A few nice ramen images I found:

Raman Lidar Data


Image by ARM Climate Research Facility
Example of Raman lidar data from March 7, 1999.

Ramen Love Series – The Grand Finale


Image by Telstar Logistics
… in which we watch with eager anticipation as a street sensei brings a fresh bowl of ramen into the world for us to eat. Yum.

Tsujiki, Tokyo

Photo by Jennifer Granick

Some cool ramen images:

Ramen Wait


Image by Subspace
Taking photos because it keeps me from yelling WHERE IS MY GODDAMN RAMEN at the guy cooking.

Raman Lidar Data


Image by ARM Climate Research Facility
Example of Raman lidar data from March 7, 1999.

Some cool ramen images:

Beef Top Ramen Contents


Image by camknows
Beef Top Ramen noodles and seasoning packet.

http://thenoodlefreak.blogspot.com/2010/07/review-nissin-top-ramen-beef.html

Tonkotsu Ramen


Image by mahiro1322
At Roppongi Ramen, Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan.
Not good..

Motomachi Ramen


Image by mezzoblue
Motomachi Shokudo is the best ramen in the city, as far as I’m concerned.

Some cool ramen images:

Ramen Santouka – Char Shu Ramen


Image by Xin Li 88
???
Ramen Santouka
6 Eu Tong Sen Street #02-76
The Central Singapore

Tel: +65 6224 0668

11:00am?10:30pm
(Last Order 9:45pm)
Open 7 days/week

Ramen Santouka – Char Shu Ramen


Image by Xin Li 88
???
Ramen Santouka
6 Eu Tong Sen Street #02-76
The Central Singapore

Tel: +65 6224 0668

11:00am?10:30pm
(Last Order 9:45pm)
Open 7 days/week

A few nice ramen images I found:

Miso Ramen Noodles


Image by Robert Banh
Miso ramen noodle soup at Benkei Noodle Shop, Vancouver 2008.

Cup Noodle Vending Machine, Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum


Image by Ganjin
Ramen Museum, Ikeda, Osaka. Cup Noodle vending machine. The machine also dispenses hot water for your noodle pleasure.

Shio Ramen with green onion of Ajisai, Hakodate Ramen


Image by shinyai
Shio Ramen with green onion of Ajisai, Hakodate Ramen, Hokkaido Ramen Square, Chitose Airport
Hakodate is famous for Shio (Salt) based Ramen soup
[MAP by ALPSLAB]

by xxHxx

An online payday loans service can be a lifesaver if you are in a real problem and need some money until payday, but be careful the interest rates charged can be truly outrageous.Sometimes they charge up to 15% of the actual loan amount to finance your advance cash payday loan, and it can be even more than that!

The people who are most likely to use an online payday loans service are almost all ways really poor people who cannot get credit from any other source and have fallen a little behind on a payment of some kind maybe the rent or something like that. They get an advance payday loan because they do not have any other option. They are literally living pay check to pay check and hand to mouth and once they get a few days behind they are desperate to do something, to help make ends meet until the end of the month and the next payday.

Also there can be another problem area with this type of borrowing, sometimes advance payday loans are not used by people who are having trouble making ends meet until the end of the month and their next paycheck, they are used by the really desperate people like drug addicts or others with additions of various kinds. They can be so desperate about not getting their fix that they will spend money they don’t even have yet and get farther and farther behind, because they are so desperate to get their next fix.

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This is really very sad, these people already have such incredible problems without loosing 15% or more of their income to a loan company. There are many stories of someone finally being finished off for good by the pressure coursed by advance payday loan repayments.

I know of one example, there was this guy in college just like that. He was very clever a student of both Physics and Math, and one of the most creative, innovative, and advanced thinkers you were ever likely to meet. He got an advanced cash payday loan because he was looking to party and had run out of money. He thought he could make it up the next month by living on a tight budget, eating ramen and ketchup sandwiches and that type of thing. He was young, he thought, he could eat better when he was older. Unfortunately it did notwork out like that, the next month he was still behind, and the next too, and so it went on. He even had to get instant payday advance loans to cover the debt he already had.

