Tiana Feng

Victoria’s Day at Ashbridges Bay

Tiana Feng — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:15:42 +0000

I spent Victoria’s Day at Ashbridges Bay relaxing by the beaches. We took a walk along the board-walk and visited the skate park.

At night, we braved the chill to see their spectacular fireworks. My favourite part was when the many fireworks dispersed into what looked like mini stars.

Bacon Crackers from Fita Spreadz

Tiana Feng — Sat, 18 May 2013 21:01:31 +0000

While I was grocery shopping with Mom at the Asian grocery store, I came across these Fita Spreadz crackers from the Philippines. These were borderline weird but as a bacon lover I just had to try them.

They were individually packaged so you could have some on-the-go like the people in their commercials.

They looked a lot like giant ritz bits sandwiches and the aroma of bacon was enough to get Teddy wanting some too. The verdict: they weren’t as weird as I’d expected. They were creamy like cheese cracker sandwiches but saltier.

The downside was that it left an after taste that was kind of like when you eat a package of dried Mr. Noodles. Fita Spreadz also comes in a spicy tuna flavour, but that seems even more frightening than bacon.

Crochet Shawl for Mother’s Day

Tiana Feng — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:51:17 +0000

As a Mother’s Day gift, I made Mom a Sidewalk Shawl with a free pattern from Stitch Nation. I used a 5mm yarn but 8mm crochet hook so that the pattern would be more visible. I skipped the third and fourth repetition of the pattern but it still resulted in a large shawl!

Sodastream Kraft Launch Party

Tiana Feng — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:48:27 +0000

I was invited to the Soda Stream Kraft launch party last night by the fine folks at The Mint Agency. To be honest, I had not previously known about the company and went out of curiosity and of course as a freelancer, couldn’t resist free food and drinks!The event took place at 2nd Floor Events on King Street West.The space was decorated with bottle decor to fit Sodastream’s campaign of saving the earth from bottles. The idea of Sodastream is for customers to have a system at home where they can carbonate their own water and make DIY sodas, therefore cutting down on the need to buy pop bottles.

Since it was the Kraft launch, we had the opportunity to sample the Kool-aid, Crystal Light and Country Time lemonade flavours. They were pretty good and tasted exactly like you’d expect the carbonated versions to taste like. With the exception of some added vodka, since it was a party.

The evening was catered by Brassaii who served various finger foods.
Oh, and I can’t forget about the glorious candy bar. I definitely smuggled some home.

At the end of the night, the invited guests got to take home gift bags with a Sodastream Source machine!

Here’s everything unboxed. They even threw in full bottle of the lemonade flavouring.

The normal kit comes with only 9 trial flavours. 1 of the packages makes a bottle.

To use the machine, the included bottle needs to be filled with cold water (because who likes warm soda?). Then you stick it in the machine and press down until your optimum fizziness as indicated by the LED lights. The machine doesn’t need to be plugged into anything and there was no included instructions on batteries. The first time we tried it I don’t think we pressed down hard enough because we didn’t see bubbles, but we definitely did eventually!

I had a cherry coke-lover in the house so we gave this a test.

The verdict: tastes like regular cherry coke with a lot less sugar. There’s only 7 grams compared to the 25g of sugar in coke. I think the health (and taste) aspect is a bigger seller than the environmental concerns.

DIY type people would enjoy this product. I think it would also be fun to host and play bartender at a party full of Sodastream mixed drinks with this machine!

Youtube Helped Me Fix It

Tiana Feng — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:15:05 +0000

The dusty insides of the front of my laptop

I have a 4 year old Dell Studio 1555 laptop. It is still running perfectly smoothly. However, whoever designed this thing didn’t think about longevity and stupidly put the power button on the screen’s hinge. The most moved part on the entire computer.

Anyways, a few weeks ago I dropped my laptop and everything seemed fine except for the lost connection in the power button. It would take me 3-4 attempts to turn the computer back on and I avoided turning it off since then. The past few days I was bringing the laptop outside to work and today on my way out bumped the battery and it turned off. It wouldn’t turn back on after about 100 attempts at fidgeting with the hinge. My warranty has been up for almost a year and I knew a repair was going to be costly for something that probably took 10 minutes.

So I Youtubed my problem, took my laptop apart and 10 minutes later I am writing this blog post to you about it. It’s amazing how much of our life problems can be Googled, and how much you can learn from Youtube. No need to “call the guy” when you can “be the guy”.