Today I went to work.... Pretty boring eh? Actually not so much. After leaving Hotel Junior and walking to the metro station I realized that I don't have the actual company address. I tried connecting to multiple INTERNET access points to get it but failed. At some point I was out of time and just decided to find it based on memory of the email I received. I've still not heard back from them on what time the class starts. Actually I've never been gien a security badge either. What choice did I have but to just go to where I thought it was and look around? I took the metro which was awesome and only took 10 minutes to get across town. I exited the Metro station and instantly was dropped into Lebanon or so it seamed. My immediate thought was "where in the world have they put this training room?". The answer to that I didn't know....

I remembered on Google maps a roundabout so I walked until I found one. I also remembered that the street was named after an American General. The roundabout listed an Avenue General Eisenhower so that was good enough for me. A ten minute walk later and I still can't find the company. I asked a security guard and he pointed down the street, said about 3 chapters worth of stuff in French (none of which I followed) and drew a square in the sky followed quickly by the company name. I figured he meant there was a sign so I took off walking. Another 10 minutes later I had reached my destination and without security clearance proceeded to the visitor lobby at which point I was met by the folks that had hired me.

The classroom had no computers, no white board and only a small weak projector. Those of you who've been in my classes know I last about 10 minutes without my teaching aids. Apparently they were thinking that it was going to be 40 hrs of Power point presentations? We russeled up markers for the giant tablet on easel and started burning LiveCDs for the employees laptops. This whole thing was crazy but I'm good at rolling with the punches. The biggest hurdle was to enunciate in such a way that a native

French speaker could understand me. This is difficult for someone who can't get native English speakers to understand me. By noon we had the students on Linux, I had markers and a pad and we had access to the Internet.

During which time Natalya checked out of the old hotel and into Albert 1er. The wifi didn't work so she used their computer to let me know she had arrived safely. We went to eat at a new restaurant on Place St. George which is a very pretty small quiet square not far from the Capitole. The Foie Gras was decent on a spiced toast and the duck was really good. The star of the meal however was this mount of potatoes topped with caramelized shallots that were to be honest phenomenal. This is jump up and down and shout Hallelujah good. I'm going to experiment with that when I get back home.

I knew I wasn't going to get a lot of site seeing in but I wanted to do two things while here - go to Carcasonne and see some prehistoric caves. Carcasonneis a small village about 40 minutes from Toulouse by train. It's also the home to the largest castle in all of Europe (maybe the world). It cost us55 Euros (roughly $80) by train which I thought was bit steep. On arriving we talked to the tourist information and they gave us a map. We were doing just fineuntil we were approached by this little old blond haired French lady who spoke a mile a minute and was all too enthusiastic to show us her town. She didn't speak a lick of English and was doing her best to help us get to the castle but she couldn't see well enough to read our map and we couldn't hear well enough to get what she was saying. She'd rattle off stories about the history followed by a quick "Do you understand?" at which point a drop of drool wouldfall from our lips and the blank look on our faces would resume. Between Natalya and I we were able to discern that she was 71 years old, had livedin Carcasonne her whole life and has a daughter in Washington but we don't know which one. Oh and the daughter watches kids. She then got out her keys and insisted on us getting in her car at which point my red flag started flapping and we declined. I'm sure she was just fine but up until this point this was going to be a great story to tell and I thought it best to keep it that way. Last think I want is a newspaper headline announcing the finding of a couple of American tourists in a canal somewhere. The one thing she did tell us though is to traverse the esplanade and take the small rue to the left. This we did which was a great tip because it led us across a foot bridge in plain view of the castle. Maybe she did have good intentions.

