t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


the end of daylight-saving time coincides with the end of my stay at my current webhost. tonight i'm redirecting my DNS addresses to point to the new server. hopefully the downtime will be quick and painless and the weblog won't be offline for too long. i'll let everyone know once i've successfully migrated to my new webhost.

"hey jawei, it's snowing!" i told my exchange student as i looked out the window this afternoon. jawei, who grew up in tropical taiwan, has never seen snow before. before i knew it he was outside in the street, grabbing at the clumps of white fluff falling from the sky. living here in new england, we take snow for granted. as beautiful as it might be, we also know how much of a nuisance it can become. snow is one of those things that's nice to visit but you wouldn't want to live there. unfortunately for us, we don't have a choice. but seeing someone who's never experienced snow before brought back some of that newness. since i was born in taiwan as well, i can remember the first time i saw snow when i first came to america. i probably did the same thing, 6 years old, grabbing at the snowflakes floating down to the ground. was it even supposed to snow today? the temperature was hovering around 40 degrees, i figured it might snow up in the mountains, but not here in the city. i worries me though, it's only october and already it's snowing; i wonder if it's going to be a long winter?

i took jawei to his first first american movie theatre experience, down at fresh pond. we picked weather man because jawei said he's a nicholas cage fan and the movie looked good in the trailers. we drove in the falling snow, like traveling through a star field, flakes swirling around the car. the film turned out to be not so good. i was worried that jawei would have hard time following the story, but even i was having difficulties. from the preview i thought the movie would be a humorous romp about a struggling weather man (nicholas cage in the eponymous role). the actual film itself is a depressing tale about a man trying to reconnect with his splintered family, from an ex-wife on the verge of marrying another man, the overweight camel-toed daughter, the drug-rehabbing son who draws the attention of a pedophilic counselor, and the dying father with a prestigious background as a writer. the running gag of people throwing stuff at the weather man is funny and so is the part where the father takes the daughter to do some clothes shopping. otherwise, the movie meanders in a dreary way, more indie vague than mainstream obvious.

it was still snowing when we left the theatre. i drove us to the cafe, where my father gave me a ride back to my place while my mother took suhan and jawei out shopping.

i headed out around 5pm to the supermercado to pick up a case of guarana before going to dan's place for cymara's baby shower. it was kind of a weird experience, almost everyone there was married, almost everyone had a kid. it's an ever increasing world that seems alien to me. i'm still struggling to find my own piece of that four-letter-word, let alone thinking about matrimony or reproduction. it was interesting though, when it came time to open the presents, to see all the different baby gadgets. earlier dan had showed me their transformer/baby-carriage (collapsible canopy! detachable car seat! drink holders!), and now i was seeing things like milk bottle warmer and the disposable diaper genie. what an industry! at least with a tv or a computer, you can use that for a while, but something like a carriage, once baby is grown, what do you do with that? the shower also came with dinner, including dan's slightly spicy chicken concoction which people were raving about. dessert came in the form of a homemade cake (baked by their friend wendy) that featured chocolate ducks (dyed yellow, i've never seen that before). i also got a chance to play with kevin's canon digital rebel XT (EOS 350D): i'm so sold on the camera, i'm going to save up and get a digital SLR as soon as i can. it might be bulky, it might be more expensive, but the picture quality is incomparable, and the speed of capture is nearly instantaneous.

by the time i got back around 9pm, jawei was already home. i spent the evening moving more files from my old server to the new server.