Anyway, we found several recipes at home via my mom’s cookbooks and had actually decided to use one of them. But at the last minute, I decided to Google for some more recipe options. I found a teriyaki burger recipe online at About.com: Southern Food Recipes. It seemed easy enough. A big plus was, except for the meat, the other ingredients were readily available at our house.

I have replaced the two slices of bread (crumbled) mentioned in the recipe with commercially available bread crumbs. Moreover, I added instructions on how to cook them using an electronic grill.

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
• 2 tablespoons bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup finely chopped onion
• 2 eggs, slightly beaten
• 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 clove garlic, finely minced
• 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger

Procedure

Combine ground beef and remaining ingredients in a large bowl; blend well. Shape beef mixture into 6 patties.

A. Using a broiler:

Broil for 10 to 15 minutes about 5 inches from heat, turning once.

B. Using an electric grill:

1.  Cook each side of the burgers at 245°C for about 3-4 minutes.

2. Reduce heat of the grill to about 200°C and continue cooking each side for another 4-5 minutes.

3. During the last minute of cooking, you may add a slice of cheese on the burgers.

Serve burgers in warm hamburger buns. You may choose to serve with fresh vegetables like lettuce, onions, tomato, and cucumber. Add condiments if desired.

This was written by Fr. Vincent Serpa as part of his answer to one of the questions posted by a member in Catholic Answers (http://www.catholic.com). Here is the original link to the answer: http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=424877

The agony in the garden was really the agony in His mind. He suffered the passion in His mind before He suffered it in His body—to the point of actually affecting the latter by sweating blood. But from then on, it was His bodily suffering that affected His mental suffering.

At the base of all His suffering was the one thing that human beings dread the most: rejection. He was betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter and abandoned by all the rest of His Apostles; those He had hand picked as His closest intimates. He was most rejected by those who put Him to death. They not only wanted Him dead, they wanted Him to suffer. They not only considered Him to be worth nothing, they considered Him to be worth minus nothing! This significance was not lost on Him. He felt fully the rejection as each physical agony reminded Him.

So we thank Him for joining us on our human journey and actually choosing to experience what we fear the most.

We thank Him for enduring the arrest and the cruelty of the guards and the Sanhedrin. We thank Him for enduring the cruelty of Pilate who allowed Him to be executed rather than risk his own political ruin—and for the cruelty of Herod who wanted to be entertained by having Him work a miracle. We thank Him for all the time He spent satisfying their preoccupation with themselves, just delaying His ultimate death. We thank Him for the anxiety of that night in a cell.

The next morning He was brutally scourged with such intensity and violence that He became as an aged man in a matter of minutes. His multiple wounds bloodied His entire body. The loss of so much blood not only severely weakened Him; it also caused a severe, throbbing headache that remained with Him for the duration.

We thank Him for this and for the mockery He received when they put a purple cloth on His shoulders and pushed a crown of thorns down into His head which intensified His headache. They blindfolded Him and slapped Him, insisting that He ‘prophesy’ who had hit Him. They spat on Him and beat Him. But it was they who were blind. He knew who they were. This is what we do when we sin. We blot him out of our consciousness as if He can’t see us. But it is we who choose to not see.

He stood at the praetorium in utter disgrace according to the attitude of the crowd—while in reality, He stood in utter glory: almighty God, being present to every person who has ever suffered rejection, joining them in their moment of pain. It was there that He was sentenced to death by crucifixion. As a further humiliation, He was forced to carry His instrument of execution. He revealed to St. Bernard that carrying the cross was His most painful agony. He was so weak, He could hardly walk. So the weight of the cross on His shoulder was unbearable. It most likely dislocated His shoulder. It is not surprising that He fell down on the stone streets that were filthy with animal dung—with the cross on top of Him. And He got up each time.

It was only with the help of Simon of Cyrene that He made it to the top of Calvary. There they drove the nails into the carpal tunnels of His hands, causing pain throughout His upper body. The nail in His feet registered great pain through all the sensitive nerves there. When the cross was righted, His up-stretched arms squeezed His lungs and He began to pant for lack of oxygen. So He had to push down on His crucified feet to push His body up in order to fill His lungs with air. This took great effort because He was so weak. Yet He managed to maintain such effort for three hours of agony which increased gradually as He became weaker moment by moment.

