Yesterday my fellow CocoaHead Tan took me and two other friends to a Malaysian restaurant called Taste Good in Elmhurst. We stuffed ourselves silly with delicious food. The stew below, for example, was full of juicy, tasty stuff, and the folks there treated us very well.

If you're interested in checking this place out, this Wednesday would be a good time. I transcribed the following from a sign in their window. They won't be keeping any of the proceeds, not even to offset the cost of ingredients. They're hoping for as many customers as possible. The restaurant is about a minute's walk from the Elmhust Ave. subway stop.

* * * * *

For Immediate Release

Contact: Helen Thong T: 718 898-8001

China Earthquake Relief Drive at Top Queens Restaurant One day only – May 28 in Elmhurst

Come and eat some of the most exquisite Malaysian cuisine and help the victims of the devastating Chinese earthquake.

On Wednesday, May 28, 2008 from 11:00 AM to 10:00 PM the management and staff of the Taste Good Malaysian Restaurant will be holding a charity sale to help with the Sichuan Earthquake Relief efforts.

All the proceeds (100 percent) from the sale of the entire days' worth of business at the restaurant will be donated to the Chinese Ming Pao Daily News Sichuan Earthquake Relief Account.

Date: Wednesday May 28, 2008 opens for lunch at 11 AM and closes after dinner at 10 PM.

Taste Good Malaysian Restaurant, 82-18 45 Ave, Elmhurst, NY 11373 tel: 718 898-8001

Map

Background Information:

Taste Good Malaysian Restaurant is well loved by food aficionados all over the city and has been written up and reviewed in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, NY Newsday and the Daily News. If you are serious about ethnic eating, the boro of Queens affords the intrepid food eater some of the best ethnic cuisine in all of NYC.

The Taste Good Malaysian cooking is a culinary delight. Mouth watering signature dishes include:

Roti Canal – Indian roti bread to dip in a chicken curry sauce.
Malaysian Popiah – Spring roll rice crepes filled with sweet turnips, bean sprouts, and egg.
Sate – chicken, beef or pork bar-b-q in mouth watering home made peanut dipping sauce
Nasi Lemak – Coconut rice, curry chicken, hard-boiled egg, anchovy, cucumber slices, peanuts, and maybe a bit of pickled vegetable
Beef Rendang – moist, coconutty slow-braised beef
Assam Laksa – spicy-sour fish soup with round glass noodles

Cottonelle's aggressive "Be kind to your behind" ad campaign has succeeded in putting their brand at the top of my mind. I was tickled by this series of signs over an escalator at Grand Central Station.

By ending with the one-word question, the ad injects a bit of humor, and it also makes the text a little less blunt and indelicate than if they'd spelled it out for us and said "butts get Cottonelle."

Coming home today I saw a bus go through Times Square with a big billboard on the side that said "We're forgetting AIDS." Say it out loud and see if you don't agree that's a terrible slogan. It was made even worse by the fact that the "for" and the "getting" were in different colors.

It reminded me of a night a few months ago when I noticed a poster on the side of a building with a photo of Whoopi Goldberg's face, and below it the words:

The way it was laid out, it looked a lot like "I'm a New Yorker. Who cares?"

Is there something about working at a charitable organization that causes people to be oblivious to these kinds of things? It could be that I notice them more than most people, but Google tells me I'm not the only one.

It bugs me when I walk by a store or restaurant that looks interesting and their business hours are not in plain view. Often I just want to know if they'll be open late enough for me to come back later, but I'm not curious enough to go in and ask, which means I probably won't come back later.

It's not that I'm terribly inconvenienced; it's that it's so easy and obvious to make basic information available at a glance, and they don't do it.

As a Manhattan apartment-dweller I get a lot of menus from area restaurants slipped under my door. This happens when a delivery guy is making a delivery to some other apartment, and takes the opportunity to spread some advertising throughout the building. You'd think these menus would have business hours on them, but they sometimes don't. Sometimes they don't even have an address, or if they do, and it's on an avenue, they don't say what streets it's between. What a wasted opportunity to give me a clear picture of where they are.

Businesses are usually better about this on their web sites, but even there useful information is sometimes missing or more trouble to find than it needs to be.

Last night I set up a trial FogBugz account. FogBugz is a web-based software project management system that combines a wiki, scheduling tools, bug ticketing, and customer support tools. Yesterday I saw a video of Joel Spolsky giving a demo, and I'd found it almost as riveting as a Steve Jobs keynote. I had to try it.

It's easy to set up a trial account. Just go to the main FogBugz web page, scroll down, and enter the name you would like: _____.fogbugz.com. If the name's available, you go through a quick email confirmation and they reserve your account for one day. You don't have to enter a credit card number or answer any "May we contact you about future products?" questions. They just want you to try their product, no strings attached.

Thought it's designed for teams, FogBugz has a lot of qualities I've been looking for in a personal wiki/task-manager. For one thing, the user interaction is really nice. Comparing FogBugz to other systems I've used, I'd say it's like using the iPhone compared to other phones. There's a level of thought behind it that goes beyond the utilitarian.

I suspect the feature that blows most people away is the "Evidence-Based Scheduling." It would have been easy to do what every other project scheduler does, which is add up estimates and spit out a projected ship date that reflects the team's wishful thinking as much as anything. FogBugz models the uncertainty inherent in project scheduling, based on the historical accuracy of people's estimates.

FogBugz has some other cool goodies. For example:

• Screenshot capture. You can download a tool (Windows or Mac) that lets you capture a screenshot, crop it, and upload it to FogBugz in just a few clicks. On the Mac you install it with a .pkg, which I wondered about, but upon closer inspection I understand why.
• Snippets. You can define keyboard macros, which they call "snippets," and customize the key you use to invoke them. You can *group* snippets using a "category/name" format. You can define snippets to be global or personal.
• Easy SCM integration (haven't tried this yet). They give you the scripts you need to install on your SCM server so that links are automatically created between your FogBugz tickets (which they call "cases") and your SCM commits. I've used a Trac system that did this kind of linking, and I loved it, as well as the ability to receive emails whenever somebody commits.

At the special price of $21 a month, I'm almost certain I'll get an account for my personal stuff. I would do it even at the full price of $25 a month. Before committing, I want to play with it a little more, and see if I find any dealbreakers when I get over my initial enthusiasm. It's true that even committing wouldn't really be committing — Fog Creek offers an unconditional money-back guarantee on their products. But I'd rather not have to go that route.

I never thought I'd see the day when an Ajax web app would excite me as much as a major Mac OS release. Leopard is coming out today, and yet the thing I look forward to spending my money on is FogBugz.

UPDATE: In the comments, Eric from Fog Creek pointed out that you can opt for the "Startup and Student Edition," which allows up to two users on your account for free. Naturally, I switched over to that option, and the fact that Eric pointed it out is much appreciated. I'll have more to say about FogBugz when I've used it more — I haven't been able to give it much attention just yet.