September 2007 Archives

Just yesterday I bought US$100 worths of books from Amazon which cost me an additional $50 shipping to Australia. I'm never quite sure whether I'm still getting a great deal after the shipping charges are included but I really can't be bothered manually checking umpteen different stores local and overseas to find out where I can find the cheapest price for each of the 7 books I ordered, taking into account the combined postage if dealing with multiple book stores.

Enter AddAll. I just discovered this site and as a book nerd its bloody awesome. The key features that make this site rock are 1. it takes into account your destination country which is important to take into account postage costs, and 2. it'll search for multiple books and return you the best overall package. Holy crap, its like someone finally made computers do what they're good at - crunch lots of combinations - to save us poor human beans time and money (literally! :).

There were no ads that I could see and according to the FAQ AddAll makes its money through affiliate commissions - that's perfectly fine by me.

I'm doubly glad that someone's already done this because if they hadn't I was about to spend months of my life hacking something up. Big thumbs up.

Mark, Phil, and I dined at the Gaucho Grill on Thursday night. Its an Argentine restaurant formerly in Stanmore, but now in Kirribilli, serving what Argentinians eat most of - meat and cheese. :)

We had a mixed entree consisting of an empanada (like a beef pastie), morcillo (blood sausage) and some weird cheese omelette thing which was extremely salty. But tasty. And of course, some bread on the side ... in classic Argentine style - it was at least 8 days old, very hard, and very dry. I'm not dissing the food btw - this is exactly how it would be in Argentina!

Mains - well there's only one option. The parillada all around. Its a mixed grill so you get a bit of chorizo, grilled chicken, grilled pork, steak, asado (ribs). The only thing wrong with the picture was that it came with a dressing of vegetable! In Argentina meat never comes with vegies. ;)

We shared 2 flans for dessert ... but to be perfectly honest the flan was just an excuse to have some dulche de leche. We also asked if they had any mate and to our surprise (delight?) our friendly host brought out a cup. Its quite a bitter tea.

Throughout the meal we reminisced about our trip to Argentina and Chile in 2003. Laughs all around as we remembered the English fella who "squealed like a pig" as he dove headfirst down Volcan Villarica after losing his footing on the side of the icey volcano; memories of staying in the big creepy house in Frutilla with the crazy old wheelchair guy who was hacking up a leg of ham with a saw; fond memories of the oversized schnitzel rolls called milanesa over there; and of course who could forget the jamon y queso rolls .. or the pizzas with a solid inch thick layer of queso (cheese). Seriously.

Our fave place over in that part of the world was Cerro Fitzroy. The lake had the bluest, clearest water I have ever seen.