What a relief! Most of the things for my euro 2004 trip have been confirmed. With only a little more than 2 months left, it’s reasonably expected that everything is difficult to book. 99% of the hotels are full throughout that period and the airfares are double or triple of the normal rates. Local agencies seem to be quite helpless and I always prefer sorting the things out on the web. Sent out 50+ enquiry emails to all hotels found on the web, I got three positive replies, it’s not that hopeless after all.

So, I will be flying from London to Madrid on 11 June, spend a night there, then fly to Porto on 12 June morning. Check in at the Hotel Residencial Dona Sofia (see picture right) in Braga. Stay there for 3 nights, watch the match on 14 June afternoon. Leaving Porto for Madrid again on 15 June and arrive London the following day. I have not yet bought the ticket for the flight from HK to London, but I guess it shouldn’t be hard to find one.

Got a new gadget for myself in Mongkok on Sunday - BlueTrek G2 Bluetooth headset for HK$488. It was quite an unpleasant experience shopping in Mongkok on Sunday. Everywhere was damn crowded. It took me some time to squeeze into a counter front inside a Broadway chain store, the salesman was rude, impatient and uninterested to serve me, after I made up my mind to get the Sony Ericsson one, I asked him to give me a new one, he at first refused (claiming that the one on display was a new one) and reluctantly went to find a new one after I insisted. Then I waited for 15 mins and no one followed up. Well, you should know what I did in the end. I walked out of the shop with my sister, we went to another chain store and bought the Bluetrek G2.

The headset works flawlessly with my T630 phone, never thought it got so many functions to play with. Arnold sent me this link, cool! I maybe able to use the headset to play iChat AV! So I started trying to connect the headset to my PowerBook. After a few attempts, I still couldn’t get it connected. Did a lot of googling and came across another article, still couldn’t get it work…

This afternoon I had my late-lunch in a nearby restaurant, actually a typical Hong Kong style cafe (Cha-Chan-Tan) called Tai Hing, and discovered that they are serving cold drinks like this (see right picture, my iced milk tea, taken by my new T630 mobile). I had a HK$24 afternoon tea set: a choice of two roasted food with noodles plus a drink, HK$2 extra charge for cold drink as usual. Before flipping through the current issue of PC market, I spent quite a while figuring out when and why they started doing this.

I don’t have any clue yet, you got any? Well I do like it, this has solved the problem of having your drink diluted by the ice cubes when the ice melts, and that also means you probably get more tea/coffee/coke than before. Hm… there must be other concerns for the shops to make such a change.

Helped dad get a new digital camera - Casio QV-R41. What he needs are very simple: 4 mega pixels (enough for 4R prints), easy-to-use and reasonably-priced. This QV-R41 is perfect for him, selling at a mere HK$1,800 (US$230), it got everything he wants. The price of parallel-imported model (without local dealer warranty) is only HK$1,500! It also has a similar model (QV-R51) offering 5 mega pixels selling at only HK$2,200. The only drawback with the QV series is the lack of sound in movie mode, but dad doesn’t shoot movies anyway. My parents learned how to use the camera in less than a few hours, which is really not bad for them! Got them a 256MB SD card (380 medium quality JPEG) now, may need more when they visit brother Henry in Sydney in late April.

It has always been a mystery to me. While the majority of people I know pronounce it as Lin-nix, I did hear a rare few who pronounce it as Line-nix. It still gives me no clue who is right even after reading Linus Torvalds’s autobiography. According to this source, Lin-nix is correct because Linux was originally based on a small, PC-based implementation of UNIX called “Minix”. I don’t know Swedish (Linus is an ethnic Swede from Finland), so I am not sure whether Lin-nix is an imitation of the language. Well, who cares if Linus himself doesn’t care? If there are only two to choose from, one British and one American (Line-nix), I would definitely choose the British one - listen to how Linus himself pronounced it (wav, 81Kb).

My brother is now back in Sydney and just entered the Macquarie University for his bachelor study in Finance. I think it’s quite a nice university, unfortunately the cost of accessing internet is quite high in Australia, average unlimited dial-up plans cost around HK$200/month and broadband access starts from HK$400/month, excluding installation charge and cable modem rental! He’s got a 12″ G3 iBook running OS X 10.3 and a high-resolution logitech web camera, but no broadband… hopefully he can have that in a few months and we could play some iChat.

At the orientation, my brother saw a competition for iPod mini in his campus. To be in the running to win an iPod mini, complete the following in 25 words or less:

An Apple iPod mini will help me get through Uni because…….

Anyone can help?

Just returned from a fine home-made dinner at Margaret’s place tonight, I am 200% full and filled with joy and energy! We spent more than 6hrs eating and chatting non-stop without realizing the time at all. The wines, the snacks, the fruits, the desserts, the tea and the dinner… were just too tempting to resist, I probably ate twice the amount that I should and swear to myself that I must at least do 7hrs of intensive exercises this week! My plan is: 2hrs of tennis on weekend, 3hrs of swimming during the week and another 2hrs on running. As my dear friends said: do you still wanna eat nice food? If yes, then don’t be lazy! Totally agreed.

Too bad I missed the HKPSCAA (aka. Inter-U) Tennis Finals last Saturday at Sandy Bay, HKU. I have left the U-team for more than 3 years but I still feel being part of it. Once again, we did it! We beat our arch-rival CUHK in both Men’s and Ladies’ Finals as underdogs. The Ladies’ championship had to be decided by the final third singles match with a seesaw tiebreaker. The HKU Ladies Team crowned in a record 8th consecutive win and the Mens made it 5 in 8 years, congratulations! As our coach, my mentor and best friend Ricky says: the ball is rounded. Now everyone should believe that hard work does pay off. Oh, I really miss the old days when I trained at the Flora Ho Sports Centre every Wed and Fri and lifted the trophy in all 3 years at HKU.

Today is my mom’s birthday, happy birthday to her! We had already celebrated at a restaurant on Sunday, that place was nice, I guess we’ll go more often for tea lunch or dinner later. Sister ordered some flowers from an online shop last night and went to Guangzhou, leaving me to deal with the mess - no delivery took place this morning and only found out an hour ago that orders made after office hours would not be delivered until the night after, what’s more, the price wasn’t the amount my sister told me, surcharges have to be added for delivery! Anyway, mom is already out for karaoke with her friends, I wish she’ll be home tonight when the flowers arrive.

Another busy week is over! It’s now Monday morning, as usual I am burning the midnight oil to catch up with numerous tasks at work. Getting used to using iCal as my PIM, the only thing still bothers me is its lack of “notes” feature, the “to-do” does not come with notes too. So I turn to Mac’s post-it-like Stickies program to store all the tiny little bits of useful memo. It’s quite a handy program, but still I prefer my sticky notes be attached to my to-do’s.

An internal wall in my office got removed last week under the advice of a “Feng Shui” master. I am not aware of any significant business blooming *yet* but it’s nice to have that extra space, oh, and the new fish tank as well. Looking forward to putting up my company logo to the new glass door, well, it’s not that kind of logo engraved with 18K gold finishing, just a transparent adhesive sheet bearing two green beans and a wooden box.

Updated on 5 March: Too bad that the two green beans couldn’t be added to the glass door due to their oval shapes, the beans inside the box are lucky, they could stay. Can’t wait to see them…