I recently ate at Restaurant Maxwell in Berlin with JRW, GR and CH. We enjoyed ourselves enormously but that wasn’t because of the food or the service.
The restaurant is in a beautiful courtyard off of a side street in the extreme north of Mitte in what was East Berlin. The space is galleried and light and airy. I hear that in the summer the tables spill out into the courtyard.
Restaurant Maxwell
The atmosphere inside was really quite stiff. It had a formality that captured none of the drama of, say, Le Gavroche in London. It was more courtroom drama: Think Crown Court. Eventually the leaden atmosphere worked its way into our rather cold funnybones. We guffawed and sniggered like schoolkids in a library. It was quiet. Quiet enough to hear the English couple next to us complaining about their meal (Lonely Planet must have been getting a cut for the intake of foreign clients that night).
The service was also formal. The limited menu was edited by the waiter once we were ready to place our order (restaurant owners: this always a bad start to a meal). The service was also slow, which seeing as the place was pretty empty was quite a feat. The owners might want to do a time management study on their staff. The amount of time they spent fussing with the wine and coffees was unbelievable (GR and I watched in awe as a waiter made coffee at the bar. It was like watching Michael Angelo apply finishing touches to David. “It’s a fucking coffee for christ sake”, I wanted to scream. “Get it to the damned table”. The waiter also ignored us for most of the night; this seems to be quite a fad in Berlin.
The food was archly pretentious. This can be a good thing at times but here the chef attempted to marry food combinations that plainly didn’t work, or worse, were sadly devoid of any taste at all, or worse still, extremely untasty. I am guessing that stores were low as it was the 2nd January. This is no excuse though. If you are going to open a restaurant then I think that the cooking must be at the same level at any time of the year regardless.
I personally quite enjoyed my dishes; as an ex-public schoolboy I can eat pretty much anything, even glass. But my companions suffered from over-complicated and, at times, very cold food. It was minus 2 outside and at least 100mm of snow had fallen that day. You would have thought that heating the food would be a priority in the kitchen.
I am not saying that the food was badly cooked. The kitchen contains considerable talent. 2 of the party had a rack of lamb which was beautifully cooked and showed real technical skill. It’s just that the sum of the whole on the plates was too messed with, too finicky to make any impression on the palette. Did my boiled beef in broth need a ribbon of quince jelly plopped on top of it? It was like eating the rubber lining of a car door. The atmosphere crushed any enjoyment out of eating, therefore the food became too austere, too uptight to enjoy the meal itself.
The super expensive wine was whisked away by the waiter at every opportunity. Why do this? We bought it at that vastly inflated price. At least let me have the bottle to caress or talk to or do whatever I want to do to it. I felt like stabbing him in the hand with a fork every time he ventured near our table.
“Did you enjoy it”, whispered the waiter as we left. “The food I mean”, he added in flawless English. Even though only 1 and 2 halves of the 4 of us could claim to be English, we did the English thing: We lied, told him yes, and tumbled giggling like lunatics into the snowy Berlin night.
I am in Waterstones guiltily buying books for people I haven’t seen over the Christmas break. The lady behind the counter says, “If you grab one more stickered book you get it free”. I turn around and glance at the pile of paperbacks behind me. “Aah the new Robert Harris”. I spot an apparent gem in the 3 for 2 towers of tosh. I have vaguely stored the fact that he has a new book coming out somewhere in my brain. I think I heard it on Radio 4 or the Guardian books podcast. I grab it. I look at it. “I don’t think I have read this. No I am sure I haven’t”. I add it to my pile of books by the till.
Later I begin to read the book in bed. I have a slight suspicion that I have heard this before. I look at the blurb on the back of the book. I look at the cover. “No, no, this must be the second one the series. I don’t remember that cover”. I carry on. “Hang on a sec, this is just like the first one”. It is about the early life of Cicero. “Perhaps he is reinforcing the past”. 20 pages pass, 30, 40. “This is really familiar”, I think. I walk into my study. There on the shelf is the same book: Imperium. Different cover, mind you, but still the same book. I wouldn’t mind if it was a dusty tome, but I bought and read this book earlier in the year.
My Granddad Bob used to do this all the time. He would sit in his council house in Abbots Langley, tapping his fingers and humming or whistling to an Italian opera warbling away on the tape player He would get halfway through a library book he had already read. At the moment of realisation, he would throw his head back in laughter, his bright metallic dentistry glinting in the light.
