June 2006 Archives

Update: After many fabulous years Mandalay has closed its doors as Janny and Erik move North to be closer to family. I'm in mourning for my curries.

Seattle area | Wallingford neighborhood | Map
Dinner only
http://mandalayspice.com/

My VeggieFoodie Rating: Fabulous

This is one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle. They do wonderful curries with complex spices from several Southeast Asian countries. My favorites on the current menu are the Malaysian Green Banana Curry, Thai Green Curry, and Szechwan Black Bean Stir Fry. If you happen to spot a Pineapple Panang, Taro Root, or Green Mango curry on the specials board, go for it.

In addition to the curries, there are some vegetable sides, appetizers, and daily soup which are veggie. Most of the items flagged on their menu as vegetarian are in fact vegan—just ask and you'll find the staff knowledgeable about the ingredients. If you manage to leave any room for dessert, try the Toasted Coconut Bananas or Thai Basil Cheesecake. Most of the curries keep very well as leftovers or takeout.

Tell them Ann says "Hi" ;-)

More reviews:
Yelp | Judy's Book | Citysearch | Seattle Weekly

Seattle area | Ballard neighborhood | Map
Dinner only | 21+
http://www.thebalmar.com/

My VeggieFoodie Rating: Excellent

I've now been to BalMar twice, and both times the food was excellent. Saturday night was a packed, younger crowd with lots of noise bouncing off the brick walls, but Thursday evening it was much more mellow and I had a leisurely meal and conversation with a friend.

They have a tasting-style menu with "Small Plates"—two make a good meal, perhaps with room left for bites of their decadent molten chocolate cake. The items in the Veggie section are all vegetarian, as well as a few under Etc.

More reviews:
Yelp | Judy's Book
Normally I'd also include CitySearch, but when I typed "Bal Mar" in their search engine it came back with "We assumed you meant Wal Mart, instead of bal mar." Yeah, right.

Technorati | Restaurant | Food and Drink | Vegan | Vegetarian

I've been seeing the nice orange RSS icons everywhere, and wanted one to replace the plain text TypePad uses by default. With a little Googling, I found http://feedicons.com/. They've done a really nice job packaging this up, with multiple sizes of the icons and instructions on how to change the color if orange doesn't do it for you.

For anyone on TypePad, here's the code I used to get the icon to appear with no border and to pick up the subhead style for the word "Subscribe". Adjust icon dimensions based on the one you end up using.

<div class="module-syndicate module">
<h2 class="module-header" style="margin-bottom: 15px"><a href="http://[yourblog]/index.rdf"><img src="[youriconpath]" border="0" height="32" width="32" style="border: 0px"> Subscribe</a>
</h2>
</div>

Now I need to stop playing with my blogs and bill some hours! ;-)

Technorati | Blogs | Blogging | Technology | TypePad | Web design | RSS

Update: TypePad has added Technorati tags to their software. On the composition page, click Customize the display of this page and you can turn it on.

I looked around for a tag generator and didn't find one that did exactly what I wanted, so I built one. It will let you:

• Keep track of the tags you use (up to 50)
• Open tag links in the same window or a new one
• Set text/paragraph formatting
• Change the opening text "Tags" and delimiter between tags

All you do is put an "x" next to the tags you want in a particular post and copy the code it generates for the paragraph. Since I can't write ASP or Perl to save my life it's in a spreadsheet, but should be cross-platform.

Please let me know if something needs tweaking or if you find it useful!

If you want to muck around with the basic formulas yourself, first un-hide all the columns and rows as there are a few layers of If and Concatenate statements due to working around Excel limits.

For anyone wondering why I bothered with this when Technorati picks up my TypePad categories as tags, it's because the two serve very different purposes in my blogs. I use categories to organize posts when someone is within the sites, while with the tags I'm trying to capture more terms to match what people might be searching with. More of the whys—as well as a video demonstrating tags in Technorati—can be found at Rich Brooks' Flyte blog.

Technorati | Blogs | Blogging | Marketing | Technology | Technorati | TypePad | Tags

The trailers for Nickelodeon's "Barnyard" coming out in August depict a group of 4 cows who have very male voices—and udders. How many people forgot to mention the emperor was running around without clothes?

