The Triple Mix

I thought I'd nothing new to listen to but then just brewed up this triplet which nicely works out on these winter days.

1. A Winter's Solstice VI: A Windham Hill Sampler - A nice classical album. Just by look at the track names like Northern Lights, January Stars, Snow Dance, This Clearness Of Light - you know it's gonna be good :).
   


2. The Very Best Of Yanni: Yet another good (if not as great) keyboard fiesta. Nice tracks: Flight Of Fantasy, In The Morning Light, The Mermaid.
   


3. Maroon: Surprisingly good for those "missing" times when there is too much to do and absolutely nothing do. This my Barenaked Ladies Firsts which probably one can never get tired of hearing one more time.
   

Listen As: Random
The entire play list is available on Rhapsody.

Chinese New Year Festivities

While my wife would be celebrating Chinese New Year on more native land of Hong Kong, there would be quite a few events happening in NEw York city. The big parade is on Sunday 25th in Chinatown with dragons and lions, all red and gold, along with other events. Chinatown-Online gives nice little info on traditions of Chinese New Year and other festivities dates.

The major deal of New Year is, of course, lavish food festivities. There is a suprisingly large number of restaurants in NYC which will be offering special New Year meals, but here are some select few places to get the Year of the Monkey off to a good start (Chanoodle is the most recommended):

• Chanoodle - (212) 349-1495 - 79 Mulberry Street (Canal Street), Chinatown


• Congee - (212) 965-5028 - 98 Bowery (Near Hester Street)


• Dim Sum Go Go - (212) 732-0797 - 5 East Broadway (Chatham Square)


• Funky Broome - (212) 941-8628 - 176 Mott Street (Broome Street)


• Joe's Ginger - 212) 966-6613 - 113 Mott Street (Near Hester Street)


• Ping's Seafood - (212) 602-9988 - 22 Mott Street (Near Mosco Street)


• Sunrise 27 - 212) 219-8498 - 27 Division Street (Near Market Street)

(Courtesy: NYTimes)
However my personal choice would be the Rainbow platter at Penang, the Malaysian restaurant on Rt. 10.

Have a good new year! Sing Dan Fai Lok!

Venus And The Moon

If you live on East Coast and if you looked in to West in last few hours you might have seen a real bright blob of light. It's so bright and has "burning aura" (literally looks like flames) around it that I thought it will soon fall down as huge shooting star. So I just fired up my copy of TheSky software to see what's going on and came out with some neat surprise. Well, this is Venus and for next month or so it's gonna be visible long after sunsets and would stay pretty well above horizon (which is not very usual for Venus). With it's current magnitude of -4.0 that's way way too bright for normal night sky standards and it's gonna be even more brighter. If you trace path of Venus, it seems Venus and Moon both comes really really close (almost touching) on 23nd Feb, 2004 at around 17:34 which also happens to be Sunset time! And the beauty of the whole scene during this Sunset is that it would be really nice crescent moon. So watch out and put this date and time on your calendar!