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Restaurant Review: Gary Danko

Too much IE talk, so need to balance me out a bit. Tine and I went to Gary Danko for b-day dinner, one of the coolest dining experiences in San Francisco, and the cost reflected it. I had the 5 course dinner, she had 3, we also had champagne and a half-bottle of wine.

We had a sommelier recommend the wine, a 1999 Calera Selleck Mt. Harlan Pinot Noir. We had about 4 or 5 more people fussing over us too, serving us bread, water, food, the cheese course, welcoming us, open the door to the bathroom — service was pretty good.

I had caviar/oysters, lobster, duck, cheese and this killer chocolate mousse with marscapone sorbet. Tine had risotto, frog's legs (yum), and souffle.

It was our second time at the restaurant and hopefully not our last. I'll come up with an excuse to go there again next year. It's a pretty ridiculous dining experience.

So back to the bathroom. Gary Danko is probably the best place to go to the bathroom in San Francisco. The bathroom is well decorated, they play new age music so if you need to go #2 you're all relaxed, there's a water fountain, lovely hand soap and lotion, rolled up individual towels, and little Gary Danko stickers on the toilet rolls that are folded up. I wonder if we can get some of this stuff done at the office.

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Online Account Hell

I've got a ton of accounts online, it's a problem (I can say why in a different post), and I don't think I'm alone. I probably have 50+ online accounts.

  • 4+ email accounts: personal, work, public, and spam plus several test accounts
  • 8+ for banking, investing, credit card, taxes, insurance, bill sites like cell phone, tv
  • 5+ shopping sites, not including all the individual stores I have to register for one off purchases so another 10+
  • 4+ member sites like Airlines, car rental
  • All the photo sites, Flickr, Kodak, Snapfish, Shutterfly (SmugMug maybe?)
  • n+ web sites like Delicious, Classmates, Backpack, etc
  • n+ work sites like bugzilla, intranet, wiki, addons

Single sign on is not a solution. Password manager is moderately helpful. It's disheartening to know that each one of these auth/registration systems are different and most are likely not secure.

What I'd like to see is to be able to log-in to my web site and everything is keyed off of that authentication. That's not of course for everybody. The other model to look at is how bill pay companies like CheckFree, have been able to get people to play nicely.

Do we fix this in Firefox 3.0 or is this not a solvable problem (live with password manager) and move on? The bigger problem I have is that I don't exactly know what bits of information each of these accounts have. It's not that these 50+ sites have just my log-in information, username, password, email address. It's that these 50+ sites have contact information, some usage information, some other stored information like photos or financial data, and that's not good at all. People make it really easy to sign up for accounts, but I know of no site that makes it easy for you to close/delete/purge an account.