lilyhammer season 2

How can you not love Netflix? They just sent me an email that the season 2 episodes of Lilyhammer just become available. While it is nowhere near as good as The Sopranos it is quite entertaining.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 11

I have been anxious about hitting the storage limit with the thousands of photos I posted in my blog. I have checked my Google account many time to no avail. Are the photos that I uploaded stored in my Picasa account or in my Goggle storage. I had a hard time telling if Picasa and Google storage (now called Google Drive) one and the same.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 10

more photos from bangkok

more home made sausages - part 2

Home cooks that constantly pursue new skills deserve a lot of praise. There are a lot going against the amateurs. Buying ingredient in small quantity cost a fortune and most of the time you get sub par quality ingredients. Stuck with toy-like equipment handicaps you. Making small batches is very labor intensive and exhausting. A lot of popular and wildly successful restaurants and chefs gained their fame from a very small repertoire. Many foodie home cooks are extremely resourceful and can cook with great depth and breadth.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 9

The flight from Macau to Bangkok took about 2 hours. Air Asia has the best rate as long as you don't care for the free drinks other airline give you. Their young crew run a very tight ship in each flight. Meals are pre-order so there is no waste.

The down side of flying Air Asia is it uses the older Don Mueang International Airport. Getting from Don Mueang to where your hotel in Bangkok requires going though the worst of Bangkok traffic jam that flows with the brisk pace of molasses.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 8

Still more photos of the old part of town in Macau.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 7

Off to Macau 澳門 I went departing Hong Kong. I was pondering where to go after Macau. I originally was thinking about Taiwan instead of going back to Thailand. I have been to Taipei in my business travel. I didn't feel that I had explore the city and that was my wanting to return. However I am aware food in Taiwan tends to be quite blend to my taste and I have been reevaluating going there. While I was in Hong Kong I checked in with a travel agency for a self tour package which including visiting Taipei as well as so other places of the island nation. I struck up a conversation with the clerk and he too commented that the Chinese food there looks good when you watch on youtube, but is too blend to his taste. That was enough to put a nail to the not visiting Taiwan coffin for me. I made travel arrangements to go to Bangkok after Macau. This including booking the flight, hotel, and exchanging enough Thai baht (you get better rate once you arrive and exchange with USD) until I checked into the hotel.

airline serving cart as furniture

No sooner than I wrote about digging the airline serving cart I saw in Hong Kong yesterday, using airline carts as furniture was featured in Deutsche Welle's Euromaxx program on the same day!

asia trip - winter 2013 part 6

This is a continuation of the series of posts on my recent trip to Asia.

more home made sausages - part 1

A few days ago I ventured into sausage making for the first time. I have been sitting on the fence about trying cured meat for the fear of indulging into a diet of too much red meat. What pushed me over the fence is the general poor quality of these products available in my town. Invested in a sausage stuffer I did when I seized on the opportunity of an open box on Amazon. Cannot beat a discount on already discounted item and free shipping. I made 2.5 lb of andouille. The result of my first attempt exceeded my expectation.

asia trip - winter 2013 part 5

In case you wonder why my posts have so many photos. To me my blog posts are substitute of online photo albums like flickr. I had used flickr briefly a couple of years ago but find it very unsatisfying. I also ran into size limit within a week unless I pony up and pay. Then I decided to start my blog using blogger and the rest is history. With thousands of photos I uploaded I have yet to reach my free (albeit I pay google with my priceless privacy) account limit.
With blogger I can selectively upload photos, write comments and contents of the post faster than I can rename each photo. When I first started using blogger, the browser based authoring tool would keel over if I try to upload more than 8 photos at a time. The tool has gone though a lot of enhancement since. Today I tried 120 photos in one shot and it suck them up without crash and burn. I was impressed how far the tool has come along.