I’ve been hopped up on uppers all day (relax, just a huge amount of chocolate-covered high-test espresso beans, though the amount of caffeine was surely enough to get me disqualified from competing in any sport - every time I pee it smells like freshly-brewed coffee). Needing something to relax me, and since my bowel movements have been altogether too easy lately, I thought I’d go for steak. Two birds with one stone.

It’s been a while since my last red meat extravaganza, and, at the behest of my buddies, I tried The Old Homestead, on 14th and 9th.

The place is a bit old-fashioned, as befits most NYC steakhouses. There’s this weird old sign, stating this place is “the king of beef”.

I bumped into Odin on the way in, he was ordering takeout for the lads. We exchanged knowing nods, told him to say hi.

I was served by a decrepit waiter with a handlebar moustache, he probably was almost too old to fight when he was drafted in WWI. He had an accent so I asked him where his pith helmet was. He, in turn, recommended the 36oz ribeye, priced no more than lighter fare on the menu. Once again, I asked for an internal temperature between 145F and 150F, once again I got a blank stare. So far, only the people at Emeril’s Delmonico in Vegas have been able to respond to this request without batting an eyelid. But that is a story for another day.

I also ordered a chopped salad since I’ve been told I need some roughage. The salad was amazing, and enough for two. I ate the whole thing, not one to ignore roughage consumption guidelines.

Then the steak came.

Oh dear.

The bone wasn’t even that big. The rest was all meat and a bit of fat. This is, to date, the largest single steak I’ve had (though not, alarmingly, the largest amount of meat I’ve consumed in one sitting). And was it good! It was served with a roasted head of garlic, French style. Not quite the consistency of the steak in Flames (that was almost like good Ahi) but still awesome.

I almost couldn’t eat the whole thing. But I did, it was that good. By the end I felt like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. And I did not have the “waffer thin mint“.

On the way back to the train, it was hot and, after all this food, I started sweating profusely. I passed by a funeral parlor on 14th and the proprietor eyed me appreciatively. This is not hot-weather food!

Highly recommended.

D

The deluge of WAN accelerators from Cisco, Riverbed, Juniper, Expand, Packeteer,Bluecoat, Silverpeak etc. etc. is proving good for datacenters. Not sure how many vendors will remain viable in a year or two, but the selection at the moment is decent.

However, most of the vendors don’t address remote desktop acceleration, say for people using 3G cards on their laptops or even cable modems - sometimes the routing to corporate networks can be arcane enough that the ms of latency add up, plus most home connections are asymmetrical anyway.

So, it would be pretty cool to have a WAN accelerator in your laptop, right? Well, so far only two companies have stepped forward:

The far more established product, even if you’ve never heard of it, is AcceleNet Enterprise from ICT (Intelligent Compression Technologies, www.ictcompress.com - they were recently bought by ViaSat). ICT has been doing just this for years, with a veritable who is who of clients (no they haven’t paid me to say this, I just think the stuff is cool). Lots of service providers use it.

ICT deploys a server that acts as a proxy, then you install an agent on your laptop. Transfers are compressed both ways.

The other vendor is known to us all - it’s Riverbed. They have now what’s called Steelhead Mobile. Effectively, it puts a Riverbed box inside your laptop. A normal Steelhead is needed to communicate with, as well as a Steelhead Mobile Controller for management. I saw pricing for the controller and it was a bit dear…

You can even adjust how much cache to give your mini-Riverbed, so if you have the space, go nuts.

Of course, you can also use this technology for servers and save money on appliance costs - I wonder if they have something that checks if you’ve installed it on a server OS, and how much CPU does it take to do it’s thing.

I heard somewhere Cisco is also working on something similar, unsurprisingly.

D