Author Archives: Johan Ho

I’m now 26! The age just keep ticking up. I’m not sure if I like that. I still haven’t finished BioShock that I bought last Christmas, and it’s almost Christmas again now… where has all my gaming time gone! Well I’ve played a lot on my Nintendo DS, so it’s not as if I haven’t played anything I guess. I did finish Metroid Prime 3 and Mario Galaxy (that I also bought last Christmas), so it’s not too bad I guess.

By the way, there’s a new DS now, the DSi, with slightly larger screens, camera, SD card support, and support for downloadable content. It got rid of the GBA slot though. It’ll still support DS games, but there will also be DSi-only games later.

It’s out in Japan now, but won’t be in Europe before next year. Since I’m going to Hong Kong, I guess I could get one. But I actually already bought and installed a new touchscreen for my old DS fat! (The old one was scratched up and awfully inaccurate.) The new one is working quite well, and it’s a joy to be able to look at the screen without having to try and look past all the scratches! So I still don’t really need a new DS. (I also skipped buying the DS Lite.)

I had a few friends over for my birthday, it was kind of nice. We ate dinner, talked a bit and played some games: “Ta 6″/”6 Nimmt” and Cash’n Guns. “Ta 6″/”6 Nimmt” is called Category 5 in USA I think, which is why it looks different on the webpage that I linked to.

My friends were kind of skeptical to the games in the beginning, but I think they enjoyed it after we started playing! Both are kind of simple games without too many rules and strategy requirements, so it wasn’t too hard to learn.

Still haven’t quite been able to get into a routine of working out… I need to make it a routine somehow in order to keep doing it. Right now I’m only doing it when I “have time” and “feel like it”, which is to say once a week plus/minus. I’m considering trying to get myself up earlier in the morning to do exercise. But seeing how I can’t even get myself up for eating breakfast, I’m not sure how feasible that is… I want to go to bed earlier too, but I’ve always got too much things to do! Not that having things to do is necessarily a bad thing, although I still wish I had less things to do. Then I might’ve been able to finish BioShock, for one thing. Ah well…

I guess I’ll try going to bed now. Or soon. Writing on my blog hardly counts as essential I guess.

My old website died, and I haven’t even had time to resurrect it. Since they added banners on that site, maybe it’s just as well to leave it dead… And because some of the contents has been mirrored here, I might as well continue using this site! I turned on commenting on this site too. (I had previously disabled commenting here because I wanted people to comment on my other site instead. So much for that.)

I recently installed the Windows Live Messenger 9 beta, and though I didn’t really use it much, it came with Windows Live Writer, which I actually really liked! It’s basically a blog editor which lets you post blog posts in a word processor-like editor. I’m even writing this post using this program right now:

The best thing with this program is that you can just paste photos and images into it (like when using Microsoft Word), and it’ll take care of uploading the photo and making thumbnails for them. And you only need the YouTube URL to embed a YouTube video clip into the blog post! So it’s really nice free program from Microsoft, which makes it a lot easier to write blog posts quickly. Maybe I’ll post more stuff on my blog now. Which nobody reads anyway. Well, I guess I’ll be using this as kind of a diary, so that in the future I can look back and see what kind of silly things I was thinking back in the good old days when we were still using 2D monitors for computing and we had to write using our hands.

Chrono Trigger was released for the DS. Just listening to the opening music is so nostalgic… It’s the first RPG I played, I think. Below is the PSX (and DS) version of the opening movie. (SNES version of the opening for those who wants the 16-bit goodness instead.)

I tried out Ubuntu Ultimate Gamers Edition 2.0 on my laptop. It had lots of free 3D FPS games, I didn’t realize there were that many for Linux, and they actually look quite good! And the desktop GUI came with Compiz, which is basically a large set of (mostly useless) fancy effects, like shaking your windows around and having fire/water/glittering effects when you do various things like minimizing your windows and opening programs. Here’s a random video I found of this OS:

The worst part of it all is that even with all these effects, and running it from a DVD (it wasn’t installed on my PC), it still felt rather a lot more responsive than Windows Vista.

I really need to get rid of Vista and install XP instead.

By the way, if you see any typos, it’s because my wireless keyboard is running out of battery and letters seem to not always show up when I press them.

Haah, seems like I just don’t care much about updating my website anymore? Over three months since my Hong Kong post! I guess I’m still not quite used to having less spare time because of work…

I also feel that this website loads very slowly, so I’ve been thinking about moving to some proper blogsite… But I haven’t decided yet, so I guess I’ll still stick with this one for now.

I’ve tried to list the things I’ve been doing since my last (proper) update, click “Read more” for the list.

A list of somewhat noticable things that I’ve done, roughly in the order they happened, would be:

• I bought a new phone, Nokia 5300, also just recently bought a 2GB memory card for it.
  
• Easter camp – and a lot of time for planning it! I made booklets and name tags, and drew the logos. I’m actually quite satisfied with how the logos turned out, although the “glutinous/sticky rice ball” logo was kind of… plain. The last day before camp I stayed up till 4am to work on the booklets. And there were still some errors in it…
  
• Met Lorna and Patrick (and Tone) when Stephen was visiting before the Easter camp. It’s kind of disappointing that I see them so seldomly even though we live in the same city… Also I feel kind of bad for having them “take care” of Stephen and even picking up Man Jai while I was busy preparing for Easter camp. But I think they had fun, so I guess it’s OK. Probably. In case you read this, Lorna and Patrick, thank you!
• I finished Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, also bought Red Steel. It’s not a great game, but it’s OK, and it was half price, since I bought it with Rayman Raving Rabbids, two (mediocre) games for the price of one. I gave Rayman to Enoch as a birthday present.
• Went clay pigeon shooting with Trygve and the youth group. In the last “contest” before we left, I hit 5 out of 6! But I was aiming all the time rather than lifting the gun after the clay pidgeon was shot, so it wasn’t “properly”. Also my shoulder was kind of sore afterwards. But it was quite fun!