Sushi is good!
Author Archives: Johan Ho
Last week was another “busy” week. The week before that was a bit more lax, though I can’t quite remember what I did at all, except that I spent most of Saturday 5th on making the incredubilous (this is not a real word) SCCC youth leaders clock:
The biggest problem with this clock is the fact that the photos have different lighting, making some people rather colorful while others are pretty pale. I was too lazy to try to adjust this though, since I had enough trouble looking up photos and fitting them into the numbers.
Sunday 6th was “open house” at my parents’ house, with some of the new Chinese/Asian students that moved to Norway for a year or more. Actually, I don’t think any of them were from China, but some were Singaporean, some were from Taiwan and a couple were from Hong Kong. Talked a bit and ate a lot, then played some “Fantasi” (a miming game) with them, it was ok fun!
Playing games! By the time I started taking photos, most of the new people had left.
On Monday I went to play some board games with Leon, Vilhelm and Enoch. We played a newly bought game called Formula D, which is a racing board game, where you have to try and go through a racecourse as fast as you can, but without going too fast through turns, otherwise you’ll end up damaging the car and eventually breaking it. You have to decide when to gear up or down, with each gear using different dices with higher or lower numbers. And you can only gear up one gear at a time, meaning that once you’ve braked down, you’ll need more time to go to the fastest gear again… Still, even with this strategy element in the game, it’s still a dice-based game and you can pretty much lose just by having bad dice throws. We’ve only played the “basic” version so far though, will be interesting to see how the advanced version plays out!
Tuesday I went to donate blood. Didn’t experience any trouble at all. Except for the fact that they had lost the form I gave them when I went to the introductory interview several months ago, and I had to fill out a new form and go through a (quick) new interview. And that the woman in charge of my blood donation didn’t put the needle in properly, so blood didn’t come out. But other than that, I didn’t get sick or nausious, so I guess I was still lucky. Got a nice salt and pepper duo mill! According to the webshop it would’ve costed 299NOK! Pretty cool. 🙂
Wednesday we had the SCCC youth bible study. I was supposed to cook, but when I was trying to fix the clock (that I made on Saturday), I found out that I had kind of broken the clockwork when I was taking the clock apart. I ended up spending too much time trying to fix the clock, so I didn’t get enough time to buy and cook enough food… just cooked all the frozen pizza I had bought before. Ah well, at least I got to clean out the freezer a little bit. (Even though there’s still lots of dubious plastic boxes in the freezer.)
Thursday I helped out painting the outside walls on my apartment building. It was mostly the same neighbours as last time when we washed the walls, they said that lot of people never bothered helping out at the “dugnads“. I hardly ever see any of the neighbours at all, except for the ones I’ve worked together with at the dugnads. It didn’t take too long to paint in any case, with 4-5 people, and it looks a lot better now that we’ve covered up the dark spots!
Friday I went to the Chinese Jubileum Concert in Oslo, part of the Chinese Culture Festival arranged by my mother and her partners/friends. I have to admit that I’m not really very interested in culture at all, but the dancing and kung fu parts of the show were pretty fun to watch at least. I have to admit that I fell asleep at the part where they sang Mongolian folk songs (sounded like a mix between yodeling and laughing). I did better than last year though, when I fell asleep for probably almost half of the show…
Saturday was Elizabeth’s confirmation. I managed to squeeze in some time on Friday to buy some gifts for her. Ate lots of food at the party, and talked a bit with the other youth. Played some games too. Other than that they had speeches. I fell asleep during the second or third speech. It’s hard to listen to people talk! Tried playing with my tiny cousin’s Diabolo, it was pretty fun, although I don’t think I’ll buy one anytime soon. He tried to teach me and my brothers a few tricks. Apparently they’re pretty “in” at his school now. It’s good that kids still like to play with real toys too, and not just video games! 😀 Yeah I’m not really one to talk. Hurr.
Oh, I finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time! One down, many to go. Hmm, what to play next… I don’t really want to start on Fallout 3 because it’s a “sandbox” game, so I feel like it’ll take a long time to play through… saving it for later. Maybe Prey… Or some of my Wii games. Man, I hate Megaman 9. The end stages are hard! But I will defeat you! One day.
Sunday we had a guest speaker, Martin Goldsmith (Norwegian page. Strangely enough, I can’t find a good English page about him, even though he’s an international speaker), a jewish Christian born in Germany. He was a pretty nice old man, and gave a speech about how the churches in the western world have gotten smaller, while churches in Asia, Africa and Latin America are growing bigger and bigger. And that we Chinese Christians born in foreign countries had a big advantage in missions work, because we are used to adapting to different cultures! Yeah mission work is important… I would need to work on the talking with people part for something like that though. I wouldn’t mind being more of a background worker. Nothing wrong with that!
