Happy New Year 2011

First post in 2011.

Well since I couldn't do my last post of 2010 in time because my brand new Sony Vaio crashed on me and seemingly wiped all my data along with it, my baby had spent the last couple of days dismantling my laptop and doing a hard recovery on all my files, which outside would charge RM1000 per GB of data (apparently this is not your typical data recovery that normally low yat charge RM150 for), it requires a special software and is a bitch to retrieve them back.

We have been working on the solution (which took us one day to find) since last year (well it's been three days) and the progress is simply tedious. Urgh.

And this does not include the time I would need to take to format my laptop and install everything back again.

I have to say, my baby is simply a genius. And I'm glad he's here for me.

In case you're wondering, I'm updating from my iPhone, which isn't the friendliest way to blog but it's definitely easier than a blackberry when it comes to typing. Phew.

Went to KLCC last night for my first Malaysia count down in years.... And it's like a flesh market out there. I never knew the existence of human traffic until last night. Made me appreciate experience of traffic jam in a car ten times fold, no wait, it made me appreciate traffic jam, period.

So yes, Happy New Year everyone. Will resume blogging once my laptop live again.

Xoxo

Cheers!

It will be a few more days before I really get back to writing, but I wanted to take a moment to wish you a fresh and happy start to your New Year.

Over the break, I read cookbooks like they were juicy novels and tore countless pages out of magazines. So many new ideas for simple, healthful meals to share with you! I cannot wait. After we've had our fill of sledding, movies, good books and my children return to school, I'll get back into a writing rhythm.

In the meantime, for those who may be asked to bring an appetizer to a gathering this winter weekend, I gave that pesto torta a whirl on Christmas and it was delish. I highly recommend it for a crowd (though the leftovers are fabulous too spread on hearty bread). To make it look less Christmas-y you could substitute a kalamata olive paste for one of the two layers, making it purple/green or red/purple, your choice.

Simple (and totally decadent) Baked Brie

And as you cozy up inside with friends and family, you can not go wrong with a simple round of triple creme brie sliced horizontally and filled with caramelized onion confit (which I found in the gourmet section of our market) + blueberry jam + topped with some pistachios and baked at 350 until it melts into a gooey, decadent appetizer.

May your year ahead be filled with balance, dear friends, fresh air, simple healthful meals with your family...

a little adventure, and plenty of laughter.

Cheers!

Christmas Party 2010

We celebrated the holidays with what is now our 3rd company holiday party. It's been a pretty interesting way to track our growth over the past 2.5 years. The first party was just 5 of us enjoying a homecooked dinner at Patrick & Rachel's house. The second party was about 12 of us having lunch at a nearby gastropub. This year, between Bruery employees, Provisions employees and significant others, we had over 30 people celebrating together at our brewery.

Patrick coordinated with some of the other great brewers around the country and was able to obtain some pretty incredible (and hard to find on the west coast...or anywhere) beers for us all to share, plus we had one of our favorite local food trucks, The Lime Truck, cater the event. It was a pretty amazing time. Can't wait to see what next Christmas brings.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!!!

Happy Holidays!

After a very busy holiday shopping season, we will be taking a much needed vacation! We will be closed from December 26th, 2010 to January 3rd, 2011. Our online store is open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, so you will be able to place orders. However, any orders placed during this time will be processed after January 3rd, 2011. Unfortunately, we will not be able to send confirmations or provide customer service support until we re-open.

We hope to come back refreshed to take on the exciting projects for the new year! We apologize for any inconvenience.

Wishing you a very happy holiday season!

Season's Greetings

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there

'A visit from St Nicholas' (Dec 1823) by Clement C. Moore

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers around the world. Normal service will be resumed after the festive break.

Better than sex! US college students value self-esteem boosts more than bodily pleasures

'Because you're worth it!' L'Oreal's catchphrase taps into the narcissistic zeitgeist. But it also begs the question: Are we at risk of becoming obsessed with feeling good about ourselves? According to new research by Brad Bushman and his co-workers, not only do US college students have higher self-esteem than previous generations, they now value self-esteem boosts more than sex, food, receiving a salary payment, seeing a friend or having an alcoholic drink.

