Year: 2006

My sister-in-law’s family is leaving on Sunday, so we decided to have a farewell session today in one of the many Limassol restaurants. There was a leap towards Chinese cuisine among the few of us, so we opted for Jin Chao restaurant.

Olga and I discovered Jin Chao a bit more than a year ago. But we were only using the delivery option. Today we decided to try it out inside out.

To tell you the truth, I was surprised. Positevely surprised that is. I’ve been to many Chinese restaurants – some as simple as an empty room, others as decorated as a palace. Jin Chao is somewhere there in the middle. There is simplicity, and some minor works are not yet finished, but overall it looks great. Both inside and outside.

One of the outstanding points is furniture. It has some really classy old-fashioned furniture. It looks expensive and feels comfortable and solid. Chairs, tables, and there is also this nice woden curtain, which separates tables, but still leaves the feeling of a large room. You know there are other people at the next table, but you don’t see them at all.

The service is excellent too. We’ve been served by two waiters, and both of them were extra pleasing – kind, smiling, and always nearby.

The food was as good as usual. Of course, it tasted somewhat better from a real plate, than being served from plastic container used for delivery.

If you’re looking for a nice Chinese place to eat at, or to call for a delivery order, give Jin Chao a try. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

I have totally switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. This was the fastest switch ever. And the most surprising one too. You see, I’m spending more than half of every day in my feed aggregator. That’s a lot of time. Needless to say, Bloglines is one of my favourite tools. And we all know how difficult it is to move away from one. Especially, when it does the job.

As I mentioned earlier, I was going to try the new version of Google Reader. And so I did. I found myself two hours later glued to it. And couldn’t leave it. And what is even more surprisng, I haven’t checked into my Bloglines account ever since. It was an instant switch.

Bloglines is a great tool, but Google Reader is almost perfect. It has a number of its own little glitches and annoyances, but it works so great that I need no other.

And just in case you’re interested, here are the things I want to see fixed in Google Reader:

• Feed options. I have a whole bunch of feeds and it’s no fun going through all of them in one page. Bloglines has a nice way of managing feeds on a feed by feed basis. I just click to read the feed, and I have a nice feed settings link right up there. There is one in Google Reader too, but currently it only has “Unsubscribe” as the only action. This will probably change soon though. I am waiting for a way to change feed tags for example.
• Manual sorting. Google Reader now has this folder-like look with tags, like many other RSS readers do. The only problem though is that there is no way to sort tags, except for alphabetically. That’s way too limited. I need manual sorting. I want to have feeds from my friends and family up there at the top, no in the F-section (Friends, Family). There is a workaround to tag those feeds with _friends and _family, but it looks ugly and feels hackerish.
• RSS feeds for tags. There is a way now with Google Reader to mark every tag either private or public. And to easy embed items from a certain tag to a webpage, via just a couple of clicks. What I want instead, is to have an RSS feed for this tag. So that I can have a tag like “funny” and all items that I tag with it, will appear in the feed, which I could then share easily with my friends and family. That’s like forwarding jokes without annoying people. And, if it is in the form of RSS feed, it’s pretty easy to embedded into the website too.

That’s about it. Oh, well, there is a little bug with new items counting, but every RSS reader that I’ve seen passed through this stage at one time or another. With all the smart people at Google, I’m sure it won’t take them long to fix it.