So lately I’ve been introduced to 3 new food items:
Yi Mein noodle, a chewy and spongy flat noodle served in Chinese restaurants in birthday  celebrations. I think I might be able to buy this from Tsue Chong in the international district.
SomTam, a Thai papaya salad, made with fish sauce and ”mam”and chili pepper, and blazingly hot, I mean burn in your mouth hot.
Muscat grapes, a translucent grape that has a strong floral note, available only around April.

Love them all.

It doesn’t matter to me if they reversed their decision not to fund Planned Parenthood. They have shown their real color, and i’ve picked my alternative organization (plus Planned Parenthood) for my hard earned money.

Here’s a great yogurt drink: mix equal parts of Haggen 2% milk and Strauss Family Creamery organic vanilla nonfat yogurt into a capped bottle, and give it a vigorous shake until a good foam is formed. Put in the fridge for all day enjoyment.

It’s winter and uni is in season. For a month I had live uni from the local Japanese seafood store once a week, eating on average 2 uni’s (10 lobes). Then someone pointed out to me that uni has a high cholesterol contents (12% daily consumption for each spoonful). After numerous readings from the internet the verdict is still out for me. Is this cholesterol all bad? What are the other nutritional values from uni that can counterbalance the high choleserol level? For now we stop having uni, trying to be moderate about it. I have to admit though, that last month was a blast, the live uni was always so fresh and yummy.

Today the work on our backyard tree stump is complete, it’s now a salmon jumping upstream. Stan (Stanley Rill) is a great man and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to get to know him, and what’s more, have a sculpture done by the master woodcarver. Here is the completed picture, I’ll post more in our Photo Gallery.

I’m so very excited to have Stanley Rill, master wood carver, travelling from the Olympic Peninsula over to our place to start a small project on a tree stump that we saved since April of this year. He’s been busy with other big projects and just got some free time now. The weather is cold and foggy, but he’s used to it. He also brought along Luke (I called him Lucky Luke) the dog. Will post picture when the project is complete. Shhh my wife doesn’t know this, it would be a pleasant surprise when she comes back!

I’ve been using DVD Profiler for years to keep track of my DVD collection. It works great on my PC. The problem with a PC is that it’s not accessible on the go. I want to have my collection with me on the go. I don’t need any fancy features like the ability to edit or make changes to it. Just a read-only list is good enough. And now that I have an iPad, which is a great medium to showcase and browse your collection, it would be useful if you can find movies you might want to watch at the moment without having to run to your computer.
So today I went to the App store and bought the DVD Profiler for iPad version. Its design is an exact match for my needs, and then some. I sync’d it to the master database on my PC, and voila it’s done.
The Browse tab is most useful, allowing you to look up movies based on genres or rating. Want to know which movies have THX? Browse to Features. These lookup methods might alleviate somewhat the only thing missing from the app that I really wants: the ability to show the Tags and filtering based on them. I use tags to flag certain things which allow me to build complex filters, among them is the location of a movie. I know you can define a location in the Disc portion, but you know how many clicks it takes to get there? Not to mention the lack of filtering on Disc Location. Well, something for the next version I guess. For now, the work-around for me is to put the disc location in the Notes section, which shows up in the main movie page.
Now this works only for iOS, but what about Android? There is an app called Movielicious that I need to investigate.
The world is getting better every day.

Thanks for a great new home.
Thanks for fixing up our home.
Thanks for helping us get in shape and back in good health.
Thanks for being a fantastic family one could have asked for.
Thanks for the beautiful girls.

After upgrading my iPad to iOS 5, boom all my books lost their covers! What’s the fix? Unsync all of them and then add them all back, taking a lot of time. Not cool.
Second problem: this might or might not be a iOS 5 problem, but I tried putting my first video into the iPad and played it with the iPad built-in Video app. In the middle of playing, I switched back to Home screen, and when I returned to the Video, it froze. Solution? Kill the app and restarted it.
Third problem: iTunes sync. Sometimes it just say that my iPad is not connected. Solution? Kill iTunes and relaunch it.
So wo says Apple sofware just works?

Read here for more info on this great community event for the DC – Maryland – Virginia area: