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I’m reading on a number of weblogs today about where people are taking their Valentines for a nice dinner out in the spirit of romance. I had the same idea, but I quickly realized that, at least here in Raleigh, Valentine’s Day is mainly seen by the nicer restaurants as an occasion to extort money from people who aren’t part of their usual clientele. I had read in the paper that most restaurants offer special Valentine’s Day packages. I’m not opposed to prix fixe in general, so I called one of the places that we often visit on birthdays and anniversaries to get an idea of what was on offer. Their regular menu is here. Two people can get out for under $100 if they forego wine, even if they both have their own appetizer and dessert. The Valentine’s Day special is $85 per person – two salads, two appetizers, two entrees, and a special dessert sampler for two. Oh, and you each get a glass of sparkling wine. The options are limited for each course, and the price does not include tax or gratuity. In other words, for the same price, we can eat there twice and have whatever we want, or we can eat there once, choose from a limited selection, and have the privilege of celebrating Valentine’s Day. I went ahead and made reservations (which had to be guaranteed with a credit card, naturally), presented my wife with the value proposition, and called a few hours later and cancelled when she dismissed the idea of paying more for less as absurd. A perfect reminder of why I married her in the first place. We both love a good meal out, but throwing money away doesn’t appeal. I think that the idea behind the pricing is basically that fancy restaurants get a huge clientele on Valentine’s Day who would never eat there otherwise. These people are less price sensitive because they are expected to treat someone to a nice meal out, so the restaurants can gouge them. The prix fixe enables the restaurant to get people to pay the higher amount without dwelling on the per course prices (people might blanch a bit if they saw a chicken entree that normally goes for $17 priced at $40), and it gets the patrons with unsophisticated tastes off the hook because choices are limited. The thing that really pushed us away from going out was that we felt that the menu choices on Valentine’s Day would certainly be the safest that the restaurant could afford. When you’re catering to people who don’t normally eat pretentious food, you don’t present an adventurous menu. And at $85 per person, I want to have an adventure. ...

I made it to the Triangle Bloggers Conference today, and had a great time. The proceedings were interesting (although I couldn’t get called on when I wanted to make an incredibly salient point about the fixation on media criticism among bloggers), and I got to meet a bunch of new people and see a few people I hadn’t seen in awhile. I finally got to meet Dave Winer, whose work on Scripting News was the inspiration for this Web site, way back when, and I got to thank him for motivating me to do something that has become a huge, permanent fixture in my life. I also got to thank Eric Muller and thank him for adding his powerful criticisms of Michelle Malkin’s arguments in favor of internment and Thomas Woods’ faux history to the body of human knowledge. I didn’t get to personally thank Anton Zuiker or Paul Jones for organizing the conference, so I’ll mention them here. The directions were great, the conference began and ended on time, and the discussions were stimulating. There was a lot of talk at the conference about regional weblogging, which was interesting to me, even if it wasn’t directly up my alley. Heck, it was years before even mentioned where I lived at rc3.org, so needless to say, I’m not really focused on local issues. At the end of the day, I kind of felt ashamed of that. I definitely felt my passion for working on this site rekindled. I haven’t lost any of my passion for writing entries here, but there are a lot of other features that I could add to this site that I just haven’t gotten around to. For one thing, I was one of three people out of a few dozen who does not have a comment facility at all, so I’m definitely thinking about adding one. I have my own ideas about how to do it so that I can avoid spam and build a community of readers. We’ll see what happens. I think the quote of the conference came after someone said that comments are binary, either enabled or disabled. Dan Gillmor said that they’re binary in the sense of being crappy or not. If I do come up with a commenting system here, you won’t have to worry about reading crappy comments. ...

Some of you don’t believe President Bush’s rhetoric about being a uniter, not a divider. Well, just look at what he’s done for Iranians.

Google has offered to host Wikipedia. This seems like a nice bit of altruism. Bandwidth and hardware costs that are no doubt a constant headache for the Wikimedia Foundation are a rounding error for an outfit like Google.

I’ll be at the Triangle Bloggers Conference tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to meeting some new people and seeing the people I’ve met before. If you read this site, be sure to look me up. (Hopefully we’ll all have name tags.)

You’ll get in less trouble if you steal a DVD than if you download its contents.

A blogger named Josh Webber has taken apart Google Maps had documented how the DHTML works.

If the Bush administration is going to give White House credentials to reporters from fake news organizations, I think that they should be fair and invite Rob Corddry to join the White House press corps. Update: Yes, I posted my little joke there before I finished reading the linked article. I guess the analogy was just too obvious.

I don’t know what’s more surprising, that David Talbot is leaving Salon, or that the online magazine is officially profitable.

Did you know that Google Maps supports keyboard shortcuts? Useful keyboard shortcuts are the key to bridging the gap between Web applications and desktop applications. (I’m still waiting for someone a DHTML implementation of vi.) Adrian Holovaty has some suggestions that could improve Google Maps. I found a bug in Google Maps yesterday, but they fixed it before I could write it up this morning. That’s impressive.