I want to buy a product that's for sale online.  The exact product doesn't really matter; what matters is that it's a relatively new product that I've never used before, so I'm not sure if I'm going to like it and want to keep it.

Every place that sells this product charges the same price, so there's no bargain hunting.  The dilemma is that I can buy it either directly from its maker (which I generally prefer to do) and get free shipping and handling and a 30-day money-back guarantee.  Or I can buy it from a high-end retailer, pay $20-25 S&H and get a lifetime money-back guarantee.  This means that I'm essentially paying an extra $20+ dollars (in this case, around 10-15% of the product's price) for an extended insurance policy and I have to decide if it's worth it.

I recently learned about a restaurant named Watercress Asian Bistro.  While I have not eaten there, its name alone raises warning flags.

Let's break it down:

If this seems like idle speculation, check out what today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer has to say about a similarly-named-but-probably-entirely-unrelated restaurant:

Cilantro Asian Cuisine, with the third-highest number of red violations this year, was closed in May after "cockroaches were found crawling on cooked vegetables that were stored on a shelf," according to the inspection report.

The inspector also found shrimp stored in used containers and stacked with the bottom of the containers on the shrimp in the container below, a non-functioning oven hood and a dishwasher that wasn't sanitizing the dishes.

That was one of three inspections in which the health department found serious problems at Cilantro. Other problems included "raw fish on top of cans of soda," "dried blood on the floor" and a customer complaining of a cockroach in his or her takeout.

For contrast in both name and cuisine, consider the estimable Malay Salay Hut.

When did restaurant managers and waiters decide that it was a good idea to replace the question, "Is everything to your satisfaction?" with, "Is everything tasting wonderful?"

First of all, I don't really want you asking me directly about how the food tastes.  That's way too intimate a question for our relationship; you're figuratively prying open my mouth and inspecting my tongue.  Secondly, it discounts the ten other things that affect my experience at your restaurant.  (Yes, my water  glass is empty again.)  Finally, in all likelihood "everything" doesn't taste "wonderful."  Good, hopefully, excellent, possibly, but you set yourself up for failure when you set the bar at wonderful.  Unless you're serving me at Canlis, the Herbfarm, or a handful of less well-known restaurants, everything isn't tasting wonderful, and the waiters in those establishments are old-school enough to ask the question appropriately.

Bombs, Tanks Shoot Down Roadside Avalanches

Getting paid to drive tanks and snowmobiles and set off explosives?  They could charge people to do that job.

Courtesy of today's Seattle Times I learned of a new Jewish-style deli opening next week in Factoria.  I am guardedly optimistic about the possibility of a decent deli that's closer than a plane flight to my home.

For the uninitiated, here are some of the things you look for in a credible, Jewish-style deli:

• Good rye bread -- the foundation of every good deli sandwich
• Kreplach, fried or in chicken soup
• Kasha knishes and/or kasha varniskhes
• Smoked whitefish

The news about Tamara and Tom appearing on Iron Chef America is fun too, and hopefully good news for Brasa.

A couple of years ago I became an avid user of the KCLS electronic catalog for getting books and DVDs.  Kind of like using Amazon.com, except it's free and you have to wait for the popular titles.  The unintended benefit is that I read the books I've gotten from the library much faster than the ones I've purchased at a bookstore, because of the time pressure (especially for popular titles, where you're limited to four weeks because you can't renew a book for which others are waiting).

Last fall KCLS "upgraded" their site's software, apparently because they were running some ancient, unsupported system.  Unfortunately, in doing so they made the site less user friendly and took away two of its best features.  One in particular is the ability to pause your holds.

To explain, a hold is when you request a title that isn't available because all of the copies are lent out to others, and you have to get on line for the next available copy.  It's not uncommon for there to be hold queues of a couple of hundred people for popular new titles.

The problem with holds is that you can't predict when you're going to get to the front of the queue, so you can't plan for when the book is going to be available.  If you have holds on ten books and six become available at once, you either have to check them all out and hope you can find time to read them all in four weeks, or let them pass and get back in line again.

Being able to pause the hold addresses this.  It lets you keep your place in the queue, but the title won't be delivered to you even if you're at the front.  If you get to the front of the line when your hold is paused, people behind you pass you one at a time until you reactivate your hold, at which point you get the next available copy.  This gives you a lot more control over when you get the title.  The only limitation is that a hold can only be in effect for one year from when you initiate it, which includes any time that you wait for it to become available and also any time that you have the hold paused.

As you can imagine, losing this feature made the site as a whole less useful, esp. for popular, newly released titles.  There are half a dozen books that I've taken out in the past six months -- in some cases more than once -- and returned without reading because I didn't have the time.  The good news is that this feature was added back recently, so now I can place holds to my heart's content.  I went from three to seven books on hold, and four of those holds are paused (or "frozen" in the site's new parlance).  I'm tempted to publish my hold list here, but then the folks at DHS won't feel as special.

Karen tantalizes with her tale of the new Seattle Costco but she leaves out all of the details that a Costco junkie cares about.  What's the new store got that the old one didn't?  Levitating check-out stands?  Take-out deli from The Herbfarm?  Self-serve OxyContin?

A few weeks ago my sister was visiting and offered to make us dinner one night.  She was broiling chicken when, halfway through cooking, the oven suddenly stopped working.  Even after letting the oven sit idle overnight and cycling the power, the problem remained. 

The symptom was that the heating elements were not getting hot, even when the electronic controls (which appeared to be working fine) indicated that they should be on.  It was affecting both the upper and lower elements, even though the lower element was not in use when the oven stopped working.

When my wife called Dacor to get assistance, they immediately knew the cause.  The broiler had been on with the oven door open, which is the traditional way to broil.  As explained here:

Broiler temperatures can be in excess of 500 F. At these high temperatures, if the door is closed when you are broiling and you open the door, the sudden rush of oxygen could cause flare-ups and you could be burned.

On the other hand, our oven's owner's manual explicitly and repeatedly says, "Broiling is performed with the door closed."

So what's the explanation?  In order to protect the electronic control panel, the oven has a breaker that causes it to shut down automatically when it detects excessive heat near the panel, the kind that might be generated by, say, broiling with the door open.  The downside is that Dacor won't tell the customer how to reset it, because they want a qualified technician to verify that the electronics were not damaged by the heat.

In our case there was in fact no damage, so while we were out the cost of the service call, we didn't have to spring for expensive replacement parts.

Why doesn't the aforementioned flare-up problem affect this oven?  I'm not sure, though my hypothesis is that because the oven has its own automatic, thermostatically-controlled exhaust fan, perhaps it's not subject to such problems.

What's interesting about this episode is that the manufacturer has put a fail-safe into the oven that's necessitated entirely by people's traditional behavior and their failure to read manuals.  You just know that the first generation of these ovens were plagued with expensive repairs for exactly this reason, and in all likelihood were blamed on "unreliable electronics."

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Great things about December 26th:

1. Lockdown is over.
2. No more avoiding Christmas shopping crowds.  I went to Costco this afternoon for the first time since Thanksgiving and it was practically empty.
3. The Sunday New York Times is on its post-holiday crash diet after weeks of extra ad bloat.  And this week's magazine is the annual "The Lives They Lived" edition, which is just the thing for an obituary junkie like me.