Chris' World

66 Bobs Noodle

I was up in Rockville, MD today (10 miles north of DC) and had heard that Rockville is the “New Chinatown” for the Washington DC area.  So of course I had to stop and get some tastey chinese food. One of the places that garners the best reviews in the area is 66 Bobs Noodle — a Taiwanese noodle restaurant.

I have two benchmarks for a good chinese restaurant

1 – crowdedness — if all the tables are taken, and people are waiting to be seated, it must be good.

2 – ratio of asians to non-asians – if the restaurant is filled with chinese people, again it must be good.

Realizing that by eating at a “good chinese restaurant” I influence the ratio of asians to non-asians, it sometimes makes me wonder if when other people walk in, and see me eating in the restaurant, they think to themselves — “Oh no — a white person, this place can’t possibly be good!”

Another random observation that I made about this restaurant, is that it is Taiwenese owned.  How can I tell?  Well, after eating in a number of Taiwaenese establishments, it’s pretty easy to tell… How?  Just look around the restaurant for one person standing around, dressed fairly casually (jeans/sweat peants), and bossing around all of the waiters that are dressed nicely in dress shirts and ties.   66 Bob’s Noodle was no exception, as the owner was standing in back, wearing a polo shirt and jeans and “observing” his restaurant from afar.

So enough with the obversations — and on to the food.  Since the name of the place has “noodle” in it, I figured I needed to get noodles.  I ordered the Noodle Soup with Chicken, Pork, and Vegetables.  I asked the waiter whether they could add wontons to my soup.  It was at this point that the waiter looked very concerned — said “just a moment” — and walked over to the casually dressed guy in the corner (the owner!).  When the waiter came back he said “Okay… wonton $2?”.  I should sure — and 3-4 minutes later I had a bowl of piping hot soup on my table.  That’s what I call service.

The broth was quite good and rich… and the noodles had a good texture.  Total bill only $9.  Cheap Cheap Cheap.

The largest movie theater in DC

Today I went to see the newest Quentin Tarantino movie, Inglourious Basterds. Being new to the DC area, I had to do some investigation on what are the good/sucky theaters around… Because we all know that not all movie theaters are created equally. I ended up going to Loews Uptown 1 — the largest single screen movie theater in DC.

Definitely some history here — this is the only theater I’ve been in that has a balcony (which is where I am sitting and writng this blog entry). Sitting here brings me back to a time when theaters only had one ticket booth and the restrooms weren’t restrooms, but “lounges” with sofas.

The theater seats around 1,000 folks… and the screen is HUGE — so big that it curves in order to fit in the building.  Definitely a cool place to see a movie.

Blogging from my Blackberry with Wordpress mobile app

While attending DEFCON, I had a lot of free time in 10 minute increments between talks and thought it would be cool to see what I can do from my blackberry besides just e-mail.

I installed facebook for blackberry, twitterberry to be on twitter, the gmail and google apps for blackberry. After all that, I thought it would be cool to be able to blog from my blackberry, so I poked around, and lo and behold there is a beta wordpress mobile application for blackberry.

This is my first post from the Wordpress for Blackberry app, but so far it is pretty slick. It uses the wordpress XML-RPC interface to download all of the recent wordpress posts and comments. It also allows uploading of photos with the post and using the blackberry camera.

To demonstrate attachment of photos attached is the DEFCON 17 badge this year.