Monthly Archives: February 2009

I was going to write a blog post, but ended up spending most of my time writing the 16 random things thing for Facebook. So I’ll just post that here.

1. I get up 5.30 in the morning to do devotions and exercise before leaving for work. (Only on workdays though, on weekends I get up 8, or later if I go to bed late.) Because of this I try to go to bed 10.30, but it’s not so easy…
2. I still use the old, silvery Nintendo DS (the DS fat as some people call it). The touch screen was very unprecise for a while, but I replaced it. (I actually bought a replacement touch screen online, disassembled the DS and replaced the monitor.) I believe the touch screen, the special screwdriver and shipping cost roughly 5 USD in total. Instead of buying a new DS for over 100 USD.
3. I like curry! Although when people ask me what kind of curry (Chinese, Japanese, Indian), I don’t really have an answer.
4. I like ice cream! I actually bought an ice cream machine. While it’s not cheaper to make ice cream than to buy it in bulk, it gives me a chance to test weird stuff. Like wasabi ice cream.
5. When I write SMSes, I always use correct grammar, with full words, punctuation with spaces after them, capitalizing the first letter of new sentences. Then once I reach the 160 character limit, I start shaving away words, rephrasing sentences and removing spaces where applicable. I do this even though I have 90 free SMSes every month! (And I’m nowhere near being able to use it up, since I far prefer MSN and e-mail over using the mobile phone for any communication!) It’s kind of a bad habit.
6. On MSN I’m a lot slacker, leaving out capitalization and using netslang abbreviations even though I type 10 times faster than on the cell phone. But then again, I write 50 times more text on MSN than on mobile phones, so I guess it’s okay. (I still use correct punctuation and grammar on MSN most of the time too.)
7. I check my e-mail several times an hour as long as I’m home or at work. But I usually don’t reply to personal messages immediately anymore. I only reply immediately if someone asks me a simple question or request of some other sort. Some people have reacted when I reply to their e-mails/Facebook message 10 minutes after they sent it. The problem nowadays is that I seldom get time to sit down and take time to reply properly on personal e-mails and Facebook messages, I only do once a week or every other week…
8. On that note, I now almost use Facebook messages the same way I use e-mail. Since they include the message text in the notification e-mail from Facebook, I can archive those notification mails, meaning I can actually see and search those messages in my e-mail. The big drawback is that I don’t get Facebook messages that I write to others back to me on my e-mail…
9. I actually kind of like to cook and bake, but it’s hard to get time. Maybe if I move out again. But then again, when I lived with Leon in Trondheim, I did get a bit tired of cooking, and ended up just woking together random stuff for dinner most of the days.
10. I don’t actually eat so much candy and snacks… I bought several bags of candy when I was traveling a few weeks ago, but I still haven’t finished them all. And yet, somehow I seem to have eaten snacks almost every day the last few weeks, because they’ve been giving out cake and chocolate and cookies for various reasons at work, and also on youth meetings, etc.
11. I use my mobile phone mostly for music, checking time, wakeup alarm, and playing games when I want to pass time and for some reason or other can’t or won’t play on the DS. I also use it to look at my e-mail and surf the web when I don’t have a computer. And I now use my mobile phone as my only photo camera when travelling. Calling and even sending SMS messages with my mobile phone is only done in emergency situations. (Well, not really, but it’s close.)
12. I kind of like playing board games and video games, but I’m usually too lazy to think many steps ahead, making it hard to win in the more strategic types of games. In single-player video games it’s okay, because I can just try again and again untill I win. But in board games (and also multiplayer video games) I can’t really use that kind of tactics to win…
13. When eating sweet things, I prefer that they are cold. (So I like sweet cold drinks/desserts more than the warm sweet congee stuff that Chinese people eat sometimes.) And when I eat hot/warm things and meals, I prefer that they aren’t sweet. (I never order sweet and sour sauce, and I prefer not to have pineapple or other fruit in my food. Don’t really like tomato either, actually.) I still enjoy eating all of those things though, it’s just that I wouldn’t order those things when I’m ordering my own food.
14. I feel uncomfortable when I am unable to keep a conversation going with a person. That’s why I: (a) don’t like to be alone with another person unless it’s a person that talks a lot/is good at keeping a conversation. I  generally prefer to be in a group of people rather than alone with someone (b) hate talking on the phone (c) try to avoid people in general.
15. I keep are plushies on my bed. But my bed is rather narrow, so I ended up squashing them together at the foot end of the bed. They probably smell like my feet by now. There’s my Kon plushie, my polar bear plushie that I’ve had since I was a child, also my Dan tat pillow (although it’s not a plushie I guess). I also have at the side of my bed a Sasuke pillow that I got dirt cheap in HK, and a cushtie pillow. It’s supersoft and squishy!
16. I was unable to think of 16 things in one go, so I had to make a document and write it little by little. Good thing I didn’t have to write 25. But man, do I write a lot whenever I am able to think of a topic… =/

I was in Gothenburg on 7th – 8th of February, met a few friends and played games with them. Also had some gymming, apparently all of us are are lazy bums who can’t even run for 5 minutes without needing a break. Should’ve taken a photo of us lying on the floor! Anyway, photos:

Met with Connie, been quite a while since last time… Right now she is in Japan now with her boyfriend! Lucky people. I wanted to go to Japan too. Stupid passport rule. 🙁

Eating at Jensen’s Bøfhus. I had “flankstek” or something. It was kinda sour, not sure why, didn’t really expect that. But it tasted okay enough, and was a bit cheaper, which I used as an excuse to also pay for the soft ice cream buffet, which wasn’t really that cheap. But I had 5 glasses of soft ice cream with various toppings, so I probably can’t complain, even though the glass was kinda small.

