Russian Restaurant – Bradford – Review

I admit the primary purpose of my blog isn’t to commentate on the state of the food industry in the UK however every now and then my exceptional dining experience forces my fingers to bash violently in either blissful joy or rampant disgust. Unfortunately this review is of the latter type.

In Bradford, choice is not limited but variety is and it was this that drove me to try the Russian Restaraunt. We arrived at about 7pm only to be told they couldn’t take card. For some reason I had a moment of English etiquette and decided that it would be a good idea to go to a cash point and then back. Big mistake, I should have just gone elsewhere.

Returning, cash wielded, we arrived back at the restaurant hoping for a truly cultural experience. Maybe that is what we got. It began with us ordering drinks, the simplest thing for any restaurant to accomplish without failure, surely? Not at the Russian Restaraunt. I ordered a £3 pint of natural orange juice. For that type of money I expected Katie Perry to come use any part of her body I wanted to squash the oranges whilst covering any song of my choice. I asked “Is it proper fruit juice” to which the restaurant owner replied. I’m not sure. I went for it anyway, mistake #2.

We decided on starters and mains and placed our order, this was an arduous task as both the restaurant owner and waitress (who couldn’t speak English) wanted to have a conversation with us trying to sell us a number of side dishes. Pretty annoying to say the least…

The starter came and we were further disappointed as the chicken pancake had transformed into a mushroom pancake. School boy error… At this point you are probably thinking, “Why aren’t you walking out?” Well that’s because I’m used to poor service in restaurants, this isn’t my first review and I feel it’s important to share good and bad experiences with others via the power of internets.

During the main course all of the earlier fails made quite a lot of sense and were somewhat forgotten as both of the dishes were great. Plentiful, full of flavour and good hearty food.

After we were done eating we waited 20 minutes or so for the waitress to come and collect the dishes and bring us a bill. This didn’t happen so I went up to the cash desk and waited for the restaurant owner to finish his pointless conversation that other guests were cringing through.

Instantly the owner began an Oscar winning builder impression, this was because he didn’t have a bill or any record of what our table had consumed. He looked at me and said on average a table in my restaurant costs “£20-£25 per head”, “What would you pay?”. Again I came over all British and replied “That seems fair — however”… I then asked him if he wanted me to tell him about the things I didn’t find quite right… He approved so I did…

We agreed on £20 per head, and I handed him my hard earned cash. He then proceeded to ask me if I wanted to join his mailing list, being a tech guy and getting thousands of emails every day the last thing I want is marketing spam from a restaurant I didn’t enjoy. It was a stupid question and my answer was an obvious No… As he proceeded to try to sell me “Why I should be on his mailing list” I began to get a bit annoyed. I kept saying no and he didn’t get it. I asked for a receipt. He couldn’t give me one. If I was a tax inspector I would be suspect about this place for sure…

All of the above seems bad enough right? Possibly the only way he could go any lower was to go racist. As a lifelong Bradfordian I know that racism isn’t just pointless, stupid and placeless. I don’t expect it in Bradford, as a city we grew out of it and we hope that we can start reaping the benefits of being a truly multicultural city. When I said No to him asking do I want to join his mailing list, he asked me why I not. I told him I like to try lots of restaurants. As he lowered his voice and leaned in towards me he attempted to discretely scowl “They are all Asian though so the food is not so good”. I hate any type of discrediting based on race or ethnicity. Simply put this is racist and the guy should seriously reconsider the location of his business.

The restaurant is only 10 minute walk from what is probably the best curry house in Bradford. The sweet centre.

Big brands get educational games horribly wrong

Consider a big organization (lets say a bank) decide to create some web based educational content because y’know Natwest have done such a great job of sending people into schools to talk about finances and lets face it banks have money to burn.

We know this because it’s our money they are burning. We know they are doing it because we get loads of requests every day to promote their content on Primary Games Arena.

PGA is an open non biased platform. If your game is good it will end up on the front page. If not then don’t moan at me when it gets a 1 star rating.

So.. Some PR douche bag at a bank employs a development company to make some game.    The development company has a little experience creating flash games so off they go making a load of “out of the box” template games that really offer nothing but an educational wave of fail.

Kids can smell this shit a mile off – don’t do it. Get a proper game mechanic first then build around that. Examples: Civilization, Sim City, Diner Dash.

Don’t be precious. Research how children in Primary Education use the internet. They do NOT use the back button nor will they search for “your bank + game name”.

Sites like Primary Games Arena use iFrames to make the pupils educational/learning experience better, we don’t care about your click through or brand recognition. If you are making Educational games with a sole purpose to increase your brand awareness then you are guaranteed to fail.

Don’t spam call me or my company or send me crap loads of urgent emails that aren’t urgent. This will get you ignored and your company blacklisted.  Isn’t this common courtesy?  Do certain organizations think they are above common courtesy or something?

No I wont do free consultation on how you can gamify or use gamification. If you want a decent a gamification consultant then hire one. Here are a few: Jesse Schell, Gabe Zichermann, Dru Wynings & of course I will be happy to help.

What is even worst is when you see “educators” create educational games but then don’t want to see their games linked to on other websites. I completely disagree with these people. The Rings of Saturn will not be kind.

Rant over. Trust me, it was needed 🙂

Etherpad build fails fsc Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: scala/tools/nsc/CompileClient

Etherpad build fails with output: fsc Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: scala/tools/nsc/CompileClient

Cause: Bad path or symbolic link issue

Solution: Firstly replicate error by typing

fsc
which fsc

if it isn’t the actual literal fsc path then remove any symbolic links to the fsc file in /usr/bin

add the scala/bin path to $path – ie

export path="$PATH:/usr/local/scala-2.7.7/bin"

type fsc again, the error should be gone.