jyoti brand Indian foods anywhere? I haven't located their stuff in any of the local exotic-food markets here, probably because their stuff is organic Indian food (back in Florida, I could only find Jyoti at whole-foods-type places and never in Indian grocery stores). I'm missing low-fat organic versions of my favorite vegetarian dishes!

Aaaand secondly, does anyone know of a photography student (grad/undergrad) or new professional photographer who would be interested in taking our engagement photos? My fiancé and I are both grad students ourselves, and don't want a huge, expensive ordeal of getting some engagement pictures done for family and friends. We're just looking for some digital prints, and we're happy to pay for an hour or two of shooting and let them use the photos for their portfolios/classes. Someone who knows the county/city would be a bonus (although not necessary) since we're looking for some awesome Pittsburgh fall foliage to include in the pictures. My fiancé's family has traditionally done engagement/wedding pics at Jefferson Memorial cemetary, but we're open to any suggestions!

Thanks in advance for any help. :)

All good things must
First off, I did NOTHING on Monday. I woke up with a somewhat annoying hangover, laid on my futon for a while on the floor, then did laundry. I thought about going to Yokohama or Jingu for baseball, but decided against it. I really don't know where the day went. I did watch the Rakuten game on the internet for a while in the evening and I chatted with Westbay about some ideas for baseball programming projects for me in the offseason (should it concern me that he sometimes jokes about me being his "apprentice"?) and I got dinner at the Nishikawaguchi Kura for what might be the last time ever, and well, that's about it for the day. There was no Ainori and I didn't finish any writing or anything else much besides laundry.

Tuesday was today, and I had work, and I had that stupid incident at Heiroku. Also, my coworker Kazumi went to some shop near Akabane and got me boxes to use for moving, which was nice.

It's been a week now and I have told most of my students the following news now, so I think I can say it in a public entry, but... I'm ending my time at GEOS fairly soon. My last day is October 21. I'll be going back to the US sometime in November, for a few months, to take care of my dad (who has lung cancer), to see my brother and sister-in-law (who are having a baby in November), and so on and so forth. I plan to return to Japan in the spring. Yes, I think I'm probably ditching the JLPT until July of next year, sadly.

As for today, several of my students wanted me to tell my dad that they are concerned about him. I haven't been going into discussions about it much, because English school should be a fun and happy place for people, but today one of my active classes was asking me how to say a lot of cancer-related words in English because they have also had relatives go through it:

We talked about Randy Pausch a little. And we talked about lung cancer, and one of my students said "I'll let my husband stop smoking," and I said "Err... do you mean you want him to stop? And you'll force him?" "Yeah." "You mean, you'll MAKE him stop."

And on another note, this is just too funny. I was using Stitch as a prop for a conversation and one of my students stuck him inside a roll of tape:

Whee. I should sleep.

This is probably a strange question, but does anyone here have asian lady beetles swarming around/in their house? We don't really seem to get them up where I am (Butler County), but when I used to live in Connecticut, they were EVERYWHERE in the fall.

I ask because I actually am writing an article on them and need some photos of some ladybird swarmage. So, if you have an infestation and let me come take photos, I can hook you up with some free organic bug spray.

Thanks!

oh MAN
had the WEIRDEST thing just happen at Heiroku (the kaitensushi place I go to twice a week for dinner).

I went in, sat down, and this CRAZY older guy started harrassing me, in Japanese. I forget how it started, I pretended I just didn't understand him... he then was like "how DARE you say that to me?"in English, and I'm just like "zenzen wakaranaiyo," I don't understand you, and he said it again, "how DARE you. understand? english you?" or something. Then I was like "no." I talked back in Japanese a bit, then just started ignoring him.... and he started going on about european musicians for some reason. He started babbling phrases in russian, maybe german, I don't know, I said in Japanese "I don't understand German either." and so on.

I looked at Kanno-chef and he was just like (in Japanese) "uhh... do you want ebi-tartar rolls?"

The other staff were just kind of like "sorry..." to me, but they didn't say anything at all to the guy. And he just kept ranting.

so eventually this other American guy in the back says to me, "If that guy is bothering you, you can come sit here."

