Thursday I had dinner with Madhu Kurup at Amarin, a Thai restaurant in Mountain View which neither of us had tried before; he didn’t comment on his, but my dish (spicy chicken with cashews) was quite satisfactory.

If you read his flattery of me, remember that it takes two to make lively conversation.

I found his Livejournal (incidentally he looks nothing like the photograph) indirectly: my log shows hits from four ‘friends’ pages which carried his report. It’s a bit of a shock to dip into foreigners’ informal writings in English but peppered with strange words; it makes me worry that my own writing might be made unnecessarily obscure by local jargon. What is the right balance? Does anyone whose English is weak read my site?

I took Madhu’s suggestion to try Google Sets on my favorite music. I found that it helps to pre-filter my entries; if the initial set is too diverse, the narrow result is nothing and the broad result is effectively useless.