Christmas Stuff
Not having been around snow when I was growing up, one of the things I miss most about this time of year is the whole Christmas light thing in the US. There are lights everywhere here, of course, but they’re usually up all year and have nothing to do with Christmas.
But today I came across this, which has to be the most awesome display of Christmas-light firepower I’ve seen. Impressive (note: wmv link).
Hotpot was had last night at Prince Roy‘s place, whereupon a whole lot of politics was discussed. As usual there was a lot of code-switching, which I really should be getting better at but patently am not. At one point Lennet leaned over and asked me, “Can I expect a lot of this kind of conversation in the future?” I said yes, I was afraid he could. He was referring to the political nature of the talk, though, not the code-switching. I guess Lennet’s used to the lack of political debate in Shanghai. Or he just doesn’t like it. Still, some interesting theories were proposed, and we managed to avoid the whole cult-of-the-expert thing you see on discussion forums.
Afterwards, when I was ready to go home, I found that I was out of cash after giving up my last change to a friend for getting me some cereal products, so I went to an ATM to get some money. It was offline. I went to another. It was offline as well. In the end I had to get PR to call Spicygirl to come down with cash to lend me for the taxi ride home. This never happens. Usually, even if one bank is down, you can easily find another one within one block. At first we suspected, of course, a mainland sneak attack, but that would have involved paratroopers, and the skies were clear. So it was either a personal attack by a well-informed hacker or just an inconvenient coincidence.
In preparation for the switch over to the new version of Blogger, I saved all my accounts to Word files. This account alone is over 1,000 pages long in Word, or approximately 3/8 of an average Harry Potter volume. Thus, the forthcoming novelization will be a hefty tome indeed. I also switched the Chinese blog to a more generic, comments-friendly format. I’ll see if I can make the appearance more interesting later. I’m not sure how I feel about the tags/labels thing yet.
Bret and Alan are having their annual Christmas party tonight out in Nangang, and there are various shenanigans and goings-on through Monday night’s dinner at Darrell’s and Judy’s place. Unfortunately, the current administration isn’t feeling too festive about Constitution Day, so we have to work on Christmas.
