January 6

Garden bounty: Air Fried Okra

Returning to our NCR house after the holiday break yielded a small bounty from our small urban garden: a chili pods, tomatoes, eggplants and a fistful of okra:

The young okra pods were added to our seafood sinigang but a few were already too mature and very fibrous. I found some links in the web for air-frying mature okra and converting them to chip snacks. The premise is that the slimy interior will steam and allow the okra to become crispy. Below are the procedure and notes of this snack experiment.

Procedure

  • Wash and cut the okra into small “chips/buttons” which I did on a bias (angle).
    • There were some recipes that recommends a lengthwise cut ala fries but I advise against doing that the same way that steak are always sliced “against the grain” to make the meat softer.
  • At this point, I pre-heated the airfryer to 190-200 degrees Centigrade for 3 minutes. Our airfyer is small enough that this is sufficient time to heat the whole chamber.
  • Put in a small bowl and drizzle with a bit of cooking oil – just enough to coat each chip and allow the spices to stick.
  • Sprinkle salt and the spice of your choice. We have some cajun spice in the pantry so I used those. Toss the okra lightly to ensure each chip gets some seasoning.
  • Air-fry at 190 Centrigrade for 15 minutes, shaking the basket halfway.
    • Each air fryer model is different so I was shaking the basket every 5 minutes.
  • Allow the okra chips to cool and serve. You can use your favorite dip but I didnt use any.

Verdict

The resulting chips were still fibrous as hell! Next time just cut up the mature okra pods and add them to the compost. 🙁

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April 21

Illusion of Choice

Lately I am seeing attestation forms in the projects I am working in wherein the contents are split across multiple checkboxes followed by a submit button. The beef I have is that the submit button will only be valid/enabled if all checkboxes are set to checked/true.

The problem with this approach is that it gives the wrong perception that you can say I dont agree to one or more of the provided options and you can still proceed. I assume the intent was to increase the possibility that the reader goes through each line but this is still bad form. The assumed intent does not guarantee that readers actually read the lines. All this does is increase the frustration of doing 5 more unnecessary clicks to the form.

If it was up to me, I will just list down the lines and then just put a checkbox at the bottom that states that the reader confirms to reading all the lines and agrees to follow them. It bears the same weight and legality, with 5 lesser clicks.

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May 20

Food karma

Everytime Mommy cant eat I’ll kid her that I’ll buy her a blender/osterizer so she can ingest her food through a straw. She will vigorously shake her head and respond with an adamant no because she has memories of my grandmother’s last days where she can only consume liquefied food.

Now I am eating rice congee using a straw.  I had a molar extracted and I need to avoid getting food particles or have hot food  in it to avoid preventing the wound from clotting. I have the choice of eating through a straw or going hungry. I chose the former.

Karma is a bitch, and it is real.

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July 5

Locating happiness

Happiness is an elusive treasure for most but in reality it is hiding in plain sight.

Happiness is located at the crux of being content with what you have and what you are willing to forego.

Getting more means exerting additional effort and taking on more responsibilities. If those start being a burden then it is a good sign your personal inflection point is already known. The question now becomes “are you ok to maintain this as your status quo, or do you still want to achieve more?”

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April 21

Two sides of the same coin

I prefer training my team using the pavlovian conditioning, with a slight bias in negative reinforcement. This has drawn the ire of the Human Resources department in the past.

The reinforcement that I usually employ is done via penalties. The penalties are monetary in nature, and increases in severity if the infraction happens close to each other. An example is a first violation is worth Php50, but any violation in the next 2 weeks will incur a higher penalty of Php100, and so on until a set limit (normally Php500 per infraction). If there is no violation after 2 weeks then the penalty goes back to Php50 as the next violation will be treated as a first offense. The reinforcement is only effective if the team sees that I have my skin in the game too. If the violation is something that applies to me then the same penalties cover my violations. Usually I also sweeten the pot wherein if there is no violation for 2-3 consecutive periods then I automatically contribute the highest penalty amount to the collected funds. I “lose” either way but my goal is not to collect funds but to make the team learn a certain behavior.

