Another lunch place in the area. Since I have a lot of Indian coworkers, I’ve been enjoying many great Indian restaurants in the area.

This place, although marketed as “Indian and Pakistani”, is a Pakistani/Muslim restaurant. That is, they serve halal cuisine. They are located near Scott and El Camino Real in Santa Clara off the main streets where you wouldn’t normally expect to find a restaurant. But they seem to be doing quite well.

This affordable lunch buffet ($8 per person including tax) menu is quite simple and vegetarian friendly, I think: pickles and salad, dal, a couple of vegetable curries, lamb curry, tandoori chicken and a dessert. Nans (bread) are brought out by the servers.

For me, the favorite is the nan. Most restaurant nans are quite greasy. Here, they are not. Also, they are always hot.

Other items are less greasy, so they are more like everyday menu. Also, the food goes pretty fast, so every dish is brought out from the kitchen constantly and kept fresh. I usually do not like lamb dishes, but I like it here (although often times you find more bones than meat).

The service is… okay. You need to actively ask for more nans and stuff. And during the peak time, you may need to remind them more than once.

But otherwise, this is a great quick lunch place. I’ve only been here for the lunch buffets, but I’ve heard that non-buffet items are also not bad.

Of course, if you want an authentic Southern Indian (vegetarian) cuisine, you can go to Saravana Bhavan, but that’s another story.

This is probably my favorite (and the best) Greek place in the area that I know. The surprising thing (at least to me) is that this place is hidden among the boxy office buildings where you would not normally find good restaurants.

I would not have been able to find this place if not for the catered lunch on Friday at work. Most of us thought the food was great and prepared fresh. I had to find out where this restaurant was, and since then it’s been one of the favorite place to go for lunch.

Until recently, they were only open during the lunch hours catering to the office workers. They expanded their hours to dinner, but I have not been there for dinner, so I am not sure how crowded it is. I’ve been wanting to take Hyun there but they are not open during weekends. Oh, well.

You can see their menu online, but I tend to order from the daily specials written on a long paper on the wall. Also, they have a very good selection of vegetarian dishes and desserts.

The decor is more like a casual sandwich (?) place. You order at the counter and they bring out the food. Lots of pictures and stuff about Greece.

I left work a bit early because I was a bit tired (the Monday thing). But when I got home, I felt like going to a bookstore. On my way there, I noticed a smoke trail (or moisture trail that is left by plains) up in the southwestern sky (from San Jose, CA) around 7:05 p.m. It did look like a jet trail, but the thing seemed to be moving quite fast straight up. It looked a lot more like a rocket to me. So, I stopped the car to the side of the road and opened up the roof to see it better. It seemed to shoot straight up and disappeared after what seemed to be two booster fires. It was quite amazing although it was for a few minutes with all the trails.

[Just talked to our in-house rocket expert, Erik Ebert, and he told me there was a military exercise.]
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I guess I haven’t been to Barnes and Noble (Santa Clara, CA) recently, but when I got there, I noticed these new listening stations in their CD section (I was told that it has been a couple of months since they had them). These were made by RedDotNet. What’s different about these from other digital listening stations was that these had bar-code scanners. You put any CD under the scanner and you will be able to sample the tracks.

There were two types of stations: one with a touch-screen LCD and one without one. The one with a touch-screen LCD were mainly used to promote certain CDs with extra information. However, you can scan any other CD if you want to see the descriptions.

True, the samples are quite short (30 seconds?), some information was incorrect (one of Marian McPartland’s CD came out as some hard-rock CD), and you have to manually advance to the next track (which might be a good thing because people usually leave the station without stopping the player), but this was wonderful. I really liked it because now I can sample those CDs that I was curious about, but wasn’t inclined to buy one. The only thing is the keeping the database up-to-date, but I am sure they have a dedicated company for this.

The jury selection was over even before they had a chance to ask me questions (yeah, and that took three days!), but from the questions asked by both the judge and the counsels from both sides, it was clear what they were looking for in a juror. The most important question seems to be if a potential juror can be fair to both parties and just rely on the evidence and witnesses presented during the trial.

For example, there were some ailments involved with the case and the court wanted the prospective jurors to disregard whatever research they have done or knowledge they acquired before this trial and only rely on the material and testimonial evidence presented during the trial.

That made me wonder what this court system is trying to do. The system is, without a doubt, based on a very idealistic perspective. However, I don’t think it is that naive to think that a person can completely disregard whatever they had for the trial. That’s just not possible. What the system seems to be doing is to be reasonable and asking that one try to be one’s very best and to be fair as much as one can (this reminds me of the Army motto). It seems this system recognizes the imperfection of being a human, but realizes that there probably isn’t any better way and have trust in its people.

Frankly, at first when I was summoned for the jury duty, the first thing I thought of was how I can get out of it. I postponed it once, partly due to my house purchase and the move and partly due to the schedule at work. I’ve asked around for “advices” on how to get dismissed.

But after the whole jury selection process started, a part of me actually began to hope to be selected as a juror (although a possible 6-week trial seemed a bit too long)… That I wanted to see if I can be the best that I can be. :p I mean, this wasn’t really due to any patriotism that I have for the U.S. of A. This was more about being a part of a system that puts its trust on people and making a contribution.

Yeah… It’s not perfect, and I do have a bit of a problem deciding the reward amount for the punitive damages, but still the system is trusting its members to decide what the facts are from the evidence with the guidance of the judge with the knowledge of the law. It’s asking, basically, for each member to be the best person (in part, at least, on the subject of “fairness”) and be active (that is, make a decision). Even the mostly sarcastic person like me can be a sucker for human idealism.

One might argue this jury duty or the ballot participation of individual doesn’t make much impact. Maybe not an immediate one. But I do believe that by participating one changes oneself, at least. And this will determine more firmly who we are, and will eventually influence those around us. However passive some of these processes may look, we are making a change (or a seed of changes) by participating.

Anyway, this experience made me think a bit. I sincerely hope that one day I would get selected and serve as a juror, and do my best.