While I was having an italian hoagie for lunch today, I noticed something on the label on the bottled iced tea that I bought. The bottle is a 16 fl oz. bottle, and the recommended serving size on the label was 2. The nutrition fact on the label was divided into two halves, with one for half bottle, and the other for the whole bottle.

It made me think why they would do that. Why would they sell a bottle that would serve 2 instead of 1? If it was determined that half of the bottle is sufficient, then wouldn’t the utility of drinking each gulp of the second half be negative? After I thought about it, I started to feel that the second half of the bottle made me too full (when drinking with the hoagie). It would be more optimized for me if the bottle were half the size, and the price be reduced. But of course, that probably wouldn’t be optimized for the manufacturers, which is probably why they don’t do it…

Maybe I’m just thinking too much… but hey, I’m going to grad school for a reason… :-p

I got my hair cut today. As expected, I get shocked faces from people who knows me everywhere I turn. I don’t get haircut that often, and people are more familiar with me having long hair. When I had it cut last year, one of my coworkers actually thought that I was a new employee. As the matter of fact, Eric, another coworker just came in, turned around, and then quickly turned back again and tried to figure out who I am. He was like “I thought there was some random dude sitting there.” :p

I guess it’s nice to make changes from times to times. On the plus side, I don’t have hair poking my eyes any more…

A successful cooking story….

Lately, I’ve found ways to cook several dishes differently than how I used to cook. The first one was fried rice. I usually use sauces such as fish sauce and a small amount of oyster sauce, but I found out that I could make it good without those. The only thing you need to make a good fried rice is salt and sugar. Don’t believe it? Just try it.

You need to first heat up the frying pan. Then, put in some chopped bacons in there. Wait for a while until the pan is sufficiently greased, and the bacons turned golden brown. Take the bacon out and put chopped/diced onions in there.
Stir-fried the onions for a while, then put an egg in there. Wait until the egg white starts to turn from transparent to white, then stir the eggs. Put the rice in there and mix everything together. Put in chopped carrots, bacon, sugar, and salt. Stir everything in the pan a little more, and voila… there is your fried rice.

For pad thai, I had always thought that you need to use tamarind paste/juice. As I found out, many thai restaurants here (in the U.S.) do not use tamarind juice. Instead, they use vinegar to substitute for it. I decided to make that today, and it turned out amazing.

At first, I was only planning to eat egg pad thai. After I soaked the noodles in water, I found out that I did not have any eggs left in the refrigerator. So, I decided to put in shrimps for proteins. I first mixed sugar, vinegar, and fish sauce. I heated up oil in a frying pan. Then, I put in some chopped onions, stirred them a little until golden brown and throw the shrimps in there. When the shrimps turned the color (just cooked), I took them out. I then put all the noodles in there, stir-fried them a little, then put the mixed sauce in there. I added shrimp and salted pickle cabbage (ตั้งฉ่าย?), dried shrimps, cooked shrimps, and ground peanuts. After another 30 seconds, I took them out (without even tasting). As it turned out, it was one of the best pad thai I have ever made. I was amazing how well it turned out. I will have to try again some other times, and this time I will make sure that I have eggs…

Note: Please do not ask me how much salt, sugar, fish saurce vinegar, etc. I put in. I just put whatever felt right, and they just turned out good… (fortunately)

The PM has declared a state of emergency in Bangkok. Apparently tanks are rolling into Bangkok. News are still coming in. Whatever is hapenning..I hope that it will turn out well.. for the good of the country.. and our beloved king.

Long live the king!

Hey.. what’s this?

a little more…

and more…

Mmmmm….

I decided to bake today. The only thing I know how to bake is Zwiebelkuchen (German onion cake (or pie?)). I got the recipe from my coworker, Ingmar a while back. His recipe were from the top of his head at the time with little of this and little of that. The first few times I made it, it turned out quite well. I decided to make another one today, but this time with sour cream added, and much more butter in the dough.It seemed that today was a bad day for cooking. After I mixed some salt with flour to make the crust, I took out (melted) chilled butter from the fridge. As I took it out, the edge of the bowl was greased with butter and it slipped from my hands. As you can imagined, butter splattered everywhere (on the fridge, counter-top, stove, microwave, cabinets, wall, etc.). It was actually amazing that the energy from the fall was high enough that the butter was launched and hit as high as the microwave, which was at about my eye-level. Of course, the house now smells like butter. The kitchen floor was a little greasy even with a long session of cleaning with various agents.

It was unfortunate that the two rows of butter were the last two that I had in the fridge, so I had to drive to a grocery store to get it. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in my kitchen and happily worked on the Zwiebelkuchen again. The cake (or pie?) is much thicker than other times because of the amount of sour cream and eggs I put in. It tasted great when it was fresh out of the oven (and it’s still tastes great), but too bad that I ate too much steak for dinner that I couldn’t finish even a small piece I cut out.

It wasn’t until after I cut it into pieces (and took one out for myself) that I realized that I forgot to take a photo of it! Hence the foil… (to cover the hole)…

Yes, karma is real.. and I believe in it.

I just saw this on TechCrunch. According to this post, a Microsoft Live Expo project leader posted on his blog claiming that a chinese site steals their design. You can check the post out and judge for yourself whether the design was stolen or not. Doesn’t that remind you of the case years ago when Microsoft was accused of stealing Apple’s GUI design? But hey.. don’t get me wrong though. I am a software engineer (well.. until next week when I will officially become a grad student), and I would be pretty upset too if someone copy my work (especially those that kept me up all nights). However, like what a friend of mine likes to say.. whatever goes around, comes around…

Karma is real… and it will catch up with you.. sooner or later..

Be good… you are being watched!

I finally had a chance to put all the photos from recent trips and events up on my gallery. It took me a while because I had to remove large dust specks from the photos. It doesn’t take much time to remove these spots from a photo, but it adds up when the number of photos are large. I want to buy a sensor cleaner, but I don’t think that I have money to do that. I’m becoming a student again…

Feel free to head over to the gallery to see the photos from the Chicago trip, California trip, and the summer graduation at Penn State. Comments are always welcome (and encouraged!)…

Here is a sample photo from Yosemite…