Monthly Archives: April 2010

Catching My Breath

★ Posted on at 10:08 pm ★

bi bim bap

Vyanne made some Korean Bi Bim Bap a few days ago. The great thing about Melbourne is the variety of ingredients you can get.

* * *

It’s not easy to get a car fixed. Everytime I go to an auto repair shop, I find out something new about the bits and pieces of the car. There is the panel work, beating it back into its original shape. There is also the paint job, which is outsourced. There is also the windscreen installation, which is outsourced. There is also the windscreen tinting, which is also outsourced.

So I picked up my car on Friday. Walked to the auto repair shop and saw my car parked by the side, looking all proper again. Got my keys and it went downhill from there. The central locking was not working, so I got them to look at it again. Opened up the bonnet, looked through the fuse box. The one relating to the locking mechanism seemed fine. Pulled out the car manual, and found another fuse box under the steering wheel and sure enough, one of the fuses had blown. Got a replacement, and still the central locking did not work. After a few tries with my remote lock, that fuse blew as well. So there’s one other thing that that’s outsourced, the electrician work.

Hopefully the car gets sorted by tomorrow.

* * *

Covered my exam syllabus. Not confident, just needing to do more practice questions and going through the concepts again. About 3 weeks away.

Home loan should be settled. Just need to liaise with the various parties again to ensure I get all the proper stuff sorted before then. Then there’s the furniture shopping. Also about 3 weeks away.

Signed up for a 21km run in July. Heh, no idea what I’ve got myself into, but already have Jerome and my cousin Ernst to go run. Need lots of practice from now until then. About 3 months away.

* * *

April was supposed to be quiet. Too much going on, just trying to catch my breath.

The Upgrade

★ Posted on at 06:26 pm ★

sticking out

Trying to not post a picture of food every now and then. Heh, still taking public transport to and from work, so I decided to bring my camera out just to grab some photos. Put on the 85mm f/1.8 to try as I seldom venture further than 55mm these days.

The flowers were sticking out of the fence, and the 85mm gives the back of the fence that nice shallow depth of field. Also played around with the white balance to impart a blueish hue on it. I think it works pretty well with the picture. Trying something different as I usually try to make the colours naturally white.

* * *

Geek rambling ahead. You have been warned.

Since I bought in Eee PC in late 2008, I’ve always wanted to replace the internal SSD as it’s been pretty slow. That plus the fact that I only had less than 450MB of space left on the SSD made it difficult for me to install more programs (poor program design, forcing me to install stuff on the C:/ drive).

Managed to snag one off eBay at a reasonable price. The SSD came with an external USB case/connector but the computer did not want to detect it so I just pulled out the older SSD and installed the new one. After fiddling around with Clonezilla and GParted, I managed to transplant the Windows partition on the older, slower 4GB SSD to the newer, faster 32GB SSD. Took me a while to figure some of the bits out, but eventually got everything working.

The SSD upgrade is like buying a new computer. My Eee PC feels as snappy as my desktop for most tasks (other than running Flash related media, where it slows to a crawl, hence the reason why Apple shuns it from their iPhone and iPad). Startup to Windows felt the same (although it was already reasonably quick to begin with, under 30 seconds). After that you could see the new SSD shine, as the previous one would take a while to load up all the startup processes before I could do anything with it. I tried Firefox initially, and there wasn’t that noticeable lag when starting up the program, or when opening new tabs and switching between sites. The most exciting part came when I tried Google Chrome. Startup was instant, and everything just loaded in a zip.

I feel now that my Eee PC can keep up with me and it’s one of those machines that seems to cater for only 2% of the market masses, as Asus has phased out my model and have not replaced it. None of the other manufacturers produce anything similar as well.

The 8.9″ screen is too small for most people and it makes people squint. It is however, exactly the kind of size I want as it keeps the form factor tiny enough and this is still the lightest netbook with a decent screen resolution at 1.1kg. Everything else is about 1.5kg, and every little bit of weight counts when you are travelling.

When they can manufacture another laptop at that weight with more performance, I might consider upgrading. There is the iPad at 700gm, but it has no USB ports (for me to backup photos when travelling) and I don’t think I can type nearly as fast on it as I can with a physical keyboard (and as with the screen, the keyboard is too small for most people to type comfortably on,which makes me special, heh). The last bit is that I can’t service the iPad the same way I service my Eee PC. Parts are available on eBay and I’ve replaced a keyboard, upgraded an SSD and if the battery dies on me one day, I can easily procure a replacement on eBay. I don’t have to send it back to Apple and wait for them to replace the battery for me.

