Happy Friday! I was thinking I would participate in the widely-known "Friday Five," but I did not care for the questions this week. Instead, I have a few little items and then I am off to have my tires balanced and possibly aligned.

First, this story from the BBC about unlicensed vendors in Swaziland, Africa showing the police a piece of their mind.

BBC: Swazi women bare bottoms to police
Little did the lone Swaziland police officer know what he was letting himself in for when he attempted to arrest a group of women fruit and vegetable vendors. [ full story ]

Next, since so many people have been searching for pictures of Frank Abagnale, Jr. and ending up here (after my review of Catch Me If You Can, I figured I might as well appease them.

→ frank abagnale photograph one
→ frank abagnale photograph two

And finally, a little shout-out to my friend Allen who was recently featured in Jacksonville's Florida Times-Union newspaper. Although he was miffed at the exclusion of the fact he won first place at recent Regional competitions and disappointed at the quality of the photograph, it still is pretty nifty. He says of the picture, "[It] looks better in the paper."

FTU: Skating toward elite ranks
Allen Davis is young enough to possess realistic expectations of reaching figure skating's elite level, but old enough to realize how far he has to go.

Davis, of Jacksonville, finished sixth in the novice division at last month's Eastern Sectional in Aston, Pa. By doing so, he earned the second alternate spot from the region for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, scheduled to begin Sunday in Dallas. [ full story ]

Just a quick warning: This post will be a little technical and probably boring to most, but I am pleased with my accomplishment and wanted to share.

If I set out on a mission, I will not generally quit until I have completed the mission successfully. This is especially true when it comes to internet and programming matters. I am not a programmer by trade, but have learned a lot about the server-side scripting language Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). For readers in the dark already, PHP allows simple and advanced programming operations to be completed on the server before the page is served to the viewer. The benefit of this is one need not worry about browsers inappropriately interpreting your code and making things look undesirable.

Many operations on this site and others I have produced use both simplistic and more advanced scripts, generally based upon something I have found online and adapted for my use. A few were written specifically for me by a few very generous people whom are often the ones helping me learn as we go along.

I decided tonight during an unusual television-watching session that I wanted to reconstruct the operation of the "Random Fixation" "Media Library" window, which randomly displays musical works I own and enjoy. As it stood previously, the HTML code needed to generate the information was placed into an array that randomly displayed each time the page was loaded or refreshed. A very simple randomisation script was modified and used for this purpose. However, adding new entries was a cumbersome task, requiring lots of scrolling and copy/paste actions. The immediate solution was apparent: I needed to build a MySQL database and use it as a back-end to serve the data to the randomiser.

PHP programmers, this is your cue to begin laughing. Hysterically. I am sure there were much easier, more proper and cleaner ways to accomplish this feat, but after five hours of coding, testing and failing, I figured out how to do all this. I did not even ask one person for assistance, for which I am particularly proud. My next addendum to this project will be modifying the script to allow people to view all of the selections (thirty-four at the time of this writing) at once. Nevertheless, that will have to wait until I stop seeing PHP code when I close my eyes.

So if the site suddenly catches fire or vomits a spew of error messages your way, chance may be that I managed to bollocks up the works. Should that be the case, please let me know!

People that cannot fully plan ahead for multiple contingencies should probably steer away from a life of crime. If there were a children's version of Cops, the following story would probably had been a good candidate.

While leaving the local Denny's, a teenage boy pushed his way past my party through the double-doors of the vestibule. After exiting fully, he took off in a run. Not too far behind him was the waitress. We were not paying that close attention prior to the waitress coming outside, so we did not see where he went.

She did. A minute later she came walking back to the entrance with the guy closely behind, speaking, but it was incoherent at our distance. After being inside for several more minutes, he emerged and left, presumably in his vehicle which was parked behind the restaurant where he had run.

I had to learn more, so I went back and asked the waitress some questions to wrap-up the story a little more and confirm our suspicions of what had just gone down. The waitress said that when she approached the vehicle, the guy was inside it obviously readying to go. She pointed out to him that she had his car's colour, make and tag number so it would be a good idea to follow her back inside to pay his bill and avoid the involvement of the police. His grand defense was that he had dashed outside to check on his friend. After paying, he left and drove off.

