Last November, Leslie and I went to Hong Kong and Tokyo for a couple of weeks. It was the first time I’d been to asia and the whole trip was a great experience. In Hong Kong, we got to meet up with my friend Helen who is currently working there for Ebay. It was really easy to get around Hong Kong on just English, which made it a nice way to ease into the trip, but the value of the US dollar really hurt sometimes. The Hong After 5 nights in Hong Kong, we stayed for 6 nights in Tokyo. It took some convincing to get Leslie to trust my subway navigation, but we got to see a lot of the city. If we did it again, the only thing that we’d do differently would be to see a lot more of the sights outside of Tokyo.

Lately, I’ve had a couple of different projects going. One of them was to build a hackintosh (a PC with mac os installed). I did a variation on the Ars Technica Hot Rod build from here, after a friend had good luck with it. The goal was to save money, so I got an older video card from the same friend and used some drives that I already had. After doing a bunch of reading on the insanely mac forums, I got virtually everything working. I still need to really decide if I want to keep using mac os full time, but I did go out and buy a copy of leopard.

The home office has also undergone a lot of renovations. In order to get Leslie moved in, I took out my old desk, pulled the closet out of the office, and finished the repainting of all of the walls. We now have a couple of ikea desks that fit a lot better together and I’m putting together some more ikea furniture for storage in the room. Its been a long project, but I think that it’ll look and work a lot better when it’s done.

On Monday night, we opened presents and Leslie helped me finish up my xmas tree cupcake experiment. It has been awhile since I’ve done any interesting desserts, so it was fun to play around in the kitchen. For Christmas, we went to visit Leslie’s mom in the east bay. Thankfully, the family drama was kept to a minimum. The funniest event of the day was when shortly after we arrived, her mom started doing really really laud karaoke.

• I confirmed with my manager that I was quiting my job
• My surviving grandmother had a (mild) heart attack
• My mother had an unrelated heart procedure done
• My mother got scheduled for open heart surgery tomorrow
• I heard from a cousin that I hadn’t seen in years from a comment on this blog.

All in all, the day was definitely net negative. The first was probably the toughest decision to quit that I’ve ever made, the last was pretty cool, and the other three made me remember the kind of things that are important in life and remind me how much of a difference Leslie makes.

For those of you involved in some way in my finding, getting, or agonizing about the new job, thank you very much. For anyone else interested, the company is pretty stealth at the moment, but expect some kind of blog post in the next couple of months.

We left late afternoon on a Thursday, which got us there with enough time for dinner and sleep. The place that we were staying at included a kitchen and living room, so we didn’t have to go out for breakfast. On Friday, we decided to stay close since we were going on a dinner luau cruise. The cruise was about what you would expect. They had a live band along with dancers that would dance around the isles and on the tables. I didn’t have the heart to tell Leslie that the wine I brought back from the bar was box wine, but she probably had her suspicions when I told her that the bartender had suggested I bring back some ice for the wine since it was warm. After all of the food had been taken away, everyone was invited to dance on the tables to the sort of stuff you’ll find played at weddings when they want everyone to dance. My personal highlight was when Leslie and one of the dancers started doing the electric slide. The rest of us around that table will a little intimidated at the quality of the dancing, so I decided to just take pictures.

In an effort to pack in as much as possible, much of Saturday was spent driving to various parts of the island seeing the volcanoes and waterfalls. The best waterfall we saw was a triple waterfall at one of the botanical gardens. We drove around the volcano park, which was pretty impressive for someone that had never been to a volcano in person. Most of Sunday was spent shopping before we flew back Sunday night. If you want to see some more pictures, I put some of the more interesting ones in a flick photoset. I’ll admit that it wasn’t the most exciting trip that I’ve ever had, but Kona is a great place to go if you want the kind of vacation where you just wander around and chill out most of the time.

The other day, I felt like I’d gotten to the point on my windows pc where there was simply too much clutter. Too many old registry entries, half uninstalled applications, etc., so I figured that I’d reinstall windows. At this point, I put in the install CD, started up the machine, and watched it try and find a driver for my SATA hard drive. Alas, it was unsuccessful. I then remembered that when I first installed windows, I was installing onto an IDE drive which I’d replaced with the 10k rpm drive. After some searching, I found some drivers and a floppy disc image, so I figured I was all set.

If you’ve ever seen my shuttle pc, you’d know that it doesn’t have a floppy drive. This is why I keep around a floppy drive that I can connect to the motherboard in case I have to do this sort of thing. After connecting up the floppy drive, it found the correct drive, but windows still had some issues doing the install. A few google searches later, I found out about “slipstreaming” a windows installer (this is where all of my windows using friends think “duh, why didn’t you think of that in the first place”). It turns out that there are programs like nLite that will allow you to take an existing windows installer and modify it to include other drivers, service packs, etc. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to point nLite at the drivers I had found, create a CD with the drivers included, and do the full windows installation from CD.

The highpoint of the day was watching Segway Polo on a really small field. We started watching a game and I turned to JB and asked, “Is that Woz playing?” A short while later Woz said something and JB and I agreed that it must be Woz. I started thinking that it was too bad that I didn’t have my camera, but then I figured that because of the sort of event that it was, I should be able to find a photo on flickr.

I’d recommend the event to most people if they’re thinking about trying it next year. I bet that it will probably be slightly bigger and better in the future.

1. If You’re Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows) – Rodney Atkins
2. Something More – Sugarland
3. These Words – Natasha Bedingfield
4. Nothin’ to Lose – Josh Gracin
5. You’re Beautiful – James Blunt
6. Sophmore Slump or Comeback of the Year – Fall Out Boy
7. Did You Get My Message? – Jason Mraz
8. All the Gold in California – Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers
9. Some Beach – Blake Shelton
10. It’s For The Best – Straylight Run
11. Change – Sons of the Desert
12. I Know I Know I Know – Tegan and Sara
13. Don’t Ever – Missy Higgins
14. Numb – Linkin Park
15. Where Does the Good Go? – Tegan and Sara
16. Bubble Pop Electric Feat Joh – Gwen Stefani
17. Geek In The Pink – Jason Mraz
18. Come By Me – Harry Connick, Jr.
19. Scar – Missy Higgins
20. Small Town – John Mellencamp
21. White Kids Love Hip Hop – MC Chris
22. If Your Gonna – Natasha Bedingfield

If you use iTunes, I recommend finding any listening to the first track as an example that you can have a song about how much life can suck and still have it be upbeat and catchy.

Update: Scott suggested that I make an iTunes iMix out of it and since I put it together in iTunes anyway, I went ahead and published the iMix here. The odd thing is the songs that aren’t on iTunes like Numb by Linkin Park.