They must be paying a bomb for rental. Plus, the first time I went there, our char koay teow came after 1 hour. The waiters are frantic and busy – they don’t have time to smile at you – they are polite but they don’t smile, and they don’t bother to explain why £6 is justified to the customer – who is left to decide whether to eat more or leave.

I’m taking my business to other restaurants. I’ve decided that not eating Malaysian food isn’t a big deal in this big city that serves up a lot of other stuff that’s more worthy of the customer’s interest.

To date, I have put my hands to claypot dishes, braises, sautés, grills… I’ve recently revisited char-siu again, and it seems to be okay. I’m still not sure which cut of pork is best. I tried tenderloin the last time, and that got burnt into a fish shape, and this time I tried regular ham steak, with a bit of fatty streaks at the top. The fatty streaks make it taste yummy, but they don’t make the corners crust like I want them to because the fat melts away from the meat too easily.

Anyway, I have more ham steak leftover and I’ve decided to put them to grill later. I was thinking of getting some crunchy greens like french beans or peas, but I realized I still have carrots, mushrooms, onions and leeks, which should go well with the steak. All that combination of veggies made me think of a stew or braised ham, but I ran out of aluminium foil and didn’t want to dirty the oven than it already is.

Claypot Chicken Rice

I bought a medium sized claypot because I wanted to cook more authentic asian dishes. It’s big enough to make claypot chicken rice for two people, and so that’s what I did. I can’t remember where I got the recipe from, and usually I just sample a few recipes at a time and adapt it to my needs. Some recommend stir-frying the chicken first. Some gave the recipes that didn’t need the claypot. Some cooked the rice first.

In the end, I just went with the cook-rice-in-claypot-dump-marinated-chicken-later approach. It took quite awhile – I was wary of letting the claypot crack on the electric stove. Thankfully, it didn’t, but man – 45 minutes for claypot chicken rice? I admit it was on 3 most of the time.

Google is still my best resource for recipes. I claim to keyword search everything, but I keep thinking that there should be some way of keeping track of all that besides my delicious bookmarks. My engineer mind is running wild again.

Masters Thesis and Microsoft Research

That being said, I now have some direction as to where my Masters thesis is going. I will be working with Microsoft Research at Cambridge to study how people search for images. While most work along those lines have gone into how to make machines more effective in finding images, my thesis will focus on more social and behavioral aspects about how people search for images on a day to day basis. So now, I am getting to grips with sociology and ethnography, and there’s tons of reading to do.

I’m really looking forward to it – it will be observing people rather than keyboard and computers. It’s a nice departure after a decade of tech-talk and ritualistic paradigms of engineering supremacy. I’m welcoming this paradigm shift, on my way towards thinking more about design than systems.

More food in London

The days of snow has departed. It’s been raining sporadically over the past few days. But we were blessed with a clear day on valentines, when LL and I went to eat Italian at Il Convivio near Sloan Square. They were having a lunch deal but I couldn’t resist ordering the prosecco which was absolutely brilliant, and some sides like the deep fried zucchini. The cappucino was a bit small, though the biscotti was the best I’ve ever tasted. Why does Starbucks and all the other high street coffee shops sell biscotti that hurt your teeth? This I don’t understand.

It’s the first day of my reading week, where I have no classes but am supposed to catch up on my reading. Tomorrow a bunch of us are taking a break and heading out to grab some swiss fondue at a restaurant that has cow bell shows and yodelling.

Mexican is our backup plan in case the cows go mad.

It’s indirectly related to the tau eu kay I made today, which is very Nonya, like my background (yeah, I have peranakan roots from my dad). I adapted from these two recipes, and I realized I put too much water, so the chicken didn’t come out all goo-ey like in the pictures. Instead I was left with a soupy sauce, which tasted super herby from the chinese 5-spice powder.

Note to self: Next time, put less water, or cook the chicken and simmer first before putting water.

