I ate lunch there today for the countless time and, as always, I enjoyed it. There is a wide range of food to choose from at very reasonable prices. If you find yourself at City Market early in the day, their egg scramble is always a good choice and you can put a wide assortment of different food in to it (but be aware, more than two items costs more). Otherwise they have a wide range of sandwiches, soups, and other entrées to choose from. If you’re a true Wisconsinite, like myself, then their Mac & Cheese is highly recommended will full but wanting more. Even if you aren’t looking to gorge yourself with an entire meal, they make a wide assortment of fancy coffee drinks, or just regular coffee if that’s your style, and have a great bakery to match. For about a third of the year, they even offer outdoor seating right on their patio overlooking North Avenue.

Just about the only complaint that I ever have when eating at City Market is the seating. If you’re there at a peak time it can be a daunting task to find an available table and if you’re there with a large group, they only have one table capable of seating more than about five. During these busy times, you will without fail also find a single hipster sitting alone with his or her laptop at a table for four while your party of four can only find an open table for two.

Regardless of the seating issues that they sometimes have, it is still worth a trip and is always a great destination to meet friends or family for a nice breakfast, brunch, or lunch.

The rumors were swirling that Apple would be porting the iOS to the Apple TV. Although I suppose this is still something that could happen in the future, it did not manifest for this release. Instead, they chose to just update the software a little bit and write their own programs to support Netflix streaming, YouTube, and Flickr. The addition of Netflix and YouTube are fantastic additions, but what really would have sealed the deal, at least for me, is a third-party App Store. Hulu Plus in particular would elevate the Apple TV from a novelty rental box to a potential competitor to the cable and satellite oligopolies that currently dominate your television. The possibilities don’t stop there, though. Pay channels such as HBO and Showtime could easily release an App tied to a subscriptions service. Depending on the versatility of the included remote, it could even become a gaming system. As Apple has learned from its other iOS devices, the possibilities are quite literally endless when you open up development to third-party developers.

Instead, Apple released a smaller black box that basically does the same thing it did before, but now you rent instead of buy. Coming from a company that is known for innovation, the Apple TV is a pathetic shadow of its true potential.

I guess what pisses me off about this more than anything else is the fact that this is even a national controversy. In opposing a peaceful, moderate, and fully westernized Islamic center, it’s opponents are demonstrating the exact bigotry that led the September 11th attackers to attack the United States in the first place. The rise in anti-Islamic bigotry in this country is precisely what the extremist terrorist groups want. It allows them to more easily radicalize and recruit otherwise peaceful and moderate Muslims. This country was based on freedom of religion and it scares me that we are going in a direction that condones the losses of those rights for certain ethnic or religious groups. A similar type of hatred, bigotry, and scapegoating is what has led to virtually every genocide in history.

If someone can post a legitimate argument as to why this shouldn’t be built and explain its opposition as anything other than bigotry, please by all means inform me. But until then, I will continue to see the opponents of the Lower Manhattan Islamic Community Center as racist.

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.

While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn’t a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.

Put simply, that little “like” button that you now see all over the Internet lets Facebook know what pages are more popular than others and when you search for something on Facebook, that plays a large role in to the rankings of the search results. While this is a great system for businesses to help drive more traffic to their site or promote their brand, it will, as Facebook’s open graph continues to grow, be a very bad thing for bad news.

Say, for example, that a terrible earthquake occurs and you read a terrific article about the aftermath of the earthquake and the destruction that it caused. Are you inclined to “like” the devastation of an earthquake? Probably not. Therefore, information that could potentially be critical to the recovery of the earthquake, news about where is safe, aftershocks, and who knows what else will likely never get a “like” click and will suffer in Facebook’s search rankings. See where I’m going with this? Although it is a fantastic new way to interconnect the social web, some thought clearly needs to be put in to the logistics of using a term such as “Like”. In Facebook’s credit, you can already change the button to instead say “Recommend”, but perhaps something like that should be the default, not the second option that few sites use.

