My favourite restaurants in Luxembourg

SushiI just downloaded and installed the new Skype 3.1 which now includes SkypeFind. This feature “lets you recommend and share your favourite local businesses with the entire Skype community”. A nice idea, hopefully it won’t get overwhelmed with spam like the comment function of my blog.

So far, there were only two restaurants listed in Luxembourg, so I added my 3 favourite places. After providing valuable free content to Skype, I’m going to post my mini-reviews here as well. I might come back later to update this post (there are so many great restaurants in Luxembourg it’s hard not to gain weight). As I’m a vegetarian, the restaurants mentioned below are veggie-friendly. Should you happen to know any other great restaurants in Luxembourg that you think I should check out, please leave a comment (note that I don’t like very formal places and no, seafood isn’t vegetarian even if Chi-Chi’s thinks otherwise).

Restaurant Royal Chine: My favourite restaurant in Luxembourg due to the great choice of vegetarian dishes. Of course, they serve traditional Chinese food, too, as well as some Korean specialities (like Kimchi). It seems there’s a Chinese restaurant on every street in Luxembourg now, but this one really stands out and I suspect many of the friends and family members who come to visit me actually just want me to take them to the Royal Chine. 😉

Disclosure note: I’m good friends with the owners and designed their webpage (for free). However, this doesn’t make anything I wrote above less accurate or true. In fact, you can take advantage of my “guanxi” and send me whatever sincere comment you might have concerning this restaurant and I’ll mention it to the lǎo bǎn next time I go there. Or you could pretend being a friend of mine to see if you get a discount.

Restaurant Star of Asia: Lovely Indian restaurant with great food, relaxed atmosphere and very friendly service. Popular with locals and expats alike. My favourite dish is Bhagara Baigan (Aubergine curry) plus Chilli Naan (Indian bread). I’m getting hungry right now just from writing this comment. 😉

Disclosure note: I’m good friends with the owners, designed their webpage (for free) and also did an ad for them which was printed in Paperjam magazine. This shouldn’t make you think that I’d write an embellished review. Quite to the contrary, I wouldn’t consider designing a website for a bad restaurant!

Ristorante Dal Notaro: This would be the perfect Italian restaurant – if only it was closer to my home! 😉 Seriously, I love going there because it’s always a totally enjoyable experience. Great food, great atmosphere, what more could you want? Wine, you say? They have a superb selection of great (mostly Italian) wines, too!
The menu is apparently only available in Italian, but you can always ask the waiter to translate. My favourite dishes: Melanzane e mozzarella (starters) and Pappardelle alla trilogia di funghi.

Disclosure note: Nope. I wish, but there’s nothing to disclose. No connection other than me often going there.

BTW, the “sushi” picture above isn’t really related to this article as it was taken at a Japanese restaurant in Taichung, Taiwan. No luck finding a veggie-friendly Japanese restaurant in Luxembourg so far.

vtiger CRM 5.0.3 release announced for April

vtiger CRM - photo montage using iStockphoto file no. 2093341vtiger announced today that the newest version of its popular open source CRM software is going to be released at the beginning of April.

I had installed their software some months ago and found it to be very powerful and promising, but still a bit too buggy for my taste. I’ll certainly have a look at the new “solid and bug-less” 😉 release and post a review.

JAJAH can’t make calls to Taiwan anymore

Taipei 101 on a rainy dayI have to admit it has been a while since I last used JAJAH. As I’m sitting in front of the PC most of the day, Skype is just a tiny bit more convenient. Still, I was disappointed to find out that it’s currently not possible to make calls to Taiwan with JAJAH.

Here’s what their support had to say: “[…] The service to [Taiwan] is temporarily unavailable due to regulation issues. Please note that we cannot provide specific dates for when certain destinations will be available. […]”

🙁

The danger of being paid for links

Risky BusinessWith “monetize your blog / site” ads popping up all over the blogosphere, I’d just like to quickly point out that there might be side effects other than those usually associated with suddenly becoming rich. Consider what allegedly happend to MangoSauce (possibly NSFW): “Mango Sauce was penalised because I sold links through www.text-link-ads.com. A vengeful Google docked my “reputation” score thereby cutting referrals to the site by 75%.”

Now only Google knows if this is what actually happend, indeed there could be many reasons for being demoted on the search engine’s result pages, thereby receiving less traffic. However, while it seems to be unclear if selling links can actually damage your site’s ranking, Google’s disapproval of link selling has been very clear.

Note that I’m not saying “don’t do it” and I won’t even touch the ethical aspects of paid links. All I’m saying is “if you’re thinking about selling links, think twice, because there’s a chance your site’s ranking might suffer”.

Das Jahr des Schweins

Am 18.02.2007 beginnt im chinesischen Kulturkreis das Jahr des (goldenen) Schweins (金豬年). Das fiel mir gerade ein, als ich auf Spiegel Online gelesen habe, dass Media-Märkte per Abmahnung gegen ein Blog mit Parodien der Schweine-Werbung vorgehen. Wobei es viel einfacher sein dürfte, einem Deutschen das chinesische Jahr des Schweins zu erklären als einem Chinesen das (weltweit wohl einmalige) saublöde deutsche Abmahnwesen.