Category Archives: Ramblings

Michelin Star winning Street Food in Hong Kong

Chan Hon Meng Michelin Star Winner

Chan Hon Meng

This is an interesting story, Michelin who give awards to the best of the BEST in the food world have awarded a street food vendor or “hawker” a Michelin Star. To give you an idea of how much of a big deal this is, in the whole of the United Kingdom there are only 4 such places, in the whole of the United States of America there are 14 of them. This is the first time a street vendor has been honoured in such a way with a star.

Chan Hon Meng who is 51 and born in Malaysia, is the chef at Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken, Rice and Noodle Stall in Singapore initially thought it were a joke when the world class restaurant reviewers invited him to attend the awards ceremony.

Are You Joking

He went on to asked “Are you joking?, Why would Michelin come to my stall.” he continued “I’ve never heard of Michelin visiting a street stall, can a hawker even be nominated?”. Michelin told him “We only judge based on the food, not on the venue.”.

Interesting that Michelin are leaving the comfort of crazy expensive venues and actually looking high and low for the best food in the world.

I think its brilliant that a street vendor can be elevated to a global level, especially one who works a 17 hour day, selling over 180 chickens worth a day and charges around £1 per tray to huge queues of people. 35 yrs he’s been working and perfecting his art, its even more special because he says 30 yrs ago when he first qualified as chef, his peers told him the highest honour for a chef to attain is to be in the Michelin Guide, and none of them believed Michelin would come to their neck of the woods.

£1 for a tray of Michelin star rated food, that maybe worth travelling to Singapore for it.

Image Courtesy of Michelin Group.

25 Years of Websites and Interesting Facts

The first website ever were launched by Tim Berners-Lee exactly 9,125 days ago, or 25 years to the day. 6th August 1991 were the day he announced it on a usenet group. Technically the first day it got new visitors were the 23rd August 1991, but the official launch were the 6th August.

It were a few years later that NCSA actually launched the first popular website browser (Mosaic) and CERN helped by making the software both free and open source.

It seems bizarre to me that Tim Berners-Lee intended it to be a platform to share academic and research papers. The father of the internet or World Wide Web has he named it,

Interesting Internet Related Facts

1, Currently we have Mozilla Project, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome and the various variations under those banners. Originally it were just Mosiac which came in 1993 and were discontinued in 1997.

2, China has treatment camps for those who are addicted to the internet.

3, Internet Addition is officially recognised as a mental disorder in many countries.

4, Mount Everest has it own High Speed Internet station.

5, When Montenegro became independent from Yugoslavia its internet domain extension went from .YU to .ME.

6, The man (Patrick Rock) in the UK who were behind the countries porn filters were arrested for child porn offenses.

7, WiFi doesn’t really have any meaning, beyond Wi for Wireless, the rest were made up because it rhymed with HiFi. Originally it were called Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, so should really be WECA.

8, On the 31st December 1993 there were only 623 Websites on the then named World Wide Web, up from 1 in 1991. By the end of 1995 there were 100,000.

9, In 2010, Finland became the first country in the world to make internet access a legal right.

10, Forcibly disconnecting people from the internet is a Human Rights violation according to the United Nations.

11, The very first thing ever sold on the internet were a bag of Marijuana. Which were bought by Standford Students buying from MIT Students.

12, The technology behind the internet began back in the 1960s at MIT. The first message ever transmitted were LOG. The user attempted to type LOGIN but the netowrk couldn’t handle the enormous load of the data caused by the 3 letters sent thus far.

13, Mark Zuckerberg is actually the 4th original member of Facebook, his ID number is 4.

14, Tila Tequila had the most friends on MySpace at 1.5 million.

15, Carrier Pigeons were officially still faster than average broadband speeds until as late as 2010. They gave the birds a USB Drive with a video file, and started the upload at the same time. The pigeons won.

10 Interesting Images from Internet History

1, In 1991 the first webcam were invented to monitor a coffee pot so the workers at University of Cambridge didnt’ waste a journey to the coffee maker to find it empty.

First Ever Webcam in Trojan Room

First Ever Webcam

2, The first tweet was sent on March 21, 2006 at 3:50pm by Jack Dorsey and said “just setting up my twttr”.

Jack Dorsey First Ever Tweet

Jack Dorsey First Ever Tweet

3, The first ever picture uploaded to the internet were by Tim Berners-Lee and it were the women from the Nuclear Research Lab at CERN.

