Dog Meat: Just not the same

There is currently an epidemic of folks getting sick from eating contaminated shrimp paste. Finally the cases are dropping off. However, the dog meat restaurants are still feeling the effects.

The shrimp paste scare is also the reason why dog-meat restaurant owner Tran Muc in Au Co Street is down in the dumps. "Usually people are piling in to eat in my restaurant but no one wants to eat dog meat without shrimp paste," he complains.

I'm not sure what's worse, eating tainted shrimp paste or eating tainted shrimp paste on your stir fried dog.

ADSL Inappropriately Asymmetric

So normally ADSL is asymmetric but in such a way that the downloads are fast and the uploads are slow. I've noticed that this doesn't seem to be the case in Vietnam. It seems very strange that upload speeds are faster than download speeds. Maybe it's because the net here is just way overloaded on the download side and so the upload side just has extra capacity. To be fair, I'm testing this using the Speakeasy servers in San Francisco. I'm sure there is a lot of weird routing and other strangeness going on between here and there.

Anyone else notice this sort of thing?

Open Coffee Saigon (6pm next week)

We had a great meeting today. Thanks to everyone who attended. We ended up with six folks, five entrepreneurs and one investor.

Mainly the discussion was around interesting startups and how to start a company here in Vietnam. We debated the benefit of options make when hiring Vietnamese workers. We discussed office space styles and universally lamented the lack of bandwidth here in Vietnam. Hey, that gives me an idea for a startup. :-)

Almost everyone hated the time, except me and Pho. We'll try 6pm next week so the late night hackers can wake up at a reasonable hour.

I've created an Upcoming event for this. If you want to add yourself to the guest list, you can find it here. You don't need to sign up but it would be nice to know if we're going to have a big crowd so I can get there early and stake out some space.


Details:

Highlands Cafe, Saigon Centre
6pm November 15th, 2007

CNet Digs Vietnam

Here's a great Vietnam article from our friends at CNet. It covers a lot of stories I've heard about Vietnam since arriving back in August. Our favorite Saigon Blogger, Kevin Miller, is quoted several times. Congrats Kevin!