A Fish Bite

My wife and I enjoy going out to dinner at least once a week. When we lived in Orange County there was a great English pub called The Olde Ship just down the street from our home. The pub has the best fish and chips we have ever had: large pieces of fresh battered cod and steak chips. The batter is great and the fish is always fresh...and they have a great selection of beer and scotch!

When we moved to Bakersfield, we thought we'd never find a good fish and chips plate in town. To our surprise we've found two places with fairly decent fish and chips offerings: Fishlips and Mossman's. Fishlips is located downtown and has a pub atmosphere with live music on some nights; they've recently remodeled and the place looks great...the change of lighting would have been enough but they upgraded everything. Mossman's is located at Westchester Lanes, a bowling alley.

Both restaurants are similarly priced and both are about equal in terms of flavor and quality. Fishlips has a few different offerings like shrimp and chips, but Mossman's offers different sides if you'd like to have the fish but not the chips. We like both and rotate our visits. Our last visit was on Sunday at Mossman's.

We both ordered the same dish: the Old Timer's. Instead of chips they serve a great tossed salad with a house dressing. The salad is large and very good, so if you're not in the mood for a whole lot of fried food, this dish hits the spot. As usual, service was good, the drinks were cold and the food was prompt. The salad was fresh and cold. They serve a roll with the dish, but I rarely eat it. This time, I shared one with my wife...it was slightly warm, but very hard, not typical quality at Mossman's.

I had a heaping of battered cod chunks, maybe six pieces about 2 ounces each. Everything was going fine until I bit a small piece off one of the chunks...very chewy, rubbery. I figured since it was a small bit off the larger chunk that it didn't have enough meat so it over-cooked. Wrong! The whole chunk was rubbery. Something was very wrong with this piece, I couldn't even cut through it with my fork. No big deal, the plate was huge and I had plenty to eat...10 ounces out of 12 is fine.

However, I overheard another patron sitting nearby complain to the cook about the same thing. He saved his rubbery piece before the waitress took his plate so he could give it to the cook. The cook said he thought they received a bad batch of fish because they had several complaints recently. Well, I hope they get through that bad batch quickly because if I get another piece like that, I'll probably head to Fishlips before I order another bite of fish at Mossman's. Heck, I may even head to Orange County for a really good fish and chips plate!

A Computer Bites It

It's been a while since I posted anything. Well, I have good reason: my computer bit the dust just before Christmas. What an inopportune time for such a disaster. With the Christmas season already taking a huge bite out of funds, an unexpected expense like a new computer was not welcome news. Plus, with all the time spent with visiting family and going out of town, who has the time to set up a new computer, transfer all the backed-up data, and re-install all those programs? No has the time, but you have to make it when your business relies on a computer and internet access.

I ended up buying a Mac since I think the hardware is much more reliable than any PC maker, and the software is very user-friendly and offers better features, in my opinion. Since there is no software for my business available for Mac, I also had to buy virtualization software. I spent the entire week after Christmas getting files transfered, installing software, and getting re-organized. Then I spent the next few weeks getting caught up on my work, thankfully it was slow between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Everything is pretty much running smoothly...thanks in part to a huge memory upgrade: 1 GB is standard on the iMac, so I upgraded it to 4 GB. The upgrade process is very simple, and the RAM was fairly inexpensive through Newegg. Getting used to some of the new features in Leopard and getting the virtual PC up and running, easily with Parallels, was the biggest part. Running dual monitors on a Mac is a piece of cake compared to my PC and actually offers some additional features that my PC didn't have: separate desktop backgrounds for instance.

I'm very happy with the way everything turned out. Even though this was an unexpected expense, the results, as expected, are excellent.