Bushman's team made their finding by asking dozens of US college students to imagine their favourite food, sexual activity, self-esteem boosting activity (e.g. receiving a compliment, getting a good grade) etc, and in each case to say how much they wanted it and how much they liked it. The key finding was that self-esteem boosting activities came out on top.

Some validity was lent to these thought-experiments by offering the students a real chance to boost their self-esteem. For example, in the first study, as well as answering questions about food, sex and so on, the students were scored on a simple verbal intelligence test. They were then given the opportunity to wait around for an extra ten minutes to receive a score based on a different algorithm that usually produces higher scores. The students who said earlier that they wanted self-esteem more than they liked it (taken as a sign of being addicted to self-esteem) tended to be the ones who stayed behind for the chance to receive a higher intelligence score.

Other personality factors that the researchers looked at were 'entitlement', and trying to get other people to recognise how good you are, otherwise known as 'pursuing self-image goals'. Higher scores on entitlement, as measured by agreement with statements like 'If I ruled the world it would be a much better place,' tended to correlate with wanting the rewards - that's the imagined self-esteem boosts, sex, food etc - but not the liking of them. Predictably enough, pursuing self-image goals tended to correlate with placing a high value on self-esteem boosts.

What does all this mean? Bushman's team think the new results confirm that self-esteem is an essential human need, as claimed by humanistic psychology pioneer Abraham Maslow and others. 'Overall, our findings shed new and interesting light on just how important it is for people to feel worthy and valuable,' the researchers said. But their write-up is tinged with anxiety. Valuing self-esteem can encourage the pursuit of self-image goals, which they warned can lead to conflict with others. 'Of course we should enjoy the good things in life, but not so much that we want them more than we like them,' Bushman's team concluded. 'We do not want to become addicted to self-esteem or other rewards, or we will become "slaves" to them, to borrow the words of Fritz Perls [the founder of Gestalt therapy].'
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Bushman, B., Moeller, S., and Crocker, J. (2010). Sweets, Sex, or Self-Esteem? Comparing the Value of Self-Esteem Boosts with Other Pleasant Rewards. Journal of Personality DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00712.x

The Amazing Post - Wigs Galore

Short Note: Let's take a break from my Hat Yai trip. I've been busy with something lately and what I am about to show you is just a start. :)


You're in for a treat!

Weeks ago I obtained myself a few wigs, then I made a shopping spree out of my solo Taiwan trip, when I came back, I decided to arrange a photoshoot as part of .... something... I'm doing at the moment. I shall reveal that eventually, well let's hope soon.




I've always had a lot of fun wearing wigs, but because I have such a massive amount of hair, it's hard to find wigs that are of quality to fit my head and hide the huge bundle of mane well.

Then I started thinning my hair so it won't be so thick, and when I went to HeadCoverZ shop, I discovered the correct way to wear your hair. I'll show you that next time, not in this post. This post, I'm going to show you the looks you can obtained with different kind of hairstyle.


Anyway, I had a lot fun doing the shoot at Reina Design's studio.

I had to lull my luggage over that day, stick with one make up look but different sort of hair, it was tiring and pretty taxing but it was worth it!

So here are the shots.

First I had the popteen look. Here are some of my fav shots.





























I look like some pop star from a magazine. *shy*

Though as much as I like this hair, I found that my favourite wig was in fact the Korean Wave.




Well you see, I have long hair all my life, and I never have the courage or motivation to actually cut it short, not to mention my baby wouldn't allow me anyway.

It was so refreshing when I finally "had" short hair.

It felt so.... breezy. And I kinda feel a bit boyish doing the shoot. Hehe.











this looks like some phone ad. lol


My favourite shot of the Korean Wave is this:




I'm surprised how little photoshop one needed when it comes to studio shots. Perhaps because I have really lost weight, I almost didn't do anything editing to my face, chin, body, legs, etc. Even the lights removed all my freckles and spots.

