Firepop
My talk at the ACM Web Conference went OK, I guess. A/V problems were painful, not least because I had foreseen them and warned the powers that be. It’s 2025 and this is the Association For Computing Machinery: it ought to be possible to hook a Macintosh to your beamer.
Oh well.
In a lousy mood, I retreated to Firepop, a fun little restaurant with some serious ideas.
The highlight was the app: “Cured duck / Piel de Sapo melon, Koroneiki olive oil ”, which is a stunning demonstration of wicked knife skills. The pieces of duck, skin-on, are slivered with equal amounts of duck and skin. The melon is the same thickness. Just wonderful.
Nor do I want to dismiss the skewer of “Wagyu beef slice / barrel-aged soy, Tasmanian wasabi, sesame”. This is an elaboration of a pandemic takeout dish; I thought wasabi and wagyu might be too much, but it works. “Lamb / sesame cumin dukkah, chilli” was great, too, and did not blur into the beef at all.
This year’s Web Conference is entirely consumed by AI: there are almost no papers about the Web.