I want to buy so many things but I am holding back because we’ve been blowing our eat-out budget again and again (even after LL increased it). So in an effort to cook more often, I went out and bought dried noodles that will keep for centuries, so that I don’t have to worry about food turning stale so fast. I only have two hands and I can’t buy a lot of food and carry them back, so I have to make several trips in a week.

Anyway, my wife says my cooking is improving. She asked for more rice today, which is a first. I have never seen her ask for rice before. Maybe she likes water-y tau eu kay. All the ones I’ve had are NOT water-y. She said the smell is accurate and the taste is accurate – just not thick like they usually do. I also think I put too much 5-spice powder.

The next dish I want to make is bolognese sauce for pasta. Just because Iceland was selling 8 tomatoes for £1 and I need to eat tomatoes before they go bad. I also have ground beef which I need to consume. And I have tons of medium-sized onions left.

I have a problem in that I can only decide what my stomach wants to eat. So, I have no menu for the week, and I cook whatever’s in my pantry, or starve – because my stomach rules over my head. If it doesn’t want to eat something, it goes without it fine.

Of course, this is not fine. I need some way to set up some kind of structure so that I can go and buy food and cook it and have less wastage, because it stinks up the refridgerator (which is extremely small) and fungus feels absolutely yucky.

So what I’m doing is browsing recipes and keeping track of things I want to try. I take note of all the consumables and other stuff that I should store up in my pantry (flour, spices, herbs). So far, that’s been good. The 5-spice powder came about because I was reading another recipe from somewhere that needed it, so that’s why I bought it, although I never got around to cooking that dish. So I was happy that the tau eu kay recipe asked for it.

If any of you cook chinese/local meals – please teach me your stuff!

I haven’t yet made any

• curries
• fish dishes
• desserts (sago and gula melaka?)
• dim sum

So if you’ve got simple, great recipes for those – please drop a comment here.

I grabbed some recipes (here, here,and here) from Google and decided to give it a try. My wok wasn’t hot enough cos I was using an electric stove. I didn’t have belacan or sambal. Maybe I should have mixed the chili oil with some sugar, but I thought it tasted quite sweet already.

Some more I had lup cheong thrown in. The shrimps shrank from a 20 sen size to a 5 sen size… ????? I didn’t know they could shrink so small. The shrimps were from Netherlands or something. They eat a lot there, like in Ikea (cold water prawns).

Anyway, I think I should have put more soy sauce. I put like 4 tablespoons into my dish, which was sort of medium-sized – but it didn’t seem salty enough. I also used the oil from the chili oil (just the oil, not the chili) to cook everything. I did add about a healthy teaspoon of chili after frying the kuey teow a fair bit. I think 1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce is enough. More than that and it would taste really weird.

The taugeh tasted good though. I think I’ll make a batch of it in a few days’ time with sesame seed oil and soy sauce. Yummy.

I didn’t bother taking a photo because I was busy eating.

Why so CACAT ONE!?!?!??!

Webmaster: madsalleh@btconnect.com ????

“Photographer Service Availabled” ????

The trick is to keep the pan super hot and sear the steak, which should be marinated on pepper/salt and olive oil. 1 minutes 30 seconds on each side for medium. 8 minutes total for well done. Another recipe says not to overwhelm the flavor with too much pepper and salt. Rub in with fingers. OK.

Note to self: canned potatoes and peas don’t taste like the real thing.

10 bonus points for an edible budget steak meal for two.

I sat back after my last bite of steak and contemplated how I was slowly sinking into a state of stupor, having only consumed bits of food and research papers for the past 2 days. Maybe that was what made me download more emo and folk albums, and buy myself a ticket to see Feeder this Tuesday – alone.

I love the new Flickr homepage redesign. They’ve made it more easy to do common things on one page, instead of having to move about different pages.

Overall, the original page hasn’t lost its flame. It still shows your latest photos, photos from your contacts, and photos from other people. But it’s been upgraded to provide activity filtering (via the activity page), preferential settings for contact photos displayed, most recent photos from groups (wasn’t there before), a ‘reload’ feature for explore, and bits of other interesting things, like a mini stats graph right above your latest photos.

