Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Just in case if you do not know what it is, here is an explanation from one of my favourite blogs. Sister and I will be our family’s sole representatives to attend tonight’s family feast with all others while my parents are away from Hong Kong. It’s a very good timing, since I have been so overwhelmed by work these days, the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day will give me good breaks to slow down a bit. When I was a little, I enjoyed playing lanterns and eating nuts and fruits in Victoria Park every year. We usually came in a large group, like 20 or even more, occupying a large piece of grass in the Park and stretching a few long ropes to tie up our lighted lanterns, as many as 50 of them, it was quite a scene! I remember once the biggest local TV station came shooting us and we appeared in the Evening News that night!

Today’s my dad’s birthday! Happy Birthday my dearest dad! He’s now probably flying back from NY to Toronto with mom and other good friends in their N. America trip. I am sure they are having great fun and enjoying very much. Thanks to Ben for putting together a birthday party for dad and Mrs. Yip (23 Sept) tonight in their Toronto home!

For me, not yet recovered from the excitement brought by the arrival of our iMac G5 and exhausted training lesson last night. The work is getting so busy lately (which is a good sign!) and I found my iCal almost completely filled with red color - for I use red to represent any activity categorized to work/business. At the same time, I am happily counting down to 6 am tomorrow, my best friend Bernice is arriving HK from SF! I will pull myself off the bed and pick her up on time, just like every year before. Cheers!

What a big day to celebrate! For less than a week’s wait, our new iMac G5 arrives! It’s always been one of the most exciting experiences to welcome a new Mac, and it’s not just one, but three today! We’re glad to announce that we have two new mac users in our office now. Raymond and Catherine bought their first Mac (12″ iBook) and we opened the boxes together.

Everyone (including visitors) is attracted to the gorgeous iMac G5, surprised by its beautiful appearance, unbelievable design and powerful operating system. Our new iMac G5 is the cheapest model (1.6GHz, 17″ LCD), but it feels really fast on a bare 256MB RAM on OS X 10.3, we are going to remove this 256MB and add a pair of identical 512MB RAM to maximize its dual-channel mode power.

What’s next? Work even harder to make everyone switch to Mac, LOL!

From left: Yiu, Ronald, Belle, Anthony, Momique, Lee, Perline, Nanda, Danny & his GF

“UPS” means United & Progressive Students, a funny name we chose when we formed a cabinet and ran for the HKU Law Association back in 1997. The twelve of us haven’t met for quite a while, we used to have regular monthly gathering before graduation. I called for a get-together a month ago and finally 9 of us showed up last night in Central for dinner, quite an achievement indeed! Everyone is practising in the legal field as qualified barrister or solicitor except me, it’s a great pleasure to meet up old buddies and chat about career, plans, relationships and office jokes! I’m glad to know that everybody is doing well. Happy birthday to two pretty ladies: Perline (21 Sept) and Nanda (13 Sept). May you both just get prettier every day and start your own firm very soon!

Happy birthday also to Ricky (18 Sept, today) my mentor and coach! This won’t prevent him from “ace” me less tonight.

Today I returned to HKU for the Back To School event jointly organized by HKU Mac User Group and Senco-Masslink. Time really flies, the user group has been set up for more than 2 years now, I still feel that I have just switched to Mac, probably because this Mac user experience is ever-fascinating and I never get bored with it. I keep discovering good things about using a Mac every day and get addicted to preach about it.

This is a two-day event, so you will see me again tomorrow at the same place. I am there to answer people’s questions of all kinds: product features, usage questions, support issues, pricing… etc. But most of those questions are related to Windows, like: Is there any compatibility problem with windows-created files? Can I connect to a Windows network or share files with Windows? I am more than pleased to answer questions like these. I want to tell every body: you have an option (a better one) than Windows.

For those who are convinced, check out the special offers, the prices are really attractive, believe me, you’d never regret if you switch (except: why didn’t I switch earlier?)