Besides this, he was also developing a drug addiction at the time, and the stress of his finances was only making it worse. He was very fortunate, he had a supportive family who were able to get him into a rehab program, and help sort out his financial situation, so in his case it worked out o.k. but it just goes to show you that it’s a bad idea to spend money that you don’t have.

An online payday loans service may seem like a good idea, but believe me if you are not careful you can soon end up in a lot of trouble. This type of borrowing should only be used as absolutely the last resort, when there is nothing else available and you just have to pay that outstanding debt or bill.  

Roger Overanout

When it comes to eating healthy at work, it’s easier said than done for most people. It’s hard enough to remember packing something substantial in the morning, especially if you haven’t had your coffee yet, but what about when you need your lunch to be healthy and tasty? For those times when Cup of Noodles just don’t cut it, here’s a list of 5 lunch items that are healthy, tasty, and all in all, simple to pack.

1) Asian Noodle Bowl- If you love pasta, but don’t want to make a production out of lunch, there are tons of options in terms of lunch items. However, not all are healthy. Look for a bowl of noodles that is made with fresh noodles that aren’t fried or dehydrated. It is also a good idea to find asian noodles that contain no MSG, artificial colors and flavorings, and has no hydrogenated oils. That means staying away from the fried (and pretty tasteless) Ramen noodles. In addition, a good Asian noodle bowl will have healthy properties, and taste like you just ordered take-out. It sounds too good to be true, but they do exist.

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2) Turkey and Swiss Sandwich on Whole Wheat- This seemingly simple lunch item can be very filling and is full of good protein and carbs to keep your energy-level up all day. If you’re using a nice, hearty wheat bread, some good deli meat, and a little Romaine lettuce with a slice of ripe tomato, you can have a really nice lunch. The best part about this option is how easy it is to make. You could probably throw one in that pre-caffeine morning daze!

3) Mozzarella and Tomato Salad with Balsamic Dressing- You don’t have to like salad to love this lunch option. A traditional mozzarella and tomato salad is extremely healthy and easy to prepare. All you need is some fresh buffalo mozzarella, some ripe juicy tomatoes, some balsamic dressing, and a pinch of sea salt. Slice the cheese and tomatoes to your thickness preference, toss with a light amount of balsamic, and sprinkle on a bit of sea salt to taste.

4) Chicken Noodle Soup- The key to keeping this one healthy is sticking to a low-sodium version or one that uses natural ingredients. If you really want to ensure that you’re getting healthy and natural ingredients, you can make your own. It’s fairly simple and you can make enough to portion out for the week or use in other meals.

5) Hummus and Pita Plate- This is a really light lunch that when paired with some grapes or other fruit can get you all the nutrients you need to function at high energy levels all day. If you’d like a little more protein in with this option, you could also bring along some sliced deli meat to add to the mix.

So whether you’re interested in eating Asian and getting a nice steamed bowl of noodles, or want to go Greek with hummus and pitas, you can rest assure that the Cup of Noodles that you once relied to get you through the day can be retired.

by shinyai

All the monuments near the first refuge weren’t for climbers without skill. This graveyard is testament to the unpredictability of high places. Chimborazo is very high. It randomly drops large rocks or pieces of glacier on you, and has weather that changes by the minute. Hiking to the second refuge, we could hear the rocks and pieces of ice falling somewhere above.

“El Refugio Edward Whymper” is a simple, unheated, hut at 16,000 feet. It’s named after the English climber who first made it to the summit of the mountain. It isn’t completely unheated. When somebody feels like carrying wood up to 5000 meters, the fireplace might raise the temperature 3 degrees.

We drank “mate de coca” a tea made of coca leaves, which are also used to make another product – one that is taken up the nose. That seemed to help. We went hiking for a short while, which was the sum total of my acclimatization. Paco cooked something, and after eating I slept for at least an hour before starting the ascent at eleven that night.

Mount Chimborazo

Mount Chimborazo is in Ecuador, about 100 miles south of the Equator. At it’s peak, it is the furthest point from the center of our planet. Earth bulges at the equator, making Mount Chimborazo even further out there than Everest. It’s the closest point to the sun on the planet, and yet still the coldest place in Ecuador.

