It was lunch time. As we were about to finish lunch, Leng told me to get her some ice cream. As I got the ice cream from the freezer, I noticed that is was almost empty and informed Leng about it. She said she haven't touched it and recalled it was more than half full since she last ate ice cream. During that week, we have noticed that Dareen, Dani and Danyl was coughing. So we said, "Who ate ice cream without telling us?" Nobody answered. I said, "Don't tell a lie, who ate the ice cream?". Then I saw Dani and Dareen whispering things to each other. After their short talk, Dani look at me and said, "Um.. Maybe it was me?" Then Leng blurted out, "Daddy, lets check the hidden camera and see who really ate the ice cream!" After a few seconds, Dani said, "It was me... I think I was sleep walking!"

It was sleeping time. As I was preparing to perform our nightly ritual of brushing Dani and Danyl's teeth and washing them up, I notice someone had bitten a thing (that wasn't supposed to be bitten--I forgot the thing). Furious, I stepped out the washroom. While showing the thing in my hand, I said, "Who bit this thing?!" Nobody answered. I called again, this time raising my voice."Who bit this?!". Then Dani answered, "I don't know..." After thinking for a while she said, "My teeth doesn't work!" (that's because she don't have her two front teeth). Then in the corner of the room, someone raised her hand slowly--it was Danyl.

They say nothing comes close to freshly baked homemade bread. I usually bake about 2-4 loaves of fresh bread a week and I have been doing it for several months now. With the use of a KitchenAid™ mixer, bread making is simple and fast. The photo on the right shows a finished product. When I started rising the dough, the dough was just a little more than 1/3 the depth of the loaf pan. From my experience, you would get nice results if you follow some of these tips (but you risk the warranty of your mixer):

• Mix all liquid ingredients by hand using a wire whisk (Unless you have a lot of liquid that the included wire whisk of your mixer can mix it--you'll know what I mean).

• Add all the flour at once, leaving about 1/2 cup to finish the recipe and always scrape the dough from the sides of the bowl and hook.

• When kneading, mix the flour with the liquids at speed setting 2 until no loose flour exists (about a minute), then mix at speed 4 (or even 6) until dough is smooth and won't stick to your fingers when touched--but still pasty (depending on the room humidity, this is about 2 minutes--don't forget to add the remaining flour during the mixing/kneading process).

When mixing in high speed, the gluten strands are cut short but you still have a lot of it forming. With this, you get good structure to hold the air during rising and will have a fine soft texture of the finished product. Unless you like a heavy, rubbery tough bread, then mix it slowly to get long strands of gluten. Also high speed mixing aerates the dough for a fluffier body (No wonder commercial bread is so soft and airy).

The house is almost empty and we have started doing our house cleaning. We're getting ready to move out! On our way to Phoenix, Arizona--at least its near California. Even if the weather is super hot, we know we'll be settled in before fall this year--by then, temperatures will begin to drop.

We're excited that we had a great deal on our new home. Maybe its because of the "recession" or housing slump that we got a good deal...but who cares? At least we have a bigger house that could handle our growing family and help make work faster. To our new 8 bedroom home... here we come!

P.S. I'm talking about the new Dailychex server colocated in Phoenix, AZ.

Today Dailychex is 1 year old. It has been 12 months of fruitful service since we opened the doors to a select few. We have gone a long way in such a short time.

When we started recording our rank last September 4, 2007 we ranked at 429,449^th place according to Netcraft. During the following months we slipped to 441,572^nd (November 2007) but then gradually moved up. Today Netcraft ranks us at 116,392^nd place. Alexa gives Dailychex a traffic rank of 3,783,859^th place. According to Alexa, we also rank 125,504^th place in the Philippines and 211,174^th place in United Kingdom for traffic. Quantcast ranked Dailychex initially at 8,900,982^nd (January 2008). Today we are ranked at 2,704,190^th place out of the 20,267,977 sites Quantast has on its records.

