Eat Right

It is Sunday morning, the edges are not as sharp as they should be after Saturday night's farewell to the week. 

While most of my healthy friends were running for the marathon at dawn, a good and hearty Soho breakfast was on the mind.

At Eat Right on Staunton Street, their calories counters gave me something to ponder and so at last, scrambled eggs cooked naked, served with spinach on rye bread became my ultimate pick - filling for the heart.

Up In The Air

"Up In The Air" is one of those movies that I can go watch without trailer previews or needing to read the synopsis beforehand.

 

The fact that Clooney is starring in this movie alone, was more than sufficient to drag me to the cinema like a magnet. The reality that I got presented with a BOGOF offer doubled it down and...the truth that I could enjoy with good company was worth pushing back my otherwise long overdued facial appointment!

Simply delightful!

P.S.

"Up In The Air" talks about how Clooney spends most of his time up in the air flying and when he's on land, sacks people for a living.   With what is going on in my office now, I just couldn't help feeling ironic about the whole timing thing!

Adieu

We have talked about the arrival of this day for many times, imagined and even rehearsed how it would all be like, and yet I refuse to admit you are finally heading out the door of the company today.

A decade is a pretty long time to be sitting next to someone in the same office.  If we are to take a 40-hour work week, makes it 50 weeks a year, 10 years turns out to be 20,000 hours!  This span of time can be hardship if things were petrifyingly dull but I am awfully glad that it was mostly exhilarating.  

I am very sure that we will forget lots of the nitty gritty details as time goes by, but I am also certain that only the best of the best would linger on in our minds.  

It has been my honour to be able to find a true friend in the office, and you and I know a large chunk of my life could not have been the same without you. 

Wishing you all the best. 

P.S. These were lovely.

ANA To Join Women-Only Loo Club

In theory, women won't expect to have to lower the toilet seat on ANA flights any more!

All Nippon Airways (ANA) is introducing the ultimate answer to men who refuse to put the toilet seat down: 

Go find your own toilet.  

They are responding to customer requests and announced from March 1, it will join Korean Airlines in having a dedicated women-only lavatory on its aircraft.  

I personally think this is a sheer nuisance.

Goodbye City Golf

With the approval of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, cranes are seen at the site on day 2 shut down of the golf club. 

Well, the government and the precious land can't wait, but my golf?  Surely.   

Goodbye to the closest driving range from my home.  Guess it will be a while till I pick up my golf again.

Read A Person Like A Book

A few months ago, I read a book with immense interest on body language, titled  I Can Read You Like a Book, by Gregory Harley and Maryann Karinch. 

Later that day, I experimented the concepts learnt from it and held a conversation with a friend online.  She was surprised when I told her I knew what was on her mind and how she was feeling at that time!

You are thinking "Psychic" isn't it?

There ain't no rocket science here, but a certain pattern which, if you can master, will allow you to "decode" a person just like I did.  

Well, I thought I had things in my grasp.      

The same friend above caught me totally off guard yesterday when she saw right through me and read me like a book!

So...either my book is too easy for her to read, or she must have read the same book!

I need to invest in...another book!

Cute Taxi Advertising

We are a consumer nation and we will buy rocks if it is packaged and advertised right.  Agree?

My favourite ad campaign lately would be these cuties running on crisscross streets in Hong Kong.  Did they catch your eyes?

 

Reading Emails After Being On Holiday

Most people are used to the pile of email which awaits them after returning from a few weeks off.  Let's say you have three hundreds sitting there and you have an hour to just read without needing to respond to any of them.  Is it better to read the most recent emails first, or the oldest first? 

I always experience this dilemma plus the constraint in time, but it is generally my habit to read them from oldest to first. That way, if an issue or outage has occurred, I could come across the notification first, then the resolution to the notification. 

What is your way to deal with yours?  Would you scan and filter? Sort by sender?  Would love to do a little survey here and could be interesting to see if there exists some kind of correlation to the personalities and occupations in the sample.  