The new homepage feels a lot more dynamic too, with updates from the Flickr blog and tips giving you new feeds from time to time. I like how they didn’t displace things too much – the photos are on one side and the text activity (Flickr blog and tips) on another side. And they still maintained the international greeting at the top of the page, so I can continue learning how to greet people in different languages (not that I can remember them all).

The tips aren’t simple help advice that bore advanced users, either. One tip I just read informed me about how Flickr gives away free pro accounts to individuals from specific charity groups. Nifty!

The overall impression that I got was that Flickr is still on the ball when it comes to user experience. I signed up many months ago for a pro account and I’ve not been dissapointed. I do know that the original founders have left Yahoo recently, but the Flickr team still ‘gets it’ and I’m looking forward to more Flickr goodness in the future.

Check out the screencast.

Couple that with the huge load of reading I have to do everyweek, and almost 3 full days of classes every week – London is becoming quite exhausting.

Still, I still feel optimistic as people around me remain bright and cheery, and my classmates are equally positive and opportunistic. We’ve started getting into group assignments this week and everyone has been contributing some awfully good stuff into the work.

There are a bunch of us who have started doing poker nights, and I’m thinking of setting up a gaming night for board games and for us just to hang out. There are a bunch of us who has played Settlers and someone in the group wants to play Risk.

Anyway, London is really great for walking because there’s just tons of stuff to see on foot. The buildings are really old and they never grow higher than 5 floors, which means it just keeps spreading wider eastwards, westwards, northwards and southwards. I’m staying at the northern end of London just at the tip close to where the countryside begins and there’s still tons of stuff to see and do out here.

This is probably what keeps housing rates so darn high. It’s almost impossible to get a decent place to stay that’s affordable.

We’re going to Borough Market tomorrow to see if we can pick up some fresh food and other stuff we can eat over the week. It’s quite a fun place, and we hope to avoid the crowds that usually come on Saturdays and Sundays.

The duck I tried at Bayswater wasn’t as great as I thought. It’s good…. but, I mean, no big deal. I’d probably go back there for duck rice, sure… but I’m not sure I’ll have a craving for it very often. I may be overzealous by comparing it to some delicacy duck dishes I’ve tried back home, but I think I’m being fair. Then again, maybe I went to the wrong restaurant, because there seemed to be at least three or four on the same row.

I’m waiting for my debit card. Due to arrive any day now.

I am dead tired from being out the whole day, but I just had to satisfy my curiousity and find out what the big deal ISOP was all about.

I’m glad they separated graduates and undergraduates because otherwise it would have caused a massive traffic jam and people wouldn’t be able to identify their peers.

I was pretty much alone for the most part. I saw a lot of groups of people who seemed to hit it off real fast, and did everything together. Maybe they were from the same halls or something.

Anyway, when I got there in the morning they handed to us blue packs with stuff in them that were quite useful, like a London guide and a UCL Union handbook.

I must say that there’s a lot more going on here than there was at KU, but I guess with a city like London, there are bound to be tons of things to do.

There’s even a Trip to Ikea on the Give it A Go list. What the?

I had a lot of time to waste after the formal introductory speeches by the Provost, Deputy Dean and UCL Union sabbaticals. I found a quiet little corner at Gordon’s Cafe at the Union, got a latte, and proceeded to sift through the stuff from the blue pack for an hour or so.

I thought to myself – one year is going to fly past like it was yesterday. I suppose that’s what a blog is for.

Anyway, it was hardly 12pm when I got done with the pack, and I decided to wander up and down the Union. Then, I decided it was time to check up on Barclays and kick their ass for delaying the opening of my account.

After 15 minutes of utterly pointless conversation with the Barclays rep, my phone credit exhausted, and we got cut off. They still demanded red tape treatment so I gave up. Anyway my credit was nil so I had to get up and go find a T-Mobile store.

