Top 10 Excuses When You’re Running Late

Interesting article, what excuses have you used?

Top 10 Excuses When You’re Running Late

I am a boring person

I used to be an interesting person, have many hobbies, and was passionate about life. Well, I guess I am still passionate about life, but somehow I turned out to be this boring working guy now. I was reading my old blogs and realized that. Is this sad? I am afraid to think of it. Maybe people change after they get a job, for one thing, you don’t have the time to walk around and see what’s interesting around you any more. I still remember when I worked for the department of plant pathology; I would go to the horticulture greenhouse once in a while to see what kinda cool flowers they’ve got.

Now when I think of something, the word is “used to” do what what, be what what, think about what what. Seems that nowadays all I think about is work. I don’t think I am a workaholic, because I don’t usually work overtime nor take work home. I still have a strong belief that work should be done at work and only at work. But then all those cool things that was in my life are gone now, at least it seems like.

Come to think of it, I am still a happy person, feeling fulfilled and satisfied with where I am today. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe when I was in college, my future is unknown, and I have so many wonders about life, maybe I’ll become a photographer, maybe I’ll become a graphic designer, maybe I’ll become a …

Well now that I am a computer engineer, seems like that I’ll always be a computer engineer, no matter what company I work for, which country I go to. Maybe later on I will get promoted and become a senior engineer, or an information system consultant, or maybe even a manager (I don’t really wanna be a manager), it would be good, and I would get more pay to support my family…and you see, how boring are those thoughts! You see what I mean now? Perhaps that’s part of being mature? I used to tell my friend that I wanna open a coffee shop and also sell books, and maybe has a small bakery as well (I would hire Aya for that). How cool would that be? But then she called me childish and immature. Yeah, I am a man now, no longer a teenager dreaming of future. Maybe having those thoughts right now is a sign of immature, oh well, once in a while I gotta let it out.

Maybe because I am alone right now, all my time is used up by working and cooking. Last night I was telling James and Melinda that I started reading Real Simple magazine, while it’s a really cool magazine, I started to feel feminine just by reading it. How to cook this, how to cook that, how to do a house make over in a weekend, how to… I know it sounds gay, but I can assure you that I am not gay, and in fact I cannot even stand gay people.

Maybe when my girlfriend comes back, things will get better, sometimes I think. But then doesn’t it mean that my happiness is depends on her? That doesn’t seem right, I am supposed to bring her happiness, not depend on her as a source of happiness. I need to have a life so that when we get together we’ll share lives, otherwise I’ll just be living her life, isn’t it? At least logically it’s sound.

What about other working people? Are you guys all like me? Am I childish to think of these things? What is your source of happiness and source of life? I am not talking about religions here, I mean what adds joy into your life? Your family? What if one day you lost your family, the source of your joy, could you still go on? What then would you look for? Seems like dumb questions here, and I know as a Christian I am not supposed to doubt about that. My joy comes from God and I shouldn’t be depending on earthly things.

But we do think of things sometimes. Things we are not supposed to think of.

Several years ago I was wondering what life is about, then I found my answer in the Lord, and now I am wondering about that again, except this time I know what the answer is.

Maybe I should pick up photography again, I always think when you pay attention to life, life will also pay attention to you.

The end.

Vegetable Quiche Cups To Go

Great for breakfast, and good for you too! You should try when you have time. 

Serves 6

Ingredients

• 1 package (10 ounces) frozen chopped spinach
• 3⁄4 cup liquid egg substitute
• 3⁄4 cup shredded reduced-fat cheese
• 1⁄4 cup diced green bell peppers
• 1⁄4 cup diced onions
• 3 drops hot-pepper sauce (optional)

Instructions

1. Microwave the spinach for 2 1⁄2 minutes on high. Drain the excess liquid.
2. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with foil baking cups. Spray the cups with cooking spray.
3. Combine the egg substitute, cheese, peppers, onions, and spinach in a bowl. Mix well. Divide evenly among the muffin cups. Bake at 350°F for 20 minutes, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
4. Quiche cups can be frozen and reheated in the microwave. Any combination of appropriate vegetables and reduced-fat cheeses may be used.