By the end of the third hour, His agony was at its peak and His self-gift was exquisite. He had come to the point where His strength simply gave out and He suffocated. In this eternal moment as He died, He gave us His life. Transcending time, this moment of divine love is present to us in the tabernacles of the world.

Thank you, Lord. We adore you O Christ and we praise you. By your holy cross, you have redeemed the world!

There are many things in our life that sometimes, leave us bewildered and lost, leaving us clueless as to why it happened to us. It is not in our control on when and how these answers will be revealed to us. We can only remain faithful that everyday is a new day and it will always get better.

To whoever crafted and whispered this wonderful tale, I thank you….

(This story is also known as “The Two Angels,” “Things Aren’t Always What They Seem,” and “Two Angels Story.”)
_______________

Two traveling angels stopped to spend the night in the home of a wealthy family. The family was rude and refused to let the angels stay in the mansion’s guest room. Instead the angels were given a small space in the cold basement.

As they made their bed on the hard floor, the older angel saw a hole in the wall and repaired it. When the younger angel asked why, the older angel replied, “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

The next night the pair came to rest at the house of a very poor, but very hospitable farmer and his wife. After sharing what little food they had, the couple let the angels sleep in their bed where they could have a good night’s rest.

When the sun came up the next morning the angels found the farmer and his wife in tears. Their only cow, whose milk had been their sole income, lay dead in the field. The younger angel was infuriated and asked the older angel how could you have let this happen?

“The first man had everything, yet you helped him,” she accused. “The second family had little but was willing to share everything, and yet you let the cow die.”

“Things aren’t always what they seem,” the older angel replied.

“When we stayed in the basement of the mansion, I noticed there was gold stored in that hole in the wall. Since the owner was so obsessed with greed and unwilling to share his good fortune, I sealed the wall so he wouldn’t find it.”

“Then last night as we slept in the farmers bed, the angel of death came for his wife. I gave him the cow instead. Things aren’t always what they seem.”

Sometimes that is exactly what happens when things don’t turn out the way they should. If you have faith, you just need to trust that every out come is always to your advantage. You just might not know it until some time later…

If you haven’t logged on in a while, you’ll be presented with “News Feed”. This view contains a summary of what you may have missed since you last logged-on. It includes some of your friends status, links, photos, and videos. The posts shown depend on varying factors like the number of comments they received, the number of likes, the number of views, etc.

After looking through this summarized version, you may opt to view the “Live News Feeds” which contain the latest updates from your friends. This view integrates the “News Feeds” view and “Highlights” which used to appear on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. So aside from the usual status updates, links, videos, application updates, and others, it also includes information like friends that one of your own friends added, groups that your friends joined, what your friends became a fan of, etc.

In short, “Live News Feeds” contains more information that you may or may not care about.  Although Facebook still gives you the option to hide application updates and even friends from the view, you cannot hide the “became friends with”, “has become a fan of”, “has joined the group” information. That is really a big downer for me as I don’t want those information on my stream.

Apparently, a lot of people have the same sentiment. They have cried out to Facebook to bring back the old version of the home page.

But this recent change may also be a blessing in disguise. It shows you how much information you yourself may be unwittingly sharing to the world. For me, it made me review my privacy settings on my Facebook account.

From the settings page, I realized that like my friends, I was allowing Facebook to send out the same information that I didn’t want appearing on my home page. Check out your own privacy settings and think about what you want or don’t want published. If you want something published you may want to limit those who can see it. For example, most of my information and updates cannot be seen by people who are not on my friends lists. I’ve also chosen not to publish information about who I’ve added as a friend, what groups I joined, and I just became a fan of.

