Visual Recipes - Community of Cooking Enthusiasts

Now that's an idea.

Ajax resources - tutorial, reference, howto, index

My Ajax resources page, published using RawSugar collections.

The return of animated GIFs

Back in 1996, there was this new invention that allowed using animation is web sites. Those were the days were the default website background was gray. Now its white. There were a couple of years that black really was the backgroun color to have on your site - but that was soon changed. Microsoft Explorer has taken the browser wars, and with it - the non-white background web dies.

It's funny, as animated gifs were forgotten, stored away on dusty hard drives in all corners of cyber-space.

The MSN messenger 6 allows defining shortcuts to display animated gifs. These gifs, when recieved as messages, can be added to the recipient "emoticons list", and then sent to others.
Most people do not know they can add any animated gif to their emoticons list, so they relay on others to send them over, and pass them on.

Recent couple of months - I am witnessing the rivaval of animated gifs, as those are being sent to me (and from me) to all, as a form of virus. They spread quick. Especially the fat laughing kid, which to tell you the truth is a bit sad. Not to mention the "sexy" sometime pornographic ones that I often get from a gay friend of mine.

Funny how things have their day in the sun, then forgot forever, and suddenly, with no forseeable reason, make their return with vengence.

Take the letter 'w' on your keyboard for instance. How often was it used before the web came on? rarely. and now? it is being clicked by millions of people around the world, www this and www that. The letter 'w' is now a proud member of the popular kids on the keyboard. So in @ which, when growing up, seemed to me so odd, placed on the keyboard, with no apparent reason to use it. I used to have a "british pound" sign on my old Sinclair spectrum. It did not make the cut. @ survived, while the pound sign is dead. They now call the # character pound. Sir claive sinclair is probably pissed off.

a pissed off Sir.

BillSaysThis

I have just added the technorati embed code to this blog, and found that a co-worker in RawSugar found this blog and posted a link to it.
So - I do the same here, let's see if he finds out about it.

WTG, kemosabe!

RawSugar - Social Search

Yesterday, RawSugar introduced a preview version of its new "Social Search" site.
as this becomes a rapidly growing market nitch, with many players, RawSugar has some significant winning features on site, and many in store for next releases.

This version is still rough, and probably not usable by the average "internet joe", but by "internet savvy" people.

To get a taste, check out my restaurants collection. This is a search/browse collectino of restaurants, click on the "all..." menu to see all of my different tagged categories for various restaurants.

Also interesting point of browsing, is the "recently tagged pages" list, which can provide a good starting point for a recreational search session, where you want to find things that you're didn't know you're looking for.

Enjoy.
Post suggestions, rants and raves to the forum

PORTFOLIO update

well, it certainly been the best weeks I had in the market for months.

My current portfolio status:

BSTE	-8.32%
CNC	+11.62%
FCBP	+2.44%
SIRI	+22.56%
TS	+21.92%

defenately nice gains for many of the stocks.

One thing I miss is buying HANS @ $67 on May 5th, and selling it for 72.88 on June 3. True - I had a +8.8% on it, but HANS is now $92.75.

well, you know what they say: "In Wall Street, pigs get slaughtered"

recipe - pad thai w/ tofu

tags: tofu recipe cooking vegetarian

this a a very good pad thai recipe, I prepared yesterday, when Lilach was hungry and wanted to thai food.
My Recipe in intended for people with some culinary creativity sense. I don't give any exact quantities (unless its for baking and deserts, where its a must).


Ingredients

• 3-4 tablespoons of dried shripms
• 4 dried or fresh thai chillies (the small red ones or (second choice) small green ones
  
• about 250grams medium or hard tofu
• 4 Kfir lime dried leaves
  
• 2 little stalks of lemon grass
• about a tablespoon full of shrip paste
• a handful of nuts
• 3 lemons
• salt
• sweet chilli sauce (I use Mae Ploy brand)
• soy sauce (kikoman is the preffered brand)
• sweet plum sauce
• 1 pack of rice noodles
• 1 big carrot
• some seseame or other oil (not olive oil this time, love)
• a tablespoon (a bit more, actually) of pal sugar
• 6-7 chives
• coriander leaves
  

Preparation

The goodies

1. put the dried shrimps, shrip paste, chllies, palm sugar, kfir lime, lemon grass into a container, squeeze about 1/2 of lemon inside (a big shaker is the best for this purpose)
2. pour some boiling water into the container, and steer well, to get the palm sugar melting, the dried ingredients suck some juices in.
3. Cut the tofu into small (1cmx1cm) cubes, and put them into the container
4. add some salt, pour in a good amount of soy sauce
   
5. cut the chives into small rings.
6. grater the carrot

The Rice noodles

1. boil some water in a pot wide enough to put the rice noodles inside without breaking them.
2. after the water are boiling, take the pot off the fire, put the rice noodles inside
3. steer gently, and taste periodically. after about 3 minutes the rice noodles will become "al dante" - they won't have the "ricey" taste to them anymore, but still have a hard bite to them. don't let them get too soft! when they're ready, drain them out of the pot, and rinse them under running water to take all rice starch out - and prevent them of becoming sticky.

Wokking everything together

1. heat up a wok on large flame
   
2. put a genearous amoung of seaseme oil inside
3. put the carrot slices inside, and steer breifly
4. put the noodles inside, but not in one batch, but taking a handful at a time, to "air them up" and make some room for all the goodies you are about to add.
5. pour in all of the goodies - a nice sauce with all those great goodies inside.
6. toss all the ingredients in the Wok for a couple of minutes
7. add some more sweet chillli sauce
   
8. add some sweet plum sauce (really just a touch - about 2-3 tea spoons)
9. squeeze an additional big lemon into this great smelling wok.
   
10. as you fry everything up - add some more soy sauce - the noodles should not be white, but have a brownish color to them.
11. after about 5-7 minutes of frying (depends on the size of your Wok and the heat of your fire), turn the flame off

Garnish and Serving (for two)

1. put a mount of the delicious pad-thai on two plates
2. sprinkle a very very genearous amount of chopped coriander leaves on top of each plate
3. sprinke a very very ver ygenearous amount of ground peanuts on top of each plate. you can't really go overboard with the coriander and peanuts - they have to be abound.
4. cut a slice of lemon, and put on the side of the plate for further appling of lemon by the happy bastard who's gonna eat this dish.
5. Serve
6. smile
7. make love
8. do the dishes
9. take the garbage out
   

First POST

Stock market fun

I have been playing the market since the beggining of the year, after a long period of time I was involved in writing and implementing day-trading models for Radial LLC.

I found that to be a successful trader (yes - I know I am not - but still I am not doing bad) - one needs to have character attributes of the same kind that might help one being a successful enterpraneur.
* Presaverence
* Being passionate about what you do but keep your mind cool
* Continuing learning and curiousity.