Montage, second round

I just watched Montage for the second time, since it was showing on Unifi TV. I had given it high praise three years ago. It was the first Korean movie that I really liked.

Watching it the second time round was a different experience compared to the first time, but just as awesome. Knowing the ending meant I could focus on what each character was doing and why, instead of wondering "Why? What's going on?" the whole way.

I seriously appreciate the way the writer planned the plot. Any other way, and the watching experience would have been hugely different!

A classier ugly omelette

I tried making frittata for the first time. It is like an omelette, but with milk/cream and cheese in it. I read up a few articles and recipes on it before deciding to go ahead and make it.

A lot of the recipes use cream, but they say whole milk is fine too, so I decided to use whole milk. I also decided to take a risk and skip the cheese. They say the proportions are
6 eggs
a quarter-cup milk (or other dairy)
one cup cheese
two cups vegetables/meat

I got these proportions from The Kitchn but everything I've read gives roughly these quantities. Especially the egg-to-dairy ratio, so I didn't dare to mess with that!

I had read somewhere else that we need to put loads and loads of veggies into a frittata to make it good. So I decided to start with veggies, and omit the meat altogether.

An actual frittata is made by first cooking the eggs on the stove, and then transferring it to an oven to bake the top. I didn't want to move it to an oven (I didn't have a proper cooking vessel for that), so I searched up whether we could make a frittata using only a stove. They say that we can flip the frittata. Er...well, that will make an ugly omelette then!

And that's exactly what happened.

I tried my best to make the eggs cook all the way to the top, by covering my pan with a cover. But the only cover big enough for that pan was a glass cover, so it didn't work so well. (I have had oven-like results by using a steel cover over a pan before) In the end, since it didn't look like the eggs on top were going to get cooked however much I waited, I surrendered to the task of flipping my frittata.

As expected, the frittata broke just like all my ugly omelettes. After that, I transferred the pieces to two plates:

Six eggs would make three meals for me!

As you can see, the top of the frittata is just cooked. The bottom, however, is fully browned. Here is where I am extremely grateful to Tefal for their non-stick pans: With my other frying pan, the bottom would have turned black, especially since I was waiting for the top to cook through!

The inside of the frittata seemed all right...they say it should be creamy and custardy, mine was solid but not hard. I think it was probably slightly overcooked, but what can I do? At least it's still edible. However, the seasoning needs a lot of improvement. I had to sprinkle black pepper on it to make it palatable (well, I have a grinder, otherwise I might have just sprinkled salt).

I'm not sure whether I will makea frittata again, but if I do, I think I will add meat. Meat will probably help even when the seasoning is not good enough!

Another thing I had read from my prior research was that we should use fully cooked vegetables when making a frittata. So I used roasted vegetables. Where did those roasted vegetables come from? Here's the story...

Last weekend I made roast chicken, and also roast vegetables to go with it. I roasted the chicken on Saturday night, eating it with salad, and then the veggies on Sunday morning (to eat with reheated chicken). I planned it this way so that I wouldn't have one dish going cold while the other one was in the oven.

I bought a whole lot of vegetables (broccoli, carrot, French beans, and capsicum) to roast. I also bought some mushrooms, and planned to put in some onions that I still had at home. However, it seemed that I was overly ambitious. After cutting up the vegetables, I found that they could not fit into one tray! Even with two trays, the vegetables couldn't be placed in a single layer, so they had to be more or less stacked on each other (which leads to less efficient roasting and less browning, I suppose?) And that was without putting in the capsicum and the onions! (I had not cut those up yet...luckily!)

But here's the thing: The amount of vegetables turned out to be just nice. Because after eating here, Snorlax took three portions of the roast chicken home, together with two portions of vegetables (and some cucumber to go with that third portion of chicken). The remaining vegetables was just about two cups, just nice for my frittata.

And just because I've mentioned my roast chicken, here's a photo of it!

I actually planned to take a photo of the roast vegetables when they were done...but I forgot. :P It's okay, they didn't look especially good anyway!

Deliveryman read my mind!

I just received a delivery. The package was delivered by Ninja Van. This morning, I received an SMS informing me that the package would arrive today. I knew I wouldn't be at home when it arrived, so I thought that I would ask the deliveryman to stick it into the letter box, and if it couldn't fit, he could toss it into the front porch. (Other deliverypeople have done it before!)

There is a pile of smooth pebbles (large pebbles though) at one side of my porch, and I thought that it would be good to ask him to try tossing the package there. (The package contained nuts, so it would be better if it didn't end up on the ground.) But when he called, I first told him to try passing it to my neighbour. He siad there was no one home, and he suggested tossing it beside the car. Of course I agreed, but I felt embarrassed to ask for such precision to throw the package on the pebbles (it was a good 1-2 metres in from the gate too!)

