nacken

… before we start our first road trip of the summer.

Hopefully instead of nice Italian food we will indulge in French and mainly Spanish cuisine!! Paella, ole!

First time Ritsu experienced the nice outdoor seating at Al Castello. And we had a new waiter, Italian, but married to a Japanese lady (so he spoke very nice English) and they have a 6 year old daughter. Could be a nice play-pal for Julius.

Finally I can write openly about this. And it is a long read if you bother to click for the full version.

Short version: In January some online troll left racist comments on this and Ritsu’s blog. As the comments originated in Germany, I quickly involved the police and the local press.

They found the racist who thought he would not leave traces online and by now he has been prosecuted. He has to pay a quarter of his annual income (which is probably rather low for a student, I still hope it will teach him a lesson) and I hope the money goes to some benefit or good cause.

A rather sad story and I am still puzzled about what this guy’s motivation was.

Read the whole story here.

In case you missed that post from pretty much exactly 5 years ago … I made this fantastic chicken salad again. Having found mango and mint, but no macademia nuts (replaced them with cashew). It was very yummy … until it started pouring and we had to move inside.

From the 6/27/04 post:

I came across this recipe and I think this truly is the best chicken salad in human history:

- bake a few chicken breasts in the oven, cover them with a little olive oil, they should be done after 25 minutes .. cut them into bite size pices
- cut a mango or some frozen mango bits (about the same amount as the chicken)
- slice and dice a little chili, a green capsicum (bell pepper) and 2 stalks of cellery
- roast some roughly chopped macademia nuts
- make sure you get some fresh mint leaves!!! chop them ..

add all this together…

dressing :
- 1/2 cup of mayonaise
- teaspoon curry powder
- 3/4 cup plain yoghurt
- big spoon of mango chutney

Mix it all .. and love it

It had to come to this … bitten by the twitter bug!

I have been struggling a long time to find any tangible use or reason why to tweet …

I had played around with it a bit but then lost interest. Then recently we pondered at work how we could utilize it and thus I gave it another try and slowly I see what it can be good for. With the current workload I keep procrastinating ‘regular’ blog updates … but writing a short update on twitter and add a picture … so much easier!

The idea is that I will tweet when there is a fun pic or story to share (which probably will then later show up on the blog here anyways), but thanks to twitter you get it right away, maybe even on your mobile phone (This does not work in Italy … yet)

I will also tweet when there is a new blog post published …

So .. go ahead, follow nackendotcom on twitter to get the latest news. I highly recommend TweetDeck as a nice desktop application to sort out your twitter stuff (e.g. use several accounts) and even follow your facebook status updates. They also have a free version for the iPhone.

On the way to the movie theater: nap time

Then a pit stop at McD

And then off to the movies. Great movie, even better in 3D .. but the projectionist screwed up, at around 30 mins we had some overlay of some Zach Affron movie, the 3D effect was gone .. once they got onto the issue it was clear that the movie came from a DVD like device, as they were able to skip through the movie like chapters on a DVD (which is not possible with a movie reel)

It was a fun experience to have the 30+ people in a 250 seat theater shout ‘forward, forward, one more, stop! .. back . BACK!!!’

I very much recommend Coraline .. but I have to say you don’t need to watch it is 3D .. it is a nice extra .. but not necessary. Also, the soundtrack is very nice and is constantly on around breakfast time. Julius had no issue about the movie being in Italian and kept chatting about it … in Italian.

We had started doing BBQ on 5/16 and since then I have used our little 5€ grill every weekend, sometimes twice.

What was missing was the opportunity to sit outside. We had looked at many kinds of balcony furniture, but it was always too pricy (not knowing how often we would actually use it) and we were just looking for some cheap-o plastic stuff.

And finally we found it: 3.99€ per chair and 16.90€ for the table. Comfortable and easy. And so we had 2 dinners this weekend outside. Friday I made Jerk Chicken and today it was 3 different kinds of sausages. Yummy! I just need to find better mustard now.

Like many things this year (Apartment, Job) things are just floating in our direction … this time a new car. Again we were not looking for anything new, but we got this great offer from a trusted source … and since our next 3 trips are all road trips, we are more than happy to have a bigger, newer, more comfortable car.

Say hello to our Mazda Tribute V6. Since renting SUVs back in the states I always wanted to have one, but always thought they are out of our price range. But this baby is just fantastic and we will test it thoroughly on our upcoming trip to France / Spain.

(Now I just need to sell our trusty Mercedes A-Class)

If you know a bit about the blogosphere, then you know BoingBoing, a blog about all kinds of interesting things. And getting a story published there is a fun experience. Suddenly your counter goes beserk.

