Piatti Italian Restaurant

Went to an interesting Italian restaurant last night.  Uptown near Eglinton and Yonge.  Fixe Prix meal, $25 per today, gets you started with a trip to the appetizer bar and an order of pasta (order from the list or build your own with a pasta, sauce and about 20 ingredients). After you receive and eat your pasta, a waiter brings around a variety of risotto, pizza, lasagna and cannelloni.  And ends with dessert pizza.
Ana ordered from the pasta list, I made my own with gnocchi, tomato sauce, olives, mushrooms, capers, chicken and bocconcini cheese.  Came out okay, though the capers pushed things overboard a bit.  Would have been perfect without.  I will know better for next time.  The quality of the ingredients was good and the flavor was excellent.  Much of that would be based on being prepared fresh over gas heat, I think.
Tried the veal cannelloni and a bite of Ana’s cheese and spinach cannelloni.  Both were good, but I preferred the flavor of the veal and the texture was good.  Wasn’t interested in the pizza, as I’d had enough.  Figured to try dessert.

Ah, disaster.  As the waiter reached to give Ana a slice of the dessert pizza (pizza crust with fruit and white and dark chocolate drizzled on) another slice didn’t separate correctly and plopped in my lap.   Fortunately, I have good reflexes and caught a majority of it (all of the crust) in my left hand.  But the chocolate and fruit fell on my pants (and a bit on Ana’s skirt).  The poor waiter, obviously just in from northern Europe, didn’t know what to do.  He stammered a bit, gathered up the destroyed remnants and took off.

Had it been a professional wait staff, and not kids in college, I think I would have complained.  But it was okay and looks to be coming out of my pants with some stain spray.  Wait and see, eh?

I would go back.  And hope for better service.  Also, I got even by snapping up one of the little start/stop bringing me food cards at the table (see the scans in the image gallery) for a memento.  I told Ana it would come in handy.  I can put it on the armrest of my chair and she’ll know when to bring me sandwiches.  Yes, I’m writing, so I did escape with both arms in one piece and my head attached.

Last night I “repaired” a bookmarklet allowing you to search for material in your local library from Amazon.com using John Udell’s code from his LibraryLookup bookmarklet generator. Here’s the code if you live in Toronto: Amazon > Toronto Public Library search. Just drag the link to your bookmark bar (the link bar below your address form in the browser in which you are currently reading this post).

How I “Repaired” the Javascript
Wish I could say I am a brilliant javascripter, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. But, I am very stubborn and had to get this to work after having dinner with someone who’s brother wrote an Amazon bookmarklet for his local library. While most library’s do an excellent job of returning a specific search, Amazon has done a great job of enabling you to “browse” the collection in an “e-tail” environment in place of a “retail” location like Barnes and Noble or Indigo/Chapters.

I knew I had read about Amazon to local library search before but didn’t have much interest because neither Richmond city nor Henrico county had a great library system to search. Toronto has an excellent public library system. If you live here, you should read the Wikipedia entry. It is an impressive institution and, according to Wikipedia, has the largest circulation in North America and the second-highest number of visits per year, in the world, after the Hong Kong library system.

Anyway, on with the fix so you can try to build one for your local system as well.

1. Visit the LibraryLookup Project homepage.
2. Start by visiting the system software links in the 3rd paragraph (Innovative, Voyager, iPac, DRA, and Talis at the time of this post). Chances are your local library system already has a search tool. You can search for your city (or college or university) by using your browser’s page search function to locate the existing link by keyword.

If it isn’t there, then you can do the following:
3. Visit your library’s website and do a quick search for a book you know they have in circulation. Look at the URL. For example, from Toronto:

http://hip.tpl.toronto.on.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=E18H87367I106.731071&profile=
rs&source=~!rs&view=subscriptionsummary&uri=full=1100021~!3135138~!3&ri=
1&aspect=subtab37&menu=search&ipp=20&spp=20&staffonly=&term=steven+brust&index=
GW&uindex=&aspect=subtab37&menu=search&ri=1

Please note the bold text where it says ‘ipac’ as this is rather important. Your library’s may say something different.

4. Go to the LibraryLookup Generator page. Enter your library’s base URL. That actually didn’t work for the TPL as the search page results have a different parameter. I couldn’t use ‘http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca’ and had to do a search and replace that with the beginning of the search result page ‘http://hip.tpl.toronto.on.ca’.  Simply putting that in the Base URL page might work (and does with the TPL system).

