Esther Ku

Today i got the giggles (i'm mildly in love) for Ester Ku

she's smart, funny and - in my eyes - incredibly beautiful. Also helps that she's a cool 10 years younger than me .. yummy.

Still working with barbells, trying to get to 3x3x30@ 12.5Kg

Maybe if i shape up really a lot, i can land a chick like that :p

The Life of a Restaurant Manager

I'll try to make a long story short; Recently i'v been trying out for a position as "Team Leader", which is a fancy name for Assistant Manager, with a big company, Withbread to name names, and going through the job description with the Manager i had clouds of dark thoughts going through my head.. that can be summed up by the word "boring".
Yep, instead of thinking how hard the job is going to be, my head was already on the "oh this is going to be tedious".

If you have any experience in the restaurant business you will know that a manager's job is anything but relaxing - essentially, you are a waiter who also does a million other things, and generally speaking you are the onoly one who really gives a crap about the business, with everyone else interested in one of the following, instead : Tips, Not Working, and Getting Out.

Withbread instead have a structure in place where managers do the management, and staff does the work, which is .. nice, if you think it can work, but i have my doubts.. if only, for the fact that i believe in "lead by example", and after all, what a restaurant really needs is really good staff, if hey had that, management needs would be minimal.

So, Withbread's managers do exclusively the management work. And apparently, so do many other businesses, here and elsewhere.
In fact, i was watching once again an episode of Kitchen Nightmares USA, and Gordon walking in to be greeted by a formidable looking lady claiming "i am the manager"; my thoughts were "and so you take the blame for everything that's wrong in here". But apparently no, a manager doesn't actually manage the restaurant.

You see, a restaurant is - like many other businesses - a system : 1) money is used to buy food and to transform it into the sold product 2) the product is sold to the customers 3) the cycle repeats. Other subsystems include the cleaning of the premises (part of 2), the serving (also 2), the cooking (part of 1), keeping all the structure functional , i.e., bills paid, machines working, etc.. (part of both 1 and 2), customers booking and table orders (part of 1 & 2), and so on. In my short experience, the person who makes sure the system works is called a Manager; if the general consensus is that this isn't the Manager's job, ok then, i will admit i am wrong, but then i am curious as to who exactly does that.

Or perhaps people think that this role can be split amongst different people, but then it leads to problems that we see happening every time a new episode of Kitchen Nightmares airs.

To be fair, there are many problems a new food business can have, but when we look at Kitchen Nightmares, the problem is always the same - in Chef Gordon's own words, "the food is shit".


Now, customers are normal people - believe it or not - and they *will* put up with poor service; hey, there's even a famous restaurant back home where the waiters yell obscenities at the customers (properly called "The Insult"), and it's packed every day.
But if the food's bad, there is no way you will stay afloat - nope, you'r going under.

End of story, i have a really, really hard time understanding what keeps today's managers from successfully managing a food premise : you know what the system is, if the food is bad, where can you go to locate the problem ??
Right, the Chef.
And if the Chef is bad, what do you do ?

I have never had an instant of hesitation to fire an inefficient staff person - people would not put up with a mechanic, a doctor or a plumber not doing their job properly, but for some reason they are willing to put up with a chef that is incompetent and/or does not perform properly.

In the end, dear Gordon, it's not the Chef who deserves a bollocking, it's the Manager; their very job description is "take shit for everything that happens here", and if you are not able, or willing to do it, don't call yourself a restaurant manager. It's an insult to those of us who really do the work.




Cheers,
Bokken

Why i think computers are awesome

see if you understand this one

The Sushi FAQ - The Definitive Guide to Sushi and Sashimi

The Sushi FAQ - The Definitive Guide to Sushi and Sashimi

just thought i'd try the "share this" button. i love sushi - and my dream is to be able to make it just like the chef at Hasekura used to make - Takeshi, here's to you kid, your sushi was the best i have ever tried.. and i tried a few.

WD hard drives are ok, after all.

Ok, two days ago something happened to my PC - a power-related problem, that ctually wound up frying one of the SATA ports on my motherboard, and it led to me discovering that i have made a mistake .. a grevious mistake, in my build, 3 years ago (!!!) that i just only discovered.

Yes, i somehow had a SATA power connector taking electricity from a fan cable - don't ask me how, i must have been really tired when i was setting up, because i missed that in PC building, a cable can take power as well as send it - ie, a connector isn't exclusively male or female, and after all these years i understand that this was the source of all my stability problems.

Well, just so that you should know, i can now excuse the drives - Western Digital is back at the top of the list - though, Seagate might just be as good, as they price everything lower.