I was getting really tired by then.

I tried looking for a free wifi hotspot, but failed. The Tottenham Court McDonald’s did not have free wifi even though there’s a sticker on the entrance that says they do. I wasted £4.90 on a sucky chicken sandwich meal to find that out. I should have just gone with a quarter pounder, but I thought I’d sample one of those “healthy” McD options we don’t get back home.

I even tried to pretend shop at PCWorld, just to google for a list of free wifi hotspots. None of their laptops had an internet connection (unlike Regent St.’s Apple).

So I gave up again and went back to UCL and found a bench to sit on, and after catching a breath, decided to read an ebook and listen to some music. I realized I could only do that for an hour and a half, which is quite long, and then I needed to take a break.

I wandered around the South Cloisters, and then East into some obscure locations, up and down stairs, and then back to the South Cloisters and south onto Malet Place and into the Engineering building to check out where the UCLIC offices were. The door needed ID and I didn’t want to buzz anyone in there, so I left.

The view on the 8th floor was amazing though. It’s got a nice view of the church roof there, and the east parts of London.

I went into Waterstones, found out that Don Norman has written a new book called The Design of Future Things, and found another book on interaction design there which was £24. Geez. As usual, I didn’t buy anything and left.

By then, it was 4.45pm, and I had killed about 2 hours just by wandering around and doing nothing. I decided to walk to Gordon Square and do more nothing, and wait for 5.30pm to come when the ISOP reception would begin.

I sat down on a bench where a young lady was, took out my moleskin and decided I should try and memorize the map of London.

I realized that the Thames starts with a “U” on the west where West Brompton is, and then makes like a step upwards towards Chelsea, and then another towards Covent Garden… where it tapers southwards past Tower Bridge towards Wapping where it tilts northwards into an upside-down “U” where the Limehouse DLR is.

After I had done that I realized I was crazy, and the young lady must have thought that as well because she left.

So I decided to get up again and walk to the South side of the gardens and relax on the grass. For some reason, everyone was hanging out at the corners on benches, but no one was sitting on the grass. I felt that was a bit weird.

Anyway, 5.30pm rolled by in no time, and by then a huge crowd of international students had gathered at the giant tent.

I walked in with the herd and found myself completely solo, amongst pockets of people who were chatting away about random things. I felt really out of place without any friends or acquaintances, and I attempted to gain eye contact with at least one human being in that big crowd.

I managed to creep up in between two Americans’ conversation and introduced myself. We chatted for a bit, and I found out we didn’t have anything in common, took the queue for my empty cup and made my exit.

After I had returned with a new glass of apple juice the Yankees had relocated, so I wandered around again for a fresh pair of eyes. A Chinese professor found me and we made idle chatter for a few minutes. I can’t even remember now what we were talking about. It must’ve been quite insignificant.

Anyway, he too decided the conversation reached its end and decided to walk away. So I went my way, and found this Korean guy who was there by himself.

For some reason we hit it off and we were sharing our stories with each other. Apparently, he married a Spanish woman and has been working in Spain since 2002. He decided to come to UCL to pursue his Masters in globalization, even though he has a background in Unix administration.

We talked a great length, and we were joined by another Masters student, a Japanese, and we exchanged contacts. The Jap majors in urban planning in politically unstable areas like Afghanistan. I told him my wife thought of doing Urban Planning once, but realized she didn’t want to travel too much.

By that time I had one glass of white wine, one of red, and I had sampled all the juices they put out on the table. Somebody came on the microphone and said it was time to leave.

So the Korean guy and I walked to Kings Cross Station where he had to catch a bus and I had to buy National Rail tickets for our trip to Colchester this weekend.

I didn’t think it was a bad night, especially since I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone at the reception.

Tomorrow I might meet with someone else I haven’t met before – a new classmate I might end up working with this year. Strangely enough, we met on Facebook.

Anyway, I hope I can enrol tomorrow. I want that dang student ID card, and the perks that come with it.