RSS

Author Archives: Johan Ho

Hong Kong tomorrow! Also, I went snowboarding.

I’m leaving for Hong Kong tomorrow! Looking forward to seeing my relatives and to shopping and eating. A bunch of friends are going to Hong Kong too, so I’ll try and meet up with them. My relatives are having a new house built at the village we’re living in, far north in Sheung Shui. They’re not finished yet though, so we’ll still have to stay in the old house that they never use except when we or other relatives are visiting.

HPIM3199 Maybe they’ll even repaint the road sign!

We’ve been cleaning the house the last few days, because people will be staying here during co-workers weekend. Hopefully they don’t mess up the house. I made Enoch sign a paper which said he’ll clean our house if it gets too dirty, so it’ll probably be fine.

Oh, and the youth group went to Hemsedal in the beginning of december! It was kind of fun. I went snowboarding with some others. All us were noobs though, so we all fell down 5-6 times before we arrived at the kids’ slope. Eventually Trygve came and taught us how to not fall so much, before we went to the normal “easy” slope. It was OK fun once I got the hang of it, but I was so sore after only one day that I couldn’t snowboard properly at all Sunday… so I gave up and just took the ski lift up and down a few times (before it got too cold). I also had to take a day off from work on Monday. I probably just need more exercise, since I think I was just mostly stiff, rather than being too sore from falls.

07122008875There, I put it on, did you take the picture yet? OK then, I’m done or today.

I have actually done snowboarding once before, although that was at least 5-6 years ago, and that was also the last time I did any type of wintersports. Wintersport is a kind of pointless activity anyway… what’s the point of going up the hill, and then down again? It’d be like if I took the bus to the end station and then back again, for no reason at all! Taking the bus is even more comfortable and cheaper too… The ski elevator pass cost 610 NOK for the weekend. For that price I could take the bus, subways, trains and route ferries in Oslo for over a month! And I wouldn’t be sore for several days after taking the bus. Man, buses are nice.

 

But anyway, Hong Kong for three weeks! We’re considering going to Disneyland early since it’s cheaper when it’s not a peak day. Then we won’t feel as ripped off when we get bored there because it’s so small! Although we might get ripped off if we eat any meals there and it’s twice as expensive as in the rest of Hong Kong? Or maybe not. I guess it could be fun too! Must think positive thoughts.

image

I actually kind of like shopping now, even clothes to some degree. But I still think there are too many clothes stores in most malls… How many clothes can a person need? I prefer games, electronics and funny stores! Although I still haven’t finished many of the games I bought last Christmas to myself, uh, as a Christmas gift. Right. And I even bought a few more games in London! PC and Wii games I need to finish:

A lot of the games would’ve been finished much quicker if I didn’t always try to look in every corner to see if there are any secrets hidden. It’s kind of a collection mania… I eventually managed to make myself play BioShock a bit without trying to search for helpful items in every single trash can I saw. It was actually kind of relieving… I’ll have to try and make myself play more games this way.

image It’s interesting, but gets boring… Might be more fun if I stop my collection mania.

I’ll try not to buy too many useless things in Hong Kong… although I’ve kind of considered getting one of those ultra-portables that are so popular nowadays… and probably some clothes… maybe try out more various kind of snacks… I probably won’t get a DSi though, since I replaced the touch screen on my DS fat… Anyways I should really get back to checking my luggage and cleaning the house.

 

Posted by on 2008-12-15 in Uncategorized

Comments Off on Hong Kong tomorrow! Also, I went snowboarding.

Photos from Sichuan, also a webcomic about the earthquake

image

Bunch of photos from after the earthquake in Sichuan.

Coco Wang also made a few touching webcomic strips about the earthquake and the rescue operations after the earthquake.

Wikipedia also has a few links to collections of news stories, videos and photos.

 

Posted by on 2008-12-10 in Uncategorized

Comments Off on Photos from Sichuan, also a webcomic about the earthquake

Got rid of Vista, installed Windows XP

Been busy lately, I reformatted my laptop and installed XP on it. It feels a lot less sluggish now! It’s hard to understand why Vista lags so incredibly much doing even simple tasks like opening “My Computer” or using Launchy, which is supposed to be a superfast program launcher. (It is superfast now that I have XP instead of Vista.) But now I have to reinstall and configure all my programs, which is quite a bit of work. I thought I had copied all my program settings, but apparently some of them were lost…

At least it gave me a chance to clean up some stuff, like my address book. Luckily I had a backup of my Thunderbird address book, so I merged it with the contacts that I had already imported into GMail, had to clean out duplicates and make sure the addresses and phone numbers were put in the right fields.

Here’s a screenshot of my current desktop:

image

I actually installed a Vista theme on it, which is why the taskbar looks like Vista. The wallpaper is supposed to change daily, but the scheduled tasks in XP is actually not as good as in Vista, because it won’t run tasks that were missed because my computer was off. (Note that the only reason I dislike Vista is because it’s slow. I actually kind of liked the functionality and even the graphical changes in Vista…) Also I usually don’t use desktop icons (since I use Launchy anyway), but I kept a few icons to test BumpTop.

BumpTop is kind of interesting, but entirely useless, at least to me. It might be somewhat useful for people who has tons of documents and actual use visual cues to recognize them, but I actually don’t have that many documents, and I usually prefer looking them up using their file names. Keyboard navigation is better for your hands too, I’m pretty sure using the keyboard more is part of the reason I don’t get as much trouble with my arm as other computer users do.

I guess I’ll get back to the computer configuration. I think I’ve installed most of the things I use every day by now at least.

 

Posted by on 2008-11-29 in Uncategorized

Comments Off on Got rid of Vista, installed Windows XP