As the holiday season goes into overdrive, so does gas prices.  It’s such an interesting coincidence that when people have to travel to meet their friends and family, the oil companies jack up the gas prices.  Weird.

This is a picture of a gas station price sign in downtown, that is electronic (maybe LED), and not the regular plastic numbers that they have to manually change with a stick.

With prices fluctuating so often, you would think that all the gas stations would get this high tech sign with electronic numbers that probably can be updated via the Internet.

Of course, this convenience could encourage the gas station owners to change the prices every hour, on the hour.  Maybe it’s not such a good idea afterall.  At least not for us drivers.

For a while, I’ve been trying to eat healthier.  During my grocery shopping, I noticed this healthier soup by Campbell’s. 

“Healthy Request.” 98% fat free and 40% less sodium.

I don’t know who requested this, but it tastes 100% like crap.  The less sodium is bad enough but the 98% fat free makes this thing taste like plastic.  Plastic with no taste.  If I have to eat this crap to live a few years longer, I’d rather be dead earlier.

I’ve seen restaurants with “A” ratings that didn’t seem very clean to me.  Hope I don’t die from eating here.

Yuzando is located in the West LA Tokyo Row area on Sawtelle in the same building as the Shabu-Shabu place.  It used to be another sushi place and I guess it has changed owners and there’s a new temporary sign hanging on the building.  That’s always a bad sign when the owners don’t want to spend the bucks for a “real” sign.

The inside of this place looks almost the same as before but it’s been brightened and spruced up a little. The lighting on the wall next to the tables are way too bright and hurt my eyes.  But everything looks clean and updated.  So far, so good.

Other bloggers seem to like this place so I was looking foward to some great sushi.  My friend ordered her usual seaweed salad and although it looked small, she said it was good.  We both ordered the mixed sushi, mine for what was supposed to be under $20 on the menu, but came out $23.50 on the bill, and hers for $19.50.

The picture above is what was supposed to be the best mixed sushi on the menu.  No, it’s not a picture of something from Ralphs.  You can see from the unagi and even tuna, that this is not what it should look like.   For a comparison, see the picture from my Izayoi mixed sushi plate.  When sushi looks bad, it follows that it tastes bad.  The bait and switch on the pricing was bad enough, not to mention the small sized sushi, but I just don’t like bad sushi.  Period.

The only good news is the hot green tea was free.  Unfortunately, it comes in the smallest tea cup ever invented.  If you’re going to offer tea that small, you need an ultra attentive waitress to refill it every 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, no such luck here.  Stay away from this place.  I’m sure it’s not going to last very long anyway.  At least the owner saved money on the sign outside.

Yuzando – Sushi on Sawtelle
2004 Sawtelle Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 473-2388

Most people have seen these automated checkout machines at their local grocery store.  This one pictured is called “U-SCAN” and is at my local 24 hours Ralphs.  I love that it’s open 24 hours, and it’s also right next to a Best Buy.  Perfect.

If you’ve never seen one, it’s basically a bunch of checkout stands that the customer can operate on their own.  You scan your items over the bar code reader, the same way that the “professional” cashier does it.

You use the touch screen (shown here) and follow the instructions, including using your credit card, ATM card or cash.  You can even use coupons.  Of course, there’s a employee watching to make sure you don’t cheat and put stuff into your bag without scanning them.  I’m sure some people have figured out how to cheat this setup but for me, I use it because it’s fast.

Today, I noticed yet another Windows XP pop-up message on this particular checkout machine.  This one was closed for obvious reasons.

Click on the picture to see a close up of the error message.  It’s kind of a weird one (hope the hard drive is okay), and not as cool as the “blue screen of death,” but still worth this post to remind all of us how nicely Windows XP works for imbedded applications like this.

My friend and I have been coming to this place for many years but I haven’t been back in over a year.  The first thing I noticed was that it has been remodeled and now has a darker, sexier ambience.  The funiture also seems to be new but I’m not sure.

As we sat down, my heart sank when I realized the sexy Asian waitresses have been replaced by Asian waiters.  What’s this world coming to when you go to a Thai restaurant and they don’t have sexy Asian waitresses?  The end of Western Civilization is closer.  I’m not homophobic so I don’t care if the waiters are gay.  I just want to see some sexy girls.

I got over the lack of sexy waitresses situation and ordered my usual beef steak dish with a side of white rice. My friend ordered his usual fried rice thingie.  The picture above shows my plate. The dipping sauce was a lot spicier and less tasty than before, and worst of all, the steak was not the great marinated dish at all. In fact, the steak was barely edible.

Oh, the humanity.  One of my favorite Thai hang-out turns into a “pass” in just one year.  If they brought back the sexy Asian waitresses, I could overlook the bad food.  One can hope.

