A sweeping update

So recently I've been picking up my mouse and playing a little Minesweeper again... tonight I got two 21s and two 20s on intermediate, which makes me pretty happy. I played a little beginner too, nothing too good today, but no expert, because my expert scores are really kinda depressing :P

Anyway, I took another look at the country rankings.

There are two new players since I last checked; at no. 9 and no. 15. No new scores from any of the others.

A little perspective

Well, I'm early this week! As opposed to the past few weeks...

Anyway, this week's theme is perspective. I thought long and hard (well, a little long but not really too hard) about what kind of perspective I was going to show you, and then I thought, how about the perspective of the food in your fridge? Well, my fridge, in this case.

I'm glad that this photo is taken at a time when my fridge is actually stocked with fruits! And several kinds! The first one you see is an orange, then you see two apples, with a Chinese pear on the left, and at the back is actually a mango. I placed my camera on the purple container that you can see a bit of, angled towards the side and the door of the fridge. Set the timer, pressed the button, and closed the fridge door. I like how it turned out. :)

A visit to Legoland

Last year, we went to a colleague's house for one of our team retrospectives. (the retrospective is part of our Agile practice and is done every two weeks)

She has a huge jigsaw puzzle on the wall:

24000 pieces, I think. She said it had to be shipped from overseas, and in several boxes.

On the upstairs landing, she has her Legoland!

mini-Venice

theme park

a neighbourhood beside a fair (different from the theme park with the ferris wheel), with the beach beyond

The cable car can actually move, and so can the ferris wheel.

a gardener

There's even a pasembur stall beside Tutti Frutti; they're just inside the Chinese archway.

Entrance to the theme park? With a merry-go-round.

What's this attraction called? Here she's showing us that we can really play the game.

Beside the gong with the mallet, there is a dunk tank. See the person inside? She had just shown us that we can put a person on top and then dunk him.

There's even a guy working on his laptop... and someone's 100 bucks on a table!

She says that she moves the things around a bit sometimes. She still has some empty "land" for development, which you can see in the first photo of the Legoland.

By the way, she didn't actually call it her Legoland, but we did. :P I was actually a little hesitant about posting too many details, for privacy's sake, but since our visit she has made it into the newspapers, so I guess it should be fine! (By the way, these photos are from February last year. Ouch, seems like I've procrastinated a looong while.)

The long-awaited teambuilding write-up!

A long, long time ago (last year), Tetra had a teambuilding event in Georgetown. They called it a treasure hunt, and having experienced an awful sunburn the last time I had gone gallivanting all over Georgetown for a similar event, this time I brought an umbrella (and a long-sleeved jacket, which I didn't use in the end). So I managed to avoid getting sunburned!

Our activity was organized by a touristic business in Georgetown (our teambuilding committee hired them for the job). When we arrived in the morning, we were split up into groups and given a questionnaire to fill in (answers were to be found around Georgetown), and a list of tasks to do. Each team had around 8-10 people if not mistaken. Among the tasks, some consisted of taking photos or videos of ourselves doing something and posting them to the team's Whatsapp group (in which we had to add the organiser so that he could check our answers). Here are some of our photos:

We needed to find a Penang White Coffee banner and take a photo with it. Our team had split up into a few groups and two groups found the banner, as you can see from the photos above.

Another thing we needed to do was to take a photo with two policemen on duty. We chanced upon a police box and took a photo there.

One of us had to make a flower garland. I volunteered for this immediately because it was the most interesting of all the tasks (to me; maybe not to you :P ). The flower-seller taught me to make the simplest flower garland. However we were pressed for time so I only did a small portion and then the seller completed the garland with another string of flowers that she had already made. I think the task here was just to take a photo of the garland-making process, so we didn't have to finish the garland ourselves.

And then one of the girls had to get a henna done. The others didn't seem to want to, so I got one. It was my first time (and maybe only time? :P ) getting a henna art.

We also had to make roti canai and teh tarik at an Indian restaurant, but someone else did that.

Another task was to eat an ice-ball. This was the cycling team, by the way... I opted to walk so that I could carry my umbrella. :P  And also, I was a bit scared of cycling where there were many cars.

We had to get a fortune reading...

...and find other things to eat.

Taking pictures with wire art...

...and murals.

The event ended at around 1pm I think... then we headed to Equatorial Hotel for a Japanese buffet lunch (scheduled at 2pm). We had the restaurant to ourselves, but I think it was for that same reason that the food was not adequately prepared. We had to wait for refills, especially the tempura and the sushi.

When I got home, I took proper photos of my flower garland and henna. (I didn't take any photos all morning)

garland and its reflection (you can see my Pikachu in the background!)

henna

This was after the henna bits had peeled off... after getting the henna I had to wait about 20-30 mins before it actually dried, so I had to be careful not to brush my hand against something. After it dried, it still took some time to peel off.