Before baking:

Close up:

After baking:

Close up:

Early Bird

Normally I start work at 8am.

This morning I am having training at 7am. So I had to spend extra effort and resources to get up one hour early. And that’s not the best thing yet. The best thing is that after I get to the training room, no one is here.

So the Calendar on my PDA is messed up, I guess the time zone is set wrong somehow. Sucks.

So I am stuck here on a training PC. Drinking my McDonald’s coffee. You know their coffee is not bad. I remember their coffee used to be REALLY bad, but then they started a gourmet coffee thingy, and since then, the coffee is getting much better. Still not as good as Starbucks, but then Starbucks don’t open till 9am, and I guess maybe only housewives can have the pleasure to have a cup of Starbucks in the morning.

Last night I went to dinner with James and Melinda, at Acropolis the Greek restaurant. I had the Ultimate Gyro Platter with a Greek salad. Pretty good stuff. We went to B&N after that to have coffee and James and I got into some discussion about the racial profiling and stereotyping in the US. Then we got off tracked on some topics about illegal immigrants. A good movie about this is “Crash”, worth a watch, and it happened to be this year’s Oscar winner. Great movie.

Found the bug

One of the reasons I switched to this new theme was because my old one was kinda buggy. Many times it would cut off on the left side of the text. It was very annoying and I had no clue why, wishing that by changing theme I can get rid of this problem.

Little did I know that the new theme didn’t help much either, the problem was still there, and this time not only it cuts off on the left side of text, it even dropped my side bar where it contained all my archives and links.

So I decided to look into it and try to figure out what is going on. After 2 nights of checking and testing, I finally found out the problem was caused by an “&“. You might wonder what I am talking about. Well, to understand what I am saying you have to have some programing knowledge. It’s kinda like the escape character in C#/C++. One of my URLs I included in my blog contains an “&” (ampersand), I didn’t really pay attention and left it there. Turns out the HTML took it as a operator rather than a character. What I should have used is , which displays an “&” (ampersand) on the webpage.

A good resourse to use is http://validator.w3.org/. It can validate your XHTML code and point out the errors for you, sort of like a debugger, very handy.

Kind of a dumb problem, but I am really happy that I figured it out. On another look, this also shows that WordPress is yet to mature up as a blogging platform. Each blog entry should act like an individule container, errors made in the a single blog entry should affect that entry only, instead of messing up the entire site.

A step-by-step guide on how to play music and video on MSN Space

After reading jojo’s comment, I started looking into how to play music or video on MSN Space, it’s not the easiest thing to do, but there’s a way to do it. Just in case I have other friends that wanna do this but don’t know how, I decided to create a step-by-step guide for this task. Hopefully it will be easy to follow, otherwise please let me know.

Before we start, I’d like to state the MSN Space Official Policy here, make sure you read this first and knowing that you are responsible for your own Space.

IMPORTANT

• This feature is to be used for authorized content only. Please respect the creative efforts and intellectual property of others, and do not link to unauthorized materials. Linking to unauthorized material is a violation of the law, and of the MSN Spaces Code of Conduct.
• Please note that the Windows Media Player PowerToy is available in English only and is not supported by Microsoft. Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about PowerToys.

The Microsoft Windows Media Player PowerToy enables your viewers to watch or listen to authorized personal media files you have linked to. You can customize the experience by adjusting Windows Media Player settings, such as auto start, times to play, and player mode.

To play authorized audio or videos on your space, you must first download the Windows Media Player PowerToy onto your space. Then you must add the URL of the authorized personal content you want to play to the player on your space. You cannot add or store your personal audio or video clips on your space, you can only play authorized personal content that exists on the Web.

To play authorized content on your space, you have these choices:

• Create a website that includes links to your authorized audio or video clips.
• Use an audio or video hosting website to upload your own audio or video clips. See the instructions at that website for determining the URL of your clips.