Tuk Tuk
8875 Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035
(310) 860-1872
tuktukla.com
Saturday – Sunday: Noon – 11pm
Monday – Friday: 11am – 11pm

Since we are officially in the Christmas shopping season, I though I’d share my shopping pictures with everyone.

During my trip to the Westside Pavilion, I noticed that one of the plasma driven advertisement had a pop-up window on it so I took this picture.

It looks like the computer is on Windows XP and it got disconnected from the Internet or something.  Something else that I noticed was that although there was another plasma on the other side, they must have been connected to different computers because the same error didn’t show up on the other screen.

To me, this seems like overkill.  Why can’t one computer drive 2 screens.  I don’t understand why they need 2 computers to drive 2 screens that are back to back.  Maybe they have too much money and not enough engineers.

I assume new ads are being downloaded via the Internet to these ad displays, so if this one is disconnected, I guess it’s showing the same banner.  Hopefully, they have some type of watchdog process that will send a message to them telling them of the error… oh, they’re disconnected.  Well, maybe a watchdog process on the server side.

Here’s a bigger picture of the error pop-up screen in case you’re a hacker and want to see the IP address.

It’s not as cool as those monster sized billboards with the “blue screen of death,” but it’s still fun to see that Windows is being used even for a simple application like this.  I just don’t understand why imbedded applications like this don’t use Linux.

At least we’re one step closer to living in the world of the “Blade Runner.”  More ads like this with video all over the city and we’re there.

My friend noticed that I didn’t post anything for the entire month of October.  Well, it was a combination of things, but mostly it was jury duty.  Since I’m used to waking up late, having to do jury duty put me on a weird schedule that made me tired all the time.  I just didn’t feel like writing anything.

Over the years, I’ve been on a jury 5 times, so this wasn’t anything new for me.  The case I was on was a commercial burglary, so it was fairly straight forward. Or so I thought.

When we took our first poll, it was 7 to 5, so I knew we were in for some work.  After having the testimony re-read to us by the court reporter, and spending a couple of hours re-drawing the map of the area on the white board, the count was 9 to 3.  In fact, at one point, the number went back to 8 to 4.

After 4 days of deliberation, the 12 of us finally came to a verdict on the case, at least on one of the 2 counts.  I guess one man’s simple case is another man’s enigma.

What does all this have to do with anything?  Actually, this was the first time that I was picked for a panel on jury duty since I started playing poker.  I didn’t realize it but playing poker and looking for tells, and watching the players have made me a better juror.  In the past, I struggled to see who was lying, and who I should trust.  This time around, it seemed a lot easier to me because of my poker training.

This made me think that maybe the lawyers should play some poker.  As a matter of fact, Mark Seif, a professional poker player, is (or was) a lawyer.  It might even be a good idea to ask potential jurors if they play poker.

Another talent that seems to work well with poker is being a magician.  I used to do some magic tricks starting from about Junior High to about 9th grade when I lost interest when I found computers.  Of course, Antonio Esfandiari was a magician, and that’s his poker nickname as well.

Therefore, a lawyer that’s also a magician probably would be one of the best poker players possible.

In a past blog entry, I mentioned seeing Steve Case’ Flexcar.com being advertised on the bus in Los Angeles. Well, now I’ve seen it actually in the wild in downtown Los Angeles in the parking structure at 333 Alameda.  At this location, there were 2 cars (Mini and Toyota?) and some signs promoting the service.  In Los Angeles, it’s $5 per hour to use these cars, and that includes insurance.  Not a bad deal for students who need to use a car for a couple of hours.

One thing I didn’t realize before was that the cars have a prominent logo on the doors, so if you’re a college student wanting to trick some girl into thinking you have a car, foget it.

On the window of the Mini, there was an ID number and some type of electronic device that looked very interesting.  It seems to indicate that there’s some type of wireless remote device to activate the car.  Maybe all members have one and it’s somehow matched with the ID number via the website.

You can click on the thumbnails below to see a larger version of the pictures.

Decided to go back to Blue Marlin for another meal with my friend.  She had the Seafood Cream Pasta ($13.95) shown above and I had the Chilli something or rather with an egg on top ($11.95) which was very tasty.  Click on the thumbnail to the left to see a bigger version of it.

The pasta comes with a nice salad with some type of soy dressing which was good.  After we were finished with the meal, we couldn’t resist getting some bomb ass desert.

From left to right, my friend ordered the Tempura Geen Tea ice cream ($4.95), I got the Souffle ($5.95) and coffee in cool cup ($2).  My desert was great and I loved the cool cup for the coffee.  Sometimes the presentation makes things taste even better.

Blue Marlin Mistro
2121 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 445-2522
Sunday: 11:30am – 10pm, Monday – Thursday: 11:30am – 10:30pm, Friday – Saturday: 11:30pm – 11pm
Map