Happy Birthday again!

Yup happy birthday again! This time to my mum!

Ok her birthday was definitely going to be more than just a few warcraft pics so those now famous pics of mine are not around. Instead I cooked her a special meal! Some Spanish(I think) thingy called quiche and some salmon with Italian herbs. Sounds cool? Sadly, it didn’t really turn out as cool as it sounded.

But it was still good! Though there were many minor hiccups along the way of my foray back into cooking after a break of more than 1 year. The last time I can remember cooking was at paul cheong’s house I think… I havn’t cooked since entering army.

So started off with the simple task of cooking the veg. Everything had been cut washed and prepared nicely when I realize that my mum had changed the place we put our cooking oil since a yr ago. And I can’t find it. holy shit. Worse still, after I found it, I realized that I hadn’t chop the garlic. Up there lah, I’m pretty sure that 2 years ago I would never have forgotten these things.

Anyway, after veg and mushrooms are done and transferred into a nice pot for the next stage of cooking, it looks like this

From UBERCOOLKIAs! :)

Now the eggs and milk, I must say my egg beating skills just rock. My house DOESN”T HAVE AN EGG BEATER, so I beat it with a spoon. To perfection =) ok fine, near perfection. End product looks like this

From UBERCOOLKIAs! :)

Add it to the bowl of veg and mushies, add parmesan and cheddar cheese and bake, and the quiche is done! And it’s good!!! Only bad thing is that there’s way too much.

From UBERCOOLKIAs! :)

A bowl this size is >>> 3 ppl. Way too much for 3 ppl. But still qte happy wif it.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the salmon, so I shan’t really say much abt it. It’s good tasting, but not as good as I tot it would be. Below expectation. Yup. Anyway, the final thing looks like this

From UBERCOOLKIAs! :)

Yup yup happy birthday!

Next estimated post date: 1-3 may 09

Happy Birthdays!

ok i'm at it again.

AND

ok i know gerard's one abit cram despite using short form. And chinny's one have to use initials else too long. but nonetheless i hope they're ok! enjoy ur birthdays! chinny past 1 day while gerard's one will be spent in taiwan. lol

Next estimated post date: 26 april 09

yet another article

lol i wanted to post about something else one, but this article caought my eye. So this post first, the something else another time. Here it is.

Bad mood, better recall, researchers find


SYDNEY (AFP) - - People grumbling their way through the grimness of winter have better recall than those enjoying a carefree, sunny day, Australian researchers have found.

The University of New South Wales team used a Sydney news agency to test whether people's moods had an impact on their ability to remember small details.

Researchers placed 10 small items on the shop counter, including a toy cannon, red bus and a piggy bank, and quizzed shoppers about what they remembered seeing upon their exit.

Lead researcher Joseph Forgas said subjects were able to remember three times as many items on cold, windy, rainy days when there was sombre classical music playing as they were when conditions were sunny and bright.

Rainy-day shoppers were also less likely to have false memories of objects that weren't there, said Forgas.

"We predicted and found that weather-induced negative mood improved memory accuracy," he wrote in the study, which was published in the latest edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Shoppers in a negative mood showed better memory and higher discrimination ability."

Forgas said a worse mood helped to focus people's attention on their surroundings and led to a more thorough and careful thinking style, while happiness tended to reduce focus and increase both confidence and forgetfulness.

"This finding suggests that some allowance for such mood effects could be incorporated in applied domains such as legal, forensic, counselling and clinical practice," he said.


ok point of article? study when u're in a bad mood when it's raining outside =)

Next estimated post date: 19-21 april 09

how to improve your eyesight

I chanced upon this article a few days ago.


PARIS (AFP) - - Slaying hordes of bad guys -- the more the better -- in fast-paced video games improves vision, a study published Sunday showed for the first time.

Far from being harmful to eyesight, as some had feared, action games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or Left 4 Dead provide excellent training for what eye doctors call contrast sensitivity, the study found.

Contrast sensitivity is the ability to notice tiny changes in shades of grey against a uniform background, and is critical to everyday activities such as night driving and reading. It often degrades with age.

The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveal a previously unsuspected adaptability in the brain, and could open the way to new therapies, the researchers said.

"This is not a skill that people were supposed to get better at by training," said Daphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Rochester in New York state and the study's lead researcher.

"It was something that we corrected for at the level of the optics of the eye -- to get better contrast detection you get glasses or laser surgery."

"What we found is that even without this correction you can help your brain make better use of whatever information is received from your retina," she said in a phone interview.

For the study, Bavelier and three colleagues conducted two sets of experiments.

In the first, they compared the contrast sensitivity of hard-core action game players with video game aficionados of the same age who preferred less rapid-fire fare.

In action games, players typically target and shoot figures that pop up suddenly on a computer screen.

The researchers found that the action buffs were 50 percent more efficient at detecting contrast.

But there remained a chicken-or-egg question: had their vision been improved by playing, or did they become action game players because they had better than average contrast sensitivity to start with?

To find out, Bavelier asked two groups of non-action video game players to undergo 50 hours of training. One played a popular point-and-shoot game called Call of Duty, and the other played a game that offered a rich visual experience, but one bereft of action.

"We found that the people in the first group improved by 43 percent, and the other group not at all," she said.

As important, the study also found that the improvement was not transitory. "The positive effect remained months, even years after training, indicating long-lasting gains," she added.

Is there some limit beyond which playing action games loses its positive effect or becomes detrimental? Can you, in other words, have too much of a "good thing"?

"For your visual system, probably not. For your social life, perhaps," said Bavelier.

yup end of article.

wah this could actually be used as an excuse to play left 4 dead huh. though i havn't played that for more than a month cuz nobody plays wif me =(

and that, along wif the fact that my warcraft 3 is not patched up, means i havn't played comp games wif anyone for more than a month le. oh yeah!

Next estimated post date: 12 or 18-19 april 09

lalala

Ok it's been more than a month since i made that random emo post that turned out to be the last post on this blog for a long long time. That fact changes today. NOW.

And since calls for the rest of the ppl involved in this blog to do something abt reviving the blog has gone rather unanswered, i shall treat this like it's my own little blog(wooh no need to go through trouble of creating own blog!!!) and post random stuff. which chances are will not concern much abt the rest of this class. which won't really matter cuz i bet 70% of the class will not read this anyway. think it'll just be me, rard, sc, lz and occasionally jameson. hmm. 5 ppl. looks like the 70% is an underestimation then.

ok to keep this blogging going, i'll post the expected date of the next post at the end of every post. That gives me no reason to slack off, and give readers an estimated date of coming back to the blog instead of checking repeatedly to find it not updated which puts ppl off.

The revival/transformation starts now.
Next estimated post date: 9-10 april 09