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Migi took her friend from out of town to Kittichai today. We really love the food. It’s probably the best Thai I ever had. It’s one of the restaurants that we try to take our out-of-town guests to. And it turns out, they not only excel in cooking, but also in customer service. Today, Migi ordered from 3-course prix-fixe menu, but the waiter mistakenly brought out the entree and forgotten about the appetizer. When they realized this, a burly manager came out to apologize and told them that everything was on the house! That’s a pretty impressive customer service, because dishes aren’t exactly cheap there (although it’s more reasonable during lunch).
So, next time you’re in NYC, give Kittichai a try :-)
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GrandCentral: The New Way To Use Your Phones
Wow, this is an impressive service. GC gives you a free phone number from area of your choice, then route all calls to that new number to any phone numbers (which you can configure via web) or to vm which you can listen to it later online. It has host of features which I have not yet played with. Best of all, it’s free.
I think we’re going to use it as our “home phone”
Click on the button below to call and leave a message :-)
Oh, it’s going to be swooped up by Goog-pire
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Scientific American: Strange but True: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good
I’ve always believed this was the case, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless. First, did you know how soap and alcohol-based cleaners work?
Soap works by loosening and lifting dirt, oil and microbes from surfaces so they can be easily rinsed away with water, whereas general cleaners such as alcohol inflict sweeping damage to cells by demolishing key structures, then evaporate. “They do their job and are quickly dissipated into the environment,” explains microbiologist Stuart Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine.
And why antibacterial kind might be bad in the long run:
As bacteria develop a tolerance for these compounds there is potential for also developing a tolerance for certain antibiotics. This phenomenon, called cross-resistance, has already been demonstrated in several laboratory studies using triclosan, one of the most common chemicals found in antibacterial hand cleaners, dishwashing liquids and other wash products.
Not only that:
Both triclosan and its close chemical relative triclocarban (also widely used as an antibacterial), are present in 60 percent of America’s streams and rivers, … Both chemicals are efficiently removed from wastewater in treatment plants but end up getting sequestered in the municipal sludge, which is used as fertilizer for crops, thereby opening a potential pathway for contamination of the food we eat, Halden explains. “We have to realize that the concentrations in agricultural soil are very high,” and this, “along with the presence of pathogens from sewage, could be a recipe for breeding antimicrobial resistance” in the environment, he says.
…
“What is this stuff doing in households when we have soaps?” asks molecular biologist John Gustafson of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. These substances really belong in hospitals and clinics, not in the homes of healthy people, Gustafson says.
Bring back the good ‘ol ๋นจ๋๋น๋!
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Do you taste what I taste? - By Mike Steinberger - Slate Magazine
Interesting article about how we taste, and why wine reviews are bogus.
Brochet has shown that people given a white wine that has been dyed red will describe it exactly as they would a red wine. He has also found that if he serves the same wine in two different bottles, one labeled a cheap vin de table and the other a pricey grand cru, people invariably lavish praise on the latter and scorn the former. Brochet has dubbed this phenomenon “perceptive expectation.”
Wysocki expressed admiration for the stamina, aroma-identification skills, and descriptive abilities of wine critics, but he was skeptical about some aspects of the trade. He said it’s impossible to taste dozens of wines in rapid succession and not suffer olfactory fatigue and that anyone who claims otherwise is claiming to “defy biology,” as he put it. Although a critic might think that his sense of smell is still acute after sampling 40 Cabernets, his impressions at that point are being formed less by the nose than by past experience, visual cues (such as the color of the wines), and perhaps also tactile sensations.
I’m sure there are wines that generally go well with certain dishes. For instance, I tried drinking red wine while munching on dried squid. The wine brought out the fishy flavor of the squid so strongly that it was quite obvious why people prefer white with seafood. (Dried squid goes really well with beer btw) However, I’m dubious as to whether abstract words like fruity, full-body, … really means anything, and means same thing to everyone. And if those subtle difference are enough to justify the premiums on most wines.
Two buck chuck rules :D
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Windows XP Zune theme - Download Squad
Sick of the default XP theme? Try the Zune theme from M$. Free, small (1.6MB) download.
(Thanks Rex!)
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Essential Street-Cart Questions Answered — New York Magazine
I’ve never bought anything (other than nuts, ice cream, water and pretzels) at street-carts. I’d like to try it at least once before I leave NYC… Maybe one of the top-20 ranked ones :-)
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NYTimes magazine has an interesting article about Chinese “Gold Farmers” - people working 12+ hours shift at sweatshops making virtual gold coins on WoW and other games for “export”.
Accompanying slide show of real-life characters and their avatars are pretty amusing. Pictured left, Harisu, famous Korean transsexual turned model/actress/singer.
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Check out Highlights from the 2007 Quality of Living Survey and the Cost of Living Survey. All ratings are relative to New York City being 100 — NYC thinks it is the center of the world, after all.
I would’ve never thought that Moscow to be the most costly city to live…
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How to Change the World: Ten Questions With Penelope Trunk: Career Guidance for This Century
Penelope Trunk, author of “Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success
” answers “ten” frequently asked questions about career (Hm, does Guy know how to count?) Somewhat “practicalist”, and answered by someone obviously making much more than $40K/year… Anyway, there are some good tips (although none that most people haven’t heard before)
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Behold the Creation Museum - a photoset on Flickr
This couple visits the new Creation Museum Must see to believe! :D
Seriously, I’d be more inclined to go to church if it they weren’t trying this hard.
This one just kills me, LOL
Views about fossils have come and gone. But fossils themselves do not tell us where these creatures came from or how they died.
Fortunately, we have another source of factual [!] data - the first book of the Bible, Genesis. This book makes it obvious [orly?] that carnivory, disease, and death, as seen in the fossil record, came after sin. So the fossil record had to be formed after sin entered the world.
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