After weeks of Playstation Network being down because of hackers stealing private information, Sony has turned the network back on and is offering free PS3 games as a way to say “sorry dudes.”

Free PS3 Games

Unfortunately for me, I already have inFAMOUS and LittleBigPlanet, and the other games don’t seem that interesting to me. In fact, I didn’t really even like LBP.  And inFAMOUS was great but inFAMOUS 2 is coming out so it’s basically a dead version.

I decided to pick WipEout and Dead Nation. Both were very forgettable and I can see why they are free. I would never pay for either. WipEout is a futuristic racing game on rails (read boring), and Dead Nation is a birds-eye-view zombie shoot-em-up game that was a little more interesting but not even as fun as Angry Birds on my phone.

Yeah. I’m not feeling the love here.  Hey, Sony. How about 2 free movie rentals and let us choose the movie we want to see.  That would give me a little more warm and fuzzy.

Across the way from Houston’s in Century City, is another upscale restaurant owned by the same chain called Gulfstream for seafood. On our way to the movies, we decided to checkout this place.

The setup looks a lot like Houston’s with an open kitchen for everyone to see, and raised booths all around. One interesting difference was the white paper covering over the table cloths. This made me feel like I had to order crabs and break them with my bare hands.

To start, we got the heavenly biscuits, which come with butter and honey, and yes, they really are heavenly. Yummy.

My friend tried the Crab Cakes which I tried and liked but I’m not a big crab cakes guy. It also comes with coleslaw which I don’t like.

Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes - $32

For myself, I was tempted to try their steak, but why come to a seafood place and order steak, right? So I resisted the temptation and ordered the Salmon. The salmon was perfectly prepared but slightly light on the seasoning for my taste. Also, unfortunately, it also comes with coleslaw. My friend liked the coleslaw but I didn’t like it but I’m definitely biased.

Sedar Plank Roasted Salmon - $27

There are only 3 choices for desert so this isn’t the place to come for that. We tried the Hot Fudge Sundae which was on the house because it took a while to get.

The ambiance here is open and classy, and the service was good. My friend thought the waitress was overly attentive, and didn’t like the intense eye contact, but I liked it. It doesn’t hurt when the waitress is attractive either.  She’s no dummy. She knows who’s leaving the tip. Kudos to their hiring practice.

As for the food, it’s not spectacular but there was nothing to make me not want to return. I’m willing to give this place another try.

Gulfstream
10250 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90067
(310) 553-3636
hillstone.com

Back in 2009, I noticed a minor bug in PHP 4.3.11 that caused a problem with obtaining the “last” Sunday using the strtotime function and provided a workaround fix.

However, as of PHP version 4.4.9, that fix no longer works. I didn’t really dig into why that is, but did create a function that works for that version and above as shown below.

To use, simply call get_sunday with no parameters to get the last Sunday from today. To use another day, provide $offset. $datefmt is a global variable that is the date format that is to be used to return the date of Sunday.

function get_sunday($offset = FALSE) {
   global $datefmt;

   if (!$offset)
      $offset = strtotime(date($datefmt));
   else
      $offset = strtotime($offset);

   if (date('w', $offset) == 0) {
      $d = date($datefmt, strtotime("-1 week", $offset));
   } else {
      $w = "-" . (string)date('w', $offset);
      $d = date($datefmt, strtotime($w . " day", $offset));
   }
}

While in Northridge, we were driving around to see where we could get some grubs and came across Kabuki Sushi in a strip mall. At first, I thought it was part of the Kabuki chain, but even before entering, I could tell that it was too small and Mom & Pop-ish to be part of the chain.

It’s surprising that the Kabuki chain hasn’t sent these people a cease and desist order since there’s definitely confusion created by the same name, and even a very similar logo. It appears that there’s a deliberate attempt by this place to confuse prospective customers. Of course, it’s possible that this small place was first and they just haven’t bothered to sue the chain.

But I digress.

I’ve been to plenty of tiny sushi places that turned out to be a gem so I was not deterred by it’s looks. Since it’s tiny, we did have to wait a few minutes to be seated. We were seated in a booth and served by what I would describe as probably a family member or at least somebody that’s not worried about getting fired. Don’t get me wrong. She was nice enough. Just not somebody that seemed to be worried about their tip.

