Each maker proudly showcasing his/her handicraft.
Oops, this one's leaking some meat!
This wonton got a little scrunched.
You can’t quite tell, but the wonton was very small and a strange sort of shape. 😛 Just as yummy though!
And to top it all off, we have cheesecake for dessert!
From chaos...
...to what we dubbed "Sparta."
Fun times at ESLP (Education for Sustainable Living Program) during the lecture series.
Last week, the battery in my car key was dying and it chose to give out when I needed to unlock my car to get to a lecture. Though I could open the car manually, it would set off the car alarm time and time again, which did me no good. I tried to get in and just start my car, but it didn’t work and the engine wouldn’t react. I called up Panda to try to figure out a solution and eventually decided to go back to my internship to see if the guys there had suggestions (or could possibly take me to a local shop to buy a battery).
I got a screwdriver to open up the casing and at least see what size the battery was. One of the guys took it and decided he’d try something radical – he started to rub it vigorously on the carpet! Trying to work on the static electricity generated to create a charge strong enough for it to work for just one more push, he went on for a few seconds, then quickly replaced the battery. I pressed a button and the red light lit to indicate it was working, so he and the other intern started to yell at me to run to my car to unlock it. Nervous and anticipatory, I ran out as fast as I could and cautiously pressed it when I felt close enough for it to work.
Miraculously, I heard the double-beeping that indicated my car was unlocked! What a genius move! I was really excited about it, since it was such a great application of the physical sciences! It’s like when you take a potato to power something and it’s a really cool science experiment because it works and it’s so simple too. In this day and age of technology, it’s great to see that there are still some less high-tech ways of solving problems. It took a certain creativity to even consider the idea (which was borne of desperation). As my tagline says, “because inspiration doesn’t wait,” after all. Crazy, huh? 🙂
An exclusive version in early November!
A special flavor they only had in the back for Twitter followers: dulce de leche.
Mmm, chocolate cupcake with caramel frosting and chocolate ganache! 🙂
Look at this little guy who came slinking under my car.
Aww, looks like he was just a little hungry and smelled my food.
A friend or foe? Probably mates. Minor standoff before they ran off together.
She looked right at me! Aww. 🙂
These days I’ve just been bombarded with new sites for every imaginable aspect of web 2.0. Many are overlapping in services, which makes it hard for me to figure out what I should actually try. As I found a few days ago, I’m actually quite an early adopter, though I never considered myself that before. I never realized that all the sites I’ve started to use are so new and foreign to most of my friends. I have discovered that I’ve been using sites that many of them have never heard of and that most of them don’t have accounts on. When I share them with friends, the ones I like best I often convey in such a way that they want to join too. This ranges from Baseloop to Google Wave to Swagbucks. There are so many choices out there that I don’t know what to use anymore.
Let’s take sharing pictures, for example. There’s Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and many more that focus more on printing photos. Facebook is useful because you can tag your friends and use the existing social network to share your photos. Flickr is good to share your stuff with the world and make your pictures show up on image searches. Picasa has a fun face recognition algorithm that allows you to have people pre-tagged whenever you upload new pictures. Those people are also linked to your Google contacts, so if you already use one of the other Google services (Gmail, Voice, Wave), you can use existing contacts to tag, much like Facebook. So when you want to share pictures, where do you go?!
Now let’s say you want to plan an event. Facebook comes in as a contender once again, as does Google with its new Wave. Then there’s the up-and-coming Baseloop fully intended to cater to this need. For Facebook, the edge in this area is once again the existing network you have on there. Most of my friends are on there and I can easily invite them (or one of my groups) to an event I create. Wave’s biggest setback at the moment is the lack of people using it. I’ve finally got more than 5 people on there, but it’s still a long ways to be able to invite all of my friends to something through Wave. I do like how you can embed a map of the location, include the weather for that day, and other nifty features that would be useful. 
Finally, Baseloop caters to both events for your friends and more public events. What I like best about them is they allow you to suggest things to do and they show you a public calendar of events going on in your area. That way, if you’ve wanted to do something but could never seem to find the people to do it with, you can put it out there for all your friends (and even random people) to see. Much easier than e-mailing or messaging all my friends just to see if they’re interested in a particular activity. You can also quickly see what things there might be to do on a Saturday night when you’re bored and want to go have some fun. But of course, few people are on it now, so when I invite friends, they’d need to set up an account. So which of these is best for event-planning?
Similar issues arise for just choosing a social network. There’s Facebook, Baseloop, Plaxo, Brazen Careerist, Ning, MySpace, Hi5… Then for blogging or micro-blogging there’s WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Livejournal, Xanga, Plurk… Even video posting and interaction has a wide selection with YouTube, Vimeo, Tokbox, Stroome, Nurphy… Plus search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing (ok technically a “decision engine,” but you get the idea), Ask, Swagbucks, Goodsearch… Let’s not even get into the online shopping sites, mapping and direction sites, online game sites, dating sites, etc.!
Aaaah! It’s overwhelming and there are still more sites like this popping up ALL THE TIME. I suppose that’s what happens when it’s relatively easy for people to start online businesses. You have little startup cost beyond the website itself and whatever you need to do to create and maintain it. The only physical stuff you really need is computers and computing power. Beyond that, it’s all your programming skills, creativity, and customer service put to the test.
