NYC Dining: Ann & Tony’s

Ann & Tony’s
2407 Arthur Avenue, Bronx NY 10458
(718) 933-1469

Web Site: http://www.annandtonysonline.com

Ann & Tony’s restaurant in the Arthur Avenue section of Belmont in the Bronx is one of the oldest continually operating Italian restaurants in the borough, dating back to the 1920s.

Twitter is a very interesting phenomenon. I’ve only really started using it in the last year, initially as way of sending automatic updates from OTB and Tech Broiler to people who actually cared about using the service. A year ago, I thought the idea was pretty pointless, with these limited 140-character messages that people send out that everyone on the Internet can see, which seemed to focus on fairly dumb, exhibitionist status updates such as “eating a Cannoli” or “This alfredo sauce is @#$%ing awesome dude!” so I stayed away from issuing my own updates because I didn’t want to look like a total ass. I knew a lot of people were LOOKING at Twitter, but I didn’t feel like engaging in it beyond the “let’s feed my blog updates into it and see how it goes” capacity.

But then something else happened. I joined FaceBook, which hooked me up with a lot of old friends and many other foodie and technology industry colleagues. But FaceBook, like Twitter, requires you to enter updates about what is going on with your daily life to make your friends feel like you haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. So if I was now committing to doing FaceBook updates, I might as well start updating my Twitter as well. So I downloaded Twitter software for my Blackberry and my PC and started sending updates to Twitter, and automatically syncing those to FaceBook.

So now I’m addicted to Twitter. I have TweetDeck running constantly in the background on my PC and whenever I’m traveling I have TinyTwitter running on my BlackBerry. When people have questions, such as when Eater “Retwittered” a particular person’s inquiry about where to eat in the Bronx on Arthur Avenue, I offered up some advice. No later than 10 minutes afterward, I get a message from Twitterer @RalphNapolitano:

@jperlow saw your tweet about Arthur Ave. When are you coming to eat in my restaurant…LOL!!!

So I look Ralph up. Along with this brother Anthony, he Co-owns Ann & Tony’s, one of the many Italian-American restaurants on Arthur Avenue. Normally, when restaurateurs want me to come visit, I usually get  an email extending an invite to an open house or a press event, or sometimes even a phone call from a publicist, but receiving a challenge over Twitter to come eat was a first. Okay, then, I’ll play. What kind of guy broadcasts a message like that to the entire Internet and not expect a serious foodie like myself to take him up on it?

I told him I was coming over that very evening, with hungry wife and friend in tow, and he had better be ready to face the consequences if the food wasn’t any good.

Click on the “Read the Rest of this entry” link below for more.

Optimum Offline

As I explained in a previous article last summer about my broadband situation, my employer, like many large technology services companies, has elected to classify my work situation as “Home-Based”, in that when I am not at a customer site, I’m working from home. So for connectivity to corporate email, our Intranet and Instant Messaging system, my link to the mother ship is entirely dependent on the reliability of my connectivity through Optimum Online, Cablevision’s cable broadband service.

Click to read the rest of this article at ZDNet Tech Broiler.

Summer Doldrums? Listen to the Frugal Tech Show!

While Off The Broiler is primarily focused on food, as many of you know, I also write technology articles for ZDNet, CBS’s technology news site. Over the last few months I have been teaming up with Linux Magazine and DaniWeb columnist Ken Hess, where we broadcast live on BlogTalkRadio every Friday at 6:30PM EST on leveraging technology to save you and your business money. The format of the show is news and commentary for the first half hour, with the second reserved for special guests from the technology industry. This summer we are going to be featuring a lot of Linux and Open Source guests, so be sure to tune in.

The replays of all the shows are available at www.frugaltechshow.com, just in case you miss them.

Linux Magazine: Final Shutdown

I began my relationship with Linux Magazine in the Summer of 1999. My, what a long strange trip it has been.

In 1999, Linux and Open Source’s position in the computer industry was very different. Hell, the entire world was different — Bill Clinton was nearing the end of his presidency, and Windows 2000 was nearing the end of its beta cycle, marking the beginning of the full transition from the old DOS-based PC paradigm on the corporate desktop to the mass-adoption of the Windows NT kernel, which would complete a year later with the release of Windows XP in the consumer space.

