Three unrelated things.

Item 1: If you ever go to a TGI Fridays or some of the other "Fun/Cheesy" restaurants¹ you will see in the US various sauces on the menu made with liquor, like Friday's "Jack Daniel's Honey Barbecue-Flavored Corn Syrup Magic For Meat" or "Jim Beam Spicy Chipolte Chicken Cover-up." In Doha, except for VERY limited situations, there is no liquor, but these menu items are still available. They are now simply slathered with a generically named "Tennessee Sauce." If, however, the sauce can be made with no booze, and booze is always more expensive than no booze, do you really think that the sauce in the US contains the liquor it was named after?

Item 2: The villa I was assigned to came with a computer an Internet access, and it ran slowly (probably a bloated setup), so I put Linux (Ubuntu 8.04.1) on it in place of Windows. I would say that I got about a factor of 5 speed up, and in general had a very positive experience. More impressively, my wife, who never used Linux before was able to interact with it easily and accomplish all of her daily computer tasks. That said, I finally had to revert to Windows today, due to webcam support. I got the cam to work in Skype, but only sporadically, and I spent three evenings messing about with drivers. Plus the exact same cam on my Sister-in-Law's slower/older computer looked like a TV show when using the Logitech-written drivers, whereas on my machine the frame rate was such that you looked like you were trapped in Benny Hill episodes, without the quasi-nude English birds. If webcams worked (since I don't play a lot of computer games) I think I could actually go Window's free for my primary box.

Item 3: I have to go get fingerprinted tomorrow at a gov't office, according to an email I received this afternoon. I have absolutely no idea why, as in what part of my immigration or getting a driver's licence this is part of. I have reached the "Oh, OK, whatever" phase of interacting with bureaucracy.


(1) Quick rule of thumb: It is a "Fun/Cheesy" restaurant if you would not be surprised to see an LP cover attached to the wall. Of course, this definition would thus include the Hard Rock Casino, which doesn't make it wrong.