All Entries in the "Weekend Musings" Category
Weekend Musings: Great Ideas
Here is another interesting email that a friend shared with me that I like to share with chowtimes readers.
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Weekend Musings: 13 Hilarious Dog Costumes for Halloween
A friend sent me an email of 13 hilarious dog costumes just in time for Halloween. Happy Halloween to chowtimes readers.
A tiger dog
A lion dog
A knight dog
An elf dog
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Weekend Musings: The Art of Tree Shaping
This is another interesting email that I received from a friend that I would love to share with chowtimes readers. I admire the passion and patience of the artist who shape the tree into indoor furniture and living art.
Peter and Becky of Australia have mastered the art of Tree Shaping.
Pooktre, as Peter and Becky have called it, has perfected a gradual shaping method, which is the shaping of trees as they grow along predetermined designs.
Designing and setting up the supporting famework are fundamental to the success of a tree.
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Weekend Musings: Amazing Vegetable Art
A friend sent me some amazing vegetable art. I would like to share them with you. Enjoy and have a wonderful weekend.
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Weekend Musings: Addictions
I have been busy. Real busy like you do not believe it. Life had been pretty much consumed by “China” ever since I was landed right smack in the middle of the new project. As much as I want to be positive and say that work will tone down to normal levels soon, the truth is it will stay at this heightened level for some time. I had kept insane working hours, at times starting at 4AM in the morning. With teams working on Beijing, London, Hong Kong, Atlanta and with me alone directing the project right at the edge of timezone, I do feel like I am working around the clock on some days.
And the travelling is not helping too. I am down to working two weeks a month in London and Beijing until the end of this year. Just yesterday, I got an email asking me to consider being based in Beijing until the end of the year! But work had been exciting. All these came about when I managed to pull off a particularly difficult delivery two weeks ago and my just reward was emails floating around that I could bring some other distressed areas of the program back on track … “he needs to be there, get him there” was what people are saying.
So I really do need to juggle my priorities. Chowtimes is one of them that gets relegated to the lower rungs. Although writing by itself does not take much time and Suanne helps greatly doing up the pictures, I need the creative juices flowing to wring. You know how I write my posts? I compose posts in my mind throughout the day, like while driving or walking. By the time I sits down at the computer, I already know what I want to say and can hack away at a post in a short time. But these days, my mind is dominated by work matters alone.
So what does it mean? As much as I hate to say it but with work and travelling, it is nearly impossible for me to keep up the level of writing I want. I don’t want to stop writing. No sir. So, the best I could do is to change how I write and what I write about. Chowtimes is about food and travel. Chowtimes is about sharing the life of Ben and Suanne. That will not change. What will change will perhaps be that the posts will be lighter.
Let’s see how things will evolve. I am on forced vacation next week (boss says to take the week off because I still have 20 days of vacations banked) and so will attempt to write next week.
Today, I want to speak of my latest addictions.
For the past couple of months, we had not been exploring new restaurants. Since we had so many posts yet not written and that I can’t even find time to write, there is no point going to new places.
Instead, we went to our favourite places and much nearby home. That pleases Nanzaro and Arkensen a lot. One of the restaurants we had gone back to several times is the Szechuan Delicious restaurant. We like that place because it is inexpensive and there are much more to discover on their menu.
One of the dishes we are utterly addicted to is the dish above. Remember the popular Sichuan appetizer dish called “saliva chicken”? Well, we like this version of the same dish using “beef tripe”. We love the crunchiness of the tripe and the same spiciness of the chili sauce. This is awesome.
I have not come across this version in other restaurants and just wonder if it is commonly found in other Sichuan restaurants. If you like “saliva chicken”, you will probably like this too. BTW, the name “saliva chicken” is my preferred translation over “mouth-watering chicken”. :-)
My other addition is this one above. I have to blame grayelf for introducing this to me.
She introduced this in a recent dinner I had with Sherman, Karl and Angie. If you like … More on following page. Click here to continue reading
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Weekend Musings: My Name Is Ben And I Am a Stats Junkie …
Hi. My name is Ben and I am a stats junkie.
[Here is the part where all of you are supposed to say collectively ... Hey, Ben ...]
It’s true. I can’t peel my eyes off the stats on chowtimes. I guess that is one of those things that keeps us going with the blog. We use a variety of tools to keep track of the traffic. Our primary ones are sitemeter, Feedjit, StatCounter and Google Analytics.
I like Feedjit because it is realtime and the sound it makes each time someone hits a page … ding-ding-ding-dong-dong-ding-ding … sweet music. LOL! Every time when furious dings emitted from the computer, we are alerted that something is up (most likely visits from our dear friend, Google bot).
Suanne loves statscounter but I hate it. She likes that because she likes to see what keywords that Google brings traffic to the site. I think I know why. You see Google brings more new readers to chowtimes via recipe posts than restaurant ones.
The Flagcounter is a pretty one but it is quite useless for us. This is located way at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.
I think we had maxed the number of flags already because for the past six months there had not been any addition of countries. I think there are either 100 flags or 104 flags (so hard to count those tiny flags).
It goes with saying that most traffic is from Canada. Although a lot of the content in chowtimes are Canadian, the traffic from the US is pretty high too. So it is good to know that the reach of chowtimes does extend beyond the 49th parallel.
The UK and Australia took 3rd and 4th spot while Malaysia and Singapore was not far behind.
Of particular interest to us is China (2,924). There used to be … More on following page. Click here to continue reading
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Weekend Musings: Of Creative Sofas and Men vs Women’s Brains
I slept like a baby last night. It sure feels great waking up at 7:00 AM for a change instead of 4:00 AM for the past week. LOL!
I am feeling so relaxed right now and what better thing to do than to share with you some pictures of creative sofas that I came across on this site. What I like about the site that I don’t have to use my gray matter … just a bunch of interesting pictures. I added some more that I had found to the collection too.
While talking about brains, Andy from Portland sent me a youtube yesterday. I had seen this before but it is still as funny as ever.
Enjoy a nice relaxing weekend and just imagine you are on one of these sofas!
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Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone
Here is a collection of food related Valentine pictures from Curious, Funny Photos/Pictures.
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