Farewell #2

It’s been a week since my last farewell, now another friend is leaving. James is going to Cali for his internship, for 6 months.

Sometime I wish I could leave this place too. Maybe one day I will.

Farewell

Irma’s leaving us next week to go to work in the chocolate factory. Goodbye Irma!

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.