I found this girl’s picture the other day and I was wondering how was it possible that this photo was featured in iPhone Photography Tumblr when clearly there was no app that could do this and it would go against the blog’s policy of posting iPhone-only photos.

Then I found the app.

Lo-Mob. And it became my 11th photography app on the iPhone.

To be honest, I bought it because of its tagline: Bring Retro to Your Mobile Pictures. It’s not like I don’t already have other Lomo-fying, Polaroid-izing, apps but this one just tops it all with over 25 formats.

Lomo, Holga, Polaroid, Slide, 35mm, etc. And they look authentic.

From a boring Look Shin shot like this:

I now have these options to choose from:

There goes another $2.

But this surely won’t stop me from coming home from Wang Lang or Ratchada Night with a 30-year-old camera. But $2 does beat B5,000 for a retro shot.

*Yes I tried the app with a Look Shin photo I took at On Nut Square. I was hungry. And now I’m hungrier.

Today marks the end of the first week of my diet program.

I don’t remember what kicked start this. One day last week after stuffing myself with dinner, I suddenly felt my face bloating. I could feel oil oozing out of my pores and my thighs jiggle with the bestest bits of fats that have gathered in the regions. It was the first time that I felt like I needed to do something to get rid of these imaginary (not) feelings. I got home, cleared all the clothes and hats there were calling my cycling machine home and got on it.

I spun for an hour while watching True Series. You know how people say exercise makes you feel great, elated and happy afterwards? To me it was agonizing and a living pain. I never sweated so much. My face was so red it was almost purple. The legs were throbbing and muscle pains followed the next day.

Been doing that for a few days now, still the same agonizing results, yesterday almost fainted, but I had never come this far. I’m setting a goal. To be on a low carb diet, and to exercise at least an hour a day, until I start my new job in September hopefully with a new body.

First thing to go from my eating habit is the snacks and the sugar. Now I truly know what a drug withdrawal feels like. I’m obsessed with snacks. I always have to end a meal with something sweet and to have munchies in between. I don’t drink water but Coke, Ginger Ale, Lemonade and whatever that’s filled with sugar. Well now, my only sources of sweet fixes are Baskin Robbins Sugar Free Hard Candies, Crystal Light drinks and Splenda.

I haven’t touched pasta for a week already and that’s a huge accomplishment considering I have pasta for dinner at least four times a week. So far dinner composed of sushi, beef teppanyaki, Korean BBQ and khai jeaw. Lunch is harder to avoid refined carbs, so I’ve had noodles and rice but without ending it with an ice cream or cookies like usual. Breakfast? Omelets with mushroom, sauteed spinach and broccoli (my only two tolerable vegetables), and whole wheat English muffin with a stain, not a layer like usual, of natural peanut butter and raspberry jam.

Then today I have decided to make it official. Just downloaded Lose It! onto the iPhone to accurately keep track of what I eat. There’s no point doing all beef diet at 2,000 kcal a day if you only need 1,000.

The App asks you to enter your details: age, weight, goal weight,etc and it will calculate how much you need to eat in one day to reach your goal. The app also has a database of common food, even some Thai dishes, complete with calories per serving so I can add into my daily log. If I exercise, I can also add it to the log. The more I exercise, the more I can eat. And having your intake laid out in details like this kind of makes you more careful about what you put in your stomach.

According to the app, I will need to lose 1 1/2 lbs. a week and eat less than 1,100 kcal a day to reach my goal weight by Sep 26, 2009.

This goal weight is the exact same weight I had before I started working. Three years ago exactly. Damn you BK Magazine and your Silom office that gave me easy access to Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King, S&P Bakery and numerous sidewalk treats from sugar-loaded coffees to deep fried crispy wontons. I gained 6 kilos in two years.

And with the new Japanese bento set I just bought, I’m also gonna be packing my own lunch from now on, starting tomorrow with fried brown rice with naamprik noom, a chicken strip and sauteed spinach with lite cheddar.

Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

Hungry in Thonglor and you’re looking for something cheap and filling, where would you go? Greyhound? iBerry? No effing way, you’d go for ramen.

We recently found ourselves in that situation on Sunday wandering around Thonglor trying to decide which one of the hundred ramen shops we would walk into. While I was debating whether we should give up Japanese noodles for Italian ones instead at Scoozi we found a cute little narrow ramen hole just across the road.

Mokkori Ramen.

The dude with the hat just kept reading comics. Selfish little showoff.

Just like any other Japanese-run ramen shops in town, customers are greeted with a series of friendly high-pitched screams in Japanese that I assumed to be an aggressive Japanese-style welcome. Scared and startled, we sat down at one of their very limited number of seating right in front of the door.

The screaming Japanese dude was apparently the owner and the head chef responsible for whipping up the signature bowls.