To get us started, we ordered some Edamame which was over cooked and almost inedible. This was certainly a bad start because any restaurant that would serve that can’t have anybody in the back that is doing some quality control. The only good thing was the waitress talked us out of ordering the large edamame and told us we should get the small. I guess she knew we wouldn’t like it.

Not deterred by the edamame, and starving, we continued our quest. Instead of my usual ordering technique, I decided to order a bunch of stuff a la carte as shown below.

Nigiri and Tempura Roll

The sushi was acceptable and fresh but nothing to write home about or go out of your way for. I wanted to find a small hidden diamond, but instead found a forgettable lump of coal sushi place. If you get the chance, skip this place.

Kabuki Sushi
9701 Reseda Blvd
Northridge, CA 91324
(818) 886-8266

The tires on my old 2004 Toyota basically are bald. It’s time to get new ones. In the past, I’ve used the dealer but I know they charge more. But now that I’m buying everything online, I decided to try buying tires this way and hopefully save some time and money too.

Using google, I found Discount Tire Centers, which apparently has stores all over Southern California.

Discount Tire Website

Their nice website allowed me to pick my tires based on my car, and even make an appointment at their nearest location, which was just down the street from me. Their prices were very competitive too. Nice.

So on the day of my appointment, I arrive at the Discount Tire Center at 1992 S. Sepulveda in West LA, park and go inside. There was nobody behind the counter. Strange. After just a minute, a guy comes out with a customer and they start discussing his options. While this is going on, calls are coming in and this lone employee must answer the calls while trying to help this live customer. I could tell this was going to take a while.

Fast forward to my turn. I show him my appointment print-out and he starts typing into the computer keyboard. I can already tell there’s going to be a problem. He tells me he doesn’t have any record of my appointment but he’ll check to see if he has the tires I need. He then literally calls 2 places on 2 phones simultaneously. One on each ear. Talk about multi-tasking. Unfortunately, this amazing phone trick yields zero tires.

Actually, what’s amazing is what happens next. He tells me that the online appointment system is run by another company and I need to call a guy at that company. With that, he wipes his hands of me and the sales pitch is over. The strange part was not that he wanted me to call some other guy, but that he didn’t try to sell me something. This was a perfect opportunity for him to upsell me to some expensive tires that he has in stock. But no upselling. In fact, no selling at all. It was just bye-bye.  Weird.

So I called the number he gave me and indeed it was the voice mail of the guy that he says the number was for. I explained my situation and left my number for him to call me. It’s been months and I’m still waiting for a call.

At this point, it was apparent that this company didn’t know online from hole in the wall so I was no longer thinking that I was actually going to get tires from this company, but I didn’t want my credit card being charged and wanted to cancel my order.

After getting back home, I went back to their website and found their corporate phone number. Amazingly, I got a live person there without any waiting. I explained my situation and she explained to me that the online service simply emails the local store and it’s up to them to take care of the appointment and ordering of the tires. So apparently, either the local store didn’t get the email or more likely, they don’t know how to read their email.

She was very nice to me on the phone and explained to me not to worry about the credit card because it doesn’t get charged until all the services are completed. She also told me that she would look into the apparent disconnect between their online system and their store.

That’s all nice, but it’s too late for me.

In hindsight, I should have double checked my appointment before going there and I probably could have avoided the problems I had. I still may not have been able to get my tires, but at least I wouldn’t have gone there and wasted my time. I guess the official looking print-out I got from their online website gave me a false sense of entitlement.

By I digress.

On to the next website I go looking for tires. The next one I found was tirerack.com. This one is different in that it just sells the tires to you and ships it to a tire installer near your house. As you can see from the website below, my car can have 2 different sized tires depending on the options I got on my car.

Tire Rack Website

Unfortunately, being the moron that I am, instead of double checking the tire size simply by going to the garage and looking at my tires, I decided that I knew my tire size from memory. You already know where this is going. I went ahead and ordered the tires and had it sent to a Firestone Auto Care center near me. Because Tire Rack is an online company, there is no sales tax so even with the UPS shipping, the cost was basically the same as Discount Tire. Nice.

