Month: October 2003

Baby Kasutera vs Namagashi

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When I was in Tokyo a while ago with my friends, we bought a bag of little grilled cakes with sweet beans inside. I had always called these things “manju,” but I was corrected and told they were “baby kasutera.” I have since done a little more investigation.

The general phrase wagashi refers to the whole class of Japanese sweets.

Kasutera is the Japanese rendering of “castella,” apparently a type of sponge cake. They are in a subclass of wagashi called yakigashi, “grilled sweets.”

The type of wagashi I am used to is called namagashi – “fresh sweets.”

  • Most of what I make and consume at home are various kinds of dango (simple sweetened pounded rice), or
  • daifuku-mochi (the kind with the anko inside).
  • I already knew “yokan,” solid bars of bean jelly.

Japan Wagashi Association

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Japan Wagashi Association. “Wagashi” is “sweets”

This site is pretty intense- now you can link to hundreds of sweets stores all over Japan.

There is also a section with an index of all their members, indexed in several ways:

  1. every shop in Tokyo, sorted by district

  2. by the shop name in a giant list

  3. by sweet variety name, sorted by first letter

I think I need to make a big printout of the “shops by sweet name” list and make it a checklist, working my way through the alphabet until I’ve eaten every variety or I drop dead.
Web link of note: Japan Wagashi Association
(At http://www.wagashi.or.jp/)

Martin Yan

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Diane was busy tonight so I was going to go home and just code- but then Emily called me up and said she had some free Chinese food available. Turns out it was with Martin Yan at his new restaurant.

So, I went with her to Yan Can in Santa Clara- there was a non-profit benefit there, and the foundation she worked for had tickets… We came late and the only seats remaining were outside (no heaters!) but that was ok- I think Em was sick of the non-profit scene for the day and just wanted a break. Our waitress, Emma, was extremely cool and took care of us.

This particular Yan Can had just opened for business, and Martin Yan himself was there. He did a small floor show after the appetizers were served to entertain the non-profit people. He showed us how to debone a chicken (after giving it a massage), and how to cut garlic and skin ginger with a giant meat cleaver. Amazingly, I don’t even remember how he tied all these things together (we didn’t even have chicken, we had beef and vegetables!) but somehow it made sense at the time.

Mr. Yan is a master at self-promotion. During his routine he promoted his new cookbook, parts of the regular menu at the restaurant, and the line of knives he sells, but again, it made sense at the time.

I have heard rumors about how he puts on a fake accent for his TV show, and I have to say that unless he was doing his act the entire time we were there, even when he was exhausted and signing photos, that just isn’t true. But in a way… who cares! He was cool and I had a good time.

Diane was busy tonight so I was going to go home and just code- but then Emily called me up and said she had some free Chinese food available. Turns out it was with Martin Yan at his new restaurant!

Dengue Fever

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Awesome. It’s basically 1960’s acid beach rock, in Khmer. Very cool. Check out their web site.

Apparently there is a whole scene in the background of this CD: a reviewer on Amazon says

It’s amazing that the late Cambodian superstars Sin Sisamouth & Ruos Srey Sothear are finally being acknowledged and appreciated outside of the Khmer community. Both are paid homage to on this debut CD from Dengue Fever.

Whoa! Who?! I guess I have some serious homework to do.

B0000996H5

MT: More on Individual Archives

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I’m still designing on this “individual archive” problem. To recap, I want:

  • each individual posting should have its own page
  • different categoried postings will have different look and feels
  • the “link” postings, posts which are just a URL, will either have a very minimal page or (preferably) not be archived at all.

I think I have a few more ideas on implementation options.

  • Stylesheet reference and inclusion is in the HTML of the header, which is generated by MT… could use this to specify a particular CSS file based on the name of the posting category. So for example, every individual posting archive page would have a stylesheet for most of the style, and also another which specifies categroy-specific layout styling.
  • For the actual formatting of different categories, we could have just the raw information from the entry (e.g. MTEntry, MTExtended, MTExcerpt, the date etc), each field in its own named DIV. Then have a serious CSS to determine the entire layout of the page, generating HTML…
  • OR could instead just list all the code for every type of entry, and then specify in the CSS which ones are visible- just like the Amazon list on the right margin here. So for example there could be a thing which formats the Link postings into

    here’s a link I was looking at today:
    <a href=”<$MTExcerpt$>”><$MTTitle$></a>

    which only is visible if the posting is in the Link category.

  • Another option: the
    MTMacro plugin. You could use this to generate blocks of code based on the category. Used in conjunction with one of the above, this would be the nicest on the user end, since not all of the code would appear in every single page… However the complexity goes totally crazy and I would have yet another technology to debug on my site. I dunno, it’s a possibility.
  • To continue on the previous article about this, I found a tweak someone implemented where he made .htaccess redirects in certain directories. I could make a template for that, and list redirects for all the articles that are not in the proper location (like an individual posting in category A which has been generated with style B and is thus in directory B). This would complete the plan where we generate all articles in all styles and ignore (link around) the ones that don’t match.