 

The Knitted Love

I learned to knit in the first year of secondary school and the first item that I knitted, like most people, was a scarf (full of holes), trashed the very next minute.  

I found learning to knit very difficult to master and remembered complaining to my mom when all of the stitches came off the needles. 

"How am I ever going to knit?" I said.

She told me to just sit quietly and find my own way of doing it (as if it was that easy!)
 

I have a great mom who can come up with hundreds of different knitting patterns in her head. She can practically produce a vest in a day, a long-sleeve pull-over in two, but that string of her genes certainly didn't reach me.   

Till this day, I remain totally hopeless in knitting, but I admire those who can.

I am also proud and glad to be wearing my mom's knitted wear.  

Cheetos: Cadbury & Kraft

I have no idea what got on me, but I bought myself a pack of Crunchy Cheetos to munch on the way home. 

I mean, what could I possibly be expecting from that sort of snacks?  To satisfy my tastes buds or to fill me up?

Neither could happen, but I had an afterthought.

The thought of the ­Americans – so good at so many things, so bad at coming out snacks like Cheetos!  The fact that they are meddling with the Cadbury formula, could prove too much for many of us to bear. 

It is a very British thing, Cadbury. We have all got a great deal of fondness for it. It was my favourite pick in tuck shop, it has been one of the few home comforts I miss while I am abroad, along with the BBC or the self-deprecatory British humour.

Look at Cheetos, they have them in every shade of orange imaginable, Spicy Orange, Smokey Orange...and they tasted downright bad!

Kraft better downright assures us, that they are going to leave Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate formula intact.
  

I used to play the piano...

There are literally millions of adults today who took piano lessons when they were young, but at some point down the path, all that accumulative hard work was forgone some way or the other. 

Over the years I have never heard anyone say "I'm glad I never learned to play the piano", but I have heard hundreds say something like "I sure wish I had paid more attention when I was a kid", or "I would love to get back to the piano some day."

I am definitely one of them.  

I sat in front of a piano tonight, couldn't recall any songs I used to memorise by heart.  I couldn't run my fingers on any scales nor arpeggios, which I used to pride myself in performing quite flawlessly.  

The most shameful thing was, I couldn't even demonstrate to a 3-year old kid how to play the world's easiest piano duet - The Chopsticks!

I should very much be ashamed of having attained grade 8 in pianoforte!


 

A Chocoholic Confession

Chocoholic - Is there such a word?  Apparently there is, and it is a portmanteau of the 2 words chocolate and alcoholic.  

I have a confession to make.  Due to an alleged addiction to chocolate, the chocoholic me have not been updating my blog for the last 2 days.  

Even though I can never seem to get enough of these snack from this fifth major food group, before I got drowned from indulging these lovely chocolate from Royce, I did remember to take photographs of what I consumed for my Project 340. 

 

A Whole New World of Cognac

I met with an uncle who's a connoisseur and had the honour to taste some of the finest Cognac in his collection.  

I better jot down what I learnt like a reporter, before everything evaporates!  

• One can never be in too much of a hurry to enjoy the wonderful Cognac you just been poured.  The best rule of thumb is to let the Cognac breathe at least a half-minute per year old.  Thus for the XO I had, which was 20-years of age, breathed for a minimum of 10 mins prior to our tasting.   

• A tulip glass must be used to get the full aroma do somersaulting in the glass.  

• Great Cognac is sipped and not swallowed!  So what he meant was, taste a few "drops" at a time, let it sit in the mouth for a good minute for flavours to engulf the whole of our palate and entice our oral cavity in totality.  

• Hold up the tulip glass and take one or two shallow sniffs, don't enforce it with a big breath or else the 80% or so spirit will just anesthetize our entire olfactory and dumb our senses.

