Author Archives: Johan Ho

Went on a five day cruise with my family in May, with Royal Caribbean‘s Vision of the Seas. Apparently there was a problem with diearrhea onboard the ship on it’s last few trips, and even on our trip there were 75 people or so who got sick, although we were lucky enough not to get sick or see anyone sick. The biggest difference for us was that we on the last few days of the trip weren’t allowed to get food from the buffet ourselves. Instead there were a bunch of staff stationed near the food to hand out the food we wanted.

The cruise went to Zeebrugge in Belgium and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. From Zeebrugge we took the train to Brugge (I think) where I took a few photos to make this panorama:

Also bought some cheap Belgian chocolate (factory-made instead of the more expensive hand-made ones). In the Netherlands we went to some Chinese supermarkets and visited our aunt. Other than that, I spent most of the time eating buffets, going to the shows and playing Dominion and other board games with my brothers. This time we only went swimming once, but I actually climbed the rock wall this time! Don’t have a photo of me climbing, but have some of Leon. Also had some Ben&Jerry’s ice cream (not free). The shows were almost exactly the same as last year, only the singers and dancers were switched out! It was still pretty entertaining to watch I guess. And one of the new guest artists was a juggler, Niels Duinker, that was pretty fun!

The last photo is of the “world parade” thing where they showed off all the countries that the staff came from. I tried using TiltShift Generator to make it look like a photo of miniatures, it looks kind of cool in the thumbnail, but not as good when zoomed in I think.

Last week we painted the outside walls on my parent’s house twice (two coats), such a bother… but finally finished! Also put up wallpaper in Vilhelm’s room. Luckily I didn’t have to join the painting, which Leon and Vilhelm did by themselves, since they don’t have school or work during daytime anyways…

On Saturday last week we had a cake baking day at my parents’ house, made some quite delicious cakes! Ate some of them and brought the others to the church the next day. Also watched the Eurovision song contest. The funniest part was actually the Spanish entry, where some random dude jumped up on the stage to join the dancing. And got escorted away by security. Well I guess Madcons song with the flash mob dancers was somewhat interesting too. The winner’s song (Germany’s song) was sung by a girl with a weird English accent. I’m not saying my accent is much better, but it was kind of strange listening to it. Oh well, congrats either way.

Ice cream cake woohoo!

Yesterday we had the annual church barbeque party. Ate some meat. Saw some swans. Had a nap under the sun.

Today we went to MegaZone with the alpha group, it was pretty fun. Although my team lost. I went from 7th rank overall in the first round to 4th overall in the second round though. W00t! Next time maybe I will even run around for more than 5 minutes before getting too tired in my knees. I tested taking some photos with RetroCamera, which turned out pretty cool. But the photos are just too low quality… so I guess I might uninstall it, maybe try FxCamera a bit instead.

Still haven’t beat Final Fantasy XIII. There just isn’t enough time to play, especially with all the painting last week. Maybe this week… I mainly want to beat it before Metroid: Other M comes out, but since it isn’t even announced for Europe yet, I guess I probably will have time. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is coming out soon, but I never got all the stars for the first one so I’m kind of hesitant about getting it. But seeing that it got a score of 98 on MetaCritic really makes me reconsider! Maybe I’ll buy it when I’m in Stockholm next weekend. Yesh, going to the Final Fantasy concert June 12th! Looking forward to it.

Been playing a lot of Aquaria lately!

It’s a beautiful 2D/sprite-based Metroid-like exploration game. You’re a mermaid with amnesia who can swim around and “cast spells” by singing, when you sing you pick out a sequence of 8 different notes. Although you don’t actually get many actual spells, most of the spells are for transformation into different forms, with different powers. The first form you get is the “Energy form”, which shoots homing energy beams. You get new forms as you go through the game, and the powers from each form allow you to go to places that you couldn’t access before. The graphics are, as I mentioned, sprite-based, but pretty detailed and vivid. Not everything you meet are enemies, there are lots of fish, crabs, dolphins, turtles and other creatures you might expect to find in the water.

I played the demo probably several years ago, but never got around to buy the full game before now because I had so many other games that I hadn’t finished playing yet. However, I bought this game as part of the Humble Indie Bundle, which lets you buy Aquaria and some other indie games for whatever price you wanted, and part of the money goes to charity. As of writing this there are still 7 hours left, so you can still buy it cheap!

Have gotten to the “missions” part/chapter in Final Fantasy XIII, finished the first 17 of the missions and also mission 36 or something. Now I can finally use the chocobos! It’s just way too much running around back and forth in this chapter, having a chocobo helps at least a little… They’ve made some funky chocobo music.

Also I’ve been trying to settle in at the new apartment. My parents brought me to IKEA where I bought a mini computer desk that could fit inside the “closet” in my bedroom. (It’s actually just part of the bedroom separated by some sliding doors.) So now I’ve got a computer workplace at least! Also bought a shelf/rack thing that would fit in the corner of the closet, so I didn’t have to try to balance all the boxes and bags on top of each other like I did before. I have also set up my stuff and posters in my room pretty nice now I think.

I got an old Toy Story wall lamp from a friend of the family, he had originally planned to throw it away since none of his teenage sons wanted it anymore. Hurr hurr. The reason it’s hanging on its side is because I’ve just used tack-it to stick it to the wall, and when I hanged it the correct way it would always fall off after a while. So now it’s partly hanging from its cord and partly from the tack-it, so it doesn’t fall down.

