I ignored the bad reviews on AusLunch because any place that gets a ton of fans and vehement detractors tends to have a really good niche flavor, and I tend to go for that.

I’m glad I did. This place is pretty good. I went to the North location and, take heed, don’t go at lunch. Go after or before, but right at 12 you won’t be able to park without circling around a few times. The line’s a little long, there is no place to sit, and it’s loud.

Of course, that’s a lot of people that like it. I got the pulled pork tacos (starts with “Al A..” something) on the Blue Plate (+rice +beans) and it was actually very good. Lots of good flavor and just a little red grease, as cheap pulled pork is (a complement).

Overall, I’ll go again … at an off hour. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good lunch place.

I’ve discovered that I don’t mind watching shows on the iPhone and have run into a lot of times where it would have been real nice to have some things to watch. So I hit iTunes and found as many cool things as I could that I could sync up and keep handy. It turns out that there’s a lot of really good stuff out there now.

I’ve been without DirecTV and TiVo for about a month now and I figured now’s a good time to look back on it and see if this was a good decision. The best way I’ve found of determining that is the venerable pro/con list. So without further blathering, I’ll just drop into that.

Pros

1. Recording four shows at once without degradation in video quality. A DirecTiVo can do this for two shows at once but I, alas, have one of the old 40GB Series 2 TiVos that was controlling the DirecTV box via IR cable. So not only was I getting compressed video off DTV, but then TiVo was compressing it again. Best Quality never was. With U-Verse, however, what I see in a recorded show is always the raw MPEG-4 stream that it received, so that’s spectacular. Then on top of the better video quality, I get four at once.

1. Better conflict handling. Rather than TiVo’s priority-based approach, the U-Verse box walks me through conflict resolution when it happens and lets me sacrifice a recording right there in the “please record this” screen. TiVo makes me add the show as all-or-nothing and then tweak it in the Season Pass screen (for which processing takes forever when you change something).

After talking to people that waited for them and reading around the web, here’s some of the things that are coming to light for me that make me a little happier to have waited:

• No phone-to-phone Bluetooth for file/photo/contact transfers. If I take a photo, I can’t just fire it off to you. I have to email it.
• No MMS. Again, no way to get a photo off of this outside of email or sync.

• No custom ringtones. Rumor has it that’s coming from the iTS and you’re going to have to buy it. You can’t take music you already have licensed (“bought”) and use it and you can’t even make your own from you screaming into the microphone (music might be playing in the background!).

The [iPhone] interface makes all the other mobile devices I have around the office look dumpy and half-functional; the sleek form factor makes my other smartphones look morbidly obese. I want to pick them up and gaze upon them pityingly, then throw them all in a blender and hit “puree.”
Boing Boing: Jesusphone: He is Risen

I’ve heard the same sentiment from others, but none quite so graphic or amusing.

I remember trying TextMate back when it sucked, around 1.0 or 1.1 or something like that. It was this bastard program that everyone hyped for RoR development and called insanely cool and yadda yadda. Everyone was raving. So I downloaded it and tried it out. I hated it. It broke everything I knew and loved about the Mac in terms of how it worked, and I kept accidentally triggering macros and didn’t see the point to code folding and, really, it was a strange new land that I was totally not ready for.

About a year passed, I think, and I was at a WWDC session this past summer when much of the session was about using TextMate to speed up development. Then I see that some of TextMate’s ideas were incorporated into Xcode 3.0 (code folding, for one). Later, I’m two rows behind Allen as he won an award for the best Mac OS X developer tool.