I took my mom to Uchiko and got their 10 course meal thingy. It was quite tasty!

I also decided to get a new receiver because my Onkyo was kind of crapping out and having issues with certain inputs. Decided to get a Pioneer VSX-1020-K, which I just got today and installed. I’m now letting Star Trek play to “break it in” (I don’t think I need to do that). While installing the receiver, I discovered that some punk had unplugged my subwoofer and who knows how long that’s been that way. Hmph.

In other food related news, I booked a reservation at Alinea!

Oh, also, here are a lot of Olivers from the past year or so of blog posts (click for larger version).

I finally launched TeetarSauce.com, the site dedicated to Viraj Bhagat! I’ve owned the domain name for a while with changing intentions, but finally decided to put something together and get it live this weekend.

My sleep schedule has been kind of messed up this past week initially due to jet-lag, but I didn’t do a whole lot to fix it. I’ve been falling asleep at around 5PM with the intention of waking up in an hour or two, but I keep on sleeping through my alarms and waking up in the 3AM-5AM range. However, with some help of some HoN play time, I managed to stay up until midnight last night so hopefully my schedule will have righted itself for this coming week.

It’s also my mom’s birthday today. Happy birthday, mother!

Yeah yeah yeah, I went to Hong Kong and Singapore. Here are some photos:

There was a Korean place in this alley that was awesome:

I like to think of this as SAW VII: PANDAMONIUM:

I picked my own fish to steam from this lot of live seafood:

It was mighty yummy. =)

Clown barf!

This chili-crab in Singapore, OMan recommended, was also rather yummy.

Lots more photos on flickr.

I also made a movie trailer starring Melissa!

This is what came out of my short toying with iMovie.

Viraj and I had a lot of fun with this one. Except for the names, all the text is default.

Last night, I summoned Sam over so Viraj and I could show him the above video. Then, we told him to go home. Haha… actually, we made him drive us to Walgreens where we purchased milk, chips, beef jerky, ramen, sardines, and tuna. I think Viraj may have gotten some other stuff but I can’t remember. Viraj made the dark hot chocolate I got from Seattle, which was pretty rich. I think as far as hot chocolate goes, milk chocolate is the way to go… it was like drinking a melted dark chocolate bar… haha. Then, we watched part of a high school football game at 3AM. That was awesome.

Our family typically celebrates Christmas more on Christmas Eve than on actual Christmas day, so that’s what happened again this year. I picked up iLife ‘11 and took it home and Olivia toyed with it a bit and quickly came up with this using its new trailer “mode:”

Here are a few shots of the Wong family opening presents, and related shenanigans:

Then, at around 1AM on Christmas day, Steph and I repeated our early morning IHOP run with Sam, Heather and Viraj this time (last year OMan and Mikey were there). We ended up staying there until 6:30AM. Craaazy.

We also didn’t let Christmas get in the way of our usual ultimate game, so we rounded up a group of six and headed to the field with the wind blowing and the temperature in the 40’s. We ended up revising the rules so that the frisbee was still live if it was rolling which caused quite a bit of hilarity. We played until until a team scored five and got out of there. Heather invited me over to Jimmy’s for dinner and they (plus Steph) cooked dinner which I was able to mooch off of… woo!

Now it’s time for me to play with iMovie… adios. =)

I did not play ultimate this weekend because I was lazy and slept through it. Very sad. =(

I went to see The Blistering Speeds at Spider House with a bunch of BVers (Al and Scotty are in the band).

After that, I hung out for a few hours with Steph, Heather, OMan, Sam and Ryan. I also uploaded some photos I took for a photobook I made for Melissa…

On Sunday, Heather and Steph came over and OMan, Sam and I joined their scheduled P90X exercise which was intense. I think Melissa and I will start it when she comes back next year. Sam has also committed to doing it, so we’ll see how that goes. =)

Speaking of Sam… there is now a new Samitic.us post all about Sam Ni.

There was lots of HoN last week. Somehow, Viraj has become really really horrible at the game. We end up balancing teams counting him as a negative because he usually ends up hurting his team more than he helps. That makes balancing a little tricky because on the rare occasion that he doesn’t do horribly but instead just does mediocre, his team ends up winning because we’ve tried to balance out his horribleness.

On Sunday, my mom locked my car keys in my car, so I slept while she obtained my spare key. Wooooooo.

I’ve been watching Veronica Mars and I just finished the first season. Man, that would have been a frustrating season finale and they even tease you throughout the first episode of the second season before resolving the cliff-hangers. Glad I don’t have to wait. =) Enjoyable show.

Nancy and Ochs had a party at Chancy’s for their combined birthdays. Some photos:

More photos.

On Saturday, Sam tried to molest Kat on the ultimate field. I’ll post more about that on Samitic.us sometime… along with some videos of Sam from the birthday party.

Yay long weekend! Thanksgiving was pretty good. There was an absence of the loud one, but Oriana did try to kill me with a bottle. I went to Mark’s on Thanksgiving as my family (strangely) decided to have dinner on Friday instead of Thursday. On Saturday, during ultimate, Viraj decided to flash the elementary school with his jungle of love. Watch for him on the sex offender registry soon!

I watched Unstoppable with Sam which was enjoyable. Did I also watch HP7 this break? I think I did… I thought it was meh. I found it akin to an amateur school play with no heart. Not sure if was poor acting, but I just didn’t get a good sense of atmosphere… it just felt kind of hollow and a collection of scenes rather than a movie that invoked much emotion. Maybe would have been better had I read the books.

On a completely unrelated topic, is anyone else amused with how terrible pandas are at living? Sometimes I think it would be funny if there were a crazy stealth group out there that strived to accomplish what nature probably would have done without our meddling - make pandas extinct… by assassinating them. Plus, it would probably really piss of China.

I was talking to Melissa about when I read the Lord of the Rings series which was back at UT when I took Linguistics of Tolkien’s Middle Earth with Mark. That brought up the subject of our awesome project where Mark and I took a MrTechHappy plot and translated it into Quenya, Tolkien’s elvish language. The translated comic is available here, but I would recommend just reading the English version then looking at our translation PDF which is pretty awesome. I like how we translated my name to mean “SnowFlower.”

There are quite a few good translations, I thought, but here are two humorous ones as a preview:

Haha…