From the official policy, you can see that MSN Space does not allow you to upload music, however, you can play the music that’s already on the web.

1. So the first step is to upload your music onto the web, so your MSN Space can point to it. To do this, you have 2 ways:
   1. If you have a personal web server, like me, you can upload your music there and get the URL of the file. For example, if I upload bg.mp3 on my server, the URL would be: http://espressoo.com/bg.mp3
   2. If you don’t have a web server, then you can register for a free one at Yahoo. I think you can use your existing Yahoo account information. The free account will give you about 15MB storage and 3GB data transfer rate per month. That means if your mp3 file is 3MB each, you can store about 5 songs on there, and you can play for about 1000 times per month. If this is the way you are doing, make sure you find out about the mp3 file’s URL (link).
2. After you uploaded your song onto the web, now we can start working on the MSN Space part.
   1. First of all, go to your MSN Space and Sign In. In my case, I would go to: http://spaces.msn.com/espressoo/ and then click on the button to sign in.
   2. After signing in, you will notice that the URL has changed to: http://spaces.msn.com/espressoo/P
      ersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_blogpart=m
      yspace_c02_owner=1&_c=blogpart
   3. Now add &powertoy=musicvideo to the end of the displayed URL.
   4. So now your URL becomes: http://spaces.msn.com/espressoo/P
      ersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_blogpart=m
      yspace&_c02_owner=1&_c=bl
      ogpart&powertoy=musicvideo
   5. In the web browser, click the Go button next to the address line, and then wait for your space to reload.
   6. After reloading, click on Customize on the upper right side.
   7. Then click on Modules, you will now notice that there’s a PowerToy: Windows Media Player option, click Add.
   8. Click Save.
   9. Now you can configure the module:
      1. Enter the URL of your music file, notice here it supports a variety of file formats. In my case I will enter http://espressoo.com/bg.mp3
      2. I am not sure what Position in sec. means, but I don’t think we need to change that, just leave it as the default, 0.
      3. Times to play means how many times you wanna play the music.
      4. Rate to play means how fast you wanna play the music, leave it as the default 1 to play at normal speed.
      5. Auto Start means whether you want the music to start playing by itself or you want the user to click Play to play it. If you are using this as the background music, then you should check Auto Start.
      6. Display Mode has 4 options: Invisible hides the entire module, so the users won’t see the windows media player, but the music will play in the background. So if you are using this as the background music, you can choose Invisible. But the user won’t be able to stop the music since the module is invisiable. None determines whether to show the windows media player control buttons, when you choose None, it will still show the module with the visual effects, but it will hide the control buttons. Mini and Full determines whether to show the mini set or the full set of the control buttons.
      7. Right Click Menus determines when a user right clicks this module, whether to show a menu or not.
   10. After you have configured all this, click Save to save your settings.
3. You can play around with the settings and find the best combinations for your site.
4. To play videos, you probably don’t wanna set it to Invisible. But the rest of the settings should be the same.
5. Depends on your Space’s theme and layout, you can drag this module around for a better position on the web page. The size will also change if you put it in the side bar for example.

That’s basically it, now when you go to my Space, you will hear the background music, but you won’t see the player since I set it to Invisiable.

I am sure I must have missed something in the instructions, if so, please let me know.

By the way, the background music is quite nice, isn’t it?

The End.

Make Over

I liked the previous theme a lot, even though it had some problems, such as cutting off on the left side of the text on small screens. But it’s been there for so long, and I thought now is spring and everything, my blog also needs a make over.

So here it is, what do you think? I kinda like it, though it’s a bit gray, but I feel quite elegant. Also the header photo changes everytime you refresh the page, making it less boring to stare at the same coffee cup.

I also added a Contact page, so you can email me from there if you don’t know my email address.

I am also thinking about importing all my old blogs back in my college days, I have quite a bit, but that’ll be the next project.

So this weekend is not bad at all, quite productive, even though now is almost 5am, I am still not sleepy yet.

The End.