Unlike Discount Tire Centers, Tire Rack emails me automatically when my tire shipment has arrived at Firestone with their phone number and instructions on what to do next. So far so good. I call Firestone and they tell me the tires have arrived and I schedule an appointment to come in a few days later.

When I arrive at Firestone, unlike at Discount Tire Center, there are 2 people behind the counter, not to mention other people sitting in a waiting area for their cars. This looks much more promising so far. The guy behind the counter goes to the computer and my appointment is actually there. He asks for my key so he can get my odometer reading.

Unfortunately, when he comes back, he gives me the bad news. I’ve ordered the wrong sized tires. He tells me I can send the tires back to Tire Rack and have them ship the right sized ones, or he has the right size in stock but it will cost a little more. Yes! This is the upselling that I was expecting at Discount Tire Center but didn’t get.

At this point in the game, I was happy that he was upselling me and quickly told him to write me up and install those more expensive suckers right on my car.

While waiting for the installation, I called Tire Rack and they said I can either take the tires to UPS, or have UPS pick them up at Firestone, which would cost more. Completely defeated at this point, I told them to have UPS pick it up and I’d be happy to pay extra to end this nightmare purchase.

Finally, after about 2 weeks of online play and false starts, I had my new tires installed at a cost higher than initially expected, not to mention the extra UPS cost I incurred. The guy at Firestone told me there were other things wrong with my car but I ignored him and drove away quickly before he did any more upselling on me.

At this point, you’re thinking this epic fail is over. No it’s not. After a month, I noticed my credit card wasn’t credited with the return of the tires so I called Tirerack and learned that Firestone had sent them the wrong tires. That’s right.

The customer service lady was kind enough to tell me that she would contact Firestone and work this out with them for me. However, she also told me that this could take a while to work out because they will probably dispute the claim. And she wasn’t kidding. In this case, a while may mean forever. It’s been months and I’ve pretty much given up on it.

So in the end, not only did I waste weeks, got frustrated and spent a long time on customer service calls, I ended up spending hundreds of dollars more than if I had just had my dealer put the tires on. What an epic fail this turned out to be.

So what the moral of this story? There are more than one lesson to be learned here.

First, when making an appointment online, do not trust that the system works properly. Double check the appointment by talking to a live person.

Second, don’t be a moron. Double check before ordering online to make sure you are ordering the right thing. Just because the website tells you what to order, doesn’t mean that’s what you should get.

And lastly, sometimes in trying to save a few bucks by ordering online, it may end up costing you more money.

I’m going to take tires off my list of things to order online.

After trying out the Brentwood Sugarfish many times, I decided to see how the Downtown version was.

The 7th street location is not great in my opinion as far as parking. There is no street parking and the lot that they use is around the corner and multi-story so you it can take a bit of walking to get to the actual restaurant. Of course, this is coming from the laziest man on earth.

As you can see below, the restaurant is airy with high ceilings and the windows allow you to see out to 7th street where you will see people waiting for the MTA bus since the bus stop is right in front. Most of them are probably looking back wondering why you would pay so much for some uncooked fish.

Larger than Brentwood

We ordered the Nozawa as per usual to see how consistent the quality would be between the different branches. To my pleasant surprise, the quality was very high and identical to the Brentwood branch. It’s amazing that they can get things to be so consistent.

Unagi

However, one thing that wasn’t consistent was unlike the Brentwood branch, the waiter here DID ask me if I wanted more hot tea. Apparently, it’s not the chains policy to purposely not ask.

All in all, this branch is just as good as the Brentwood branch and I will be coming back here.

SUGARFISH Downtown Los Angeles
600 W 7th Street, Suite 150
Los Angeles, CA 90017
213-627-3000

The Curry House in Little Tokyo has had a 20% discount on all spaghetti dishes for about 2 weeks but they’ve kept it pretty quiet and nobody seems to know about it. I found out about it by accident and ask how long this deal was going to be going on, and nobody seems to know.

