Category Archives: Blog

The Weekend That Was

★ Posted on at 09:49 pm ★

danish and escargots

Vyanne was adventurous last night and decided to make some danish and escargots. Heh, she’s really into the pastry stuff these days, churning out pretty delicious stuff.

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Heh, churning out a lot more posts these days. Getting into the habit of expressing my ideas, and as long as I put them on the blog quick enough, they materialise into words.

The new version of WordPress feels a little more snappy (it’s supposed to utilise less CPU power on the server side) and I hope that makes it easier for me to want to write stuff (because if it takes too long for stuff to load on the browser, my train of thought goes missing).

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Looked at a nice place in Flemington yesterday. It was a cozy little place, and pretty well kept, but at the asking price of half a million dollars odd, I could get a slightly larger place not too far off. I think I’m pretty set on the area I’d like to purchase a place at. Will be a little more dilligent picking places to visit and view. Melbourne can be a pretty large and daunting place to house hunt at.

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Been failing at keeping my place clean, but picked up a tip reading stuff online and decluttering starts with making sure everything you have has a home. That just means that an item should belong on a shelf, in a drawer, and not on your tabletop. It also helps if you can throw away stuff you don’t need anymore. I’ve been more than good with throwing old stuff away, and I do have random bits laying on my desk and I’ve packed those away, so I’m left with a little less clutter on my desk. The last problem really is space, as there’s only so much I can cram into my room, so I’m still trying to sort out if there is anything else I can get rid of.

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I’m still not very good at taking pictures that need external light. Sometimes the pictures just look wrong and I don’t quite know why. I’m keen on the idea to snap as many pictures as I can over the week and see if I can work out the problems slowly. Need to be able to setup light sources and take them down quickly. Definitely needing more practice over the next few months.

More Comfort Food

★ Posted on at 09:52 pm ★

yongtaufu

Finally got a picture of home made yong tau fu at home. Heh, the food usually gets eaten before I get a chance to photograph it. Here you see it still cooking in the pan, in a broth of fermented beans and garlic. The food made it into a pot, but again I couldn’t get a decent picture before Vyanne and I started to dig into the food.

It’s not the quickest meal one can prepare, with the need to prepare the fish paste as well as cutting up the vegetables, tofu to be filled with the paste. Doesn’t matter though, when it tastes this good, I’d happily spend the hour making it, and another five just chomping it down.

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.8 today. Fastest upgrade I’ve ever done for this. As much as I’m finding WordPress to become more and more bloated (the post revision feature is cool, but adds extra bulk to my database size), it does get some things done without needing to leave your browser. Managed to update WordPress straight to the website with just the click of a button, where before I had to download WordPress, and then copy the files to the website via an FTP client. That used to take a half hour at least, and today it was all done in under 5 minutes.

Only problems I’ve had so far are some broken plugins. That isn’t a deal breaker, but it does make posting pictures from Flickr take a few seconds longer.

Was fiddling around with the database and getting all the settings to work on my Windows 7 machine. Heh, took a while, but finally have a proper machine for developing websites again. Will have a go at churning out websites soon enough.

Half a Decade

★ Posted on at 09:32 pm ★

pai tee

Vyanne made pai tee over the weekend, using a mould my mom bought many years back. Heh, it’s an appetizer where a crispy shell is filled with vegetables and meat and topped with garnish. The vegetable in question is what I know as sengkuang (it’s also known as a yam bean, Vietnamese water chestnut and all the names in the various other languages) and it was a chore looking for it as we went from shop to shop until we finally found one which sold plenty of them. At around $10/kg, they don’t come cheap.

The crispy shell is the most tedious part, where you prepare a batter, dip the mould in and then transfer that to the oil. The shell will be fried and turns crispy, and then you remove it with chopsticks or whatever utensils you have on you. If the oil is not hot enough, the thing sticks to the mould. Too hot and your shell gets charred very quickly.

Once the shells are made, the filling is then made from sliced sengkuang, carrots, dried shrimp, fresh prawns and chicken. Sliced chillies, coriander and fried shallots act as garnish over the filling.

Not a very good shot, with the coriander being disproportionately large over the pai tee.

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I’ve been writing stuff on this site for half a decade now. It’s like a personal diary, yet slightly vague with little detail on personal agendas. It’s more of a catalyst for my memory as when I read through older items, I recall what I was doing at the time. One thing though, is that I’ve been persistent in maintaining this site, just because I still like to share my photos and the odd thought every now and then.

Much has evolved on the Internet, but I’m still stuck with what my experiences were from back then on blogging. I’m slowly going through the process of overhauling this website, but I’ve adapted it in such a way that I’m sort of set in processes from a distant past. Every new design after a few times at experimentation is just a rehash of the old template. This current design was hacked together in a couple of days, so you can sort of figure that I’ve become somewhat lazy and taking shortcuts to do this.

Going to take the bold step of breaking the innards of how the whole process works and tweaking it every now and then. Work means I can’t attend to the website everyday, but I will at least try to make it fresh.

Well, it starts here then.