CUSTOMER databases, accounts and records are critical to business and if this information is lost a company will grind to a halt. The problem for many companies is that backing up information is often too complicated and expensive to do properly. But Ruslan Kogan, founder of the online stores Kogan and Milan Direct has made it easy by storing everything the company does on servers on the internet, the so-called cloud. He says while many IT managers see the cloud […]
Month: June 2010
First In, Fresh Dressed
The most copied chef in the world isn’t necessarily one you’ve heard of. But when a chef talks about using fresh, locally foraged ingredients you can be pretty sure the influence is Michel Bras of the eponymous restaurant now run by his son Sebastien. Based in Laguiole, the restaurant is a three-hour journey from the nearest city and relies on seasonal produce from the Bras garden and ingredients indigenous to the mountains and plateau of the Massif Central in the […]
The humble olive: how to cure your own
Three years ago I went on a boozy winery tour with a busload of artist mates. Somehow along the way I managed not only to buy two small olive trees, but also two magnificent French oak wine barrels to plant them in. Once I had persuaded the bus driver to let me manoeuvre the barrels onboard, I also had to convince the other passengers to help me load them off and back on at every winery so we could exit […]
First truffle of the season
It was an urgent call to action the other Friday from Prahran Market’s Twitter stream: “Stop press! Black WA truffles in an hour ago! These were in the ground this time yesterday! Damian puke (sic) mushrooms” Pretty soon I was on the tram from South Melbourne to pick up the car in St Kilda. The tram terminating at Mart 130, I marched across the Albert Park and was drenched for the first time that day to pay $60 for 15 […]
This is why I blog with knobs off
This is why I blog. To tell people stuff that they won’t find in the newspapers or glossy magazines, like the time I told you that expensive Miele cooktops are crap simply because they are badly designed. Now thanks to a house sitting stint, I can reveal that Smeg cooktops are just as bad. The problem is that the knobs sit higher than the trivets. And that means in the panic of pans rattling across the cooktop, the knobs snap. […]
The food and wine conversation on the web
The food and drink conversation on the web View more presentations from Edward Charles.