Dinner with Alicia Silverstone

Well, not quite. I went to Hollywood this afternoon and who better to recommend a vegan restaurant to visit than Alicia Silverstone, celebrity vegan? The Internet gossip rags duly obliged, confiding that the M Cafe on Melrose Avenue is her favourite. This is a macrobiotic cafe not far from the centre of Hollywood, so after a quick trip to Hollywood Boulevard and Grauman's Chinese Theater it was food time.

Plenty to choose from, mostly soup, salad and sandwiches (it's a cafe) with a few rice and veg dishes. Plenty of seitan, tempeh and soy mozzarella if you want protein. Fish is available too in that strange combination that is macrobiotic. I went for a brown rice and seitan dish, which was great in itself, except that the veg (carrots, broccoli and cauliflower) tossed into it looked like something from Sligo. That is, chunky, looking fresh from the ground and just about boiled with no condiments. I felt so healthy.

Not to worry, the M Cafe boasts a leading vegan/macrobiotic chef de patisserie!
Unfortunately they were out of chocolate cake slices - all that was left were entire chocolate cakes at $40 a pop. Maybe a bit much. So I settled for a lemon meringue tarte...and a soy cappuccino...and a couple of cocoa truffles. Just in case.

To finish off a perfect evening I returned to find I had won a parking ticket. Los Angeles, I will remember you.

Counter Strike Dynamic Pricing

I just played the new beta of Counter Strike: Source with the controversial Dynamic Pricing. What do you know? The sky didn't fall in. Adjusting the price of the weapons by a few percent at most right now (e.g. $50) it is hard to really notice that much. After a while the impact might get more pronounced I guess. As they have released this as a separate beta game you are still free to play under the old rules (static pricing).

Edgy and pam-keyring

Ubuntu Edgy is still looking good 3 weeks on. One joy of Dapper was Network Manager and the ease of dealing with both wireless networks and switching between many networks on a laptop. Logging into Gnome and then logging in again to unlock the gnome keyring that Network Manager uses to store wireless network passwords was a pain.

All in the past, as the (unofficial) pam-keyring deb and new versions of the pam libraries in Edgy mean that pam-keyring work like a charm now. There is the occasional bump where it connects to a wireless network and after switching back and forth from wired it starts prompting for the wireless credentials again. Overall though, life is much easier now.

Remember after installing pam-keyring to add these lines to /etc/pam.d/gdm:

auth optional pam_keyring.so try_first_pass
session optional pam_keyring.so