Author Archives: Johan Ho

I was in Stavanger last weekend to attend to the ceremony for Stavanger to become an official church (not sure if it’s the exact correct wording, but, uh, something.) Also visited a few friends there. It was nice! I posted a few photos of the ceremony at http://blog.sccc.no, but I actually never took any photos when I was with my friends… ah well. Elisa’s (and John’s and Janey’s and Cecilie’s and their parents’) house in Stavanger has gotten quite nice now, I believe the first and second floor is finished now? Most of the work left is in the basement, which we didn’t visit this time. John was apparently in London when we were there. Oh, also I met Henrik and Thomas.

Ah, I recently started using Feedly, which is a Firefox addon which works as a frontend for Google Reader. I’ve been using Google Reader for a while to keep an eye on various news sites, without actually having to visit each site. But while Google Reader just lists the articles with their titles and eventually a short summary, the interface in Feedly greatly improves on the usability by showing the news feeds in various ways. You can just list the news articles like Google Reader, but you can also show them magazine style with the title, summary and a photo from the article (if any), and you can also show a grid of just the photos, then move the mouse over articles to read the title, and clicking on them to show the full summary.

The drawback is that many Norwegian newspapers don’t have photos in their RSS feeds, but I found that NRK and TV2 have it, I’m using those now instead, as you can see in the screenshot. I’ve also recently added my friends’ blogs in Google Reader, so it’s easier to see when they post new blogposts. Works great! But not many of my friends actually have blogs, or not that I know of, or that is updated in the last, say, year or so.

I’ve played a new board game called Agricola two times now. I think I really liked this game, although it’s quite tiresome to plan so much ahead! Basically you play a family in some farm, and there are lots of things you need to acquire before the end of the game, in order not to get minus points and also to get higher score at all. Some examples are grain, vegetables, sheep and cattle, but also resources like stone, wood and others in order to build upgrades to your farm. But the number of turns you can take is actually quite limited, and also each action can only be done by one player each turn, so if you want to do something specific, like sowing grain and vegetables in your field, you’ll have to make sure you do it before someone else does it. We plan to play it at the church with the youth group this Sunday. It’ll be fun. I hope.

Now for something completely random: The many visions of Johan!

Okita Sougo vision	Disney Digital 3D vision	Disneyland HK 3D vision	Sunglasses vision	Dantat vision	Owlovision

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!