The Good
The very first thing I played around with when it was done updating was folders. If, like many users, you have compiled 3+ pages of apps that you use frequently enough that you are unwilling to uninstall them and clean things up, then you are probably sick to death of attempting to organize your apps. Folders are like a dream come true. Although I cannot explain why it took Apple this long to integrate a feature that dates back to the original computer operating system GUIs, this is a feature that is truly welcome. Instead of 4 pages of apps that are loosely organized and a pain to navigate through and reorganize, I have managed to condense everything in to a single page with 4 main folders.

Once I was able to move beyond the excitement of having folders (Sad, right?), I popped open the mail app. The new inbox structure is great and navigating through the app just to get to each account’s inbox has never been easier. I’ve never really been a fan of a unified inbox, but from what I understand it is hugely popular and was a very highly requested feature, so kudos to Apple for adding it in. Also, for you business users out there, you can now access more than a single exchange account, so there’s that.

For those of you that do a lot of mobile web browsing, you’ll also notice that not only is Safari faster to load initially, but there are some nice new changes. For starters, you now have a choice of the default search engine and can switch between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Along with the option of which search provider you want to use, search recommendations have been added and are powered by whichever search engine you select as your default. Supposedly there’s also better better HTML5 support and HTML compliance is extremely high, as my phone scored a 94/100 on the Acid3 Test (Note: Firefox 3.6.4 on Mac OS X 10.6.4 only scores a 93).

Are there more things that are awesome about upgrading to iOS 4? You bet, but those are the three that really stand out.

The Bad
The bad points about upgrading your iPhone 3G to iOS 4 aren’t so much as what’s wrong with it once you’re done but what you know for a fact you’re missing and won’t ever get until you buy new hardware. Most notably, multitasking, facetime, and desktop wallpapers. I understand that do to hardware liabilities multitasking and desktop wallpapers had to be disable or they would have just about crippled the phone (at least according to Apple) and facetime simply won’t work without the front-facing camera, but it still hurts to know the awesomeness that others are experiencing which your phone shall never enjoy.

The Ugly
Speed. Sure, a few of the built-in Apps such as Safari and Mail are snappier than ever, but I’ve started noticing more and more that it just seems a bit more sluggish than it ever used to. It is by no means unusable, or even anywhere close to it, but Apple has clearly switch gears to optimizing the software for the newest hardware. Even uglier is the crashing. This really can’t be blamed on Apple because it is an issue exclusively with 3rd party apps, so my guess would be this will be less and less of a concern as the app developers update their code for improved compatibility with iOS 4.

Conclusion
Overall, it is a very solid upgrade for the iPhone 3G. The addition of folders and the improvements made in Safari and Mail are enough to make the upgrade more than worthwhile. If, however, you’re concerned about some of the issues I’ve discussed above, then maybe put it off for a month or two until Apple has released the first bug fix (presumably to be called iOS 4.0.1) and more developers have had a chance to ensure that their Apps are up to date and working properly.

Earlier today we decided to make our second trip there, but this time for a nice sit-down lunch. Both of us ordered the $13 lunch bento. The price seemed a bit steep, but they really do a fantastic job of filling you up. We were promptly brought out a fresh salad and within a minute or two of clearing our salad plates we were brought the rest of the meal. Honestly, it was more than I expected. Both of us got the teryaki chicken bento, which had a large amount of the chicken, topped with thinly shredded and fried sweet potato, a California roll (which my wife substituted for a sweet potato roll – a very good choice), a steamed veggie whose name I cannot recall, the option of either a spring roll or some little fried stuffed rice ball, and a bowl of white rice. By the time I’d cleared my plate I was thoroughly stuffed and extremely satisfied.

Although I can’t (yet?) speak for the menu in it’s entirety, I am willing to pronounce Ginza a worthwhile destination if you are in the Mayfair area and looking for a good meal. It certainly isn’t the best sushi in the metro-Milwaukee area, but the food is good, the service is fast and friendly, and it is in a very convenient location across from Mayfair Mall. I will definitely be eating there again.

Here’s the address and website: