Nong-Shim is a Korean food manufacturer known for their spicy instant noodles as well as a few varieties of shrimp crackers. When my local convenience store started carrying the brand along with the classic Japanese brands and the ever ubiquitous nissin cup-o-noodles, I thought I’d give their products a go to see if there was any validity to the “hot and spicy” promised on the packaging.

I picked up a few of the different offerings and started with the beef-flavoured cup (containing no actual beef, surprisingly) and I have to say, it’s much better than the atrocity I picked up last week: Maruchan’s Yakisoba. To begin with, the tiny cup holds a surprising amount of noodles, complete with lots of dried veggies, mostly green onions and mushrooms that rehydrated fully compared to the usual corn/carrot fare. You can see the sizable chunks in the pre-cooking shot below.

Generous flavour packet as well full of what was honestly a decently hot and spicy soup base. Sure it’s not tongue searing, but it certainly isn’t for the faint of heart and I personally find it pretty refreshing to have a bit of the good stuff in the instant noodle aisle. It was bright red, so from the get go I thought it promising.

Packaging is sturdier than your average instant noodle cup, more plastic than styrofoam, and the paper is coat to keep the water and steam in. I noticed the difference when the noodles were completely plump and ready before my 3 minute timer was up. I quite enjoyed the taste, and especially liked that you could add less of the flavour if you were sensitive to spice or worried about the nutritional intake. It’s pretty easy to spot in the bright red and black graphics, though not often easy to find. Much more popular are the company’s shrimp and “vegetal” flavoured Kimchi bowls.

Price wise, all the Nong-Shim products seem to rank about the same as the upscale and fancier instant noodle bowls, on par with something like Kraft easy mac or Chef Boyardee, though to my taste buds, far tastier (about 1.50 at my local 7eleven). Health-wise the Shin Cup also on par with other instant noodles, complete with 65% of your daily sodium intake, though the Shin Cup also has 2g protein and 12g of fiber, and 0 trans fat if you’re counting. Surprising for a convenience food, actually.

Overall I rate the shin cup pretty highly. I look forward to giving their packets of Yeul Ramyon and the larger Kimchi-flavoured noodle bowl a try soon. I’ll be sure to share my findings. But first, I have some noodles to finish!

On my plate: homemade pizza with yellow pepper, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, roasted garlic, and goat’s cheese

Today Apple announced the release of their newest mobile device, a tablet with the unfortunate name of iPad. Is it a neat device? Can it do cool things? Was huge step forward for netbooks and e-readers? Yes. Was it a bit of a letdown? Absolutely.

It’s slick, with that fancy interface familiar to iPhone and iPod Touch users, but with the added juice of a netbook. The tablet itself boasts a new chip I’m sure we’ll start seeing elsewhere, a ridiculous battery life of 10 hours, and finally answers that question of who wants to watch a movie on an eight centimeter screen. But for the company that made me reconsider digital convergence, the people that made me inseparable from my mobile phone, the design team that made me require more of my technology, the iPad was terribly disappointing.

While it’d be easy to say the iPad was overhyped (it was) or that it doesn’t tout any groundbreaking UI changes from the iPod Touch (it doesn’t), these aren’t the disappointments. To be honest, I applaud those choices. Apple doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel when they have an interface they know works, an impressive library of apps and games that already exist, and a landscape of other tablet products that, well, suck. In many ways, the iPad is a good move, and hopefully will get us moving in the right direction. Why the long face then? The truth is, the iPad is most disappointing because it isn’t for me. I’m not the market, and here’s why: sure it has a big touch screen, but the iPad doesn’t do anything my other devices don’t. It doesn’t even do something better than my other devices.

It’s supposed to fill that gap between the smartphone and the computer, right? Well (and this is why I used to hate digital convergence) it doesn’t fill that gap particularly well for people like me. It isn’t a suitable computer for me because 1) I can’t edit on it, 2) it has no input ports, 3) you can’t multitask, 4) the price point and AT&T contract don’t match my wallet or my fancy. But it isn’t a suitable mobile device for me either because A) I can’t put it in my pocket, B) the charge isn’t long enough for serious travel, C) it still requires a computer to add content, and D) I already have a device that can run the same apps, has the same 3G coverage, and fits in any purse. It doesn’t turn-by-turn navigate as well as an in-car GPS, it’s much harder to read and offers fewer books than the Kindle or the Nook, and is much too large to make a convenient phone call. So when I, an extended traveller who would love nothing more than an in-between device that let me stop worrying about laptop theft and international roaming charges, can’t see the point of owning one, you have to wonder with whom the appeal lies.