Technorati | Film | Movies

I've been to steakhouses which were veggie friendly and Italian restaurants which weren't. As a cook, foodie, and 15 year vegetarian, I'm a firm believer that accommodating vegetarians can be easily done by just about any restaurant. (I'd love to see every restaurant accommodate vegans too, but that's going to take more time.)

1. Knowledgeable staff
If I ask whether an item is vegetarian and the wait staff says "Um, yeah, sure it is" I start focusing on the green salads for dinner and never come back. If I ask and they answer "No, it has worscheshire sauce" I've found a new home. Vegetarians don't expect wait staff to have the ingredients memorized, but we do need the first reaction to be "I'll check with the chef" instead of a guess.

It's that time of year again! The day when mobs of people descend on Seattle's Fremont neighborhood for its rather unique take on summer parades. A bit of what makes the Solstice Parade special:

• Naked cyclists—with some body paint of course
• All human pushed or pulled floats
• Utilikilt brigade
• Flock of belly dancers
• Political and environmental statements in floats
• Charming disarray

It's all today, Saturday June 17th at noon! For a great set of photos from last year, see Tim Greyhavens' site.

PS—520 is closed this weekend.

Technorati | Seattle | Culture | Fun | Travel

If you like films with quirks, find your local film festival!

Not only do you get to see some of the most creative films generated by the industry, you encourage the creation of cinema that isn't calculated to appeal to the greatest possible audience by catering to the lowest common denominator. Yes, some of the films are rough, but you'll also find gems by up-and-coming talent. You'll also find films with impressive casts whose established actors are there because they found the project interesting.

While we all know about Sundance and Cannes, there are many local film festivals to attend. You can find a staggering international list at Inside Film Online.

Here in Seattle we're just wrapping up SIFF, and it's been wonderful going to screenings. They did a great job this year with their Web site, providing a good system for identifying films of interest and winnowing that list down to something feasible. This is a non-trivial task—today, a Thursday has 18 screenings and this goes on for weeks. Their ticket system also allows the purchase of will call tickets up to 30 minutes before a showing, and you can pick up tickets for multiple venues at any box office.

Next year I look forward to even more shows. The only thing I'll do differently is load up on as many immune boosters as I can before it starts! I've missed two of my films because of a cold caught at one of the screenings.

Technorati | Film | Movies | Seattle | Culture | Fun | Travel

Infoworld has a nice quick article called "What users hate most about Web sites."

Of course to read the article, you have to get past the animated banner ad at the top, animated inset ad on the article, and pop-up it will attempt to open—items number 1 and 4 on the most hated list. As irritating as these regular ads are, I've accepted them as a fact of life on browsing free sites, though I greatly prefer Google's context-sensitive ad words as they've actually been known to be things I'm interested in.

Here it is, a picture perfect Seattle June weekend, and what am I doing? Sitting inside with a pot of mint lemon tea, a bowl of dry Cheerios, and blogging about TV as I miss today's SIFF flick. I hate being sick.

I killed my cable in January, when the most recent rate hike put my Expanded Basic—no premium, no digital, no PPV—over $50/month. Since I only watched a handful of shows regularly and also had a TiVo subscription to grab eps at odd hours (TiVo rocks), it just wasn't making sense when I could get box sets on Netflix.

That was the rational financial justification. The emotional justification is I was tired of giving $50/month to a company that ticked me off.

Or you would if you were a little pewter shoe. Since you're a human, I'm afraid you can't fit on the Start square for your $200. Sorry.

I'm an eccentric geek in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.  I first launched my personal site a couple years ago to keep track of vegetarian restaurant and other lists that I seemed to be repeatedly generating and sending via e-mail. Some quirk of my psyche loves collecting and disseminating information (including bits I personally could never use). I'm sure you know people who you can always ask "Where can I get" and they'll list 3 stores including URLs—that's me.

Tangentorama is basically everything which doesn't fit tidily in my survey research blog Practical Surveys, as well as my playground for working with TypePad. The layout will have some pretty awful moments this first month as I'm not bothering to prototype things out on a test site.

Please post general comments/questions to this entry—I do take requests. When I feel like it.

Cheers,

Ann