How you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character

It seems that you can tell alot about your staff by how they treat waiters at restaurants. From the elitist, to the just-plain-agressive, restaurants bring out the best and worst in customers.

How a person reacts when a glass of wine is spilled on them is a real indicator to their true personality and how they might react in a difficult business situation. This great article tells you more and is full of insights from CEOs about their dining/hiring experiences. Maybe we could start a restaurant hiring service whereby you call us and we deliberately drop food on your next candidate… how they react might save or make you a small fortune in the future

Booking a hotel? Read this first…

Want to know the condition of rooms in your next hotel destination… or see photos of bed bug bites from a particular hotel in India? Then you need to visit TripAdvisor. This site has ‘real people’ reviews on countless destinations around the world including photos.

One of the best hotel travel sites around!

Cheap Asian Airlines

In planning our tagalong tours I often get asked about discount Asian airlines, similar to Virgin or Jetstar in Australia. Most of the carriers I’ve found, fly out of Singapore, Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. Here’s a list of the best and cheapest Asian airlines I’ve found so far:

• Air Asia flies to a huge range of destinations… more choice if you fly from Kuala Lumpur but you can fly fron Singapore to Krabi in Thailand for around 30 bucks… which is cheaper than any airline flying out of Bangkok!
• Jetstar Asia, also known as Valueair, flies from Singapore to Indonesia including Bali… so you could fly to Singapore, zap up to Bangkok on airasia and then down to Bali to finish your holiday on jetstar asia.
• Tiger Airways fly to similar destinations as Air Asia but uses Singapore as its main hub. I like this airline because they also fly to Darwin, Australia. So this airline might really suit people flying from Europe or USA to Singapore and then want to travel Asia and China and then finish up in Australia.
• Bangkok Air fly into all the groovy destinations in and around Thailand like Luang Prabang, Siem Reap for Angkor Wat. Not the cheapest airline but it certainly goes to some interesting places from Bangkok.
• 1 2 GO Air is a domestic Thai discount carrier flying to unusual towns and cities in Thailand.

There are more airlines that fly into other destinations in Asia but these airlines service Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia at a very reasonable price

How to cook with Lava!

You get wrecked on an Hawaiin Island… you’re hungry and you need to cook your dolphin steaks but you have no matches. Here’s a great site that will teach you how to cook with LAVA. It doesn’t show you how to catch dolphins but the lava cooking lessons are part of the Dolphin Bay Hotel.

Cappucino Art

The Dutch sure take their coffee decorating seriously… some amazing photos of cappucino art.

Corruption leads to poverty

The map above shows the corruption index of countries around the world… red is bad, white is good and Australia is a faint pink. Notice how all the countries in red are the poorest?

Here I was blaming factors like natural resources, climate, lack of education etc as factors that kept countries in poverty… but it seems that the more corrupt a country is, the poorer the people. I’d like to say more but I have a march to attend, dreadlocks to grow and a flag to burn so in the meantime you can learn more about how to fight corruption here.

small scale food scenes

It’s amazing what some time on your hands and a macro lens can create. Found this neat blot about architecture which also has some amazing photos of miniature figurines doing things to food… quite fascinating.
BLDGBLOG: Foodscaping

Godzilla Eggs

Here’s a great way to sell fruit to kids… repackage it and call it something cool. Check out this japanese site for more cool ways that fruit vendors sell watermelons.

Jamie Oliver email is a hoax … or … a clever way to sell new book

This email hoax from about two years ago is doing the rounds again and has just arrived in my inbox. It reads:

Cook book = $50
Ingredients = $25
Getting sacked for “accidentally” releasing the new Jamie Oliver cook book to the entire planet before it even hits the shelves = PRICELESS!

The story is that someone at Jamie Olivers publishing Company sent a word document version of his 2nd book to one of their mates this morning and it’s now zooming around the internet – again.

It turns out that this email and the attached word file is a fake… true it does have real recipes in it and food photos but some further investigating showed that the recipes weren’t that new and Jamie’s lawyers were on the case trying to track down the originator of the email.

But what a fantastic way to MARKET a new cook book (Penguin says Jamie didn’t have a new book due for release btw)… spread a fake copy, generating a huge amount of interest and then deny it to the public but point out that the REAL cookbook is on the way. Hmmm … we have the new Spirit House music CD about to be released … might have to call the marketing people.

Read more about the Jamie Oliver email is a hoax.

One thing I have to say to Mr Oliver… “Dude, your Thai chicken curry recipe sucks! No fish sauce, palm sugar, shrimp paste – and virgin olive oil? – what are you thinking?”.

Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena

Stare at the cross in the middle of the image above and the dots will disappear – how cool is that?
Here’s a great site full or more Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena.
viaboingboing