This is my first post from my new place of residence, thousands of miles away from home. I’m starting my graduate studies somewhere in the US, and that meant packing up my stuff and moving to a new place. It’s an exciting time for me; I have my worries, but I’m still optimistic that everything will work out. If I don’t slack off, concentrate on my studies and take care of myself then I should be alright. I haven’t really settled into my new life yet, but hopefully I’ll get used to this as time goes on. I do miss my family though. Anyways, that’s all I have to write today. I have to get back into school mode before the work load really picks up. Wish me luck.
Month: August 2010
Grouse Mountain
Here is another short trip/visit that’s part of my efforts to get to know British Columbia better before I leave for the US for grad school. This time, I visited Grouse Mountain, one of the more notable attractions in the Lower Mainland area. Located in North Vancouver, Grouse Mountain is a ski resort in the winter and a scenic park with shows and a trail in the summer. Despite living in the Lower Mainland for quite a few years, I’ve never been to Grouse Mountain before, and so last weekend my family decided to go there. The post is short description of our trip accompanied by some photos.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Gakuen Datenroku – Final Thoughts
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a manga “review” on this site.. This post is for Neon Genesis Evangelion – Gakuen Datenroku, which is one of the many NGE-based manga series. I’m not too sure why I picked up this series since I’m not that big of a NGE fan. I blogged about this series from late 2008 to early 2009, but stopped because I couldn’t find any new chapters for several months. The manga ended serialization in December 2009. I finally read the last chapter a month or two ago and it looked like the manga got canned and ended prematurely. Still, I thought I’d put a conclusion to my own coverage of the series with a final thoughts post, so here goes:
My Experience: Repairing a LCD Monitor’s Back Light
Yesterday I fixed an old broken LCD monitor and I thought I’d share the experience. Specifically, I replaced a bad capacitor on the LCD’s inverter board to fix the problem of the back light not lighting up. Repairing a LCD… sounds impressive right? Yeah, I’m proud of myself right now :lol: , but it’s actually a really easy job if you have a soldering iron. I have really shaky hands and if I can do this, then so can most of you. This article is part guide and part personal experience. You’ll have to excuse my blurry photos though. Read on if you are interesting or if your monitor is afflicted with a similar problem.
New External Hard Drive: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex (500GB)
I haven’t made a computer hardware post for a while, mostly because I didn’t buy anything significant until this month. As the title indicates, I bought a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500GB portable hard drive. As with all of my hardware posts, this is not a review. It’s just a chance for me to show off my new gadget and write some thoughts on it. Read on if you are interested.
Picking Blueberries
My family went to pick some blueberries recently and I just thought I should write a post about the activity. Since last year, picking blueberries has become one of my family’s favorite summer activities. Picking blueberries is an easy, inexpensive activity that is not very time-consuming or tiring. Perhaps more importantly, blueberries are also touted for various health benefits, and they can be delicious too.
Day Trip to the Sunshine Coast
A few days ago I went on another day trip to explore places near and around the Vacouver region. I will be leaving the area to study in the US soon, so these are the last few weeks that I have to get to know British Columbia a little better. This time I went the Sunshine Coast, an area composed of several small towns/villages that’s located northwest of Vancouver. As a resident of the Metro Vancouver area, I keep hearing about the term “Sunshine Coast” but before the trip I didn’t really know where the Sunshine Coast was. Just likes the trips to Sydney (Vancouver Island), my relatives and I fished and crabbed during the trip, and below is the record of that day.
Badminton Portal and Travel Log Rebuilt
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on some of my other websites and the work is finally (nearly) complete. Firstly, the main area of Travel Log has been rebuilt using WordPress at the request of its authors. For this redesign, I used a stock theme and didn’t need to do any importing as there wasn’t too much content in that site.
On to the second piece of news, JP’s Badminton Portal has also been rebuilt using WordPress, and what’s more it has been combined with JP’s Badminton Blog and moved to it’s own domain, www.jpbadminton.com. Formerly, the Badminton Portal was run using a self-wrote PHP content management system and the Badminton Blog ran on Textpattern. I had the Badminton Portal separate because I wanted to make the site truly bilingual (in English and Simplified Chinese), but after thinking about it I decided to combine the two sites to make administration easier. My self-wrote PHP script was buggy at places anyways. Importing from the Badminton Blog to the new Badminton Portal was fairly easy as there is an import script available online, but all the articles from the old Badminton Portal had to be manually moved. I also built a custom theme for the site using Thematic Theme Framework. There are still some minor tweaks for the new Badminton Portal, but it’s ready for visitors.
Hopefully the changes to both websites will improve the visitors’ experiences and draw more traffic.