Big problem - what to name it

My new iMac arrived today, a day earlier than expected and I can't start it up because haven't decided what to name it. I thought I had another day.

In a mish-mosh of two forms of geekery...

I'll probably keep with the Flemish composers theme that I have been using (the soon to be decommissioned Windows machine is Josquin, my old beige G3/G4 mac that I don't use is Ockeghem, my dual G4 is Obrecht, my G3 Powerbook is delaRue, and I have either Palestrina or Lassus in the basement - a 601 that probably doesn't run anymore.

The choices are:
Dufay, Regnart, Binchois, or Clemens non Papa (probably with spaces removed). An old work machine of mine was Dufay, but I'm OK with reuse of names - I had both Ockeghem and Obrecht at work once. And I have an earlier Mac laptop also named delaRue. I figured that laptops which roamed and of the street kind of fit.

An exception to the Flemish rule is my current iMac which is Machaut who was French and a century or two earlier.

Another possibility is Pachelbel - I like the sound of the name.

I do intend to move what was Josquin to a virtual machine in Parallels and I guess I'll name it desPres. The virtual machine running Windows on delaRue is called Pierre which was his first name.

my birthday dinner

Tonight as is our custom, Robert took me to dinner to celebrate my birthday. Yes, it was several weeks ago, but that is another part the custom. We went to Salts, a small excellent restaurant in Cambridge. This was the site of our wedding dinner on Aug 4, 2004 and we hadn't returned since then - pity because it is so good.

Their signature dish is roast boneless duck for two which is what we had back on that occasion. Since our table was next to a carving table we got to see them serving quite a few instances of this dish and they usually left the platter with some of the duck on that table. I said that if this were a sitcom, we would reach over and sample a piece and then something dire would probably happen, but we didn't do that.

The reservation was in the name Alexander, our alligator, and I quipped that I we should have guinea pig, since Alexander used to always threaten to eat our guinea pigs (who have no names because they can't remember them).

Actually I had a sashimi of some hawaiian fish with pluot (a form of plum) and a nice dish called a Naverin of porcelot in a small iron pot with a confit on the side. Robert had a squash soup with squab and the porcelot. We had glasses of white and red wine as suggested by the waiter. I could get these facts right if they updated the web site from the summer menu, but... For desert we split a lemon soufflé tart and a Torchon of chocolat with ice cream on the side.

Another nice feature of this restaurant is that the portions are quite reasonably sized and not gigantic like some places. And the service was excellent. There were 4, sometimes 5 people working the dining room which only has about a dozen tables.

The tea I ordered came in a proper ceramic pot with an interesting metal lid with a generous amount of tea leaves in it (yes, I looked). It was lemon verbena tea. It often surprises me when we go to a fancy restaurant and they bring out a box of tea bags and a metal pot of not very hot water. I did write to Allison Arnett, the now retired Boston Globe restaurant reviewer, suggesting that she cover the tea service since it was a good measure of completeness in quality for a restaurant' service. She agreed with me about the matter of principal but said she would only sometimes mention it. She retired soon after - not as a consequence of bad tea reporting I'm sure, but a pension sweetener to allow the Globe to reduce staff.