Since October 11,2007 up to this day, we had 12,797 visits (from 2,219 unique visitors; 5,334 unique IP addresses) and 561,156 page views. That's an average of 43.85 pages/visit. Our average time on site is 11 minutes and 25 seconds. Just this past month (April-May 2008) we have had 2,295 visits which came from 29 countries/territories, 105,363 page views (45.91 pages/visit) and an average of 11 minutes on site.

After 12 months since the first photo was uploaded, have now 29,952 photos on file (most of which are full resolution photos).

To give you an brief technical overview of our humble system, we are hosted on a relatively small dedicated server which has an uptime of 971 days (more than 2 ½ years). The server has a mere 256 megabytes of RAM (far too small for a Photo sharing site or sites with similar traffic ranks) and a total of 40 gigabytes of hard disk space with a 1.8GHz Pentium Celeron CPU. We are running on FreeBSD. Much of our front end applications were written in PHP and our backend applications written in C (we use fastCGI for serving photo images). We are using Apache for our webserver and PostgreSQL as our database backend. Amazon S3 stores most of our data.

This year we made plans for a major upgrade. We have already purchased a new server (waiting for delivery) and have started development of the new Dailychex engine. We'll be running off the new and exciting FreeBSD 7 operating system.

In behalf of the Dailychex webteam, I would like to thank you for your support! Happy chexing!

It was a months before black Friday when I ask (maybe pleaded is the right word) Leng to buy me an electric stand mixer. The big sale was coming and I just got tired of kneading bread (almost daily) by hand. She agreed with a condition that if I could make 10 consecutive bread batches that are soft and tasty--with an emphasis on consistency (during that time I was still experimenting, hence the inconsistencies). Well, 20 batches later, I got my wish! She added that it was a prize for "being good" too (well that's strange, I have always been a good boy).

Using a mixer is indeed very different from making bread by hand. My first product was surprisingly really nice! Really nice to throw! It was as though I was using the mixer to mix cement blobs. But after serveral combinations of techniques and recipes here is what I have adopted. First, I still use a wire whisk to mix the liquid ingredients by hand. It may sound backwards thinking especially with a mixer that could do it, but still I get very good results from manually mixing the liquids and semi-solids. Secondly, I still do a very short kneading of the dough by hand. The kid in me just wants to feel and play with the soft and smooth dough and to do a final tactile check to see if the dough is ready for its first rising. By far, these are the only things I do that gives me great results. The advantages of using a mixer is that it always does the job consistent every time.

Here is my basic bread recipe:

And this is how I do it using an electric stand mixer...

First, dissolve the 1 tsp sugar with the ¼ cup lukewarm water. Add the yeast and stir to dissolve. Set aside until this mixture becomes frothy (just like frogs eggs).

Next, in the mixer's bowl, throw in the salt, sugar, oil and the 1 cup lukewarm water. Mix with a wire whisk until sugar and salt dissolves completely. Then add 1 cup bread flour and mix thoroughly. If you have the Wheat Gluten, mix it until well blended. Then add the yeast mixture into the flour mixture. Mix well.

Now, add the rest of the flour except the remaining ½ cup. I usually add 2 ½ cup all at once. Then secure the mixing bowl into the mixer. Start mixing on speed 2. Mix for about 2 to 3 minutes (or until dough shows signs of gluten strands). After this, I usually scrape the bowl's sides and scrape the dough hook. Add the remaining flour (you may do ¼ cup at a time during mixing to prevent flour from spilling out). Continue mixing for an additional 2 minutes. If dough is sticky to the touch, add more flour (about ¼ cup at a time). I stop mixing when I touch the dough and it doesn't stick on my fingers but is still sticky (hmmm... hard to imagine huh--but you'll know it when you get there). Or stop mixing when the sides of the dough doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl (but at this stage the dough is already semi-hard--good for loaf bread,french bread or soft gluten). Sometimes I stop mixing after a total of about 7 or maybe 10 minutes of mixing. Take note that this time includes the scraping, and placing more flour (which includes scooping the flour, dropping the mixing bowl, lifting it and turning on the switch... you get the idea).

