鼎泰丰

Met Ash for dinner at Din Tai Fung at J8 earlier today. DTF's my choice of la mian. Crystal Jade's for their side dishes and Imperial Treasure get the kudos for their xiao long bao. Yeah~ The "Holy Trinity"....

Some pics below of what we ate~ Forgot to take pic of Ash's Yam Paste Bun but here are the rest!

小菜 (Vegetables with vinegar dressing), one of my fav. appetizer~

红烧牛腩面 (Braised Beef Tendon Noodles)

小笼包 (Steamed Pork Dumplings!)

Ash only ate 3, leaving 7 of these babies but I could finish them luckily... She almost wanted me to try the yam paste bun... *burp*

After that we went to NTUC to shop for stuff and I learnt something new from her! That's the title of this post actually. Ever wondered what the bar code on the label means?

888811267003

The first 3 numbers (888) are for Singapore
The next 4 (8112) are for the factory code
The next 5 (67003) are for the product code
And the last (6)104 is a check digit, used for error detection.

If it's EAN (European Article Number), the check digit is derived like this.

1. Sum of all the even-positioned numbers (excluding the check digit itself) and multiply by 3
which means 8 + 8 + 1 + 6 + 0 + 3 = 26 X 3 = 78

2. Add the odd-positioned numbers to the result earlier.
which means 78 + 8 + 8 + 1 + 2 + 7 + 0 = 104

3. Take 10 and minus the last digit (if last digit is 0, take the next number on the left) to get the check digit
which means 10 - 4 = 6!

Click here for a link to Wiki on check digit!

The last alphabet in our NRIC number is also like a check digit. Click here to find out more!
By the way, Ash only taught me about the barcode. I found out about the check digit online~ Hah!