Blogs

Another release for the downloadable Dilbert Strip Index (DSI) is available on the download page. Version 3.02 has the following new features:

- Strips added up to 2010-07-31. Some spelling and grammar corrections to older strips.
- No more strip descriptions containing lists of words from the dialogue. They are all real sentences now.
- Word stemming has been added to the library.

See the Changelog included in the zip file for further details.

You can grab this from the Downloads page.

780 Somerset
613.567.6050
Map

A Vietnamese place that I'm not sure how to enter the accented characters to spell correctly.

It's a small place that serves pho, hu tieu, and Vietnamese submarines. That's a first for Ottawa, to my knowledge, to serve pho and submarines in the same place.

Pho and hu tieu is $7.00 and only comes in one size. Deep frides spring rolls are $3.25, and sub sandwiches are $2.25 each. Bun is also available.

Their hours are 10:30AM to 9PM except on Sunday when they close at 7PM. And they are CLOSED MONDAYS.

280 Elgin
Map
Website
613-233-2888

This is an Asian place that includes pho on the menu, although they just call it "noodle soup". Their other dishes are sushi, bubble tea and other drinks, and appetisers including spring rolls.

Pho comes in two sizes. Regular sizes range from $7.50 to $9.00, and large sizes cost $1 more. Spring rolls are either $3 or $4 for two rolls. Bubble tea and other drinks range from $3.50 to $4.00.

778 Somerset St. West
Map
613.237.3002

A new entry in the Pho Bo Ga "chain" that's been open since last year.

Open daily 10AM to 1AM, and Friday and Saturday until 4AM.

The menu is similar to others in that they have pho, Bun, Hu Tieu, Com, appetisers and drinks.

Pho comes in 4 sizes. Smalls are $6, Mediums are $7, Larges are $8 and XLs are $9.

This is right in the heart of Chinatown so parking is very hit and miss.

1053 Somerset W.
Map

This restaurant is renamed from "Pho Bo", in the same location.

According to the lady there, this restaurant is still in the same family as before. The original owner has opened two more restaurants in Ottawa, and brought in family to help run them all.

Their menu is not large, and contains pho, hu tieu and bun. Pho is $6.95 for small and $7.95 for large. Hu tieu ranges from $7.25 to $8.50. Appetisers, stir frys and the usual selection of drinks are also available.

They do take out as well.

In what has turned into an annual event, we hosted pho at my place on Friday at lunch time instead of one of our usual pho restaurants. I made Pho Bo (beef soup), and my SO made deep-fried vegetarian spring rolls for an appetiser, both made from scratch.

Here's a slightly doctored photo of most of the group:

There were eleven of us, and 72 spring rolls. We ate them all.

The Pho Bo was an assemble-it-yourself type lunch, where the broth, rice noodles, thin-sliced eye-of-round and barbecue pork were laid out in the kitchen, along with some sliced shallots and green onions and tofu puffs. Each person helped themselves, buffet-style, to the fixings for their own creation.

Pictures of the soups are below.

The Dilbert Strip Finder now uses word stemming during the searches.

This means that searching for the word "meet" will also match "meeting" and "meets."

This will increase the number of hits and hopefully will help you better find the strip you are looking for.

Other than the word stemming, searching the Dilbert Strip Finder is the same as it was. It still uses the MySQL search engine and still has the same set of strips to search (though now this last part will change soon).

Questions? Problems? Drop me a line!

Made dumplings on the weekend. We've made dumplings many times but this is the first time we made the wrappers from scratch.

We made two versions, one pork, one veggie. The veggie version was made with mushrooms, black fungus, transparent noodles and more. The veggie dumplings are shown here.

Delicious!

This is in Tai Wai, New Territories, in Hong Kong.

What to Search

There are two types of searching on this website. The Dilbert Strip Finder and the Web Site Content.

The search box on the side navigation bar every page will search the Dilbert Strip Finder.

If you want to search the web site content instead -- say for Pho Ottawa restaurants -- then select the "Search" button on the side navigation bar (with or without entering a search word), and then select the "Content" tab.

Here are some tips for the Dilber Strip Finder:

• Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT are not recognised. The search engine uses Natural Language mode.
• Not case sensitive.
• Wildcards (using the asterisk) are allowed except at the beginning of words. For exanple, meet* is allowed, but *ful will not work. (In this case, searching for *ful will instead search for ful)
• Search for individual dates using the formats YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD or YYYYMMDD. Wildcards are not available for dates.