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About the Weather

Not the best photos representing the grub I cook. First one is a cream/cheese based tuna pasta. It turned out to be a little on the salty side.

The second one is loosely based on the Korean Bi Bim Bap dish. Both meals I cooked hurriedly as I was hungry and just wanted to fill my stomach up. Heh, even the photoshoot didn’t last for more than a minute each. It’s just difficult to make a pile of mush stand out sometimes.

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Vyanne is coming to NYC in a little over a month’s time. Yay! Heh, am excited that she’ll be here. I will be able to bring her to tour NYC with the little knowledge that I know of places. Hopefully the weather warms up a little by then, as it’s just been wind, snow and water pouring from the sky whenever it can. It will be spring then, and the flower buds should start to sprout out. Heh, I imagine Central Park would look more welcoming as opposed to the bleak, barren branches these couple of months before.

Today was the only sunny day I’ve seen since Monday. Strangely enough, when it’s cold one tends to just sit still to prevent the further loss of heat. My job is a desk job, so one doesn’t wave their arms around or run up and down so it’s a little hard to get a chance to convert that kinetic energy into warmth. Heh, really just want to be like a bear and hibernate now.

Going Through My Mind

There’s a long list of things going through my mind. Heh, wonder if I can finish spouting them all out in one breath (or one post in this instance). It’s strange how when people ask, how you’ve been or if anything is new, and all I can manage is that things are the usual, boring, bland ways they are. It’s just that I’ve always automatically accepted that no one would be keen to hear what I have to say, or maybe I’m just too indifferent to explain the nuisances of it all.

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I’ve been preoccupied with work. Lots of programming going on, and lately it’s extensively in VBA for Excel. Learning to program is very much like writing an essay. First you need to learn syntax, and you write clunky sentences to begin with and with each iteration of your self expression, you start to write slightly more elegant code. Then the next thing when you take off your training wheels, is to find a topic to express yourself in. I’ve needed to rework one of my work processes, so the whole idea was conceptualised from scratch and after 2 weeks, I have a program that at a push of a button, does something in under 30 seconds what used to take me about 5 minutes each day to perform.

Heh, besides the time saving, the program was built to be scalable so everytime I needed to add currencies or portfolios, it was just a matter of adding a line on a sheet in Excel, and no dabbling in code (or very little of it). This was one of the reasons I embarked on this project to improve on existing processes.

This is probably how I’ve operated for a while at work. I’d do something repetitive until I got sick and tired of it, and built my own spreadsheets and processes to address the issues. It’s been a couple of years now at work, and I feel I have made significant improvements in my programming skills. Heh, my programming style still has rough edges, but it’s becoming more useful now as I find it easier to navigate myself out of problems and make things work.

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All that programming has led me to take an interest in Linux again, and specifically, the Asus Eee PC. It is a subnotebook device, practically half the size of the laptop I’m typing this article on (which is a 12″ widescreen, to give you an idea). It is enticing in the reason that it’s reasonably affordable, and a full powered computer. It’s just as fast as the laptop I got in 2000, and with the write software (non Windows bloat), you can get things to run pretty snappily on older hardware.

I’ve more keen to find useful things to write programs for. The problem is that usually if there’s something you need done, someone has already written it, and it’s usually available as freeware to be used by anyone and everyone.

I am really tempted to plonk down $370 for an Eee PC, a memory module and an SD card for additional storage, just so I can play around with it. Heh, but I have plenty of computers as it is, and I need to find an alternative method of testing something new. The biggest reason that’s holding me back is the crappy resolution of the device. I’ve tried resizing my browser to fit those dimensions, and most stuff online isn’t really readable without scrolling left and right just to see the contents.

Heh, I know I’ve paid more for lesser things, but I think I’ll hold out for the next generation of this device, just like I’m holding out for a 3G iPhone. Yes, in most eyes, they are like expensive ‘toys’ but having the Internet at your fingertips whereever you are is really, really useful. So I’ll just wait and see, I have a couple of months left in the US to take advantage of the ‘cheaper’ prices. Australia, without the mass market of the US, ensure that items cost more, even with the superior currency exchange the Aussie dollar has.

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So speaking of my remaining 2 months, heh. I have managed to survive nearly a year on my own. I’ve met people and do have a few friends, including my colleagues, but life isn’t quite the same in some far off land where you are in a different time zone to your friends and family you have been so close to all these years. If I was a little stronger in my self belief, I might have taken more advantage of what NYC has to offer. I will definitely be experiencing as much of it as I can before I leave. I have picked up a different kind of culture here, and the energy the city gives a person. I have experienced the absurd weather at times, where flash floods have brought the subway system (which happens to celebrate its 100th year today, and everyone got to travel free for one day) to a halt as well as cause underground pipes to explode and heavy snowstorms as well.

It’s been a tough year, but as my stint overseas is drawing to an end, there’s more to look forward to once I return to Melbourne. I’m not too sure about work, but there will still be things I can contribute to when I’m back.

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So it’s just a tiny peek at my mind, wondering about different things. There’s still plenty going on but as usual, it’s always pass my proper bed time. Heh, back to slogging at work in another 7 hours or so.

More Snow

This is a variation of what my mom used to make me for breakfast when I was going to school as a kid. She’d slice up a banana on bread, stick a slice of cheese on top and stick it in the toaster oven. It comes out nice and warm so you get a breakfast with plenty of energy to keep you going through the day. My version above is a little different, it’s just toasted bread (heated with a frying pan anyway) and a spread of cream cheese on top. I then slice bananas into the frying pan, adding cinnamon powder and a bit of milk while lightly heating the mix. This is just to soften and sweeten the bananas up a bit as the heat works to pull out the extra flavours and sweetness of the bananas.

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Woke up to the biggest snow storm in NYC for a while. I just opened the door from my apartment and was greeted with falling snow and a blanket of white. I didn’t even realise it had started snowing earlier in the night as unlike rain, you don’t hear the snow.

There was so much snow, it was a few centimetres of it at least. You could move your hands through the freshly fallen snow and it’d just slide off. It’s very light and fluffy, much like freshly shaved ice for the Malaysian dessert ais kacang.

The snow storm lasted throughout the day up until after lunch time and it’s nice to look at when you don’t want to concentrate too hard on work. Heh, but as nice as it looks, the snow causes havoc for daily routines as planes are grounded and traffic slows to a crawl. Throughout the day you could see trucks ploughing the snow off the streets.

By the evening, most of what was on the ground was cleared off. If you haven’t moved your car since the night before, you’d be seeing about 10cm of snow over it. I saw people with brooms just trying to push the ice off.

Melbourne weather is dull by comparison. It doesn’t rain as hard nor does it snow there. These are slightly more extreme conditions and while it makes life more interesting, it also complicates things as you get flash floods occasionally and when there’s snow you need to shovel it off the pavement so that it doesn’t harden and make the ground slippery to thread on. Heh, just a lot of extra work to keep things going, but people have been living like this for the past hundred odd years, so this is probably something people get used to.