Tuesday evening is always a pleasant want to spend with the FOBORG (Friends Of Ben OR Gerrod) gang. Stacey and I organised for this early dinner to be held at the new Punjabi Palace premises, and was rewarded with their delicious curries, Punjabi Naan and this time no (really) salty lassi! Thanks to Jason, Karl, Caroline, Suhail, Sarah and Stacey for providing the excellent company.
TheKua Gallery Online
I’ve also recently added a gallery of photo albums that will continue to grow. See the sidebar or visit http://www.thekua.com/gallery/.
House of Flying Daggers
Yesterday I managed to get along to see the House Of Flying Daggers before it stopped showing at the cinemas. I had seen the preview and it definitely looked like one of those movies you have to see on the big screen. Made more in the style of the movie, Hero, and starring one of the actresses (Ziyi Zhang) from both that movie and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this movie focuses less on the martial arts action and definitely more on the storyline and cinematography.
Let me warn you now, there is no mistake that this movie is based on a love-story with most of the conflict really there to build each character before a stunningly predictable finale, so be sure to indulge in the fighting scenes you do see. Admittedly the storyline succeeds with what it tries to do and manages to throw in a number of twists which I did not see coming (but I tend to be pretty naive in these things).
Cinematically this movie exceeds in being visually stunning, with each scene filled with backgrounds and costumes indulgently rich in both detail and colour. At times I felt like some of the scenes were only there to provide yet another opportunity at showcasing more detail, but they were all entertaining nevertheless.
The House of Flying Daggers is one movie you have to see, but make sure it’s at least once in the cinemas.
Moroccan at Mecca Bah
July 2004 saw Brisbane welcome the latest sister restaurant (named the same) of the apparently very popular Mecca Bah, first opened in Melbourne. Its Middle Eastern theme heavily influences all aspects of its new home situated at The Emporium in Fortitude Valley, from its oddly shaped yet vastly fashionable indoor and outdoor eating areas, the intricately decorated plates, bowls and dishes and finally its food and cocktail menu.
Although open for some time (or maybe because of it), this restaurant, that does not take bookings, is still hugely popular, with a living testament being a decent sized queue waiting to be seated through our entire evening there on Saturday night. The menu offers enough variety not to overwhelm, with decently priced main meals ranging from several types of tangines (casserole-like dishes), various middle eastern grill and (stick-style) kebabs both served with couscous as well as a good variety of turkish pizzas. They do offer starters (which we did indulge in) but we skipped their dessert offerings.
Dishes from all sections of the main menu were ordered by all. The Moroccan spice calamari with Turkish bean salad was extremely tender and my swordfish kebab packed full of flavour from its Middle Eastern spices went down a treat with its couscous salad (though not at all very spicy as described on the menu). The tangines were apparently okay, but the most striking dishes of the night had to be the uniquely shaped and great value for money Turkish Pizzas, enjoyed by all those that ordered them but could not be finished by them.
Service was pretty good especially considering the restaurant reached full capacity early on. Our waitress was extremely polite and responded extremely well to a number of our questions.
The Kua Rating: 9 out of 10 stars
In Transit
A few of us managed to make it to an event tonight that hadn’t been really heavily advertised. I had stumbled across a poster on a bus stop on my way home from work and was captivated by the mystery of an event touting the latest in Asian Art, Music and Film. Sponsored and promoted by Tiger Beer, the website Discover Tiger Beer had plenty of opportunity for people to apply for an invite to Brisbane’s “Transit” event.
Strangely enough (or maybe not so), the invite to “Transit” said to be at Platform 3 at Roma Street Station (a major Brisbane train station) at 7:30pm. Those of us who attended could not form any preconceptions because of the lack of detail on the invite – Were they really going to close a platform? Were we going to catch a train somewhere? Or would the event actually be held on a train?
I think we were all positively blown away by the evening that ensued. Transit was literally held on Platform 3 @ Roma Street Station, with the number of walls constructed turning the area into an art gallery. Live house music pumped throughout the night, accompanied by clips of modern Asian films and a combination of live performance and static art pieces. Free (Tiger) Beer, Wine and Water, as well as freshly cooked Asian dishes served in those little boxes you see mainly on American TV were also readily available through the entire night.
The crowd was a strange mix of different groups of Brisbanites, some dressing up (in suits), with others dressing down (t-short and shorts), but all with the consistent theme of being there to have a good time. Overall it was a very entertaining event for a Thursday night and was a definitely good way of breaking up the week with something different.
Wagamama Wa Sugokunai Desu Ne!
I ended up having dinner at the new Wagamama restaurant at the Emporium in the Valley tonight (courtesy of Suz and Al and a very entertaining evening with a friend of their’s, Josh- thanks guys!). I had heard good things about the other members of this chain (mainly centred in Sydney and Melbourne for Australia, but with many other numerous locations around the world), but was sad to leave the Brisbane one with a lot of my expectations shattered. Read more “Wagamama Wa Sugokunai Desu Ne!”
Sarah’s Last Meal at the House of Kua
Last time Marie and I had finally managed to sync up our schedules for another dinner, I had to unfortunately postpone the event due to the travelling that I was supposed to be doing at the start of this month. With a big promise to Sarah that we’d have her along at our next get together, and armed with the recently acquired knowledge that she would be heading to Sydney (pretty much permanently) over Easter, it looked like tonight was our only night to have one last feast together (at least at my place).
The pressure was on (yet again), with each dinner getting more difficult to prepare something different and memorable, so another three-course meal was planned, conjured, consumed and enjoyed by all. The menu for tonight consisted of:
- Entree: Bruschetta
- Main: Peri-Peri Roast Chicken served with Tex-Mex Potatoes, Roast Sweet Potatoes and Garlic, and a refreshing Salad (with cucumber, capsicum, corn, carrot, spanish onions, roasted pine nuts and dressed with a coriander, mint and lime yogurt dressing)
- Dessert:A White Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse served a top a Chocolate Meringue Base and accompanied by fresh sponge soaked in a Hazelnut Syrup and fresh berries.
Despite a little bit of last minute panicking and preparation, I think the night went well, especially considering it was a school night with not much time for real preparation. It was definitely fun having Michael, Marie and Sarah around for one last feast before Sarah heads off down south. We even tried out the game my sister had brought back from London. I was convinced that its literally “shocking” value would scare off any guests, but we all had a good laugh and managed get through a few rounds (at least on low power).
Not So Agile Operations
The last two weeks have been rather chaotic with the introduction of a whole set of new environments (one for User Acceptance testing, one for Performance testing, and one for our new Oracle database). We’ve had a number of issues moving to each of these environments, highlighted by both our own set of test suites and by our testing team.
Although all the new environments were supposed to be replicas of production, there were still many not-so-subtle and definitely unintentional and unnecessary differences (such as basic Oracle configuration of the NLS_DATE_FORMAT and NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT values). Working with my, it-doesn’t-work-until-it’s-proven (with a test) attitude, has now lead to a whole new suite of “Environment Acceptance” tests that we can now run against each of these environments to further narrow our scope of debugging to just our code.
It is of great relief to have feedback should these things go awry again, but I’m now concerned that a whole other part of IT (operations management including people like systems and database administrators) may be lacking the discipline (or is it the awareness and importance?) of continuous integration and testing.