La Panza es Primero

Location: Kukulcan L. 16-A Y 16-B, Plaza Flamingo, Km. 11, Zona Hotelera, Cancun, Quintana Roo 77500, Mexico
Cuisine: Mexican
Hours: SUN-SAT (10am-10pm)
Prices: $17/person
Credit Cards: All major

Food: 10
Service: 9
Value: 8
Environment: 7

Frequency: Unique

For lunch, we went back to Flamingo Plaza to try out that first restaurant we passed up. The menu had similar dishes to Sanborns Cafe, but slightly more expensive. It turned out that this was the best meal we've had so far... including the great food at the wedding. All portions were huge (some big enough for 2 people), which justified the prices. I really wanted to try the fish enchiladas, but they didn't have that item at the time, so I settled for the safe bet... beef enchiladas.

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The decor in the restaurant resembled Cascabel Taqueria with its luchador theme. The interior was dark like a sports bar and the furniture was much like what one would find at a taqueria. It was clean and had a nice atmosphere. The staff was very friendly and welcoming. Our host, Miguel was energetic and happy to explain all of the dishes.

I gave the food a rare 10 because this is clearly the best Mexican food I've ever had. I tried a little bit of my Mom's (something resembling chicken curry) and my Dad's (a beef stew) and everything was just great. The meat was tender in all dishes and the sauces were full of flavor. The corn and wheat tortillas were freshly baked. I'll have to try to come back to this one if possible so I can give the fish enchiladas another try.

Note: "la panza es primero" means "the stomach is first."

Reinhard & Marites

Wedding by the Sea

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Reception on the Beach

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Sanborns Cafe

Location: Kukulcan L. 16-A Y 16-B, Plaza Flamingo, Km. 11, Zona Hotelera, Cancun, Quintana Roo 77500, Mexico
Cuisine: Mexican
Hours: SUN-SAT (10am-10pm)
Prices: $15/person
Credit Cards: All major

Food: 6
Service: 7
Value: 7
Environment: 7

Frequency: Uncommon

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By the time we got to the hotel in Cancun, it was about 6pm already. We settled into our room and checked at the front desk to see what the prices were like in the hotel's 3 restaurants. They were all $40 a meal per person! It's pretty much a ripoff unless you bought the all-inclusive package. So we headed out to the street to see if there was anything around. Fortunately, Beach Palace is across the street from a shopping center called Flamingo Plaza. We walked through the entire length to get an overview of the place. The larger restaurants were all chains we have in the US... Bubba Gump, Outback Steakhouse and Margaritaville. There were 2 Mexican places... Sanborns and La Panza es Primero. We decided to go for Sanborns because it was a brighter, larger space and had lower prices.

Overall, it was a good first dinner in Mexico. The food was OK, but I wasn't blown away by it. I've had better in NY (see Cascabel Taqueria). Service was laid back, but good. I was a little nervous that the restaurant was empty when we went, but it filled up little by little.

Centrino SSD (Part 2)

Cloning
The fair way to go about testing this was to clone my old hard drive so that everything would be in the same exact place, same software and startup items. If I did a clean install onto the SSD, it would hardly be a controlled experiment. I used a free software called Disk Copy 2.3 by EASEUS to do this. Unlike other cloning programs, this one does a true sector-by-sector copy. The download from their site burns to a bootable CD, which starts up a mini OS that detects all hard disks, including USB and Firewire ones. Since Windows isn't running during the cloning, you won't run into any permissions errors.

Stats
Cold Boot (powering on from the off state up to the logon screen)
45 seconds

Windows Start (logon until all startup items have loaded)
18 seconds

Photoshop CS (Photoshop startup & plugin load)
7 seconds

Conclusion
There you have it... same exact systems on 2 different hard drives. The SSD swap made a significant difference. There wasn't as big a difference with the cold boot, but that's because both tests went through the BIOS sequence, which doesn't occur on the drives. The Windows startup was unbelievably fast... 1 minute and 8 seconds to just 18 seconds!

Liam's 2nd Birthday

Today was a rare day that I wish I still lived in Manhattan. Liam's Birthday was 10:30am @ Inwood Hill Park... all the way at the Northern tip of Manhattan. I also had to time a pickup of an order of homemade lamingtons at 116th & Lenox. I was late to pickup the lamingtons because of construction on the 1/2/3 line, but somehow made it to the park @ just about 10:30. I also got off a stop too early.

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I passed by Andrew & Joanne's apartment just as Andrew was about to head out, which was good timing because Joanne gave me a call to see if I could help Andrew with the rest of the food. We were able to stuff everything into a large box for the 2 of us to haul over. Liam was already there with a couple of his friends. As we arrived, I also saw some familiar faces in John, Francis Helen and Cary who I know through the Homework Help volunteer program.

