Rome, Italy

It’s Wednesday, so let’s get over that hump and explore the blogosphere for some great posts.

We start off closer to home with Stacey Robinsmith as he highlights some of the Downtown Vancouver restaurants where he’s been eating. He was disappointed by the pan fried noodles at Hon’s in Chinatown and he though the gravy at The Winking Judge Pub was “blech,” but he did enjoy a great Bourbon Caesar at Peckinpah and a “heavenly” pastrami sandwich at Big Lou’s Butcher Shop, both in Gastown. Where are your favorite spots?

Broadening our horizons, Tanya Desrosiers is preparing for an epic European cruise tour and she’s looking for some advice for what to do at each of the ports of call. I’ve already commented with some insight from our time in Rome, for example, but her plans to rent a Ferrari with her husband to race around the Ferrari test track in Modeno sounds pretty amazing. Not including the assuredly pricey track time, renting the Italian supercar alone is 140 Euro.

Grounding ourselves back in reality, Thursday Bram offers a strong reminder why freelancers and small business owners should never compete on price. It may be unavoidable if you’re selling commodity items, but you should avoid participating in a race to the bottom with your competitors when setting your rate. Instead, provide better value to your clients and justify what you charge.

Next, we turn to The Simple Dollar where Trent Hamm discusses the challenge of trying to be as frugal as possible with your grocery shopping and eating healthier food whenever possible. For starters, it can be difficult to define exactly what is and isn’t healthy. Are you better off drinking skim milk or whole milk? What about soy or almond milk? Even so, there are some guiding principles that both your wallet and your waistline should appreciate.

And finally, we end on an athletic note with Betshopboy. He’s been running marathons for a while, but he recently made a trip to Hong Kong for one of his biggest adventures yet: his first 100km ultra trail marathon. That’s right. As its name indicates, the Translantau 100km is a trail race that runs across Lantau Island in Hong Kong and it’s a full one hundred kilometers long. What’s more, the race started at 11:30pm, running up and down two of Hong Kong’s highest peaks, before finishing some 30+ hours later. You are an inspiration, sir.