Archive for January, 2004

Nagi Toro

That’s the chopped Tuna belly sushi that usually comes in a Temaki – coned hand roll sushi.

city’super, a local upscaled supermarket, is now selling Nagi Toro in passed blocks that look as if they were cut out whole from a Tuna. At about HKD$30 for a block of about half the size of the middle of a palm, it’s relatively a steal considering a whole non-chopped piece could run several hundred HK dollars.

That’s assuming they are freshly chopped from leftover pieces of cleanly cut and handled fresh Tunas.

Bouns

When one views “Chinese” DVD-9 discs, one gets “bouns“.

Sometimes colorful artistic digital squares. Sometimes automatic digital freeze frames. Sometimes 2 Mandarin audio tracks when 1 Cantonese and 1 Mandarin audio track were clearly printed on the cover. Sometimes subtitles that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie on the disc whatsoever. But more appropriately, when one is really lucky, one also gets the “extra” clips that come as bonus with the original legit disc which are listed as “bouns” on the disc menu.

That’s what we get when we borrow those discs.

Update

My extended Chinese New Year holidays is almost over. It has been a relaxing, and slightly constructive one.

I have managed to DIY some sort of a fix for the new spilling problem of my new bath tub. The new tub is about 3 inches shallower than the old Jacuzzi tub and the shower curtain is too long hanging inside the tub. I believe the problem is that the water in the tub is squeezed through between the shower curtain and the tub and spilled over.

I bought a nice long flat type self-adhesive HKD$9 electrical wire tubing and had it taped along the entire side of the tub with water and mildew proof silicon sealant for a more permanent fixture to act as a dam. It seems to be working quite well, but the sealant cost much more than the tube.

On another note.

I am not a gambler and I would only play the very odd games every now and then but never play the ponies. It has been a family tradition that several groups of the family with my cousins, aunties, and uncles have games of cards as well as other types of light wagering games only during the first couple of days of Chinese New Year holidays. Since Alec is very fond of numbers and moneys, naturally he became fascinated with these games.

This is the first year that Alec started paying attention on our games and my letting him getting in on it a little. Cousin William showed him Blackjack and a couple of dice games and Alec was quickly attracted. It took him just a few minutes to learn and got overly excited in the games, and took me a couple of days and several hours worth of prep talks the day after to let him know the difference between playing and gambling.

On the second and last night (2nd night of the year), I only allowed Alec the bring HK$10 to cousin William’s and warned him that only a gambler would kept wagering without a limit. Alec wanted to be the dealer of the dice game “fish-prawn-crab”! I told William, who was entertaining a few kids only with the game at the time, that Alec only has HKD$10 and after that he has no money whatsoever.

As it turned out, Alec won over HKD$300! The funny thing was, William while almost letting Alec to win yet at the same time, there were quite a few games in the middle that William would only bet on crab and Alec rolled no crab at all until the one time that William forgot to bet. Then the next game on, he rolled no crab at all again! That gathered us spectators around and laughed our heads off.

Luckily, Alec has always strived to be good, so although there were many questions from him about the good and bad of the games, we had finally got through to him and got him off the obsession despite the big win. Alec has never asked or tempted to play those games since.

More Excellent Online Jazz Broadcast

WBGO is online here.

Bryan Ferry & The Pretenders

Are also on live in Hong Kong at the HKCEC on 25 Feb ‘04.

Tickets at HKD$888, $688 and $488, Chrissy Hynde and the poor acoustics of the HKCEC don’t worth half the price though.

Dionne Warwick - The Platinum Concert

Live in Hong Kong at the HKCEC on 10 Feb ‘04. Tickets available here.

Would have loved to go if not for the steep ticket prices of HKD$680 or HKD$880 each.

Down With Love

The movie was based on a 60’s theme and a few cliche lines among a well thought out plot and a twist enough to make it an enjoyable love comedy show.

Renee Zellweger’s performance was simply astonishing, and her hypnotic like eyes could swipe many sober men off their feet.

Dead Motherboards

Pc Chips brand - stable but easy to short burn.

I bought two of them about 6 months apart a couple of years back. My cousin Peter also bought one at the same time as my first one. All three are of the same model.

Both my first one and my cousin’s shorted out the built-in LAN plug about 9 months later. My first one then shorted out completely last month, which I wasn’t in a hurry to have it fixed since it was for home use and I still have two notebook computers. So Melinda and Alec shared one and I just kept using the other one.

Last Friday, the second motherboard which was for work shorted out completely as well. So my good friend Rex helped me bought a couple of ASUS motherboards and have them replaced for me. We had lunch last Monday, brought the motherboards back to my office where I took my home computer there early that morning. In attempt to replace them, only to find out that the slower work computer was only using SDRAM and an older AGP display card instead of DDR RAM and the newer AGP slot display card required by the new board.

After much considerations, I went and bought two 512MB DDR 400 RAM and a Matrox G550 thinking after the replacement, I would buy an iMac sometime next couple of months so then I could swop out the two 512MB with the iMac’s 256MB.

The work computer motherboard replacement with MS Windows ME then went smoothly; but the harddisk of the home computer with Windows XP home had to be reformatted and reinstalled.

Major drag!

A Hike to Man Cheung Po

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11:00am, we gathered at the Tung Chung MTR station and went grocery shopping for lunch. We took a bus to Tai O and then hike up to Man Cheung Po through the coast.

It started out as a dry trip. By the time we started the fire for lunch and tea, it started to drizzle. Midway through lunch, it was raining and everyone was soaked. Luckily, I was well prepared and it didn’t soak through all my clothes and they kept me warm enough through out the trip.

On the way down, Roy, Sonic, Danny, and I took a wrong turn and we had to rock climb down for about 20 minutes. Although it stopped raining then, it was a fun but messy climb.

By the time we got back to Tai O, it was already close to 8:00pm. After a hot drink at McDonald’s, we went our separate ways home.

just How Fast is “The World’s Fastest”?

Probably not quite fast enough as they’d hope and claimed to be…

Here is a comparison report.