Paco, my guide, woke me up at ten that evening. He frowned when he saw my sleeping bag, which packed up smaller than a football, and weighed a pound. My frameless 13-ounce backpack didn’t seem to impress him either. In any case, although it was below freezing in the hut, just as he said it would be, I had stayed warm – as I said I would.

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Paco didn’t speak a word of English, and I was just learning Spanish. Since our whole group consisted of him and me, we had some communication problems. I thought, for example, that the “night” (a few hours) in the hut was included in the 0 fee. He thought I was a mountain climber.

Actually, I had practiced once with crampons and an ice axe on a sledding hill near my house. I climbed forty feet while people walked by with their sleds, warning their kids to stay away from me.

I think Paco was telling me he didn’t like the papery rainsuit I was using as a shell. He frowned at my homemade one-ounce ski mask. When he saw my insulating vest, a feathery piece of poly batting with a hole cut in it for my head, I just pretended not to understand what he was saying.

I hadn’t planned to climb Chimborazo with such lightweight gear, but I had come to Ecuador on a courier flight, and could bring only carry-on luggage. I had only 12 pounds in the pack to begin with, so by the time I put on all my clothes that night, the weight on my back was irrelevant. The weight of my body, however, wasn’t. Paco had to coax me up that mountain.

Glaciers Near The Equator

The glaciers start near the hut. Hiking soon became mountaineering. I put on crampons for the second time in my life. During one of my many breaks (“Demasiado” – too many, which I pretended not to understand when Paco explained in Spanish), I noticed that the thermometer I carried had bottomed out at 5 degrees fahrenheit. I wasn’t cold, but I was exhausted at times – the times when I moved. When I sat still I felt like I could run right up that mountain.

We struggled (okay, I struggled) up the ice, hiking, climbing, jumping over crevasses, until I quit at 20,000 feet. I had also quit at 19,000 feet, and at 18,000 feet. Quitting had become my routine. Lying had become Paco’s, so he told me straight-faced that the summit was just fifty feet higher. Maybe I wanted to believe him, or maybe the lack of oxygen had scrambled my brain. In any case, I started up the ice again.

We stumbled onto the summit at dawn. Or rather, I stumbled. Paco, who seemed somewhat frail down at the refuge, was in his element at 20,600 feet. Dirtbag Joe, a nineteen-year-old kid from California with ten dollars in his pocket, borrowed equipment, and my Ramen noodles in his stomach, was waiting with a smile.

The sky was a stunning blue color that you never see at lower elevations. Cotapaxi, a classic snow-covered volcano to the north, was clearly visible 70 or 80 miles away. Chimborazo’s shadow fell across forty miles of land to the west. I had never seen anything like it.

Handshakes all around, and it was time to get off the mountain. I was told you don’t want to be on Mount Chimborazo when she wakes up. She wakes up at nine a.m.

Paco was looking at his watch, and telling me to hurry. He got further and further ahead. Was he going to abandon me? When I caught up to him at the hut at nine a.m., I heard the rocks begin to fall out of the ice above as the sun warmed it. Now I understood. We really needed to get down to the refuge by nine. A thousand feet lower a photograph that mercifully doesn’t show my shaking knees ended my Andes mountains adventure.

Related Ramen Articles

Some cool ramen images:

Hokkaido Ramen Square


Image by shinyai
Hokkaido Ramen Square, Chitose Airport
Authentic ramen restaurants of Hokkaido join in this Ramen Square.
[MAP by ALPSLAB]

Tokyo – Ebisu: Kohmen Ramen – Kogashi-tantanmen


Image by wallyg
Kohmen Ramen (??), located at 1-9-5 Ebisu, is one of 12 Kohmen shops around Tokyo. Their kogashi-tantanmen is a creamy sesame soup with hot chili and charcoal-grilled marinated pork.

Ramen (????) is a Japanese noodle dish consisting of wheat noodles served in a meat- or fish-based broth, with toppings such as sliced pork (?????? ch?sh?), dried seaweed (?? nori), kamaboko, and green onions. Of Chinese origin, it is unclear when and how it was introduced to Japan. By 1900, Cantonese and Shanghai restaurants and portable food stalls began serving simple ramen dishes, called shina soba (????), literally "Chinese buckwheat noodle". After World War II, cheap flour from the U.S. poured into Japan, and in 1958 Momfuku Ando, chairman of Nissin foods, invented instant ramen.

