16 September 2007

I haven’t cooked in like…3 months? Today was the first time I cooked in Canada, and thankfully it was good! Haha, but I guess you can’t really go wrong with Japanese Curry. My housemates were surprised I could whip this up, since they have only seen me prepare meals like sandwiches, salads, oven-baked instant pizzas or microwaved soups.

Sorry for the rather horrible picture of “Xanne can cook”, my housemate Connie took it hmmph.

The ingredients: Garlic, onion, carrots, potatoes, chicken breast, oil.

It took me a while just to get the ingredients ready. Around half an hour to forty-five minutes. But don’t you think I sliced the ingredients rather aesthetically? No? Haaha

Stir fry the onion and garlic first, and then dump everything in haha. Stir, stir, and stir.

Then add water till it covers about 3/4 of the food, bring it to a boil, and then adjust the heat on medium, and leave it covered for half an hour.

After which, turn off the heat and add the japanese curry cube (I used glico brand), keep stirring to let it melt. Tada! Ready to eat with rice, bread, or whatever you want.

The picture above this one was my experiment-turned-success, whilst this one was the hopefully-successful-and-fortunately-was.

Guten Appetit!

15 September 2007

I went to Metrotown at Burnaby again today! This time with my housemate, Connie!

And here are some random photos! (I don’t seem to blog words very much nowadays huh. There’s so much to show, and nothing to say. Or ‘coz what I say might undermine what I show, so showing shall be what I will just do! Okay that was just nonsense, and you just read a whole load of it huh.):

Plenty of boots!

An Espirit top made in Singapore, found in handfuls amongst exact tops made in China

Pez! Not just any old Pez but…

…Ratatouille pez!

Stocking up on essentials!

Bare essentials! Sidenote: I’ve never seen this flavour for Nissin noodles before! Have you?

Must haves!

My secret stash drawer is officially full! Maybe it’s time to upgrade to a cupboard.

Okay, we bought other stuff too like undies and tops, but they aren’t picture worthy haha.

Unless your housemate shows them off in such fancy manners!

Okay, this is totally off-key, since the outfit isn’t part of the shopping trip or anything, but don’t you think my housemate Katherin looks really cute in her PJs?

There’s probably something about the weather or just the air here to make everyone have such good complexion. So come to the west if you want such great skin.

Or you could invest in an R.G. Skin Revitalizer.

Inspired by a fruit found abundantly in Vietnam, Gac is admired as nature’s gift to the women of Asia because of its rich supply of carotenoids to nourish the skin. Gâc oil is a premier source of carotenoids which are in a highly bio-available form – your body absorbs these fat-soluble nutrients better than if it were a juice. It supports the body’s own defense mechanisms from free radicals. Furthermore, Science has demonstrated that lycopene, beta-carotene and other potent antioxidants found in Gâc fruit oil help support strong cellular rejuvenation throughout the body.

Your body’s individual cells need protection from free-radicals (which are unstable molecules that try to become stabilized by taking electrons away from other stable molecules). This results in what is called oxidation, which is similar to what happens to metal when exposed to air. Oxidative stress occurs for example when your body gets exposed to the sun or other environmental factors, leading to degenerative conditions.

Antioxidants donate their electrons to unstable free-radicals (giving them back their stability) without causing any damages to themselves. When your body uses antioxidants (from the food you eat for example), it keeps free-radicals under control.

This is a sponsored post.

Click on the above picture to load slideshow! (copying the images one by one to this blog has been very tiring, so I have devised this shortcut haha.)

Shaina! You must look out for all the food pics I took just for you! Hahaha…

Here’s a few spoilers of the show:

The main characters in the show

Fresh fruit

Freshly baked to cater to my sweet tooth

And the very sweet young one that inspired me…

…to try and be a kid myself!

Then I tried to be a skipper too!

And tried acting pensive

Click on this pic to view the pictures!

Or click here if you prefer to do very manual scrolling (click on the left pic of “Granville Island” set to check out next pic).

*Updated*

I LOVE IT HERE!!!

