the boredom of ramfree17

The universe really wants to flaunt the universal truth in front of my face. Two clichés come to mind this afternoon:

• Accidents happen anytime, anywhere.
• Accidents are most likely to occur near at home.

At around 1:30PM today, a metal bar came flying at us from a roadside demolition job that didnt have any barricades or safety nets against debris. One second I saw the construction worker dismantling the bar at the second level and the next thing I know I was hitting the brakes as the bar is already in the road and in our way. This is what came at us:

And thankfully the brakes limited the damage to the headlight and the front fender. It could have been worse as a second too late and it would have crashed through our windshield.

Now I have to go to the construction site tomorrow and settle how the contractors will pay for fixing this. Even though my car looks dirty[1], all repairs and maintenance are handled by the car dealer casa. And no way I can afford to get the car unusable for a few days for the next 3 weeks as I need it for the everyday errands that seems to sprout up like mushrooms.

[1] the dust cover you see is is a result of 1 day travelling along kilometers of under-construction road from Binangonan to Manila and vice versa.

**UPDATE 8/31** The site is being contracted to D. R. Robles Construction. Their site foreman, a certain Dennis Bonifacio (09157069096), is a man whose word is worthless. After agreeing to talk on the morning of 10/31 he is a no-show and is already dodging my calls.
**UPDATE 9/5** The D.R. Robles Construction secretary told me that they are going to pay the damages but I need to fork up the money first and submit the receipt to them. Now I need to figure out the optimal weekend (and Monday) that we can afford losing access to the vehicle while it is being repaired.

Tags: Top of my head by Erin
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Posting for Macy.

Caveat Lector:

• I dubbed my cooking style as “Tantyamba” or “Tantyahang+Tsambahan” (Guesstimate+Luck-of-the-draw). I usually look at a recipe and then just follow the general procedures. You can do the same.
• Be adventurous, you only live once. My cooking satisfies that criteria, depending on how you look at it.
• Good for the Heart means its will make your heart take a break faster. Faster is good, no?

Required Cooking Equipment:
– Knife and chopping board
– Pressure cooker
– Grill (I use a stovetop grill as I’m too lazy to tend a real grill)
– Tongs, strainer (optional)

Ingredients:
– 1/2 kilo balingit (pig’s ears), can be swapped with fatty pork cuts with skin
– 1/4 kilo lean pork, which replaces the pork face mask.
– 4 cloves of garlic, or garlic powder
– onions (about 3/4 coffee cup when chopped)
– salt and pepper
– mayonnaise (2/3 cup)
– 3-5 pieces of calamansi (or lemon/lime)
– liquid seasoning (2 cap full)
– 1 finely chopped hot chili (siling labuyo), optional

Meat Preparation:
– Clean the pork balingit and mask.
– Put all the meat products in the pressure cooker, together with the crushed garlic/garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Cover with water, enough to cover the meat. If you are using both balingit/mask and normal pork cuts, don’t put the normal pork cuts yet.
– Put the pressure cooker on high-heat until it whistles. Once it starts whistling, put in low heat (enough to maintain the blasts of pressure every 5-10seconds) and maintain it for about 20-30minutes.
– If using normal pork cuts, add it on at the 15-20 minute mark and then bring the pressure up again. Resume the countdown when the cooker whistles again.
– Once the meat is soft enough (a bit gelatinous), strain them and let them cool enough to be handled without screaming.
– Once the meat is strained and cool enough, grill the meat until the skin pops and becomes crunchy (instant chicharon!). I like giving the whole meat pieces enough face time on the grill to dry them off.
– Once done, chop the meat into small pieces. Some people find it therapeutic to use cleavers but dont get carried away. The aim is to reduce them to small pieces and not to turn them to liquid.
– Mix 1/4 cup of the chopped onions to the chopped meat and set aside.

Sauce:
– Put the remaining chopped onions, mayonnaise, liquid seasoning, calamansi juice, and chili in a small saucepan. Mix well and season to taste with salt and pepper.
– Put the pan in low to medium heat and simmer until the onions are soft/wilted.

