Thought it would be right to post this along.
kiwi_grrl: Help Me, Please

Help Me, Please
Hi everyone.

So, as of a few hours ago, my father died.

Needless to say, the whole family is in a bit of shock as this came completely out of the blue, totally unexpected. I’ve booked a trip back to NZ, but of course, given it’s a) flying all the way to kiwiland, and b) last minute (leave first thing saturday morning … tomorrow would have meant selling my first-born child, and given how I am not planning on having children … well, you can see how expensive that would make that) it’s made things requiring a chunk of cash.

A friend has fronted me the money, wonderful incredible friend that she is, but her credit card will require payment. So, I am wondering, can I please ask anyone and everyone to please donate below? Any amount at all will help, and I totally mean that.

Please.

Thanks so much.

Do feel free to post a link to this on your blog if you feel so inclined, I would appreciate it more than words can say.

I’ll arrive back in Chicago around midnight on Sunday night, the 11th of January.

Turkey neck or horse penis?

Sometimes I’m really happy I moved to DC

Still!

’nuff said!

Software specifications, when introduced for the first time to a company, can be a horrible thing. 

There’s the initial design of the specification document, who gets to write them, etc.

Process stuff.

But there’s a bigger problem.

The lie.

When a specification is written, and sent to development, it should be a static document.  Understandably, this isn’t always possible.  Not every company has the resources to do the kind of thorough design review best practices require, and during development you learn, change your mind, etc.  So, in a perfect world, a specification is static, but in the real world, not so much.

The problem is when a specification changes but the document doesn’t.  If you tell me to do A,B,C and then change it to A,B+1,C and don’t change the document, we are living a lie.  And mostly I’m worried about the damage the lie can do to me.  Really, I can’t win.  If I do what the designer ask, and it goes poorly, they go back to the document and see that what I did doesn’t match the specification.  If I go with the original document and it goes poorly, the designer can complain about how they made a change and just didn’t record it. 

If a design specification document is not sacrosanct, then the developer has to work overtime keeping track of things so that when people come to complain, his ass is covered.

Yeah, ok, I really don’t like tripe.

But I don’t hold that against them.  Pork and Cellophane noodle was great as well as another spicy chicken dish.

As it turns out, I like coconut ice cream (which we were encouraged to order instead of the tempura ice cream).

We recently moved to a Maryland suburb of Washington D.C.

One of the interesting things about this area is the high number of ethnic restaurants.  Every strip mall (and there’s a lot of those…its just the architectural style of this area) has a japanese steak house, or Salvadorean restaurant, or a Vietnamese Deli.  For some reason, though, we haven’t been eating any of these places.  Thats sad because not only do we LOVE food, but one of the biggest complaints we had where we last lived was that everything was a Chilli.I.Fridigans.  Since moving down here, we’ve eaten at a BBQ place and a chili place, and thats about it.

Well, that’s pretty much over.

Today, we ate at Mr. K’s Oriental Cafe in Germantown.  They have three menus: Thai, Chinese, REAL Chinese.  When we got there, they gave us the first two (seeing as we are pertty damn white).  We’d known about the third, but didn’t think to ask until an asian family came in and were given that one.  We started with ground chicken lettuce wraps with hoisin sauce and then ordered Pork With Hot Pepper And Garlic Leaves from the Real Chinese menu and a Thai Ground Chicken Breast With Basil Sauce from the Thai.

Wow.  I mean, this was just fantastic.  The lettuce wraps started out not-so-good because we were just eating the insides.  Once we actually ate them as wraps, they were tasty (a little too sweet otherwise).  The pork dish gave you a different flavor every bite, and the ground chicken is exactly how Thai food is supposed to taste (though my wife thinks they toned down the spicy still).

We ended with Thai Doughnuts which are basically sweet fried dough nuggets that you dip in a sweetened milk sauce that has these tasty bits in it, which we think were probably carmelized brown sugar, maybe.  MOST TASTY!  Its all about the bits.  Though a tad much to end the meal on.  Next time, we’ll try the tempura ice cream.

The staff was very nice, and seemed tickled pink that we ordered from the Real Chinese menu.

The whole thing, two entrees, an appetizer, a dessert, and two bubble teas (which I wasn’t impressed by, but I think I just don’t like bubble tea much) was 45 bucks.  And had we not gorged ourselves, there would have been enough for another meal (there’s probably enough leftover for one of us, not both).

BIG thumbs up!!

Next time, we’re going to try something with either tripe or beef tendon, which we’ve, historically, been hesitant to order.

Yeah, it was that good.