The menu is not that impressive. Ramens, curries, and simple stir-fries like you can get anywhere else on the same strip. I settled for an egg curry with rice, while the BF went with some spicy ramen.

To be honest, we both had better. The curry is a little too sweet while the ramen’s bowl size is the only thing impressive about it. But what surprised us was the amount of customers this ramen hole is pulling.

The place is messy, hot, and crammed. There are not enough seats, 20 people max, and like I said the menu was not even big enough to make us want to come back. But while we were eating, there had to be at least 10 more people waiting to be seated. Waiting. Outside. In the drizzle.

And these people were not neighborhood Japanese expats you see slurping in Soi 33 either, these were Thonglor people: Scantily clad skanks and a suit-wearing metro man with his Chanel-carrying trophy girlfriend. They were waiting, some for a good 10-15 minutes, for a seat so they could eat here. I mean this is Thonglor. There are at the least-est 5 other ramen shops just few meters from this one that can offer the same, some even bigger menu.

We speculated that the reason why the ramen guy greeted us with such glee was because he was high on something, and that something was definitely spilled over into the food. We were expecting to crave their curry a few minutes later after finishing but that didn’t happen.

Are we too hard to please? Is there really something about that place that made everyone flock to it and we had missed? We ordered their best-sellers and we were not even close to being convinced.

Can somebody please try this place out?

Like seriously, how is it possible that leading iPhone blogs like TouchArcade or even TiPB are not covering this?

The first time I came across Cooking Mama was back in college when one of my classmates was busy cooking on her Nintendo DS at the back of a classroom. I thought it was the coolest game I had ever played since The Sims.

Here’s this thing about me. I hate cooking. But I have always loved play cooking since I was a kid. While girls would usually go gaga over Barbies and My Little Pony, I went for McDonald’s hamburger sets or food editions Play Doh. And yes, since I am an only child, I had an imaginary friend at one point. But it was more like an imaginary customer who I cooked dirt and dead grass for on my plastic kitchen stove. Even when I was addicted to The Sims, my most favorite part was not the interaction or the house design, but the restaurant and the cooking skill practice.

Anyway back to Cooking Mama. After finding out my own cousin, who’s a boy, had the game on his rather macho DS, I was ecstatic. I borrowed it for a week and managed to get gold medals for all menus despite the game at the time having all instructions in Japanese.

I almost bought a Wii when I found out they have cooking utensil consoles.

I had been waiting for this game on the iPhone ever since I got one. I knew it would come even though it was an obvious Nintendo-only game. I was so psyched I was willing to pay US$7 for a game.

You may think that’s cheap but most great fun iPhone games usually hover around US$2-5. So I cheated a little and kind of… um… borrowed a sneakily obtained version first just to try it out to see if it would be worth my 7 dollars. Hey I did that with Flick Fishing, Photogene and Tweetie OK and I am now a fully legit and paid user of these apps.

I installed the game about midnight last night and finished all menus, with gold medals, by 3am.

I am very disappointed. On DS, the menu is vast, and the steps are much more difficult. There are a lot of things that the iPhone version doesn’t have like rice cooking, breaded tonkatsu, makis, takoyaki, etc. basically the stuff that made me fall in love with Cooking Mama in the first place. On the iPhone version everything is so easy. It’s all about cutting and mixing. Like for example, a dish like katsu curry rice on DS you would get to cook the rice, bread the pork, deep fry it etc. On iPhone, you just make the curry. What is up with that?

OK this rant is probably only useful for a handful of people but I really need to contribute to the interwebs about this game. So far Google mainly shows blogs and websites introducing and announcing the game with no reviews. Well here’s one.

So I am kinda glad that I didn’t spend my hard earned 7 dollars. But I definitely will when they come out with an update that offers more menus. For now, I’m already bored and deleting it.

I don’t cook. I can’t cook. Kitchen appliances and I don’t get along. I either get burnt, knock things over, overcook, undercook things beyond edibility.

Well I have recently mastered one easy recipe that I was tipped by a friend. It did not take much convincing as anything to do with unhealthy food would get my attention, especially this one as I was just yearning for these rice crispy bars. You know one of those overly sweetly flavored crunchy snack bars made from the cereal Rice Crispies. Villa used to sell one of those but they somehow stopped.

So one day I decided to try making it myself. I bought all the ingredients and with fingers crossed I went ahead at it. I thought it would turn out to be just another failure but so far I have gained quite a fan base, which includes my dad and my BK peeps. Then I had an epiphany the other day. Why stick to the plain old Rice Crispies when you could have the chocolaty Coco Pops Bars instead.

So without further ado, please give it up for, the first time ever, Gnarly Kitty Unhealthy Cooking School:

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