Spent almost the whole last week on trying to fix my uncle’s computer, in the end I ended up wiping it and reinstalling Windows. (After backuping his data of course.) It kinda works now, but I’m still not sure if the hard drive is quite okay, since Windows still has some weird issues. Well, as long as it doesn’t break down, it should be okay. I guess.

Oh, after I used my external hard drive to backup his files and copying them back, the power adapter stopped working. It’s a weird proprietary power adapter too, so I can’t just replace it with any common power adapter. Their support said they’ll send me a replacement for free, but they’re out of stock, so it won’t be sent before March. I guess it’s a pretty common problem… Maybe next time I’ll just buy a mini HD without power adapter. *sigh*

Didn’t do anything special for Valentine’s day besides going to my uncle’s house to finish up some stuff on his computer, and playing computer games when I got back home. My family went to visit some family friends on the day afterwards though, so I played some Wii games and card games with the kids. Also watched most of Alvin and the Chipmunks, although the movie was so cliched and predictable so I didn’t bother watching the end, and went to play some Wii instead. Misin, Minh Thu and Vilhelm came and joined after a while.

Dancing is fun!

Oh, I also tried making different ice cream types. First I made apple ice cream, which was okay. Then wasabi ice cream, which was just so-so, but still edible. Lastly I made a triple layer chocolate ice cream cake, but I think I messed up the amount of various ingredients, so it’s kind of bitter and might be too sweet, and there might be too much margarine in the semi-Digestive-cheesecakelike-bottom layer etc. (Because I did look briefly at some recipes on the internet, but since I hadn’t prepared all the ingredients beforehand, I just randomly grabbed whatever I had at home.) That’s just from tasting the mix though, so it might taste better when I actually eat it. Time will show!

Last week I bought a Bluetooth Stereo Music receiver for my N95 at DealExtreme. It cost roughly 120 NOK, for a nobrand product. In comparison, the cheapest comparable branded headset cost around 4-500kr, even those I found in Hong Kong. The one I bought works okay, although it’s very obvious a cheap product. The clip broke after only a few days (I was holding it too roughly while inserting the charging cable, and it broke off). Sound quality is okay, although for some reason the “no-battery” beep sounds off once in a while even after it is fully charged.

The Bluetooth receiver, once paired with my N95, automatically connects to my phone when I turn it on, and I can then use the buttons on the receiver to start playing music and selecting songs. This means I no longer need to connect my headset to the N95 remote, and then connect the remote to my cellphone, thus having one less wire to worry about while walking around. Another good thing about this connector is that the headset itself isn’t part of the receiver, so I can at any time turn off the receiver and use the headset with my DS. There’s also a mic on the receiver, so I can use it for phone calls, but since the clip broke, I’d have to hold the receiver to my mouth while talking. I’m sure it’d look weird, like I’m talking to my MP3 player… I need to figure out how to fix the clip. *sigh*

On Saturday I went with Vilhelm to see a 3D movie, Bolt. 3D as in real 3D, with 3D glasses and depth. It was kind of interesting, and not as tiring as I feared it might be! In face, after watching a while, I hardly thought about the fact that it was in 3D, and once in a while I tried taking the glasses on and off just to make sure that the movie was still in 3D. You could say it is a bad thing and that the 3D wasn’t worth it if I hardly noticed it. But if the 3D was distracting you from actually paying attention to the movie, it would hardly be good either. Still, I’m not sure that paying 120 NOK for the 3D effects is quite worth it. The movie (Bolt) itself was hardly original, it was a pretty generic Disney movie. At least I think the next time I’ll only pay extra to watch it in 3D if it’s a really cool movie, like Final Fantasy: Advent Children or so. I don’t regret going though, just for the novelty of watching a full-length movie in 3D!

Lately I bought a lot of PC games. Uh, they were, on sale. Last Friday, after I bought the other games, I decided I’d stay up and finish Bioshock no matter how long it took me. I finished around 2:30 I think, starting around 22 o’clock. I guess it wasn’t that much of the game left, but before then I had been playing the game one hour at a time every 2 or 3 weeks, which explained why I haven’t finished it yet even though I bought it Christmas 2007… Anyways, here are (most) of the new games I bought:

I also bought Max Payne 2 on Steam, plus I recently discovered GameTap, which lets you play certain old games for free. I started playing Hitman (the first one), which I never finished when I borrowed it from a friend back when it was a new game. Now I’m playing it on easy, just to see if I can finish it… But since I bought a bunch of newer games, I’ll probably play those more. Out of the games shown on that photo, I started with Devil May Cry 3. I the game found difficult at first (it took me what, 4 or so tries before I got through the second chapter?), but after I got used to the controls, I think I really like this game! I usually don’t play many of these kinds of 3D third person “pure action” games, especially since I never got a PS2, which has tons of these. I’m pretty sure Devil May Cry is supposed to stand out a bit from other such games though? Not that I would know. But it is a fun game.

I made a cheese cake on Saturday! It’s orange jelly type. I also put some coconut in the bottom layer. It’s shinily delicious! I even had some for breakfast this morning. Because, uh, it was kind of late, and I was in a hurry, so no time to make sandwiches. Really! There’s still half of the cake left, I should go eat some more.