The trouble you can get into with truffles

Truffles. These are a group of valuable and sought-after underground fungi. True truffles belong to the genus Tuber and are made up of several species. There’s black truffle, white truffle, Chinese truffle, and Summer truffle. There are lesser known kinds of truffle. Truffles are considered a delicacy and they are quite expensive. The world’s most expensive truffle was a 1.5 kilogram white truffle that was sold for $160,000.

Truffles are traditionally ‘hunted’ using pigs. The problem is pigs love truffles as much as people do and they can end up eating the truffle. Truffle-sniffing dogs are used as substitutes for pigs. Dogs will eat truffles but they prefer bread and other treats so they are easily distracted. Truffles are usually preserved in grapeseed or very light olive oil and placed in a jar.

Our chef from Antichi Sapori had a friend in Hong Kong who invited him to spend time with him in Italy for the holidays. Heading back to Hong Kong, his friend brought along with them truffles in a jar. Flight to Hong Kong from Italy was usually direct but in this instance they had a stopover in Bangkok. The Hong Kong authorities are wary of passengers coming from Bangkok since it is the center of the opium trade in Asia. They have drug-sniffing dogs and all that. It was quite unfortunate that the jar did not survive the long trip. It broke and spilled its contents, splashing oil and freeing up the truffles. The chef and his friend was aware of this and as they passed through customs, the drug-sniffing dogs went nuts. They smelled the truffles and they wanted those bad. They barked and yelped and scratched at the bag with the broken jar of truffles. Well, you know what happened next. The authorities were on top of those two men in an instant. The incident was smoothed out after much explaining and the two men were released.

I’m going to have the pasta with truffles at Antichi Sapori soon. I wonder if it will be worth the price tag. I hope there won’t be any drug-sniffing dogs around.

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My Brain On Ink

I’ve just revised my blog’s name again but this time I’m keeping it for a year. That’s how long I’ll own the domain name. Yes, my blog has it’s own snazzy domain name. Henceforth, my blog will be known as www.brainonink.com. All I need now is a logo. That’s coming next.

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Spro Coffee Shop

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce ourselves. We are Spro Coffee Shop. Watch this space.

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The Quicksilver Experiment

I’ve been a Mac user for more than 3 years now and I am in no inclination to ever return to Windows. One of the things that makes me say that is an application called Quicksilver. Quicksilver is an application launcher. This allows users to use the keyboard in launching applications rather than having to navigate the UI with a mouse. I’ve used Quicksilver almost as long as I am a Mac user. I probably will have a bit of trouble using a Mac if it didn’t have Quicksilver in it. You could say that this application is an integral part of the Mac experience for me. The developers called Blacktree did a fabulous job on Quicksilver and most importantly, they allow the use of this application for free! Yep, you heard me right. This application, this swiss army knife of a tool can be downloaded and used for free.

I mentioned that this is a swiss army knife. Quicksilver is more than an application launcher. It does so many things of which I haven’t even gotten into yet. But this application has it’s user base and they all love it!

I use Quicksilver much much more than Apple’s Spotlight since a) I’ve gotten used to it and b) Spotlight requires and extra keystroke to launch an application. That is not saying Spotlight is useless. Spotlight is useful when looking for documents and media files. It’s powerful app but for application launching, Quicksilver does it better and you can customize the way it looks, too.

So this brings me to my little experiment. Mac users are aware of the Dock (even though some may not know that it is called as such). The Dock is where the currently open or running applications can be seen. The Dock is also customizable which means you can drag and drop applications from the Applications folder and an icon of that application will stay in the Dock for easy access. This is useful for software that a user frequently opens. So you can imagine that if a user frequently uses twenty apps everytime, the Dock can pretty much get crowded. I’m a minimalist and I like to make things as clean as possible. I have stuck some icons in the Dock like Adium, Firefox, and Google Earth. But I found out that I’ve been using Quicksilver almost exclusively when launching apps. I can’t remember when I last used the Dock to launch an application in my Powerbook. There’s the occasional drag and drop of files to the Bluetooth File Exchange utility to transfer themes and files to my K800 but that’s about it.

So an idea struck me while I was listening to the MacCast Loop show no. 3. I’m going to try to remove most of the icons from my Dock and try to use Quicksilver only from now on. Save for the bluetooth file transfer, I won’t use the Dock to launch apps. I’ll see how this will pan out. This is only for my Powebook. I think it’s a entirely different thing when it comes to my iMac.

So today will be Day One of the un-Docking of my Powerbook. I’m going to go Quicksilver all the way.

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