Xmas Breakfast: Char Kway Teow

Christmas breakfast Singapore style: fantastic char kway teow from a hawker stall at Ghih Moh where the old man cooks just one dish over and over and over, day in, day out, year after year after year. It is sublime.

If you're familiar with chow fun from a U.S. Chinese restaurant, it's kind of like that, but far better and more complex in flavor. Two kinds of noodles are stir fried with a complex sauce of sweet, savory, salty flavors, with various seafood, scrambled egg, bean sprouts, and even little blocks of crispy fried pork lard, with a touch of brightness from a fresh squeezed calamansi lime, and optional hot chili sauce. The textures should be light, the noodles not at all thick or gummy, and the temperature piping hot.

Done right, this signature Singaporean dish is well worth the 30 minutes I had to wait standing in line. When cooked wrong, with flavors either missing or out of balance, you will hear howls of protest from Singaporeans considering it a national disgrace.

Simply delicious.

More Signs of SF Bay Area High Tech Job Market Warming Up

Google and Facebook continue to dominate the news media when it comes to the ever-changing Silicon Valley job market, but most of us know that any kind of warming up of the competitive employment landscape requires the broad participation of smaller companies. I believe the greater San Francisco Bay Area's high tech sector has recently shifted in the past few weeks towards more hiring.

I haven't even been paying close attention to the most obvious indicators like job board posting volume or regional unemployment claims figures, although I do pay attention to them on occasion as part of my professional responsibilities.

The indicators I have are entirely anecdotal and rather similar.

Horrible Stampdede Tragedy in Cambodia

The curse of the deadly human stampeded has struck again, this time in Cambodia, on a massive and terrifying scale.

The Associated Press reports (via The New York Times website) "Hundreds Die in Stampede in Cambodia"

GlobalPost reports "Cambodia: More than 300 die in stampdede"

CNN reports "Stampede in Cambodia kills hundreds, government says"

I get nervous when a very large crowd gets too dense. I always stay aware of evacuation routes.

RIM is DOA

RIM in 2010 is DOA. Their recently released BlackBerry OS 6 is years behind Apple iOS and Google Android. RIM CEO is either delusional or a hipocrite.

The New York Times Bits tech blog posted "RIM Is Not App-Happy" on November 16, 2010.

GigaOm's theAppleBlog posted "Poking Holes in RIM's Anti-Apple Rhetoric" on November 18, 2010.

RIM CEO Jim Balsillie shouldn't be talking smack when he's the former 800 lbs gorilla sinking neck-deep in the quicksand of today's smartphone market.

Taking a Break from Facebook

I've decided to take a brief break from Facebook. Not really for any one reason. It just felt like the right thing to do for now.

Last weekend, I returned from a business trip to India, where I spent a work week with my colleagues in Hyderabad. It was my first visit to the subcontinent and I'm quite pleased with how the trip went. Most of my business objectives were met, the people there were welcoming and supportive, and logistically, I was fairly comfortable with the hotel, the flights there, the food, and so on.

I chose to use Facebook as my unofficial travelogue, making comments about my observations at the India office, and the surrounding community, to a relatively private set of friends, as opposed to here on my public blog or even on my Twitter profile. Getting a small handful of comments from friends was always reassuring, that my short, personal posts had some sort of audience. Other than daily calls with my family, Facebook was my own personal conduit to staying in touch with home.

Still Getting AlertSF Texts

It's been a few years since I last worked in the city of San Francisco and even longer since I lived there. I still get the emails and text messages from the city government's safety alert system.

Some of the alerts are still interesting, such as the tsunami warnings. Others are more mundane, such as street closures and other traffic related ones.

When I was both living and working in the city, I tried to be prepared for emergencies, so the city alert system subscription made a lot of sense. Post 9/11 and around Katrina we all were subjected to disaster awareness. And 2010 has shaped up to be a year full of global disasters.

Now, I am thinking about unsubscribing, at least from the text alerts that go to my cell phone. I think I can still handle the email alerts.

I should look into whether there are similar alert systems for my current cities of residence and workplace.

Facebook Outage Feels Weird

Gotta admit the current Facebook outage feels weird. I'm surprisingly stunned. Of course, no system is fool-proof, but for the website that serves literally hundreds of millions of people, by some measures more than Google, it's unexpected.

I don't have any critical business or even personal processes reliant on Facebook, so a brief outage is no biggie. I can still read and post status updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and my blog here.

Oh, I should mention I only connect with people on Facebook that I already know and want to connect to.

I've been spending quite a bit more time on Twitter the past few months anyways. Seems like Twitter is more appropriate to post status updates, where people only read who are truly inclined to read such updates, whereas on Facebook, people are somewhat forced to see updates only because they know someone, but perhaps don't care about so much.

Simplified Blog Layout

I've decided the 3 column layout for my blog, with widgets scrolling my tweets and diggs alongside my blog posts, was just a jumbled eyesore.

Besides, the trend in blogs is to be visually minimalist. I'm not ready to strip away everything to leave the blog text bare, but I have finally dumped the many widgets that cluttered my site.

The AdSense vertical banners are gone. Even my blog tags list is gone.

Probably putting out more frequent blog posts is the next step to livening things up here.

Definitely not ready to hyper-specialize into yet another food blog or a mind numbing HR blog.

Twitter Recruiting Video

The folks at Twitter put together a pretty compelling, hip and unique recruiting video.

Mercifully, no talking heads spewing predictable platitudes, like this utterly boring and vapid example from Symantec. Also, no half-assed wanna-be music video, like this awkward example from Ernst & Young. Twitter's is well paced and tasteful.

One of my previous employers, Guidewire Software, produced some high quality recruiting videos (a project initiated before my arrival, my involvement was limited) that are worth viewing (one, two, three, and four). They were carefully crafted for a narrowly defined target audience: bright, wary, discerning software engineers.


The best recruiting videos I'm aware of are the ones from Facebook. Great production values, well targeted messaging, with plenty of authenticity.

How to Properly Cook Scrambled Eggs

Today's SFGate Food section included a link to CHOW's The Basics: How to Make Scrambled Eggs.

While I applaud the intent of this recipe to instruct people to make good scrambled eggs, I gotta say, as a scrambled eggs enthusiast, I have some issues with this recipe.

First, who cooks 6 eggs at a time? OK, I do, on occasion, but I don't know of anyone else who does, even when cooking for two.

Second, the setting aside a small portion of raw egg in a separate bowl means unnecessarily dirtying up a bowl, and the recipe calls for fully cooking that portion anyways, so, uh, what's the point?

Third, the larger portion of egg is poured into the pan (I agree with the medium-low heat setting) and is just left there to get stiff, overcooked, and chewy. Alton Brown correctly instructs the egg mixture to be immediately stirred around as it hits the pan, to keep whatever egg that is initially cooked by the heated pan surface from being overcooked.

Personally, I like my eggs very wet and runny, and that's easily achieved without having to pour in a second bowl of raw egg mixture (cold raw egg in my scrambled eggs are not my idea of a good time). Just plate the eggs, with its hot runny goodness, out of the pan, sooner than most people would with their scrambled eggs.