The funds collected do not go to my own pocket. The team decides what to do with it. Normally the team spends it on a lunch-out or a series of snacks. I had one team donate the collected funds to charity.

The whole point of negative reinforcement is to make sure that the subjects do not deviate on the prescribed behavior as it will be too inconvenient. Positive reinforcement on the other hand makes it pleasant to meet the prescribed behavior. I just prefer the former because I find it more effective in getting results in a much shorter time.

ciao!
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April 14

[BftP] Deductive Reasoning FTW!

I am lifting the image below that I sent to some colleagues to highlight the power of deductive reasoning. The image originally came from 9gag.com but I am hosting a copy since this blog has been littered with broken links.

Batman vs Sherlock Holmes

The comment that I sent to accompany the email message has already been gone from the site. It explained the comics so I replicating it below for archiving purposes, with typos and all.

It’s quite easy, my dear watson.
It is Apparant that the mask is used to disguie a well-known identity from society. a man using a double life is most clearly a famous person, most possibly a rich man who can use an expensive Cavlar suit and quirky gadgets. the square jaw indicates a good lineage, perhaps a doctor’s son. the bat-motif is most likely from a childhood trauma that branded into the man’s mind as a great truth in the power that chiroptophobia has on the common man… *puff* *puff*

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March 24

Mob mentality

The mob mentality negates the basic premise that two wrongs doesnt make a right. Being part of a mob grants both a sense of power and a degree of anonymity by blending with the crowd. The combination of both can imbue a euphoria that overrides the normal and logical reasoning, enabling a person to do things they won’t normally be expected to do.

Once a mob is fired up, it will either take a lot to subdue it. Most of the time, it will simmer down but only after leaving a lot of damage in its path. The participants of the mob usually doesn’t feel any remorse as they justify their actions as both “right” and “acceptable” since it was the actions of the mob and not their own.

The best time to stop a mob is when it is just starting up. That is easier said than done though. The best way to handle a mob is get out of its way and just hope that there is still something left in its wake.

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December 26

BftP : Passing vs Working

[Lifted from an old email I sent to my previous project mates.]

This is an email to remind about wantonly tweaking configuration settings in the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack to make the code work. Wantonly in this case means it did not go through the official change management process as the members in question wanted to quickly solve an issue that was first encountered in the UAT environment.

E2 is supposed to mirror the E3 environment to catch any problem that could happen in E3, or replicate an ongoing issue.

Our goal is not to make our deliverables pass UAT, but to provide deliverables that will not malfunction in production.

Any setting that needs to be changed needs to be evaluated properly to ensure it doesn’t affect the other applications in the environment. Each setting change is always a compromise between two conflicting scenarios (e.g. performance vs scalability, traceability vs resource management, etc.). We need to understand what we are exchanging for each setting update. The E2 settings change needs to be propagated to E3 afterwards.

For the nomenclature:

  • E2 is the User Acceptance environment, and
  • E3 is the Production environment.
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May 30

Business Optimism

You probably have heard of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” or “you cannot make omelette without cracking eggs” but company business optimism is taking this a bit further. They are thinking ahead and in what I would assume to be pursuit of cost cutting the powers that be has shifted to “why bother making lemonades and omelette in the first place? let us take away the lemons and eggs so you wont have that problem” mentality.

Ingenious, yes.
Devilish, yes.
Practical? It depends on whose perspective.

I like lemonade and omelette. I also like having the choice whether I will or I will not have them.

ciao!

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May 21

Turn around

SLA – the maximum amount of time that a task can be put off that the requester cannot contest except to raise the cost by involving higher-paid individuals to increase the imaginary priority shown to external users.

Sometimes misunderstood to be the time needed to require work to be completed.

AnalogClockAnimation1 2hands 1h in 6sec

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