Had “dugnad” at church last Saturday, only Vilhelm, Tina and Stella showed up to help with the painting. Minh Thu and Lisa cleaned out the Youth group closet though. We still almost managed to finish painting everything. The bigger problem is that one of the paints was the wrong color… we ended up painting it anyway, but it’s pretty apparent that it’s wrong. Well I guess it might still look a bit better than when the wall looked partly burnt and discolored. (It was the part of the wall which was covered with heaters, but we changed to new, smaller heaters.)

Oh, I installed XBMC on the computer connected to the TV, it’s quite sweet! It scans through your video collection and downloads information about the movies and TV shows from internet, so that you can browse through them like browsing through a catalogue of movies, with cover art and movie descriptions. And for TV shows it will automatically download episode descriptions. So you can look through the description in case you forget which was the last episode you watched.

(Note: The screenshots were taken from the XBMC website, it’s not from my computer.)

You can also install plugins to do various things, there are a bunch of plugins for showing videos from popular websites, like Youtube, Gametrailers (this one didn’t work for me though, but some other gaming websites worked), National Geographic to mention a few. Also there’s a plugin for downloading subtitles. And I installed one for showing Bleach episodes directly without predownloading. Although I don’t really follow the anime since I read the manga.

Hum yeah, so that’s all for this post. Apparently a month since the previous one. Actually almost none of the friends that I’ve subscribed have kept up their blogging, I guess exams might be part of the reason. Good thing I don’t have any exams! Now is vacation time!

Haven’t been able to take time to blog in over a month now. Main reason is that I spent most of my free time on trying to finish Bioshock 2 before Final Fantasy XIII arrived. I just barely managed to do that by playing till 2-3am the night before I got FFXIII. After that most of my free time was spent playing Final Fantasy XIII. Then I had to pack up everything in my apartment because I moved to a new apartment in the end of March (the new apartment doesn’t even have internet yet…) Lastly I went to Easter camp.

Oh, I wrote this before, but Bioshock 2 really is quite an atmospheric game. The story is not the standard “kill the bad guys save the world” FPS games. The part where you play as a Little Sister, showing the roseypainted world view that they see is pretty amusing.

Final Fantasy XIII is quite different from the last Final Fantasy game I played (which would be IX, not counting the DS games). The battle system has changed considerably, and while many people joke about it, there is actually some bit of strategy involved in using the paradigm shift system. Although even then it’s usually not much deeper than ATTACK – ATTACK – DEFEND WHILE HEALING – ATTACK AGAIN. Well I guess it was the same in the old Final Fantasy games, so maybe nothing really changed. As for the story, I guess it’s pretty much standard JRPG fare? SPOILER ALERT: Emo people with exaggerated personalities to compensate for their insecurity. Then they have to overcome that in order to work together to try and save the world.

And yeah, it does render a lot worse on the XBox 360 than it does on PS3. On some of the cutscenes, I can clearly see video artifacts. I haven’t actually seen it on a PS3, but everything I’ve read states that the PS3 version should look a lot better. Shucks. Well it beats paying 3K NOK or so for a PS3 just to get the game there, when I already have tons of other games I haven’t played yet. I still plan to get a PS3 some time, uh, so I can watch Bluray discs. *cough* Man it’s nice to have a job and not having to pick just one console and stick with it. 😀

The new apartment is nice, and a bit newer than my previous apartment! But right now I don’t have an office space because my bedroom isn’t big enough for a desk after I put my big bed there, and Leon is staying in the other bedroom where I put my desk. That’s not really a big problem for now, since I don’t even have internet there yet. I mostly just leave my laptop in the bag so I can easily bring it to either my parents house or to church for internet use. Oh, I haven’t yet taken a photo of my living room after I cleaned it up, so I’m just showing a photo of my bedroom (with a small view of the balcony outside).

Easter camp was nice, we had an overnight prayer meeting the day before camp, and I surprisingly managed to stay awake for most of it. Mainly because most of it involved standing on the floor singing worship songs (without chairs at all). But when we went to the campsite, I got too tired and went to take a nap around 19:00, and then I slept through the first session (which was mostly information) and worship untill I got waked up by Leon around 21:30. Then I slept again around 22:00. Myeah so I guess I should’ve tried taking a nap during mid-day when we didn’t have anything to do… but I strangely didn’t feel tired then. Oh well.

Most memorable thing I learned from camp was the first session, about the spiritual dry that we get after a while after going back home from camp, and how this shouldn’t discourage us from doing Gods work or keeping in touch with him. The other sessions were about different ways to keep contact with God: prayer, fasting, image prayer, and some sort of meditation. (I think.) I hope I’ll manage to take myself time to try them out more later, but for now I feel like I haven’t even had time to stay at home for more than a few hours each day because there’s so much stuff I’ve been doing after work. Kind of annoying. Ah well.

Other than games, moving and camp, I’ve also had a few dinners with friends. Invited some over to my house, then went to Jessie’s apartment for steak and New Super Mario Bros Wii. Two-player is reasonably fun, although I can imagine the pushing and chaos increasing with more players. Also Yve visited my new apartment in Easter week, and I also went to her house to help her parents get TV sound to their newly acquired surround system, and watched Star Trek there. The surround didn’t quite work for some reason, I think the back speakers were too low volume, didn’t manage to fix it though. Yesterday we also went to Enoch and Elin’s house to celebrate Enoch’s birthday. Lots of good food! And played some party games together. Also mafia. I died early because the detective (Enoch) lucked out checking me and another mafia at the beginning of the game. Bah.

And that’s another ton of text from me. I really should try going over to microblogging. Twitter maybe? But then again, this stuff is partly written so that I hopefully in the future could look back and get some overview of what I’ve been doing in my life. So I guess it’s fine like this. Now if only I could find a good way to backup all those posts… Maybe I’ll just have to write a program to brute-force itself through the blogsite and copy the text and images. Harr.