However, there was one problem. We only had one flash gun to work with during the shoot so in the end it was casting a lot of shadow on all the photos.

Editing these shadows out was a bitch. A BITCH!

And not only from the background, but from my face, my hands, in between my legs when I sit down, etc. urgh.

Next wig.

Here's another type of hair I've never had for a long time.

Black Hair. ha ha.




Nice isn't it. This was pretty refreshing too. Black hair on me, wasn't that bad. Eermmm...













My baby commented that these photos look like some music album cover. Do they?







Now the last hair is actually a straight wig with bangs. Though I'd like to call it my Egyptian wig.




I used this hair to create two looks, I love the first one, so fluffy makes me feel like I'm in Alaska.







I even created a duet photos, which will be used in my recent project.







The other look without all those fluffiness.














All wigs obtained from HeadCoverZ in Bangsar, Jalan Telawi 2 (above KK mart).

You can view the rest of the photos in my flickr album.

Toys to Avoid Buying This Holiday Season: CPSC "Most Wanted"

When holiday shopping, we usually think in terms of what gifts to buy, not gifts to avoid. But some children's toys are not safe or have been recalled. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has compiled a list of recalled and "most wanted" toys to avoid this season. Read more...

Paralysis deniers have subconscious insight into their disability

Anosognosia is an intriguing neuropsychological syndrome in which a patient with one or more paralysed limbs denies they have anything wrong with them. In a new investigation, Aikaterini Fotopoulou and her colleagues have shown that some patients fitting this description have a residual, subconscious awareness of their disability.

The researchers recruited 14 brain-damaged patients with a completely paralysed left arm, half of whom denied their paralysis (ie they had anosognosia). Next, all the patients were presented with a series of sentences for which they had to provide the final word. The twist to the task is that the word had to be completely unrelated in meaning to its adjoining sentence.

Some of the sentences were emotionally neutral (about cars), some were negatively emotional (about violence), and finally some pertained to stroke and physical disabilities. The patients with anosognosia performed no differently from the paralysed controls on the neutral and negative sentences, but they took longer to complete the sentences about stroke and disabilities. This was taken as a sign of competition between subconscious self-threatening information about disability and the task requirement to find an unrelated word. It suggests the anosognosic patients had a subconscious awareness of their own disability.

The patients were also asked to rate the same set of sentences for their self-relevance - this was an explicit test of their awareness. Again, the anosognosic patients differed from controls on precisely the sentences that pertained to stroke and disability. This time, as you might expect, they tended to say such sentences were less relevant to them than did the controls.

A final component of the study involved scanning the brains of all fourteen of the patients. This showed that the patients with anosognosia had damage in brain regions involved in motor control (including the basal ganglia) and body representation (including the anterior insula) that were unaffected in patients without anosognosia.

Fotopoulou's theory is that patients with anosognosia have a subconscious awareness of their deficits but that the brain circuits responsible for creating an up-to-date representation of self are compromised. Consistent with this, in previous research, patients with anosnognosia have shown greater insight when describing their impairments from a third-person perspective and also after viewing themselves on video. A related theory is that patients with anosognosia have intact motor planning brain circuits but that their feedback circuits are damaged. So, when asked to move, they feel that they've sent a successful motor command to their limb but are left unaware that the command wasn't enacted.

One reason anosognosia is so intriguing is that it has both neurobiological and psychological components. Some experts have interpreted it as a form of Freudian defence against the emotional trauma of paralysis. Consistent with this, when insight into their paralysis has been achieved, previously anosognosic patients have subsequently suffered from an increase in depressive symptoms.