Sh?yu Ramen


Image by Calweb
i know it’s summer time, but i absolutely love soup, especially ramen.

chicken broth and soy sauce, lemon juice w/ chicken, nori (seaweed), some asian spices like ground fresh ginger, black pepper, chili paste, and some chicken breast. pretty simple, great taste!

by cariberry

Of all the questions surrounding a business and how to effectively run it, “running my company like a startup” has got to be the most asked about strategic question. Why? Because nobody has given a popularily known satisfactory answer. Yeah, sure, every expert worth his flagrantly padded “CV” has to cough up all kinds of authoritatively sounding answers, preferably sprinkled with the most current biz buzzwords and concepts. But the question keeps being reasked again and again, in trade magazines and blogs and seminars and so on, precisely because all the aforementioned answers amount to nutritionless rhetoric. Until now.

The secret, the key, to understanding how to run your company “like a startup” is to understand what changes occur in  a company’s transition from startup to “up and running”, as related to innovation and nimbleness. In other words, when you say you want to run your company like a startup, what you mean is you’d like your now bigger company to have the inventiveness, the innovation, the maneuverability, of a company just starting out. You don’t mean you want to be eating cold pizza and sleeping on the couch in your Mom’s basement when you’re not pulling all nighter’s trying to make Mr. Client Worth Profit happy on an impossible deadline.

No, that’s not what you mean.

So, we need to define what unique qualities a new biz has that are lost in its transition to a more successful, but bigger, lumbering business. Once you understand the difference, then you can do what it takes to incorporate that innovative streak into your company.

To make this easy, let’s use an example. Say you’re just out of college, and together with a couple of buddies, you decide to launch a software company. You interned in this hospital not far from the college doing software grunt work on their information systems, partly because they paid you, but mostly because of Ashley, the cute nursing student you wanted to get to know better. While punching code, you notice their systems were inefficient and clumsy; wasted time, energy and money; and you thought, hey, I could do this much better.

So now you’re a proud partner in Scalpelware, a medical information technologies and software systems company, whose tagline is “cutting out the deadweight”.

You start out trying to make that medical records software that you were “working” on while using your hospital pass to self-importantly wander the hallways hoping to “accidentally” bump into Ashley. But you soon get quagmired in the gargantuan scope of the project, having to interface the records software with a veritable jungle of often arcane inputting programs and system setups, on top of the seemingly insurmountable twin goals of overpowering the entrenched dominant players in the business and convincing fickle, security – sensitive hospitals that your little college roommates and you are good enough to maintain sensitive patient records in a reliable and secure way. Honest!

So you and your partners fish around. You try an iPhone applet one buddy wrote (great, but didn’t exactly ‘create waves’, what with the 23 downloads and all), you try various kinds of linking-stuff-together-ware, a quick access to paramedics program, an internal algorithm to scan the records and identify patients who need certain age or disease triggered checkups, a program to……. You get the idea. This goes on, with each idea running into its own set of challenges and problems. You finally settle on a program that optimizes and manages hospital functions to save money. You then go through all the usual start up steps and classic war-stories, from cold calling to selling off Uncle Elmer’s gold teeth to that weekend you spent in County under Suspicion of Stalking, which led to your self-vow never to pitch to hospital executives late at night on their front porch after you followed them home.

A few years later finds you looking out your 42nd floor window office as CEO of the renamed MSS International (Medical Software Solutions), now a respectably sized company, facing the same economic issues with everybody else while trying to stay innovative and ‘ahead of the curve’.

Then it hits you, while reading about another young startup: the memories of your earlier years, different types of software you had tried, the all nighter’s you pulled, the cold calls and connections and friends you made – and the general nimbleness and maneuverability you had.

You remember this wistfully because now you don’t have any of that. You spend your days locked up in the Glass Prison, only allowed to experience Fresh Air at preordained, often supervised recreation time blocks, only in designated areas, to be whisked back to your ornate cell in the cubicle encrusted Big House for further 18 – hour stretches of Labor.