The elusive sign that directed me to the escalators!
When I was in Hong Kong, one of the attractions that I went to visit was the Mid-Levels Escalators. It is a series of escalators running up the hillside of Hong Kong Island, and the longest escalator ride you can ever take at 800 meters! Now granted, there is some walking in between for certain areas where some turns had to be made, but for the most part you can enjoy standing on the belts and going down in the morning or up at night. For those trying to go in the opposite direction of the escalators, there are stairs running alongside them the entire way so you can walk as needed. What really threw me off in Hong Kong was that they stand to the right of the escalators, which is the opposite of what I had been doing in Singapore! So the first few times, I’d stand on the left side only to find myself in the way. How confusing!
When I first arrived at the Mid-Levels Escalators, it was around 9 PM and things were pretty quiet. I began my journey upwards and started to count how many stretches of escalator I got on. Along the way, I passed by restaurants, bars, pubs, massage parlors, beauty salons, random shops, and lots of homes. After about 13-15 escalators, things really quieted down and became very residential. Stubbornly, I continued on, even though it was dark and there were hardly any people around. I wanted to make it to the end of strip! After much dedication, I eventually made it (and lost count along the way). I believe I totaled 18 or 19 escalators of varying lengths.
I finally got to the top! Yeesh.
At the top, I was happy, tired, and really hungry. I began my descent down, this time with a mission of finding some place that was still open for dinner. I also started to count the number of stairs I took. Down, down, down I went, counting to myself the whole time and rushing to get back to the livelier parts. Eventually, I came across a Pizza Express that was still open and happily settled in for a meal. As soon as I was happily full, I continued on my trek down the mountain, still counting the stairs I took in the process. I can’t find where I wrote down the exact number I took, but it was something like 843.
Some were this kind and a few weren’t working, so I had to climb that bit.
Ear candling is this crazy thing where they take a special cloth tube thing and stick one end in your ear canal while lighting the other end on fire. It burns gently and because of the air being sucked away at the top of the tube, your earwax is drawn up into the tube. I heard a gentle crackling noise the entire time it was burning away and though I felt more refreshed and noises seemed crisper after that, I don’t know if that was just a psychological effect. The result is this honeycomb-looking thing that is the earwax that was drawn from your ear canal! I found it to be a surprisingly soothing experience and you could tell from what was taken out which ear was more clogged up. Nifty!
Poinsettia. A word I always dreaded come Christmastime as a child. I distinctly remember in first grade when we were learning holiday-themed words in class to be tested on and I always struggled with poinsettia. Christmas was fine, Santa Claus and reindeer and wreath and holly were all too, but poinsettia – that dreaded flower! I mean, they’re nice enough to look at and all, but really, who came up with that name?! Was it in their agenda to make my childhood December uncomfortable and awkward? If so, they were quite successful.
I’ve always prided myself in being an excellent speller. Not the best, but enough to win the spelling bee in my second grade class with the word chimney. Though I wasn’t able to win the overall school competition, I wasn’t that crushed – I never expected to be a prodigy or genius of any sort. I was just a natural at spelling, that’s all. But oooh when I had to spell POINSETTIA the year before, I lost some of my confidence. Perhaps it was because I always had it in my mind that it was “poinsetta” (and thus always got docked on my quiz). In retrospect, it seems such a silly little thing that I should have been able to pick up easily enough, but then again it’s been 16 years since those days.
I guess I’ve learned something since then. 😛
P.S. – Happy 50th to my mommy! 🙂 As I told her, halfway there. 😉
I wasn’t going to write a Thanksgiving-themed entry since the holiday hardly felt like one and I don’t like holidays dictating my writing, but I happen to want to write about something that is somewhat related.
Can you fit under that?
As I was driving home yesterday (stuck in afternoon traffic that I’d all but forgotten about until right before I was planning on leaving), there were these big rigs that were right next to me (and nicely blocking the sunlight for me!). I could see under the one directly to my left to the one in the lane next to it and I almost felt as if my car could fit under them. That got me thinking about whether or not someone can lay down on the ground and fit under the lower parts of the vehicle (particularly where the wheels are and under the head).
I recalled hearing about someone who jumped in front of an oncoming subway and pushed the person down there onto the ground. The two of them made it out unscathed because the subway car was high enough on the tracks that they could fit underneath. Or maybe it way just one guy or maybe it was under a train. Either way, you get the idea, right? Well, I was thinking of this in terms of those big rigs and it looked shady. The lowest part looks too far down for anyone to not get caught and dragged along.
Next Thanksgiving, spare a turkey!
Well, it suddenly occurred to me that I was thinking of someone my size. What of fat people? I hope that this is not too insensitive, but obese people would definitely not fit under any of these vehicles! Sooo it goes to reason that if you are extremely overweight and one day need to save your own life by fitting underneath a subway, train, or big rig… well, you’re screwed. Hence, all those people who stuffed themselves full tonight should think again before fattening themselves. Who knows, you might just need to save yourself from getting run over and that extra inch around your waist could make the difference.
And there is my Turkey Day entry. 😛
I thought it was a wildfire at first, but turns out it's just the normal marine layer.
Sudden gloom and doom! This was creepy.
Can't even see the ocean anymore...
I feel like I've entered into another planet's atmosphere.
