Sayang Central

Minli's moved...

2008-04-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

Over to howloopy.blogspot.com

Remember when....

2007-02-08T20:38:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, Skittle could fetch too! Now he just sits around and chews his paws.

Siena, the amazing fetching cat

2007-02-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

'Nuff said.

Can you see me?

2006-11-13T20:37:00.000-08:00

Yay for new hobbies!

2006-11-12T13:12:00.000-08:00

Siena always loses her toys. I don't know what she does with them but every time we give her a toy, she will squirrel it away. If we're lucky, we'll find a collection of them either under the dishwasher or under the couch, but sometimes they just disappear.

So I have taken to crocheting her little toys (no more Pet Club toys for you young lady!) -- the first attempt was a sad blue shrimp which was ridiculed by all who came by. As I scoured the web to find mouse patterns I could trust, I came across this incredibly cute crochet craft called amigurumi. My life has never been the same again.

Here are my amigurumi pals, Beany the Octopus, Hippy the Hippo (named by Paul), and Anty the Reindeer head Christmas ornament. Also have a photo of them next to little Miss Siena for a size comparison. =)

Patterns for Hippy and Anty courtesy of Crochetville and Roxycraft. Beany was my freeform pattern.

2006-10-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

Can't believe it's taken me so long to do this, but here is a picture of Skittle (known as Flash in his previous life) when he was still a little kiddo. Poor little guy was fished out of a drain in South SF by Jeri Dopp (http://www.safehavenforcats.com/) who does a wonderful job of rescuing kittens and advocating cat "spas".

Pictures courtesy of www.safehavenforcats.com.

Good ole farmers marketing

2006-09-10T22:58:00.000-07:00

Nothing terribly exciting this week, so I'm just posting pictures from our trip to the San Francisco Farmers Market a few weeks ago. It was our first time there and we were amazed by the multitude of shops. Got some lovely cherry tomatoes to munch on and sampled lots of peaches and nectarines. I looove peach season!

Here's Paul reaching happily into his bag of cherry tomatoes (he liked eating them so much he couldn't keep his hand out of the bag even though he was posing for a picture).

Next year, we should definitely grow cherry tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes. Our 6 Roma tomatoes are fruiting immensely, which is amazing, but a tad boring. We get over 20 tomatoes a week, and since I hate wasting food, we have been actively eating them every weekend. Roma tomato overload!

In the running for cutest kittens ever

2006-09-04T22:19:00.000-07:00

Skittle and Siena say hi in their own special way. Took these photos with the lousy camera on my phone so you're going to have to forgive the quality.

Californian Safari?

2006-09-04T21:56:00.000-07:00

Who knew that there is a safari just north of San Francisco? Paul and I decided to make it our one-year anniversary holiday and trek up to Santa Rosa to spend a day with the giraffes at Safari West. We got up close and personal with a wide range of Afrian savannah wildlife -- wildebeests, zebras, assortedboks, Watusi cattle, and of course, the giraffes.

My favorite part was when our guide introduced us to the herd of Watusi cattle and we noticed that some of them looked strangely like domestic cows. True enough, two cows had wandered over from the neighbouring farm and had settled in with their African friends. Yay for silliness!

The cool thing about the safari was that we got to ride around in a jeep. The extra cool thing is that we got to sit up top! We giggled like two little children throughout the safari, yelling things like "zebra" and "springbok!", and we had a whale of a time.

Side note - Paul fell down the stairs on Saturday (his foot slipped), causing him to slide down and make a huge ruckus. He ended up with a bruise on his back. *I* on the other hand was innocently and quietly lounging on the sofa with Skittle on my lap. When Paul fell, Skittle was so startled by the loud commotion that he sprang off my lap in a panic, leaving huge gouge marks on my left thigh that bled for the next 15 minutes. The boy falls down the stairs and gets a bruise, while I do *not* fall down the stairs, but get scar-leaving jaggedy scratches. Grrrr. Paul laughed himself senseless for the next hour.

Post what post?

2006-08-31T22:31:00.000-07:00

We are back! What, it's only been more than a year since our last post. Nothing really major happened though -- we just got married, one of us moved countries, changed jobs and strangely enough discovered a keen interest in gardening, the other one just had to change his lifestyle to accomodate the new distraction. ;)

To commemorate this first post of 2006, here are pictures of the SayangCats, named Skittle and Siena. Skittle is 11 months old, walks with a sailor's swagger and is black with white paws. He does have one little black toe. He is reasonably good friends with Siena, the latest addition to the Virdone family. Siena is 5 months old, completely bomb-proof and is a grey tabby. Her favorite pastime is stalking Skittle and beating him up. She also likes kneading (especially when the body to be kneaded is trying to sleep), stealing food, and jumping on top of the TV.

The first picture is of Skittle in our backyard with his leash (courtesy of Lori, who is owned by Nikko , who is now being a sick kitty in Seattle -- get well soon Nikko!). The second is of a very sleepy Siena stretched out along the living room couch.

Yay for cute cats!

LED Candles

2005-06-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

I want a whole set of these:

They come in all sorts of different shapes too.

A gadget that I could use

2005-05-10T15:03:00.000-07:00

This Powerseed device is an eating metronome.

It emits a beep every few seconds, telling you when you're allowed to take another bite of food. Then every five minutes or so, it emits another tone, at which time you're supposed to pause and consider whether you're full or not.

