Too much Chicken and not enough Rice

At work today, we had a morning tea in the morning (duh!), and a BBQ in the afternoon. We also closed the phone queues early today.

Earlier this week, Dolly at work kindly gave me a voucher for a meal discount at a restaurant. She had originally got a discount book from the ANZ when she got a loan. There is a selection of restaurants that the voucher is valid at, and I looked up the associated website for the listing. Tonight, we decided on the Catch Restaurant on Ronwood Drive in Manukau.

I booked the table for two at 7pm. Overall, neither Anisha nor I were impressed by dinner. My orange juice didn't taste like orange juice, and the bread with my chicken curry didn't taste very nice. Anisha voiced that she didn't like her meal either.

Two positive comments about the restaurant were that the staff were very efficient and polite, and our meal was delivered to our table very quickly after ordering it.

We decided not to have dessert there and went home.

Anisha and I went to Charlene and Nicks to give them some Xmas presents. Anisha is to fly to Wellington tomorrow.

After that, we went to Denny's for dessert. I had a banana split. Anisha didn't feel like dessert at this stage and had a lemonade. Later that night Anisha and I swapped Xmas presents. Anisha bought me Start Trek: The animated series.

Useless Information: The restaurant industry provides work for more than 9 percent of those employed in the United States.

An Agent and a Lone Star

Anisha's brand new Seagate FreeAgent hard drive had gone kaput. She had a lot of photos on it, and they were in jeopardy. From various methods and sources, we managed to restore about 80% of them, but the drive was dead.

We took the drive into Harvey Norman Botany Downs and explained the situation to their customer service. The guy we dealt with plugged the unit into three separate computers and it detected the drives without a problem. This was the initial behaviour we experienced on our PC's at home. I asked the gentleman to attempt to copy some files off the drive for five minutes. The drive failed and was no longer recognised after performing this test.

The Harvey Norman representative recommended having the drive with a Western Digital unit. He stated that he already had another dead Seagte drive in for repair, and that he uses Western Digital himself. Harvey Norman have the WD Mybook at the moment, which is a good unit as a replacement. Harvey Norman are going to attempt to recover the data, but their team on site hardly has the capability of a full data recovery.

Anyhow, Harvey Norman will try and recover the data and give us a call to see how it goes. It has not been successful. We may or may not have them approach Seagate to perform a data recovery on the drive. I'm personally feeling that the units firmware or connectivity has died somewhere and that the data could be recovered if the drive was removed from its casing. I'd be pretty sure that the unit would contain a standard hard drive.

I went to Just Cuts to get a style cut. Just Cuts are running a promotion where if you refer someone to Just Cuts, you can get free movie tickets.

We went to The Warehouse and Anisha had the idea that we could buy Carlos a little gift. After much discussion, we decided on getting some little bath toys which squirted water. We were ambushed by Eric Hart who was on duty, and I spoke with him for about 15 minutes. After talking with mum, she let us know that Carlos already has these bath toys. We returned the bath toys to The Warehouse and went to Kmart and picked up a toy box (Anisha's idea) instead. We then dropped it off to Carlos.

Later that night Anisha and I went to the Lone Star Bar & Cafe in Manukau. We had been to the one in Newmarket and were quite happy with the food. For my main I had Cajun Chicken, while Anisha had Dixie Chicken. We borrowed the family Entertainment Guide, which included a discount for a free main when another main is purchased. After a few drinks, and a Lone Star bread, this bought the total down to NZ$46. A very reasonable sum for a night out. We also saw Joe who used to work at CTRL-ALT-DELETE (Datacom Cafe) while dining. He is still working in Botany Downs.

Useless Information: In 1991, during an attempted political coup on Russian President Boris Yelstin, food supplies had dwindled down at the parliament buildings so they ordered Pizza Hut to deliver pizzas.