Carcasonne itself is a fantasy castle built by the Cathars a long time ago. The Cathars were a group of people that thought Christianity shouldreturn to a simpler time. That and they believed in reincarnation - don't ask how that works...The Catholics declared the Cathars patrons of the Devil or something and decided to exterminate them and eventually succeeded. By the 1600s the castle had fallen into disrepair and the French border had moved south lessening the need for such a bastion. Later the village moved out of it and settled in the valley below. Now it's been restored and the village inside the walls is filled with restaurants and shops. It's actually quite nice and not crazy like Mount st. Michael. The sheer size of it is impressive. The Moors (Muslims) holed up in it when resisting against French troops which is a great story in the area. It's interesting to hear about the Muslims as being the good guys and the Christians as the aggressors. Quite the change of characters.

We ate at the only open restaurant in the town (It was Sunday) and decided to try the other local specialty - Cassoulet. Cassoulet is a heavy white bean, sausage and duck parts dish cooked in a clay pot. I think it would grow on you but is definitely not something one would call fine food. Natalya was not impressed.

For our first dinner out we went to the Capitole square which has restaurants along one side. After perusing the menus (le carte) of each we decided to eat at Le Florida which had Foie Gras and Magret du Canard. The Foie Gras was excellent and the Canard OK. I'm afraid we've been spoiled by Duck Breast at Le Square Cafe in Paris. We returned to the Junior hotel and Natalya went straight to bed. I had to get ready for class and stayed up late to work on curriculum.

At 3:30 am the electricity went off so I fumbled around until I found my way to bed. The next morning the wifi didn't work (nor did the hot water) but it was already checkout time so I paid for another night. Needing electricity (who would have thought that important?) and wifi we spent the day looking for another hotel. The Hotel Sernin around the corner (also over a restaurant and facing the Church) was very nice but because of a rugby match and a marathon they decided to bump their rates by 30% which
didn't seem like a really good idea to me. We also went by Hotel des Artes which gets good reviews in Let's Go. They didn't have wifi nor could we see a room so we moved on. We landed at Albert 1er (pronounced Albert Premier) which turned out to be excellent for the same money as the Hotel Junior. However, their wifi was on the brink too. Since we had already paid we went back to Hotel Junior for the night and I prepared for work. For those who've never stayed in a French hotel
they're something else. The process for making a French hotel goes something like this. You take the standard human and draw a line around them in both laying and standing positions. Now you place both drawings next to each other and draw a square around them. This is your hotel room. The person standing is the area given to the bathroom and the person laying is the area given to you when sleeping. If the architect is particularly generous he may allow the door to the room swing inward.

My previous post was titled "And I thought I was going to France". I said this because this city is as if someone took France, Barcelona and a little of Mexico and blended it on high. The street signs are in Spanish (I think, it may be Catalan) and French. The recording on the Metro that announces the stations is in French and the second language as well. Not to mention these people can't dress themselves. Are we in France? I'm not sure.

My neighbor Achmed (yes that really is his name) drove us to the airport where we checked in at the Air France booth. Actually we checked in online but we needed to then take our passports to the counter to get our boarding passes which just made me wonder why we checked in online. Our flight was on an Airbus A340 which I've liked in the past. In typical Airbus fashion I had excellent legroom (something about the way the seats are formed) and we had in flight entertainment on tiny little screens. The system worked well and gave us Movies, TV, travel channels and music. There were games but I didn't feel the need to explore. Even though I was tired from getting up at 4 I couldn't sleep. I do however, want to mention that the food on the plane was top notch. All airplane food up until now has been barely edible. I've gotten in the habit of just going to Burger King in the airport and taking it on with me. You know how much I detest fast food but truth be told it's a step above airplane food - a big step. The bread we go was better than we can get in the store at home and my beef braised in a balsamic sauce actually tasted good. Keep in mind we're not talking about 3 Michelin stars here so let's keep things in context. Also we got fed more food than we could eat and what blew me away completely is they were serving Champagne, white wine, red whine and variuos liqueurs free of charge! I'm used to AA charging $7 for a tiny bottle of something. They just kept on bringing the wine around and yes there was cheese in our meal as well. Afterwords they bought tea and coffee and to top it off we had dishes. The silverware wasn't metal of course but they went through the trouble of procuring metal colored plastic...

