Hometown Delights

Wife and I were out and about to do our grocery yesterday and much to our surprised, we found young coconuts on sale for $1.09. We decided to buy one for each of us as we knew that there aren't much of coconut meat and water coming out of each.

Almost the same size

When we were about to buy them, we knew we were going to have trouble cracking them open because of lacked of tooling at home.

Opening the first one was proven to be an issue. We used a medium-size kitchen knife and it wasn't effective enough to cut the skin.

Ineffective medium-size kitchen knife

Messy

For the second coconut, we decided to switch the knife to a more jagged kitchen knife. Result was way better.

Second coconut, let's try that again

Cleaner...

Cutting the top skin is the first step to crack open a young coconut. The next step is to actually crack it open... somehow. We didn't search over the net beforehand thinking that it was probably not too hard to do this task. We were, again, wrong.

What we did was we tried to find the "weak spot" and start hammering in a circle to soften the shell. Not that what we tried was completely the wrong but definitely we could do better.

Victory! (first coconut)

Second coconut (definitely has improved)

We ended up getting almost a litre of fresh young coconut water (and a lot of meat as well).

Yummy!

By the way, we broke the meat pounder during the process of cracking open the first coconut. Lesson learned: meat pounder is not a hammer to crack open a young coconut.

Here's a video on YouTube explaining how to open the young coconut. The video seems to skip a little bit but her technique is excellent. 

Along with coconut, we also got ourselves "Pempek" since wife was craving so bad. We bought them from someone we knew. Cost us $7.00 each.

Each portion consists of one mix of fish skin and two "sub-marine" type (not sure where the sub-marine comes from, probably because of the shape somehow...? although I still doubt that up until today). The sub-marine type has egg inside it. 

The picture above is before we deep-fried them (to make the experience eating them more enjoyable, of course). 

With sauce and seasoning

Next comes the sauce and the seasoning. The sauce taste a bit sour and spicy while the seasoning is just shredded fried ebi (small shrimps).

Overall the taste was okay. A little bit below our expectation but considerable substitution in case we decided not to make them ourselves (wife can make them but chose to try these ones first).

Later that night we taste the sweet victory of our earlier effort :)

We definitely will be buying more of them young coconuts.

2012 Property Assessment Notice: Grade C-

It's that time of the year. The time where people opened a magical letter sent by BC Assessment and felt richer after they found out that their property value has increased (normally between 7 - 15% depending on the area).

When we received ours, we didn't feel that way. We were in the opposite end because our property value dropped by almost $70,000.00. It was too significant that made my blood pressure rise to the roof.

Because of the drop, we were curious to find out the property value around us. Thankfully, BC Assessment has made all prices accessible via their eValueBC online system.

After querying the system here and there, we learned that the overall strata price has dropped as well. Wife and I had a few entertaining/for fun theories as to why:

• Bribery: to lower down the price around here so developer can purchase the land and build condo?
• There are 2 new Strata Townhouse (one of them has 15 units, the other have a few more) being built in recent years; competitive market, increase in supply.

We decided to dig up all of the previous Property Assessment Notices to compare the property value since we moved in back then in 2005. We came up with the following table:

Increase Per-Year

Year	Land	Building	Increase
2005	+$0	+$0	+$0
2006	+$21,000.00	-$2,000.00	+$19,000.00
2007	+$66,000.00	-$1,000.00	+$65,000.00
2008	+$2,000.00	-$2,000.00	+$0.00
2009	+$0.00	+$0.00	+$0.00
2010	-$22,000.00	+$45,000.00	+$23,000.00
2011	+$109,000.00	-$2,000.00	+$107,000.00
2012	-$62,000.00	-$7,000.00	-$69,000.00

That is one wild table if I may say. Hardcore roller coaster. We looked at those numbers and assumed that between 2010 to 2011, the market was at its peak and now it has cooled down and hover around "acceptable" price.

But then we probably know by now why the data looks like that. Vancouver is probably the most volatile city when it comes to housing price. The Globe and Mail published an article with a title of What's driving Vancouver house prices? back in June 2011.

The price may goes up again next year but probably will not be as high as before, which is probably a good thing. But it's still hurt to see money gone (^_^).

