[thumbs up] Deep Ellum, the new beer bar in All­ston (477 Cam­bridge St). Decent food and a first-rate beer selec­tion. Most beer bars seem focused on Bel­gians, but Deep Ellum’s tap list favors stouts and porters. Many selec­tions hail from New Eng­land. And unlike many All­ston bars, the place is not over­run with hip­sters. Awesome.

[thumbs down] Graph­i­cal User Inter­faces. They are well-suited for per­form­ing tasks that are graph­i­cal in nature, or for mak­ing com­put­ers acces­si­ble to ama­teurs, but for repet­i­tive oper­a­tions they only slow peo­ple down. My bank recently switched to some kind of Web-based com­puter sys­tem. Tasks that were once accom­plished with a few quick key­strokes are now ago­niz­ingly slow, as the teller moves the mouse around the screen, click­ing, click­ing, then switch­ing hands to the key­board to type, then back to the mouse for more click­ing. Any­one who was ever watched a travel agent make a reser­va­tion on SABRE will have a deep appre­ci­a­tion for the power and effi­ciency of text-based systems.

[thumbs down] Bath­room atten­dants. These are to be expected in fancy restau­rants or other places where you might like to be pam­pered. But they are nei­ther nec­es­sary nor desir­able in places like bars and air­ports, where their pres­ence (and con­se­quent demands for tips) basi­cally amount to a tax on toi­let usage.

[thumbs up] Con­ver­sa­tions with strangers. Sun­day I talked to a semi-professional bowler who is try­ing to break into the tele­com busi­ness. Explor­ing Boston at lunchtime today, I stum­bled upon a shop oper­ated by the man who pub­lishes the Eldridge Tide and Pilot book. His grand­fa­ther stud­ied physics with Lord Kelvin before enter­ing into an ill-fated busi­ness part­ner­ship with Kelvin’s heirs that even­tu­ally became a suc­cess­ful Boston-based man­u­fac­turer of nau­ti­cal instru­ments (pri­mar­ily ship com­passes). The man inher­ited the com­pany from his father. He taught me a few tricks about com­pass man­u­fac­tur­ing and nav­i­ga­tion at sea. I promised to return should I ever need to buy a barom­e­ter or a sex­tant. (“That one costs only ten ninety-nine… with the dec­i­mal point at the far right.”)

[thumbs up] Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Hal­l­i­day (Anchor Books, 2005). The New York Times Book Review called this biog­ra­phy “a mag­is­te­r­ial work… mag­nif­i­cent… A tri­umph.” Mao Tse-tung (a.k.a. Mao Zedong) has been a house­hold name since the Cold War days—he held absolute power over 25% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion for nearly 30 years—but only within the last decade have the grue­some con­se­quences of his rule come to light (out­side of China, any­how). This book is 617 dense pages of mod­ern Chi­nese his­tory, and it makes no attempt to con­ceal the gory details. My guide­book had said that to under­stand China, one must first under­stand Mao Tse-tung. I now whole­heart­edly agree.

[indif­fer­ent] eW Cove Pow­er­core. The prod­uct I designed at work was announced yes­ter­day in a press release. They’ve already sold over 5 miles of the stuff (it’s 12 inches long) with a firm ship­ment date. Mean­while, I haven’t even fin­ished get­ting the design into mass pro­duc­tion. Typ­i­cal. On the upside, I am amused to see that the mar­ket­ing depart­ment has blessed my cir­cuit with a new trade­mark called “DIMand tech­nol­ogy.” Funny, that I find out about the name for the first time in a pub­lic press release.

[thumbs up] Reg­is­ter­ing to vote. After years of liv­ing ille­gally, it is a great feel­ing to get a let­ter from the elec­tion com­mis­sion con­firm­ing that I am a voter again. I feel like a real cit­i­zen. Now, if only the press would stop harp­ing on the 2008 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, which isn’t hap­pen­ing for another year and a half…

[indif­fer­ent] Blogs. Still not very cool. Randomly-edited web pages are clearly the way to go.