Beating the ol’ drum

Things never quite go the way you think, do they? Last year I started a couple of new blogs to complement this one: GeekReads, supposed to be a blog about books that I enjoyed reading, ended up reviewing more movies than books; and THRIFTerrific, which started out as a place for me to show everybody how to be a tight-ass, ended up as more of a general Internet lifestyle blog. This left cyberseraphic free for me to use to focus on the art of writing, but amounted to not much more than a couple of depressing poems and some pictures of Transformers.

Reflecting upon the stats from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, it seems that the thing I do best is choosing and tagging images. My blogs rank consistently high in image-related searches, and visits are almost entirely from people looking for various pictures. If image clicks paid like pay-per-click ads, I’d probably be turning a buck from my efforts.

Notable (blogging) achievements from last year include the redesign, which I’m pretty happy with. I’m greatly indebted to my friend Jan for the logo execution – I’ll get around to putting it on a t-shirt one day, mate – as well as Rodrigo Galindez for the theme, and also for popping by to leave a comment. I’m very happy with the result, and glad to have moved on from the dull grey/black theme that I was previously using.

One other thing that I’m proud is my post rate. If blog posts were heartbeats then you could say that my blogs were barely alive in 2009. Hopefully this year I’ll be able to turn that into a pulse. A fitting analogy, since Jenny always encourages me to post more from my heart than from my mind. Har har.

At any rate (ah! I crack myself up), I hope you’ve been enjoying my various ramblings and look forward to more, because the words, they are a-flowing :-)

Wong-Wong (nee Hong) in Hong Kong

We had a fantastic time on our recent trip. We did loads of shopping (I think I’ve got enough socks and undies to last the rest of my life) and I gained 2kgs from all the endless eating that we did. Of course I bought a bunch of Transformers, and you should know better than to expect that I’d post about it here instead of making a separate dedicated post :-)

Dunno whether it was just being away from home, and all the stress that is here, or the hardcore retail therapy and excellent food, or the safety of being “parented” by my awesome mum and dad while we were there, but Jenny’s blues also took a holiday.

We also went on a tour of Seoul, but joined a really crappy tour, so I’d say that I’ve experienced Korea only very barely. The other Honkies on the tour decided that they were more interested in shopping, so at every non-shopping destination we arrived at, they’d take the obligatory photo and get straight back on the bus, leaving us to always be the stragglers. The “Korean” tour guide was also an idiot, constantly taking pot-shots at Jenny being an ex-pat despite the fact that she herself was from Hong Kong and had only lived in Seoul for 6 years, making outrageous claims about how she was more Korean than my wife. Grr… I’ll stop there before I get even more angry. Suffice to say, she was full of bull, and spent more time talking about herself than the country.

We did manage to get some time away from the tour to visit Jenny’s relatives, and they cooked us up a super Korean feast! Beat the heck out of the crappy food we were getting from the stupid tourist restaurants that the tour took us to.

Back in Hong Kong, we did some more last minute shopping, and finally managed to get across to the Hong Kong side, having only explored Kowloon up to that point! 2 weeks definitely wasn’t enough, and like how I’d dearly love to revisit Japan, Jenny now wants to make Hong Kong her home away from home!

A few pics below. More over at Flickr.

Shelf sufficient

It just occurred to me that we have a lot of bookshelves around the house. It’s not only because we have a lot of books (we do), but because bookshelves seem to have become the de facto storage type for everything.

We have a tall, skinny one which has all of our shoes and shoeboxes, a few Ikea jobs for DVD’s, CD’s and games, and a half-height one that a previous landlord kindly gave me acting as a chest of drawers for my clothes.

Then there’s the big looming black things in the dining area that we’re borrowing from the owners of our current place, which are supposed to be display cabinet-type things, but they’re really nothing more than bookshelves with glass doors (and it’s where I keep our cookbooks anyway).

Now to find somewhere to put all the books…

Card humbug!

Is the Christmas card dead? It seems as if people are becoming less and less inclined to send bits of flattened wood pulp all over the place in order to express their season’s greetings. It’s probably due less to do with environmental concerns than the fact that in today’s world it has just become plain cumbersome to have to go and buy the damn things, write in them, and then put them in the post or hand them out. Why go through all of that when one can simply put one’s thoughts into an e-mail and send it off in an instant?

Me, I wasn’t able to find the motivation to do even that. Most of my friends and family received a cold, unfriendly silence in lieu of a card (virtual or otherwise), or even a generic mass e-mail. Now I have this guilty feeling for not making the effort to keep in touch with people, so I suppose you could consider this blog post as a weak attempt at restitution – a cyber-repentance of sorts.

So an extremely belated merry Christmas, and a happy new year! Keep in touch. Feel free to send me a card to let me know how you’re doing :-)

Keeping secrets isn’t easy

One of my usual haunts on the Internet is the Ars Technica OpenForum, and around this time every year they run a Secret Santa where forum members buy geeky gifts for each other. I won’t make any pretence of modesty – I expect the gift value to be worth somewhere at or near the specified value (US$25 plus shipping), or to have had some thought or effort put into it, or preferably both, but not none of the above.

In past years, the gifts that I’ve received have usually been good, but unsatisfactory by the above “standard”. I’m sure this is in no small part due to the fact that I live in Australia, and Ars Technica is a US-based website.

This year, however, my expectations were not only met, but greatly exceeded. My secret santa bought for me the entire first season of the game Sam & Max, plus a poster signed by Steve Purcell, the creator of the comic. I photoshopped the dialogue from a Sam & Max comic to express my gratitude, which you can see by clicking on the thumbnail picture above (my forum username is zzyss and my santa’s is westyx). Unfortunately, despite my santa’s attempts to conceal his identity, which included registering a purpose-specific gmail account, the games store accidentally provided his details in an e-mail informing that the poster was out of stock and will be shipping as soon as it becomes available.

I loved the original Lucasarts game Sam & Max Hit the Road, and I’m definitely looking forward to getting reacquainted with the characters and their quirky humour in this new series.

On a side note, this game also represents a new trend in gaming, where instead of releasing a story-based game all in one go, the narrative is broken up into discrete chunks and presented episodically, similar to a TV series. See also: Half Life 2 goes episodic on Gamespot.