Good Food: Ngoc Lan

In a previous post I ranted against a local "Subways" shop as a prime example for bad food in Darmstadt. I want to share an example for good food today.

Asian restaurants are often laden with kitschy decoration and the menu is mainstreamed to comfort the local taste. Also you have the same dishes with only small variations everywhere. Traditional style cooking is rarely found anywhere.

A very nice example of stylish interior and excellent cooking is the "Ngoc Lan", small Vietnamese restaurant located a bit outside the city centre. You find it at the corner of Bismarkstraße and Steubenplatz, see the map embedded below.


Größere Kartenansicht

We come here once every while and the quality of the food is always great. The cooking is very traditional compared to the standard issue Asia Kim or Dong Dong in more prominent areas of the town. Well cooked, spicy and with fresh herbs, the menu lists many unique meals very different from the usual "fried noodles with chicken/pork/beef". A selection of well mixed, fruity Cocktails can be had as well.

The single room is bright and nicely decorated, calm in minimalist way but not frugal. Go there after dark to experience the full effect of the lighting. There is parking space behind the restaurant, about 15 places in the lot. No need to make a reservation, in fact we never found more than a couple of tables occupied whenever we came there. Which is a pity, because it means it won't stay open for much longer. So go there and enjoy before the place closes for good.

Pockets Picked in Paris

Apart from the obvious Pun, this is what unfortunately happened to me a few days ago. I was buying some snack before entering the train back home at Paris Gare de l'Est and was probably spotted tucking my wallet away. I put it in an outside jacket pocket, a circumstance that immediately retaliated itself as I stood waiting by the platform for my colleagues to arrive.

I was approached by an Asian looking women of middle age and asked for the train to Basel. It struck me odd to be asked for this for my obviously tourist look (after all I was carrying a backpack and a camera bag) but not odd enough to raise my suspicion. While talking to the woman, which took a good amount of time I felt something brush my backpack but again it did not alarm me enough to make me look around. I think I was set up with a classic distraction manoeuvre to give the thief opportunity to pick the wallet from my pocket. It can not have taken him/her more than a couple of seconds despite the pocket being zipped shut.

I did not notice the loss before the conductor asked for my ticket, a good while after the train left the station. I was baffled, but quickly recovered and phoned the emergency hotline of my bank to have the banking and credit cards suspended, avoiding additional financial losses apart from some cash that was in my wallet.

Still, I've now lost my ID, drivers license, credit and banking cards and a couple of other documents that can all be replaced, still there is a significant amount of time and money to be spent now to have them all back. Definitely gives you a sour taste being ripped off like this.

What to learn from this? Crowded places should keep you alert. Strangers approaching you should make you look around for other strangers standing close. Wallets should not be kept in outward pockets. Documents should be kept apart from the money to limit the damage and the amount of time to spend recovering from the loss.

Don't be evil, but a little dense, maybe?

Look what the cat just brought in. Holy cow. Only miscreants and evil-doers fear Google tapping their into their privacy, but the Righteous have nothing to worry about. And it's all the governments fault, anyway.

But this doesn't come as a surprise, does it? Google is an information broker so how can they share anyones concern about information not being another good to sell. However, it's primarily information about people that they collect to drive their advertisement business. This is hardly neutral goods.

I'm wondering if with all this business background Google can still be the best resource when it comes to Internet research. Either the web complexity has grown to a point where they cannot come up with good search results any more or they weigh the results too much towards what their customers think you should be seeing, anyway I found it's becoming increasingly difficult to have good search results with Google. Too many hits are on proxy sites that just pretend to have the keywords you look for and instead reflect to some shady online shops claiming to sell "cold fusion energy cheap"?

So Google has their own DNS now

Google announces their own public DNS now. Some seem to think it's a good move and a fundamental threat to ISPs who are diluting the neutrality of the net. However, I tend to side with the conspirationalists who see it as an attempt of Google to gather even more information about what people do online.

Using the Google DNS you basically allow them insight into any connection your PC performs while it is online. Not about the data exchanged, but at least about what other computers you are connecting to, and not just during web browsing, but also email, instant messaging, chatting, peer-to-peer networking and so forth.

Of course my ISP provides their own DNS and uplink routers are normally configured to use the ISP DNS servers, but I bet Google's Chrome OS will by default use Googles DNS. Guess what I'm not going to use on my private machines.

Now, unfortunately ISPs are known to tamper with DNS queries of their users. If you ever tried to surf a non-existing site you probably found your browser displaying some "navigation aiding" by courtesy of your friendly Internet provider. While meant to be helpful towards their users it bears a threat as well. There you have an infrastructure which is specifically built to intercept connection attempts. While I can't say I actually appreciate this, the way Google harvests data is seriously creeping me out just as much.

Some photos from the summer

I only recently found time to process and upload some photos I took during our summer holiday this year. Instead of going abroad we decided to travel Germany, there are quite a few places we've never been. This year we went East, visiting Thuringia and Saxony. I've uploaded a selection to Flickr, with more to come. Enjoy today some impressions collected visiting Dresden, which marked the end point of our journey.