Nordic Cuisine

Some of the nice Nordic cuisines that we had the privilege to taste.

One of those (I do mean one of those! For those of you who might be interested to know what else we have tried may find them here or here.) we have tried in Iceland is Whale meat and we have tried it at a seafood restaurant called Thrir Frakkar

Whale Sashimi (also salmon)

Whale steak!! very nice, although it was seasoned so much that I could not taste any whale flavour. I think sashimi was better.

As for Finland, we went to the NJK's yacht club restaurant to taste some of delicate Finnish reindeer

Helsinki, Finland, July 2008

Some photos I have taken in Helsinki.

Food at Zurich

Last week were TOOLS EUROPE and ICMT and they were held at ETH Zurich. While we most ate at the conferences, we went to try some "local" cuisine when possible... here are some photos of the food we have had...

One of the lunches "I" have had at ETH was SUSHI!!

One of the meals we have tried outside conference is the traditional fondue and rabbit raclette... I have to say though the waiters in the restaurant we went to called Swiss Chuchi had very very very BAD ATTITUDE!!!

Sausages (veal, beef, pork, chicken...) are the local food we have also tried... the way is to dip into loads of mustard and ketchup hahahaha....
Although not a Swiss cuisine, kebap (kebab) is also a fairly local dish. Again there are veal, beef, pork and chicken as meat... I actually found them to be better than the ones back at home...

Royal Society Meeting

I went down to London last Monday and Tuesday to participate in the Royal Society Discussion Meeting on "From computers to ubiquitous computing, by 2020". I was there as an audience and as a "microphone helper". Below are two photos I have taken at the venue as I arrived too early on Tuesday (it did not start until 9:45am)

A display of a photo of Alan Turing and his certificate of royal society fellowship!!

Beef & Guinness Pie

DSC05311.JPG, originally uploaded by Wendy.Chang.

This had got to be the best meal whilst at Belfast! Cubes of prime beef cooked in Guinness with a pastry crust top... from Crown Liquor Saloon. Very Nice!! I was completely stuffed afterwards (with 2 pints of Guiness!!)

Online TV

Below are some of the Online TV apps I have been trying out.

BBC IPlayer, this one allows you to watch upto 7 days old BBC programmes and each programme downloaded and unopen has about one month expiry, whereas once they are open there is only 7 days expiry.


Channel 4 on Demand, this one allows you to watch upto 30 days old Channel 4 programmes and each programme downloaded and unopen has about one month expiry, and again once they are open there is only 7 days expiry.


Joost, programmes here do not expire and they can be viewed when available. Although this is different from 4oD or IPlayer since it does not have a terrestrial counterpart.

So I suppose even I do not have a TV now, there is still loads to watch (when I am not working obviously kakakaka)

Dragon's mum 親自下廚

本來要去小舅家烤肉... but Dragon's mum 說會親自下廚! 所以我們也留在家裡吃晚飯

As you can see... Dragon is not helping at all!! 後來還出鎚 kakaka!!

Bytheway 這道清菜是我炒的!!

包春捲

今天我們到阿嬤家包春捲, 以下圖為證.

Dragon did hers and came out square like .... how weird!!

阿嬤在旁指點(介入)... fortunately mine turned out to be the right shape
(a bit squashed in width I suppose haha)

戰利品

Haha... 下面是我最近的戰利品... 兩雙加起來都不到 30塊英鎊... 超讚!!

超讚的拉麵

Yesterday, Dragon's mum 炮製 two bowls of ramen with 貢丸!!


一個字 --- 爽

More spider-pig

More spider-pig hahaha

Spider-Pig

"Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig.
Does whatever a Spider-Pig does.
Can he swing from a web?
No he *can't*, cause he's a pig.
Look out! He is the Spider-Pig! "

Requiem for a Tower

A variation of Lux Aeterna, which comes from the soundtrack of the film Requiem for a Dream. I think it is a brilliant piece of music and it is used as a trailer music of the film Sunshine.

Chip shop Connie's 100th birthday

From a BBC News article :

"A 100-year-old woman has celebrated her landmark birthday by working at the fish and chip shop she opened nearly 80 years ago"

That is a heck of an achievement you've got to admit!!

Our drinks

I think this really catches the essence of "The Dragon and I" (龍與我) hahahaha!!

Panoramic View of Blenheim Palace

I took these panoramas of Blenheim Palace using my mobile phone. Not bad I have to say haha ^_^

En route to Vicky Arms

Desperate looking forward to my pint of Guiness, as Jeff and I were taking in turns to "punt" all of us to there!!

Mark's Graduation Celebration

We went to Zizzi in Leamington for Mark's graduation celebration!! The food was not terribly good and the overal it was a good dinner ^_^ Congratulation Mark!!

A good postcard from Jell (Dragon (Wendy)))

Yes, this is a lovely postcard and yes "Guiness is good for you". Thanks Jell (Dragon (Wendy)) ^_^

A weekend of nothing

Ha! After a busy week of conference (and subsequent nights out)... I finally made all the correction for my report and have actually had it printed off on last Friday!! Ye!! Now I am waiting for some "forming filling" to be done by my department and my college. So this weekend has been a bit of a slacker really... not been doing much at all!! However, I watched Live Earth on Saturday night and found KT Tunstall a very good singer and indeed although I was quite familiar with the music she played but I did not know they were hers!! (I could not find any good recordings of her at Live Earth from youtube and so I used this music video instead.)

Anyhow... back to work this coming week... no more slacking!!