We arrived at what is possibly the worst run airport on the planet - CDG in Paris. I try to avoid CDG at all costs but when you're making a connection to another French city you don't have a lot o choice. I love France but sometimes you just have to shake your head. There's a train that connects the terminal buildings but for whatever reason we where shuttled from one section of the terminal 2 to another on a bus. I thought it was so we didn't have to go through immigration but the first thing we did on arriving the new section was exactly that. Then I thought it was to avoid having to exit the secure zone and re-enter but that was next. The security "pit" (for lack of a better word) looked a lot like a couple of rugby teams fighting over a twinky. Everyone thought they were going to miss their flight so they were waving their tickets in the air and shoving. Just about the time I've decided to forgive the Spanish for what they did to the American natives I end up in line next to them for something and my negativitiy grows. For a second I thought we were in China because I was going to have to fight to RETAIN my spot in line. They had no problem jumping from line to line in an attempt to get ahead of everyone else even to the point of walking past people who were going through the metal detectors. As you can imagine the security folks were not amused. Ironically we walked up to our gate about 1 minute after they got there and we maintained our dignity and probably avoided being made fun by bloggers.

Our flight to Toulouse (pronounced toulouza by the locals) was quick and painless. The Toulouse airport is small and welcomingly so. A quick bus ride into the city got us to where we thought we wanted to be. Hotel reservations in a city you don't know can be a liability so we walked around to a few that I had in mind and looked at them. We chose the Junior hotel because it's over a restaurant (I love those sounds of people clinking their glasses and conversing while having a meal) and it's right next to a giant church and not far from the capital.  That and it has free wifi. For France it's cheap at 80 Euros a night but after exchange rate we still get beat up pretty bad.

Toulouse is an odd one. This area was independent up until about 1300 when it was taken over by the French. Langedoc actually means The oc language which is the group that Catalan belongs to. Catalan is what people from Barcelona speak. Provencal also belongs to that group as well...

More later.

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I've posted to my food blog. So this is what it's like to have a job...

The other night H-mart had a great deal on snow crablegs so I bought a few pounds and took them and 2lbs of shrimp home to cook. I threw my Emeril Lagasse signature double boiler/steamer engineered by All-Clad on the stove with water in it. We then proceded to shell and devine the shrimp which took longer than expected. During this time I hadn't noticed that the steamer was no longer steaming. Natalya turned around and asked if there was still water in it at which time everyone jumped up and ran to the stove because we all knew what that means to a pan. No matter what your pan is made of it's not going to withstand high heat for too long if it's dry. The pan was in fact dry and the burner was bright red and something curious was happening - there was a stream (literally) of aluminum pouring out of the bottom of the pan. We dumped 4 cups of water in the pan which turned to vapor on contact. I knew the pan was completely destroyed but was just trying to contain the damage. There was a pool of aluminum under the burner and a lake on the stove top. A little poured onto the floor and just as fast as you could say Bam! Natalya stepped in it. Thankfully she only got a small burn.

Now before anyone gets cute and says "you're not supposed to do that" let me say this - stick a fork in it.  Having said that I'd like to focus on the pan. This is very clearly advertised as a copper and aluminum core pan engineered by the most renowned American pan company - All-Clad.  Here's the wording from Emerilware.

The triple-layer encapsulated base of stainless steel, aluminum and copper are bound together to ensure fast and even heat distribution.

So the triple-layer encapsulated base is made of stainless which is the outside and  aluminum/copper bound together for the inside, or so it would seem. If you look at the outside you will see that it appears to have about 4mm of copper in the base. I've never doubted this fact since you can very clearly see that there's a great deal of copper there. Since I only use it for boiling pasta, steaming etc. I've never really cared outside of the fact that I knew I had a fairly reactive pan. I do admit though that I bought this pan because I've loved how well my Mauviel copper performs and we all know that copper is a better heat conducter than aluminum by several times. Granted this is only a $100 pan and I shouldn't expect too outside of the fact that you have two well known qauntities felt it important to slap their names on it.

