Lambda the Ultimate

...only if "California" qualifies as the general area of Palo Alto. :-) I'm down in suburban Los Angeles, but if I can help somehow, do please let me know!

Thanks! I don't think I'll need to bother you, but I appreciate the offer.

I live in SF (San Francisco). If you want to know about where to eat, what fruit is ripe this time of year, and other culinary stuff, let me know.

Palo Alto and the rest of the tech sector are in what we call the 'Peninsula' or 'South Bay'. The food there is generally rubbish. Palo Alto is a blessed oasis in this regard. I'm sure the farmers' market there is decent. We are at the very tale end of the season for peaches, plums and other 'stone fruit'; apples started coming in a couple of weeks ago (get the smaller, dry farmed apples); Barhi dates arrived just last week. There are still strawberries and tomatoes lying around, all of them decent. Look for pears soon.

If you have questions about the area, do feel free to email me:

        jsn
         at
          well
           dot
            com

Palo Alto restaurants are OK, but for my tastes not as good as Mountain View's Castro street. Miyaki's (spelling?) just across the street from the Stanford Engineering/Medical bookstore has pretty good reasonably priced Japanese food. Most of the other places in Palo Alto are pretty cheesy and overpriced (i.e., fake italian bistros), but you should check it out for yourself. Best bet: sneak into the Google cafeteria down the street (ok, a bit south, and you have cross 101), a lot of brilliant PL people there along with free good food!

While we are on the subject, I'm moving from Switzerland to Beijing in a few weeks. Any LTU people there?

Although it is slightly OT in a moving thread: where is SuperGlue?

Well, this thread is pretty OT anyways :)

Over the summer I was pretty saturated with getting the new Scala IDE plugin out. Now that I've done a BETA release (still not quite done, but getting there), I've switched back to SuperGlue. Actually, I'm working on it ATM, redoing the type checker and runtime (trying to get performance up, something decent for release, also want some better demos). OOPSLA is in three weeks, and my talk is the first one after the Tuesday morning keynote.

I'll be working full-time on a SuperGlue-like programming system after OOPSLA, although I will probably start from scratch again while moving to .NET...

Thanks, sounds promising - SuperGlue is one of the few projects I try to observe their progress.

Good luck and have a good time in Beijing and with .NET !

To tell the truth, I've only been to Castro street a couple of times. It's greatest strength seemed to be South East Asian food.

I have yet to find a decent bakery in the South Bay. In Los Altos, there's a 'Japanese-French' bakery, by the name of Satura, which, while pleasant, is just too fussy. Please do not even mention 'La Boulangerie', that awful South Bay chain. For many things in the South Bay, your best bet is Whole Foods.

There is a good coffee place -- a 'Japanese' cafe, run by a large, Caucasian gentleman whose had a coffee shop in Japan for something like 20 years. He recently opened 'Mr. English' in Los Altos, selling coffee beans, like Jamaican Blue Mountain No. 1, that rarely make it to the U.S. because of the large Japanese demand for them. Espresso is made correctly there, which is more than I can say for most coffee shops in SF (alas).

Try any of the Vietnamese/French sandwich (really different baguettes!) places in San Jose (mostly in the not so good part). They are amazingly good and cheap. For Chinese, you can't go wrong in Cupertino Village (across the street from HP). Personally, I was addicted to Perl milk tea, which I believe can be had in downtown Palo Alto (and everywhere else in the bay area).

Being stuck in Lausanne I usually just go to the Coop pronto (convenience store) for pastries. Being in French Switzerland has some advantages I'll miss!

If you find good things to eat in Beijing, do let me know.

I don't know if you are much into tea at all; it's a complicated subject and I've managed to learn a little bit, through friends.

Well, I suspect I'll be eating a lot of chinese food, which I hear is ok over there :)

I've stayed in Beijing for two months -- we took an afternoon and went to the tea shopping district. It was heaven on earth ;-) Bring $$$$$ though, because good tea isn't cheap, even if you can bargain in Mandarin. However, you can generally get teaware (porcelain, glass, filters, wooden tea trays, and cute (or kitschy, depending on your POV) little statuettes for your tea tray) at much better prices than in the US. Tea tasting in generally free, but it's considered polite to buy an ounce at least if you do it.

There's so much good food there that I can't even begin to describe its yumminess here, but I didn't pick the places. Some streets have a restaurant every third or fourth shop.

When I lived there (1996-99), there was a good Burmese place called Rangoon, on Bryant St., between University Ave. and Hamilton Ave. I last ate there in 2001 or so; don't know if it's still there. The samosas were great.

Hi, I'm a UC Berkeley student and spend a lot of time on campus, though I live in the north bay. You can get my e-mail address from my home page URL:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mhoemmen/

Just take the username from the URL and append cs AT berkeley DOT edu.

FYI http://bayfp.org/

I'll send email. (It'd be fun to connect with other LtU members, but I don't have bandwidth to post an address: can't keep up with much email.)

You might want a former Stanford student knowing quite a lot about Palo Alto. I was there 18 months before retreating to San Jose. I've lived many places in the Bay Area (including Berkeley, SF, Mountain View, etc) so I can help with practical issues.