Then using a spatula, scrape the dough out the the dough hook and mixing bowl. Place it on a floured surface. Do a quick knead and shape into a ball. Grease the sides of a bowl with vegetable shortening (not the liquid type, e.g. oil unless you're making pizza!) place dough inside bowl and invert dough to coat all sides. Place dough in a warm place. I usually turn on the oven lights before I make bread, by the time I'm on this stage, the oven is warm and cozy. Let rise for 1 hour or until doubled in volume.

After an hour, punch down dough. Now we're ready for shaping. At this stage I weigh the dough using a digital scale (a must have for consistency) then I divide by either 18 or 24 or none at all if you wish to make cinnamon rolls. If making dinner rolls or buns, shape the dough into small balls. For Pan de sal, coat the dough balls in bread crumbs. Then place the shaped dough into baking sheets. Now, let rise for 2 to 3 hours depending on the dough's characteristics (only the creator would know). Do not overise!!! as it could break a hole on the dough and make it flat, hence hard to eat (unless of course you master the art of making the dough very elastic). Usually after 2 hours, the dough has almost tripled in size. Unless if you're playing on the XBox 360 or watching a movie, then 3 hours will be acceptable. If by this time the shaped dough hasn't risen doubled, then its either you killed the yeast or the environment is not optimal. Maybe the room temperature is cold (or a busted oven light) so then it needs more rising time.

Baking time. This depends on your taste. If you like a soft chewy product, bake at 325°F for 15 to 20 minutes or until light brown (even if its under 15 minutes). For Pan de sal or for a crusty bread, bake at 375°F or 400°F (crustier) for 10 to 15 minutes or until golden brown (even if its over 15 minutes). For normal types of bread like cinnamon rolls, bake at 350°F for 12 to 18 minutes or until golden brown (even if your tummy can't resist the taste and smell). And don't forget to cool the bread on a cooling rack. If not it would turn soggy.

And there you have it, my version of bread making using a mixer. Enjoy!

Tag searching is up. The site wide tag search only works for tagged albums and photos for now--blogs are up next. Only resources that are public and published gets to be searchable. For internal or user specific tag searching, the "My Tags" application is your best bet (found in your toolbox). This app searches all your tagged resources and returns the results by resource type. A handy tool for quickly finding something. Expect some changes along as we integrate site wide content searching. For now, tag 'em.

Internal messaging is now functional. Users could now send HTML formatted messages to other Dailychex users instantly. Our messaging app is still on its basic stage but it packs some unique features. First, you can include a photo with your message--any photo published in the Photo Galleries is a valid candidate. Second, if you click on a photo with the "Use in message" icon, a new message is automatically created and the owner of the photo will be added as one of its recipients. If the owner of the photo is not listed in your contacts list, the system would add it for you automatically. And third, your messages are fully owned by you--talk about total cost of ownership. Once a message has been sent, it is placed into your Sent folder. If you decide to delete it even if other users have read it (and those who haven't), your messages would be deleted completely from the system. So if you have made an error and have accidentally send it to thousands of users, a single cilck would erase all traces of your message in the system. Unless of course someone had cut and paste or copied your message into a new one (like when a user replies to your message).

We have released a new Contacts application in its basic form. Soon we would develop this into a full blown Address Book app in the coming weeks. The new contacts app allows for easy selection of recipients when you email photos, albums or blogs. To populate your recipients list, just click on "Add" to load your contacts list. Then select your recipients by clicking on the check boxes. You may "toggle" your selection and page through your list while still retaining your previously selected contacts. Once you're done, click on "Back to Recipients list" to bring you back to the email app. Chex it out!