foodie.tv

Before I came to Vietnam, duck seemed so old-fashioned, so Peking, so Donald, so Daffy, so cartoon-character. So zoo animal, even. At Christmas in Australia, the duck was envied by other birds, less often getting the chop. I wonder if...

Once in a while, a rare while nowadays, I’m called upon to help diagnose a Windows XP PC malware and slow performance problem. Maybe it’s rare because I’ve succeeded educating my friends and family on the Defence Against the Black Arts or it may more likely be that these owners of machines have grown up from Primary school kids to being more adult Secondary school individuals with some amount of discernment.

Usually, the Windows XP PC isn’t the main production / family PC any longer – it’s so cheap now to resolve the issue by going to the mall, buy a new Netbook, not so Netbook or an inexpensive Notebook / Laptop with glitzy screen, bigger hard disk, dual core processor. However, owners of old machines don’t like old machines to go to waste so if they can rope in a nerd to fix up their PC, they will – feast of a Chinese dinner at the Hakka Restaurant with some 2002 Loxton Merlot thrown in.

Moving forward in time, disinfection tools vary – the techniques remain similar, but what is free and available are updated. Enumerating the stages in reverse….

more drawing! i was hunched over my lightbox on wednesday, drawing a bowl of soupy noodles, when the bell on my inbox went. it was the editor of pan magazine, asking me how the illo was coming along. spooky. (well, perhaps not so spooky: i was quite late.) have you bought yourself a pan yet? [...]

Last week our investigation into the origins of perhaps Asia's favorite sandwich -- banh mi -- was published in Wall Street Journal Asia. Read the story here. If you saw our May post on op la -- a delectable a.m....

The beginning doesn't bear thinking about. There's oil and butter cooking together, forming fatty golden suds. Which will by dinner's end be coating my insides and squirting onwards to my heart. I console myself with the knowledge that humans need...

I really couldn't have told you, before we spent two weeks in the former Lao royal capital of Luang Prabang last March. Vietnamese influences show up in markets (as in the rest of Laos the local version of pho is...

I've managed to survive my fourteen years in Japan without experiencing much culture shock. That doesn't mean I haven't faced...

but we haven’t been making a habit of sailing off to bedtime on a big maudlin cloud, no. for example, mere pages before charlotte was dispatched, we read of templeton’s all-night bender, eating discarded fairground food. there was an illustration on the page: a line drawing of the corpulent rodent. “he looks like matt preston,” [...]

i’m not doing a very good job of being here. on the other hand, i’m doing a sterling job of not being here. i mean, i have been here, only i’ve been working. that 300-page textbook job evolved — over more 1-and-2am bedtimes than i care for — into a 384-page textbook job. it’s not [...]

I'm back from what will likely be my last solo trip in a very long time: a three week visit...