We were looking for something quick, local, and mostly veggie for dinner, so my wife came up with the idea of takeout from Holy Cow (3rd and La Cienega - in the minimall with Mishima and Kiwiberry). I’m not the biggest fan of takeout; I like to sit and relax, and I don’t like soggy food from containers, so Indian works pretty well. I can sit and the food can sit and not get soggy. Good combo.

This was our first time at Holy Cow. We’ll definitely go again.

The woman taking the phone order was nice, helpful, and clear. Unfortunately, they were out of several items we wanted, but with a good attitude from the woman, we basically didn’t mind.

We ordered four veggie entrees, plus raita, which was fine but nothing special. Of the four dishes, the weakest, surprisingly, was the dal. I often think of dal as the cheese pizza or the mu shu pork of Indian food - the standard dish that every place serves with their own flavor, and that gives you an idea of the quality and the seasonings of the restaurant. It was a red-herring here. It just wasn’t that great. Having eaten a lot of dal at a lot of restaurants, I’m guessing that theirs changes nightly or at least from time to time, so it may be worth another shot.

The other dishes were, frankly, great. Even from takeout containers. The spinach with garbanzo beans (channa sag) had a very fresh flavor, having likely been made from fresh spinach. Next, the tofu masala was in a wonderful red masala sauce that was reminiscent of a really good pasta sauce, again, with fresh vegetables. And the star of the show was the bharta - and I’m not even really a big fan of eggplant. But this is as must-get.

The nan was, well, nan-like.

Close to home, good service, and fresh, good food. No question, we’ll be back.

Last night I went to Soot Bull Jeep for dinner. Hadn’t been for a while. Since it was a guys-night-out, we decided to go for the marinated squid - something that our wives would have objected to.

I’ve got to say, we eat pretty much everything, but when this plate landed on the table, we were pretty shocked:

I was expecting maybe a plateful of normal-sized squids, cut open, or rings, or something similar. But this was essentially a giant squid (not too huge, but not quite related to the calamari variety). If you ever get squid leg at a Japanese restaurant, you’ve seen part of this beast. It looked like an alien creature.

Anyway, we threw it on the grill and it started to look a bit more like food. 

Finally, the waiter came over with scissors and cut it up into pieces for us. In the end, actually, it was really good!

Long time readers will know that I just started this blog.

Since I installed this on my Mac Mini, I decided I needed a way to back up the SQL data. If this Mac fails, this blog is toast. Most of what follows applies to any Linux machine.

I wrote a pretty simple script to run the backup. If you want to do something similar, use Terminal on the host Mac (or you can login remotely, but that’s another story). Go to a directory where you keep scripts (maybe “/usr/sbin” - you can do that by typing cd /usr/sbin).

Then create a file named something like blogbackup.sh (to do that, type vi blogbackup.sh).

Then, since you’re in the editor vi, you’ll need to press “a” then paste the following, replacing password with your SQL password, and backup with your secondary hard drive (or replacing /Volumes/backup with a different location on your primary drive, but that defeats half the purpose . . .).

 #!/bin/sh
mysqldump --add-drop-table -ppassword wordpress | bzip2 -c > blog.bak.sql.bz2
cp blog.bak.sql.bz2 /Volumes/backup/blog.bak.sql.bz2

To save in vi, press ESC then :w then :q.

Set the permissions to be sure this will execute:

chmod 777 blogbackup.sh

chmod +x blogbackup.sh

(I confess to not being a chmod expert, so those commands might be overlapping.)

To test out the script, type: 

 ./blogbackup.sh

From there, you should set up a recurring crontab to take care of the job. I set mine up as the superuser so that it would run without interruption. To do that, you’ll need root access - that’s a whole different story. But once you have it, here’s what you do:

crontab -e

brings up the list of cron jobs. To add a new one, paste in a line like this:

10 2 * * * /usr/sbin/blogbackup.sh

That basically says at 2:10 AM, run that script everyday. Save and quit with :w then :q.