It isn’t supposed to be a computer, or a phone, or even an e-reader. That’s all well and good, and perhaps I’ve judged the iPad too quickly, but if that’s the case, then what exactly is it supposed to do? If you’re the business commuter who occasionally looks at a photo, might like to read a book or watch a movie, and really needs to edit spreadsheets, then the iPad is for you. Since Apple hasn’t given me a reason to need the iPad like I need my iPod, then it’s going to be up to the developers to provide the impetus. Perhaps this was Apple’s plan all along, since the app store has singlehandedly carried the iPhone through competition. In that regard, it isn’t a bad plan at all, but as it stands out-of-box, the iPad is for people like my father, like that girl that always takes the Red Line to the last station, and for the the grandparent that, when it isn’t masquerading as a digital picture frame, uses the iPad to play FIFA with their grandchildren. Maybe it does fill the gap between computer and phone for these people, maybe your answer to “do I really need another device?” is a resounding yes, and maybe mac developers will come out with a trillion different uses for this thing that deem it indispensable. All of this is possible, I don’t deny. Only, right now at least, the iPad doesn’t do much for me.

On my plate: delicious vegetable pot pie from wee feast

Back by popular demand, I’ve got another batch of words of wisdom to help you cultivate the right attitudes for change. Check out my first post on mantras to live by to get started on the subject.

1. What you do everyday is more important than what you do occasionally. (via Gretchen Rubin)
It’s so easy to burn out on change, whether it’s a lack of willpower or a commanding pace of life, so when all seems lost, remember that what you do every day is way more important than what you do every once in a while. The everyday actions are the things you’re really committed to, the things important enough to make it into your already crunched day. These are the things that stick with you. If you’re going to make a change, don’t focus on being able to deadlift 150kgs, focus on lifting every day. Change starts on a much smaller scale than we think, just as the small routines we complete have a much larger impact than we might have imagined.

2. Shoot for the stars, you may land on the moon. (via my dreamy nature)
I’ve always said this phrase to explain to people why I’m such a dreamer. I think big and you should too. Really big. Expect to get there. It will seem absurd to everyone else, but when you aim for the big fish, you inevitably end up somewhere cool, regardless of whether you catch the whopper in the pond or not. Don’t be afraid to overshoot or to aim high. How else do you wind up on top? Ask yourself what really makes you and the greats of the world different, and you’ll be surprised how often we scale ourselves back instead of letting ourselves be big picture thinkers.

3. Make no apologies. (via Ross Wells)
I’m not ashamed of who I am and what I do, and even someone as infallibly confident as myself often makes too many apologies. Ramit Sethi calls it the “Eeyore effect”, I call it “youtube syndrome,” but anyway you slice it, overapologising is no good. Creative people often fall into the trap of apologising when they miss a post or the sound is bad or the focus off. I do the same thing. I used to regularly kowtow a world of “sorry”s when I sent a newsletter out too close to the end of the month. Don’t. Just show up with what you got and make punctuality or presentation or production value or whatever your private area for improvement. Not only will most people never notice, but you end up putting your best foot forward. I did a documentary shot entirely in noisy, crowded, dark restaurants all over Los Angeles. Sure the picture was grainy, the noise floor was higher than heaven, and the subjects hard to understand, but what are you going to do when you know your shooting conditions suck? You go with your gut. You do your best. You make no apologies.

4. You can’t eat the meat until you kill the cow. (via Outlandish)
It sounds like something Dr. Phil would say, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You do have to walk before you can run if you don’t want bruises on your face, but the old adage is so much more than that. Once you’re ready for a steak, it’s really easy to start thinking about how you’re going to get it. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, if you want the meat you have to kill the cow first. So before you grow livid wondering where the steak life promised you is, pop in Bread and Barrels of Water until you remember that you haven’t killed the cow yet.

5. As in the beginning, so in the middle, so in the end. (via Danielle LaPorte)
It’s a Buddhist proverb I’ve heard before to describe infinite nature, but Danielle LaPorte gave it a whole new meaning for me. In her regular appearance with Mark Kelley on CBC, she spoke about trusting your intuition and your first impressions when it comes to business. While I do believe humans can change, I agree that most of us are unwilling to. If someone comes off as rude at first, they generally continue to be rude and are still rude when you decide to stop taking their rudeness. As it was at the start, in those first few seconds you thinsliced the situation, so it usually ends up being. Stop fighting the things that are unchangeable and changing what you can: in LaPorte’s case whether you work with them, in Buddha’s case how you look at the world, and in your case too.