• Then try to make sense of what you got out from that momentarily wait. Was it fruity or flowery?  Woody or spicy?  Chalky or oaky?  

I had no clue as you can guess, but the roof of my mouth and the back of my nasal sure had some fun crawling in a whole new world of wine tasting! 

  

Define: CNY

Most people associate Chinese New Year (CNY) with spending time with family, visiting relatives and catching up with close friends.  Plus lots of eating...and food, and, more food!

For me, part of the fun occurs when our normal home get transformed into make-shift casinos! 

Gambling is simply ingrained in our family tradition and

in the last 2 days, I have won some lucky money playing Fish-Shrimp-Crab, Caribbean Studs & Blackjack at the pleasure of my own home.

It wasn’t as much about winning or losing, but being part of the action allows members of the family to connect and joke around.  

Family together-ness would always be something that we all have to treasure - best defined during CNY and carry way beyond throughout.   

 

Welcome To The Year of The Tiger

Facts About Us Southpaws

Being a member of an elite society, I hereby present you with some interesting facts pulled out from the internet about left-handedness.  

• Roughly about 5-15% of the world's human population is left-handed.
• 4 of the 5 original designers of the Macintosh computer were left-handed.
• 1 in 4 Apollo astronauts were left-handed (250% more than the normal level).
• Left-handed drivers are apparently more successful at learning to drive than right handed people. As many as 57% of left handers passed their driving test first time compared with only 47% of right handers (a poll for the AA Driving School found).
• Lefties are more prone to have allergies, insomnia, migraines and are 3 times more likely to become alcoholic.
• Most left-handers draw figures facing to the right.
  
• Left-handers adjust more readily to seeing underwater.
• Left-handers excel particularly in tennis, baseball, swimming and fencing.
• Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Einstein, Ben Franklin, Bill Gates are some famous lefty geniuses.
• Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama are lefties presidents I know.

I was hoping to find evidence to support the fact that we are no good at numbers or bad at maths.  Only to find leaning comfort which states left handed people are the only people in their right minds!

Blur Or Not To Blur?

I was discussing the preferred selection depth of field (DOF) with a friend over coffee and that was when I realised opinions can be quite subjective. 

The decision can be truly a matter of personal preference when trying to determine the appropriate use of DOF to enhance an effect in a photo.

One thing is certain though - no one would say no to a smaller f-stop number!


Let's do an experiment here.  Which photo do you prefer?

A Cuppa of Ronnefeldt

Tea, next to water, is the most widely drunk beverage in the world (and beer is third I think).

If I am to buy tea bags, I would look no further than Twinnings from London because it would be a no brainer - can't go very wrong with that choice.  

I recently discovered many hotels serve Ronnefeldt tea, so I went and check out their organic Japanese green tea.  

One thing good about this brand is that it tells you how long you should let the tea bag sit in the water.  So it would be 2-3 minutes for its Organic Japanese Classic; 8 minutes for their Lemon Sky.

My morning coffee has not been replaced, but a sip of tea in the mid-afternoon, added on the fact that it is organic, definitely serves me right.

 

The Outliers

Received this bestseller written by Malcolm Gladwell as a gift.  

After reading a few pages, a strong message conveys that I fall in either 1 of the 2 categories...really. 

1.0) Outlier 
2.0) Failure

I would have known better if I am an outlier, so logic tells me I am the latter. 

Let me read on and see if I stand any chances of any in-between. 

Wait a minute, but do I really want to be 

 1.5) mediocre?

In Search for a Bowl of Quality Ramen

At HK$120 a bowl, UME SHIO RAMEN definitely has made a statement and drew my attention.  I went for a trial but sadly to say it was not worth every cents of it.

This is the Plum with Salted Broth Ramen from MIST, which I ordered for lunch today. 

It has a slight hint of plummy citrus-ness, the broth was thin in taste and rather oily.  Pity one only gets 1 piece of BBQ pork to go with the big bowl, the high-class Ramen and the presentation of the whole thing nonetheless made up for the lost scores. 