To get to the privacy settings, go to the Settings menu located at the upper right hand portion of the Facebook page and select Privacy Settings. From that page, you can tweak your privacy options for the following:

1. Profile. This is information about you. This includes your birthday, current location, education information and work information. You may want to limit who sees this information particularly your birthday as this piece of information can be used in identity theft.
2. Search. You will want others — particularly your friends who are not on your friends list yet — to be able to find you but you may still want to limit what information is shown on search pages. You can also opt not to be included in search outside of Facebook (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Bing).
3. News Feed and Wall. Here is where you control whether or not you want to publish information about the friends you’ve added, groups you joined, etc.
4. Applications. The settings here control what information is available to the applications integrated with Facebook.

You may need to tweak your settings several times until you are satisfied. To do this you may need to ask a friend to help you out so you can verify what information you are not allowing to be published are not being published and only the information you want published are being published. Since Facebook is constantly evolving, you may want to check on your settings once in a while to see if they’ve somehow been reset, if new privacy option settings appear or if old ones disappear.

Facebook and other social networking sites are still for me a great tool to connect with each other. But at the same time we still need to be aware that any information we put up may just be something that we or our friends may or may not want to see.

Then just the other day, I read that Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone/iPod Touch was available at the App Store. So, I decided to give it a try and compare it with Bloomberg Mobile.

Adding stocks

Bloomberg Mobile "My Stocks" Screen

With Bloomberg Mobile, you just select the ‘My Stocks’ icon on the bottom of the screen and you’ll see a list of your stocks. The information on the two right-most columns can be changed so that you can view the last price traded, % change from previous close, the price you initially bought the stocks, profit and loss amount, current value, and stock position.

The prices shown on the left are in Philippine Peso. Very useful for me as I usually think in terms of PHP.

To rearrange, add or remove items, just select the Edit button. When you access the add new stock screen from the Edit screen, you can search for stocks either by company name or stock symbol. You can then enter the number of stocks that you have (stock position) as well as the price bought.

Yahoo Finance Mobile "Quotes" Screen

The Yahoo! Finance for Mobile for iPhone has a cooler interface when displaying stock information. Just select the Quotes button at the top of the screen and you’ll be presented with your list of stocks as well as currency exchange rates. You can even customize the view for each stock to include more information such as a mini-chart.

However, the downside for me is that stocks prices are displayed in USD. If there was an option to change how this information is displayed, I have not discovered it yet. I like how you could add currency exchange rates. Bloomberg Mobile has a feature that displays currency exchange rates but it is on a different screen and unfortunately, I could not add the Philippine Peso.

When rearranging items, Bloomberg Mobile allows you to simply drag the items so you can change the order of your stocks. With Yahoo! Finance Mobile, you have to hold down the item and when a pop-up menu appears, you can remove, resize or move the item. Selecting move, will enable small dots to appear on the different items. An instruction at the bottom of the screen tells you to touch a dot to move items. How touching the item will move it to another portion of your list, I haven’t figured it out yet.

Viewing Stock Information

Both applications give you the option to view stock charts and other information like stock movements for the day, the last month, the last six months, etc. Bloomberg Mobile conveniently shows you this information in one screen. With Yahoo! Finance Mobile, it spans three screens so you will have to page through the information before you find what you need.

Bloomberg Mobile and Yahoo! Finance Mobile both have delays in getting information from their respective servers. That’s not really a problem for me since I don’t have a wi-fi connection everywhere I go. All I need is keep updated once in a while. However, I do expect to see some information (i.e. the information from the last download)  if ever the application cannot establish a connection to the server. That is, information from the last download is cached on the device.

With Bloomberg, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I tried not to download data for a couple of days and some of the stock information still displayed. A message on the bottom of the screen even showed when — a date if it’s more than a day or the time if it’s within the day — the data was last downloaded. There are times though, that nothing is displayed at all and an error message at the bottom of the screen tells me that there is no internet connection.

However, with Yahoo! Finance Mobile, it does not show any information at all when you launch the application without an Internet connection. Not even the last stock price or last currency exchange rate is cached.

I’m not sure if it’s a glitch or it was behaving how it was supposed to, but when I launched Yahoo! Finance Mobile for the first time and added stocks that I want to monitor, no chart information was downloaded. Furthermore, it seemed that the stock price is not updated. I had expected that the data will at least provide information from the previous  trading day. But it didn’t.

