Food Change Blindness

I completely redid my favorite restaurants page on googlepages, a.k.a. Google Page Creator. It's actually my first experience with any sort of html editor outside of what is associated with blogger. I would actually like more control and I did find myself switching to html mode to fix things, but overall it was probably more pleasant than doing everything by hand. It's entirely possible that I would like something like Dreamweaver much more, for more sophisticated pages, but this did the job and was convenient. I have the feeling that I am more likely to maintain the links on this version, but that, as usual, may be wishful thinking.

Friday's Visualization Forum was particularly interesting. It was a talk by Stephen Mitroff on change and inattentional blindness. I don't want to spoil the demos for those who might see them in the future, but it's amazing what it's possible to miss when one is concentrating on a particular task, such as counting. One experiment was where they had an actor playing a construction worker asking a person for directions and then people would walk between them while carrying a door. While the door was going past, they would switch actors and the person giving the directions wouldn't even notice. Something like 50% of the people didn't notice. The videos of this were just hilarious. It was clear from all the demos and experiments he showed that eyewitness testimony is pretty much worthless.

I had fun at guitar practice that night. JJ and I played music by ourselves and then he, JA, HB and I went to Bali Hai for dinner.

Last night, my parents and I decided to check out the new Nikos, Nikos Taverna, on Davis Drive, in Morrisville. We've been going to the original, Taverna Nikos, at Brightleaf Square since 1992. The new location is spacious, with high ceilings and large paintings. It was well lit, so my photo turned out well. I had the Garides Kataife, which was shrimp dipped in mustard and covered with shredded pastry. It was extremely good and was served with lots of perfectly cooked vegetables. For dessert, we shared a honey walnut spice cake, which was moist and not too heavy. It was a very pleasant way to end the meal. It was also nice to have a chat with the owner, since we hadn't seen him at the old place for a few months.

Today AE and I went to the see the Stars of the St. Petersburg Opera in Baldwin Auditorium. It was supposed to be a comparative look at Russian and American works, but the Americans couldn't make it for some reason, so they compared Russian opera to Italian opera instead. I enjoyed it.

Afterwards, we went to Cinneli's. I'd only had pizza delivered from there before and had no idea that they had an expansive menu with tons of pasta dishes. I had fresh clams and mussels in a spicy tomato sauce over linguine. They had very good bread, too. I used to go to that location back when it was Pieworks, a decade or so ago, so it was interesting to see how it had changed.

Finally, we went to Whole Foods and shopped. It was yet another kid in a candy store experience for me, since I hadn't actually been there to buy stuff in many years, but I managed to get several things that I actually needed in the process.