Oh, almost forgot again, but the reason for the title of this blog post, is that I just spent an hour or so buying random stuff on DealExtreme. I tend to do that from time to time. But I should head to bed now, so I’ll refrain from listing some of the funny things I found there, or what I ordered. Good night!
Last week was pretty “busy” so to say. Wednesday I went to church to play board games with Vilhelm, Enoch and some of Enoch’s friends. I played horribly bad though, probably because I was tired from being superbusy at work. My colleague at work had the day off, and of course everybody had to have tons of problems just that day, making my day rather miserable from walking around helping people with everything.
Fun! Also, nobody expects this card!
Thursday we had our youth meeting as usual. Friday I went to IKEA with Elin, Leon, Minh Thu, Stella, Vilhelm and Timothy to buy stuff for the youth room at church. Bought a clock, some decorative items and some kitchen utilities. My brothers then went to my house for playing games and watching movies, it was kind of nice. Watched Ong Bak, which really was pretty much like any Hong Kong action movie, with some funny slapstick stunts and a couple of pretty cool fighting scenes. Except everybody spoke Thai.
Saturday evening we went to an uncle’s place to eat dinner. There we watched an old Michael Jackson movie, dubbed to Cantonese. Luckily they hadn’t dubbed the songs. But the movie was more of a music video, or rather, a bunch of music videos strung together. Still kind of funny seeing Michael Jackson turn into a futuristic car, a giant robot and then a spaceship.
On Sunday the youth were in charge of the church service, and we had Trygve come to preach. In the evening I went to my parents’ home to eat “Vietnamese spring rolls”, or summer rolls as it seems like it’s called, according to Wikipedia. We had chicken and shrimp and wrapped them with peanuts and various vegetables, then ate it. It was pretty good!
Photo taken from Wikipedia, not from my actual dinner.
Oh, and finally, this last weekend I finally got tired of my N95 having troubles with old software left on the memory card that I couldn’t install or uninstall, so I reformatted the memory card, and eventually also my phone. My biggest problem with the whole process was that when I copied my MP3 collection back to the memory card, the phone hung on trying to update the music library! Even after leaving it on “Updating library” for the whole night didn’t do anything… After a couple more reformats, I eventually found that if I connected the phone in “Music player” mode and then copied the songs over, it would automatically add them to the library, without needing to reupdate it afterwards. Unfortunately I had tried to make syncing work in Windows Media Player, and it seemed like Windows Media Player messed up a lot of my MP3 tags… So I had to go through my library and retag a bunch of songs. But at least I got to clean out a lot of other tag errors that had been there for a long time (mostly wrong artist names).
After that, I simply set up Wi-Fi and then resynced my phone with GooSync to get all my GMail contacts and Google calendar events back on my phone. GooSync is an excellent service and I think it was really worth it buying a Lifetime subscription from them! Other than that, I’ve been reinstalling lots of apps on the phone. I also found a lot of new apps that I didn’t have before, but which are pretty sweet:
- Youtube mobile
- Skyfire – a new web browser for mobile phones, seems to work pretty well!
- MDictionary – a free dictionary with several language packs to download. I installed the English/Swedish and English/Chinese (simplified) dictionary
- Pixelpipe – I used to use Shozu for uploading photos to Facebook from my mobile, but now it’s not free to download anymore. But Pixelpipe seems like it might even work better than Shozu, since it uses Nokia’s builtin sharing function. Haven’t tested it yet though.
- I also installed a lot of apps from Nokia Beta Labs, like Ovi Maps (the newest Nokia maps application), a magnifier program, a program for geotagging my photos, and various others.
Yeah, instead of bloating this blog post any more, I guess maybe I should just write a separate blog post with the N95 apps I liked the most. Later. Should head to bed, I wanted to go to bed earlier today, but I ended up spending too much time on installing mobile apps, writing this blog post and also adding album art to my MP3 collection… There’s just never enough time in the evening to do all the stuff I want to do.
I also spent some time today playing through The Path with the rest of the game characters. I got this game from a Steam weekend deal, 10 indie game pack. This game isn’t really much of a game, but more of an, uh, story. A visual novel, so to say, except there’s very little text. Honestly, I don’t really think I was able to enjoy the game that much. It’s an “interpretation” kind of story, where everything in the game is symbolism for things in real life, emotions, growing up, those kinds of things. But I guess I’m the kind of person who prefers shounen stories, where things are mostly straight-forward, fight the bad guys kind of simplicity. Well, it was kind of interesting getting to know the girls’ personalities through their thoughts in the game, their descriptions on the website and their fictional LifeJournals. But I doubt I’m going to try and play the game much more, with all the other games waiting for me to play through them.
Anyways, bed.