So I did.

The American guy works for Nova and has been here TEN YEARS. Jesus. We talked for like 10-15 minutes before he headed back to work, pretty crazy.

And that crazy old dude NEVER shut up. We could still hear him across the restaurant, babbling about random foreigner crap. He did leave before I did, thankfully...

When I was leaving, the other sushi guy whose name I never remember was like "tasukerarenakatta sumimasen", which I guess is "sorry we couldn't help you", and Kanno was even like "moshiwake gozaimasen", which is the most polite he's ever spoken to me, usually we joke around. I said, or I think I said, "it's ok. I've come here always for the last year and I swear that is the first time I've had that happen."

but, I have to admit I was really disturbed by it.
I don't know if I want to go back there or not. we'll see how I feel thursday, that'd be my next usual time coming in.
maybe I won't go. maybe I will and I'll see how the staff acts to me.

sigh. Sometimes I love Japan but sometimes I'm just amazed by how people take this "if we pretend that didn't happen, it isn't a problem" attitude towards things. It's both a fundamental part of how things work here... and also a fundamental reason why some things DON'T work here.

Seminar
Gave a talk in seminar today in preparation for the conference in Connecticut I'll be going to this weekend. The talk went okay, but I feel lame speaking on basically the same topic (my thesis) so much. I also have to watch how I deliver the talk. I think that since I had just come from teaching two sections back to back right before seminar, I was especially prone. Basically I overdid the "ask the ~~students~~audience a question to keep them involved" bit and I think it came off too unprofessional. While I didn't make any serious errors, I don't feel like I said anything that certain members of the audience didn't already know before.

I'm glad to have the talk out of the way. However October and November look to be especially busy, with postdoc and job applications on top of the regular teaching and thesis stuff. After seminar I talked to Scanlon a little bit about the Connecticut conference. He told me a very famous professor (Hr.) was going to be there, which took me by surprise. Somehow I had noticed one famous professor (Ch.) was going to be there but had overlooked the other. This makes me more nervous about giving my talk there since Hr. was the main person to do much of what I'll be talking about...Better get it right!

Teaching this semester's been going okay. Sometimes I spend a little too much time writing up homework problems and solutions and preparing for section, but I think it's paying off. The first section (42 students) really seems to be involved in my sections and even now the second section is warming up (maybe because it's finally whittled down in size that people feel they can't be silent?). I think I'm having more fun with the material so it's really helped me be an enthusiastic teacher. That may diminish a bit in the next month once we get heavy into probability, but hopefully not too much.

Current Mood: blah

ConCert reading group today covered Plotkin's classic paper on call-by-value and call-by-name CPS translations for the lambda calculus. It was interesting, but it's a slog to unpack all his ancient notation and notions. One thing clear to me now is that it's very important what you choose to be your source and target language when thinking about CPS transformations; that the target language is an ordinary lambda calculus in most traditional explanations is why "administrative reductions" are even thinkable.

_tove had been threatening to drag me to the open figure drawing sessions in CFA one o' these days and finally succeeded. It was a bit crowded, and the model never seemed to face us, but it was basically pretty fun.

restaurants and free wifi near UPMC Presbyterian hospital
i will be in Oakland the last week in October and first week in November while my father has surgery at UPMC. i've been trying to do research on my own, but Yelp Pittsburgh seems a little thin and i don't know enough about where to look for local reviews.

please, kind citizens, comment with your favorite places, a street where restaurants cluster, or websites i should check out for recommendations.

i'm looking for suggestions within a twenty minute walk of UPMC or the Wyndham hotel on Forbes for:

- places with free wifi
- a coffeehouse or tea shop (bonus if hot beverage and wifi go together)
- restaurants - especially places that serve vegetables. while i'm looking forward to enjoying the greasy delights of the kind of places that cluster near colleges, more than a week of it nonstop will kill me. asian food good. south asian food good. (but i also would enjoy some pierogies. and subs. and cheesesteak.)
- a grocery or convenience store for snacks

if this stuff has been covered in a previous post, please point me to it. thanks.

food processor
Ok, I decided to get this one.

