Terrariums, Raindrop Cakes and Basketball Games

 "A terrarium is a portrait of a perfect world, a microcosm of beauty and life contained within the glass walls, forever unchanging."

- Edward Gorey

Years ago, I remember being fascinated by terrariums and tiny plants kept in jars or glass containers, back when they weren't yet popular on Facebook. It was a mystery to me how the plants could live and flourish in a jar with minimal intervention from the person who set them up. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon some viral Facebook photos of attractive terrariums, which led me to Facebook groups dedicated to terrariums and "mossariums" (a term coined by Lee of Korea Blog for live mosses kept in jars for aesthetic purposes). That's when my interest about this niche was rekindled, and I began to explore this hobby more deeply.

This is my first attempt at building a terrarium for my office desk. I never imagined that creating one would require invoking artistic imagination and engaging the inner child that has long overshadowed by my movie-oriented and work-game-life advocating personality.

If you look at the picture above, you'll see that I tried to recreate a simple, life-bearing village with a well for its residence to get their water. Due to the limited space in the jar, I ended up with two houses and sandy pathway that was meant to resemble a flowing river. However, now it looks more like a snowy landscape than a river bed.

I have no prior proper experience on building a terrarium and all I could think of at first was to throw something in there. Luckily though, I have some clay pebbles and filter pebbles that I was using previously for my potted plants during the Covid-induced quarantine era. I used them as the first and second layer of moisture-absorbent layers to prevent the growth of invasive fungus, or so I thought. But that remains to be seen.

The little decorative huts and the well including the tiny bricks are items that I purchased online from Lazada platform. 

If you're ever wondering who's responsible for making that hastily-made terrarium, it would be this man. I know that he looks exactly like me and the only difference is he likes to wear a pair of glasses. We can refer to him as Mr. Terrarium because he thinks he likes terrarium so much that it is impossible for him not to build one. 

You might think that all that Mr. Terrarium is interested in is terrariums, but he is also an avid fan of raindrop cakes. In fact, he went so far as to make one, copying recipes and cooking directions from some reputable Japanese Youtube channels. 

The brownish powder that you see next to the raindrop jelly is supposed to be a Kinako Flour, which is a powder made from roasted soybean flour.

But Mr. Terarrium didn't actually use a kinako flour as side toppings, because he couldn't find that anywhere in Papua New Guinea. Instead, he used another powdery substance called "Ground Almonds," which he found on the shelves of RH Hypermart in Vision City.

It turned out that it tasted as as good as kinako flour, which raises a question, "How did he know it tasted as good?"

The person who helped Mr. Terrarium gather the "moss" for the terrarium project is Elijah, who is in the middle wearing a blue polo shirt. And that's Mr. Terrarium on the right, happily eating fried chicken to satisfy his craving for a salty food after eating the raindrop cake he made.

I guess if someone wishes to save money, they should avoid eating too many sugary sweets.

Now that we're done discussing terrariums, we no longer need my alter-ego, Mr. Terrarium. From now on, we will refer to him as me, or I. Therefore, I shall start my next sentence with the letter "I". 

I recently joined a baskeball team in an on-going basketball league for Filipino OFWs in Papua New Guinea. However, in one of our practice games, I severely injured my right ankle to the point where it was almost impossible for me to play without an ankle brace. The picture above shows my right foot in a laced-up ankle brace that I purchased from Lazada. It provides pretty good support for injured ankles.

That's me, wearing the number 77 jersey, in one of our practice games. I never considered myself a tall player or the tallest member in our team. However, from looking at some of the pictures we took during the games, it seems that I'm indeed the tallest on my team, next only to the player wearing the purple jersey, who is from another team.

I'm 5'9" by the way. One of the benefits of being in this height is when I'm standing in long queues, I can easily count how many people are ahead of me.

The healthy person above is Romar, one of my basketball teammates. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to play until the end of the league because he decided to resign for other commitments.

He was a great center and a wonderful co-worker. We will all miss you Romar.

That's all for this entry. I apologize for not keeping up with my blog as regularly; I've become more busier with my Youtube Channel and my work. Thank you very much for your continued support of this blog. 

I wish you all more success in life! See you on my next post.