A bit of a preview of coming attractions straight from the heart of my own creative lair and into yours via the interwebs. Get ready, unlikelysquiggle.com is about to get an overhaul.

On my plate: “clash of the snacks” — chips with salsa, chile con queso, and quacamole, homemade bean and cheese nachos, onion rings and taquitos, blonde oreos, pretzels, and bagel bites, all washed down with a margarita and a Cowboys victory (not to mention Perseus and Laurence Olivier saving the world from a gaggle of angry Greek gods)

Let me tell you about my views on the smartphone five years ago. Five years ago I was carrying around a rucksack everywhere I went that held my mobile, my palm pilot, my digital camera, my mp3 player, my TI-89 calculator, plus a paper agenda with my to-do lists, important documents, and maps, a 3.5″ hard drive and enclosure, a spindle of CDs for my car and a bundle of charging cables. Five years ago I toted around eight different objects on a daily basis with a combined weight of 8.5kg and still eschewed the idea of an all-in-one device.

Why? There were devices of that variety on the market, including the Blackberry and Palm Treo which dropped two years prior, many of which could have lightened my load, yet I was convinced none of them could do a series of combined tasks successfully. I required that the quality of my pictures, the features of my PDA, the speed of my data transfer, were maintained to the point that I ran the risk of back problems from a heavy bag in order to accommodate my digital needs.

It’s fairly insane to consider carrying around so many devices today, especially given my travel-heavy lifestyle, but at the time it was considered normal for tech-heads like me. It’s not because I was so gadget-lusty that I needed to try everything, and it’s not because I was so tight-fisted I wouldn’t go out and give the Treo a go, but it was that five years ago you couldn’t find a mobile device that did everything I needed it to. There was no device on the market that could give me cellular service, keep my calendar and contacts, take decent pictures, play most of my music, calculate differential equations, hold copies of my presentation, or store my data, let alone play videos, back itself up, or sync to my email account. Heck, there were hardly any internet-ready devices in the market at all five years ago.

Now there are numerous devices that perform multiple functions, and not only do them, but do them well. The camera on the Droid is better than my point and shoot camera was five years ago. 16GB of storage has never been so light or so sturdy as it is today. Cellular data coverage has become so popular you can use it as your primary source of the internet. These are equally insane times, but in a different way. People have finally jumped on the smartphone bandwagon, everyone keeps talking about digital convergence, and the projections that everything will move up to the cloud are in unanimous agreement.

Today, while rumours about the Apple tablet closing the gap into a single, everything device, I think people are too optimistic. It could be done, but the reality is that what I want in a device and what you want are going to be different, and both of us aren’t going to want a whole bunch of extras taking up system resources, adding bulk to the thing, and cluttering the interface. I still agree with my opinion five years ago: the all-in-one quality device will never exist. Just as you’ll never be able to grill steaks in a soup pot, the iPhone will never take pictures or videos as well a DSLR or an EX1 without ceasing to be an iPhone. The Nexus’s 3G coverage will not be as high-performing as a cable modem anytime soon. You still can’t watch TV on your phone on the bus. The Kindle can’t adequately display vivid National Geographic images. So yeah, devices are still specialised, but it’s okay. As much as I’d like it to be, my smartphone is not my computer, but it can do almost everything I need my computer for yet fits in my pocket and has a longer battery life. I can take pictures, edit them, and upload them to flickr. I can ad-hoc a live video broadcast that is automatically geotagged. I can ask this piece of metal for directions to “Roy’s Donut World” and it’ll get me there. I can play football with my mates or answer my work email from Amsterdam or write my own app for something that can fit in my pocket. That’s really incredible, and what’s more incredible is that none of it existed in a pretty, little, usable package five years ago.

The technology might have existed, but what’s really changed is the overlap between devices. Phones used to have atrocious calendar functions that didn’t sync to your desktop, but have you tried to get a PDA that doesn’t come with a network carrier contract? The old-school palm pilot of yesteryear has long since been swallowed up by more advanced smartphones. It’s not just smartphones that have evolved either. Canon’s new line of cameras can shoot full-size 1080p HD video and still function like the kind of quality still SLR camera you’d expect from the company. You can control your Sonos music system from your iPod touch and stream Netflix to your and your friend in a different city’s XBoxes.

