Delta

People often ask me if my life has changed since I realised that the difference between the price I paid for my house and its current value equals the price of a brand new Ferrari (albeit the cheapest Ferrari, with no optional stickers). And the answer is no, my life hasn't changed. Thanks for your support.

Back from Seattle and Irvine

I came back from the US Monday. Photos of my trip are here.

In-n-Out burger revelations

I went to In-n-Out today. This was by no means the first time I did but, this time, I had locals with me who told me about the secret menu. It's truly amazing.

In the past, I always said no to the onion option. I just didn't see the point. Now I do. You can't not order onions on your burger at In-n-Out, that would be missing most of the experience. But that's not the point of the secret menu. The menu they display is dead simple: it's either burger or cheese burger (basically, it's slightly more complicated but only slightly). You have a number of secret options:

• You can tell them how to cook the meat (I recommend "well done" in this particular case).
• You can tell them how to cook the fries ("well done" is interesting but not my favourite here).
• You can ask for an N-by-N (2-by-2, 3-by-3... Niall says it's capped to 4-by-4 and he's sometimes right, although often foreign), N being the number of steaks and slices of cheese you want in your burger.

And that's pretty nice. On top of that, ingredients are all fresh and you can absolutely tell the difference: it's really, really good fast food.

Besides the secret menu, they also hide references to the bible on the soda cups and other wrappings. Not entire paragraphs but things like "John 3:16" or "Revelation 3:20." In-n-Out burger is owned by a christian family, and that's the kind of easter eggs they came up with.

Also, I was served by Barbie. An actual person named Barbie.

Data-driven it is.

Those who don't get the reference can click this link to fully embrace the hilarity. Oh. The. Hilarity.

Desktop

That's it. I ordered a desktop computer today. I haven't had a desktop computer at home for almost 4 years now (let's not count my two failed attempts at reviving my PC from France: it never really came back to life). And, now that I'm thinking about it, I had a desktop computer more or less continuously between 1985 and 2006. So I'm pretty excited.

I gave a call to the store to get a quote and the guy asked "Do you want to order it?" I wasn't paying attention, so I said "yes", then I inadvertently gave my credit card number and that was it. I could probably sue them, because they clearly caught me by surprise. These guys at Apple are good. Now I have to find a name for my computer.

I'm thinking of eddieizzard, datadriven, bicameralism, easilyamused and computer. I think datadriven is a fantastic name for a computer.

Troll, Lenin, Cinema, not Taoiseach (yet)

So, in Fremont, there's a Troll Avenue.

Quite nice already. But there's an actual troll at the end of that avenue, underneath a bridge.

Really great. But the best part (in my easily amused opinion) is there was a vote to decide the kind of art to put there. It means there exists a community in which a majority of people decided the statue of a troll was a good thing in order to meet the goal of building "a greater sense of place in the neighborhood[*]."

It's within walking distance of the Lenin Statue and "Fremont Almost Free Outdoor Cinema." I'm not making any of this up, honest.

[*]: As they say. I'd write "neighbourhood" but the guys over there don't speak nor write Taoiseach English.

Lenin in Fremont

I'm just back from the Seattle area (more precisely, Fremont, WA). Quite surprisingly, there's a statue of Lenin, there. The full story of how it got there is worth a read.

"That's it! I'm going to 'merika!" -- Lenin