Pancakes

Today's project: Pillsbury Creamy Vanilla Hotcakes.


My first pancake failed, and it's not included in this pile. It stayed a pale yellow without turning golden brown, and it crumbled when i tried to flip it over. I think the pan wasn't hot enough yet, or something.

Everything else turned out decent enough, despite a miscalculation that resulted in me using twice as much oil as the instructions said.

Content-Aware Magic

Ok, so the new "content-aware fill" feature of the new Adobe Photoshop CS5 is pretty much the most amazing thing ever. You may have seen it in this video, a preview of the most amazing thing ever.

All of the following were made by drawing a crude selection in Photoshop and pressing the delete key. Click for much larger images.

After seeing the edited picture, the original looks fake.

Mediterranean Eggs

Today's project: Mediterranean Eggs.


Based on this Betty Crocker recipe.

I could not be more pleased with how it turned out, it looks just like the picture in the cookbook.

Philippine Senate Batch of 2004, Where Are They Now?

A look back at what happened to the Philippine Senators elected in 2004, whose terms end on June 30, 2010:


Reelected to the Senate this year are Juan Ponce Enrile, Pia Cayetano, Jinggoy Estrada, Lito Lapid, Bong Revilla, and Miriam Defensor-Santiago.

Richard Gordon and Jamby Madrigal both lost in their bid to become President, and Mar Roxas has apparently lost his bid for Vice President.

Senior citizens Aquilino Pimentel and Rodolfo Biazon both had their proxy candidates who lost in their campaign for the Senate (daughter Gwen Pimentel and son Ruffy Biazon).

And it took Alfredo Lim just 3 years to get tired of the Senate. He was elected Mayor of Manila back in 2007.

Philippine Senate, Batch of 2010

A look at the names that the people of the Philippines chose on Monday to comprise half of the Senate:

The Facebook Campaign, Pt. 2

Now that the election is over, here's a look back at the growth in Facebook fans of the Philippine presidential candidates since the start of the year. (See my previous post, from back in February)

Noynoy Aquino and Manny Villar kept a surprisingly tight race going for most of this graph, with Aquino leading by just around 40,000 fans-- until around April, when the anti-Villar propaganda began to pile up and Aquino began to pull away. The lead widened to 100,000 in late April, then something weird happened to Noynoy's fan page (his official site described it as a technical and security issue), rendering it mostly inaccessible. This allowed Villar to take the lead just days before the election.

Gibo Teodoro placed a valiant third. The others, by comparison, are hardly worth mentioning.

It's interesting to note that Erap Estrada, though ranking a shockingly strong second place in the actual election, is a very distant 6th place on Facebook. I don't have a single friend that supports him.

Nothing to Offer but Sincerity

Once again looking into the past through the thick lens of perspective, here's a good long New York Times article from 1990 titled "Cory Aquino's Downhill Slide" by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stanley Karnow. Some excerpts:

• For all her achievements, however, Aquino has lost the luster she enjoyed after toppling Marcos, when the world exalted her as the devout housewife who had exorcised evil. Her approval ratings in the Philippines, once astronomic, have dropped to below 50 percent.

• "We like Cory personally, but nothing has changed".

• "She is sincere, moral and honest, but the presidency is obviously beyond her, beyond her capabilities, beyond her experience."

• "We hope that she'll muddle through," says a senior [US] State Department official, "but she simply doesn't know how to govern"

The Philippines needs more people to remember what it was really like having a president with no qualifications, no accomplishments, and nothing to offer but a stoic sense of sincerity.