Life is Great

Anchovy Broth
Makes 1¾ liter of broth

• 2 liters water


• 1½ cups dried anchovies, washed


• 1½ tablespoons peanut oil


• a pinch of salt


• a dash of pepper

Heat oil in a stock pot over medium heat. Fry anchovies till aromatic. Add salt and pepper to taste. When anchovies are browned slightly, add water. Increase heat to high fire. Once broth comes to a boil, cover with lid but leave steamslot open (for pots without steamslots, shift lid slightly to expose a small uncovered space). Let broth simmer for at least 20 minutes. Remove anchovies with a strainer.

Sir; If, as you say, confessing a Truth indeed may procure my safety, I shall with all Willingness and Duty perform your Command. But let not your Grace ever imagine that your poor Wife will ever be brought to acknowledge a Fault, where not so much as a Thought thereof proceeded. And to speak a truth, never Prince had Wife more Loyal in all Duty, and in all true Affection, than you have ever found in Anne Boleyn. Neither did I at any time so far forget myself in my received Queenship, but that I always looked for such an Alteration as now I find; for the ground of my Preferment being on no surer Foundation than your Grace's Fancy, the least Alteration, I knew, was fit and sufficient to draw that Fancy to some other Subject.

Try me good King, but let me have a Lawful Trial, and let not my sworn Enemies sit as my Accusers and Judges; yea, let me receive an open Trial, for my Truth shall fear no open shame; then shall you see, either mine Innocency cleared, your Suspicion and Conscience satisfied, the Ignominy and Slander of the World stopped, or my Guilt openly declared. So that whatsoever God or you may determine of me, your Grace may be freed from an open Censure to follow your Affection already settled on that Party, for whose sake I am now as I am.

But if you have already determined of me, and that not only my Death, but an infamous Slander must bring you the enjoying of your desired Happiness; then I desire of God, that he will pardon your great Sin therein; and likewise mine Enemies, the Instruments thereof; and that he will not call you to a strict Account for your unprincely and cruel usage of me, at his General Judgement-Seat, where both you and my self must shortly appear, and in whose Judgement, I doubt not (whatsover the World may think of me) mine Innocence shall be openly known, and sufficiently cleared.

1. Do I want feedback on what I'm writing?
I would always welcome feedback based on my personal stand that blogging is a two-way form of communication. I assume my readers would know or get the idea which of my many writings are worth commenting on. If I happen to post rubbish then I do not mind getting some rubbish in return (GIGO!). I value feedbacks on posts which spark discussions - I learn so much.

2. Do I have time to manage a conversation right now?
I think it is not necessary to moderate all threads but I make it a point to address all comments. I also make time to edit out double entries or accidental errata. If a thread does go out of topic, I can make use of it to start another one - lo and behold! A new post... great! I agree with Meg though that it is the author's responsibility to ensure some level of civility and pleasant vibe on each thread. On spam and troll controls, I have Haloscan to take care of those.

3. Is this conversation over?
The function of disabling further comments will be useful if a thread does turn ugly and begin to do readers more harm than good. Apart from that, I think it is not a necessity to close every conversation explicitly. The author always have the right to comment censorship anyway, to use it or not is up to his or her wise judgement.

Chocolate Pots de Crème
Serves 4

• 1¼ cups Half-and-Half (pre-shredded vacuum sealed fondue packs of half sharp aged Gruyère and half Vacherin-Fribourgeois cheese)


• 3 ounces bittersweat chocolate, finely chopped


• ¼ cup sugar


• 3 large egg yolks


• ½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract


• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder


• Pinch of salt


• Freshly whipped cream, for serving (optional)

Preheat oven to 300º. Bring a kettle of water to boil, and keep it warm.
Heat Half-and-Half in a small saucepan over medium heat until it just begins to simmer. Remove from heat, and add chocolate and sugar. Let stand 5 minutes.
Stir together yolks, vanilla, cocoa and salt in a large bowl. With a fork, stir chocolate mixture until smooth. Gradually stir chocolate mixture into egg mixture. Pour through a fine sieve into a glass measuring cup.
Place four ramekins, pudding molds or pot de crème molds (3 to 4 ounces each) in a shallow roasting pan, and divide the chocolate mixture among them. Pour the hot water into the pan so that it reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins.
Bake until custards are not quite set in centers, about 30 minutes (custards will firm up as they cool). Carefully remove ramekins from water bath, and let custards cool slightly. Cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate until ready to serve.
Just before serving, dollop with whipped cream, if desired.

