Travel and Gobble

Purple Pad Thai

tinokla — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:29:16 +0000

Purple Pad Thai is a restaurant that subtly boasts of offering authentic Thai cuisine. It is located near Robinson’s Angeles, specifically, beside the 7-11 store there. Actually, finding it was a bit challenging since it’s a fairly small restaurant. That’s why, I was surprised to see quite a number of people dining. Seeing them, I felt excited to have a sampling of their offerings. I was, however, momentarily disheartened after seeing their serving of thai chicken meal. I am a breastfeeding mother that’s why I would appreciate generous servings of my meals. I was also not so satisfied with the chicken. It was dry, thin and plain. I was hoping that my side dish would be enough to make me happy but to no avail. I was definitely still hungry that’s why we ordered Thai Beef Salad and Pork Spring Rolls. These two were the saving graces of that restaurant and I definitely enjoyed every bite. The Thai Beef Salad was sour, sweet, and salty. All those flavors exploding in my mouth are making me come back for more. The Spring Rolls are likewise flavorful. These food convinced me that Purple Pad Thai has a lot more to offer and encouraged me to come back for more.

Eat out at the Central Grill

tinokla — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 09:35:33 +0000

Because of a good friend of mine’s raving recommendations about Central Grill, we decided to test it out last Saturday after our weekend malling ritual. Considering the surrounding bars and pubs in that vicinity, Central Grill in many respects appeared refined and clean. I love its cozy and familial ambiance- suggesting that it is a safe and nice place to dine in. We tried to be on the safe side when it came to our orders- choosing for myself bacon cut liempo, my husband a t-bone steak, and my daughter a pork steak. My liempo was OK- it was not extraordinary- just enough to satisfy a hungry stomach. My husband found his food rather bland. Good thing they had Maggi Savor available. I would, however, wanted to have a bottle of lea and perrins worcestershire sauce nearby… but I did not see any. My hungry daughter enjoyed her pork steak even getting another serving of rice to go with it.
Being a dessert lover, I skimmed the menu for something to satisfy my sweet palate but nothing fancied me. I opted to eat my take-out donut from krispy kreme.
No doubt Central Grill has potential- offering an option for grilled food lovers like me to go to. However, I do want them to put more effort in injecting flavor in their menu. I would go to this resto again but I don’t think it would be my first choice.

Moving into version 0.5, now running on Thematic Framework

olopsman — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 05:42:15 +0000

Finally development has picked up. After getting the previous system ported to wordpress and a turning it to a standard theme. The theme is now on a framework incorporated to Thematic, this makes it more SEO friendly and easily maintainable with support for Hcard microformat. Things are looking better with jquery tabs replacement to support sessions. Alot more updates coming up this weekend.

Dining at The Old Spaghetti House

tinokla — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:29:57 +0000

Pizza and pasta remain to be my family’s top food favorites and so our Saturday mall trips usually include scouting for the best pizza places in the metropolis. Just recently, we ventured into the comfy ambience of The Old Spaghetti House and decided to try out their ‘trio’ treats. These trio treats are said to be good for 2 to 3 persons or for one very hungry person. On our first trip to this well-known resto, we got their best-seller trio which included an appetizer basket, pesto pasta, and 5-cheese pizza. This was among the cheapest of the packages and true enough, it proved sufficient for me, my husband, and my 4 year old daughter. The appetizers were good actually, a little bland for me but nothing like a good pinch of salt wouldn’t fix. The pizza was great. I love the simplicity and rustic appeal of the 5-cheese pizza and so I would have wanted more for myself. The pesto was a bit overpowering that I swore I would not eat pesto for maybe a month or so after that.
For our second trip, we decided to try out the other ‘trio’ packages and settled for the Italian trio.

The Italian included mozarella sticks, carbonara, and supremo pizza. Their mozarella sticks have very subtle flavors, which I do not exactly fancy. I am not a fan of Xtremely Xpresso but their mozarella sticks are actually better in terms of flavor. The carbonara was also screaming salt but the supremo pizza was okay. My 12 year old daughter, who eats like a man (lol), was with us so the serving was scarce- I guess, she alone fits the criteria for ‘a very hungry person’. Anyway, comparing the two trio meals, I’d go for the bestseller– minus the pesto, of course.
Nevertheless, the Old Spaghetti House is promising, especially for dessert-a-holics like me. My heart was screaming for a slice of cheesecake, but to shell out 200+ pesos for one slice seemed too pricey… I would definitely schedule another trip just to have a taste of this imported treat from Philadelphia’s Cheesecake Factory. Anyway, I opted for their other bestseller dessert- the colossal choco-chip cookie ala mode. It took them like forever to make it that we were on the verge of leaving. It, however, proved to be worth the wait because seriously, that dessert was heaven on a plate! The cold and creamy vanilla ice cream blended well with the heat and sweetness of the freshly baked choco-chip. Me and my daughters were literally fighting over the last bite and would have wanted to order more, if not for the long wait. We left the Old Spaghetti House with a smile on our faces and vowing to return, maybe not so much because of their pizza, but for their delectable desserts!

Relaxing Spa and Kapampangan Sisig dinner after a long week

olopsman — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:08:54 +0000

After a long week, finally got a full body massage at Footsies Friendship road, Angeles City, first time to visit the place and the ambiance was right and very relaxing. The masseuse had just the right force to force those stubborn stiff joints to pop. The whole body massage was 300 pesos for 1 hour and enjoy a refreshing hot tea.

After the massage we had a dinner of chicharon bulaklak and the native Kapampangan sisig courtesy of M.S. Grill formerly known as Frank and Jim. Honestly I can say one of the best sisig in town. Just the right amount of onions and alot of chicken liver makes the sisig amazing.

Version 0.4 is up! Add listings directly from WordPress

olopsman — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:40:57 +0000

Finally I have a UI to add content directly and its WordPress powered. This allows easy addition of content with category structure. Still a bit of work though on front end design which would follow the next coming days. Will be adding more new content daily starting today while improving the UI and features.

Hello WordPress! Version 0.3

olopsman — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:53:01 +0000

I just ported the social directory system to be a WordPress Plugin, there are still alot of hooks and crannies that needs to be completed. I decided to go the WordPress route as the development on the site has become to slow. With the new framework I could focus on the application instead of trying to recreate everything. Looking forward to keep this site updated.

Just updated codebase to version 0.2

olopsman — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:48:18 +0000

Most of the features are for the administration side, which allows the admin to add more listings through a GUI, plus restructuring the schema to allow many to many relationship, this will allow more features to be easily developed. As with restructuring the ERD comes adjusting the codes to the new fields, adjusting the file structure, etc.

Have some items on the todo list, enable account creation again, enable survey and rating submissions plus more information for user profiles.

So basically a good start and hope to get more items done by the end of the month.

And will add more listings as we go.

Project Travel and Gobble – New Life

olopsman — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:01:51 +0000

Finally got some time and inspiration to revive this project. I took on this project a couple of years ago to tests and improve my skills and the development phase was build as I go, now I feel more confident with my skills and methods now that I feel I can finish this project with what I have envisioned it in the first time conceptualized. I disabled most features and started back to the core again.

Version 0.1 = August 20,2011

The site is in beta, I deem this new overhaul though as the start of something better. Listings is still manual by the admin and needs a better GUI and lots of improvement on usability.

Alpha phase = previous look from Feb2010-July 2011

Google Maps added

olopsman — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 05:32:26 +0000

Added simple Google Maps with geocoding, working fine but issue is that the address in the directory are not being loaded correctly. We want the data to be as reliable as possible. If you are the owner of the business and is fully aware of the latitude and longitude of your business please contact us here.