I decided to save even more money by changing my mobile plan ($36/mth excluding tax) to a pay-as-you-go plan (if I don’t call much, I think I can keep it within $10/mth?). To do so requires a $25 service charge. After doing some calculations (my favourite activity these days, huh), I’ll still save quite a bit ($79) after paying the extra $25 for my impulsiveness in signing for a mobile plan that costs so much (but has perks like free incoming calls, and unlimited outgoing calls during evenings and weekends! But I realized I don’t call nor receive calls that much?). Anyway, the customer relations officer at Fido tried to persuade me to change my plan at no charge to a $15/mth plan, which is apparently only offered to me and not at retail stores because I intend to downgrade my plan? After doing the arithmetic with her offer I was adamant about changing my account to a prepaid one and she relented and proceeded with the deactivation. The thing is, she deactivated my account without letting me have any value in my phone first, so the line was disconnected and I couldn’t make any calls! I couldn’t even top-up value in my phone even though I thought I was well-prepared by having purchased a prepaid voucher the other day? I used Skype to call the customer service line again and managed to input value into my line. The girl called back later and apologized profusely and thanked me for staying with Fido. She then told me the great news — due to her oversight, the line got disconnected, so THERE WILL BE NO $25 CHARGE for my migration from my mobile plan to prepaid! Yay!

Then there are the other obvious reasons:

1) Very fresh air

2) Very enforced and successful environmentally-friendly system

3) People here are very friendly and eager to help

4) Everyone holds the door for everyone

5) My campus is surrounded by beaches

6) Wheelchair-friendly public transport and infrastructure

7) Those who manage to get a seat on the bus first sits at the window seat

Easy to navigate your way around, especially with the help of trip planning by TransLink

9) Very, very diverse community

10) You can just voice out your dissatisfaction/grievances

11) I rarely hear car horns

12) Not a single spit on the ground has been seen

13) I am experiencing the beginnings of Autumn (a season negligible in Shanghai)

14) Even when there’s noise from nearby construction work, the noise stops by 5pm or so

15) I can access any site I want on the internet

16) Professors hand out the syllabus on the very first lesson so we know what she will be talking about for every class so that we can be well-prepared

17) There is REESE chocolate

18) Ice-cream like Ben & Jerry’s is relatively cheap?

19) The view from my room is very refreshing

20) Overwhelming eye candy. There seems to be something about the weather or the whole environment to produce such aesthetically inclined people. Hmm, now I know why I could concentrate better in classes back in Fudan. Haha.

21) Homework for class is to watch a trailer from Youtube!

22) Classrooms have tables for left-handers

23) Students debate with what teachers say almost all the time

24) Cars stop for you even if you’re jaywalking

25) The fact that the list cannot stop? The fact that I can think of many things to add on this list every single day.
…

Have I told you I love it here?

I LOVE IT HERE!!!

Journyx is calling it their time tracking software scholarship, but it’s more like an essay-writing competition?

Journyx is committed to eradicating cost ignorance from our knowledge worker society and leading organizations to the highest levels of profitability through innovation. This scholarship is designed to improve the philosophy and the technology of project accounting. One student (graduate or undergraduate) will be awarded this scholarship in recognition of his or her passion for improving the lives of knowledge workers through technology, academic excellence, and the ability to make a difference in the project accounting technology industry.

Write an essay of 1,000 words or fewer, on one of these two topics:

• Persuade someone who doesn’t want to track his time on a per-product per-activity basis why it is in his best interests to do so.
• Describe a real situation that you’ve encountered where project oriented time tracking has made a positive difference in the world.

You need to be a resident of the United States and enrolled as a full-time undegraduate to qualify. If selected, you will receive an award of $500 towards your tuition reimbursement.

Press Release:

Journyx Announces 2ND Annual Excellence in Project Accounting Philosophy Essay Scholarship

One Student to Receive $500 USD Toward Tuition and Fees

AUSTIN, TEXAS (Sept. 4, 2007) — Journyx – the first company to provide web-based time tracking and project accounting solutions that guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability – today launches the 2008 Excellence in Project Accounting Philosophy essay scholarship. The scholarship is open to full-time graduate and undergraduate college students at a university in the United States. The winning essayist will receive $500 USD toward college tuition and fees.

Interested students should contribute an essay of 1,000 words or less on one of the following two topics:

* Persuade someone who doesn’t want to track his time on a per-product per-activity basis why it is in his best interests to do so.
* Describe a real situation that you’ve encountered where project oriented time tracking has made a positive difference in the world.

Rocco Costa, a student at Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., was last year’s scholarship winner.

“Tracking the time spent on products and activities throughout the workday has many applications, most importantly as a cost-saving instrument for business,” says Costa. “If a person can measure productivity within a given period, they not only know how their time is spent, but also whether it is the best “value” for the company. Both businesses and employees gain from this since workers can establish if they are functioning efficiently, and businesses can determine their deadlines, profits and costs on an hourly, daily, and even yearly basis.”

