Food and Camera

Monday, I had lunch at Moe's Southwestern grill with a bunch of former co-workers. That was fun and my Art Vandelay burrito was very good, albeit messy.

Wednesday, I went to the DBM career center for the last time. I went to "job club" and got to tell everyone about my new job. I also went to the networking lunch where they toasted my "landing" as well as the landing for three other former IBMers. The DBM career center has been a tremendously beneficial aspect of my severance package. Everyone that works there is incredibly friendly and they had plenty of advice. Anyone who has an opportunity to take advantage of their services should certainly do so. That afternoon I went over to the new job site to check out the facilities there to determine what modifications need to be made.

Thursday the main events were getting a panorex and going to Penang. G and DM saw us there and joined us, which made it more fun. That's the second time that's happened in the past year or two. I ordered chicken pineapple, which was way too hot for my tastes. My dad ordered the Penang shrimp curry that I had last time, which was still delicious. We also had roti canai for an appetizer.

Friday I got to have lunch at Pizza Hut, coffee at Shade Tree and take out from Chai's. You can see the chocolate tartlet that AE and I shared at Shade Tree. Friday was also exciting because my new Canon Powershot SD500 Digital Elph camera arrived. So far I am very pleased. Getting it to focus the way I want it to is somewhat challenging in part due to having more information. With my S300, if it was out of focus, I just tried again. With the 9 point auto focus, you can see exactly what it's doing so you can try to adjust it in such a way to increase the likelihood that it focuses on the subject. It is possible to switch it to manual most and make it just focus on the center. I'm still waiting for my 1 gig SD card to arrive, but I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this camera. My previous camera, the s300 that died, was only 2 megapixels and this one is 7 megapixels. One may think that it's not necessary to have such high resolution if one isn't planning to print posters, but it does give you a lot more flexibility with cropping and therefore one's ability to select the composition. It's almost like being able to zoom with the lens. Here you can see my chives and a few other plants in my front yard.















Saturday, I went to the OCRA breakfast and then headed over to my parents to see FIFO and eat dinner. We also used my van to haul the matt board box that my dad recently finished building. It now lives in my studio.

This morning, my dad and I made a modified version of his crepe pancakes. This time we used half the number of eggs, six, 2 cups of milk, 1 1/3 cups of flour and a tablespoon of sugar. They were extremely good. If I recall correctly, his original recipe uses 1 dozen eggs, 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of water, 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1 tablespoon of oil . We actually just forgot the oil in the modified version, but we probably had to add more to the pan due to that omission.

Today, I've been spending a lot of time watching the live coverage from WWL, in New Orleans. It looks as if there is going to be a complete catastrophe due to Hurricane Katrina. I can't imagine what it must be like for the people who did not have the means to evacuate.

One more news item is that my start date for my new job was moved to September 7th.