[edit: something's getting garbled into ∏ The url should be http://www.kitchenaid.com/catalog/product.jsp?src=Food+Processors&cat=185&prod=607 ]

Extreme Makeover Home Edition: Pittsburgh
Apparently Extreme Makeover Home Edition is coming to Pittsburgh within the next couple weeks. If you haven't seen the show, basically the cast picks a family deserving of a home makeover. Generally the family, or a member of the family, does something amazing for the community, served for our country, or has a serious illness and in turn has a home that's simply unlivable. It's definitely a tear jerker kind of show, and it's always great to see communities come together to help families out, especially families who really deserve it.

Now it's our turn to come together and help a family out. If you want to volunteer your services (cleaning, catering, helping build, etc) visit this website and sign up. The website makes a point to say that even if you sign up to volunteer, your services may not be used due to a huge outpouring of support. Don't take it personally!

Anyway, it's a cool chance to help out. Just thought I'd share :)

Current Mood: happy

Cardboard Recycle in South Hills Yet?
So Mayor Luke promised me cardboard recycling at my doorstep by the middle of the year. A notice was going to go out to tell me. I was totally psyched for this!

Except that it's October, my porch has more cardboard than Giant Eagle's receiving area, and I'm still not being told they're ready to take it.

So...anyone know the scoop? Am I gonna have to haul it out to Construction Junction or what? I'm certainly not going to landfill it.

Any news would be great!

As a candidate for a vaguely interesting anime subtitle translation mishap, a series I'm currently watching persists in substituting "Wheeled Dragon" for "Weird Dragon". It's only interesting because it's a dekatakanafication issue, the key word being ウィールド, and I could see how it could go either way. Except for the fact that "wheeled" makes far less sense. And if you look at the wikipedia.jp page for the series it becomes obvious which it should be. Bah.

[D&D] Someday we'll get to a city with a pixie dust grinder and be able to ~~abuse~~ petition our wizard to create us some magic items. Consequently, I've been scanning the PHB and the Adventurer's Vault (which I picked up randomly last week) for cheap (under 2k) but useful gear.

( shopping list )
...you might detect a theme here. This would be because the things which have been making my character's life most unpleasant (aside from straight up damage) have been poisons, slows, and monsters noticing him when he's trying not to be. (Well, that last one is anticipated. Stealth really looks like it ought to be useful in fights, and someday I'll figure out how to make it so. Acrobatics and Athletics already have decent scores and are definitely useful (last session there was this one battle where I was jumping around between the tops of 30' high pillars and shooting things. It was amusing.), but better chances of success on Acro/Athl rolls are always good.)

how we talk
I see lots of movies filmed here or set here, but I have never seen anyone even attempt to recreate the Pittsburgh accent, even acknowledge that there IS a Pittsburgh accent, excpet one - Fisher Stevens in Only You with Marisa Tomei. He plays a guy who owns a roofing company. Have you seen any movies where people talk like they're really from here?

If you can just play someone one of the DVE morning show bits I'm sure they'll see what the accent is, but I just found an awesome description of the accent in a book, "About Three Bricks Shy of a Load" by Roy Blount, Jr. about the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. So good I had to share it --

"Burghers sometimes refer to their town as 'the Burgh.' For the 'ow' sound in words they say something which I have tried to render here with a short o, as in 'donton longe,' but which is more precisely, to take the case of 'town,' a blend of 'tehn,' 'tahn,' and 'tan.' It falls somewhere in between the Boston version of the short a and the East Tennessee version of the long i. The Pittsburgh accent is unique."

Current Music: watching the Steelers game on TV

Nervous but hopeful
The dirt pile is shrinking, slowly, and the lilac bed actually looks like it might be ready. I'm hesitant to call it done, as I'm sure I can stuff more dirt into it (and probably should) but right now it's such a nice, lovely mound that I don't want to poke at it anymore. But I'll have to, if for nothing else to plant the lilacs.

I've managed to dig up the trench around the first bed for bulbs, between yesterday and today, and the plastic grass barrier - well, speed bump, is in place. The bed so far has yielded a suprising number of rocks, bits of concrete, more rocks, a few weird bricks, one piece of cinderblock, and one piece of concrete bigger than both my head and

gootmu's put together. I'm exhausted.