Having said all that, I am a geek and the iPad will appeal to the other 98% of people who would rather not have to do any manual repairs/upgrades on their own devices. So in general, what works for me usually does not work for everyone else. Heh.

* * *

Heh, and I had to post a picture of food. My friend’s mum makes the best kind of laksa from the northern parts of Malaysia. The soup base is hot, with lots of chilli, fish and coconut. You top up the noodles with bean sprouts, lettuce, red onions and cucumbers before ladling in the hot, tasty soup.

I never fail to have more than one bowl of it everytime I get the opportunity to eat it.

northern laksa

Sudden Changes

★ Posted on at 11:05 pm ★

garlic prawns with sherry

I think I like my pictures better with the external flash. White light just looks so much more flattering against anything but I guess you can change the mood of existing light. Afterall, a picture is just how you interpret the light falling on the objects you see.

The dish above was a simple dish that was part of my birthday party menu. Cooked it tonight for a simple dinner. It’s just some garlic, parsley pan fried in some olive oil, before adding some sherry. The mixture is left to simmer a bit before everything is poured into the pot of peeled prawns. The whole pot is put into the oven for a few minutes, and you have a tasty dish, where the prawn juices will infuse the oils below. Good to dip with bread.

Also had this with pumpkin soup and corn fritters. Heh, went to the market without checking out what was in stock in the fridge, and came back with another pumpkin and some more corn cobs. Pumpkin is cheap at $1 a kilo, while the two pieces of corn were at 50 cents each.

With the overabundance of pumpkin, I decided I wanted to make pumpkin soup for dinner (which was suitable for the weather, which I will talk about later). As I’m still using public transport, quickly popped into the grocery store while I was waiting for my tram and got a bag of yellow split peas (was thinking lentils at the time).

While boiling the lentils, you put the chopped up pumpkin into the oven to roast. Once it’s soft enough, you just need to pop the pumpkin into the food processor and turn it into a smooth paste. Drain the lentils, and add the pumpkin back into the pot where you were boiling it. Add chicken stock, some cream, cumin powder, garam masala, and a dash of chilli powder for heat. Bring to a simmer and slowly stir it. Add salt to taste and some chopped parsley. Also good with toasted, chunky rye sour dough.

* * *

The weather decided to go out of whack all of a sudden. One sort of expects autumn to come (it is mid April after all) but the temperature change is a little more dramatic. Previously it was 23 to 25 degrees each day, and the sun was warm and nice. On Sunday, it was a cooler 15 to 18 degrees, and the wind would try to send you to Oz with every chance it got. Wearing a jacket and jeans now, as I’d rather not catch a chill while my body adapts to the lower temperatures.

Heh, the weather is sort of like work now. I don’t like to comment much on work, but sometimes it gets a little frustrating. There has been four or five resignations in the exec space over the past couple of months. It’s the culture of the organisation and I don’t find it very conducive. Like the weather, you sort of expect the resignations to come but it’s sudden and it still catches you unaware at times. I just need to air this as I’m feeling a little disappointed with the direction it’s heading in, but that’s about all I’ll comment on now.

* * *

April was supposed to be a quiet month, but I had managed to celebrate my birthday almost three times in the week (so I sort of had a birthday week). On Saturday, Vyanne had organised a Spanish themed party with lots of tasty morsels as below.

birthday tapas

For drinks my friend tried to make Sangria, we had roasted figs with jamon serrano (a Spanish ham), lamb skewers which I had to barbeque (with a friend’s help), the garlic prawns described above, manchengo cheese with jamon serrano, pickled skewers which had a pickled onion, baby cucumber, roasted capsicum , boiled quail egg and a stuffed olive. Also had crumbed mussels, a chick pea and chorizo mix, a sort of frittata with omelette and Desiree potatoes in layers, some sour dough rye. Cousin made churros dipped in chocolate as well as a creme brulee strawberry tart (not pictured) and we polished down 95% of the food.

Personally prefer to have less food (I know people like to have an overabundance of food at their parties, but that just leads to wastage and leftovers) at a party with everyone just eating enough to fill their tummies and be satisfied.

* * *

Heh, still lots going through my mind that I could write about, but the days are too short. Too much to do and too little time. Catching public transport in the morning means I have to be a little more punctual with my scheduling.