We usually only get 200 - 300 hits a day (down from 600, in the Julius baby / Fiji days) … but the day they published my report on the mysterious hail cannons, it went to 4000! The video on vimeo.com was watched 3000+ times in a single day.

It was also interesting to find out how many websites out there simply repost stories that are published on BoingBoing, just to get a bit of the ad revenue.

Here a link to a pdf of the story with comments. And here the original BB link.

Actually, this is not the first time nacken.com got boingboinged. There was this post about war on bloggers in Fiji.

Actually, they don;t really have this here … seems to be a very American thing … but we have funny local holidays (San Giovanni today) which do not correspond with the UN holiday calendar. So, Julius’ school was closed and Ritsu and I had to work … and we brought Julius with us.

I had seen that before with other kids, even younger than him. His friend Andrea for example, playing quietly by himself.

Julius was pretty ok, but a bit shy around new people. While he was in my office he drew quietly, but mommy’s office is so much more interesting, there is candy .. and toys !!! No wonder that he distracted her a lot more.

After lunch I took him, we picked up Chidi and I dropped them off at the playground close to our house, which Julius was very happy about.

Overlooking the not so far mountains, we are getting some really dramatic sunsets here.

I am always excited when Ritsu’s boss Malcolm recommends a lunch gathering. He just knows all those hidden, fantastic places. And again, he delivered. Check out Villa Tiboldi.

Based on some technical trouble (car electronics were down, thus no GPS) we arrived half an hour late and everyone else had already finished a bottle of bubbly.

We quickly ordered and soon our starters arrived. Ritsu and I had opted for the 5 course “Menu della degustazione”. I forgot to snap a picture of the menu. So I am trying from memory:

Everyone got a small scoop of home made Russian salad as pre-appetizer. While yummy, somehow I did not expect that in Piemonte.

Anchovies in 2 different ways, one marinated in fresh lemon juice, the other oven grilled. Delicious, though the marinated fish came across as a bit bitter.

Crispy eggs: Quail eggs baked to perfection in one layer of puff pastry. Evil stuff! Very good. Could not figure out what the green sauce was it came with.

This 3 meat appetizer that Patrizia had looked also very nice (not part of our menu). Did not get around to try. Maybe next time.

Mint ravioli filled with goat cheese in a very sweet nutty sauce with crispy cheese on top. (This one had very little mint or goat flavor, the sweet sauce was too strong. This could have passed as a dessert)

Guinea fowl from the oven for Ritsu, while I had changed to

the lamb “sambucana“, which was tender and lovely.

We all were treated to a little pre-dessert: Some evil milky cream with fresh apricot mousse.

While Ritsu has the something + rhubarb sorbet, my passion fruit souffle had very little passion fruit flavor (I am still wondering if that was a translation error, the Italian menu called it ‘il passione, la souffle’ or something like that).

We had some delicious wines with that. For red we had ordered some local 2006 wine, but received 2 bottles of 1996 instead, which were great. But being summer and hot, I stayed mainly with the white Roero Arneis. Fantastic stuff.

Julius was the only kid at the table and quickly focused (after he finished his pasta) on turning paper, glue and whatever else he found into a marvelous piece of artwork. He chatted away with Patrizia in Italian, she later confirmed that his level of Italian is the same as an Italian kid’s that age, and to our surprise, that he has a slight Piemontese accent.

The location of the villa is outstanding. Up in the wine hills, overlooking vineyards and a beautifully situated pool (reserved for staying guests, not eating guests). Great outdoor seating, great service. We enjoyed it so much that we are have already planning on coming back to stay booked a night, we will then enjoy the pool and eat some more!

A few more pics might be added later

This weekend we went to the Roero wine area and after a loooong lunch we sat with friends outside and looked fearfully at the looming, darker growing clouds.

When suddenly we heard a loud boom in the distance. Followed by more booms closer by … and within minutes it sounded like we were in the middle of a WW1 battlefield. Listen to the sound (while enjoying the lovely hill side panorama) in the below video:

Totally baffled about what was going on, the locals explained to us that this is the noise of air cannons, which shoot hot, compressed air against the clouds in order to prevent hail. I had never heard of anything like this and an extensive google search in several languages only yielded in a story about using air cannons in NZ against birds who plunder the vineyards.

I am very curious about the theory behind this, I will also try next time to get actual images of these cannons. Maybe they don’t look like cannons at all! I am also wondering how tourists and locals cope with that noise and why the heck has no one ever written about this before?

If anyone has a good link on that topic, please leave it in the comments.

[update] Ah, one has to know that they are called ‘Hail Cannons‘ to find information online! There is apparently no scientific evidence that they actually work. They have been around since the 18th century and you can buy them at www.hailcannon.com Seems that fights among farmers who use them and peace loving neighbors are common.