• I am not a big fan


• Exploiting !important CSS in Internet Explorer


• Redesign Redux: CSS issues


• web standards not über alles (yet)


• web design as fashion


• crme brle


• Site redesign, spring 2004


• Redesigning NSLog(); [added on 19/04/2004]

To become an academic;
To further one’s knowledge and skills after completing a Degree;
To utilize the recognition in one’s career advancement plan.

They have graduated and cannot find a 'good' job, plus they get paid being Research Analysts while doing their Masters;
They have not decided what to do with their lives and do not feel like working;
They have worked for a good many years and this seems like the obvious next step, though they themselves have no idea what to do with the piece of certification;
They have discovered that their job resulting from their previously gained Degree no longer interest them, and by doing a Masters in something they think they now want to do will open new doors of career opportunity;
They are already managers and hope that a Masters qualification may push them up a nudge on the career ladder, regardless of whether the paper is relevant to their job or company;
Everyone else they know are doing it, thus they have to keep up.

When I was doing my Industrial Training during the second year of my Computer Science degree, an acquaintance (notice I used this reference instead of friend to show how desperate she was) approached me for assistance with a computer programming assignment. She was pursuing a Masters of IT from a local college, her Degree was in Economics. In a nutshell, she knows nothing about Computer Science or IT, except maybe to use the word processor on her PC. Her then boyfriend held a Degree in Computer Science but could not do much programming to save her life. She was willing to give me a ride from my office back to my hostel room during the then semester break to convince me into preparing her assignment for her. It was an object oriented programming project in C++ which requires at least two weeks worth of man days to complete. She came to me two days away from the deadline an expected a miracle. I attempted similar assignments a year earlier. I explained to her the best I can the concepts of OOP and some syntaxes of C++ (I might as well have been speaking in Swahili to her) but frankly told her I cannot write the program for her.

When I first started working after graduation, my immediate boss was just beginning his Masters in IT program. He asked me for a favor to complete one of his assignments. It was a case study to prepare a user requirement questionnaire. Not wanting to put myself in a spot (I worried he would take it personally on me if I refused), I agreed to do it for him. I did it as if it was my life and death exam paper. I spent one hour with maximum effort on it and mailed it to him the next day. He has never since repeated any such request.

• The Wrong Paper Chase by TiFische


• Pre-Post Doctoral Blues by Ash.ox

Day 1
Clean room
Have breakfast @ Chinoz with book
Enjoy afternoon siesta
Blog
Cook pasta
Watch SATC reruns

Day 2
Order pizza and chicken wings
Vegetate slowly

Day 3
Oh... no day 3. WTF, back to work and hell.

As humans we live in a five sensory world and take in all information through these five senses. If we absorbed everything that comes to us at 3-million bits of information a second, we'd fry our circuits. To deal with this we filter the information. Some of our filters are our perceptions of time and space energy and matter, the language we use and our understanding of words and meanings, our memories, the way we go about making decisions, the patterns we look for when selecting information, our values and beliefs and our overall attitude. And we delete, distort and generalize according to our filters. We then take what has gone through and make a picture of it with sounds and feelings, tastes and smells. The next thing that happens instantaneously is that we react to that image with corresponding state emotional behavior.

- Trisha Barn, NLP - Talk Yourself into Excellence

• NLP - Talk Yourself into Excellence


• The Power of the Unconscious Mind: The Answers Are Inside You


• Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein's Brain

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctiveness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Receipe of a Complicated Weekend
Serves till this Sunday night

• Being rudely disturbed by the same Arab men while you are having dinner (dessert) with the sentinent sentient. We were supposed to be falling head over heels just because the owners of Little Egypt were attempting to pick us up?


• Discovering there are such men who enjoy reading your blog but refuse to acknowledge so when prompted.


• Forgetting to switch on the headlights at night when you are too beat to drive.


• Having to forsake a friendship with one part of a couple who are breaking up. You can never be close at the same level with both.


• Having colleagues who dislike you, and you them.


• Having to work attend a two-whole-days course on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) during the weekend with despite having overlapping deadlines lurking around the corner.


• Having a yellow little car not washed for the past two weeks and is due for yet another service tomorrow after three months.

Hart, a recovering meth addict, used drugs in an attempt to capitalize on her flourishing career. Working as an account executive for a San Francisco based Dot-com Company, Hart was earning US$80,000 a year while secretly abusing meth. Lisa Smith used methamphetamines to secure two jobs in New York City, one as a daytime marketing consultant and one as a deejay. Patricia Morgan, Ph.D., a sociologist in Berkeley, California who studied 450 meth users, supports the notion that "women who use it say they want to keep working - they feel like they're being productive."