Click here to read the rest of this article at Linux-Mag.com

Giving Thanks to Linux and Open Source

When you think of Thanksgiving, what images come into your mind? If you’re a typical American and have visions of Norman Rockwell paintings engraved into your consciousness like the rest of us, it’s Roast Turkey, mom’s doctored Pepperidge Farm Stuffing (Just say no to Stove-Top!), cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, naturally. Which ends of course with the usual gut-busting feeling from over eating accompanied by the eventual belt-loosening and football watching on grandma’s couch. Aaaaaaaaaaah.

But this year, I’ve decided to switch gears. I’m going to be doing my turkey Puerto Rican style — Pavochon Ahumada rubbed with garlic adobo and smoked over hardwood for several hours on my Weber Bullet, ditching the stuffing for Arroz con Gandules, and am giving thanks to a different bird — the Penguin, and everyone who made him possible.

Click to read the rest of this article at Linux Magazine.

Kindlenomics

A few weeks ago I evaluated Amazon’s Kindle. While I really liked the device, the big problem I had with it was that at its current price of $359.00 it was too expensive at this point for mass consumer adoption. I also had a number of issues with the fact that despite being based on Linux, the device is a closed book, literally.

At what point, however, do consumers start ditching their dead-tree books for e-books? And how many books do you actually have to read per year in order for the convenience factor of the Kindle — its light weight, its ability to store hundreds of books in its memory, and the instant gratification of being able to download books via the Amazon Whispernet EVDO Sprint network — to outweigh its costs?

Click here to read the rest of this article on ZDNet Tech Broiler.

Alan Kay’s 1968 Laptop Still Hasn’t Been Invented

November 5th, 2008 was the 40th anniversary since computer scientist Alan Kay devised the “Dynabook”, a theoretical computing device which was aimed toward higher education and “children of all ages”.

Since the device’s theoretical conception in 1968 and a publication of a paper proposing its use in 1972 when Kay was at Xerox’s PARC, many of the technologies that were in Kay’s conceptual device finally did come to fruition, such as portable and mobile computing, GUIs, and object-oriented programming languages. But has the Dynabook truly been realized?

Read the rest of this article on ZDNet Tech Broiler.

Turn off the computer and get some sleep

Let’s face it, the last month or so has been a challenge for just about anyone’s tolerance of stress and has made even the most “stable” of us question our own emotional and mental health. But I’ve discovered that IT workers in particular, or anyone who is tightly tied to the use of technology is now on the border of becoming a quivering pile of jelly.

Read the rest of this article on ZDNet Tech Broiler.

The New Deal in Personal Computing

Can Linux replace Windows? Well, ask the Atlanta Public School district, which is deploying 25,000 Linux thin-client terminals in its classrooms as a result of a successful pilot of 2200 Linux terminals in 7 schools. Ask companies like Ndiyo who have successfully deployed pilots in 3^rd-world countries in educational environments and Internet cafes.  Ask the Ubuntu project which can genuinely claim millions of downloads of its free end-user OS.

Read the rest of this article on ZDNet Tech Broiler.

Windows XP to Vista migration is no Picnic

Some of you may be aware that I have another identity besides professional technologist and tech/computer industry blogger — I’m also passionate about restaurants, cooking, and eating (albeit with a healthier focus these days) on my other blog, Off The Broiler.

Anyone who has been a reader of OTB for any length of time will undoubtedly come across posts about Christine Nunn, the Culinary Institute of America-trained chef who owns a local catering business here in Northern New Jersey, Picnic Caterers. Christine has been a valued partner in crime in some of my most infamous cooking experiments, such as the quest in creating the Ultimate Hamburger and Ultimate BLT.

While Christine is a close friend of my wife and I,  and we have known her for years, up until very recently I’ve had little or no involvement in her computing lifestyle whatsoever. This is unusual because I typically end up having to advise my friends on the use of or fixing their computer at some point in our relationship, because everybody knows what I actually do for a living.

A few weeks ago Christine calls me on the phone, out of the blue. “Jason, I have computer problems. the machine is really old and is slow. My mom wants to get me a new PC for my birthday. What should I get?”

Click here to read the rest of this article on ZDNet Tech Broiler.