Okay, I know this comes really late. I’ve been keeping it in Drafts for a few days now, but never got to completing the entry until now.

Well, I’m back.

After 3 weeks overseas, I’ve returned just in time to see many of my friends enlisting into National Service in month. It’s quite disappointing that I wasn’t able to spend sometime with them over the holidays, but I guess that’s out of my control.

In the 3 weeks that I was away, I went to Hong Kong like I do almost every year.

This year’s one was slightly different because it was quite possibly our longest stay there. My family left a week earlier than me and spent 4 weeks there — the maximum time allowed by our airline.

What do we do in Hong Kong?

You shop. And we did that.

What happens when you have an extended shopping vacation?

You overshopped. And we did that.

After 4 weeks of shopping, we had a few credit cards reaching/have reached their credit limits.

And then we arrived at the Hong Kong International Airport on 6 January to check in our baggage and head home.

That’s when we realised that our 8 baggages were overweight. 22 kg overweight, to be exact. Each additional kg costs HK$75, about S$15. So the total cost we needed to pay for overweight baggages was HK$1650, about S$330. At that price we could’ve gotten another air ticket, and put a 150 kg sumo wrestler on board.

So we tried to save ourselves some cash by taking out a 13 kg bag and dismantling it, and stuffing the contents into our hand-carried bags. We succeeded alright, and also got rid of some weight in the other luggages by removing a laptop and some other heavy stuff.

Then we proceeded to check in our baggages again, only to discover that mysterious, the total weight dropped by 5 kg only.

At 17 kg overweight, it still wasn’t cheap. In the end, we were offered to pay for just 13 kg, at HK$975. It’s like, the check-in counter can just decide how much you’d need to pay.

I think Cathay Pacific is cheating our money.

Er yeah, I wanted to change my banner to a New Year version, but the Flash source file that I copied into my laptop was saved in Flash CS4. My laptop only has Flash CS3, and apparently the format is not backwards compatible. Darn.

Well, I’m not too sure what else to add here. I’ve lost my ability to blog. But I’ll try to say a thing or two about the countdown at Hong Kong’s Times Square when I get back on the 6th.

Also, more significantly, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy!

Ahh I’ll blog properly tomorrow or something.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, etc.

An unsecured Internet connection is hard to come by, y’know.

Well, I’ll be flying off to Hong Kong tomorrow to join my family who were already there for the past week. So I suppose the frequency of blog entries will fall.

And I decided to make use of my server web space by uploading the new TV series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, for now. I chose it because anyone can just pick up the series as it’s only a few episodes into the first season.

I had better options like CSI, but it’s already into Season 9 and I think only people who have been following the series will be able to follow.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a new cartoon TV series that continues from where the movie of the same name left off. Granted, it was a really bad movie that felt like an overly long cartoon, but it was meant to be that way — It was supposed to be the opening for this new cartoon series.

It’s currently airing in the US only, in its first season at episode 10. So, well, you can pick it up even if you haven’t watched Star Wars before.

As for those who are familiar with Star Wars, you may like to know that the story is set between the movies Episode 2 and 3.

The episodes are quite high-res and are about 350MB each, and I’ve also included the subtitles file. Not to worry – my site is hosted on a Singapore server, so you should get blazing fast speeds.

So anyway, you can download them from http://files.helixated.com

Enter public as the username and 123 for the password, and look under the TV folder.

As the year comes to a close, Google has compiled the data from all the searches made using their search engine.

It’s a good measure of which events or people made the most headlines this year.

So, for starters:

Sarah Palin wins the Internet.

But not much surprises in that list. Let’s have a look at Singapore then.

In Singapore, we’re more concerned about some scandal that isn’t even related to us.

Also, we like to search for stupid terms like Facebook, instead of directly typing www.facebook.com into our address bar. The same goes for Google Maps, Wikipedia, YouTube and Yahoo.

And the stupidest thing? We search for Google on Google. What?

Read the rest at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2008/