Merry Early Christmas!

Today, my office had our Christmas celebration. We had a little gift exchange session. It involves us drawing names of our colleagues two weeks ago and buying a gift for them with a budget of around SGD$25. None of us will know who actually got the present for us nor what the present really is.

Our presents were all placed under this tree

During the actual gift exchange session, each of us were suppose to hand-write a Christmas greeting addressed to the person we bought the gift for. With the present and greeting in hand, each of us will guess who our 'Santa' was. I guessed mine right away though the lady I bought the present for also guessed correctly on her first try.

I got her a bag from SCHU
Have to thank my Dear for helping me choose

As for my gift, I got a pretty cool one. I was really glad with the present my colleague chose for me. She mentioned that she liked the present herself very much as well.

A Sony 4Gb mini thumbdrive

If even comes with an extra storage container


Its Cool, Black and Glossy like my PSP

My supervisor give each of us a Zebra pen.


I got one that is black in color.


The pen can be used while in extended mode.

Later on that day, after working hours, we all head over to Tiffany Cafe & Restaurant at Furuma City Centre for a buffet dinner. I reached home tired, but extremely satisfied. Merry Christmas everyone!

Chocolate Truffles Making

Its the time of the year. Christmas is around the corner. In view of this, I took up a Chocolate Truffle making workshop to learn how to make these yummy little things for my special someone. Its just a basic course so nothing really godly. There were a few different flavors being taught but I am just going to show the orange flavored ones here. So lets get down with it.

Get some chocolate buttons

Boil a pot of water


Place buttons into a dry metal bowl


Place bowl over the pot of boiling water


Stir chocolate till melt


Try not to introduce bubbles


Melted chocolate should shine with a gloss


Place melted chocolate into pipping bag


Coat the outer layer of mould with even and thin layer of chocolate


Place some macadamia nuts and crushed almonds
Refrigerate to harden outer layer


Grate an orange


Squeeze the juice


Place thick cream into pan


Pour in orange juice


Add in orange skin


Add in corn syrup


Prepare another metal bowl with chocolate buttons


Pour boiled mixture into buttons


Stir to melt buttons


Add in butter


A few drops of orange flavoring


Place truffle fillings into hardened outer layer


Cover up the fillings with the same melted chocolate you used for the outer layer initially
Smooth out the covering
Refrigerate to harden whole truffle

And its done. Enjoy your lovely Chocolate Truffle. This is a simplified version of the whole workshop. Do drop a comment if you have more in depth questions. Merry Christmas!

Japanese Phone

My colleague just got herself a SoftBank phone from Japan. It cost her around SGD$800. As Japanese phones can only be used with Japan's mobile network, her cell needs to be modified and sim card needs to be punched and cut.

Dun mind the bunny


AQUOS LCD screen


Swivel reminds me of Konata's keitai in Lucky Stars


Like the little wordings


Its quite slim actually


5.1 megapixel camera

Personally I think its cool and very unique. But I am not willing to part with that kind of money when I cannot use its MMS, 3G, etc features as well as only receiving intermittent signals. Its not the phone's lack of features nor poor built quality. Its just because its in a foreign country.

Download Accelerators

Due to my work commitments, and mainly because of our ISPs throttling BT speeds; I am currently now back to using more direct methods. Having only a few hours at home each day, I cannot afford to waste my time on waiting for downloads to complete.

Thus my search for the best download manager aka download accelerator began. After researching around and trying various programs, I had narrowed down to the few below.

First: Orbit Downloader
Pros:
1. Free
2. Able to grab .flv video/audio files from any site
3. Lightweight and simple
Cons:
1. Not as fast as Internet Download Manager and Downthemall (average 200-300 kbps)

Second: Downthemall
Pros:
1. Free
2. Very fast, almost on par with Internet Download Manager (average 400-800 kbps)
3. Integrated seamlessly into Firefox
Cons:
1. Exists as a Firefox extension
2. Cannot download .flv files

Third: Internet Download Manager
Pros:
1. Super fast, sometimes faster than Downthemall (average 600-800 kbps)
2. Able to grab .flv video files from any site
3. Stable with no errors even when downloading part .rar files at high speeds
Cons:
1. Have to pay once a year to get regular updates
2. Does not have alot of features offered by free counterparts

Fourth: Free Download Manager
Pros:
1. Free
2. Has the most number of features (such as remote access)
3. A little faster than Orbit Downloader (average 250-350 kbps)
Cons:
1. Beefy
2. Cannot grab .flv files from any sites

My choice will go to Downthemall, since it becomes part of Firefox and I seldom have the need to leech off streaming sites. But I did install Orbit though just in case. Do note that the latest build of Orbit as of now features the Grab Pro. It is a very nice feature with huge potential. It works well too. However, it causes IE to crash on exit. This feature is not Firefox compatible. Nonetheless, with the very frequent updates available for Orbit, I am sure they will patch up this bug soon.

Back To MapleSEA?

I used to play MapleStory alot. Had a Level 53 Bandit in Global Windia and a Level 51 Bandit in SEA Delphinus. During Uni days, I will sometimes play well into the wee hours. However, sometime during my last semester, I stopped playing Maple and went for Trickster (had a Pure Evasion Cat... rocks!). I didn't thought that I would revisit the Maple world again untill recently when my girlfriend, brother and I finished playing Diablo II on LAN. The quest of finding another get together game begun.

And of course, MapleStory was naturally one of the candidate since we all had a character somewhere. What caught me by surprise though, was the sheer number of changes that MapleStory had gone through thus far. There are now many more places to explore and newer features. And best of all, there is even a new job to play with.

Introducing the Pirate Job


A short teaser

As a pirate, you get to choose between being a Brawler or a Gunslinger. A Brawler, as the name suggests, would be a pure melee combat fighter using knuckers as their weapons. Gunslingers, as you would expect, uses... errr... guns. After looking through, my brother decided to be a Brawler. I guess my girlfriend would just continue playing her Cleric.

Aidios see you in Maple!