Conclusion

Although, Yahoo! Finance Mobile offers a great (and cool) interface, it still needs a bit more tweaking in terms of how some of the information is presented and how users can arrange items. However, there is such great promise there. I’m sure an updated version of Yahoo! Finance Mobile is already in the works.

Bloomberg Mobile remains simple to use and gets the needed information to the user. I would love to see some of the UI from Yahoo! Finance Mobile on Bloomberg Mobile, though.

A few pleasantries were exchanged and the doctor asked how I was doing since my last check-up over a year ago. He then proceeded to discuss my most recent X-ray — the one taken earlier that day. He said that the minor procedure that they performed when I last came (wherein the stopped my NF infected left leg from growing faster than my right leg) was successful. However, they noticed that the tumors are causing the bone of my left leg and my left foot to slowly disintegrate. He put up the X-ray on screen and sure enough, there was hardly any structure on my left foot. No wonder it felt so soft along the sides!

He said that they could amputate the leg — just below the knee — as soon as possible. The other option, was for me to wait until I was 18 (I was only 14 at the time) and have it amputated by then. Maybe my right leg would have caught up with my left leg in terms of growth; maybe the tumor would have stopped from eating up the bones. It was a lot of maybes.

“You don’t have to make the decision now”,  he told me.

But as my uncle and I walked out to the hallway where my parents we’re waiting for us, I had already made my decision. I couldn’t live with the pain on my left leg anymore. I just wanted to take a chance. Although the doctor never gave any assurance that the pain will go away or if the bones will stop from disintegrating, I felt that having my leg amputated will at least give me a chance.

As we all sat down in the lobby, my uncle and I related to my folks, my aunt and the other people who came with us, what had just transpired. I then looked at my parents and told them quietly that I have made my decision.

My parents nodded their heads and mouthed their okays. They were smiling but I noticed tears welling up in their eyes. They were trying their best to hold those tears back. Everyone then decided to troop down the nearest church to pray for guidance and to give thanks. Inside the church, my dad finally couldn’t contain himself and burst into tears. I just hugged him and my mom real tight, telling them that I’m sure everything will be alright. In between sobs, my dad said that he wished he could just give me his leg somehow.

It was several months before my leg was amputated. I had to go through psychological evaluations to see if I could easily cope with losing my leg.

Now, it’s been nearly 22 years since I had chosen to lose my left leg. I’ve gone through nearly half a dozen artificial legs since. It was difficult at first, but I coped. Maybe I’m still coping.  But even if I could go back in time 22 years, I would have still made the same decision.

Facebook for iPhone Home Screen

The latest version of Facebook’s application for the iPhone and iPod Touch is finally available from the App Store. It has a new user interface that totally blows away the UI of the previous version.

Taking a cue from the iPhone OS interface, Facebook for iPhone opens up with a home page containing icons representing common Facebook pages: News Feed, Profile, Friends, Inbox, Chat, Requests, Events, Photos and Notes. You can even add your own links to your friends and pages just as you would add applications on your iPhone when you purchase them from the App Store. You can also rearrange the icons and see different pages of the Facebook home screen the same way you do with the iPhone.

What is nice is that the icons show badges that represent new items. For example, if you have 5 new friend requests, that number is shown with the Requests icon.

In terms of functionality, the Facebook iPhone app is very close to the Facebook website. Below are some of the Facebook for iPhone functions:

The bottom part of the screen shows the latest notification that you may have. Touching that part of the screen will display all of your recent notifications. The number of new notifications also appear as a badge on the iPhone application when you are on the iPhone’s home screen.

When you are in News Feeds, you can filter what is displayed using the group lists that you created in Facebook. It would have been great if the same feature was available in the Friends page. As it is, you can only scroll through a list of all your your friends. So right now, if you created a list to contain your friends from high school and another list to contain your friends from college, you cannot filter your view like you can in Facebooks’ website. But I’m sure this will be addressed in a future release, though.

You can easily comment or like your friends’ posts. It’s all a matter of selecting the post you want to comment on or like, and then selecting the appropriate button.