Serving:
– Coat the chopped meat with the sauce.
– Serve while it is hot. If it has already cooled down a bit, that is what microwave ovens are for.
– Goes well as viand to freshly cooked rice, or as pulutan with alcoholic drinks. Greasy foods always goes well with alcoholic drinks!

ciao!

Tags: Top of my head by Erin
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Kay hirap mong gawin
Kay dali mong ubusin
Coke o beer bilang inumin
Puso’y lalong aatakihin.

Tags: Top of my head by Erin
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At work, the Windows 7 workstation we were given came with a Trojan-esque gift: several instances of wscript.exe are running at startup and uses all available CPU processing cycles. Killing them off does not show any adverse effects (yet) but the graphical way is a bit time consuming as the machine is already slow at this point.

Below is the quickest way to snipe these instances using the lowest memory-guzzler tool in every Windows arsenal: the command line processor window. The only catch is that the wscript instances would require the kill command to be executed from an elevated command prompt as the Windows User Access Control (UAC) is active.
1. Press the Window key to bring up the startup menu.
2. In the Start menu search box, type “cmd”. The first entry highlighted is the program entry.

3. Press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” to run the command in elevated mode. If UAC is really running, a confirmation prompt will be displayed for the command line processor.

4. Invoke the command “taskkill /im wscript.exe /f ” to kill all running instances of wscript.exe.

5. To validate if there are still instances running, run the command “tasklist | find “wscript” ” (omit the first and last double quotes). Nothing should be shown.

The exercise above can be adapted to quickly kill some errant processes without going through the task manager or resource monitor GUI clients. Be careful in what you kill for it might bite back.

[UPDATE] A colleague,Ron Emil Castro, has provided this trick on combining both in a script that will load up with administrator privileges upon startup for Vista/Win7 machines.

• Create a batch script with the following code

CHOICE /N /C YN /T 15 /D Y
taskkill /im wscript.exe /f

The first command waits for 15 seconds to give the script enough time to run and the second kills it as specified in the script above.

• Open the startup folder by right-clicking on the Start->All Programs->Startup item then selecting the Open option.
• Create a shortcut to the batch script. Right-click on the shortcut and open the properties window. Select the “Run as Administrator” option under the Advanced section.

[UPDATE] The processes are because of an errant firewall checker script loaded by the domain policies. The alternate solution provided by the support team is to execute the C:\Windows\system32\wscript.exe binary and set the timeout to a low number (5 or 10 seconds). Use the recommendation at your own risk as this basically handicaps the execution of other scripts that would require more time than the set timeout.

Tags: Tipjar, Top of my head by Erin
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Max’s Restaurant, which uses the slogan “The house that fried chicken built”, has brought back the unlimited fried chicken promo for a month. The promo starts on June 10 and will end after a month. This round is a bit pricier than the previous one (from 165 to 199), and will no longer be an all-day event but would be restricted to the 6pm-10pm slot. The package comes with a regular drink that can be converted to bottomless for Php25 more. Rice or roll will cost extra.

Neth and I were in SM Taytay at around 3PM today to do some groceries and ended up waiting for the promot to kick in. The queue outside of the Max restaurant started to form at about 5:45PM so I decided to fall in line. We got seated at around 6:15PM and promptly ordered for to chicken-all-you-can with bottomless Mountain Dew (of course) and 2 rice servings. I ended up with 1.5 servings of rice as Neth graciously gave half of her rice to me.

The chicken was as good as we expected although the refilling slowed down after the third piece. I guess that was the time when all of the tables in the place were now availing of the promo. All-in-all the slowdown and the checking of the crew asking if we want other stuff made us break the 20-minute barrier[1].

Overall, I had 5 pieces of chicken (roughly 1 whole chicken), 4 glasses of Mountain Dew, and 1.5 servings of rice. Neth had 3 pieces of chicken, 2 glasses of the Dew, and half serving of rice. Our total bill ended up as Php518. Not bad.

And some optional snapshots:

BURP!

[1] For those who don’t know, scientific studies have shown that a person’s appetite lasts only 20 minutes after the first swallow. This is the reason why slowly chewing and eating your food can help in maintaining or reducing your weight as the food intake will be less.

Tags: Top of my head by Erin
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