thomasng [dot] net a nerds life. changing things one byte at a time.

End of week recap Dec 28th – Jan 2nd 2009

Monday Dec 28th – It was nice and sunny outside, but the day was very slow going. The temperature was around 45 degrees, and I had a sore throat in the morning and decided to just stay inside and rest. I really wanted to go cycling and get some more miles on the bike before the year is up. 2500+ miles for the year should be enough, but apparently not enough for me!. Weather.com is predicting a snow/rain mix for Tuesday onwards. I’m hoping they are wrong (as they have been for most of December).

I copied most of my phone pics to Facebook. It’s about time I did that. Thank goodness for the microSD card. I noticed is that the EXIF data is missing on half of the photos- this was rather problematic as I wanted to assign a date comment each photo, so there was some manual labor going through old e-mails and chat logs to find out when some of the photos were taken! There was also something about the phone JPG files that the FB uploader didn’t like. I had to re-save each one in Photoshop to get the JPG headers correct again before it uploaded. That took a better part of 3 hours. I also started to play around with the Facebook Mobile feature the night before. I guess it’s pretty convenient to take photos with the camera phone and upload them directly, but that’s a one photo at a time type of operation. I’d much rather use my small point and shoot or DSLR if i have it on me. We’ll see how much I use this.

My friends finished tagging my Mania Monday party pictures from Dec 21st. I woke up and found 80 new photo tags. There are a lot of pics, and I thank you (John, Clara) for tagging the remaining ones! Jessica blames me for sending a bunch of FB spam. Ha.

I finally made the chocolate chip cookies — almost 30 hours after I said I would make them. The recipe [allrecipes.com] says this would yield 60 cookies. One thing that I realized is that it would yield 60 small cookies. I made 18 small cookies and 20 large ones instead. I figure why make a bite sized one?

I organized my FB Home Cooking album. I also added recipes to some of the captions and updated my recipe folder.

To end the night, I watched Stargate Universe, Episode 10 ‘Justice,’ and Stargate SG-1 Season 4, Episode 10 ‘Beneath the Surface.’ Not a bad way to wind down the day.

Tuesday Dec 29th –
I read my Google Analytics report this morning and it showed someone searching for “Facebook Thomas Ng” – I guess I’m the #2 hit on Google for this term. I’m currently ranked #4 if you just search for my name. The third ranked hit used to be my domain name as well, but it has been bought by some artist. I stopped paying for the .org domain since everything is re-directed to the .net domain anyway. Oh well. One more interesting tidbit: someone visited my website from South Africa!

Random thought: sometimes I feel like Doogie Howser sitting in front of my computer, reflecting back on the events for the day — except I don’t have an old CRT monitor or the 8-bit Doogie Howser theme song playing in the background. OH! Speaking of which, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this if you are a Neil Patrick Harris fan or just a dork (like me).

Hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/watch/53001/saturday-night-live-digital-short-doogie-howser-theme

While searching for that clip, I noticed that Hulu.com has four seasons worth of DH MD online as well [Hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/doogie-howser-md]. I remember watching the pilot episode back in 2004 when I was bored out of my mind studying at the library one day. I think I watched an episode of Duck Tales as well that day. Good times!

I’m gonna get my H1N1 vaccination today. That ought to be fun. I don’t mind needles, but I really don’t think I’ll need the vaccination either. I usually just let my body naturally take care of infection/cold and not take any actual medicine for it. Just getting it to satisfy the parents before I head on over to Shanghai for work for the last two weeks of January. Oh wow, it just hit me: I’m leaving the country in 3 weeks! Ack! I should stat looking for a decent sized suite case to fit 2 weeks of stuff and a winter jacket.

I’m aiming for a mid afternoon cycling ride at 2pm today as well. They are currently predicting a 15% chance of rain, and a high around 38deg. Should be alright for a quick ride around town. Today’s cycling plans currently on standby. Likelihood of precipitation is increasing. We’ll play this one by ear.

Alright, time to start the day.

-T

Updates for Tuesday: It started to snow around 1pm today. 3″ accumulated during the evening. The weather forecasts never said anything about it. I’m sure glad that I canceled my cycling ride. Oh well. I got my H1N1 vaccination. The nurse at Kaiser was quite cute and we struck up a conversation. Too bad she’s taken. :-\ Went to Fred Meyers for some groceries. Slowly drove home in the snow.

I made a snowman in my driveway, a snow angel in the front yard and captured some night shots around the neighborhood with my camera. Apparently I cloned myself in a multiplicity shot as well. Pictures are on Facebook (or on my Fotobook page). All in all, a good day.

Wednesday Dec 30th – I changed out the SIM card in my phone today. After installing the replacement one, it decided to delete all of my sent text messages from the phone, but it kept all of the ones in the inbox. There were some messages that I wanted to keep and didn’t have the chance to send them over to my computer yet. That’s a bummer — oh well, we’ll start fresh for 2010.

Party at my place 6pm. Made fried rice for dinner; had chips/salsa and cookies for snacks. Played Blokus, and Carcassone with a small skeleton crew.

Thursday Dec 31st – It’s been a really slow start for the day. I’m not exactly feeling 100% and I’m hoping I can thwart off a cold for another few hours. I woke up with my nasal sinuses plugged up and hurting. I woke up around 11am, checked e-mail and went back to sleep for a few more hours. I finally had breakfast at 2pm. The rest of the afternoon was met with vomiting and not feeling good at all. I did head out to urgent care to get checked out. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good night. Since I wasn’t in any immediate health danger, I didn’t leave with the answers that I wanted… I was just instructed to take some ibuprofen and wait until Monday when the surgeons would be back in the office. Ugh. Maybe I should reconsider my health benefit selections for 2011.

I went to the new years eve party at Chantelle’s place tonight. I was the only sober one there and it was freakin’ hillarious. I am glad that I got to hang out with my friends for the new year. I look forward to 2010. It should be exciting and challenging. I resolve to cycle at least 3K miles.

Friday Jan 1st – HAPPY NEW YEAR! I was going to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended edition = 11.5 hours) at Lee’s place, but I’m currently feeling a little bit under the weather. I guess I’ll stay home and spend the first day of 2010 sick. I spent way more time sleeping than awake in 2010 thus far. Currently waiting for clear skies, and green light to return to cycling. Ugg.

Saturday Jan 2nd – I woke up with a nice 101degree fever. I guess it was a good choice to stay at home yesterday. I thought about going shopping so I can make something nice for dinner, but was quickly reminded that I should be in bed and definitely not driving. I ended up making noodles for “lunch” at 4pm, and a tomato with egg dish (didn’t have beef though!) for dinner at 9pm. Ah, 2010… this has been a rough start.