Earlier this month, I dined at the Sunday Brunch Buffet at Navio at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay. (Only now do I have time to blog about it!)

The selection of food was fantastic, and of utmost quality. A great selection of sushi, prime rib, lamb, dim sum, and many many forms of seafood. The desserts were fantastic - including unique chocolate dipped strawberries. The service was also impeccable - from the valet parking to the waiters. The view was also stunning.

As awesome as Navio was, though, the Sterling Sunday Brunch Buffet at Bally’s in Las Vegas was better.

That said, I don’t live near Las Vegas - and so in the Bay Area, Navios is the clear winner. You should try it sometime!

JetBlue Passengers Watched News of Drama - Yahoo! News

The airliner circled Southern California for hours, crippled by a faulty landing gear, while inside its cabin 140 passengers watched their own life-and-death drama unfolding on live television.

While satellite TV sets aboard JetBlue Flight 292 were tuned to news broadcasts, some passengers cried. Others tried to telephone relatives and one woman sent a text message to her mother in Florida attempting to comfort her in the event she died.

“It was very weird. It would’ve been so much calmer without” the televisions, Pia Varma of Los Angeles said after the plane skidded to a safe landing Wednesday evening in a stream of sparks and burning tires. No one was hurt.

The future is here!

Omar Shahine and team - New Hotmail “Kahuna”

Omar Shahine and team - New Hotmail “Kahuna”

Watch Omar and the Kahuna team in this new Channel 9 video. I’ve seen Kahuna and it rocks. My favorite aspect? The 3 column view.

Those of you who know of my Entourage heritage, know how much I like 3 column views.

WSJ.com - Payments to IRS Lost in Accident: Check’s in the Bay

WASHINGTON — A highway accident caused some 30,000 quarterly estimated-tax payments to the Internal Revenue Service to be dumped into San Francisco Bay, but IRS officials say affected taxpayers will suffer no collateral damage.

A truck carrying about 45,000 forms and tax payments overturned on the San Mateo Bridge on Sept. 11. IRS officials said that the checks, due Sept. 15, were being transported from a post office to an IRS lockbox. No related information about the incident has been posted on the IRS’s Web site, www.irs.gov.

Wow… talk about a bad accident!

Bubble won’t burst / Study finds Bay Area housing prices in line with economic growth

San Francisco’s housing market doesn’t suffer from bubble mania, according to a new study.

The recent, rapid price increases stem not from a speculative frenzy but from basic economic factors, including low interest rates, strong income growth and abnormally low prices in the mid-1990s, said researchers at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

“The bubble fears are over people paying money for housing today because they’re expecting unreasonable (price increases),” said Todd Sinai, associate professor of real estate at the Wharton School. “Our calculation says that if people are expecting something reasonable, house prices today are justified — and they are in San Francisco.”

Whoa!

I just received notice that Citibank is going to discontinue MyCiti Account Aggregation service on 9/30.

This was a fantastic service where you could store your login and password for all your other accounts (AA.com, Bank of America, Avis, AT&T, Hotmail, etc) and they would provide you with a dashboard view of your accounts. You could also click on a link to have it log into that other account for you. I believe this was powered by Yodlee.

Well, like all good things, this too must come to an end. Do you use a web based Account Aggregation service? Would you recommend it?

At long last! Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Entourage 2004 is now available!

I was the Program Manager heading up this effort from August 2004, through May 2005, and I am damn proud of the Entourage team for this accomplishment.

This is release is one that will make any Exchange using Entourage customer happy. Amazing and awesome improvements have been made to Public Folders, Calendar Syncing, Delegation, GAL, and Permissions. It even supports multiple Exchange calendars and address books! I’ve been using this and it has been great! Some of the things I used to do in Entourage are now 4x faster - fantastic! It’s all part of the MacBU’s continued commitment to delivering value to its customers, and to enable Mac users exist seamlessly within a PC world.

In the long standing tradition of the MacBU, there is even a Mac first, and Mac only feature in this release. I’m going to leave it to you to figure it out though
To be able to use this version of Entourage to its fullest potential, you will need to talk to your Exchange administrator about applying these hotfixes:

KB892986: The value for the PR_ACCESS property that is returned from a WebDAV PROPFIND method is always MAPI_ACCESS_READ (read-only) in Exchange 2000

KB888619: The value for the PR_ACCESS property that is returned from the DAV PROPFIND method is always read-only in Exchange Server 2003

As you can see - one fix is for Exchange Server 2003, and the other is for Exchange Server 2000. I want to emphasize that these two fixes are not Mac specific - but are recommended fixes for Exchange.

If you have any questions about this release, I highly recommend you check out the following resources:

1. The Microsoft Entourage newsgroup

2. The Microsoft Entourage mailing list

3. The Microsoft Entourage MVP website

4. Your Exchange administrator - after all, she will need to apply the above fixes.

You can of course leave a comment, but do I remember that I now work at MSN Search Toolbar.

Congrats again to the Entourage team, and the rest of the MacBU for this fantastic release!

Update: Here is a link to the Entourage blog with details of the improvements.

There was a big boom.

Then the lights flickered.

A few seconds later, they flickered again.

A bunch of machines rebooted.

I thought that someone had dropped a bomb near by (I’m right next to an semi-retired Air Force Base).

But now coworkers are telling me that a transformer exploded somewhere on La Avenida.

I remember one winter, I was working at 75 Wall St on the 26th floor when a transformer exploded across the street. Same thing - giang bang, some lights flickering. Something like 15 fire trucks instantly showed up and clobbered the street.