adam bondurant

I started my search for the perfect bagel near Union Square at Cafe Encore. This little cafe is situated on Post Street at Mason Street, about a block away from my office. Its sign is small and is sandwiched between two other signs, so if you're coming from the East, you might miss it.

The cafe itself is small with a few places to sit, a juice fridge, ATM, and a menu with a healthy assortment of both breakfast and lunch options. The two women I've seen working there are very friendly and are willing to chat with the customers. There is a sign behind the register that advises, "No soup for you! (We're temporarily sold out, sorry)" and people seem to get a kick out of it.

Regarding the bagels, I should start by saying that I'm looking at four things with these reviews:

• Appearance
• Price
• Bagel bread
• Cream cheese

All bagels will be toasted, plain, with plain cream cheese. Now, onto the review for Cafe Encore.

• Appearance: The bagel doesn't really look good at all. It's smooshed, and reminds me of Lender's bagels. Even when toasted, I feel like it's just going to ooze cream cheese and not have that crunch I love so much when bitten into.
• Price: The bagel costs $2.50. I'm used to a $2.06 bagel, but I've come to accept that most everything costs more in Union Square, so I'm not too concerned. I will say that $2.50 is on the high end of what I expect to pay for my bagel, though, and anything more than that will just disappoint, unless it's God's gift to bagels.
• Bagel bread: The appearance says it all: the bread is squishy and lacks character. There's nothing like biting into a fresh, toasted piece of bread, but this comes nowhere close to perfection.

• Cream cheese: The coverage on the bagel is spotty at best. I pulled off one quarter of the bagel only to realize that 95% of the cream cheese came with it, leaving the other piece beneath it with very little. I'm not looking forward to eating a piece of bagel with almost no cream cheese.

  Another problem is that the cream cheese is really warm and gooey. I like a firm, cold cream cheese to contrast the toasted bagel, but this stuff doesn't hold up to the heat and threatens to turn into a drippy mess.

While I enjoy the cafe itself, I'm going to have to avoid Cafe Encore's bagels from now on. There are too many things wrong with them to keep going back.

I'm starting a new gym. It's actually going to be a chain of gyms, but I'm getting ahead of myself. My new gym is fabulous. It's exclusionary. It's better than any gym you've ever been to.

My gym does not accept membership during the months of November, December, January, nor February.

Moreso, my gym's card scanning system looks at your account during those four months and if it's been more than 8 months, you're politely but firmly told to come back in March. I understand how frustrated members may become, but as I said before, my gym is fabulous, it is exclusionary, and it does not accommodate resolutionists.

I ran into a few gotchas I wanted to document about testing and cookies in Rails while developing a user persistence system for a site. The implementation isn't really important, but the nuances of cookie accessing is what I really wanted to focus on.

In a functional test (and possibly an integration test, but I don't really touch those), you can set pre-populated cookie variables like so:

def test_cookie
  @request.cookies[:persist] = 'secret'
  get :index
  assert_response :success
end

The above code will set a cookie named "persist" to the value "secret." The subsequent request (get :index in this case) will have that cookie available to it during the action's lifecycle.

One thing to note, however, is that the cookies hash in a functional test is populated after a request has been made, and is only populated with cookies that were set during the request. What does this mean for us? It means this code will not work (assuming the index page does not set any cookies for us):

def test_cookie
  @request.cookies[:persist] = 'secret'
  get :index
  assert_equal 'secret', cookies['persist'] # This will fail as the cookies hash is empty
end

The reason the cookies hash is empty is because no cookies were set during the call to the index action. Think of the cookies hash as you would the assigns hash: It's only filled if you fill it during the request.

Another issue I ran into was testing for the deletion of a cookie. It's a simple fix, but it's something none-the-less:

def test_cookie
  # This action deletes the "persist" cookie via cookies.delete(:persist)
  delete :destroy
  assert_nil cookies['persist'] # This will fail as the value is actually empty, not nil
  assert cookies['persist'].empty? # This will succeed
end

Finally, unlike the assigns hash, you cannot access the cookies hash after a request using a symbol. You must identify the cookie's key by string, even if you set the cookie's key in your action as a symbol. There's a patch for this (Ticket #5924) but nothing is really being done about it.

def test_cookie
  # This action sets the "persist" cookie to '1'
  post :create
  assert_equal '1', cookies[:persist] # This will fail
  assert_equal '1', cookies['persist'] # This will succeed
end

So there you go. A few issues you might run into when testing with cookies.

I started a new job on January 2nd of this year. I'm now working for an incubator of Web applications at a PR firm in San Francisco. The job is going really well, but what I'm really concerned about is the lack of good breakfast food in my new location, Union Square. Granted, I could go to any number of restaurants in the area and get a nice sit-down meal for about $8.00, but I'm really just addicted to bagels.

When I was growing up, my dad used to get a salt-encrusted bagel as often as he could. When his cholesterol started getting too high, my mom made him make us a deal that any bagel he bought would count $5 towards the purchase of a new Super Nintendo game. I think he realized it was a win/win situation, having happy sons and an equally happy stomach, so the plan didn't work very well–at least, not for mom–my brothers and I got at least two games out of it.

There was only one good place to get bagels in Dublin: The Bagel Bakery. I'm glad my dad did the legwork to figure out the best place to buy bagels in my hometown. I think ultimately what made him stop getting so many was the change in ownership. My dad was a people person, and outward image counted a lot towards his coming back to a store. When the new owners were described as, "a little cranky," the bagels stopped coming.

While I understand the downsides of bagels, especially a bagel every morning, I just don't want to give them up. After a lot of searching around SOMA at my old job, I found Cafe Centro in South Park. They have, hands down, the best bagels in SOMA. The bagels themselves are crisp when lightly toasted. The real winner, though, is the cream cheese. A nice, firm cheese is key to a good bagel, and these guys understand that.

My goal in the next few weeks is to document my findings regarding bagels in my new area. I can only hope to find something comparable to The Bagel Bakery and Cafe Centro.