I had a rare large chunk of free time this weekend, so it was nice. So was the snow, and more is on the way tonight.

• Eatery has been one of my favorite brunch places, but now it looks like you can put it in the same category as Isabella's and Popover Café; that is, in the category of places just not worth an hour's wait because there are other excellent, less popular, places nearby. I think what did Eatery in was its mention on Rachael Ray's "Tasty Travels," judging from the crowd. We reverted to Arriba Arriba for a terrific brunch with a Mexican twist, without a wait and in a fun setting.

• Dinner at Nooch was great, as expected. The wholesome tofu salad only suffered from two minor defects: (1) the awkwardness of eating green pepper rings with chopsticks (they should have been diced or chopped into smaller pieces), and (2) lettuce that should have been richer and greener. But the chicken ramen was scrumptious, and the ambience is modern and bright. We would have preferred music other than the standard Chelsea soundtrack featuring Reina, Kylie, et. al.

• I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 for about three minutes before running back to 1.0.6. Usually I wait several weeks or months to upgrade to anything new, but previous Firefox changes have been smooth (from 0.9 to 1.0.6). Firefox 1.5 had some really bad flaws on my system, though--an inability to handle any Javascript (and the resulting dreaded "spinning pizza"), for starters. The problems probably stem partly from my own old system (10.2.8) and, judging from various Mac Web sites, sloppy QA on Mozilla's part, but it will be awhile before I try the upgrade again. I've learned my way around the quirks of 1.0.6 and see nothing compelling on the 1.5 feature list.

• My favorite sentence in today's Times: "What are the reasonable expectations of the rights and responsibilities of companies and workers these days?" Nothing like kicking off the week with some good, hard business news.