I didn’t catch the simple fix and ended up replacing the ‘index’ text to ’session’ to match the TPL system’s search URL text. I only mention this because there could be some recent changes by your library system from an existing bookmarklet and a quick comparison between the two existing URLs might show you the answer.

5. Visit Amazon.com (or Amazon.ca if you’re in Canada) and dig down to an individual book (or dvd, cd or whatever) entry and click on the bookmarklet link in your browser. The only requirement for the bookmarklet to work is the Amazon page must list an ISBN number. If there is no ISBN number, the script won’t respond even to give a failed response. If the material isn’t available in the library sytem, the bookmarklet, through the library, will generate a page saying the search failed to generate any matches.

6. The current javascript in the bookmarklet (in Firefox on a Mac) will open a pop-up page in the background. So, you might have to move the main browser window aside to see your results.

Anyway, enjoy. Hopefully you can use this to help yourself. But, do buy something from Amazon now and then. They do have a great site for perusing and we should support their endeavor so they don’t eventually get bought out by Walmart and we know how that would end.  Nothing, ever, with questionable language.
If anything is missing from this, tell me in the comments and I’ll get an email letting me know to add info.

The Best 80 Photoshop Text Effects on the Web

Nice selection of Pshop tutorials.  Always something to learn/reference.

Canadian PM vows to defend Arctic - CNN.com

The story is interesting, especially if you, like myself, just relocated to one of the two countries in question.  The part of the story I find most meaningful about how the ‘Net has began to impact all forms of communication and relationships is summed up in this brief statement, “Denmark sent a letter of protest to Ottawa, while Canadians and Danes took out competing Google ads, each proclaiming sovereignty over the rock 680 miles south of the North Pole.”

Who knows, maybe one day soon, the U.N. will go virtual and build a new center in Second Life.

Ferm Living US

I posted an earlier site for painting designs on your walls, but this seems a bit easier.  Especially if you aren’t as artistic as you would like.

Amazon.com: Duo Shower Rod & Towel Rack - Brushed Nickel by Polder: Kitchen & Dining

A second shower rod would certainly make it easier to keep towels and the shower curtain cleaner and dry.  I’m not so certain I’d drop $50 until I tested it with an inexpensive expanding rod just in front of the rod holding the curtain.

Metolius How-To Guides

Metolius has some excellent guides for adding climbing walls and such to a home. Will I ever build such a thing? In my dreams, mabye. But it will be really nice if I can pull it off in our new home.

For additional info, indoorclimbing.com has a great site: Build a climbing wall and build a campus board (which has some nice info on how protective well various substances such as bark and pea gravel protects you).

Iola Design: Bamboo Cabinets and Shelves TreeHugger

Cleaning up the hard drive and ran across the picture on this page.  Nice looking room, especially with the shelving running around the furniture providing a place to organize and store items but freeing up the central space.

I’m so-so on the shelves.  Not certain I could make something like that easily.  I guess once you had the shell you could drill and screw directly into the back of the shelf boards to secure it in place.  I still think there would be a problem with warping without using a metal support on the back.

FixMyXP.com - Your One Stop Windows XP Fix It Site - Run Programs Secretly by Setting them To Open Minimized

Yesterday was a productive day.  Slowly getting all of my computers set up so I have a very centralized system for backup, access and control.  Started turning my HTPC  into a full data server.  One nice feature was setting up iTunes for access on the network by sharing the iTunes media on the server to our laptops.

To do so, I set the following parameters:

1.  Turn shared libraries on in iTunes:
Windows: Sharing your iTunes library across computers
Mac OS X: Sharing your iTunes library across computers

2.  Start iTunes on system startup (in Windows).  Pretty simple, create a shortcut to the iTunes executable and drag the shortcut into the Startup folder.  You can also have iTunes appear in the system tray instead of as a minimized window.  Go to iTunes preferences, Advanced tab, General tab.  Near the bottom, select “Minimize iTunes window to system tray.”
3.  Use these steps to start iTunes minimized.

Now iTunes is pretty much a Windows service in the background in place of a program taking up valuable visual space.

e-zine with modern & contemporary design from young designers and creatives - [DESIGNSPOTTER.COM]