So what came out of the pan was very clearly NOT copper which is not in itself the problem. All-Clad makes their copper core line under their own name and if you look at the drawings you'll see that there are multiple copper and aluminum cores sandwiched together. I asked a Williams-Sanoma employee why they'd use multiple cores since copper was the superior conductor and his response comically was "the more the better". Somehow I don't think a lot of metalurgists would agree.

Anyway when you look at this pan you see copper but after the other nights incident it is very clear that the core is made up of only aluminum core and the outer millimeter or less is a copper veneer to make you think you have a copper core. If you take a knife and scratch the "copper core" you will hit aluminum.

So the question isn't even whether an aluminum core is bad because we all know that Calphalon and All-Clad Alluminum core pans perform beatifully but rather what is Emeril and All-Clad trying to pull? I think it has to do with wool and a pair of pearly blues set deep in my skull. They very easily could have made an aluminum core pan and nobody would have thought less of them. The fact that they made an aluminum core pan, sprayed copper on the outside and sold it to me as a copper core pan doesn't set well with me. It makes me not want to believe what either say. I wonder now if you took a knife to All-Clads copper core line ($450 for an 8qt stock pot) you'd hit aluminum or copper. Looking at the side profile drawing again of their pans it looks like there's only a minimal amount of copper in their pans as well, perhaps 1mm at most. No wonder The America's test kitchen said there's no difference between All-Clad copper core and their standard aluminum core pans. I think this is just their strategy to keep people from going to a real copper pan. You get the shiny benefits of copper without the hassle and weight!

In researching this article I see All-Clad has something called Coper-chef now that appears "all copper". Looking at the cutaway diagram it looks like this is yet another All-Clad alluminum pan with copper sprayed on the outside. Now you get none of the benefits of copper with all the hassle. I think the most irritating thing about all of this is that All-Clad makes great pans and the marketing department just needs to go take a walk and let the engineers do their work. I don't buy large All-Clad pans though because the handles are the worst I've ever seen anywhere. If I were to pay $400 for an All-Clad pan I'd drill the rivets out and put the handle from a $20 Cuisinart on it so I could actually use it. But as far as their cooking performace goes, they're top notch.

After this though I'd think twice about buying anything with Emeril or All-Clads name on it.

So it's official, Natalya and I are heading across the pond for a short outing in France. It's not the Le Grande Vacance that we normally take but after a long summer sitting at home wondering how everyone else does this we're getting a break.

It would be nice to take a week off before going on holiday just to get ready because there's a great deal of things to do. I always smile when people travel around the states and hire a travel agent to plan it becuase in the states if you have a map (or not) and a car you can just drive anywhere without a lot of thought. The culture doesn't change a whole lot, people still speak English and you can always pull over and ask for directions. If you're going to a foreign country you actually have to have some sort of idea how to do this. Say for instance if you leave the house without your passports you're going to pay a lot for your round trip plane tickets to nowhere. Thankfully the airport won't let you go very far without it anymore. Not that we'd ever leave the house without passports or in the process prove that you can drive from North Seattle to the airport, back to North Seattle to pick up said passports and then back to the airport in less than 90 minutes, I'm just saying that it could happen.

It always amazes me the people who spend zero time trying to figure out the time zone change. A lot of people just get on the plane, sleep when they're tired and work it out when they get there. I know this because I see them all the time sleeping on the metro steps with their faces as plastered against their suitcases and if you can picture it - a small amount of drool coming from the corner of their mouth. It's either that or they're from Albania looking for money to help their handicapped-underprivilieged-bother-that-was-in-the-war-who-is-missing-both-arms-a-leg-one-eye-and-a-toenail and needs food or he'll die. I actually can't tell these folks apart until they wake up at which time the Albanian chases you down the street with the most innocent look on their face ( complete with left eyebrow scrunched and pleading eyes). The tourist on the other hand climbs to their feet and drags their oversized suitcase(s) to the nearest Starbuck where they pay 5x as much for coffee as they would if they went to any of the 20,000 cafes in Paris. They don't seem to mind because it's burnt just like at home.