First Ever Photo of Cernettes

First Ever Photo of Cernettes

4, This is the NeXT computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web.

NeXT Computer

NeXT Computer

5, This is how Facebook looked in 2004.

Facebook in 2004

Facebook in 2004

6, Mark Zuckerberg had an AngelFire website.

Zuckerbergs Angelfire Site

Zuckerbergs Angelfire Site

7, This is how Google looked in 2004.

Google in 2004

Google in 2004

8, Jean Armour Polly a librarian from upstate New York first coined the term “Surfing the web”. She went on to become Net Mom,

Jean Armour Polly

Jean Armour Polly

9, This is Tim Berners-Lee the father of the World Wide Web and modern Internet in 1991 with the NeXT Computer.

Tim Berners-Lee 1991 NeXT Computer

Tim Berners-Lee 1991 NeXT Computer

10, Finally Alan Mathison Turing, the father of Modern Computing.

Alan Mathison Turing

Alan Mathison Turing

Bonus, The Manchester Mark 1, the first ever computer made by Turin.

Manchester Mark 1

Manchester Mark 1

MyFitnessPal Maybe Listens

A while ago I posted a few shortfalls of myfitnesspal, and I also wrote to MyFitnessPal with the issues. The main issues were, the way it tracked water. Where you had to physically go to the drop down menu every day and choose “add water” then scroll down to actually add water.

MyFitnessPal Water

MyFitnessPal Water

To make the water show you had to bring up the menu to the right with “Add Water”, “Add Note” etc, which would make the water counter and the “+ Add Water” appear.

The other issue I pointed out were the tracking of Sodium and Salt. The app fails to differentiate between Sodium and Salt. It may also be that the people entering the data didn’t calculate the difference. This means a packet of Biltong which has 2g of Salt is assumed to be 2,000mg of Sodium, where it is actually 800mg Sodium. This means you are always going over your suggested Sodium limit, when in reality you simply aren’t.

You can mitigate this by altering your goal to a maximum 5,500mg, on assumption its ALL salt, which is about 2,300mg sodium. I have set mine to 4,000mg which allows most of the sodium to be incorrectly assumed as salt and some to the correctly identified as sodium. If you are aiming for low sodium, I would probably leave it at the default 2,300mg and accept it as being sodium.

I however noticed about a week to 10 days ago, the “+ Add Water” and Tracker has been permanently enabled making it easier to add and track water… sadly the salt/sodium issue still exists.

There is however some hope, and I’ll message them again in a month or so.

As a side note, if you want to convert Salt -> Sodium or Sodium -> Salt, an easy method is Sodium -> Salt just Divide by 2.5 or Salt -> Sodium multiply by 2.5.

Here is a quick chart with some useful conversions and information on it.

Salt Sodium Equivelent Advice
1g 400mg A pinch of salt.
1.25g 500mg Quarter of a Teaspoon. Heart, Lung & Blood Ass. Min. Amount.
1.5g 600mg A big pinch of salt.
2g 800mg Low Sodium Diet Suggestion.
3g 1,200mg Half Teaspoon.. Diabetic Max. Suggestion.
4.25g 1,800mg 1/4 Tablespoon.
5g 2,000mg Recommended Target Zone.
6g 2,400mg 1 Teaspoon. Max Recommended Amount.
8.5g 3,600mg 1/2 Tablespoon. UK Average Comsumption.
9g 3,800mg US Average Comsumption
12g 4,800mg 2 Teaspoons.
17g 6,800mg 1 Tablespoon.

Its common sense but still worth mentioning, when a recipe calls for a “Teaspoon” of salt, if it makes 6 portions, you need to think each one will contain only 1g salt / 400mg sodium not 6g.

Its also worth mentioning when you have sweated a lot, like after a good hours work out, you may need a little sodium on those days, but you should research the appropriate amounts yourself.

I’m going to message MFP again and push the Sodium issue. I suspect its going to be a huge task, since their whole database will need differentiating. I have been there before, the longer you leave it, the bigger and the harder the task becomes.

** 3,200 kcal is an increase for heavy training days not my general count.

Time Flies

Lately there never seems to be enough hours in the day, it seem the busier I get the faster time seems to pass and the less it seems I get done overall.

It reminds me of my mum and other old folks telling me that time flies by, enjoy it while your young because it goes so quickly or various versions of the same tale.