Indoor Plants and an Update About My Life

Darkness is the absent of light. While it’s a pretty straightforward understanding that our primary need for light is to see things around us, there is a much higher purpose for its existence and one could simply think of it as the existential ingredient for which lives on Earth could thrive.

But in a room that does not receive an ample serving of sunlight, how does one’s plant be able to appear green and stay that way? 

Fluorescent lights, and a few led lights. Just a couple of it actually.

After six months in the cold and dark corner of my room, one of my orchid plants had shown resilience against the gloomy odds and it bloomed with quite a handful of purple flowers. 

Quite a spectacular sight to see.

The secret to making the plants grow and bear flowers without the real sunlight is for them to get artificial lights that have at least two of the colors from the spectrum of light. To stimulate growth, it needs to have a cool white light and a red light to encourage flowering.

It’s like decades ago since I last made my school projects. But a couple of while ago, my boss had asked me to make the covers for these two Minecraft costumes. I’m not particularly a fan of Minecraft and have never played it on PC. 

I hope the kids who would wear these costumes could forgive me if I didn’t get it right.

Here’s John, our newest IT staff. He was an OJT when I took this photo. Here, he was tasked to put a plastic sheet on the cameras because the contractors were painting the metal ducting to which the camera was attached. 

The person on the left is Dickson, another one of our IT Staffs and John is the one seated. Here they are preparing the cameras for one of our clients. If you ever come and work in the IT Department at our company, you’d be learning nice things and installing CCTV’s is one of them.

John graduated with an IT course and Dickson didn’t. But this is a good example of why experience is sometimes better than having a degree. In this case, it was Dickson who was explaining to John a few technicalities in network cabling. If you ever wonder how Dickson has gotten so good with IT stuffs, I guess he has a good teacher.

Well, who could that teacher be? Ahem. 

So, in the eyes of their humble teacher, they are now worthy of being called the masters of CCTV installations. 

Hey wait a minute! Why is John smiling broadly in almost all of the pictures? 

This printer was sent to us from one of our departments for repair. They say that it’s ON but it refuses to obey what they ask it to do.  

Now what were they asking it to do?

Anyway, I suspect that a mitigating factor is a faulty board. In this photo, I’m showing Dickson how to use a desoldering pump to remove the power module from the faulty board. Later that afternoon, we replaced the board with a reliable one from another faulty printer of the same model and reattached the power module.

It worked like a charm.

Here are some of the corrugated hoses that I would always buy from Leon Hardware. If you ever wonder what I use these for, I use it for protecting cables and speaker wires. As generally presented idea with evidence, rats will have a hard time chewing on them. 

And the insurance company will be more than happy to see us using these.

Here’s Ivan, my nephew. He just recently joined our company as the IT replacement for Raffy who resigned last year. In this photo, we are at a client’s house doing inspection in preparation for CCTV installation.

Ivan is tall person, and is visibly taller than me. I’ve seen him grow from being a small toddler up to that size. I think that if the new generations continue to outgrow the former ones in terms of height, the Earth will be repopulated once again by giants. 

Until next time. Happy weekend everyone!

Wantok Payroll Demo 1 - Giving Ratings to Employees

One of the best Payroll Software in Papua New Guinea is the Wantok Payroll System. And this is created by no other than, ehem, your humble blogger, no other than myself. There are a lot of reason why I consider this to be "One of the Best" if not the best. 

I kid. 

One of which is that this is linked to an Attendance System with Biometric Attendance Machine and on the latest versions of Wantok Payroll, it is already gearing towards making it more like an HR-friendly payroll software.

In this post, I would like to show you how one can give ratings to a staff. As we know, in Papua New Guinea, it has become a norm that every year, the staffs' performance are evaluated and that any amount topped up to their salary thereafter will be based on their performance evaluation. The company that I'm working with has over 350+ employees so going through the papers for each of them could be a tedious job. So I simplified the process by incorporating the rating system into the Payroll. 

Let's check this out.

Celebrating 45th Year of Independence In Papua New Guinea

Looking back at my first entry for this blog, it feels like I'm getting old already. It's been 6 years since I wrote my first post "My Humble Beginning in PNG" and I must admit that I barely noticed how fast the years had gone by. I came here in 2008, went back home after a few months and came back again in 2011. And today, is my 9th year in this country that I consider my second home. 

