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Bee Cheng Hiang: The Place for Jerky

January 22, 2010 in Food, Taiwan, Travel

Look, I’m a jerky guy.

And so when I came across Bee Cheng Hiang in Taipei, I just had to check it out.  The smell of fresh jerky was just too inviting.

Bee Cheng Hiang is a Singaporean chain store that only sells jerky (as far as I can tell).  When I was there I got some pork jerky and chicken jerky for an afternoon snack, and man, it was great.  They tend to either cut it up into squarish pieces or medallions.  There’s the regular flavour and chilli flavoured ones.

Mmm...jerky...

Awesomeness.

There are plenty of stores around – you can check out the addresses here.

The one I went to was just across the road from the Zhongxiao Fuxing SOGO.  Big yellow sign, can’t miss it.

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Brunch at Second Floor Cafe!

January 22, 2010 in Food, Taiwan, Travel

Restaurant: Second Floor Cafe
Cuisine: Western
Address: No. 14, Lane 62, Section 2, Dunhua South Road, Da-An District, Taipei City.
Website: http://2floor.yi-fe.com/index.html

On New Years Day in Taipei, we celebrated the start of 2010 with brunch at a popular little place called Second Floor Cafe in the Da-An district.

Second Floor Cafe is the type of place you would go on a Saturday morning for a nice big brunch.  It sells the type of food many cafe-style establishments in Western countries sell, such as sausages, eggs, bagels, sandwiches, juices, teas, coffees – you know the type.

They also serve breakfast, lunch and dinner as well on weekdays.

(Read on by clicking on ‘More…’)

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The Great Excerpt Experiment on WordPress!

January 21, 2010 in Uncategorized

I am, what you would call, an idiot.

After blogging on WordPress for just over a year, today I finally realised what that little “Insert More tag” button is in the toolbar when writing a post.

For fellow idiots, the purpose of the button is to split your post up so you have to click on the ‘more’ button to read the rest of the post.  Create an ‘excerpt’ of your post, if you will.

Many moons ago, I read about this ‘splitting/excerpt’ business on some website teaching people how to be better bloggers.  It said that putting excerpts in your posts has many benefits, such as:

  • reducing the apparent length of the post to your reader, who may be put off by such a long post at first glance;
  • reducing the load time on your front page; and
  • increasing the number of hits to your blog as a click on the ‘more’ button counts as an extra hit.

Well from today, I am going to conduct a little experiment.  I am going back into my old posts and splitting them up to see whether any of the above things are true.

I know, I know…seeing that I have almost 300 posts on this blog, taking the time to actually do this makes me an even bigger idiot.  So I am being slightly less of an idiot by just choosing the longer posts and the posts that people actually read.

Nevertheless…let the Great Excerpt Experiment begin!

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Q&A with Marcus Chown, author of “We Need to Talk About Kelvin”

January 21, 2010 in Book Reviews, On Writing

Award-winning writer Marcus Chown is on a blog tour down under to promote his latest book, We Need to Talk About Kelvin. And guess what – the man himself was kind enough to drop by to answer a few questions about his book, his writing, and his views on the universe!

Marcus is one of a handful of guys in the world that can make science sound interesting without making your head explode trying to understand it.  He is currently the cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist, and is the author of hugely successful books such as The Universe Next Door, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and Felicity Froshiber and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil.

In We Need to Talk About Kelvin, Marcus takes familiar features of the mundane world and shows, how in the light of our current scientific knowledge, they tell us profound truths about the ultimate nature of reality.  For example, did you know that:

  • the reflection of your face in a window is telling you that the universe at its deepest level is orchestrated by chance? or
  • the iron in a spot of blood on your finger is telling you that somewhere out in space there is furnace at a temperature of 4.5 billion degrees? or
  • your TV tuned between the stations is telling you the Universe had a beginning?

Don’t worry, I didn’t know either.

Well, without further ado, let’s get this Q&A started!

(Click on ‘More…’ to read the Q&A!)

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Tomic knocked out of Aussie Open; continues whining

January 20, 2010 in Tennis

Who would have thought.

After years of pining for a successor to Lleyton Hewitt, one of the most successful and reviled Australian tennis players in recent memory, the Aussies finally have a candidate – 17-year-old Bernard Tomic – who just happens to be even more irritating.

Tomic, who is embroiled in a feud with Hewiit (which is really hilarious when you think about it), is lashing out at Australian Open organisers after he was knocked out of the second round in a five set thriller against Marin Cilic, 6-7(6-8) 6-3 4-6 6-2 6-4.

The match began at 10.20pm and did not finish until 2.10am, which Tomic calls “ridiculous”, especially for a player as young as him.

“After 1am, 2am, for a 17-year-old to go out and play, it’s difficult. For the people I requested to play during the day, and it didn’t happen, I think it’s ridiculous.”

For the record, Tomic believes he “should have won” had they played earlier in the day.

(Read on by clicking on ‘More…’)

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