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Backlog

Fresh pasta with pine mushrooms and freshly grated Parmesan. The camera gets worked a lot at home with taking pictures of food. This was made before we moved to the new place and you can get fresh pine mushrooms at Victoria market at the organic section.

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Recently I’ve had the tendency to sit back and cruise along with the things occurring around me. I had the excuse that I was preparing for my CPA exam, or that I was making arrangements to move house. It mainly revolved around the house, scurrying up and down over the weekends to get things done. Now I’ve got all my furniture and being comfortable in the routines, I think it’s time to start rocking the boat again.

It’s time to start pushing boundaries again, doing things that I enjoy. I’ve spent a couple of hours the last few nights on my computer playing games over the internet with friends. Heh, we used to need to huddle in the same room over bulky CRT monitors with cables everywhere just to play games together, now broadband is quick, and wireless leaves your space clutter free. As much as I enjoy shooting zombies or building armies of alien races (playing Left 4 Dead 2 and the Starcraft 2 Beta of late), it’s a consumption activity and after leaving my camera at home these days, I long to exercise the creative part of my brain to produce something.

The camera will probably not move much, since I drive and unlike the times when I used to travel by foot to work, I can’t really manipulate the camera behind a steering wheel as I can while taking different routes home. So I’ll channel my efforts into other endeavours. Need to learn how to use the new functionality of Lightroom 3 (which seemed a bigger jump from 1 to 2). Need to redo this website. There’s new web standards to play with. When I first started CSS2 was still barely supported by browsers and Firefox was a brand new browser back then. Now we have so many other browsers competing for market share and many of the standards in CSS3 are starting to receive good support from the major browsers like Chrome, Safari (both were non existent back then). So it’s time to get cracking on something new.

I bought a whole stack of books on various topics, need to start reading those as well. Heh, need to populate the bookshelf in the study, so it will be a good time to review the stuff I’d like to read up on first.

Will also need to tidy up the other areas of the house and I have this phobia of leaving all the things I packed from my previous place in boxes. That’s not going to happen as the items will either find a home in a drawer or a shelf, or it gets thrown out or donated. Heh, this is just thinking ahead for my next house moving, I don’t want to accummulate stuff I don’t need or want.

For most of these things, I’ve set them in motion. Now it’s just moving along and finishing the race. Time to get cracking.

One Long Day

Had friends over for dinner last night and Vyanne cooked up some pretty amazing stuff. First course was a potato, leek and fennel soup, served with a poached egg in the middle topped off with truffle shavings. The second course pictured here is pan seared duck breast with a mushroom, ricotta ravioli, mushrooms in butter, served with a side of mustard and pickled onions, topped off with more shaved truffle.

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Watched bits of the World Cup final this morning at 430am. Like the semi final between Spain and Germany, I only watched the first half, before going back to sleep. I’d wake up in between winks to see the score, and in the 89th minute when the score was still zero all, I just decided to go back to sleep. I still recall the 2006 final between Italy and France, I guess with any matches where you are not supporting the team, you need to be watching with friends just to keep up with the atmosphere. Had wanted Holland to beat Spain, only because Spain was mainly a Barcelona team in disguise (half the team sheet was filled with Barcelona team members).

Not that the match wasn’t exciting, it was more a war of attrition than anything else. There were so many yellow cards dished out, and De Jong’s kungfu kick against Alonso would have been a red card were it not for the occasion as a final. A red card was dished out in extra time, and I guess the Dutch played a little too cautiously and failed to convert their chances. I guess the better team won in the end, but the agony for the Dutch, only because they’ve been in 3 finals and have not won it once.

It’s been a fascinating World Cup, with teams like Argentina, Germany and Uruguay really showing the flare in football. Then there’s Paul the Octopus, correctly predicting the outcome of 8 matches in the World Cup. Now it’s just another 4 years to the next World Cup!

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Setting up schedules at work to adhere to when I get back. It’s only because there’s so much I want to do when I get home that one can get sidetracked. Managed to cook dinner, watch some tele, play a couple of rounds of the Starcraft 2 Beta and banging out this post now. Heh, next up is doing an hour of study (hopefully) before turning into bed. With the short hours I slept this morning, it’s a wonder I’m not dozing off already.

Settling In

One of the last rooms I need to paint. The wall’s supposed to be peach, and it’s a little more subtle than it looks here. This will be the guest bedroom, and we needed to get it painted before the bed arrives next week. After painting a few times, you make less of a mess and get it done more efficiently.

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I don’t sit down nearly enough in front of the computer these days. Heh, with a living room now, I’ve become more of a couch potato, just consuming television shows when they are on. Especially after work, you come home, prepare dinner, then sit in front of the dumb box watching Masterchef Australia for an hour, another couple of hours watching whatever I have on my computer.

I’m in the process of streamlining the living room, with the TV, a computer, an audio/video receiver and speakers plus a Playstation 3. The TV and AVR have a remote each, the PS3 it’s own controller and you need a keyboard and mouse to run the computer. So I got a Logitech Harmony universal remote to rule over them all. The remote controls various devices after you program it from a central database and you can set it to sequentially startup all the devices you need to do a certain activity. I’ve always had issue going to people’s places and I’m always fumbling with the various remote controls just to do something. I usually just give up and get the host to set it up for me. At the moment the Harmony remote controls everything but the computer, and I’ll just grab a cheapo $10 IR receiver from eBay to work out that issue. Once the living room is sorted, I’ll start working on the different areas with the backyard garden the last item I’d be looking at.

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Need to work out some schedules. Already signed up for 2 subjects of CPA to be taken at the end of October so I really need to allocate my time appropriately.

My 21km run is next Sunday. Haven’t really prepared for it with all the moving and the weather’s been really horribly cold of late. I survived harsher temperatures in NYC, but when your rent covers your electricity bill, you don’t turn off the heater, heh. Will do a final run tomorrow and just hope my body can last the 21km run.

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Just need to get the second coat of paint on room now before getting ready for dinner. Heh.