The personal speed bump right now is I really would like to somehow sieve out the rest of the small rocks from the plot as I dig it up and add the nice, new dirt, but a) I don't have a dirt sieve and b) I worry if I take time to rig up something useful, I'll run out of good weather. I have this nightmare where I'm holding a bag ful of bulbs and it's SNOWING on me. Gah.

Decisions, decisions.

What a day (aka, Kamagaya strikes back)
You know... on Friday, if you asked me what I was going to do Sunday, I woulda told you, "I'm going to the Giants-Dragons game and then playing volleyball in the evening."

That is completely totally what did NOT happen today.

See, my friend who was getting tickets to the game was getting them from a Giants player, and said Giants player wasn't sure he could come through with them, and had a bad day on Saturday, so it looked super-unlikely. I made plans with my Fighters fan friends to see the Fighters split-squad game in Kamagaya today instead.

At like 10:30am as I was IN A TAXI TO FIGHTERS TOWN KAMAGAYA I get email saying "hey he finally came through with tickets, can you still go?" and I'm like "Hahahaha no."

Anyway, the game was crazy wacky fun. I talked to Brian Sweeney for a while before the game, and then -- I swear -- Ryan Glynn saw me, I said hi, he said "hey, what's up? I read your interview with Seguignol on your blog," and I'm like WTF. Seriously! Wow, that was nuts.

Dude.

I sat up front with my other camera-happy crazy friends and we cheered the Fighters and talked for the game and it was a lot of fun! One half of the Fighters beat the other half 2-1. Tsuruoka hit a homerun, WTF. It only went 7 innings but that's ok.

I saw my Train Guy friend during BP, but he sat in a different part of the stadium. Afterwards he found me and was like "hey, we're going to Yakiniku Erika, you wanna come with us?" and so I went with him, and DAMN was that fun. Erika is the restaurant run by the parents of Fighters outfielder Hichori Morimoto, and I was wearing my Hichori t-shirt, and so Hichori's dad was like "that shirt looks great on you!" Hehe. Somehow, we arrived a little after 5pm, and we ended up staying until like 10:30pm.. watched the Rakuten game and then the end of the Hanshin game, and drank a LOT. I figured sitting around talking to baseball people in Japanese for several hours took higher priority over volleyball.

Middle Eastern sword dancing and more TONIGHT!
Your Inner Vagabond Bellydance Sunday Series
presents

HAKAN
Pittsburgh's Premiere Male Bellydancer

Tonight! October 5!
7 p.m.
NO COVER!!!

Your Inner Vagabond
Turkish Coffeehouse & World Lounge
4130 Butler Street, Lawrenceville
www.yourinnervagabond.com
www.hakandances.com

A lot of sex ed
I decided to watch (or skim) a whole bunch of sex education films from the 40s, 50s and 60s this week to get a taste of what social attitudes were on this fairly taboo subject. It's been eye-opening. Some of it was much better than I expected (60s films generally and that one declassified military vid), but a lot of it was shocking in how uninformative it was and how much it entrenched gender stereotypes and people feeling uncomfortable to talk about sex. Pretty counterproductive. All these movies were found on www.archive.org including these two related shorts.

Buy an Electric Refrigerator. A 36 second clip from 1926 from the Electricians League of Pittsburgh, who tell you to do just what the title says. So, basically a forerunner to the modern commercial. 5/10.

Albert: the Movie. A recently made short that tries to humorously debunk the reasoning behind these old social hygiene movies, particularly one where a young effeminate boy is masculinized. Some of it is amusing because the arguments put forth by the original movie are so flawed and miss the point. But those scenes are funny not because of these new filmmakers but because of the flawed logic of the old filmmakers. 4/10.

( Sex ed and social hygiene shorts )

A thing that's bugged me for a long time is the apparent arbitrariness with which we have to define inflation. The CPI, for instance, picks some ol' basket of goods, and measures how its price changes. Depending on how that representative basket of goods is chosen, you get a different answer. In particular, if the basket of goods has twice as many, say, Xboxes in it as another, then you perceive inflation to be twice as sensitive to change in price of Xboxes compared to how you'd measure it with the other basket.