It’s not just the devices that have evolved, but the way we use them. The ability to link up your social networks, to have the websites you read pushed to one location, to automate everything from file storage to television viewing is widely accessible. You can take a device that has great capability and customise it to meet your exact needs, without having to pull a linux and hand-code everything yourself. The idea isn’t to make one device to rule them all, because a gamer will never want the same things in a device that a business executive will. The idea is to increase the overlap and make everything play nice, so that instead of carrying around eight devices, you only need to carry one or two light, energy efficient, globally connected objects. If I’ve gone from a back-breaking rucksack to a single pocket’s worth of space and weight in five years, just think of where we’ll be in 2015.

On my plate: ambiance and miso-glazed sea bass with house-made sweet chili sauce, nishiki rice, and baby bok choy from TenPenh. The complete meal consisted of vegetarian spring rolls with three dipping sauces (including black vinegar and spicy sesame), the sea bass, five-spice chocolate cake a la mode, and a surprisingly delicious mocktail with cranberry and pineapple juice, sprite, and passionfruit puree. All in all a worthwhile venture. Long live Restaurant Week.

My greatest fear in life is that I won’t be able to do the things I want to do. Maybe it sounds familiar to you, maybe it sounds kind of superficial, but the truth of the matter is I’m one of those few people that puts my long-term goals before much else. So, good as I am at accomplishing life goals (I’ve managed to finish 22 in the last 18 months and accrue over a dozen new ones), I still feel I’m selling myself short. I hate the idea of uni-tasking, especially when my list of life goals are so tantalising and exciting, yet every time I try to overdo it, no matter how detailed my plan of attack, I always burn out. We are just not used to implementing large-scale, long-term change or remembering more than 7 things at once; it just isn’t in our hardware. So, if you’re going to tackle a long list of areas you’d like to improve, you have to understand your limitations. Almost every self-help, personal development, and lifestyle design guru will tell you to narrow your range and pull your focus to one thing at a time, an approach I’ve spent my whole life fighting only to find it’s actually the best way to get things done. They tell you in great detail how to organise your list or how far away to put your deadlines, but no one ever explained to me why you can only chase after one habit right now. I never found a compelling enough reason to deviate from my do it all at once approach. Well, now that I’ve experienced some success at the unitasking method, I thought I’d let you know a few good reasons why you can really only do one thing at a time.

You know what happens when all the emails in your inbox are marked high priority? Not only do they all become equally unimportant, but you lose faith in the whole priority system. On top of that, it makes it so much easier to close your mail if you have 26 things you consider urgent instead of one nagging thing you needed to get done. The same thing happens when you try to tackle too many areas at once. The things you really want — to start a garden, to visit Paris, to run a marathon, whatever your goals — become lost in a mass of too many things, and it becomes overwhelming and far too easy to just turn your back on the stuff that matters to you most.

Moreover, life is hard enough. You’ve got to pay the bills and wash your garments, feed yourself and show up on time, and still find enough hours to sleep well and unwind so you don’t breakdown the next day. That’s nearly too many things to worry about already, never mind the limits on your money, your time, and more importantly your energy. You’ve only got so much energy, attention, and willpower to give, so you need to be ultra-discerning where you spend it. As much as I’d like to wallow every second of the day in my dreams, the truth is I have to go to work and I have to do my dishes and I have to sort through the mail. If I tried to learn more Japanese characters AND try new recipes to improve my cooking AND do 50 crunches every day, I wouldn’t have time or energy to go to work, do the dishes, or sort through mail, and I’d be in pretty hot water come the 31st. So instead I pick one of those things to work on, and make sure I can still function as a human being when I’m not quizzing myself on Kanji.

This is key. I’m not saying you should put stuff you don’t care about, like laundry or hoovering your carpet, before your dreams. I’m saying you need to take care of yourself first. You need to know your rent will be paid and your stomach full before you can worry about owning an Aston Martin. This is because you need to bring your A-game to make a change. You can’t be recovering from a stressful week at work and a bad head cold and expect to still hit the gym every day to start that new routine. It’s going to take an intense amount of energy to turn your dreams into reality, and you’re going to need a stable foundation to grow from, so recover first and hunker down second.

