Monthly Archives: March 2006

Restaurant at home

I was reading in MacLean’s about a new trend:  cooking meals at home and charging the guests.  The case in study was preparing an extravagant 8-course dinner that included such items as “Foie gras soaked in red-wine”, “pan-fried striped bass with lemongrass” and “rice-milk flan with white-chocolate-pistachio emulsion”.  His ingredients consisted of the finest product he could find and multiple cooking trials and tasting experiences leading up to the day of the serving.  Included in the meal was wine, so for $50 in this case, a guest was receiving an 8-course 4-star (at least strived for) dinner with alcohol.  That is very reasonable assuming the ‘chef’ was able to pull it off.

This concept appeals to me in several ways.  First and foremost, if I am able to convince some friends to buy in, it allows me to experiment and put my skills to work to see if I show any promise in high culinary cuisine.  The cost of acquiring the finest ingredients will be defrayed so the expense on my part is simply the labour and time invested – which is more of a passion to me anyway.  Secondly, it adds a pressure element that kicks it up a notch over simply cooking a meal for friends and family.  With money being paid, it implies an expected return.  The guests will be there for the fun, but there will be an expectation of quality no doubt.  And as the article explains, if a guest doesn’t like it, he won’t be able to send it back.

So my first objective is to come up with my first menu.  It may seem like a cop-out, but with spring coming into bloom, I would like to show off my wizardry on the bbq.  I’ve got some ideas floating around but I think the meal will be broken out into a Tapas course including lots of surf and turf that is prepared on the grille followed by a sort of sausage feast with plenty of different types of grilled sausages and an abundance of unique sides (unique pickles, sauces).  Perhaps even a ‘seafood’ sausage of a sort?

Anyway, I’m opening this up to you:  would anybody be interested in shelling out some coin to enjoy a night of restaurant calibre dining?  I would charge an amount that covers the cost of ingredients.  But these ingredients would be of the finest nature, implying that the cost wouldn’t be akin to a plate of burgers and fries.  But the meal received would run for at least thrice more from a restaurant.

I’m back. And so is spring

The biggest indicator of spring for me is that I have a new fantasy baseball roster to tinker with for the next 6 months.  I have bought my team and for better or for worse I have to manage it through to glory.  You see, it’s not about the money.  It’s about being able to say to the other owners:  ‘Hey, I know more about baseball than you do!’.    MLB starts on Sunday and my days of scoreboard watching are near at hand.  I have my sports package geared up so I can surf through every ball game in realtime.  The laptop will soon be on fulltime so I can monitor my stats in realtime and see how the leaderboard is shaking up.  I’ll be spending most of my spare ‘surfing’ time browsing the sportswire to keep up on player movements (even the bowel ones if it affects their playing time) in order to buy up those free agents and fill in my statistical gaps.  Yes, baseball is here. 

Some other spring queues:

  • The smells from bbq’s while walking through the neigbourhood
  • The birds (especially robins) singing well into dusk
  • The rabbits eating my plants and nesting in my garden (only to be volun-told to vacate)
  • The Mennonite smoke houses in full gear (presumably to cure the summer sausage….either that or some Plainfolk are soon going to have serious munchies)
  • That ‘loamy’ smell that’s in the air – not to be mistaken for the putrid liquid manure smell that will soon permeate through even the most airtight fallout shelter
  • Joggers baring their pasty white legs 
  • My golf clubs crying out to me
  • My beer needs to move from the garage to the fridge 

Spring:   Thank you for coming back.

Baseball draft day

The baseball draft is coming up this weekend.  In order to have any chance of competing, I need to do my due diligence and build a prospect list in time for the draft.  As such, I’ll need to devote my spare time to scouting.  I wish I had a nice list of blogs made up in advance that are ready to go out the door that I could post each day this week without additional effort.  Unfortunately my drafts are not publish-quality so I’ll have to go into hiatus for the week. 

Domain-squatting and Typo-squatting

Domainsquatting is the act of buying up domains that other people may want to use (like microsoft.com) and then selling it to an interested party for a fee.  People have made millions of dollars building up portfolios of domains and then selling them off.  The problem is that many of the obvious names are already purchased or in use.  You would need to be pretty creative to figure out what names could be of value down the road. 

Typosquatting is the act of buying up domains that are misspellings of real websites (like www.mikrosoft.com) and then adding a bunch of ads and links that make the person money when clicking on them.  Again, many of the obvious misspellings of many legit sites are already in use.  Quite often, the site looks like a search results page where there are links to many of the intended destinations.  Each click provides $$ into the pocket of the owner of the typo-site.

Not a very admirable or honourable way of making a living.  But it sure would be easy coin.

Without even looking too hard, here are a few examples:

www.gqbush.com – maybe somebody will mistakenly hit the q instead of the w.

www.canadaliberals.com – hmm, this one might be worthwhile.

www.canadandp.com or www.canada-ndp.com – probably not much interest there anyway 😉

AdSense

So I’ve been intrigued by Google’s AdSense and how it can be incorporated into a blogsite to make some small coin:

Google AdSense is a content-targeted advertising program. This means that you do not select keywords or categories for your ads. Instead, Google’s servers determine what your posts are about and display the most relevant ads to your readers. So, if you blog about baseball, there might be ads for Major League Baseball memorabilia next to your post. If you blog about painting, there might be ads for art supplies. In fact, when you blog about something specific, there’s a good chance you’ll earn more, as Matthew Haughey discovered when he put ads on PVRblog. Haughey wrote about his experience in an essay called Blogging for Dollars in which he included four of his own hints.

Haughey’s Hints for AdSense Bloggers

  1. Focus, and be as specific as you can.
  2. Write content related to real products.
  3. Don’t start a blog just for money.
  4. Use a professionally designed template.