And the problems you face! If only you had the old time inventiveness, you could, say figure out the Next Big Program or try something new – New! – or come up with a fun advertising idea like the one you got Ashley to star in. Granted, it was shot by Jesse, the perpetually semi-inebriated Frat Boy Partner, and it was a spur – of – the – moment “business” idea, in that it was primarily designed to get Ashley in her bikini on the beach, and get lots and lots of video. If only that idiot Jesse hadn’t forgot the damn cap on the lens for the first hour. What and idiot! Oh well. He turned out OK, now that he’s heading Asian Operations.

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But the point is, you could use a major dose of that startup magic, that free flowing idea and innovation set up that you had years ago. If only!

So you write to …. Well, it doesn’t really matter what you do or who you write to at this point, because we get the picture.

And no, I didn’t go into seemingly unnecessary details to waste your time, or because I talk too much. It is imperative that you understand and can envision the circumstance, beyond the technical bullet points, if you are ever going to comprehend the essence of the difference between a startup and established business.

So, what are you to do? How can you get that innovative streak back? How did you turn into Bob, the boring paper pusher?

Well, the difference falls into three categories, known as the Three R’s: reading, ritin’ and rithmatic… wait a minute…woops, those are the wrong ones. The Three R’s are:

1.      The Romance, referring to our altered, romanticized view of The Startup.

2.      The Responsibility, that your current position places on you, and associated constraints.

3.      The Reality, which encompasses everything I couldn’t fit under the first two, connected by the fact that they’re all ‘real’, in that they’re not “fake”. Simple and logical.

When you started your business, you had no clue if it would succeed or not. You had and idea you were pursuing (which eventually changed); but you didn’t know if you would succeed. You hoped, much as you hoped you’d bump into Miss Pretty Coed in Nursing Scrubs when you self importantly wandered the hospital. But there was no guarantee.

So you were just trying different stuff, without too much Responsibility beyond taking out the trash and making Mom’s curfew.

Once you had success, however, you switched to building on that Success and making the company bigger and more profitable based on that kernel of an idea. And when the money continued to come in, so you began to “buearocratize” the method that you used to succeed – hiring people and creating departments and mission statements and company policy’s and all kinds of corporate innards to keep repeating what you have done, so that your initial method could metasize and be perpetuated to bring in great amounts of money and power.

So your position changed from inventing new solutions on the fly and having a finger in every pot, to being a narrowly constrained corporate manager, making sure a wide, predefined buearocracy remains within the bounds of its definition.

This is a major difference. And from the is difference flows most of The Change. (The leader’s changing role is a critical issue, but a different subject. You can read about it in “The Changing Sands of Leadership”).

The Responsibility

When you were just starting out, nobody knew who you were (except maybe the local sheriff). So it didn’t make any difference if an idea failed. You could afford to put out a cheesy iPhone applet that was designed as a half-joke, complete with a few buttons that triggered a burping sound. It didn’t really matter, nor did it matter that only a handful of people actually downloaded it.

But now, if you were to release a program with anything less than stellar reviews and a giant buying audience, then the doubters and the Wall Street gum – flappers will throw a fit, extrapolating all kinds of gloom and doom collapsing scenarios and causing your company actual monetary losses and consequences.

This hangs a gargantuan deadweight around the neck of any serious new idea, with studies and projections and management approvals and focus groups and just a heckuva lot of hand wringing associated with any new idea.

Then there is the boring but essential heavy responsibility of keeping the company humming along and all the departments doing what they’re supposed to do and all the clients happy, knowing full well that if you were to leave the helm to less capable hands, then your company could be hurt by mistakes you wouldn’t have made. People could lose their jobs, credibility with clients could be defiled, and all what you worked for over so many years could be sunk because of a Damn Rookie.

This forces you to spend everyday stuck doing the creative version of an assembly line hole-puncher, traversing the same pathways day in and day out as you stay the course.

The Romance

Ah, the good old days of the startup, when you would slurp Ramen, invent awesome ideas, between jokes and complaints from Mom regarding the strewn about empty pizza boxes. Or at least that’s the part you remember.

