So, I'm getting ready to drive up to Berkeley/Oakland to dine at Oliveto Cafe and Restaurant. I've dined there once before and the food is remarkable — it's one of those places where you know the entire staff cares about food. One of things that stands out about Oliveto in my memory is not just the delicious food, attentive wait staff, and exquisite preparation of Italian cuisine - but also the menu. Tonight's menu should be posted around 5pm (about an hour before my dinner reservation) at http://www.oliveto.com/dinnermenu.pdf. (They always post the dinner menu at around 5pm and it changes every day.) I'll try to remember to download it tonight and post it here so it's more permanent. Anyway, the menu is always an adventure… I've been doing food writing for the last three and a half years (and been decently successful at my style of writing) and the menu confounds me. It truly is a culinary adventure just deciphering it. So, go and print it out and scribble notes over it and figure out what each menu item means. If you figure out one menu item, then post in the comments - I'll be doing the same. The early bird gets the easy entries…

Here's one from the Sept. 29 that I just couldn't figure out:
Chitarra nera alla colatura di alici - black guitar that filters anchovies?
My best guess is that it's a black pasta (either guitar strings like capellini or cut by a chitarra as in linguini shaped…) with a sauce made of anchovies…

This information is elsewhere on the net, but not necessarily easy to find, so I'm "re-documenting" it here while I still remember it from my work in this area back in 2002-2005. These states are mapped for Windows XP terminology only, but a great deal of IT machines are still out there that use XP so it's probably still relevant for another year or so. The impetus to write this down was due to my wife's work laptop "being loud all the time". I took a look and discovered that it was her fan that she was complaining about. Since it had the Centrino Mobile Technology sticker, I knew the processor had to be Pentium M or later, fully supporting Intel Enhanced SpeedStep Technology, so I changed the power profile to allow the CPU to enter a low power state while the laptop was plugged in (which is almost all the time). About ten minutes later, everything was perfectly quiet (the fan having stopped running for the first time).
Click here to read the rest of
Intel SpeedStep, Windows XP, and confusing Power Profiles

The Next Iron Chef, a new 6-part series premiering Oct. 7 on Food Network, went to the Culinary Institute of America (Hyde Park Campus) to film this summer. Check out http://www2.ciachef.edu/nic/ for more info as well as a video about the CIA (and why they think the Food Network chose to use them for this show).

Nikolas, a reader of Cooking For Engineers, sent in this photo in response to the Bacon Cooking Tests (Part I and Part II). Now that's a lot of bacon!