The Events page conveniently separates events and birthdays just like in Facebook’s website. From the birthdays tab, you can just select a friend who happens to be celebrating a birthday and post to his or her wall.

You can confirm friend requests from the Requests page. I wish you could also confirm fan, group or page requests, but maybe these will come in a future version.

An additional feature that I wish the developers will add is the ability to add a friend to an existing list group whether you are adding a new friend or you are confirming a friend request. Right now, you’ll have to remember to login to your account using a browser so you can add your new friends to the respective lists. Sometimes, I do forget and when I do remember, I have to check all my friends again just to see if I missed adding anyone to their respective list. So you can see how the feature can be handy in the iPhone app; well, at least for me.

The Photos, Notes, Inbox, and Chat apps all function as they should. Although like the Requests and Friends apps, I do wish I could set my online status selectively using the group lists I’ve already created.

Overall, the Facebook for iPhone app is worth the download (and it’s free). It’s the best way to connect to your Facebook buddies whenever you are on the go. If you’re like me, you can even use it while you are on a computer but don’t want to fire up a browser because you are doing something else…like working or playing World of Warcraft, for example.

iBank Mobile

For a few months now, I have been on the look out for a financial management app from the App Store. Although most of the apps that I tried came with lite versions, the features that they showcased were not enough to make me go ahead and purchase the full versions. I’ve almost given up my search until I discovered iBank Mobile from IGG Software. Created by the same people who made iBank for the Mac, it offers a great interface to enter transactions while you are on the go.

The application was designed to run either as a standalone mobile application or as a companion application to the desktop version. If you run it as a companion application, you have the advantage of synching transactions between your Mac and your iPhone/iPod Touch.

Unlike other personal finance apps that are sold on the App Store, iBank Mobile does not have a lite or trial version. Thus, I had to buy it for USD4.99 just to try it. I have to admit that the app coming from IGG Software was an advantage. About a year ago, my wife and I tried out iBank and was very impressed by the software.

When I first launched iBank Mobile, I was asked if I wanted to use it standalone or if I wanted to do a sync. I selected standalone. From that point, it was a matter of setting up my accounts: cash accounts, savings, checking, credit cards, etc. even line of credit accounts. I was expecting to be prompted for the beginning balance for each account but that didn’t happen. So, I created a transaction for each account wherein the Payee was “Beginning Balance” and entered the initial balances. It would’ve been great if this were part of the account setup process particularly if the app will be used as a standalone application. If the app will sync with the desktop version, then the beginning balances can be picked up easily.

The next thing I tried was to do a transfer between accounts. I had to search the support website before I could figure out how to do it. In my first attempt, I placed the transfer transaction’s target account in the Payee field. I found it strange that the name of the account was not in the list, so I typed it in. When I saved the transaction, I could not understand why the amount was debited from the source account but not credited to the target account. It would’ve been really strange if I had to enter two separate transactions.

Luckily, I found the answer in the support website. Apparently, someone else was having the same problem. I discovered that to do a transfer between accounts, you select the target account via the Category field. But then, the list of accounts is listed on top of the Categories that you have created. You will have to scroll before you can actually see the accounts. That is not very intuitive in my opinion. I mean why use the categories field in the first place? Hopefully, the guys at IGG Software will realize this and come up with something better in a future release.

A neat feature of iBank Mobile that I really like is the passcode option allows you to set a passcode that is longer than four numbers. So far, I have tried using passcodes that have six, seven, and eight digits. It appears though that you can even enter more than ten digits but I guess this is only good if you have a good memory. The passcode is requested each time you open the app — even if your device sleeps and then wakes up while you are within the app.

Overall, iBank Mobile is a great app well worth the USD4.99. It is also worth noting that this is a very early version of the software and it already has great features. The developers themselves admitted that they only focused on core functions when they released it. We can only expect even better versions of this app.

Word Camp Philippines 2009

WordPress WordCamp is coming to the Philippines on September 19, 2009. The event is a great way to meet other WordPress enthusiasts. If you are a WordPress user or you if you want to know more about WordPress, consider attending WordCamp Philippines 2009. You can learn more about the event as well as register by going to the WordCamp Philippines website at http://wordcamp.ph.