Palacia de Orienta - Tune in olive oil

Purchased Feb 2010

Impressions:  Colour was nice - somewhat orange-yellow .   Meat was loosely packed - not in a solid hunk.   Texture and flavour seemed mildly better than typical North American canned tuna.  If anything, it may be more to do with what I suspect to be a better quality olive oil and probably better attention to salting and temperature control during the cooking process - than with just plain better tuna selection.   I’d buy it over North American brands, but I wouldn’t rave over it.

Clams in salt water

Purchased Feb 2010

White Tuna in Olive Oil - no salt added.

Purchased Feb 2010

Northern Tuna in Olive Oil

Purchased in Feb 2010.

This was recommended from another food website.

Not opened yet.

On Sunday, a lot of the tourist sights close early and some shops are not open at all.   And Monday too, lots of businesses are not open.

The people are very nice.  Traffic is surprising civilized.  Not like Paris or Rome at all, drivers don’t honk their horns, they actually stop at pedestrian crossing areas but is not a traffic light area.  I don’t have to fear for my life crossing the street like in other parts of the world, like in Thailand or Beijing.  Drivers seem fairly competent compared to other cities.

It’s easy to get some cheap breakfast.  Just some coffee, espresso, pastries, and spanish ham sandwich (similar to prosciutto) are easy to get anywhere.

Went to the oldest restaurant in the world, the Sobrino de Botin .

Ordered the baby squid with squid ink see picture.  It looked totally nasty, but was incredibly delicious.   Restaurant is very touristy but  food was good.  Also had garlic soup with egg.  That was a little different.  Had some stereotypical people come in the restaurant like this asian guy who came in the restaurant and immediately took a video of the restaurant, a bunch of New York women arguing very loudly about some trivial issue, and the quietest group in the whole restaurant was my group - the quiet well mannered Canadians. 

Botin Restaurant, Madrid, Spain

Calle Cuchilleros, 17
Madrid
Tel. 913664217
Metro: La Latina

Price:  $15 cdn, around 10 Euros .

Purchased in Madrid, Spain , Feb 2010 .

In very light olive oil.   No additives according to the box.  Did not taste any strong salted flavour.  Light coloured tuna.  Clean looking strips of tuna, ie no roughly cut strips of tuna

Serving it on a tomato, red bell pepper, spanish olive salad.  Good match with salad.  Overall salad was a good way to serve the tuna.    The tuna was very light and had a delicate flavour.  The olive oil helps give the tuna a nice smooth moist texture.  Definitely better than your typical North American can of tuna but is it worth $15?  Only if you dress up a dish like the mentioned salad and make a really good presentation out of it.  This tuna is something you use to show off like smoked salmon or foie gras although the tuna lacks the flavour dominance of either.  The high quality tuna is more of a pleasant surprise because it’s not the dry tasteless tuna we’re used to eating.

Apparently, one of the things Spain is known for are their canned seafood.   The following are some brands and products that we’ve procured.   When we open it and taste them, we’ll give a review.

The first is Albo Calamari in squid ink sauce.

freefilesync

http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/

I think the Dell Network Assistant has been triggering my access alarms on my network .   Not 100% sure yet, but this software would suck if it’s doing port scans whenever someone connects their laptop to my network.

Looks promising:

http://www.splunk.com

The solution at the adobe website did not work - kb401528.

What did work was to use Terminal , use sudo (or su) , then cd to \Library\Preferences\ , then rename “FLEXnet publisher” to “xFLEXnet publisher”  then just start any CS3 product.

keywords:  ”Chicken of the VNC” , “chook vnc” ,  jollyfastvnc

Since jollyfastvnc has changed from alpha/beta development to official release version under some sort of try-before-buying distribution model,   I’ve started to look around for something that will satisfy my need to be cheap and my need to not feel guilty about using something that I should pay for.   Also something better than Chicken of the VNC.    Lo and behold, it appears that a vnc client is built right into Mac OS X Leopard!    Just click on “Go” –>  ”Connect to Server” , and type in the vnc server address, i.e.   vnc://some.server.address       

(username might be blank, if your vnc server does not need a username)

Observations:  

- the text to speech is not bad…  still pronounces a lot of street names incorrectly though.

Pros: 

- Screen is very clear and bright.   Even works well with polarized sunglasses.

- Menu system is more logically arranged that that of the TomTom series

- the bluetooth link with the cellphone for handsfree calling works very well.   Even with the noisy interior of a 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee, the other person on the call can still hear the conversation very clearly

Cons: 

- the usb car adapter seems to be very specific to the Garmin.   Attempting to use a third party car adapter puts the Garmin into computer connect mode, and you end up losing gps usage while it is connected.