Author: F C

Central American chicken chain Pollo Campero opens in Corona, and on 5th Avenue and 45th Street in Brooklyn. Supposedly the chicken is so good that people would carry boxes on the plane back home to the U.S.

Turkey is transporting the Trojan Horse from the movie Troy to Canakkale (the real one, not a computer simulation) to boost tourism.

The Practical Nomad has been keeping up with my favorite reality show, The Amazing Race. He’s an expert in around the world travel. Would you believe a stay at this week’s pitstop, an Argentinian ranch/beef churriseria extravangza is US$100 a day? Incredibly expensive to locals, but cheaper than a nightly stay at a hotel in Rhode Island where I have to go to a conference at the end of the month.

When is a Chinese wedding not a Chinese wedding? When it’s at Rudolph Valentino’s house at Caffe on the Green in Bayside. Excellent food and fantastic service; I’d go back again — check out the photos. Except for the alleged January bias incident between a group of Chinese women and a group of Family members earlier this year, if you get what I mean. More detail at this website.

On Law & Order SVU episode “Angels”, someone must have been a friend of someone else or won a contest, because in the morgue shot, the coroner introduces the cast to their “forensic odontologist” (a.k.a. the guy that does your post mortem dental work), Dr. Nova Cain. That was really bad, folks.

It was a dark and stormy night…. except for the realization that the Borough of Kings has finally arrived — 24 hour Duane Reed in Downtown Brooklyn! It’s just as expensive as in the city ($1.19 + tax and deposit for a 16 oz. bottle of Coke), but there it is in all of its neon and fluorescent glory on the corner of Fulton and Smith, which is around the block from my house. Actually, there appears to be at least 3 – 24 hour locations in Brooklyn; CVS in the Kings Highway region is also 24 hours. Now at least if I’m in need, I have somewhere to crawl in the middle of the night.

For the record, I dislike instant messaging. Maybe I’m old school about this, but I don’t like the idea that someone can randomly interrupt what I’m doing while I’m in the middle of typing or doing something intricate on the screen with the mouse. Yes, even if it’s my girlfriend. That’s in addition to random bling noises happening, or even worse, something worse popping up on my screen.

That being said, I tried sending a TV show to P–. I have a TV tuner card installed into my home computer. It’s possible to set the TV tuner to act as the video input for the web cam feature of Yahoo messenger. The hardest part was trying to change the channel — it insisted on setting the channel to public access every time it was activated. I had to start up the TV program to get to the channel switcher, then go back to Yahoo and fiddle with the screen size until the soundtrack kicked in. P– was able to watch Emeril with me.

That with using the included Snapstream (aka “BeyondTV”) software, tv viewing anywhere over the Internet is a reality. The video quality is not so hot – upstream on DSL is not much better than using a modem — but it works.