All in all, I don't think there will be a next visit from me though. 

Creativity After A Rain Bath?

It was pouring dogs and cats out there but my mind was not at all disturbed by it.  

On the contrary, I decided to tune in and bathe in the rhythm of the rain, enjoyed a bit of reading, and was able to find a sense of tranquility very shortly after. 

What also came out of the rain bath, was a fair bit of creativity - hence this image creation, how about I called it "Me & Myself In The Mirror"?

Aino

Yup, rather tired of my old phone...here comes a new one after 7 months of having SE W995 in my pocket!

As far as feature phones go, I think Aino has pretty much everything I need.  

What's new for me would be the touchscreen navigation.  So far so good, the smooth sensitivity is there and I can't wait to load some touch-controlled Java games to play.  

Its Remote Play is also something very interesting.  

I should be able to wirelessly pair up with Sony's PlayStation 3 via Wi-Fi.  Not sure how well I can control my tennis swings with that though!

Stiletto

In a magazine I read today, the queen of erotic imagery, Madonna recently compared buying shoes to having sex!

According to the designer Jimmy Choo, the singer told him that buying a pair of his shoes is more satisfying than having sex with a man.

   

She said: "At least you know they are going to last forever."

Victoria Beckham said she can concentrate better when wearing heals.  

What about this pair of Stilettos?  Perhaps only ballet dancers will find its appeal and I'd marvel anyone who aren't and dare walk on it.

A Tweety Resignation

He is the pioneer in corporate blogging and I have been a loyal follower of his blog, until he decided to flee and hide from the public since May last year, after he happily sold his company to Oracle.

For a reason beyond any fathom I can measure, I failed to follow him on Twitter! I am attempting to kick myself on what I am missing, as he tweets his way out of Sun/Oracle.

See that bottle of juice he's holding?  

I gave him that and I remember congratulating him on gaining the throne when I first met him in an Analyst Summit.  That had to be in early Feb 2005!  


So long, farewell!

"Simplicity Is Best" Album OUT NOW!

 

Simple food, nostalgic decor, 

autographed CD covers from Capital Artists...

It's SIZZLING HOT, so DON'T MISS OUT

the newly opened Capital Cafe

in the Wanchai NEAR YOU! 

Over a cuppa and a sandwich, I was able to travel back by time tunnel to Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui's heydays and hence the attempt to design the CD cover above as my pic of the day.

Charming Molecular Mixology

Chemistry just isn't a word that most people associate with cocktails.  I came across this years ago, I said I will go try many a times and finally, I experienced the thrill of it all tonight with a friend.  

 

Molecular Mixology is the term applied to the process of creating "edible cocktails" using the scientific techniques of molecular gastronomy.  

"It's about changing the texture, density or viscosity, the molecular structure of a liquid," says Hong Kong's most renowned mixologist Antonio Lai at FINDS.  

Tonight, I was honoured to have Antonio made us 3 of his spectacular signature drinks - A foamy Earl Grey Tea Martini with caviar pearls, bite-sized icy cubes made from mixing Bombay Sapphire with liquid Nitrogen and finally an adorable Godiva Liqueur Burst jelly to finish!

Man....I tell ya, my taste buds were in heaven and I can't be more thankful that they are. 

Swarovski Bombay Sapphire

Gin best typifies chic and sophistication and I think it was Premium Bombay Sapphire's Original Dry Gin that taught all the other performers how to act.

I took this at the airport and regrettably for display only and not for sale.  

Otherwise, this limited edition bottle studded with Swarovski crystals dazzles bright enough to knock me out even before I can pop open the bottle!

Perfectly Lonely

John Mayer's performance in Beacon Theatre on his latest plug - Perfectly Lonely...

Love his talent and the music that he brings...go straight to 4'25" if you want to see the guitar duo jam.