I recently changed Soda’s email over to Google Apps. What benefit does it have for our company?
First off it is an IMAP email system. It treats emails like files and folders. You can dip into any of your online folders from your email application or the web interface of gmail. You simply drag files from your desktop into the folders and they upload to the Google servers. If you have a mobile device there is no way of flagging whether a message has been read or not on a standard web hosting POP email acount. This was the biggest complaint from our accounts team with our previous email host.
It is positioned as a replacement to expensive in house email delivery systems like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. The cost benefit is enormous at a time when saving money is of paramount importance to most businesses. No more firewalls, expensive servers, upgrades and IT contracts for small to medium sized businesses. A cost saving calculator for Google Apps is here.
If you are on a web hosting package and using POP mail then the benefits are still plentiful. The email system is fast. Mail is delivered real time. You will also have the freedom to move your web site to other hosts without reconfiguring your email. If your host server suffers a failure then you will continue to receive your email from the Google servers
The free “standard” package comes with around 7 Gb of storage, nigh on mission critical email uptime due to several backup servers and the entire suite of Google Apps. The premium service, at $50 per user per year, offers Postini, an anti-spam and archiving application that acts like a modern firewall, 99.9% guaranteed uptime, support and migration tools for Exchange and Notes.
Google Apps has a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool. It includes chat, a wiki-style webserver and a calendaring system that syncs with other calendar applications like Outlook and iCal. These online applications might have the features of MS office but for quick and dirty day to day use they are absolutely perfect. They also allow you to collaborate live on documents. It is an extremely liberating experience when you first work on a document with someone remotely.
So what do you need to do?
Sign up to Google Apps here. Then simply change your email MX records in your DNS records to the google mail servers. There are even wizards for major host providers and DNS services in the set up screens. Your host should even do this for you if this sounds a bit too techy.
Data is incredibly valuable. I have always pressed my colleagues and clients to invest in a simple external hard drive to back up their precious data at the very least. Most of them now do but usually only after they are burnt by the inevitable hard drive failure, theft or errant coffee cup/cat/child. I love being a smug git but I have to make sure I practice what I preach or my petard will be hoisted somewhere and that can be painful.
Netgear's ReadyNAS NV+ is an awesome piece of kit
At my work we get through a lot of data for a small company. Soda’s growing data storage is one that constantly needs updating and improving. We did have a simple backup and archival system running on an old G4 PowerMac and OS X Server 10.3. We take a daily back up drive home with us at the end of the day. We then monthly archive old data onto 2 sets of DVDs. The amount is usually 20-30gGb or so. One set of disks stays on site; the other goes home with one of us. It wasn’t an ideal set up as a fire or theft would have meant we lost at least a couple of days back up and, although unlikely, a lost portable hard drive or simultaneous failure of the server and the external drive would spell disaster for our business. Plus we were constantly running out of storage space and having to dump data onto DVD on a monthly basis.
It was at a point where we needed a new server. The G4 couldn’t fit anymore drives in it and the firewire ports kept blowing up external drives (as well as giving me life enhancing electric shocks). As a replacement I liked the look of the Drobo. It calls itself a robot so naturally my ears were pricked. This automated RAID system has proved extremely popular over the last couple of years. Paul Boag was raving it about it on his podcast a while back. Basically the hard drive writes across up to 4 hard drives at once. So if one drive fails the others kick in until the redundant drive is replaced. So, in theory, no lost data. I was about to buy this system but started to look at alternative NAS (Network Attached Storage) Systems.
My mind was made up however, once I happened upon Netgear’s ReadyNAS system. It does a whole lot more than Drobo does including direct network sharing. This tiny little box, styled like a G5 cheese-grater, comes with a Linux-based server which runs a variety of services including DHCP, SMB log-in for Windows, AFP for OS X, an iTunes server for the studio, Apache web server, 3 USB connections for external backups and automated backup routines. And the cost? Our 4 disk 4Tb version cost us £870 back in April. That is amazing value and it is even cheaper now of course. Read/write times are a little slow over ethernet (although a recent firmware update has sorted this out) and we have had a couple of web interface crashes but this tiny little machine now runs our entire studio content single handed. The server is now redundant. When we want to expand the capacity we simply swap the Green Caviar 1Tb hard drive for a larger capacity replacement.
