It's Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
For our company trip this year, we are going headed north to Vietnam! After the fun we had at Bangkok last year, I am in favour of more trips to our northern neighbours.
So here we come Uncle Ho!
Where have all the hawkers gone?
by Chief Alchemist a.k.a Wiley Chin - July 25, 2007 Posted: 5:30:34 PM EDT
Hey, this is bizarre sounding but I'm afraid we are going to suffer another wave of brain-drain, err, talent-drain, food-drain, cooks-drain, Whatever!?! We've lost enough of our talents across the globe and now that America has discovered what real food is, i.e., MALAYSIA FOOD, we might be made to eat McD burgers while the people of the USA get all our hawkers' fares!
How come? Because all our best food people might disappear from our shores and turn up at the Big Apple, that's why. :-P
Check out this Video!
OKlah, I am damn proudlah...datswhy...you think we might loose our food heritage to the highest bidders or not?
Bring in Da Funk!
A rising-star chef rekindles his love affair with intense Malaysian flavors, laid-back ambience, and challenging finger food.
· By Rob Patronite & Robin Raisfeld
It's a well-known fact that the New York dining public comprises two distinct personality types: the foodies and the scenesters. Although there's occasionally some overlap, the former can be found stalking elusive, borough-hopping Bangladeshi chefs, while the latter are content to skulk down to the meatpacking district and shimmy into whichever establishment looks suitably thronged, menu notwithstanding. The Underground Gourmet belongs firmly to the first camp, and so, we'd always presumed, does Zak Pelaccio, chef of 5 Ninth and its newly opened Malaysian spinoff, Fatty Crab.
Read the rest on the New York Magazine.
http://nymag.com/nymetro/food/reviews/underground/14857/
Are you present?
Presence: How to Use Positive Energy for Success in Every Situation
by Patsy Rodenburg
Last weekend, I found this great book at MPH Subang Jaya.
Ask yourself this question.
What is the reason why some actors are 'larger-than-life' while others hardly make an impression on us?
Why some people have the 'It quality' while others don't. Why some individuals walk into a room and will immediately electrify the atmosphere while many of us need to raise their voices to be heard but mostly get ignored?
Patsy Rodenburg is a voice and acting coach. She's been asking the question, why some of her actors/students are technically competent but not memorable. In this book, she teaches the reader how to create the 'presence' through a set of holistic body-mind exercises.
Go get it before your next big sales pitch, casting-call or job interview! ;-)
And the most read blog of the world is...
A famous Chinese actress (Xu Jinglei) turned director's blog became the most visited one on earth. She apparently topped 50 million clicks without resorting to cheap tricks. Hrm...I think being pretty and smart at the same time helps a little...on top of writing in the language of the country with the biggest population on earth. ;-)
Original story here...
The weblog by Chinese starlet Xu Jinglei ( 徐静蕾 ) is now the world's most popular. With more than 50 million clicks it tops the 'Technorati' billboard, a leading weblog search engine.
'I didn't expect it to be so popular. An avalanche of clicks has encouraged me to keep writing,' said Xu, adding that her blog is mainly aimed at promoting her films.
Xu, an actress-turned-director, became famous overseas when she won a best director award for 'Letter From An Unknown Woman' in the 2004 San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain.
She considers blog writing to be the most convenient and economic way of publicizing her films.
While busy shooting her latest movie 'Dreams May Come', which was released in China at the end of June, she put details of the filming process and her marketing plans into her blog.
She even inserted in her blog links to film clicks posted on the website of her film company.
China Mobile seized the occasion, adding a link at the top of her blog's home page to announce that the theme song of 'Dreams May Come' sung by Xu herself could be downloaded for cell phone rings.
Begun last October, Xu's blog at blog.sina.com.cn/m/xujinglei only took 112 days to break domestic records with more than 10 million visits.
Since then, she has updated her blog every other day. But if she feels in a very good mood she sometimes posts two or three articles in a day.
Sensitive articles with her musings about life have made this beautiful young director even more thoughtful and talented, and drawn legions of fans.
Visitors leave thousands of messages about each of her articles, applauding her open, free writing style, commenting on films or taking advantage of her popularity to advertise their own blogs or businesses.
A survey by Baidu.com showed there were 16 million bloggers writing in Chinese last year, with a total of 36.82 million weblogs. Xu Jinglei was one of the first celebrities that the portal website Sina invited to open blogs last year.
Don't understand a word of what she says? No worries, someone actually translated her blog here ( http://sino-angle.blogspot.com/ ). It's not updated and the English is clumsy, but you get a flavor of it, yes? What else you want? Go learn Mandarin? ;-)
No Human Required...
When I went to catch the movie, 'Transformers' with my kids, I realised that we are on a very short journey to having intelligent machines in our lives. Surely that's inevitable. As a matter of fact, it's already been tauted hotly as the WEB 3.0 or The Semantic Web. What kind of world would that be, I wonder? I hope it will be a better world, because I am sure my kids aren't looking forward to a world where they need to avoid flying shards of 'smart metals' battling for superiority and earth domination while they try to load their groceries into their car booths after Sunday shopping...
'I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize...
People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource.'
~ Tim Berners-Lee, Father of the World Wide Web
Marissa Mayer's SEO 101...
Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience, gives an A-Z of search explaining how Google is working to ensure all its users get access to fast, relevant results, at Google Press Day in Paris on June 19, 2007.
The Twice Stolen Porsche
by Chief Alchemist a.k.a Wiley Chin - July 18, 2007 Posted: 9:59:39 AM EDT
Porsche stolen again
Note: The said car is black, this is just a subsitute pix
By M. SIVANANTHA SHARMA
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/7/18/nation/18335212&sec=nation
BUKIT MERTAJAM:
The RM963,000 sports car that was stolen from a showroom here yesterday was stolen again – this time from right under the noses of the police.
And police believe it was the same man who pulled it off again, because he had the car keys.
The thief stole the Porsche 911 Targa 4 from the compound of the police headquarters here at 10.45pm yesterday.
The car had been stolen from a showroom at Auto-City in Juru about nine hours earlier.
Police recovered the car an hour near Maktab Tuanku Bainun in Mengkuang Titi, about 15km away. But this time, unlike in the first incident, the car had fuel.
State police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Koh Hong Sun said disciplinary action would be taken against policemen who were found to be negligent in their duties.
"We have the suspect's fingerprints and are confident of arresting him soon," he said after attending a ceremony for the transfer of 42 police personnel from the North Seberang Prai district to the Central Seberang Prai district at the police headquarters.
In the first incident, the man, said to be smartly dressed man who flashed a cheque book, coolly asked for the key of the car, started it and sped off after crashing it through the showroom's glass pane.
Police recovered the car some 2km away, at Hujung Perusahaan Dua in Prai.
You can draw your own conclusions, ladies and gentlemen...