Tequila (in Beach Palace)

Location: Kukulcan Km 11.5, Zona Hotelera, Cancun, Quintana Roo 77500, Mexico
Cuisine: Mexican, International, Buffet
Hours: SUN-SAT (6am-12am)
Phone: 011 52 998 891 4110
Website: www.wyndham.com
Prices: $40/person

Food: 7
Service: 8
Value: 2
Environment: 10

Frequency: Unique

Tequila was our choice for lunch and breakfast during our all-inclusive day. It was the only one that had Mexican food and a good enough variety. The food was just OK overall. You can't go wrong with breakfast, but the bread items weren't that good here. For some reason, all the bread we had in Mexico was always crumbly. For lunch, there was a good variety of international items, but I would've liked to see more Mexican... after all, we're in Mexico!

Service at this place, like most parts of the resort were good. Our waiter was polite, cleared the table when we finished a round, but didn't ask for drink refills. The environment was as clean as it could get. Everything was always shiny. Acoustics were good despite it being a large space. The view of the pool & beach is hard to beat. I couldn't give them a high rating for value though. If you do the math, each meal is worth $30-40. In my book, the breakfast should be priced at $15 and the lunch $25 max.

La Isla

One of the things the Palace Resorts people threw in as part of the timeshare sale was a one-day all inclusive pass to the hotel restaurants. Only two of us could use it, so it ended up being me and my Dad because we could eat the most out of the group. Though I wanted my parents to spend time with each other, my Mom didn't want to throw money away. So my Dad and I ate a late breakfast buffet. Then we went out with Emily & Mom to the mall area we discovered yesterday. They settled on Taco Grill for lunch. It was a nice taco stand that had reasonable combo prices... 2-3 tacos and a drink for about 80 pesos.

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We did caught in the rain after lunch and took shelter under an archway near Lacoste. We figured we could wait it out because all the rainfall we experienced in the past couple of days only lasted a few minutes. This storm was here to stay though. We finally made a run for a cab. Sure enough, it rained for the rest of the day.

Bubba Gump (Cancun)

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)
Phone: 011 52 998 885 3115
Website: www.bubbagump.com
Prices: $22/person
Credit Cards: All major

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

Frequency: Unique

We capped off an eventful day with dinner at Bubba Gump. Though it's an American chain, none of us have ever been to one before and we figured the seafood in Cancun is an instant winner.

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The food was great... we were happy with all 4 of our dishes. Mom had the Captain’s Fish & Chips. Dad had Shrimper’s Net Catch. Emily ordered Dumb Luck Coconut Shrimp and I had Shrimp New Orleans. We had a good variety of their specialties at our table. This is one of those restaurants where you could randomly pick something off the menu and be happy with it.

The service was top-notch. It was unbelievable how fast the staff came when we needed them. While there was one main waitress/waiter for each table, any one of them could respond if another table needed them for something... a very efficient system. The environment was modeled after scenery from the movie, Forrest Gump, so it was nice and fancy and brought a New Orleans/Alabama look to Mexico.

Interactive Aquarium

The Interactive Aquarium was located in an outdoor mall called La Isla. It's one bus stop or a short walk from Beach Palace. I was hoping they would have some axolotls in captivity, but they just had the usual species you would see at any aquarium around the world.

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It costs about $10 (230 pesos for 2 people... the more tickets, the lower the price) to get in, which isn't bad for the size of the aquarium. The sharks and dolphins were the most interesting as usual. The ray petting pool was the only interactive item for the regular aquarium admission. Like many other places in Cancun, they also offered swimming with dolphins at an additional cost. That would've been nice to do, but I didn't have my swimming trunks with me.

Kukulcan Shopping

After lunch, Emily and I headed out to the flea market and mall we passed by on the way to the wedding. My parents headed in the other direction to a timeshare meeting at Cancun Palace.

During the long walk over, we witnessed a truck drive into the middle island, destroying the weakly cemented curbside. That was the second accident of the day on the same street (earlier in the day, there was a rear-end crash in front of our hotel)... not good statistics at all!

We finally made it to the flea market after making a pit stop at Senor Frog's (a Mexican themes bar/grill chain). We probably spent a total of 5 minutes at the annoying flea market before heading across the street to the mall. The flea market was just full of pushy me chants trying to sell their junk. At the mall, we were able to browse without someone talking to us every second. The mall was similar to a typical American one... even with some of the usual stores... same prices as the US as well. So there was nothing really exciting. We stopped at Coldstone Creamery for ice cream and then took the bus to the Interactive Aquarium.

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.