Archive for June, 2004

Funny ad video

Aimee and I started taking a Thai cooking class last week in Oakland. The class meets for 4 hours each monday for 4 weeks. The first week was two curries, a hot and sour stir-fry, and coconut/banana dessert. The teacher, Kasma Loha-unchit has a comfortable philosophy and approach. Previous students have reported that:

The classes provided a great foundation. I learned all the main ingredients, the basic ways to work with them, and came away with a base set of recipes that I knew worked. Perhaps most important, I was beginning to understand the concept of harmonizing primary flavors.

One great aspect of the class is all the tasting we get to do. While making the curry, we initially tasted the base paste, then took incremental tastes as the sugar, salt and other core flavors were added. This approach gives an understanding of how all the elements fit together, instead of just learning color-by-numbers recipes.

In addition to the incremental tastings during cooking, we are also learning how to shop at the market. We examinded Fish Sauces and Coconut Milk last week. Kasma has about eight varieties of canned coconut milk. We opened them all as tasted. It was amazing how much variety there was from one to the next. Some were very light, others were nearly solid. There are two or more brands that look almost identical. One is the worst of the bunch, the other is the best available product. The good one has A OK in the middle of it’s name; the bad one ends with DOC. Remember, one is A-OK while the bad one will send you to the DOCtor. They are both pitured here:

Good (It’s A-OK!)

Bad (Will send you to the DOCtor)

The LATimes (free reg req) has an exclusive breaking news bit that a group of former diplomats and military officials will release a statement later this week calling for the defeat of President Bush. The 26 ex-diplomats and military leaders say his foreign policy has harmed national security. Several served under Republicans.

A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America’s national security and should be defeated in November.

“A lot of people felt the work they had done over their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which the United States was respected and could lead the rest of the world was now undermined by this administration — by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations,” Harrop said.

“The core of the message is that we are so deeply concerned about the current direction of American foreign policy … that we think it is essential for the future security of the United States that a new foreign policy team come in,” said Oakley.

Sitting in a bar, the super bring screen on my Treo 600 lights up the place way more than i’d like. The screen could easily double as a flashlight. I was wondering if there was a way to dim or disable the screen for situations like this. Some searching revealed that

Treo 600 also has a nightime mode by entering Function-P. When selected, the Treo will dim the screen slightly and keep the keypad lit allowing you to work comfortably in the dark for longer periods of time without wasting too much battery on needless screen brightness. Entering the command a second time turns the function off.

While it doesn’t make it as dark as I’d like, it’s still a good thing to know. Unfortunately, it seems that that this mode only lasts for one session, so you need to turn on the Treo in full-brightness mode, then enter night mode. This won’t help me avoid looking like a geek at the bar, but it’s better than nothing and i guess some things are unavoidable.

An article today in CNN/Money discusses how the “hype surrounding Google’s IPO is starting to be replaced by questions about its future.“

Some interesting pull quotes:

But six weeks after the IPO filing, there’s starting to be some skepticism about just how well Google will do and if it really deserves to be pegged as a tech savior.

And it’s also worth noting that Google was not named as the favorite Internet company by most of the survey’s respondents. It ranked third, with only 9 percent saying that Google was their favorite. AOL was second with 12 percent and Yahoo! was first with 18 percent. Interestingly, more than a third of the users could not name a favorite Internet company. (So much for spending tons of money on brand awareness.)

“Yahoo! and Microsoft have reminded investors that search is not a monopoly,” Mahaney said. And investors seemed to have quickly come to this realization as well.

“The search category is becoming increasingly crowded and over time search offerings will become more and more similar,” said Kessler. “The Google IPO just increases the size and brightness of the target that’s on their proverbial back already.”

My friend Eric Miraglia at work pointed me to this post

David Hyatt, an old Mozilla alumn who wrote the terrific Camino browser for OS X, worked on FireFox and is now the Safari dude at Apple, keeps a blog that periodically provides useful insights into the how browsers work. A recent article might be of some interest if you’ve ever wondered about the sequence in which things happen within the browser application after it sends off an HTTP request: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_05.html#005496

I read David Hyatt’s blog, but hadn’t really noticed the gems in this particular post. It’s worth a read if you’re into browsers and the stuff that they digest. (Also, there are good notes on how to optimize and how to measure performance.)