9.12 - today is the Hong Kong Legislative Council Election Day, I have been looking forward to this day and reminding people around. There are chaos in some polling stations, luckily the station I went to is so far free from any trouble. I live on the Hong Kong island, there are 6 lists to choose from. But I don’t even have to think, you know, the Legislative Councillor I support is running for office again this year, and in my geographical constituency, again. Who did I vote for? Hint 1: I created a campaign website for this candidate when he/she ran for office for the first time. Hint 2: That particular election took place on my birthday that year.

Update: Results are official now, probably not so good news for me though.

It’s our “company hiking” today, we gathered in Sai Kung in the morning, took a short bus trip and began hiking in the beautiful hills near Man Yee Reservoir. We arrived our destination Sai Wan around noon. The weather was fantastic! It was warm but not hot, cloudy and a bit windy throughout the day, just like autumn, perfect for hiking! Although I only had 4 hours of sleep, I felt very energetic all day and found the trails too comfortable, thanks to my recent training at gym. The air smelt really fresh, we played volleyball on the beach and appreciated the natural surroundings. We left at 5 pm and I rushed back to HK island for my regular tennis practice. Played some good games today and felt the need for more practice, since I will be the team captain this year and going to play almost every game in this coming Winter league.

Update: Just have NOW installed today, finally watching US Open! Yeah!!!

As I mentioned earlier that I am missing the US Open this year because ESPN is only on NOW, so I have to find other ways to watch it, not for every match though. Today I finally found a way - I sneaked into NOW’s broadcast studio this morning and watched the match of Jennifer Capriati v Serena Williams. No, I was kidding, I did go there to watch the match but it was my coach Ricky who brought me in.

Ricky is the commentator for the tournament, and NOW’s broadcast studio is quite close to my home, I am very lucky indeed. This is my first time walking into a studio like that, the first feeling was - cold. It’s like a typical TV station that I could imagine. I stayed in the control panel room, in front of me were like 30+ TV sets and all kinds of panels and equipments. The staff were working all the time and I could witness how the whole show was broadcasted, you know, all the “behind the scenes” stuffs.

I am a fan of Capriati and was clearly on her side, however I would definitely prefer her winning without the controversy. Those calls were terrible and did injustice to both players, who played equally brilliant tennis.

If you are a tennis fan, there is a movie you should not miss: Wimbledon. Especially because it is also a romantic comedy from the creators of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary. It will be available in cinema in UK and US in September, I am not sure whether it will come to Hong Kong, if not, I would like a DVD.

“> What a full day! Not only my schedule was full, my stomach was full too! It’s been an unsual long day for me, getting up early for a morning meeting, then a meet-up with my ex-colleague for an unexpected heavy lunch, then an afternoon meeting with a tiramisu afternoon tea, finally a seafood and beer dinner (I saw the scary Sangria on the menu, never try that again! Hoegaarden is safe). Just too many things were going on, I love this feeling! Oh, while gathering for dinner at HMV, I bought a CD tonight, pretty surprising to myself too.

Finally it didn’t rain last weekend, I was so excited going to the tennis courts. Though I lost both games 6-4, 7-5 and played horribly, there was sufficient excuse for that - I haven’t played for three weeks! Then we had a nice dinner in a private club in Kowloon Tong, there’s nothing more enjoyable than eating with a large group of people, especially for Chinese cusine. I could taste a few dozens different things without worrying about gaining weight, just leave others to finish the dishes. In the end, I found myself only half full so I had the whole bowl of dessert - sweet potato in soup.

Having just recovered from the post-Olympics depression, US Open kicks off, it is supposed to make me spend more time on TV again, unfortunately it is only available on ESPN, and both the ESPN and Star Sport channels were just bought out by NOW TV recently. It also happened that my residential broadband service So-net was also bought out by Netvigator last month, another subsidary of PCCW, I was sure that they would hook me up to NOW TV without much problem. It turns out to be not that easy, I got some offers via email and called them up to subscribe a few weeks ago, it was always a voice-answering machine and they never called me back.

They probably got too many new subscribers, I decided to wait and call them later, since I can’t make the US Open anyway judging from their long queue of new installations.