'The combination of our behavioural and neural findings suggest that an explicit, affectively personalised sensorimotor awareness requires the re-representation of sensorimotor information in the insular cortex, with possible involvement of limbic areas and basal ganglia circuits,' the researchers said. 'The delusional features of anosognosia for hemiplegia can be explained as a failure of this re-representation.'
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Fotopoulou, A., Pernigo, S., Maeda, R., Rudd, A., and Kopelman, M. (2010). Implicit awareness in anosognosia for hemiplegia: unconscious interference without conscious re-representation. Brain, 133 (12), 3564-3577 DOI: 10.1093/brain/awq233

The benefits of thinking about our ancestors

Psychologists have shown previously that thinking about our own mortality - 'where we're going' - prompts us to shore up our cultural world view and engage in self-esteem boosting activities. Little researched until now, by contrast, are the psychological effects of thinking about where we came from - our ancestors.

Anecdotally, there's reason to believe that such thoughts are beneficial. Why else the public fascination with genealogy and programmes like the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? Now Peter Fischer and his colleagues at the Universities of Graz, Berlin and Munich have shown that thinking about our ancestors boosts our performance on intelligence tests - what they've dubbed 'the ancestor effect'.

'Normally, our ancestors managed to overcome a multitude of personal and society problems, such as severe illnesses, wars, loss of loved ones or severe economic declines,' the researchers said. 'So, when we think about them, we are reminded that humans who are genetically similar to us can successfully overcome a multitude of problems and adversities.'

An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.

Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers - what the researchers called having a 'promotion orientation'.

These benefits weren't displayed by students in control conditions that involved writing about themselves or about close friends. Moreover, the ancestor effect exerted its benefit even when students were asked to think about negative aspects of their ancestors.

'We showed that an easy reminder about our ancestors can significantly increase intellectual performance,' the researchers said. 'Hence, whenever people are in a situation where intellectual performance is extraordinarily important, for example in exams or job interviews, they have an easy technique to increase their success.'

Fischer and his colleagues emphasised their research is at an exploratory phase. Future work is needed to find out what other benefits thinking of ancestors might have, and also to uncover other possible mediating factors, which they speculated might have to do with 'processes of social identity, family cohesion, self-regulation or norm activation elicited by increased ancestor salience.'
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Fischer, P., Sauer, A., Vogrincic, C., and Weisweiler, S. (2010). The ancestor effect: Thinking about our genetic origin enhances intellectual performance. European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.778

Related article from The Psychologist magazine: What factors drive a person to research a family tree, or an adoptee to search for their biological parents?

Mini Sausage in Pancake - Just Two Baht!

Short Note: I've spent most of my weekend recuperating from a really successful Christmas dinner my baby and I hosted on Friday night AND screening though hundreds of photos carefully and putting them all together.

I never knew photo editing for studio shots can be so tiring. Urgh.


While in Hat Yai (yes we're still talking about it), Wendy and I stumbled upon a stall that was selling really... interesting snacks.




I don't remember what it's called, but it's some sort of local snacks made of cocktail sausage wrapped in pancakes with various sauces, mince meat and a whole quail egg.

The price of these ranged from 2 baht to 5 baht each, depending on the ingredients (with or without sausage) and size.




We saw some school girls crowding around waiting patiently for their ever cute pancake to be cooked by this Thai old lady, who took her time making sure her food was perfect in every way (yes she was slow).




But the food was smelling so good from a mile away and looked so tantalising,




We decided to join in the queue to order... well.. ONE.




Frankly we just finished lunch and were still pretty stuffed, being small eaters, we opted for just one piece, just to try.




I really wasn't sure what sauces she put in. Was that custard I saw she spread on those pancakes?!

Ermmm....


The old lady then rolled them up into mini rolls and placed them one by one into paper bags, which she carefully passed to the young girl with, I swear, the most enthusiastic face on her face.




Finally, it was our turn.


well, technically it was Wendy's turn. Since she was the one who wanted to order it.


We had one big one, the 5 baht with the sausage in and all, instead of the small one that cost 2 baht. Splish splash of sauces and done!




I took a bite, and damn...

That's the best snack roll I have ever had for so long I couldn't even remember the last time I had a roll snack.


half cooked quail egg oozing out.


RM0.50.

What the heck can I buy with 50 cents in Malaysia? Seriously.