Complete rules and details, including how the essays will be scored, where to send the entries, etc. can be found at scholarship.journyx.com. The scholarship program will run until June 1, 2008.

About Journyx

Journyx is the first company to provide Web-based time-tracking and project accounting solutions that guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. Customers include American Airlines, Bayer, AC Nielsen, L’Oreal and Symantec. For more information, go to www.journyx.com/company/about.html.

journyx gives a way free software (10 users forever) has free trieals of it’s online version, the ceo has a book at timetrackingbook.com and a new product at customercost.com

This is a sponsored post.

When you’ve gone beyond the “how are you” stage and are out of words to use to respond to what others are saying (for instance, after they talk about what their major is and what they plan to do for their thesis or the like, well, basically what to fill in for “that’s ___”), keep this following word list in mind:

1. (Of course, this word should be first on the list) Cool

2. (That’s) Great

3. (That’s) Fantastic

4. Nice!

5. Brilliant

6. Stellar!

7. Wonderful

8. AWESOME

9. Sweet!

10. Solid!

Other tips:

Remember something from your last conversation with that person and bring it up again so she/he feels good that you were paying attention/that you care.

Exit lines are also very important. Make sure you give the other party the impression that you absolutely enjoyed their company (albeit for just 2-3 minutes). Lines like “Hey it was really great talking to you, but I’ve gotta get going to ____, but I sure hope we can catch up again! Good luck/ Have fun with your ____ [insert whatever the other party mentioned she/he was going to do]!”

Actually, I’m beginning to appreciate small talk as a fine art. Make it natural to talk to people while you wait in line, in the elevator, anywhere…you never know who you might get to know!

these are your daily doses.

Yeah yeah, I’m stingy, I’m a miser, and very ungenerous when it comes to certain things.

Most of my friends know that I bitch a lot about the smallest things. Hmm. I’ve been here in Vancouver for 2 weeks now, and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Nothing…other than my whines on the cost of textbooks. So. I decided to cut cost on textbooks, because I am a sore loser in the publisher-reader game. I don’t know why I feel so unwilling to spend so much money on textbooks here, to the extent of becoming a laughing stock among my housemates for making it to the top of their cheapskate friends’ list. Hmm.

Back in Fudan, I never photocopied a book, although that can be done so easily and inexpensively. All you have to do is pass the book to the staff at the shop and collect your book and photocopied version a couple of hours later or latest the next day, bounded with a cover page even, and pay almost peanuts. However, textbooks over there are already rather affordable (come on, S$4 for a textbook?), heavily discounted on several occasions (student perks), or the text is already a photocopied book available for collection in the teachers’ office.

Today, I stood in front of the photocopy machine for nearly an hour to photocopy 2 books — a novel and a play. They don’t have such a photocopying service here to copy a book, afterall there are copyright issues, and if I really wanna do so I have to pay 20 cents for every page, which will cost me way more than the cost of the book itself. I believe there will be more photocopying done by me over the next few days. Haha. The censored books below cost $10.50 (used book) and $13.95 each, exclusive of tax, but they were photocopied for approximately $2 each. I will be returning these books to the bookstore for my refund soon. Yippeeee!

Sorry venerable author and playwright, for depriving you, or your family if you aren’t around, for your fees, which I’m sure the publishers take a big portion of anyway.

Tomorrow, after asking my friend whether she wants to join me in hanging out at the photocopy machine to copy our TC text together (500+ pages, so I’m crossing my fingers that she’s as cheapo as me), I’ll be able to save about $60 on the TC text! There are some books I won’t be copying so I’ll be absorbing the cost, but the total savings for books I will photocopy is $100! Yay!

I have lovely housemates, a reasonably cosy room, and a magnificent window view. So there’s nothing to complain about. After the first few days of solitude here, the unit has definitely been spruced up by my housemates.

Along with their cheerfulness and enthusiasm, they brought plenty of utensils for all to share, and a myriad of food as you can see.

Spice Rack

However, there are new habits I have to adapt to. Such as, separating my trash.

Recyclables; Compost (organic matter that will decompose (e.g. veggies)); and other trash.

A couple of housemates are very eco-friendly and have requested we buy only environment-friendly soap, dishwashing liquid, etc.

It’s all good, but requires some getting used to. Especially the trash part. I also pay extra to the supermarket when I purchase plastic bottled stuff, and will only get back the money if I return it to a recycling centre.

Lastly, what better way to end this post by showing all those interested (Shaina) an update on my secret stash!