A lame crime being pulled off (or not) in a terrible, non-planned manner by a teenage boy who was not even cute. That is practically a crime itself.

Just a few quick bullets...

1. I thought this and this were hilarious.



2. I saw Adaptation last night and thought it was great. No formal review for this one; if you like Jonze and/or Kaufman, you will probably like this film.



3. I have new headlamps and CV Axles on my car. Yay!



4. The Oscar® contender that was the highest grossing movie this past weekend: Kangaroo Jack. 17.6 million. I guess the kids were bored... or something.



5. I will scream if I read/watch/hear another person, whilst discussing the recently past Golden Globe® Awards, refer to it as some sort of fashion show.



6. I wish I spun. Delerium is doing a remix contest. The winner's track will be on the remix disc of their upcoming Chimera album. The single, "After All," is intoxicating.

I had the opportunity to visit the year-old Hue restaurant located downtown at the corner of Central Boulevard and Summerlin Avenue. The facility is snugly featured inside the monolithic Thornton Park Central that I find represents the new trend toward making downtown Orlando more like a "real" city, like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. I am not a fan of this trendy, urban and hip persona because I mostly find it to be pretentious and unlike the actually trendy, urban and hip city centres around the world. Yeah, sue me.

That said, I approached Hue with cautiousness, a friend and a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to get us started. It was around 2030 last Saturday night when we arrived after having entered a pay-parking garage to spare us more walking than necessary in arguably one of the coldest Florida evenings this season. This was another immediate concern upon entering the restaurant.

Normally, there is a full compliment of customers enjoying the spacious outdoor patio seating area. With temperatures slated to fall to the low to mid thirties, the largely middle-aged crowd was jam packed into the rather small bar/lounge area. As the wait for a table would be 45 to 60 minutes, we trekked to the bar (it was quite a feat to approach) and ordered the House Cabernet Sauvignon, which we both surprisingly enjoyed. Our wait brought another element that was not perfect. Since the outdoor patio was unused and all those people, plus the bar/lounge's normal compliment was occupying that small space, my dinner partner and I had to stand practically at the hostess' podium to avoid being incessantly knocked into.

A few more rounds of wine later, we were seated in a very artistically lit room that contained very little actual decoration or artwork, but more in design, lighting, colour and some accessories accomplished the decorative element.

The server was prompt, friendly and informative. The arrival of the menus ushered in a new aura of the fancy restaurant stench I was hoping to avoid: they print new menus every day, sometimes more often depending on availability and the whim of the master chef. A novel idea perhaps, but I would rather see the trees and ink spared in exchange for the server simply telling me what they had run out of that evening (that night it was one of their many fish dishes, a prominent staple on the Hue menu).

I ordered the mid-range priced Wood Grilled Filet Mignon with Steak Sauce with Mashed Sweet Potatoes and Sauté of Vegetables ($27.00) and my dining partner purchased the lower-range priced Oven Roasted Chicken Breast with Tomato Basil Glace, Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Pesto Vegetable Gratin ($17.00). Our entrées were preceded with a fresh loaf of bread served with a unique, but excellent garlic butter.

Contrary to our expectations, our food was wonderful. The meat of the dishes was prepared exactly as ordered (medium-rare for my steak) and seasoned excellently. The chicken was moist, flavourful and tender. I am not a fan of sweet potatoes as a rule, but my mashed sweet potatoes were phenomenal (the first time I have had them mashed, actually). Both dishes came with a small compliment of vegetables that could only have been better had more been included. An original au jus-esqe sauce came with my steak and was an excellent addition to an already perfectly prepared slice of nearly fat-free meat.

When all was said and done, my dinner partner and I enjoyed ourselves, had a wonderfully filling, but not over-portioned meal and adjusted our previous judgements. Sure, the miasma of pretentiousness still fills the air and the tab ended up being around $80.00 (before the gift certificate was taken into account and including our pre-table bar tab), but I would certainly never discount an opportunity to visit again.

Scott Joseph's Orlando Sentinel Review [ review ]
Hue - A Restaurant [ official site ]