So to avoid jetlag you get a plane from the west coast at around noon which is about perfect. It's best if that plane touches down on the east coast somewhere too but it's not 100% necessary. Make sure you get up early - say at 4-5am, eat breakfast, pack you bags or repack them. Right before you leave the house (about 10am) eat lunch. When you get on the plane don't nap. You have to stay away for about the next 4.5 hrs so watch two movies, eat what they bring then cover your eyes with something, put in some noise canceling headphones and go to sleep. Because you got up a couple of hours before your norm and you've been up for 10 hrs you'll be tired. Sleep for as long as you possibly can and when you awake they'll give you breakfast. When the plan lands you walk out the door in sync with the local time and having virtually no jetlag. This works as I've done it many times.  If you fly out at night you're screwed because there's just no way to deal with the time zone change. No matter when you sleep (or not) it will be the wrong time. Coming back is harder but I have formulas for that as well.

Qcow2

Create a disk image or download one from Stacklet.com

dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/xen/CentOS5.img bs=1024 count=10000000

qemu-img convert -O qcow2 CentOS5-base.img CentOS5-base.qcow2.img

qcreate-qcow 50GB CentOS5-base.qcow2.img CentOS5.qcow2.img

A great "preview" of the forthcoming Nokia n900 has been posted at my-symbian.com. I say preview with quotes because after you finally get to the bottom of the page you'll reallize there's 3 more!

I've been using a Nokia n800 for several years as many of you know. I've really liked it but have had reservations with recommending it to others. First, if you use only Nokia software it's a stable device but with the plethora of Linux apps out there who would do that? I sure didn't but in order to have room for everything I wanted to run I had to move the OS to the flash card so I'd have more room. After installing about 200 really unstable apps I finally got my list down to about 30 things I use and even then those things aren't completely stable. So my complaints about the n800 was size, maturity of the apps, worthless hardware buttons, size, bad connectivity (with wifi only) and size. You'll notice that I'm a bit unhappy with the size. This is why I'm posting this photo and a link to my-symbian.com's review of the Nokia n900. How it stacks up to the Nokia n800 and iphone 3GS. -

I've said this before and I'll say it again - simple things are sometimes harder to cook than complex things. If you have a lot of ingredients in a dish you can usually recover it if something goes wrong. If you only have 3 ingredients (like some breads) it may be difficult to master a recipe. To drive this point home Julia Child after having attended and graduating from Le Corden Bleu went through 200lbs of flour trying to make a decent baguette and failed. It wasn't until she got invited into a boulangerie and saw the tricks could she pull off a decent baguette at home. Baguettes if you don't know have 4 ingredients and one of those is water.

I've mastered making pita at home but for Indian dinners we really want naan. So far I've been a complete failure making naan. The last dinner we had I made both naan and pita and in case the naan wasn't right - we ate the pita. A local restaurant gave me a tip - they cook it twice, once in the oven and once in the tandoori. I don't have a tandoori and I never will but this gets me closer.

So I'm here to say that I'm going to figure out naan. To start things out right I just bought 20lbs of Chapati flour that Indians use for making Chapati (of course,) Roti and Paratha. I've heard it's also good for making naan, we'll se about that.

The way I figure it I have enough flour to screw naan up 40 times which might be what it takes. I hope I don't have to use as much a Julia Child did but I WILL figure out naan.

P.S. Before emailing me links of naan recipes please try them. I've tried many and they all make glorified pita. If you however have been successful in making naan then by all means drop me a line.