New Old Japanese Restaurant

Steven Guccione

There is a Japanese restaurant in a strip mall by the local supermarket. The whole shopping center has been re-done and is pretty spiffy now. We walked past the Japanese place last week and it looked nice. Somehow we had never been here. Didn’t know anyone else who had been here, either. I remembered that there was a similarly named Japanese place near that spot over 20 years ago. It had the feel of a fast food joint with formica booths, order at the counter. We used to go there when the kids were really small. They would eat teriyaki and rice and if they made noise or a mess it wasn’t a big deal. The restaurant also has a big bookshelf of Japanese manga comics, otherwise not much to remember.

Today we went there for lunch. Nice place with Japanese and Korean dishes. Pretty busy at lunch. Had to park over in the supermarket parking lot. Had a pork bulgogi bento, which was really the reason I wanted to go. Our old stand-by Korean place burned down many years ago and I never found a suitable replacement.

I couldnt resist asking the waitress if there was a connection between the old Manga Teriyaki joint and this new place. Yes, there was. The parents ran the Teriyaki place and now the kids have taken over and upgraded it into a nice sit down restaurant. Not sure when the changeover happened. I’ll definitely be going back.

Don’t Turn Off Your Computer

Steven Guccione

i bought one of these cute little MiniPCs a while back. Great price, and came with Windows 10, not that I wanted it. Installed Ubuntu and used it happily. It was still able to boot windows from the GRUB menu. I figured I might need it one day. I’m not sure what came over me, but today I decided to take a few minutes, boot Windows and do an update. What could go wrong?

First it wouldn’t boot. Somehow related to the dreaded UEFI security. I suppose stopping you from booting up is the ultimate in secure computing. I searched for a fix on-line and found several. All seemed dodgy or complex and none seems to have any explanation for what was actually wrong. I’m found a way to force a Windows boot via the BIOS. Good enough for me.

Updates were slow. Like really slow. In my boredom I noticed the clock was off by several hours. I guess I hadn’t set the time zone. Without thinking I set the correct time zone. Big mistake. Suddenly all bets were off. Some things worked, others didn’t. I decided to reboot, hoping for a return to sanity. Now I’m unable to even power down. I guess I have time. I’ll wait the bastards out. And to think I used to do this for a living.