And when I reached home, lo and behold, the package was sitting perfectly in the middle of that pile of pebbles, exactly where I would have wanted it to be. There was a long hose looped up on the pebbles, and the box even made it into the middle of that. Bulls-eye!

An annual sticky situation

Every year I curse the person who came up with the idea of using the super-sticky road tax. I heard that the rationale behind it was so that the road tax couldn't be stolen, because it would get torn if you tried to remove it. But because it also left awfully sticky residue (and bits and pieces that couldn't be torn off) on the windscreen, we resourceful people decided to stick it onto another piece of plastic first, then only stick it onto our windscreen. And that completely voids the purpose of the super-sticky road tax in the first place.

Can't those in power see the insanity and switch to normal stickers?

Partners for Justice

I watched Partners for Justice, a forensic drama about a bad-tempered medical examiner and a rookie prosecutor. Not particularly interesting...the cases were mostly so-so. But I enjoyed it because a number of the characters were really fun to watch. Although the rookie prosecutor was too silly to be believable... she says she became a crime prosecutor because she loves watching US dramas, and yet she doesn't know that she shouldn't touch anything at a crime scene?

There was one case which was maybe overdone...an old man died at home, and his family was one by one suspected of causing his death. I think they wanted to make it interesting with lots of plot twists, but I found it more ridiculous than interesting. They seemed to be too eager to make it into a criminal case!

And the back story, even though it was not really a big deal (it was just the thing that kept popping up here and there from the beginning to the end of the drama) was also pretty ridiculous... Even the lead character summed it up as "a trashy soap opera" after he found out the truth and was telling someone else about it.

The ending leaves a continuation for Season 2 (which is already out). So I guess I will be watching that too... (but this ending isn't really a cliffhanger, so it is nowhere as bad as Voice :P )

Super eraser to the rescue!

This morning I went to fuel up my car. My card was rejected by the kiosk for some reason, so I went to the counter. When it failed the first time she tried to use my card, the cashier took out an eraser and started rubbing it on the electronic chip.

That was a revelation to me... I have cleaned the chip of my card on my clothing before, when my card was rejected by an ATM machine. But I didn't think of it this time...and I certainly never thought of using an eraser!

Anyway, I think the fact that she had an eraser handy is testament that this method works, and that a card having a soiled chip is not an uncommon occurrence.

Response to hi

Lately I've started to tell people not to wait for me to respond to "hi".

In the office, I am continually perplexed by the number of people who like to say "hi" on Hangouts (the instant messaging tool that we use), and then nothing else until you have responded to them. Sometimes it is because they just want to know whether you are available for a face-to-face discussion, and that is understandable. But at other times, when they simply have a question that needs a short answer, this seems so inefficient.

When I see "hi" pop up in my notifications, I usually leave it for a while before I switch to my Hangouts window and respond. This is because I hope that there will be more information forthcoming, and that I can deal with whatever incoming query when I switch to my Hangouts window. However, some people just won't type anything else until I have responded to their "hi".

So when no second message comes, I respond, and then I have to wait till they send whatever question they have, and then switch to Hangouts again and reply to them. (because I'm not gonna stare at the Hangouts window while they type, right... it would be a waste of time if they take some time to respond)

For a long time, I had this niggling feeling that something is wrong with that practice of waiting for a response to "hi". So one day I sort of formulated this worst-case scenario in my brain, where these two people would have meetings at different times, and each of them would come back to see a message from the other. That is where waiting for a response to "hi" would have quite an impact.

Then today I finally got around to making a sketch and blogging about it. :P

This isn't really a worst-case scenario, because a simple question and answer ends the conversation, but it is enough to convey the idea. Without waiting for a response to "hi", the question could have been resolved a lot earlier!

(I wrote "A" and "B" in the sketch because I thought I would be referencing the scenarios, but in the end I think I don't need to!)

C- names

Since I’ve been in MSI for six years, it was only right that I change to my sixth manager! Right?

I was just telling an ex-colleague the other day about the recent change. He had left the company two managers ago (wow, now managers are a unit of time! lol). At that time I was reporting to CG. After he left, my reporting switched to CH, and now to CE. As I typed these three managers' names to him, I noticed that they were all C-.

But later I realized...the manager before CG also had the initials C-. And...so did my first manager in MSI! Only my second manager was not a C-. I just didn't think of that at first, because my first and third managers did not use those initials as often...they either used an English name or their surname.

So, uh...does that mean you have a better chance of becoming a (or "my"?) manager if your initials are C-? Or maybe C- names are just popular in general!