Apr 9 2012

Books!

The books that I bought. Aren't they pretty. I must admit. I do judge books by their cover!

I went to Green Apple Books yesterday and bought some books plus another one I bought at Costco.

Lisa See – Shanghai Girls

Sophie Kinsella – The Undomestic Goddess

Nicole Mones – The Last Chinese Chef

Gail Tsukiyama – The Street Of A Thousand Blossoms

I bought Shanghai Girls in Costco for $4+. There were others by the same author, Dreams of Joy, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan but I bought one just to see if I will like it.

Sophie Kinsella’s The Undomestic Goddess, I bought it used at Green Apple for $5. I’ve read Confessions of a Shopaholic and I liked it a lot so I got this too.

For the other two books, I just bought them randomly because it was on sale. It was at $3.98 each with an extra 50% off. I only ended up paying $1.99 for each before taxes.

I walked out of the shop smiling with 3 books and the total bill was less than $10. =) This was a bit of an impulsive buy as it would take me a while to read all these books. I never have quite enough time everyday after work. I have to catch up with my movies, cross-stitch, blogging and other random stuff.

I really wonder how do others do it? I’ll write reviews when I get around to reading them. Won’t be for a long time though. haha

Apr 4 2012

Qingming Festival

Last weekend, I went with my husband and relatives to the cemetery to visit his grandma for qingming festival. We went early to avoid all the crowd and traffic every year. Qingming is when you go visit graves of departed ones, do some cleaning and pay respects to them. Kinda like spring cleaning I guess. hehe

Usually we bring lots and lots of food and we eat there after we pay our respects but it was drizzling a bit so we decided to just keep it simple and go somewhere else for breakfast after.This year Google have something special for qingming too! Just google “qingming festival” and see the results. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you can see 2 animated bulls.If you click around on the white spaces on the page, you can see water ripples and occasionally a fish jumps out.

This is how the search page looks like. Love the leaves

Cute bulls at the end of the page. The kids and bulls are animated too if you click on them

We went to Kome after for the buffet. Love that place! There’s 24 of us in total and the price is reasonable too. I think it was $14.95 per person and seniors get $1 off. Better than nothing. lol. There’s so much food there. Lots of sushi and also cooked Asian food. Noodles, dim sum, dessert, ice cream etc.

Kome sushi buffet. My plate of sushi lol

Mar 21 2012

The Sims 3 – Patch 1.33 Fix

The Sims 3

Last few days after the patch came out, I have been experiencing some trouble with it. Whenever I try to play, the game would freeze on me for a few seconds and then start running again. Its so annoying as it cuts into a lot of my time after work (which is not much >.<)

I’ve tried looking for solutions online in the forums but no one has come up with a solid answer. I know for sure it has nothing to do with my computer as it was running fine before. But anyways, here’s my computer specs which my husband just build for me about a month back:-

Gigabyte A75m-D2H Motherboard
AMD A8-3870K APU
Plextor PX-128M3 SSD
G.SKILL F3-12800CL9d-8GBRL Ripjaws 8GB DDR3 1600 F

I’ve tried un-installing and re-installing and nothing worked. So in the end, I tried clearing the game cache and it fixed it. Here’s how to do it.

Go to the directory where your The Sims 3 is installed. Mine is in my Documents folder but you could probably find it under

Windows Vista/Windows 7: C:Users(username)DocumentsElectronic ArtsThe Sims 3
Windows XP: C:Documents and Settings(username)My DocumentsElectronic ArtsThe Sims 3

Delete the following files below

CASPartCache.package
compositorCache.package
scriptCache.package
simCompositorCache.package

Run your game like normal

After deleting the cache, the game will still have that constant freeze for a period of time as it has to build up the cache again but after a while, it will run smoothly like before. I think mine took about an hour or so but I wasn’t really paying attention.

I was just forcefully trying to play through the constant freeze and it just started working smoothly. Now I can play my Sims like normal again! On a random note, I forgot to set the option of no aging for my Sim and now she’s an old lady =(

Mar 14 2012

Weekend getaway at Clear Lake

I mentioned last week that I was going to clear lake for a weekend vacation with my husband and his cousins. We had fun just relaxing and chilling doing nothing much lol. The vacation house that was rented was the one on 13550 Anderson Road Lower Lake , CA 95457.

Its a huge fully furnished 3 storey house. Let me breakdown what’s available on the different floors.