Choices

It just occurred to me yesterday that I should have chosen to learn German instead of Spanish in university. In both companies that I have worked in, there has been a link to Germany but none to Spain.

In IQ Group there were German customers, and some documents were in German. French was a tiny bit useful at times, because there were French customers as well.

As for Motorola, there was no use for foreign languages (apart from English to deal with the US team, if you count it as such) when I was in the Accessories team, but in Tetra there is a huge German market. And because of that, there are a whole lot of documents in German, which are sometimes not even translated to English properly.

I've been in Tetra for more than two years now, and last year we already had to deal with some documents that had to be translated from German. I don't know why I suddenly thought about it now.

A hands-on project

This weekend I was wondering whether to make ham and cheese bread or cranberry bread. After some thought, I decided to make both, so that I wouldn't have too many ham and cheese buns (it would get boring to eat that repeatedly).

I let my bread machine do all the kneading like the bread I usually make, and then took the dough out to form the buns. The dough came out of the pan in a big cohesive blob, but it was stickier than I expected once I started splitting it into buns. It stuck all over my fingers and I had difficulty wrapping the dough around the ham and cheese.

The result was very ugly, after a tedious process. Because I had so much difficulty pulling the dough around the filling, I even added more dough for each bun than I had intended to.

I was going to use only half of the dough for the ham and cheese buns, and the other half for the cranberry buns. But since I had used more dough above, that left me smaller cranberry buns.

This was a bit easier to make than the ham and cheese buns, but by that time dough was all over my fingers already, so it also hard to manipulate.

After the dough had risen (I left it for about 45 mins to an hour), I scattered ("sprinkle" should be a better word here, but I didn't sprinkle, I scattered :P ) some almond bits on top and put it into the oven to bake (180 degC, 14-15 mins).

The buns rose a whole lot more while baking.

I was going to put almond on the cranberry buns too, but seeing as the almond bits didn't brown, I decided not to. But maybe I should have... since the cranberry buns browned a lot more than the ham and cheese ones.

The cranberry buns probably didn't need that long in the oven (I put them in as long as the ham and cheese buns), because they were smaller. But I didn't think of that before baking them. :P

I broke off a bit of a cranberry bun to try...it tasted more or less like the bread I usually get from the bread machine. Now I hope the buns won't go stale too quickly... I've already put the ones that are not meant for tomorrow into the freezer, to be safe.

The second platter

Some time ago, I posted about going to Manhattan Fish Market for a platter promotion. Well, we just went to redeem our free platter.

From top left, we have deep-fried squid (the body, not the head/crown) on fries, a bowl of curry fish (the fish was just a bit of the belly portion, it seemed), mussels (six of them) on herb rice, and squid heads (maybe three of them?) with pasta. The pasta seemed to have a tiny bit of chilli or paprika sprinkled on it (you can see small red bits), but it wasn't spicy.

To me, this was even more of a letdown than the previous platter, because there was hardly any seafood. However, while the previous platter was too oily (everything was deep-fried), this one was a better mix. The curry was actually really nice, and we used it on the rice. Paying full price for this (RM67+, I think) would have been a total rip-off. Seeing as we got two platters for that price, it was still acceptable.

The sky

Two weeks ago, I had chosen to snap a photo of a bright sky for the theme bright. As luck would have it, last Friday's theme was sky. So I decided that I had to get a photo of a sky that wasn't bright!

In the course of the week, I managed to get not one, but two passable photos of the sky.

The first one was during sunset, when the sky glowed slightly pink. This one is my "official" submission for this Photo Friday.

The second one was on a gloomy morning. The sky was slightly dark, and above the roofs of the row of houses opposite ours, we could see a gradual lightening of the sky. It is not so noticeable though, but I find that the colours came out nice in the photo (though maybe not exactly the same as the hue seen with the naked eye).

That's why I decided to keep this photo too. Would you have chosen this photo over the first one?

The buddy bears

When I was in Berlin, I saw some bear statues scattered around the city. It turns out that they were the Buddy Bears, and last year they came to Penang. (Now that I'm done with my delayed posts for 2017, here we go back in time to 2016!)

It's been so long, I don't even know whether I initially had something in particular to say about the bears. So I guess this post will be mainly filled with photos.

The bears were arranged in a huge circle. I was standing here:

And there is the far end.

There were so many bears, one for each country.

We took photos with a special bear standing on its own. There were actually a few standing on their own, outside the main circle.

the Malaysian bear

two special Malaysian bears

We missed the French bear during out first round, so we turned back to look for it. Luckily we noticed that the bears were standing in alphabetical order. When we found the bear, it was no wonder that we missed it:

Pretty ugly, actually. The bear's tummy is supposed to represent things that France is famous for.

(P.S. I'm too lazy to zoom in and check where each bear is from, but you can take a look at the plaque in front of the bear if you're interested. Good luck! :P )