Last week, a few friends of mine took me to Joe’s Noodle House in Rockville. Now i should say up front that I am far from a connoisseur of Chinese food and about as adventurous in the domain as the average American (i.e. my favorite dish is usually fried rice and General Tso’s chicken). Nonetheless, my friends had urged me to go for several months and given that we had made plans to watch a movie nearby, I was game.

Joe’s itself is as they say in great literature, “an unassuming hole in the wall” in a typical suburban DC strip mall off Rockville pike. Yet though the atmosphere is simple, it is at once fresh and inviting, as if you were entering a local joint in Shanghai where you know the food is fresh and the service is friendly. The menu is expansive and comprehensive across the major categories of protein and vegetables and frankly can be overwhelming for the unitiated. Fortunately for me I was with a few regulars and in the discussion on the car ride up, it was decided that one dish for sure would be the “mapo doufu” a Szechuan tofu specialty known for its lip numbing Szechuan peppercorns (more on that later). Joe’s is ostensibly a Szechuan establishment and not the tabasco, Siracha style Szechuan that it passes for “spicy food” in most American restaurants. I knew that spicy would be baked, indigeneous to the dishes I was eating.

After some deep consultation, we decided upon the following for our hungry party of four:

• A plate of “mapo doufu”
• A whole fish
• Green beans with garlic
• Eggplant with Basil

As the “tofu semi-virgin” (or tofu skeptic, depending on your perspective) the group insisted that I try the mapo dofufu first. I have to admit that I only intended to have a few bites to be polite and then move on to the other dishes. But after a few bites and the numbness on my upper lip combined with the firmness of the quality tofu turned me into a convert and one bite became a second helping much to the joy of my hosts who had successfully turned another soul to the Tofu side.

The fish was tasty, though I personally didn’t care much for the gelatin cubes that accompanied the spicy sauce. Honestly, I think my palate was completely confused by the Szechuan peppercorns so I am probably not well equipped to give a definitive appraisal of the fish. The green beans were excellent and inspired me to try cooking crisp green beans in season with garlic at home. Finally, the eggplant which was high quality combined with particularly fresh basil made for another great dish and my hosts noted that though the eggplant with basil was a first order for them, it is likely to be a mainstay in their ordering repertoire.

All in all, I have to give Joe’s four stars for a top quality Chinese meal at a decent price especially for larger groups. I will definitely be back and in the future I may even get one of their signature rewards cards as well so I can enjoy more food for less money

Discussing the new Nokia Lumia 900 running the Windows Phone operating system in the New York Times:

“It’s not just about software,” said Albert Shum, general manager of the design studio for Windows Phone. “It’s about the whole end-to-end experience.”

Funny how good ideas take a while to be accepted.

Logged into twitter this morning to see that I was mentioned in a tweet by a user called “BusinessPalaces”. Clicking on the URL took me to a paper.li where my tweet last night about entrepreneurship resources in the DC Metro area was put on the “front page” of this virtual newspaper. It never ceases to amaze me that people find me, a relatively little followed and far from prolific twitter user, on Twitter. I am also intrigued by where what I tweet might end up! Happy Tuesday!

Tweet below:

@BusinessPalaces: Business Palace News is out! http://t.co/sa6YPGB5 ▸ Top stories today via @noframex @rasheqrahman @glemmie @republic1st @crispkirstbarba

Today, I relaunched my blog design. As regular readers of this blog will note, I probably spend more time writing about reprogramming my blog than actually writing it. I’m hoping to change that in 2012 but allow me for a minute to discuss the story behind the latest incarnation of RasheqRahman.com.

The impetus began this past summer when Twitter announced its new CSS framework called Twitter bootstrap. As I read more about the theme and downloaded the v1.0 source code, the simple, clean design tugged at me as if begging me to use it in a project. I had looked for years for a simple theme that was mainly white for the text part but had a fixed top navigation bar that could pull together my different interests (photography, writing, web development) but in a compartmentalized way so that the output of each activity could be cleanly displayed in a format that highlighted its unique characteristics. Bootstrap provides such a lattice upon which build such websites. As always, WordPress is the brains behind this project because, like the dependable friend that it is, I can connect it to my front end HTML and CSS almost immediately and know that the key files will be in the right place and easily customizable.

I vowed for this project to use as few WordPress plugins as possible, relying more on code snippets and design patterns to customize my website so I truly understood what was “under the hood.” As I hope to share in coming posts in the code category, I did this in order to improve my PHP skills and to gain a better understanding of WordPress theming. Having now completed this site and several others this year I am excited to declare that I intend to “hand roll” my own themes from here on out, i.e. using only HTML templates and adding in the WordPress code myself. If you are at the point of having configured a few existing off the shelf WordPress sites yourself and are looking to really grow as a WordPress developer, I highly recommend the “roll your own” approach.

Overall the process took some four months, with a two month long break in the middle and several pauses in the middle while I thought about the design and how I wanted everything to fit together. I decided to launch it today to kick start the New Year knowing full well that both content and design need some continued tweaking.

Look for the aforementioned coding posts in the coming weeks and please feel free to comment below. I look forward to your thoughts and questions.

To all my readers, welcome to 2012. May it be a year of happiness, further progress towards peace and reconciliation and new prosperity for all!