Top floor

1 bedroom with double bed and a toilet with bathtub. Also have balcony access with lake view
1 bedroom with 2 single bed that have 2 extra single bed that can be pulled out and a small closet

Ground floor

2 bedrooms with double beds and closets
1 toilet with bathtub
1 toilet only
kitchen area with everything you would need to cook (pots, utensils, microwave, dish washer, fridge, plates etc).
1 dining area and 1 counter area to eat at
1 living room that overlooks the lake and a balcony/patio area that you can hang out at overlooking the lake.
A large sofa that has double bed built in

Lower floor

1 bedroom with one double bed
A small sink area with microwave and fridge
1 toilet with bathtub
1 living room area with a large TV
porch/balcony access that connects to the ground floor and also to the dock and the boathouse

Boathouse

2 floors, 1 bedroom with double bed and toilet (it was kinda dirty here so we didn’t actually stay in the boathouse)
bottom floor is the shed have some tools and can hold a boat

This house comes with everything fully furnished down to towels, soap, extra pillows, blankets etc. The best thing about it is that there’s a built in heater that keeps us nice and warm, hot water and also free wireless!! Oh and I forgot to mention there’s a fully functioning BBQ grill also.

Throughout the weekend, we just hang around, watch some shows on Netflix, take walks on the dock, tried to fish but no luck. =(

You can also rent a boat to go fishing but we didn’t do that. So..in total, 3 families went with 13 adults and 2 kids. It was a lot of fun to just relax and eat! I ate so much over the weekend I gained 3 pounds when I came back. >.<

The only complaint I have on this trip is the drive there! Its not that long (about 2.5 hrs from my place) but there’s one part of the road that’s really tricky as we had to navigate through the mountain. Think Lombard Street but 15 mins longer. It was kinda scary at night when you can’t see anything and have to go at 20mph.

I would definitely want to go there again and now I know what to bring and what not to. As it was our first time going there, we prepared for the worst. Bringing our own blankets, sleeping bags, portable heater, pots and lots of extra food which was unnecessary as there’s a Walmart 15 mins drive away. Well, next time we know!

Now for some pictures of the place.

Entrance to the house

Bathroom sink

Balcony / patio area

View of the house from the lake

dock area to get on/off the boat and fish

boathouse

The dcck for the house next door is so much nicer! lol

Trying to catch some fish

Beautiful morning view of clear lake

Lower floor

Cute personalized pillows all over the living room. Makes me feel more at home =)

Our stuff all over the living room hehe

Our messy kitchen counter

Beautiful vineyards on the way there

Image credit: Zillow and my own!

Mar 8 2012

Google Doodle

I’m not sure if everyone noticed but on some ‘special’ days, Google change their logo. Its called Google doodle and sometimes its interactive. Today, I was just randomly using Google and I noticed that the logo is different again. Then I found out that its International Women’s Day today!

Isn’t it cute? Lol. As I didn’t know much about this day, I read on Wikipedia that its a day to celebrate the achievements women achieved. I guess its somewhat similar to Mother’s day except this is more general to all women. International Women’s Day is not a big holiday in most places but some countries still follow the tradition where guys give small gifts to women in their life.

Google celebrated today by doing a simple and nice logo but sometimes on bigger occasions, Google have interactive ones. One of my favorite interactive one was the Christmas 2011 edition.

Another one that I love a lot is from Valentine’s this year. Its shows a story of a boy trying his best to find a perfect Valentine’s day gift for a girl he like. He tries his hardest bringing her different gifts everytime but still the girl ignores him everytime. In the end, he just gave up and started jumping rope beside her. That’s when the girl realize that he is spending time with her and gives him a hug. The best gifts are gifts you can’t buy with money!

Another famous one is when Google joined in on the The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). They kept it simple by just blacking out their logo.

Google SOPA PIPA

Because of the popularity of all the Google Doodles and people wanting to see the past doodles, Google now have a special page for its doodles collection and they also have a contest for creating doodles. Its called Doodle for Google 2012. If you are creative and artistic, why not take a look! Contest ends March 23rd.

Can’t wait to see what they have in store for the next few months and the outcome from this competition.

Mar 2 2012

Don’t get caught with your fly down again!

I bet like me, you have also experienced that embarrassing moment where you are out somewhere when you realise that you get weird looks from people looking at your crotch. Then you realise it’s because that your zipper is unzipped and you try your best to zip it without making it obvious that you’re doing so. After zipping it for a while, it would soon magically unzip all by itself again. This has happened to me quite a few times and the memory of it is so embarrassing that I don’t even want to reminisce on it. I’ve tried many ways to avoid it happening again and I figured that the following method would be the best way.

How to keep your pants zipper up:-

First, take a key ring, one big enough to fit the through the button of your pants.

Realise that there’s a hole on the zipper?

Attach the key ring to the hole on the zipper

Now, pull up your zipper and put the key ring through the button

Lastly, button your pants and your problem is solved!

No more weird looks from people now!

Noobiepies

Noobies on adventures

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