Me, the cook

The most important thing I learned with my life here in the US is survival skills. Especially feeding myself. One skill I haven't learned, is cleaning my room skill, but that's another story.

I don't often go to the kitchen back home. Either my dear mom would cook for me, or I would buy food from somewhere. I could cook eggs and that's it. I can't even cook rice (actually, even now, I can only cook rice with a rice cooker now :) ).

Before I left however, I had a crash course in cooking. Then after 6 months of experimental cooking (some were disastrous...) I was finally able to cook pretty well. Not really good, but edible (well, of course for food, I'm really easy to please, if it's cooked, it's good).

Anyway.. I have an oven, correction, I have a working oven now in my new apartment. My cooking experiments have gone up a notch. Now I cook roasted chicken with a variety of spices. Stuffed calamari (the stuffing felt raw though .. oops).

I also baked a cake. Well, to be fair, I didn't cook it from scratch. I bought a ready to make baking kit, as well as frosting. All I had to do was put in eggs, water , mix it (I had to use a fork because I didn't have a mixer). Bake it in the oven for 30 minutes..

and voila...



just imagine the frosting on the cake and cheese on top of it.. and you'll see something like this:



Sorry, I got hungry while taking a picture of it so I ate some :D

letting go...

I learnt an important lesson today about letting go.

When drinking soda, you know there's an unpleasant fuzzy feeling in your throat and your nose. Today I learnt that it's actually more pleasant to let go and burp out loud rather than holding it in.

My new bike

So here I am in Michigan State. Small city, beautiful campus.

I bought a bike, because,.. well because I wanted to. So I bought one secondhand cheap. I bought a bike that has been impounded by the police then sold to the public because the owner abandoned it.

I bought mine for $10.
I needed a lock for it, and the lock cost me $14
furthermore the chains were rusted $7
the saddle was so small it hurts $21
And a wrench to put the saddle on $6



so $48 dollars for a $10 bike :)

But it's a good bike. I ride it to campus, a 10-15 minutes ride. A lot of people ride bikes to campus. There are bike posts everywhere to lock your bike. It's funny because here people ride their bikes on the sidewalk, and nobody ever wear a helmet.

Bye bye pittsie....

Leaving pittsburgh for Michigan state in a couple of weeks. Books are packed, ready to go :). clothes are still out, obviously, since I need to wear them until I go :D

I'll miss pittsburgh's city scene. The skyline. The beautiful mt washington view. I'm not sure I'll get that same view in East Lansing :).


Took some pictures of the smithfield bridge yesterday. The smithfield bridge is I think the most beautiful bridge in pittsburgh. It's one of the oldest too. Took picture of another bridge (fort pitt bridge I think it's called).



On the right of the bridge is the science center and the football stadium where the Pittsburgh Steelers Play.

Another interesting aspect of pittsburgh, which I've heard a lot but never actually seen is the "singing fountain". The fountain sprays according to the song that is played. This fountain is in front of the hard rock cafe of the station square

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then 5000 pictures...

You may know that I'm into photography. I have a nice digital SLR. Two lenses, tripod, a couple of filters. Heck, I even enrolled in a mail based distance learning photography course.

Photography, is a way for me to balance my life. Don't get me wrong, I love programming, and the opposite of programming is photography. The language minded of you would protest that vehemently I know. Here's how I see it however, in programming we create things, software. We stay inside all day, not getting the sun on our skin. The sun is bad, it makes the screen harder to see. Photography is the opposite, it's more about capturing than creating. I like to do it outside, where the sun shines. So you see, it balances things out.

It's not that I don't like my computer. It's my favourite lifeless object in the world :D. Life needs balance and this is it.

Anyway, back to the story. Yesterday I moved all my pictures to DVD's. It took 4 DVD's to save 1 year of pictures. That's quite a number of pictures, 5000 pictures in all. 5000. Now that storage is no problem. My next quest will be to categorize them. All 5000 of them. I'm also using picasa
(
) as my photo album, it's a pretty good software, which lets you organize as well as do basic editing on your pictures.

Some of the pictures I've taken can be seen at:

• My homepage album


• Deviant Art


• Yahoo album

I've also been using a film SLR these last few days. i took 36 pictures before realizing, that I didn't insert the film properly into the roller. Therefore, the first frame of the film was exposed 36 times.... :(

Graduation at Carnegie Mellon University 

Butterfly at Phipps