Monday, May 10. Onion Rings With The Wongs. The Big Hammer Breaks More Than It Fixes. Today began nicely enough. I wrote all my Monday stuff in time for Mary Ann and me to have lunch. She even agreed to my idea for a venue: Pontchartrain Po-Boys, a little place in Mandeville that is always praised highly by anyone who tells me about it. I had a good roast beef there once, but that was years ago.
I stood at the counter giving an order for a platter of butterbeans with fried catfish and corn bread and a small ham and cheese poor boy with roast beef gravy. Then Frank Wong--one of the five brothers who own Trey Yuen--sneaked up behind me with his wife and son. He's a regular here. He told the owner--the man taking orders, in the tradition of Anthony Uglesich--who I was and what I did for a living. Well, so much for anonymity, if I had it to begin with.
Frank suggested we get fried onion rings. I suggested we get one order and split them, because I heard that the onion rings here are served in the tradition of Charlie's Steakhouse--an enormous pile of thin-sliced rings. He and the owner went along with that, and we grabbed tables.
Frank always has stories to tell. Today it was what happened on his most recent trip to Hong Kong and Taiwan. "I have a friend who takes me around to eat," he said. He told of going one place with clams, another with conch, another with cuttlefish, and on and on. How many days did this take? I asked. "It was all in one day," Frank said. "I didn't know this guy ate that much. We went from one place to another all day long."
Frank went to explain that, aside from keeping his Chinese palate up to date, he was also working on a business deal. He said that there's an enormous demand for broccoli in China, one that the local growers can't satisfy. He and a partner are setting up a broccoli export business. They will buy it in California, which is about the only place that had broccoli crops year-round. I hope he sells a lot of it. We need to nudge the trade imbalance with China a little closer to the center.
The food began arriving, and soon filled the entire table. Even a half-order of Pontchartrain's onion rings was too much for MA and me. I ate half of the excellent poor boy, whose filling of ham, cheese, roast beef gravy, and the usual dressings overwhelmed the structural integrity of the French bread. Next time I come here, I'm going to ask for half the amount of meat. Mary Ann devoured all the butterbeans, and one of the catfish fillets. All this was very well made, and agreeably inexpensive.
I got through the radio show, and planned to spend the evening finishing the forms for financial aid for both colleges. But something on the messageboard gave me pause. A couple of correspondents said that my web site was acting funny, and wondered whether it had a virus. Now what? I checked it and found nothing amiss. But even since the Russian Attack on my site last Katrina Day, I am paranoid. My defenses are incomparably stronger than they were then. But to be on the safe side, I thought it would be a good idea to roll back the site to where it was a couple of days ago, before my own computer got its own virus last Friday.
What a mistake. Instead of taking fifteen minutes or less, as promised, it took two hours. Then it told me that the process had finished, but was not successful. This shut down the entire site, giving a mean-sounding message to my readers. I called Network Solutions, which hosts my site and thousands of others. The guy on the phone said that a whole block of its servers--including the one that runs NOMenu.com--had suffered a hardware breakdown, and that trying to do a backup just then would cause exactly the effect I was seeing.
I was on the phone with this guy for two more hours, until well after midnight. We finally fixed the central problem, and brought most of the site back to life. I was reassured that no virus was found on it. But certain parts of the site--notably the Talk Food with Tom messageboard--could not be revived. The tech said that it would be as much as another full day before I'd be able to run a restore of that system, and that I'd have to reinstall all the software.
Someday, I will not have to do all this myself. Someday, I will get the kids' financial aid paperwork done.
Pontchartrain Po-Boys. Mandeville: LA 22. 985-792-0499. Sandwiches.