By the way, when we were fishing information in eValueBC, we found something interesting:

Someone bought a townhouse at $611,000 and now it is worth $501,000. Ouch. That hurts pretty bad. Seller is definitely one lucky cat while the buyer got burned quite significantly. I wonder how the buyer felt when he/she opened this year assessment notice.

Side note: have a little fun playing the "Crack or Shack" game from this site: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html. The idea behind the game is to choose if a house is a "Crack" or "Shack". Houses in that website worth at least $1 million even though they look awful.

Satisfaction Guaranteed (and More): The Pragmatic Bookshelf

On my December Shopping Spree: Ruby on Rails books, the picture showed 2 copy of the Agile Web Development with Rails books. That's right: 2 copies of the same title.

What happened was that the Pragmatic Bookshelf had sent me the first book. But somehow, US Postal Service mishandled it. I don't know how that happened but I had not receive it within the normal USPS delivery time-frame (which is about 7-10 business days).

As days gone by, I became a little bit concerned to the point that I had to contact their support to find out the status of my order.

Lucky me, Pragmatic Bookshelf has a great customer support that not only they responded very fast, but they also quickly remedied the situation once they figured out that something was amiss.

Great Customer Support: act on it immediately

Within a few days after our e-mail exchange, the book arrived and I'm one happy customer.

But there's more to the story. At the end of December 2011, another copy of the same book was delivered!.

I mulled for a few days what to do about it before I decided to contact them and ask if I should return it (keep in mind that it's a bit pricey to return the book since I will have to send the book from outside the U.S.)

Fortunately, Pragmatic Bookshelf is a great company. They informed me that I can keep the book.

Today I decided that the book may end up in the office bookshelf for everybody to read.

Excellent service. Definitely will recommend Pragmatic Bookshelf to my colleagues.

Playing With HDR (High Dynamic Range) Image

I've been reading travel blogs for a while and their pictures (and their stories as well, of course) have always fascinate me. One particular travel blog that I read on-and-off is Trey Ratcliff's Stuck In Customs. Most of his pictures are utilizing the HDR image technique (Wikipedia).

I read about it the other days and decided to give it a try seeing that it's not terribly difficult and does not require a lot of investment in hardware nor software. 

Hardware

My arsenal, as always, is the sleek Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1. Not too fancy but good enough to do its job. 

Here are the steps I took:

1. Adjust the settings (Shutter Speeds, Aperture, Focus)
2. Set the Auto-Bracketing features and mode
• GF1 can do 3, 5, 7 frames (I chose 5 frames)

Auto-Bracketing Mode in Red Rectangle

Don't forget to push and hold the snap button longer until the camera stops taking pictures.

Software

Since this is just a test, I decided to find free HDR software. Luckily, I found one that is not only free but also easy to use and works well: Picturenaut. Highly recommend it if you're looking for a quick tool to produce HDR images.

One thing that I have not done is to remove the noises from the images. That is not the focus of this exercise.

Without further ado, here are the results (not perfect, but good enough):

I showed them to my wife and she likes them. I think we may found a way to take night scenery pictures using this HDR imaging technique.

First Day of 2012: Clean up the House

Hello 2012! How time flies...

The first day of 2012 means it's time to clean up the house. As usual, we have about a week plus a few days of vacation between the last week of December and the first few days of January. When it's near the end of the vacation, it is time for wife and I to get busy preparing ourselves for the first working day. 

Wife is the master chef of the house so it is wise to let her run the kitchen (^_^).

Wife is Preparing Wontons

Ready to Steam!

That leaves the brooming and mopping the house to... me. Luckily my mother bought us a wonderful and efficient mop.

Put Mop into the water to get rid of unwanted debris

Move the mop to the left side to squeeze the water out

Don't forget to add Swiffer WETJET to the water use for mopping!

... and I'm ready to mop the whole house. 

HQ is ready to be cleaned up

Once all the busy hectic chores are done, it's time to reward ourselves with a nice juicy beefy dinner...

Medium Well please!

Yummy!

It's January 1, 2012 and this is how we roll (^_^). We ran out of gas before the dinner and had our stomach so full afterwards that it was too hard to move. 

2012 will be a wonderful year for us. That, we know.