A few days ago Jocelin and I had a free evening together, so I asked her what she wanted to do. "Let's practice dancing," she said. (We had been inspired from a wedding we recently went to, where practically everyone was a professional lindy-hopper.) Being the ever-loving, as-Christ-loves-the-church kind of husband that I am, I said, "ok."
I finally got my MacBook Pro yesterday! Many of you know that I've been coveting a Mac for a really long time. But I never wanted to pay the big bucks for one. At the end of last year I found out about a couple of websites that allow you to "win" a MacBook Pro if you complete 18 online "offers", so I decided to give it a try. Some of you know that I've been working on this for a couple months now, and this blog entry is to let you know that it worked! In fact, I found out that my good buddy Weylin and another friend of ours did the same thing and we all got our MacBook Pros yesterday. Yippppeeeee!
Last night we went to the Texas vs. Texas A&M game. Our friends Daniel and Adina got free tickets from work and invited us to join them. It was a great game - a double overtime win for the Horns. HOOK'EM! I hadn't been to a college basketball game since my days in the Longhorn Basketball Band. That would be 12 years ago. Jocelin had never been to a real college basketball game before. BTW, Joce is really a great fan. She cheers when she's supposed to cheer, she boos when she's supposed to boo, and generally just never runs out of energy. The best part about the whole thing is that she's not even a Texas alum! It cracks me up. It's cute. And it makes me love her more.
I consider myself a pretty self-disciplined person. (But then again, who doesn't consider himself a self-disciplined person?) There is one specific situation, however, where I simply cannot control myself: whenever there is an abundance of free food, I will NOT stop eating until I feel sick. I don't know exactly why I do this, but here are a few possibilities:
I'm usually not a very handy person around the house. But every once in a while I'll try to fix something. For example, last week, our portable space heater stopped working. I turned it on, and it started sparking inside (not good), and then it just died. Because I'm stupid, I kept switching it on and off, which kept on making the inside of the heater spark inside itself. After 4 or 5 times of this, it just stopped sparking entirely, which meant that I had successfully killed it. (BTW, in retrospect, the whole switching-it-on-and-off thing - I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish.)
Jocelin and I just finished watching Season One of 24 yesterday. (Yeah, yeah, I know. We are WAY behind.) All I have to say is, NO WAY!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE THE ENDING! (And all of you are saying, I can't even remember season one. That was SO six years ago...) A friend had hinted that the ending had a big twist in it, so I was trying to guess what it was the whole time. But I didn't see it coming. I would have never guessed it.
I LOST BLOG "ENTRY #86 - SWEETNESS"! WHERE DID IT GO? It is nowhere to be found. I wrote it and posted it a few days ago, but now it has completely disappeared. Maybe is has something to do with the web hosting package upgrade I did yesterday? This is so bizarre. Well, I'm not going to rewrite the blog. It wasn't a very good one anyway...
Last night was the first night Jocelin and I have slept in the same bed since 12/22. No, I wasn't in the doghouse. We got to Hong Kong on 12/23 and stayed with my parents in their apartment. Bedrooms #2 and #3 are literally 50 square feet each, so you can't fit anything larger than a single bed in them. So one of us would sleep in the room and the other would sleep in the living room. And then when we got back on 1/2, Jocelin was sick so we didn't want to sleep in the same bed. Normally we wouldn't care, but we were going snowboarding on 1/11, and we didn't want me to get sick. And then on the ski trip, we were separated because we were chaperoning the Austin Stone college kids and in charge of our respective condos.
This will be the last entry of my Japan and Hong Kong travel journal:
1. One thing I forgot to mention in my previous blogs was that I really wanted to watch the Cowboys vs. Eagles game on 12/25, which would have been at 6:00am on 12/26. We were in Hong Kong, where finding NFL broadcasts is really difficult. Somehow I was talking to my uncle about this, and he told me about PPStream, a streaming media application that people in Asia use to watch live sports broadcasts, USA Network TV, movies, and tons of other shows. Apparently, there is alot of satellite TV in Asia, and people get satellite TV on their computers. Then they open up their computers and broadcast the shows over the internet. The more people watching a show, the faster the streaming for everyone else. Anyway, we checked the online TV Guide (yes, they actually have scheduled programming), and found out that the Cowboys game was going to be available. So I set up the software on my computer. When it was time for the game, I logged on, and there were 331 other broadcasts at the same time! Of course everything was in Chinese, so I couldn't read a thing. I had to search through a ton of programs before I found the correct broadcast, but I was fortunate enough to catch the entire game - on my computer! The resolution wasn't super, but it was good enough to where I could see everything when I filled my entire laptop screen. And after the initial buffering, there weren't any glitches or delays in the broadcast. It was pretty smooth. I was impressed!
