Movement against the heat

I'm early for this week's Photo Friday! Because I doubt I'll be getting anything better, and even if I do, I'm definitely posting this one too.

The theme is movement.

I actually had this idea a little after the theme "motion" expired. But it was too late for this photo. When I saw this week's theme, I actually didn't think of this immediately either... it's been too long. But while trying to think of something, this idea came back to me. I'm glad it did!

(You do see what it is, right? The title would give a clue, I guess. But if you really don't get it... it's a ceiling fan!)

Glutinous rice flour adventures (Episode 3)

After the first two episodes, here comes one that is not about mochi cake! And it's probably the last episode, because I've finished up my glutinous rice flour.

I had just a bit of glutinous rice flour left (37g, to be exact), so I made QQ glutinous flour bread with it. There are a few blogs sharing the same recipe. The recipe called for 50g of glutinous flour and 250g of bread flour, so I put a little less flour to match with the amount of glutinous flour that I had. However I heavy-handedly tossd in an extra 20g of bread flour (oops). But the final ratio should not be too different...instead of 1/6th of glutinous flour (16.67%), I ended up with more like 15% of glutinous flour.

As for the results, I didn't find it that much different from normal bread. It was slightly more bouncy (QQ), I guess? But just slightly... I don't even know if I felt it was bouncy just because I expected it to be so.

By the way, I had heard of QQ balls in dessert before... but it wasn't until I found this recipe that I figured out that "QQ" meant "bouncy" (as in food texture) in Chinese. Haha...if you know Chinese then you'll be able to figure it out too.

P.S.: I didn't make this by hand; just put all the ingredients into my breadmaker as usual. The ingredients are pretty much the same anyway... except for some glutinous rice flour to replace normal bread flour.

Creamy shrimp pasta

I wanted to make my garlic herb prawns which I hadn't made for a long time, and needed something to go with it. So I made creamy chicken pasta without the chicken, then mixed it with my prawns, turning it into creamy shrimp pasta.

It turned out pretty good!

I feel that the garlic which was fried with the prawns give a good flavour to the pasta. I might make carbonara with this method next time, using milk and cheese instead of cream cheese and eggs. Not sure whether I should use garlic as well... it might alter the flavour of the carbonara, but maybe that would make it taste better?

Of heroes and cute things in cars

Last night at badminton, I asked one of the guys his name. He has been playing there for ages, stopped a while then started coming again, and I never knew his name. I doubt he knows mine either. When I asked him, he immediately replied "Hero!" while raising his hands up into the air. lol

You gotta give the guy points for spontaneity, if nothing else... (By the way, he did tell me his name after that.)

And today I saw a Pikachu smiling at me from a car.

I saw it on my way back from buying breakfast, and stopped to take this photo when I was coming back from badminton.

I want one too! I've seen this Pikachu pillow before in a gift shop...maybe I should have bought it. :P

Portrait

The theme for this week is portrait. Well, I have this portrait of Pikachu here.

Nothing else to say, huh?

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.