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January 2009 Archives

Nabe shuts down, in comes Shabu Shabuyo

Nabe en­tered Lit­tle Tokyo about a year ago, bring­ing with it a new choice for shabu shabu. I often went there in­stead of Shabu Shabu House sim­ply be­cause I didn’t want to brave the per­pet­ual 45-60min lines. The food was good, and they had lots of de­cent ap­pe­tiz­ers. De­spite hav­ing great food, Nabe was void of cus­tomers every time I ate there. Alas, no­body can com­pete with Shabu Shabu House: they where the first shabu shabu restau­rant in the USA and have had a lot of time to grow buzz and per­fect their fla­vor. It was only a mat­ter of time. The mon­ster has killed yet an­other com­peti­tor.

I went down­town last night and was woe­fully dis­ap­pointed to dis­cover some­one in their place: Shabu Shabuyo. A small menu, split ce­ramic pots, elec­tric heaters that don’t bring the water to a boil, crappy cheap chop­sticks, and re­ally re­ally bad music play­ing. This place bet­ter find some­thing good to pro­vide quick or they’ll be going out of busi­ness in record time.

NSU Culture Night 2009

There are only a few weeks left until the 23rd an­nual NSU Cul­ture Night at UCLA. This is a re­ally fun night ex­plor­ing Japan­ese-Amer­i­can cul­ture. There will be taiko (drum­ming), mod­ern dance, drama, and odori (tra­di­tional dance) per­for­mances. These groups are uni­ver­sity kids so they know how to have fun—every time I’ve seen them per­form it has been a phe­nom­e­nal ex­pe­ri­ence.

It’s free and open to all so if you’re in­ter­ested and can get to UCLA’s Royce Hall at 6:00pm on Pres­i­dents’ Day (Feb­ru­ary 16th), you can re­serve tick­ets by send­ing an email with your name and num­ber of tick­ets to nsuculturenight2009@​gmail.​com.

Odd new ramen place in Little Tokyo

Just tried this new ramen place in­side Weller Court called Chin-Ma-Ya of Tokyo, right below the in­fa­mous Oro­chon Ramen. Their spe­cialty is tan tan men, a fu­sion of ramen with Chi­nese dan dan mian. They serve it with three lev­els of spice, and I or­dered the spici­est “orig­i­nal”. The broth was good – very thick and murky, lots of good fla­vor, and ad­e­quately spicy. It lost a bit in the top­pings, com­ing with ground beef, ground pork, and only a few stray bits of spinach. I got a side of gyoza, which while not the worst I’ve had where def­i­nitely far from the best.

But where it re­ally failed was the noo­dles. The first bite im­me­di­ately made me think of some­thing I never thought would come to mind in a ramen place: my mom bak­ing cook­ies. Cu­ri­ously tak­ing an­other bite, I tasted it again. The fla­vor was al­most like unsweet­ened cookie dough. I’m usu­ally down for try­ing new things, some fla­vors need to just grow on you. But after eat­ing half the bowl I couldn’t take any more – the heav­i­ness of the noo­dles com­bined with such a strange fla­vor was too much for me.

Looks like Daikokuya gets to keep their crown, with San Sui Tei com­ing in sec­ond if the Daikokuya line is un­bear­ably long. Last time I went to San Sui Tei, they cooked up some fresh choco­late-filled mochi balls for me. Not sure if they will be the norm or if they where test­ing them on me as a re­cur­ring cus­tomer, but they where good!

Nokia to release Qt under LGPL

This is fan­tas­tic news for any­one de­vel­op­ing GPL-in­com­pat­i­ble soft­ware. Nokia will be re­leas­ing Qt under the LGPL.

Windows 7 Beta will be free to the public

Not part of the one of the Win­dows 7 beta teams? On Jan­u­ary 9th, the first 2.5 mil­lion peo­ple to visit the Win­dows 7 home­page will be able to down­load the beta for free.

I just got my copy in­stalled a few hours ago, so far I’ve seen a few new fea­tures I like and cou­ple that I’m not sure about. I will blog about specifics as soon as I’m cer­tain what I’m al­lowed to men­tion.