A couple of days ago, the forecast for June 26 was intermittent thunderstorms. The forecast this morning moved the storms to 9pm and they never actually came. So we really lucked out with the weather. It turned out to be a perfect outdoor day for Liam's Birthday. The location by the lake was perfect and the ground was nice and dry for the kids to play on. It was a nice relaxing day of catching up with friends and playing with kids.

Centrino SSD (Part 1)

Transcend 64 GB SSD
SSD (solid state drives) have been dropping in price, but not the PATA/IDE models for older computers. There was a Transcend model a few months ago on New Egg for $195. I thought that was an OK price and waited for it to go down as one of their daily specials. Instead, it got sold out. I put myself on the email alert, knowing I should've pulled the trigger on the purchase. I got the alert just last week and bought it right away.

Sager NP3750
My old laptop from 2003 is a 1.4 Ghz Centrino maxxed out at 1 GB RAM (shared memory architecture w/ 32 MB allocated to VRAM). It was the first widescreen laptop (yes... before Sony or Apple) and also first glossy screen released. Let me start by saying that I only spent this money for my own curiosity and knowledge and don't recommend this upgrade at all. Even if an SSD double my laptop speed, it's not worth $195 for a measly 64 GB. I could've gone with a 500 GB for under $100. But any computer or car enthusiast can vouch for the fact that we spend tons of money for slightest performance upgrade.

Stats
Cold Boot (powering on from the off state up to the logon screen)
1 minute 12 seconds

Windows Start (logon until all startup items have loaded)
1 minute 8 seconds

Photoshop CS (Photoshop startup & plugin load)
20 seconds

Macy's Cellar Bar & Grill

Location: 151 West 34th St., New York, NY 10001
Cuisine: American
Hours: SUN (12pm-6:30pm); MON-SAT (12pm-8:30pm)
Phone: (212) 868-3001
Website: www.patinagroup.com
Prices: $20/person
Credit Cards: All major

Food: 9
Service: 7
Value: 7
Environment: 8

Frequency: Unique

We had a small SCAD CSA (Chinese Student Association) reunion today because Cathy was visiting from her new home in China. It was exactly a year from her last visit. It was also the first time since we were in Savannah, that everyone was able to meet at the same time... me, Lewis & Ning. Usually when Cathy comes, Lewis & I are able to meet with her at the same time.

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Cathy was staying in the Penn Station area, so she showed us a food court are in Macy's basement that none of is locals really knew about. I've only gone into Macy's a handful of times because it's always overcrowded and a hassle to walk around in. The Cellar Bar & Grill is a great find though. It's a nice, comfortable place with good generic American food. It wasn't that crowded, so we ate comfortably without rush.

The food was nothing exciting, but tasted great. Service was pretty good. Lewis' diet is always a challenge, but the waiter was very helpful in getting him the right ingredients. I thought the prices were a bit high, but at least the portions were large. $20/person is a bit on the high side considering none of us ordered drinks and Ella Nio's order was a kid's meal.

Eastern Conference Cousins

This post is a table of contents for Memorial Weekend. As usual, all posts were back-dated to the original dates of occurrence:

- Tea Box Cafe
- MoMA
- Family Dinner
- Cascabel Taqueria

Cascabel Taqueria

Location: 1542 2nd Ave., New York, NY 10028
Cuisine: Mexican
Hours: SUN-THU (11:30am-12:00am); FRI-SAT (11:30am-1:00am)
Phone: (212) 717-7800
Website: www.nyctacos.com
Prices: $15/person
Credit Cards: All major

Food: 9
Service: 8
Value: 7
Environment: 7

Frequency: Unique

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Greg wasn't able to make it on Saturday, but made plans with Jen for today. I was also free, so I met up with them on the Upper East after church. I hadn't seen Greg in just as long a time as Jen. The last time was at Jeremy & Frida's Wedding. Greg had his car there, so he drove us along 2nd Ave. We stopped at a random spot to look for a restaurant on foot. From a distance, I recognized Totonno's, a pretty good pizza place. I had it before in the Lower East. When we headed there to look at the menu, the restaurant next door, Cascabel Taqueria caught our attention. It was a nice day and they had an open space with semi-outdoor seating.

Family Dinner

After lunch, I took Jen & Zhen to MoMA on my Wiley company membership. We didn't have time for the whole museum, so we concentrated on Picasso and some of the installations. We spent about 2 hours there and then Jen & Zhen went to Times Sq. to get Broadway show tickets. I headed back to the apartment to pick up some clothes before heading off to the family dinner in Flushing.

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Cindy & Wil went to and air show in Long Island during the day, so they couldn't meet us for lunch. But most of us were able to meet up for dinner as well. We were all looking forward to playing with the kids.