To anyone who has nearly lost a finger at one of my feeding times -- I'm sure you understand.

No more ads :-)

2005-02-24T23:22:00.000-08:00

So I figured out how to strip away the text ads in GMail when you use Firefox.

First you need to install this extension for Firefox: URIid. This extension you to provide a CSS file that will selectively override the CSS formating for specific websites.

Once you've done that, create a text file called userContent.css in your Mozilla profile's chrome folder (You can find it most easily with Start->Run-> "%AppData%" then navigate down through a structure similar to: Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/default.q12/chrome).

In the userContent.css file, place this text:

body#gmail-google-com div#ad {
 display: none !important;
}

Save the file then restart Firefox.

This will hide the text ad <div> blocks on any gmail web page!

If you fool around with this file (and know CSS syntax) you can change the colors and behavior of all the pieces of the GMail interface. The easiest way to find the names of the various components is by drag selecting the sections of the UI then choosing "View Selection Source" in the right-click context menu.

Kuala Lumpur and skew b.

2005-02-17T07:13:00.000-08:00

Since the last blog generated so much confusion, I start this blog with a "This is an ML post" caution.

Am heading off to KL tomorrow for a well deserved (if I say so myself) holiday. Will be joined by the usual suspects - fwee, addy, stupidchicken, weister and ken. (On a side note, it's a little odd calling people by their blog names, will have to get used to it.) We'll be there till Sunday, so we're just going to have to max out the fun we have there. It's so nice to get out of the country, even though it's only across the Causeway.

I also proudly announce that skew is now on dogster.com (www.dogster.com/?118474) Do drop by and give him a bone!

A Cheesy Nightmare

2005-02-16T05:12:00.000-08:00

Wei's blog has inspired me to start blogging again (not that I was a fantastically frequent blogger, but ah well). Also, I had a horrific dream on Monday night which I thought was worth sharing.

I was stirring a pot of sheep's milk over a stove to make it turn into Pecorino formaggio (had just watched Avventura on Discovery channel before passing out). The theory is that as the milk is stirred, it will slowly start to coagulate into little lumps which will form big lumps of cheese. For some strange reason, I stirred and stirred, and the milk *did* start to coagulate, but when it was almost perfect, it started disintegrating again. I ended up with a pot of milk, no cheese, and no amount of stirring would make it become cheese. At one point, I even tried squeezing the little bits of cheese together to help them clump up, but that didn't work either.

Woke up traumatized and exhausted (stirring is really tiring). Neurotic, no? That dang dream is a reflection of my work, by the way. *sigh*

Geek Love Poem

2005-02-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

From ThinkGeek:

roses are #FF0000
violets are #0000FF
all my base
are belong to you

Wow. I'm overwhelmed. Truly, quite touching.

Lacing your shoes

2005-02-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

From Gizmodo -> LifeHacker:

Some people have far too much time on their hands. Some guy has made a website discussing many ways to lace and tie your shoes.

Some of them are quite neat, and I especially like his "Ian's Knot." I need to try it out some time... I am always the last person out the door because I take so long to tie my shoes.

Amazon Prime

2005-02-02T13:30:00.000-08:00

Now this is a neat idea.

For $79 a year, you can get two-day shipping on all of your orders for "free" and overnight shipping for $4 at Amazon.com.

I'm going through my orders of the past year, and I think it might actually be worth it -- I order things from them 2-3 times a month, and often buy extra to get the free shipping. I also have spent at least $30 on outright shipping charges when I decided I couldn't wait, or have given up my possible savings when I had to go to a brick & mortar store instead to get something quicker.

Hmmmm....

2005 Bloggies

2005-01-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

I love website award listings. Not because I like to root for my favorite sites, but because I get to learn about all the other fantastic sites there are out there.

I'll definitely be checking quite a few of these out during down-time at work:
2005 Bloggies

OkCupid Death Test

2005-01-26T10:50:00.000-08:00

This has got to be one of the most morbid survey thingies I've taken:
http://www.okcupid.com/death

So apparently, I'll die in April of 2055, at age 74.9 of a heart attack.

...

2004-11-09T15:49:00.000-08:00

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

SF Gate Poll results

2004-11-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

SF Gate's Readership is so funny :)

Fall Back Tonight!

2004-10-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

Set clocks back one hour tonight at 2 AM!

Short Political Quiz

2004-10-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

It told me what I expected it to tell me, so I guess it works, eh?

short political quiz

I got this as my political leaning.

LIBERTARIANS support maximum liberty in both personal and

economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one

that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence.

Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose

government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate

diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

Of course, this in on a site called self-gov.org, so the questions probably push you that way.

Strangely enough, this is the results they quote, so I guess its not completely biased...

How People Have Scored

Centrist 30.45 %

Right (Conservative) 7.47 %

Libertarian 34.72 %

Left (Liberal) 18.74 %

Statist (Big Government) 8.62 %

Sexy Names

2004-08-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

According to this article, I don't have a sexy name:

"Men with "front vowels" in their names -- sounds formed at the front of the mouth like the "a" in Matt -- were considered sexier than men with "back vowel" sounds like the "au" in Paul, she concluded."

Considering how ridiculously sexy I am now, imagine how stunning I'd be if my name were Matt!