Mom and Dad were in Atlanta this weekend looking for remodeling ideas. As always, we got together to enjoy some unique Atlanta dining. Rather than hit the usual favorites, we decided to try a couple interesting restaurants recently featured in Southern Living, both located just off the Roswell Road exit on I-285. The first, 5 Seasons Brewing, offers some of the most highly-rated local beers and a menu with an eclectic assortment of entrees featuring exotic meats and all-organic ingredients. The second, Joli Kobe, is a Japanese bakery producing georgeous treats inspired by French patisseries. Though not instant favorites, both are quite good and well worth a try if you’re looking for an memorable dining experience.
We celebrated Cinco de Mayo in proper fashion as Frontera catered a lunch buffet for all of BarcoView. The buffet proceeded much like a Mexican-American rendition of the salad bar, with numerous ingredients available to roll your own concoctions. I constructed a couple of soft tacos and went about enjoying some excellent free cuisine. There was plenty of food for seconds, even though the vast majority of BarcoView turned out for the event.
I’ve been working at Barco for less than two months and this is the third food-related event we’ve had. We were served free ice cream a couple weeks ago and we’re due for free Subway in another couple of weeks. It’s a pleasant surprise coming from my internship, where we rarely enjoyed such company-sponsored events. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to meet some people you otherwise wouldn’t encounter in your day to day routine.
My parents were in town this Saturday searching for home improvement ideas from the local speciality shops that only a sizeable city like Atlanta can provide (or so you’d think). From what I understand, they didn’t have much luck finding anything. Regardless, I got to enjoy some fine meals from Chin Chin V and Ray’s on the River. A made a point of taking them to our Fry’s; I don’t think they were impressed. I also wanted to take them to Jillian’s since it was in the same area, but the place was just packed.
Mom and Dad left on Sunday and I turned to web design and personal development. I reworked the integration between blog entries and gallery images such that the inlined thumbnails have been replaced with a simple image count (similar to how comments are handled) that will link to a full thumbnail gallery. The reasoning behind this is to save people page load times an generally improve the look of the site. Later on, I plan to make a full gallery where you can just browse pictures.
Along these same lines, I’ve started remastering pictures from my trip to China and I’ll eventually be removing all the old images and replacing them with the new. The new images benefit from common tweaks like auto-leveling that I never used when I originally posted the images last summer.
Finally, I’ve decided to pursue learning .NET. My initial project will be to create a Windows application that will set different wallpapers on each screen in a multi-monitor display. It’s a need of mine and I haven’t found any good applications for it yet. It should be a good learning experience. In the spirit of things, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta and made console and GUI "Hello World" applications. It’s ridiculously easy to do.
Pretty much all of my immediate family came into town for my graduation. We all gathered at the Embassy Suites on Akers Mill and took a shuttle to one of my favorite local eateries, Ray’s on the River (named due to its proximity to the Chattahoochee River). I was quite pleased with my "Ginger Tuna" (first time for me). It was cooked like a tuna steak, which I’ve had only limited exposure to, but it had an unusual soy and ginger sauce. It was different than anything I’ve ever had and it was quite good.
I ate at Fellini’s Pizza for the first time today with Titus. You generally get a lot of pizza for a pretty reasonable price. They even had my favorite topping, green olives. The price was right and the food was good, but the Fellini’s atmosphere can’t quite compete with the unique and varied stylings of the Mellow Mushroom.
