wahlau's online hut

hmm. the year started well actually. So well, that i no longer feel like writing stuffs anymore :) Naw, it is just perhaps lack of ideas that can take up more than 100 words... so i think i will just quickly summarize some of the events/incidents since last update...

Christmas/New Year
time flies. Last i remember leaving my home for Christmas holiday, and now i am already back in office for a few days. Had pretty long holiday, since i have quite a number of annual leaves remaining to be "used". The holiday was good - relaxing and had nice time with wifey and friends. Food wise (well, we asian usually have this holiday time = food time association) was great. Had a spectrum of varieties from steamboat to roast goose. But the good thing is - no undesired weight increase throughout the weeks. ok, just a little increase ;)

We spent relative a lot of time catching up with friends from different groups. Usually we hardly can squeeze out time for meet ups, and this holiday gave us some chances. There are of course time where we just did nothing and watched CSI episodes. Ahem. And ya, Knight Rider actually came back with the son of the Michael and a new K.I.T.T. hmm, at least i am not that behind trend and time. :)

Last but not least - we both decided to be fit(ter) and health(ier) in 2009. So we signed up for fitness training. So far so good :)

Gadgets/Geek Stuffs
Following the spirit of the last blog post, i now try to maximize time and resources i have. Besides the N800, i had also digged out the good old Nokia 770 Kiawin returned to me and try to do something useful with it. So the first thing was to reinstall the firmware, which is something old from 2006 (the Nokia 770 has officially last update in 2006). Next i put in Canola 2, which is really a fine piece of software. Now i have a not-too-bad media player serving me podcasts from family.org, Internet radio streams, music, and photocast. With the metal casing i would be bringing it to sports training. Ideal for dangerous environments :)

Reading helps
To my surprise i finally started reading again. This time a good book from John Ortberg named "The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People".We both liked it so much so that we went a head and start buying it for friends. Come to think about it, our recents gifts to friends are really predictable - they are usually books, books and books. But to come back to the topic, reading again, with consistence and persistence is not easy for me. I had to consciously tell myself to set aside time for reading. The book did gave me a lot of good thoughts, and even wifey is kind of surprised. She said it had been a while since i got so excited of something i read, because as soon as i find something nice in the book i will tell her. She finished it earlier than me, btw, since she reads more and more often than me.

I have now started on the second book - a book from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Will write more on this book when i finish it. Meanwhile i plan to reread the book from John, to jot down the good points and to share to you guys. Wish me luck :)

Photo fun
I officially had my DSLR for almost a year now. So far i had quite a lot of fun with it. It might not be the "best" among those competitions from Canon and Nikon DSLRs, but it is a perfect camera for us both. I still believe you only make good pictures with the right skills and compositions. Camera choices will really help when you have brushed up your skills enough. Anyway, i am still way behind millions of talented photographers... so i am happy with what i can achieve. Recently i finally understood how i can use Hugin correctly (at least for my needs). Therefore now i have two photos to show off :)

Next i really need to find time to tidy up my collections. It is relatively huge for me already, and i definitely need to make a backup out of it. So i still have quite something to do at home ;)