Bill Sommerfeld's Weblog

Wednesday February 07, 2007

When a favorite restaurant closes

Valerie asks what she can do about a favorite restaurant which has lost its lease and will most likely need to move.

Don't Panic.

A while ago (must be over a decade ago by now), the canonical Chinese restaurant at the MIT end of Cambridge, Mary Chung's, lost its lease and was shut down for about a year before they found new space on the other side of Massachusetts Avenue. Mary's was open every day but Tuesday, though she took an annual one-week summer vacation (which was known as "the week of Tuesdays" to some of her regular patrons).

The Year of Tuesdays was painful for some but they came back from it stronger than ever in a better, larger space. Recently they were even one of the five Boston-area restaurants featured in an episode of The Hungry Detective on the Food Network.

There's not a heck of a lot you can do unless you've got connections in the commercial real estate arena, but there are a few things which come to mind:

• Keep patronizing them until the bitter end.
• Stay in touch with the proprieter during the shutdown period (easier with FdM than it was with Mary's since they have the secondary location).
• Most likely there will be some amount of town-level zoning/licensing involved in the move. Generally the only people who comment on such matters are concerned abutters; statements in support of the applicants from satisfied customers will typically make a big impression on the licensing authority.

Tuesday February 06, 2007

Signs the DRM house of cards is collapsing. I'm happy to see Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry where he calls for the end of DRM on downloadable music. I'm happy to say that I have on the order of 5200 tracks on my ipod, none of which were purchased from iTunes. I have a legitimate fair-use right to all of them. The vast majority were ripped from CD's I own and which I still possess. Some of the rest are podcasts (offered freely to all); some were mp3's of performances I participated in. None were downloaded from file sharing services. Steve's open letter refers to "secrets" being the key to security. General principles of cryptography say that in secure systems, the only secrets should be changeable and limited in scope. The nature of DRM is such that you'll typically end up with the same set of secrets in every device/player which needs access to the plaintext content, which is what led to the collapse of the DVD CSS scheme and its followons for HD DVD's. Time after time people learn the hard way that you can't effectively hide secrets in binary object code -- given enough time and digging it will be possible to dig any keys and algorithms out of the blob of code. (2007-02-06 18:50:18.0) Permalink