Taste of London 2007

Antony Worrall Thompson were doing the Pork burger thing (I did not remember the name well... ) but I did remember something like this was said "anymore people like to have more gordon!! leave your business card for the auction of gordon's testicle!!" That was hilarious!!

Me thoroughly enjoying the pork burger thing!! Cost me 8 crowns (4 pounds) - Actually did not cost me anything to buy that haha but it cost quite a bit to get into the venue!!

Gordon Ramsay was on the main stage performing his skill (had to pay more to get into the front row ^_^) but at least I was there hahaha...should have shouted "Bo**ocks!!" as it was the kind of languages associated with the f-word hahahaha

Stuart Gillies was there too!! And the salmon there was real good!! YUM!

Punting

An excerpt from Wikipedia

"Rather different traditions have grown up in Oxford and Cambridge: in Cambridge they stand on the till and punt with the open end forward, while in Oxford they stand inside the boat and punt with the till forward. The Oxford position is closer to the orthodox except that nearly everyone in Oxford punts left-handed. Since the rivers in both cities are narrow and often crowded, there is little opportunity for punting "at full pressure", so these variations in stance are of little importance. Nevertheless the traditions are often strongly held; students at Oxford and Cambridge frequently believe that theirs is the only correct style."

Anyhow umm... will need to see the difference for myself.

Cypriot Cuisine

Yes, this is our first taste of Cypriot cuisine!! They like large portions!! And I do mean LARGE PORTION!! Take a look at the photos above!! (I particularly like Mousaka hahaha)

The little ones are a lot easier to capture!!

The little ones are a lot easier to capture!!, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

I found this little one (in fact there are two of them). This one clearly has no idea what he/she is doing. And look at the way he/she sits.... classic... non-elegance... for the younger ones!!

Old memory

That was me and Henry checking out our "new place" on Spring 2001... Gosh... seems like a long time ago... This in fact became our acommodation between 2001-2002... ^_^

Who wants to be a trillionaire?

An interesting article from the BBC web site talks about the scale of a trillion pounds...

"If you take the typical annual salary as £25,000 a year - how long would it take you to spend a trillion pounds if you spent £25,000 a day...The answer is 109,000 years" -- source from BBC News

The Real Hustle - Waitress Card Cloning

I have always said banking/shopping on the internet involves the same amount of risks as handing a credit/debit card over to a waiter at a restaurant.

BPM 2.0

A recent launch of BPM 2.0 saw the shift from marketing BPM from business analysts to process analysts. According to IT|Redux here is how to identify a process analyst.

"...who is a process analyst? A simple test is to ask a candidate if she understands the differences between a do-while, a while-do, and a for-each loop. If she does—and can explain it to a business analyst who could not explain what a loop is at the first place—you found the person you were looking for. You will find her among the 8 million Visual Basic programmers, the 3 million PHP fans, the million PL/SQL folks, and the half a million or so ABAP guys and gals...."

Usual route

Piled Higher and Deeper

So right haha

Thesis title ^_^

This sounds pretty right hahahahaha.... source from phdcomics.com

Sesame Oil...

First time seeing sesame oil offered in a HK tea house like sugar and salt...

Gosto Superior

I went to a fairly decent veggie place in Braga on Saturday night. The place is called Gosto Superior. I only paid around 6 euros for all the food shown below plus FREE HERBAL TEA!! (The apple pie was VERY NICE)

Badminton

Quite unprecedented since my doctorate that I actually took some time out of what could be my "relaxing" Sunday to do some badminton!! I must be insane... anyhow I had the opportunity to visit DMU sports centre and I thought why not?... After a "gruelling" two hours of HARD WORK (not the whole two hours mind you, that would be considered as suicidal in my circle of acquaintance haha) I am now absolutely knackered ... still I have got a correction to make for one of my papers (especially this one because of its venue ^_^) Oh well... better get back to work...

信樂團 - 不會消失的夜晚

This one apparent has some history with it... but still absolutely brilliant!!

火星-死了都要愛

Absolutely Brilliant!!

On the way to lab

On the way to lab, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

This one however remained stationary and kept staring at me...

On the way to lab

On the way to lab, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

This little one came out and meowed a couple of times to greet me as soon as I arrived... but also almost spontaneously he (i think its a he) started to ignore me... did a bit of cleaning up... how peculiar..

Left or Right

source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_direction
Red (drove left), Blue (drove blue).

Apparently most people drove on the right (左taai) .... interesting...

So... lunar eclipse yesterday (also Magha Puja) ... somebody was too sleepy and did not think it was that important!!!

Lollipops reduce late-night crime

According to statistics - Lollipops reduce late-night crime !! Unbelievable!!

To err is human

"To err is human; to really foul things up you need a computer." -- Paul Ehrlich

Pipes: Rewire the web

The Yahoo! Pipes is a information aggregator to produce a feed that is customed by the construction of pipes. Each pipe consists of modules and connectors, each module takes some textual input and produces some textual output (functions umm), inputs and outputs of each module is communicated via pipes... (this looks like a data flow diagram or so-called data-oriented scientific workflow).... Need more thoughts on this one....

Animated vs Animatior haha

I think this is pretty cool stuff... hope I can use the chosen one for pop up blocker too haha

World's Oldest Condom

"The reusable condom dates back to 1640 and is completely intact, as is its orginal users' manual, written in Latin... The manual suggests that users immerse the condom in warm milk prior to its use to avoid diseases." -- source from Ananova

I never knew condom used to be REUSABLE and it has such a long history....