What people tend to forget are the hard parts: the fact that you had really no idea what you were doing, the fact that every “killer ap” you quagulated from your beverage infused stupor was accompanied by a half a dozed inconceivably boneheaded ideas, the fact that you were constantly poorer than a naked monk, losing opportunities and wasting the little money you did have due to knowing zilch, not to mention working very hard for a pittance, and so on.

Furthermore, the creative aspects are exaggerated. It’s not like you plopped down on the couch after downing a keg through your nose, and started to burp out multimillion dollar corporate business plans.

No, there was a lot of work involved before a useful idea come to you. You had experiences with the product and business, ran into problems and hardheaded executives and saw people’s frustrations and mistakes before you could produce a good idea.

Moreover, people project on “the startup” all their supercreative fantasies of carefree, Googlesque youthful genius. It’s not like that. The guys joke around and play foosball because they don’t have many responsibilities. Which is a good thing, considering their level of maturity. Startups from Facebook to ebay to pets.com brought in real executives for just that reason: you can’t run a company like a college dorm. You actually need people who know how to do real work, and stuff.

So get over the Romance and be realistic. An up and coming company of some fresh college kids doesn’t posses the Holy Grail of inventiveness, or the fountain of youthful genius in its structural DNA. And speaking of Barren, Ashley grew up into a fat, pushy, tobacco chewing nurse, who married “Buck”, the guy taking a court-ordered alcohol and drug abuse course while working towards getting his ASE patch. See? It’s not all like you thought.

The Reality

The reality is, in enshrining every successful aspect, action, and lesson in company policy and buearocracy, as you must do, these aspect and manners of action have become very difficult to change.

The reality is that the flip side of increased specialization is decreased wide angle vision of action and its consequences, and decreased responsibility, which carries its own negativites. Specialization also tends to eliminate cross pollination; you never know what anyone else is doing, so you neither experience how your work meshes with someone else’s, nor do yu truly grasp how what you do affects them. Designing a seat cushion based on parameters without talking to the guys designing the seat, means that there will be “discomfortables” that get brushed over because its too much of a pain to send it back until you get it right. Etc., etc.

The Reality is the increased buearacracy, including the layers of management meant to oversee and approve underling’s decisions , makes getting anything new done a draining ordeal, which unsurprisingly leads to people usually not trying anything new.

The reality is the changing role of management is not always fully comprehended by them, as evidenced by their relentless attempts to “act like a startup”, eventually leading to the Chief Financial Officer walking around the office uncomfortably dressed like “Larry the Cable Guy”.

Suffice it to say that management often has a hard time realizing that their role has changed, and is changing, and this leads to mistakes.

The reality is the size of the company, the history of its success, the breadth of its market and penetration all mean that any new product, advertisement, or business angle could not only fail on its own, but more importantly stab the company in the jugular, and cause whatever current success to be negatively impacted. This means that the creative and foresight people tend to be more focused on maintaining the status quo without upset, instead of inventing The Next Big Thing.

Maintaining the current success also often drains and occupies the leadership, neutering energy that can be devoted to something else.

The reality is “Need is the Mother of Invention”, and success is the rich stepfather of Invention, providing little Invention with all the Comfort his heart could desire, but taking away his mother, Need, and thereby turning him, little Invention, into a spoiled, lazy-ass little brat, who never wants to get off his butt and do something inventive, because he has everything spoon fed to him. Which can be a problem.

So now that I’ve deflated your hope, let me remind you of something: You’re not paying me to tell you what you want to hear; in fact, come to think of it, you’re not paying me at all. So I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. But I will tell you the facts. And the facts on the differences in mentality between the startup and the established business are exactly as I laid them out.

This doesn’t mean that there are no innovative quality’s in a startup, or that you can’t capture them. Everybody now: Yes, you can. And I’ll show you how. Just send me a thousand dollars, and a couple of dozen pictures of Ashley’s younger, good – looking sisters, so I could pick one, and you’ll be in business.

Or read the next article in this series. Although, personally, I’d go with the first choice. It’s so much easier. And, hey, if I don’t like a sister, I’ll promise to send you the pictures I reject.