Didn’t do posts for a couple days due to the dead harddrive from 4 days ago…Still trying to recover all the data, at least got my emails back which is basically all I cared. Just shipped my dead harddrive back to Western Digital and requested for a new replacement drive to be shipped. So annoying….

Anyway I did have some fun last Thursday night. Went to Boom’s farewell party as he’ll be going back to Korea. Had some good chats with him and his Korean/Japanese friends, practiced a bit on speaking Japanese (lol I sucked so much), and had some awesome Korean cow bone soup and spaghetti that his girlfriend Asami made, some tasty Thai curry from Yoshiki/Kanako, and some fried rice from Tamae. Food was really good and I ate a lot…with beer and all that. I chatted a lot with Yuuji (Japanese) since he seemed to be ultra friendly. It was a very fun night and it was especially cool to learn about the daily life in the Korean army from Boom and Jae as they had to do a 2-year practicum in the army when they were like 20…

I’ll be going for a trip to the Rockies with some of them next month, can’t wait to regroup and also to take some nice pictures with my Canon G9 The tour guide is going to be speaking Korean though, guess I should cramp some texts prior to the trip hopefully can understand maybe 1% of it…lol

PC is dead! Primary harddrive is dead. I’m likely going to lose all my data on my C: drive, don’t feel like a long post, I’m just going to get back and fix / recover the data on my drive. >< I HATE VISTA IT’S VISTA THAT CAUSED IT I’M SURE…  Mac RULESSSSSSSSS

I came across this site where some guy ripped his old laptop and sticked it to his kitchen wall to use as a clock, that immediately reminded me of my super old Pentium II laptop that was sitting in my closet collecting dust (bought in 1994-95). The laptop had already been previously ripped apart when I installed it in my first car as a mp3/movie player…that was like 8 years ago…

Anyway I had decided to rip it again and this time I was going to set it up on my kitchen cabinet…lol! Took me about an hour to rip it apart, took all the useless parts off, leaving only the barebone. Also took the battery and cdrom off to lessen the weight. Did some measurement and then went to Canadian Tire to grab some 1.5″ wood screws so that I could screw the laptop on the the back side of the cabinet door. After some hard work (including getting my thumb cut by the sharp metal on the LCD panel) I managed to get the thing installed.

There was a couple glitches like I was trying to conceal the wires from the LCD panel to the computer itself, also had to set up a wireless mouse since a wired one would just look bad. Luckily I got most of the problems solved and ended up getting it done quite nicely.

Of course the laptop has wireless capability so I could basically do most of the usual things like MSN, browsing websites, listening to internet radio….etc. I’m pretty happy with it and can’t wait to have some internet fun while I’m prepping for some food or drinks! Urgh my finger hurts….lol

Scoped a huge pack of Truffles chocolate ($6.99 on sale) during my regular aimless grocery wandering around. I didn’t pick it up in the beginning but then after some more walking the cravings for it just spiked up and I couldn’t help but to return and grab it. I think the last time I had it was about 4-5 years ago, but I could still remember the pretty unforgettable experience of having it melt in my mouth….yea this chocolate melts like nothing on earth Now it’s sitting on my desk within arm’s length which means it won’t be too long before it’s completely gone.

Just because FutureShop was having this crazy sale, I decided to buy a second point-and-shoot camera since the Canon G9 that I have is kind of bulky to carry around. Went to FutureShop at 5pm sharp since they were having this 10% off almost everything sale. So I looked around and asked the sales dude what’s the cheapest Canon slim camera there and he showed me the Canon SD1000. It was a 7.1 megapixels cam and was only $161 after all the savings! ($20 instant saving off $199 regular price, plus the 10% off) I was pretty stoked about the price so I bought it without second thought (which kind of went against my usual routine of reading 8000 reviews online and comparing prices on 9000 websites before making a buying decision).

Took the camera home and played around with it for a bit. Turned out to be an awesome camera! Read a couple reviews on it and most of them were pretty good. There is a newer model (SD1100) that’s already out but it’s selling for $279 which gives you an additional megapixel (8.0) and an image stabilizer. The price tag doesn’t really fall within my budget so I didn’t really look into it. Overall I’m pretty happy with the camera, will of course take more pics here and there just to try it out.

Yay! Had so much fun on Saturday night. Angela and I went to Whistler (Canada’s #1 ski resort) for snowboarding. I had been to Whistler before like 9 years ago for skiing, but since it’s been such a long time I remembered absolutely nothing so this was officially my first time there. Actually we had an option to goto Whistler mountain or Blackcomb mountain which were side by side. We opted for Blackcomb since Angela said she liked it better.

We got there around 8:30am, took 2 hours on the Sea-To-Sky Highway (highway that connects Vancouver to Whistler). There were tons of constructions going on here and there as they’re building it all up for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Not a bad drive I guess, pretty scenic. It was a super nice day by the way, unlimited visibility, no clouds, just awesome sunny day. There was tons of cars at the parking lot so I thought it’s going to be messy up there but turned out to be not quite busy…guess the mountain was just insanely vast. Took some gondolas to where all the lifts were - it was a really cool ride compared to the rides at some local mountains like Cypress or Grouse. Whistler was just too huge…

We picked a couple different lifts and went to different areas of the mountain. I was shocked by the size of the mountain….not even sure how to describe the vastness it’s almost like…snow fields with no ends….everything in front of you to 10 kilometers away from u was all snow white…you could basically board to anywhere without having to worry about falling off cliffs…etc. I of course have brought my Canon G9 camera with me as I had expected tons of picture opportunities and it turned out to be even better than I thought.

We were lucky enough to witness this guy’s “can-you-marry-me” proposal to the girl, on top of the mountain, lol. People around were snapping pics, the girl was pretty shocked, kind of interesting I guess. Apart from that, we also took some time off and went to this big jump area where people showed off their jump skills. I tried out my camera’s “Sport” mode and was able to snap some pretty nice pictures of the jumps!

I practiced a lot on my snowboarding skills since this would be the last trip for the season. I would say I’m much improved by now compared to 3 months ago when I first started….all thanks to Boom who taught me a lot of basic skills and also made me a VCD with snowboarding tutorials I was able to freely control my turns now and was able to go downhill in a zig zag pattern without falling too much. I think I fell a couple times only when the terrain was too bumpy. We left at around 4:30pm which was when the mountain was closed. Really had loads of fun, and was a pretty unforgettable experience.