Happy Chinese New Year guys. I live in Hong Kong, China and the new year is celebrated very passionately here by both locals and foreigners. This year is the year of the dog according to the lunar calendar. Chinese New Year is a very big thing in China, much bigger than the New Year we know by the Gregorian calendar. The new year season lasts fifteen days. People all over Hong Kong go and visit relatives and receive “lai see”, little red packets filled usually with money. People wish each other good luck by saying “geng hei fat choy”. Many people go to temples and burn incense to worship their gods and pray for better luck in the new year. Personally I do none of these as I am not Taoist or even Chinese for that matter. I still enjoy Chinese New Year a lot.
Most of the shops are closed during the holiday and the usually busy Hong Kong streets are somewhat empty. There are very few cars on the roads as well. Even the soccer field I usually go to play on has very few people, nowhere near enough to play a game.
I haven’t posted in a while because too many things have happened in a short period of time so I am going to try to write about everything in one day spanning a couple of posts. So let’s start off with the braces I got last Thursday. As some of you may know, I’ve been wearing these retainer things for the past 7 months. On Thursday, those would be nomore and I received my braces. This is my 4th day wearing and I no longer have pain in eating. The first few days was terrible. Biting and chewing was a pain in the mouth, literally. I couldn’t even eat relatively soft foods like mashed potatoes without having to go through some pain. Now I can eat just about anything though I still haven’t tried chewing gum because I’m afraid of it getting stuck to the metal braces or something.
So now I have to go through probably 2 years of wearing braces. Not that it really bugs me. The only problem is that 4 days a month I’m gonna have problems eating. I think that and the fact that braces cost an arm and a leg to put on are enough sacrifice for healthier and better looking teeth. With that line, I can practically advertise braces on TV or something.
I watched American History X last night on TV. The story is simply about an older brother who is a former neo-nazi skinhead who tries to protect his younger brother from going down the same wrong path that he did. Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) returns from prison to find his younger brother, Danny (Edward Furlong), caught in the same web of racism and hatred that landed him in prison. After Derek’s father is killed in the line of duty by a minority, Derek’s view of mankind is altered, but while in prison, he discovers that there is good and bad in every race. The task before him now is to convince Danny of his newfound enlightenment. There are many flashbacks in this movie showing Derek’s life as a rascist and his many actions against non-whites. The movie is actually kind of sad in the end but telling you the ending would just ruin the movie. If you’re not too discouraged by the excessive amount of swearing and violence in the movie, I would recommend you to watch it. It teaches a good lesson and the acting is very good.
By way of TUAW, I saw one of the coolest Photoshop contests ever.
The theme of the “Mike Industries iPod Creativity Competition of 2005″ was to design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs… “Just feature the man we all know and love in a cinematic role, keep your image exactly 418 pixels wide, and insert your entry inline in the comments of this post.” #
There were over 200 entries at Mike Davidson’s blog. My favorites are i,Pod and Finding iPod though all of them are really funny and cool. The winner won a 1 Gb iPod shuffle. Featured here is a resized version of i,Pod, a take on the i,Robot movie featuring Will Smith. The tagline is awesome. Enjoy them all.
I finally received the free iPod shuffle that I ordered two months ago. It’s a 512 Mb version. The shuffle is actually quite a neat piece of hardware. It is small, extremely light, has a very simple design and simple controls. So simple that even two year-olds are going to have white Apple earbuds sticking out of their ears soon (maybe not). I now have two iPods on my computer, my second-generation iPod mini and this shuffle. I use it for obviously listening to music and also to store my data, that’s school stuff and of course Portable Firefox. Although I currently use my 128 Mb USB thumb-drive for data, I might switch to the shuffle (more capacity you know). Anyway the shuffle is great and I hope it will serve its purpose.
