Tempest7: Blogger

A short update after forever.

I know it has been forever since I last updated. Speaking about myself has never really been easy for me. I get embarassed easily and self concious. Things that have happened? My plans to go abroad have not been going well at all. I had gone through a month or two of depression with my lack of success and have been re-evaluating my alternatives. This year started off with a lot of bad luck. First my Philips DVD player remote seemed to die on me. There are many options which I can not access without the remote. The player has been great, I download DivX/XVid versions of asian dramas and old StarTrek episodes and watch them right on my TV. After buying a universal remote to fill in for the broken DVD player remote, my TV breaks down. It is a nightmare going through Prima America. My TV was out of warranty by just over a month. I called to complain that it really isn't fair, and after half a month of me chasing the guy finally does something and managed to extend my warranty for repair. I just recieved the repaired unit yesterday.

Something else I picked up yesterday, was my camera again. My camera has been broken for several months. You can laugh but I broke it taking a picture of myself. I had just purchased my new HellyHanson winter jacket and wanted to grab a picture to show some friends (with my snowboard). I setup the camera on my brother's desk and set the self timer. When I walked away the case dragged the camera off the desk and bent the barrel. I waited to get the reciepts from Yoshiro, and after sending it away I thought it was lost because Canada Post did not track the package. I had to wait 20 days for them to investigate, and it ended up at Pentax on the 9th of March. each week after I found it's location I called to chase them to work on it, they finished the job in 2 days (but they have a 4 week turn around time).

The lesson learned? Dealing with Type B personalities can be extremely stressful for Type As. What I should know this already? I know... I know...

What started me to blog again was the fact that MSN Messenger 7 is out. Is it really worth upgrading to? It certainly has a few nice new features. The full screen video conferencing mode, and even the attachment blocking can be useful to a degree though I wish they made it easier to unblock file types that I want. They started something called MSN Spaces, which looks like a combination of a 6 degrees community and a blogging community. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I hate the fact that MSN Messenger auto opens Internet Explorer for a lot of the builtin links, Firefox has been a great browser for me with plugins like Adblock.

Things that have happened recently. The previous weekend I went to Hamilton to visit Ming Jian, she was nice enough to invite me over to visit and stay the evening. She brought a classmate along who originally is from GuangZhou. I had a little bit of a China lesson there. Speaking of China, I currently plan to travel with her when she returns to Shanghai this summer. This has become my alternate plan. I am in week two of my Mandarin beginners class at the Toronto District Board of Education. The class is very simple, but it stresses me to perfect my pronouncation. I have been meeting with Qiang Sun on occasion, he is a great guy who has been very helpful. Maybe I can get by this mental block learning Chinese and actually dig into my roots a little bit.

In the words of Kimura Takuya... 'Maybe...'

posted by Tempest7 @ 21:41