Sup, Man? – Of Bad Jokes, Nokia OVI, Earth Hour, Spanish, World of Warcraft, and My Band

My original intend of this post is to pen down two quick and rather short announcements for my regular readers – you.  Then my mind wanders, as always.  And I think I do have this whole bag of mundane little insignificant what-I-have-been-up-to updates that I too wish to share.  Besides, if you are a regular, you must have a very high tolerance of a long wall of text, loving the pain of reading so many words from an Internet browser.  And I must not disappoint with just 2 bullet points.  Yes?  Si!

On Website Contents Sales: OK, part one of my previous post was meant to be an April Fool joke (and part two was a real life account of one that played onto me).  I do have people coming up to me concerned about my mental health.  Oh well.  I suck at making jokes, period.  To be clear, between you and me, I am not going to deliver the DVD or Blu-ray disc to you on April Fool’s day, next year.

On Nokia OVI: You all know how much I love to use Nokia OVI to jazz up my website.  They have rolled out a new version (codename Fishbowl?).  It’s very pretty.  In fact, if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can check out this particular post.  The not-so-good news is that this new Fishbowl has caused quite a disruption to all my previous (and future) posts as most of them are not working.  As of today, I have about 40 blog entries that use the old Nokia OVI slideshow flash player displaying close to 1,000 photos.  Redoing the entries and re-uploading the photos in reverse order (don’t ask) seems like a lot of work.  Let’s see which one of these events happens first: Nokia OVI gets fixed or an alternative comes out from nowhere.

On Earth Hour: Some are curious on what I did during the Earth Hour.  Yes, light was off, candlelight was out, and if it was a girl, I would name her … OK, jokes aside.  I was at home.  Everything was off except my refrigerator.  And time flew by so quickly that before I knew it, it was 9.30pm.  The stars were so beautiful.

On Spanish:  Yes, Cynthia and I are still going strong on learning Spanish.  Our teacher is stunningly attractive, vividly chatty.  At the end of the last lesson, she asked, “Have I been using enough Spanish during the class?”  To be honest, with her strong accent, I couldn’t tell if she was speaking Spanish or English.  Either way, I don’t understand.  Either way, she sounds lovely.

On Holiday: Paris or Barcelona?  We are still contemplating.  I know Paris inside out and the airfare is much cheaper.  Then again, we’ve learned Spanish so wouldn’t it good to try it out in real life?

On the Band: Ever since our public performance at The Heeren, everyone in our band seems to have run out of steam.  So, what’s up this year?  Apparently our band manager has sourced out an opportunity to perform inside a rather posh restaurant.  And because of this, we have an urgent band meeting this Easter to brainstorm on what we should be playing for this event.  I reckon song lyrics like “this raging heart, this fire in my soul, you hurt my preciousness I erase your face” probably won’t fly in a restaurant.  So I propose to rewrite my own lyrics to “this pounding heart, this fire in my pants, you are my preciousness I adore your face”.  What do you think?

On Gaming: Yes, once a gamer, always a gamer.  These days, Cynthia and I have spent more time inside the World of Warcraft than a Cathay Cineplex.  And I got Mark (or Darkspore) back into the game too, after his 2 years of hiatus.  All of a sudden, our guild is growing, ahead of the stock market recovery (I often think that gaming industry is recession-proof).  People ask if I feel bored playing the same game for years, since 2004.  Well, it is like a game of basketball or football, it’s more than just passing the balls around.

On Digital Jukebox: Besides going into dungeons and slaying dragons, much of my evenings and weekends I spend time on ripping my audio CDs into a lossless format (flac) and store them into my brand new network-attached storage device.  All thanks to Mat and TK and their irresistible temptation.  I am hopeless when it comes to technology and I am lost when it comes to audio formats.  TK introduced me to EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and as the name suggests, it is a pretty neat tool to create an exact copy from a CD.  But 15 minutes per CD?!  TK is a perfectionist.  I just want to get over and done with ripping my 800+ music albums.  I think I must have ripped more than 100 albums as of today, using Media Monkey (3 minutes per disc).  And the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle for the completion of my dream digital jukebox is on its way from US (time for me to tempt TK to spend $$).  I am excited.

On …