The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

I went skiing during the long President’s Day weekend in Mountain High resort.

The weather was perfect. The snowfall stopped right after we parked the car at the resort and the sun started to shine on us. However, because it was the 3-day long weekend, too many people showed up. It took me almost 2 hours of waiting time to go from the eastern base to the west! It was already past noon, after I got on the lift and began skiing down the trail.

The snow was pretty good, the best I have ever seen in Mountain High. The fun of skiing down the hill was just as usual, until I noticed that I could not feel the big toe of my right foot. At first, I thought it was no big deal, which turned out to be a mistake.

On the way back home, my toe started to feel strange: it felt numb even though it was wrapped in my warm hands. “Am I going to lose my toe?”, I began to worry. Once home, I opened my computer and did a search for “numb toe after skiing”. Google once again showed its magic and I learned that my numb toe was caused by the over-tight ski boot and the small nerves were badly hurt. Luckily, it is not too bad, since the nerves could recover over time. Had it been frostbite, I would be in urgent care room.

UPDATE: It has been almost 2 weeks. The big toe is feeling much better now without the numbness. However, it is still not fully recovered as I kind of feel something different in that toe from time to time.

UPDATE 2: Okay, now my big toe kicked back with normal feelings! If you are going to ski sometime, be careful about your toes

Howdy, I’m back!

You may have noticed that it has been over a month since my last post. Oh, yeah, how time flies! My old web server died right before my grandma and mom came to visit me. So not until yesterday was I able to recover here. //sigh

Moving to a new server turned out to be a big pain, just like moving to a new place in the real world. All the posts of my other WordPress blog with Chinese characters in UTF-8 encoding got messed up after the import. Considering the fact that the server was already dead, I almost panicked. Luckily, with the help of almighty google search, I found the following site complaining the same issue: WordPress UTF-8 Charset Woes. I then added the suggested query (“SET NAMES ‘utf8′”) into the wp-db.php and it worked!

Compared to the pain with data migration, upgrading from WordPress 1.5.2 to 2.0.1 from 1.5.2 simply breathed, taking less than 5 minutes.

This morning, Steve Jobs releases news about a whole line of Apple’s new products in Macworld Expo 2006:

• MacBook Pro
• intel-based iMac
• iPod remote with FM tuner, long-waited feature
• iLife ’06, which includes a new iWeb for blogging!
• Apple Mac OS X 10.4.4

This is really exciting. Apple did make a great start in 2006!

A side note: Adobe released a public beta testing software called Lightroom, which will take on Apple’s Aperture, aiming at professional photographers.

How did you say goodbye to the year of 2005?

I went to the New Year’s Eve party at my advisor’s home. The Vietnamese food was really great. I was almost full after eating only the appetizer! The salad in the main entree was maybe the best salad I had for years! Anyway, at midnight, we watched the ball dropping in NYC on TV and opened up several bottles of champange. Frankly, I don’t know why people are so crazy about the ball drop. The lights in the Times Square looked fabulous but you need to get there in the morning and basically stay in the crowds for more than 12 hours. I’d call it craziness.

Anyway, we are in 2006 now. Do you feel freshened up and ready to fulfill your new year resolution? I hope you do. Wish you a wonderful New Year!