Alvin Lai

Bought Mom’s favourite chinese pastries from the famous Thye Lee

They’ve been consistently yummylicious, with the thin crisp outer skin
and rich sweet inner lotus paste. Absolutely fabulous.

Then Mom returned with a red bundle of suprise.

I took one up, examined its texture.

The slightly moist reflective skin indicated ripeness.
It felt a little squishy too!

I couldn’t resist squeezing..

Splat! Squeezed a little too hard, sending bits of durian cream
on my face and all over in the vicinity of 1 meter.

Joking.. I simply took a bite.

It really felt like custard pie, only creamier and sweeter!

The durian season is here!

Recently, Lihao has a few friends enquiring about switching to a Mac, who ask what’s so great about switching to another Operationg System, other from familiar WindowsXP.

Mike has a list here
with the top 10 reasons after his initial switch FOUR years ago (even longer than yours truly!).

Finally its here!

Remember playing quake or counterstrike and having to pull out the cool console/terminal ingame to type in some commands to change a game level or something?

Something like this.

Now there’s Visor that brings that to the Mac desktop! Check out my screenshot!

Sweet!

You can bind a shortcut key to call it up with a nice transition effect with customizable delay.

The nice thing is Visor automatically hides when u click on another application, so it doesn’t get in your way.

And of course it retains the session/remembers what you typed even after it hides so you can resume work after recalling it.

Get rocking with Visor here!

I finally got my automatic labeller!

It’s a Brother P-Touch PT-1830, capable of printing labels up till 20mm thick!

A couple of friends have said that they could easily just write and label stuff in hand, but I digress.

Take a look.

Would you prefer this…

or this?

Which one’s easier to read?

I’m sure you would agree with me that the latter would make filing so fun and systematic, that you might even enjoy and start labelling everything at home!

Here’s the full set, that I bought, the labeller package comes with a free sample label cartridge (I’m not sure how long it’ll last) and beside it is a black box of another label I’ve purchased.

Typing was a breeze!

Easy piecy! Printed out!

Brother labels are pretty nice, you can peel the labels out from the middle out, as the non sticky wax paper is split into half.

A closer look of the label wax paper..

I can’t wait to get started!

If you’re new here, you might be asking what’s GTD. 43Folders has a good introductory article to it. When I find the time, will blog more my GTD experience in time to come!

Wait for more pictures of my file folders nicely labelled in my file cabinet!

If you’re going to record your jedi ninjitsu on your home camera, remember to trash it.

Just as I needed to take a break from Rails, my Mom called out to me.

“Boy ah! Your father cooking crab now! Want to see?”

I’ve always relished Dad’s fantastic culinery skills from young and he has never failed to facinate with his seemingly simple procedures.

Not forgetting my loyal blog readers, I snagged my trusty K750i camera phone on the way to the kitchen.

Dad already had the oil heated up,

which filled the entire kitchen with the aroma of sizzling garlic.

Then into the wok these babies went.

The siblings just couldn’t wait for their turn.

As soon as they got partially cooked,

They were taken out and placed aside.

Looks almost eatable already

Scraping off the loose shells.

I can’t resist this masterpiece.

Back to garlic!

The browning signalled for..

Crab Bodies: “Yippie! My turn!!”

I can’t resist. Forgive me.

Getting ready Dad’s specialle crab sauce..

Pouring it in..

Sizzle sizzle…

Now if only you can smell the lethal combination of thickening special sauce and power punching stir fried garlic..

After a little while..

Dad explained that as the bodies were bulkier and required longer cooking times, it was covered to retain maximum moisture. Something I’ve noticed successful hokkien mee hawkers employ too.

Ahhh…

Pouring in egg..

Buay tahan liao..

Same thing for the pincers..

:p

The Lai family proceeded to feast and I was appointed the official crab body cruncher.

As if that’s not enough, I still had century egg porridge and this afternoon’s uneaten curry puff.

70.7kg.. Don’t run also cannot liao..

All in all, a wonderful family dinner

Was thinking of getting a cat, but after this, I realise it can get a little heart breaking..

Well, according to Apple at least.

“Located in the hub of the Silicon Valley of Singapore–the Ang Mo Kio neighborhood–the campus features a cozy and spacious work environment, a health club with up-to-date gym facilities, and a cafeteria that offers balanced meals for breakfast and lunch.”

Check it out under “Singapore Campus” here

I am so in need of manila folders! See below:

Everyone just tell me to go to either 2 places:

1. Bras Basah
2. Popular

But the problem is, they just dont have these at either!

I need them in bulk, of a few hundred per box. They sell these in the US for US$9 for a box of 100.

And why do I need these, you ask.

For GTD (Getting Things Done)!

And it’s kinda dumb shipping paper over continents. :/

What’s with Safari these days? It’s been pissing me off with the ever frequent beachball (Mac OSX’s equivalent of the busy hour glass).

The last straw came when I had to forcefully terminate whilst working on some AJAX scripts.

I turned to Camino, a mac specific browser based on the same Gecko rendering engine that made Firefox famous for its accuracy in rendering webpages.

Specially created for the Mac, Camino is tightly integrated using native Cocoa.

The only thing that you might miss from Safari is probably Sogudi, a plugin that allows you to do instant wikipedia searches like “wikip manhattan project” or google searches with “g steve yang”.

A quick google search provided the answer.

Here’s it:

Just open Show All Bookmarks, add a new Bookmark, for instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

and assign a keyword. Like “wp”. Then, type
wp Camino
in the location bar, et voila!

Enjoy!