And it will take a surprising amount of energy. There will be lots of inertia to overcome, lots of emotional baggage and circumstantial barriers to surmount. It might be stressful at times, but these are dreams you really want, right? The effort should be worth it. Bottom line, you can’t put the same amount of effort into everything. You’re going to have to be a nazi about time drains, constantly asking yourself “is this really what I want to be doing right now?” You’re going to have to take the guesswork out of it when you reach that vital fork in the road: french fries or fruit? This is a lesson I learned from polyphasic sleep. I’ve always had trouble getting up in the morning, and though my goal was to adapt to a polyphasic schedule, when my alarm went off four hours after I fell asleep I seemed to conveniently forget that goal. I learned not to trust my 6am self and instead rely on my 6pm self to take away all my 6am self’s decision making authority. It wasn’t that I lacked discipline or motivation, it was that getting out of bed when you’re in desperate need of REM took more energy than my groggy, sleep-deprived, un-showered self could muster at sunrise. I did it though, because polyphasic sleeping was something I wanted, and it was worth every rough early morning. You have to know what you want, and concentrate your energies on getting it.

The really fiddly bit is that there will always be more things you want or need to put your effort into. Your trough will never be empty, your to-do list, never complete, so in the constant stream of desires and duties accomplishing anything feels rather anticlimactic. To combat the sense of futility that lets us give up on our dreams of having the Rock’s six pack or Linda Hamilton’s ass in T2, you have to find a way to make accomplishment satisfying. If you celebrate adopting an exercise regimen the same way you revel in returning a library book on time, you’re throwing a kink in what could be a huge motivator. Fulfilling your personal goal is not the same as finishing a household errand, so make that distinction as clear as possible and be clear about what really is a victory. If you aim for too many victories, they won’t be worth throwing a party for.

How do you pick which victories to aim for, then? I’m convinced most abandoned new years resolutions are due not to a lack of realism, but a lack of priorities. What really matters to you? Don’t answer right away. I’m not asking what you want off your plate right now, I’m asking what really matters to you. Make two lists. On the first list write down what you spend your time doing, starting with the piece that eats up the largest chunk of your time. On the second list write down what the most important things are to you. Compare. Is family your top priority yet you spend the most amount of time at work and playing golf with your buddies? Is travel your number one on the second list but keeping house the number one on the first? You don’t have to drastically redesign your life and hack the soul out of your time, the idea is to make you think about the relationship between where you want your priorities to lie and where you show the world they do. Perhaps the two need reconciling?

Okay, that little exercise was slightly unfair. Sometimes it is hard to even accurately judge such lists because certain tasks carry a heavy psychological weight we’re pretty good at pretending doesn’t exist. There’s that one thing you’re procrastinating that might even be a tiny, trivial task, like mailing a form or stopping by the DMV, but the longer you put it off, the greater the burden it becomes. Yet, in your brain you rationalise it, thinking it’s such a little thing that surely putting it off another week couldn’t do too much harm? WRONG. ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Just as having time isn’t nearly as important as using time wisely, the best judge of tasks and priorities is actually their emotional impact. Once you figure out the weight of each goal, then you simply tackle the one that’ll have the greatest emotional impact. It’s easier said then done, I know, and not just because quantifying your emotions comparatively is tricky, but because then you have to actually followthrough and take on that task, no matter how painful it may be. It might be painful, and it’s going to be hard, so if you try too many difficult things at once, you won’t have the emotional capacity to followthrough.

That’s of course the trickiest part, the followthrough. I could write a whole book on how we spend so much time planning and making lists and dreaming but rarely do we ever do. It’s not easy and there are many real barriers (like being unemployed) and many fake barriers (such as lacking discipline), but the reality is that pursuing your dreams is hard. That’s why you have to tackle them one at a time. If 16 burly footballers come at you, the goalie, simultaneously each armed with a soccer ball, you’d be the next Edwin Van Der Sarr if you could stop them all. Why? Because your dreams require all sorts of different things from you. Being well-rested requires you sleep in yet making breakfast every morning requires you to get up early, and while not all of your goals will be in direct conflict, they will all require you to, well, dive in different directions to get them. Unless you’re Van Der Sarr himself, trying to pursue all those various dreams at once will overwhelm you and probably cost you the game. So focus on one footballer and block that one ball. Focus on one dream so you can actually followthrough.

There’s a bonus in all of this though, because by concentrating your effort onto one individual task you A) find a focal point, a central aim about which you can obsess, let passion overrun, and inject excitement back into your life, and B) forget all about whether or not you fail and instead do. Even if the process of pursuing your dream to get free of debt means you won’t be seeing as many movies in the theatre as you’d like, the relief you’ll feel at being in the clear is far greater than any disappointment you could muster at missing Sherlock Holmes.

So do yourself a favour. Recover before you tackle anything, clear your plate and define your real priorities, make the right thing the only thing, remove the biggest emotional burden first or give yourself the biggest break first, but most of all, only do one thing at a time. That’s more than enough. Life is tough enough already.