Local females dealing with meth addictions say weight loss was one of the biggest reasons they used.

"Nothing could curb the weight like the meth," said a 17-year-old girl at Turning Point. While it isn't always the reason they start using, many females stick with the drug because it suppresses their appetites. But even as their weights plummet, most remain unhappy with their body image.

"I always wanted more," said another girl, who dropped to a dangerous 77 pounds at the height of her addiction. Now in rehab, the 14-year-old is up to a healthy 130 pounds.

While male users also experience weight loss, it does not become a driving appeal for them. Females tend to be much more focused on being thin, experts say.

• Secrets and Lies by Kevin Walsh


• Think Tank by Ian Sansom


• A Review by David Young


• A Review by Brooke Allen

Belacan Snakes Beans with Shrimps
Serves 4

•   100 gms of snake beans (boiled and chopped into 1/4 inch lengths)


•   80 gms of fresh large shrimps (cleaned, shelled with tail intact)


•   1/4 cup of water


•   2 tbsps of oil


For the belacan mix:

•   5 red chillies


•   8 cili padi (optional)


•   2 cloves garlic (finely chopped)


•   2 inches old ginger (finely chopped)


•   4cm piece belacan (roast till fragrant)


•   Pinch of salt


•   1 limau kasturi

Pound chillies until rather coarse in texture. Add in garlic and ginger. Break up roasted belacan and add into chilli mixture gradually. Continue to pound until texture is neither too smooth nor too coarse. Add pinch of salt. Put mixture in a bowl. Squeeze lime juice in and mix well.
Heat oil in wok and stir-fry shrimps till color change. Remove promptly into a strainer. Add in belacan mix to the wok and fry till fragrant. Return shrimps to the belacan and stir for a minute before adding water. Add in snake beans and toss evenly. Serve hot with warm rice.

What Women Need to Know: 20 Things Men Find Irresistible

From the men, we love it when you:

Have the ability to tease, be playful and take a joke.
Know that men are not, in fact, from Mars, and women are not from Venus .
Wear our T-shirts and boxers.
Call us out of the blue (if we're dating; not if we're practically strangers).
Kiss creatively.
Have a social conscience and enjoy a good debate.
Have an easy-going attitude about watching or participating in athletic events occasionally.
Are comfortable leading the whole way in bed.
Ask for advice about non-stereotypically male stuff (yes, guys usually know what CD player to buy, but we like to be taken seriously about other things too).
Are charming and thoughtful to his mother.
Can hold up your hair using only a pencil.
Are sexy and smart at the same time -- for example, you do the Sunday crossword wearing a pair of flirty pajamas.
Have the ability to remind us what gifts you like, without implying an obligation.
Have a spirit of independence, but one that doesn't make the man in your life feel unnecessary.
Know the difference between flirting and just ''being friendly''.
Eat a big meal and fearlessly order dessert.
Take naps next to us.
Send us flowers (believe it or not, men like getting flowers, too!).
Know what you want.
Know what you want to do.

What Men Need to Know: 20 Things Women Find Irresistible

From the girls, we love it when you:

Own a pair of really nice shoes and actually wear them.
Brush the hair out of our eyes.
Are able to hold a baby or push a stroller without squirming.
Plan an evening out from soup to nuts, from finding a movie to making the dinner reservations.
Kiss creatively.
Handle our emotions with grace and compassion.
Have impassioned, informed opinions about women writers and women's issues.
Can distinguish between being courteous and being wimpy.
Know how to inscribe a card with a heartfelt, personal message.
Demonstrate respect for others by standing up when your mother comes to the table, giving up a seat on the bus for a pregnant woman, asking your dad for his opinion and really listening, etc.
Show genuine, platonic interest in your female friends' lives.
Are playful around dogs, cats and kids.
Make the bed in the morning and fold the laundry -- competently.
Offer juice, soup and TLC when we're sick.
Do the come-from-behind cuddle-hug, just to say hello.
Remember insignificant details, like our favorite color or flower, and make use of that knowledge.
Are unfailingly polite to all members of the service industries.
Offer us caresses and compliments for no particular reason.
Understand that we don't always like it slow and gentle in bed.
Understand that sometimes we do.

• Recent wonderful shots of Petaling Street by TV Smith