What’s the point of having a secret discount sale? I guess that’s some type of Japanese secret marketing technique that I’m not familiar with.

20% Discount

Update 6/2011:
About a month later,I found out what the real reason was for this discount. According to one of the waitresses, because of the earthquake disaster in Japan, all food items are being tested for radiation before the shipments are allowed to enter the US. This has caused a long delay in shipping the curry from Japan and so there is a curry shortage. To alleviate this problem, they are offering this discount to get people to not order curry.

Curry House
123 S. Onizuka St. #204, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 620-0855
Map

Since I have a dock for my iPhone 4, and the fancy wireless charging dock for the Palm Pre, the first thing I started to look for was a dock for my Samsung Epic 4G.

According to Amazon, the list price is $40, but you can get it from them for $24. You might be able to find it cheaper if you really look around. As you can see, unlike the iPhone dock, this dock is in landscape mode, so the USB connector is on the left side.

USB connector on left - slight indentations for camera and volume

The picture below shows the back of the docking station where you plug the USB cable into the unit. The other side can either go to your computer’s USB, or to an AC plug with the AC adapter.

USB cable plugs into back

As you can see below, you can dock the Epic with the keyboard open. It can also be docked with the keyboard closed. I’ve read other reviews where people complain that the volume button gets pushed when putting the Epic into the docking station. Although, this is possible to do, I really haven’t had this problem. First off, most of the time, I turn the Epic off (if not already off) before putting it in the docking station. This avoids any problems with the volume button.

Epic 4G shown docked with keyboard opened

By combining this dock with the free app Alarm Clock Plus, you’ll get a great clock and screen saver that works perfectly while charging your phone.

Although it’s not as cool as the wireless Palm Touchstone, this docking station works better than the iPhone dock for me because it slides in very easily. For anyone with the Epic, this is a no brainer purchase.

The time came to improve the security in my house but I didn’t want to have to carry more keys. After looking around, I found an electronic keypad door lock on the Schlage website and got it at OSH nearby. Just by chance, they had a President Day sale and I saved $50 off the MSRP, which according to Amazon is $278. It was $150 at OSH minus the 50 bucks.

Back baseplate with 9v battery

Installation was pretty simple. Just remove the old lock, place the keypad on the outside of the door, and the baseplate shown above on the inside. Connect some wires and plug in the 9V battery as shown above.

Front keypad

After screwing in the back onto the baseplate, it’s done. Instead of reading the paper instructions that comes with the unit, just watch the Youtube installation video, which shows you step by step, how to install the lock.

This particular model features a lever on the inside that activates or deactivates the lever on the outside. When deactivated, the lever on the outside does not open the door and the keypad must be used. If you want to disable that, you can do it with the lever on the inside. You have to be careful not to accidentally lock yourself out when you’re testing things.

The lock allows you to add new 4 digit passcodes or delete them using a master 6 digit passcode. There is no way to change the master code. You can also delete all passcodes if you screw up and want to start over. You can store up to a maximum of 19 codes, which should be more than enough for any normal user. Remember, there is no LCD or LED display so you have no idea how many codes you have added unless you write everything down.

There is also no way to know which code was last used to enter, or any other logging security feature. This feature would not be too difficult to implement if the unit had a tiny LCD display.

According to Schlage, with normal usage, the battery should last at least 3 years. I’m not sure what normal usage is but if true, would be a long enough time that it would not be annoying.

One thing missing is backlighting on the keys while you are typing in your passcode. There is actually a light there but I’m assuming that they don’t want to drain the battery by lighting up the keypad on each use. Basically, what this means is, you’d better have a flashlight if you’re trying to use this in pitch darkness. For me, since I have it inside, it doesn’t really matter but if you have it outside, it might matter to you.

It hasn’t been very long since I installed it so I haven’t used it much. So far, I’ve had no problems with it.

Sexy Mouse

My co-worker got this mouse which is in the shape of a female body. The body has no appendages, which is a little creepy if you think about it too much. Clicking on the breast/buttons is a little uncomfortable but this is a sure way to pick up some hot chicks. Not.