Sorry I wasn't able to update the website with a more timely blog entry, but the earthquake in Taiwan on 12/26 totally shut down the internet in Hong Kong. Here's a pretty funny article on how my fellow countrymen (and women) were feeling "depressed", "hollow", and "so sad" about not having internet access. I felt the same way, so I went shopping to ease the pain. We are geeks, and darn proud of it.
1. People spend alot of time commuting here. Even though distance-wise things are really close, it takes at least 30 minutes to get anywhere. You have to walk, take the subway, and then walk again to get to your destination. Remember how I mentioned in Travel Diary #3 that the Japanese people kill time by surfing the web on their cell phones? Not so here. Instead, people have Playstation Portables or Nintendo DSses. We saw tons of these on the subways.
A few days ago Jocelin and I had a free evening together, so I asked her what she wanted to do. "Let's practice dancing," she said. (We had been inspired from a wedding we recently went to, where practically everyone was a professional lindy-hopper.) Being the ever-loving, as-Christ-loves-the-church kind of husband that I am, I said, "ok."
I finally got my MacBook Pro yesterday! Many of you know that I've been coveting a Mac for a really long time. But I never wanted to pay the big bucks for one. At the end of last year I found out about a couple of 
Last night we went to the Texas vs. Texas A&M game. Our friends Daniel and Adina got free tickets from work and invited us to join them. It was a great game - a double overtime win for the Horns. HOOK'EM! I hadn't been to a college basketball game since my days in the Longhorn Basketball Band. That would be 12 years ago. Jocelin had never been to a real college basketball game before. BTW, Joce is really a great fan. She cheers when she's supposed to cheer, she boos when she's supposed to boo, and generally just never runs out of energy. The best part about the whole thing is that she's not even a Texas alum! It cracks me up. It's cute. And it makes me love her more.
I consider myself a pretty self-disciplined person. (But then again, who doesn't consider himself a self-disciplined person?) There is one specific situation, however, where I simply cannot control myself: whenever there is an abundance of free food, I will NOT stop eating until I feel sick. I don't know exactly why I do this, but here are a few possibilities:
I'm usually not a very handy person around the house. But every once in a while I'll try to fix something. For example, last week, our portable space heater stopped working. I turned it on, and it started sparking inside (not good), and then it just died. Because I'm stupid, I kept switching it on and off, which kept on making the inside of the heater spark inside itself. After 4 or 5 times of this, it just stopped sparking entirely, which meant that I had successfully killed it. (BTW, in retrospect, the whole switching-it-on-and-off thing - I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish.)
Jocelin and I just finished watching Season One of 24 yesterday. (Yeah, yeah, I know. We are WAY behind.) All I have to say is, NO WAY!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE THE ENDING! (And all of you are saying, I can't even remember season one. That was SO six years ago...) A friend had hinted that the ending had a big twist in it, so I was trying to guess what it was the whole time. But I didn't see it coming. I would have never guessed it.
I LOST BLOG "ENTRY #86 - SWEETNESS"! WHERE DID IT GO? It is nowhere to be found. I wrote it and posted it a few days ago, but now it has completely disappeared. Maybe is has something to do with the web hosting package upgrade I did yesterday? This is so bizarre. Well, I'm not going to rewrite the blog. It wasn't a very good one anyway...
Last night was the first night Jocelin and I have slept in the same bed since 12/22. No, I wasn't in the doghouse. We got to Hong Kong on 12/23 and stayed with my parents in their apartment. Bedrooms #2 and #3 are literally 50 square feet each, so you can't fit anything larger than a single bed in them. So one of us would sleep in the room and the other would sleep in the living room. And then when we got back on 1/2, Jocelin was sick so we didn't want to sleep in the same bed. Normally we wouldn't care, but we were going snowboarding on 1/11, and we didn't want me to get sick. And then on the ski trip, we were separated because we were chaperoning the Austin Stone college kids and in charge of our respective condos.
This will be the last entry of my Japan and Hong Kong travel journal: 
Sorry I wasn't able to update the website with a more timely blog entry, but the