Author: darrelplant

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Doggie Delight

One of the first places Barbara and I ever went out to when we started dating was a little hole-in-the-wall at SE 32nd Place and Hawthorne. It was a former hot dog stand with four or five tables, but it had been taken over by a Vietnamese family and in the transition they’d named it Saigon Café and Doggie Delight. They changed the name relatively quickly.

The first time we went there, we ate Five Spice Chicken, which became a staple of our (well, Barbara’s) home cooking menu.

As it happens, some 15 years later, when I moved my freelance office out of downtown, I ended up across Hawthorne from the restaurant, and —along with At the Hop (30th & Hawthorne) and Fu Jin (35th & Hawthorne)—they were the triumvirate of my lunchtimes. All long gone now.

The woman who ran Saigon Café sold the business when she grew ill, and it was an Italian restaurant for some years, before it became Chiang Mai—a Thai restaurant—about a decade ago. Walking past on my way home from work yesterday, I noticed it had closed; I’m assuming it and the attached house are going to be ground up in the Portland apartment boom.

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I Am Not Old

From Ron Bearry, on a Director email list (yes, there still is one!), a piece of history.

I also still have this case, out in the garage. I think there are a couple of SCSI cables in it.

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Flash Royalty

Going through the site and cleaning up some old links, I ran across a post I did on the tenth anniversary of the publication of Special Edition Using Macromedia Flash 5. That post was published eight years and one week ago, so the book is barely legal!

That post, in turn, referenced one from 2009, where I originally mentioned that the royalty statements I was still getting from the book only had me $700 in the hole to the publisher on my advance payment (the sales of the book never having earned enough to pay me a portion equal to what I’d received after completion—the advance—and sales after eight years having slowed somewhat).

In 2011, I’d provided the updated figure, which had been reduced by almost $50 over the intervening 28 months: -$658.70. 

You’ll be happy to know that in the statement I have before me (yes, I’m still getting monthly printed statements even after 18 years), that baby’s still earning 12¢/month from my share of electronic subscriptions, and the intervening period has seen the balance I owe reduced to –$535.32. That’s $15.42/year even after a decade in print! So I should be even sometime around 2054.

I look forward to these monthly reminders of my mortality.

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darrelplant.com Blog Engine Ends Service

More than fifteen years ago, while I was trying to learn new skills to supplant my knowledge of Director and Flash, I set out to pick up PHP and SQL by writing my own system for posting stuff on the internet, on my own domain, on my own server.

That effort didn’t exactly pay off—I spent most of the intervening years un- or underemployed—it didn’t make me a PHP/SQL savant, and by 2010 I was using WordPress to run my other blog, Mutant Poker. In the meantime, I posted a lot of political and general interest stuff here that I thought was interesting, but the system I wrote made more investment of time in it just seem counterproductive.

I’ve finally taken the time (not so much as I thought it would take) to convert the hand-built system to WordPress, figure out how to redirect all (well most) of the URLs, and get my act together, so: ta-dah! Welcome to darrelplant.com 2.0.

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Last Fortunes Countdown #3 & #4

From last night and tonight, with less than a week to go before the last time Barbara and I can eat together at Hunan:

Now is a good time to try something new.

A pleasant surprise is in store for you soon.

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Last Fortunes Countdown #1

The Hunan, which Barbara and I have considered “our” place for more than a quarter of a century, is closing on December 29th. We’ve celebrated many anniversaries and birthdays there. We went there the first anniversary of the day I survived my pulmonary embolism. Really, it’s been the go-to place when we wanted a meal out. We were already planning to go Saturday for our 26th anniversary, but after we heard the news, I decided to squeeze out every last bit of Hunan that I can from life, so Barbara and Dad and I headed there yesterday.

You will make a change for the better.