I only started blogging about Papua New Guinea in 2014, and I wish I could have done earlier. But I have no regrets anyway. I think I've given my fair share of contributions to the blogosphere. Also, I'm under the notion that blogs are increasingly getting less popular than vlogs nowadays. And judging from the number of hits that this humble blog gets every now and then, I suppose that blogging, particularly my blogging, has seen its golden days. 

But I'm also a firm believer of this one verse in the Bible that says "That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away."  It basically implies that some things which have seen glories in the past might find their seats again in the arena of the future, especially, if those "things" had been of something great in the past. 

I guess if I were to predict which of the things from the past could make a comeback, I would say it was Blogging.

By the way, two days from now, the People of Papua New Guinea will be celebrating their motherland's 45th year of independence. I hope that we, despite the hardship and the current marginal lifestyle with which all of us are going through right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic, can still find a way to smile and celebrate this once-in-a-year chance to cherish the birth of this nation in our own style. 

Keep safe everyone. Until next post!

 

Merry Christmas

The year 2019 has brought us a concoction fun, hard work and mind-crushing challenges, but it also came with a couple of good rewards which I should talk about later in the upcoming posts.

They say that if a dragon or a "lion dance" has come to pass by and dances nearby, and someone happens to be present at its path, well not necessarily directly on its path, but somewhat closer to where it's at, then luck will come to that person.

I'm not sure if touching the lion costume will double that "luck" but it doesn't hurt to try.

Anyway, I just want to greet everyone a Merry Christmas and I wish you all good luck in 2020. Cheers!

A Busy Life and A Little Experiment

A golden rule that I've come to learn over the course of my life is that there is no harm in trying. Thus, I and my IT staffs have gone to extra lengths just to try and test for a very common information that a Hikvision IP Camera will not run by a UTP cable of more than 50 meters away on a POE supply. While some people with glimmering technical background in this field will probably agree with it, I am not ready to jump on the bandwagon just yet without putting up a little pillow fight and proving how correct that information is.

So it has come to pass that I have asked my two staffs to cut an approximately 100 meter of CAT6 pure copper cable and to help me run a test of our own. Oh by the way, the person on the left side whose two hands are gripping a roll of orange cable is Sylvester and and that's his cousin Dickson on the right.

If Discovery Channel has Adam and Jamie for MythBusters, I have the back of  these two guys here to help me perpetuate an unscrupulous plan of busting some myths for fun; and to whom I had promised a bottle of cold Coke should we emerge victorious in the end.

The camera location is perhaps around 30 meters close to where we have set up our NVR (Network Video Recorder) so we still have the remaining 70 meters of CAT6 coiled under the table.

And look at that, it works! While it is not in my best intention to prove other people wrong, I do acknowledge that I wanted to prove something to myself. Things could be better understood if one chose to tackle the subject in an engaging manner.

Here's the detailed summary of our mini-experiment:

Success rate                             :  100%
Hostilities met along the way   :  0%
Casualties                                 :  0%
Minor Injuries Sustained          :  0%
Satisfied people                        : 3

 Oh we did go and drank some cold Coke afterwards. Happy weekend everyone!

Confidence in the Workplace

Having a job and doing the actual work is like being in a beach, trying to walk our way past against a series of waves. The water is your work environment and the waves are the problems you encounter each time.

Life in the workplace isn’t smooth, and you need to face the proverbial waves. No matter how small or big the waves are, you still take the courage to face them head on, even if they swat you like a bulldozer. But like the waves, those problems will come to pass, whether you’ve solved them or not. Like the waves, if you’re not able to stop it, something else will (thanks to the big rocks on the shore).

Or somebody else will.

The good thing however, is that each time you have courageously stood against the incoming waves, you gain experience. You build character. And those characters become you. You can even say, “Hey look, I’m The Hulk!” But I’m just kidding. What I actually mean to say is that the more problems you overcome, the more confident you may become.

Confidence is actually about thinking and saying, “I’ve done this before, and I know I can do it again.” That is, if you’ve been through that situation before. But when you’re about to face something that you have previously never come across of, confidence becomes believing in yourself.

So confidence is really about knowing what you can do and believing in yourself that you can do more. Apply that sense in the workplace, you won’t become unstoppable, but you’ll become adequately and confidently capable.

If not, then at least you become a "Papable."