I am such a n00b ..

Bokken at it again.

I need to get back to training.

It's been a few days since i realized i need to get back in shape, and by that i don't mean running in East Ham Central Park, but lifting weights and dieting. Today, for example, i have steamed broccoli florets (from Iceland, £1 a bag, two meals out of each bag) and plain boiled rice.

I guess the point of diet is mostly psychological, not trying to make your food tasty yet light, but to actually do without the taste aspect - otherwise, you are always craving for more.

So back to my crash diet, plain carbohydrates, zero fat, zero sugars, steamed vegetables, minute amounts of calories (except for rice), and mad static exercise. Coffee, taurine if you will (man that stuff is sooo harmful to health), creatine to power up during exercise, sleep on empty stomach, no breakfast, etc.. brutal.

One thing i learned during my last diet - besides the fact that i was right on everything i thought i knew - is that my body should consume, and spend, at least five-thousand calories a day to be on the healthy side, not feeling hungry and miserable but also being fit, but as you can immagine, that is truly impossible; you see, it's assumed in that statement that you get there by doing something fun, and since i'm not wrestling or swimming anymore, i have no way to get that much sport in my life. Also - i should mention - i have no money to even buy, 5K calories of good food.


I wish this blog was so much more .. than just whining. I'm listening to BBC news, now, open in iPlayer in another tab in Chrome, and they are talking about the purchase of the Typhoon (the "Eurofighter"), and of course i have something to say about that as well - as i have opinions, strong ones to boot, on just about everything i see, read about, and hear - but have no energy to write about all of it.. two things then i think i should do.

1) I'm not really enamored with blogging, but it's not bad - just an activity, nice but not really that productive.
I'm absolutely sure that better results would come if i stuck with one subject instead of making it a random whine blog, as people who chance upon it might keep coming back to it if they find stuff that they find useful;
However the reason i never did something like that, is because i have always found some better website than anything i could do, no matter what the subject.
For example, HERE is a brilliant website (all free, of course) that deals with - amongst other things - audio, and this guy is not only a qualified technician (or scientist, should i say, for it is science he deals with, even though we assume "scientist" means "researcher"), but he obviously has some real hands-on experience, amking him quite the authority on the subject. This i have seen in all subjects that i have any knowledge of, or that i enjoy and/or find myself good at, and should anyone need information on the subject, i would address them to that website or the other - one thing i would *not* do, is try to water down the web by setting up a not-quite-as-good website just to get attention, or "traffic". Example n.2 : my Advisor at Ingeus is a person very active in business, as in he "owns dating websites" and "sells ebooks" and "wrote a book about DJ'ing", and kudos to him, but.. his websites are crappy, and they are more of a ripoff than anything; eBooks are something you should give away, not sell, and finally he isn't really the authority on DJ'ing, so .. honesty, and being concerned with the wellbeing of my fellow men prevents me from trying to push my inferior products when better stuff/info is out there, expecially when the better stuff is free.
Sure, i know a thing or two about audio, but i'm far from the biggest guru on the web - and the same goes for all the people who post on YouTube their great efforts and pass themselves as kings of their trade when they are in fact buffoons who know jack shit. like THIS GUY - he thinks he's the shit, but i'v seen him do things downright abysmal - some even dangerous, and not only i don't think he is great, i feel he should be punished in some way for what he does.
If there is one thing i do well, it's .. well, that's hard to explain. But writing it down n a comprehensible form is even harder, and it's not something i could sell anyway. So, this blog will either get shut down or it will be reformatted to fulfill one of two purposes - make me look good in the face of possible employers, say, an audio blog, mostly filled with lies, or purpose two, to draw some traffic, strictly one subject, even if i don;t know shit about it - and if someone dies trying to follow my diet, fuck them.

2) Why not take a picture of my big fat belly and post it, then a new picture every day, and - since i know i can easily lose 60 pounds - make it into another wonder story.
Have just finished reading Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre, and .. i lost my train of thought. Bollocks.
Last books i read - in the last two months - Ubik, Bad Science, Franny and Zoey (salinger), Great Gatsby .. again, The Virgin and The Gipsy (dh lawrence), a Science Fiction Omnibus, The Siege of Nanking (history of the boxer rebellion .. tedious to say the least), a really bad book by Iain M. Banks (yep, The Business was great, but this one ... meh), and am still trying to read the Ulysses - but i will probably give up, since i'm still on chapter two.
So, maybe i will just get back into training and make a big fuss of it, forget all my principles, try to score some femaley attention, and make money i don;t deserve. And might just be better for it. Who knows.

uncertain future, here is london, 2011, BokkenUK.