A while ago I read an article on the perception of time speeding up as you get older. Science it seems says it true and there are a few fairly interesting theories as to why it happens, or at least we perceive it to have speeded up at least. Over the years Scientific American, The Daily Mail, The Independent, and many more have posted articles based on fairly solid research. There are 3 which I think are quite interesting and I can sort of see.

Out of Storage Space

This theory is that we have a certain amount of “storage memory”. While we are young we have apparent boundless space so we member everything and savour the details, the more we store. One suggestion were that as a child we pay more attention to the frivolous, meaning more detail is recorded so the slower it seems to pass. As the memory gets fuller (or we get more organised) we record less and less details, so time appears to pass faster.

This theory also explains what happens when the memory bank gets critically full, it randomly fills in gaps which much like a computer hard drives’ fragmentation causes our memory to slow down.  Eventually the brain is forced to ‘erase’ old and less useful memories, which can lead to corruptions in said memory with repeated erases, rewrites and extreme fragmentation.

Time Pressure

Time pressure is one we can all appreciate. Studies in Munich by Marc Wittman and Sandra Lehnhoff of Ludwig-Maximilian University (Munich) showed “time pressure” experienced by essentially working age people (20-59) which is the feeling we have too much to do and don’t have time to get it all done.

This is essentially simple over-estimation of out capabilities or under-estimation of time required which creates a time pressure or speeding of time.

Mundane Exclusions

This is one of my favourite theories. This theory says that when things are new or unusual we pay more attention thus slowing down time. As things get boring we stop paying attention and don’t create new memories, so we “jump” them. This creates the illusion that real time is speeding on by.

The older you get, the fewer things / experiences are new to you, the more things / experiences become mundane and the faster your accelerate through time.

Personally I can relate to all of them but I think its time pressure for me compounded by my memory getting fragmented.

Beard Oil and Balm

I have had a beard for about 15 yrs now, generally I look like cross between a Brian Blessed and Hagrid, I would totally be at home in a cave.

Brian Blessed (Flash Gordon)

Brian Blessed (Flash Gordon)

Since I started to want to tame it a little, I was told I needed to use oils and balms to bring it in, along the lines of deep conditioning, and styling products. I have always washed my beard fully and conditioned with hair products not not with specialist products.

The Hipster Pound

I were a little dubious, given the recent raise of hipsters and trendy beard growers, I were thinking the beard oils and balms are more about tapping into the hipster pound, which is reminiscent of the 90s trying to tap into the “pink pound” and the “yuppy pound”, one soared and one flopped.

My mind has been slightly changed, and heading toward a full u-turn, but not necessarily for the reasons most would expect.

I change my aftershave scents a few times a year, from spring-summer-autumn-winter I move from green-y, ocean-y, to fruity, citrus-y, to wood-y, forest-y, to spicy, warm scents. For example in Summer is Clinique Happy for Men and in Winter Viktor and Rolf’s Spicebomb Extreme.

Khal Drogo

Khal Drogo

Enhancing Aftershave Scents

I have now found I can match my aftershaves up to beard oils, and balms; More so I can enhance my aftershaves, for example Tom Fords Tobacco Vanille, I think is missing something, so a little Munro’s Bourbon Beard Oil, and a Melt&Smelts Cocoa and Benzoin balm and it really is quite magical. This can be applied to Paco Rabanne Invictus which needs a more woody smell to help with the syrupy smell, so add Cedarwood, Bergamot and Grapefruit beard oil, along with a Sandalwood Tache Wax and works amazingly well.

I would say you can add to your fav scent, or even enhance your favourite scent. I also don’t see why you couldn’t do this if you only have a Tache, Mutton Chops, or even have a stubble, I would even bet you could do your eyebrows, your skin still needs moisturising either way.

Aside from that, my beard is definitely softer and its slowly taking shape with a little topiary skills, less Hagrid and a little more towards Seneca (Hunger Games), well not quite, but Khal Drogo coming up.

I wish I had known…

I wish I had known, just how hard it is to come up with a first blog post. This post sets the platform for all future posts. I should really outline the fact this will be both my business and my personal blog. Previously I kept these separate and had blogs for personal, blogs for private, blogs for hobbies and blogs for work, but now all together.

I will talk about the following, but not limited to it.

  • Domain Names
  • Marketing
  • Movies
  • Hobbies
  • Interests
  • SEO
  • Complete Rubbish
  • My Day to Day Life
  • and more…

I will use categories and tags to help you pick and choose what type of posts interest you, but the rest will be there, lurking like a bad smell.

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