OS X’s backup application, Time Machine, is now built into the latest ReadyNAS firmware and so you simply hook up each Mac in the studio to it and it automatically backs up the entire hard drive. It takes about a minute to set up per computer. So your Mac will then backup itself every hour, every day and every week. No tapes, no noisy server and no expensive IT contracts. I cannot recommend the ReadyNAS highly enough.
Here we are again. Mwa mwa. Thanks awfully. After a gap of 5 years or perhaps more I have decided to write one of these blogs again. Gosh isn’t it easier now. Before I used MovableType and Ecto. Now I use WordPress, a kazoo and mind waves. Not mine of course. Too weak.
Even the dog is impressed.
Bingo - Writer, amateur sleuth, bon viveur and gad about town.
I haven’t done any design on the site yet so please bear with me. This is using a freebie template from Wordpress but I am not particularly bothered – this looks nice and simple and the main purpose is to write. I was in the process of moving our work email over to Google Apps and happened upon a load of articles I started over the last few months that I couldn’t possible put on our work website. So I thought, what the heck, let’s bung it up onto the web under my own moniker.
Restaurant Maxwell, Berlin
I recently ate at Restaurant Maxwell in Berlin with JRW, GR and CH. We enjoyed ourselves enormously but that wasn’t because of the food or the service.
The restaurant is in a beautiful courtyard off of a side street in the extreme north of Mitte in what was East Berlin. The space is galleried and light and airy. I hear that in the summer the tables spill out into the courtyard.
Restaurant Maxwell
The atmosphere inside was really quite stiff. It had a formality that captured none of the drama of, say, Le Gavroche in London. It was more courtroom drama: Think Crown Court. Eventually the leaden atmosphere worked its way into our rather cold funnybones. We guffawed and sniggered like schoolkids in a library. It was quiet. Quiet enough to hear the English couple next to us complaining about their meal (Lonely Planet must have been getting a cut for the intake of foreign clients that night).
The service was also formal. The limited menu was edited by the waiter once we were ready to place our order (restaurant owners: this always a bad start to a meal). The service was also slow, which seeing as the place was pretty empty was quite a feat. The owners might want to do a time management study on their staff. The amount of time they spent fussing with the wine and coffees was unbelievable (GR and I watched in awe as a waiter made coffee at the bar. It was like watching Michael Angelo apply finishing touches to David. “It’s a fucking coffee for christ sake”, I wanted to scream. “Get it to the damned table”. The waiter also ignored us for most of the night; this seems to be quite a fad in Berlin.
The food was archly pretentious. This can be a good thing at times but here the chef attempted to marry food combinations that plainly didn’t work, or worse, were sadly devoid of any taste at all, or worse still, extremely untasty. I am guessing that stores were low as it was the 2nd January. This is no excuse though. If you are going to open a restaurant then I think that the cooking must be at the same level at any time of the year regardless.
I personally quite enjoyed my dishes; as an ex-public schoolboy I can eat pretty much anything, even glass. But my companions suffered from over-complicated and, at times, very cold food. It was minus 2 outside and at least 100mm of snow had fallen that day. You would have thought that heating the food would be a priority in the kitchen.
I am not saying that the food was badly cooked. The kitchen contains considerable talent. 2 of the party had a rack of lamb which was beautifully cooked and showed real technical skill. It’s just that the sum of the whole on the plates was too messed with, too finicky to make any impression on the palette. Did my boiled beef in broth need a ribbon of quince jelly plopped on top of it? It was like eating the rubber lining of a car door. The atmosphere crushed any enjoyment out of eating, therefore the food became too austere, too uptight to enjoy the meal itself.
The super expensive wine was whisked away by the waiter at every opportunity. Why do this? We bought it at that vastly inflated price. At least let me have the bottle to caress or talk to or do whatever I want to do to it. I felt like stabbing him in the hand with a fork every time he ventured near our table.
“Did you enjoy it”, whispered the waiter as we left. “The food I mean”, he added in flawless English. Even though only 1 and 2 halves of the 4 of us could claim to be English, we did the English thing: We lied, told him yes, and tumbled giggling like lunatics into the snowy Berlin night.