 

 

All I need to get this working is to open an AdSense account at Google, customize my ads, copy some HTML code and paste it in the right place in my blogsite – probably a place in the php that will generate the ad per posting.

I may try this out just for the fun of it and to understand how it works, but I don’t think I’ll keep it around long on the site once I get it working.  Can’t really see myself making money unless I narrow my focus to a single topic like golf or poker or cooking.  Which is a thought that I’ve been kicking around.  Right now I enjoy floating around different topics but have thought about shifting to one or two areas only. 

Comments are welcome if you have any advice / suggestions for me!

In the meantime, you can get an idea of what AdSense is and how to get started at this site.

Bizarre weather – if you lived anywhere else but in Canada

Ok, so a little over a week ago, I was skiing in a winter wonderland.  -5C with a good snow base at Horseshoe Valley.  7 days later, there’s no snow to be found, just the expected plethora of bottles, bags, and various garbage items that are hidden from view during the winter months but appear after the melt.  I was ribfesting in 10C on Sat and yesterday, it made it up to about 18C. 

Then, the wind came in.  Strong 80km gusting winds overnight and still going strong now.  And, here comes the heavy snow.  From 18C to 0C (-8C with windchill) in the span of about 8 hrs.  Strange.  Yet not uncommon for this neck of the woods.

I was going to start whining and complaining about the outrageous weather we get here.  But then I realized that maybe I shouldn’t complain afterall:  the US has some pretty crazy weather phenomena that puts them head and shoulders above us.   With respect to dramatic temperature changes, the southwest takes the cake there.  For example, on January 22 (not sure of the year):

In Spearfish, SD, the temperature rose 49 degrees in 2 minutes (-4 to +45 degrees). Later in the day, the temperature fell from the +56 degrees to –4 degrees in 27 minutes.

So, the little temperature shift we had over night?  Not so impressive after all.

How about the strong winds?  Well, over the weekend, through the infamous “Tornado Alley” there were reports of over 100 twisters touching down (see here)!   So, can’t complain there either.  And what about this snow that’s going to hit us?  Well, talk to my friend Chris if you want to really know what it means to be hit by snow.

Well, can’t complain I guess…..except that since I am a Canadian, my favourite past-time is to complain so here goes:

“%&$*, I hate this cold weather!   When’s it going to end?  Why does it have to always snow?  Freakin’ wind!  I hate it when we get teased with nice weather and then get nailed well into April with this crap!  I heard it’s going to be a ‘cold’ spring this year while the East Coast gets to enjoy a mild spring.  Why do they deserve to have the good weather?  Oh, and don’t get me started about our summers.  Summer is not a season up here — it’s a day!  Why did man decide to live here?  When can I move to Phoenix?”

If it’s a cool summer I’m going to have to complain some more…..just you wait.

Oh, and one more thing, why is the Prime Minister in Afghanistan?  Quit wasting my money on meaningless trips!  Couldn’t you do this goodwill stuff over the phone?  C’mon!  Get crackin’ on the things you promised (for good or bad) to do here before the next election. 

Let the Ribfests begin!

The weather gods are shining upon us!  Saturday forecast calls for 11C in the sun.  To celebrate this glorious day, some friends are coming over and I am planning to fete them with a bounty of ribs. 

I’ve been cooking Ribs for several years now and I must say that I am no slouch.  I can state with confidence that every person who has tasted “Ribs a la Roach” has given them great reviews.  So, for posterity and in the hopes of providing you with some new ideas to incorporate into your BBQing techniques, I will now share some of the processes I use to make my best possible fall-off-the-bone pork ribs: Continue reading

Today I am sad

Last night, I finished reading a book that closes out one of the most fantastic series of novels I have read to date.  It is called the “Camulod-Eagles” series written by fellow Canadian Jack Whyte.   The genre of the series is “historical fiction”.  When I picked up the first book to read, I was skeptical as to whether I would enjoy something that was categorized as historical fiction.  I’m more of a fantasy/sci-fi reader.  But it didn’t take long to fall in love with this type of novel and ever since, I’ve been addicted to historical fiction. 

The Camulod-Eagles series is based around the legend of King Arthur.   It spans across several generations beginning with Arthur’s great-grandparent’s generation which consisted of the last remaining outpost of Romans that were occupying current day Britain.  The thread of the series deals with what life was like in post-Rome Britain and surrounding areas (current day Scotland, Ireland, France).  Continue reading

The 78th Academy Awards

Okay, I’m not going to go into much detail about that event.  I think most people know how wretched I feel regarding the pompousness of that particular ceremony.  So I’ll save you the spewing. 

Did I watch the ceremony?  Of course I did.  Even with my disdain for the ceremony, I can’t help but to watch.  There are 3 observations that I would like to make:

  1.  Jon Stewart.  Very funny guy.  Added a lot of interest to the ceremony.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) for you, it is unlikely you’ll be asked to repeat as host.  Hollywood and those who watch the glamour of Hollywood, are just not ready for you.  But man, you were funny.  Three 6 Mafia vs. Itzham Perlman Posse.  That cracked me up!
  2. Philip Seymour Hoffman.  If Academy’s need to be handed out, you certainly deserve it.  This guy plays some oddball characters and pulls it off.   Along with Capote, check out “Owning Mahoney” if you want to see how brilliant this guy can be.
  3. Those people that are nominated for the short and animated short awards.  When they’re at the event and afterwards at the post-ceremony parties, who hangs out with these guys?  They seem like a bunch of normal folks that happen to be bunched into a ceremony with big celebs.  They seem kind of out of place if you ask me.  I wonder which parties they go to and whether they end up sitting in some corner.