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!
Why am I taking a picture?
To capture this bug flying around!
In case you were wondering what it looked like, here you go.
From chaos...
...to what we dubbed "Sparta."
Fun times at ESLP (Education for Sustainable Living Program) during the lecture series.
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! 🙂
It’s one of my greatest pet peeves. Well, first of all I don’t like socks. I only use them when I have to because if you don’t with sneakers, they get nasty. Second of all, when I do have to wear them, they must be ankle socks. And perhaps that is where my problem lies. Those little things don’t get much clinging space when trying to hang on to your ankle without succumbing to gravity and friction. With wear, they inevitably get loose and then start to droop off my feet until I find them in a little scrunched ball at my toes. Hardly protecting my feet anymore!
What I need is ankle socks made from material that can stretch as needed, yet never get too stretched out. Those don’t seem to exist. When they’re new, they’re fine, but with use, socks get useless pretty quickly. I also don’t like them too thick, so the sturdier ones are out of the running. Guess I’m stuck with what I have now. Why do I have to be so picky about my feet?
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!
Err? What is this thing?
Who knew that Jamba Juice sells "flatbread" too?
Oooh, yummy! Sweet and tart and juicy!
Free Wahoo's on their 21st birthday!
All but the first (which I did not purchase since I had no clue how to eat it) were free! 🙂 Just gotta love when you get a good deal and find free samples.
Sudden commotion on campus!
Another news van outside Ronald Reagan.
Reporting on the Young Hall student stabbing.
It seems that reporters are always rushing. Rushing on scene (or as close as they can get). Rushing to grab interviews. Rushing to report on the latest news!