Is there a notion of average that is robust against this arbitrariness of counting?

Try this: Take a collection v₁...v_m of vectors in Rⁿ. Compute the m × m matrix D_ij = || v_i - v_j || of distances between them. Find a vector μ in R^m such that Dμ is a constantly-k vector for some k, and Σ_iμ_i = 1. We can take this to be some multiple of D^-1(1 1 ... 1)^T if D happens to be invertible. Now if I did my math right, Σ_iμ_iv_i serves as a kind of average of the v_i, but is invariant under rotation, uniform scaling, (but not nonuniform scaling!) and most importantly, duplication of items in the list of vectors v_i. If we literally duplicate entries the matrix D is not invertible, but the equation Dμ = k(1 1 ... 1)^T allows exactly those reweightings that assign a total weight to the two duplicated vectors equal to the weight of the unduplicated one.

Anyhow this seems like an utterly elementary operation. I wonder why I haven't heard of it before? Is it because it doesn't actually work as I think it does?

Elise's Playground Halloween fetish ball....
Elise's Playground presents a Halloween Ball!! It's that time of year to celebrate the wickedness in all of us!!!

PPerformances by Miss Elizabeth Couteau and the Playground's eccentric playmates, ECSTASY in WONDERLAND (sponsored by Nekkid Alternative), RADIOACTIVE (www.myspace.com/radioactiverocks), DEBUTANTE (www.myspace.com/debutantepgh). DJ Dale Cooper will be spinning old/new alternative music.

BEST male/female costume contest sponsored by the Z Spot (www.zspotstudio.com)

Will you be trick or treat? We TREAT the TRICKSTERS so come out and play, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31 at ALTAR BAR, 1620 Penn Avenue (in the strip), 21 & over, 8 p.m. $15

I make the whole world sing
Not really.

kawaru does.
He came to Tokyo for the weekend to hang out with some other friends, who don't get here until tomorrow, so I asked him to come hang out after work tonight. We got yakiniku (yay!) and then went to Karaoke-kan and sang for 2 hours.

Craig sings a lot better than me, obviously (he did a near-perfect rendition of Sen no Kaze ni Natte, you know, the opera song sung by Masafumi Akikawa) but... we harmonized on HY's AM11:00, and Orange Range's Hana, and even later on Exile's Choo Choo TRAIN, heh. We kinda failed on HY's Monokuro, my request, I guess the lower part is kinda hard to learn quickly. Oh, and we did Seishun Amigo, but I fail to be Kamenashi. Wheeee.

My own stunning moment of the night was being able to hit the high notes on aiko's "Kabutomushi", which I hadn't sung or heard in a long time. I was really trying to pick things I just don't usually sing at all at karaoke, for a change, which kinda worked out okay.

I really ought to just suck it up and go to karaoke alone sometimes to practice... seriously, the last time I did karaoke, I think, was in Nagoya a month ago... with Craig and Laura.
I'm in Japan, why don't I have any regular karaoke buddies? My life is stupid sometimes.

I have to go to sleep so I can get up ass-early and go to Kamagaya and see a Fighters intrasquad game. Woot?

Of course...
When I need to look up something transportation related, the port authority's website doesn't want to load. Why would I bother??

Anyway, does anyone know how often the T runs on weekends?? Is it the same as weekdays? Usually my boyfriend and I run around together on weekends but he's working on some big project for work and I really really need to go shopping, so I figured I could go to South Hills Village, but I'm not sure when to leave.

Also, how close is the T stop to the actual mall?? I have like...loads...of shopping I need to get done because my winter clothes are all now too big for me so I'll be lugging around a lot of crap by the end of the adventure.

Thanks!

Current Mood: sleepy

Saw a talk today by a physicist name of Veit Elser about "Divide and Concur", a funny approach to trying to find solutions to (generally NP-hard) constraint satisfaction problems that seems almost too simple to work, but it seems that it does have good constants for many particular problems.

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