think carrie, think!

Seven hours in three airports
+ Four and a half hours in three different planes
+ Eight hours of walking
+ Fifteen minutes of negotiation
+ One grumpy Carrie at the end of the day
equals …

… I won’t be homeless next year!

Last night, I got a call from my mom, asking me to check my email because she had sent me some pictures of a shirt that she wanted my opinion on. I did all of this without a second thought, gave my opinion (it was a nice shirt), and hung up.

It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized that this call was very monumental. It marked the very first time that my mom emailed pictures to me without asking me for help on how to do it. She took the pictures, uploaded them to her laptop, wrote an email and attached the photos all by herself. I was very proud of her.

Not that I shouldn’t be – my mom was an excellent student. While I was at home, and both of us had time, she would ask me to teach her how to use her digital camera and be able to email pictures to other people. One of many lessons I ended up offering. So I sat next to her, patiently teaching her the little things that I sometimes forget can be hard for people who didn’t grow up with technology. And she listened diligently, transcribing every step very carefully to her notebook, which is now filled with a variety of instructions (”How to burn songs onto CD“, “How to add songs to iPod“, “How to make DVD” … my mom is very hip).

As time went on, eventually she asked less and less questions when trying to send pictures to other people. But there was always some little issue – never was she able to complete the entire process on her own. Until last night.

Mom complained when I left the country for grad school that her personal in-house teacher would no longer be there to help her with her technology problems. We’ve found a way around that, though. I have now become her personal phone support contact. And, in the rare cases that she gets IM working correctly, her personal online support agent :)

Yesterday after work, while waiting for the shuttle to the train station:

Me: “Let’s do some food and wine at the park this weekend, if it doesn’t rain. It’ll sort of be like my birthday celebration”
Nods and smiles of agreement
Ning, fellow intern: “Sounds good… when is your birthday?”
Me: “Soon.”
Ning: “When, like, next week?”
Me: “Actually, it’s today.”

So, another year has passed. I didn’t do much yesterday, but it was nice that way. It being, what, 36C outside. I did, however, get treated to a nice birthday dinner by my mom at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze. It was fantastic. Although I may now be celebrity-chef-ed out, after having gone to Bobby Flay’s Bar American two weeks ago, and Mesa Grill just last week. But Maze was an entirely different experience, being modeled by Ramsay’s delicate small-plate, tapas style Asian-influenced French dishes, whereas Bobby Flay’s restaurants were all-out Mexican feasts. On my birthday dinner menu (for my own sake of remembering, if anything):

• Salad of globe artichoke, chickpeas, green beans, truffle dressing
• Carpaccio of tuna and swordfish with lime and cucumber marinade, soya dressing
• Gilthead bream with native lobster risotto, lemongrass and Thai basil
• Madagascan vanilla rice pudding, raspberry and lemon thyme jam, mascarpone and pecan ice cream

Yum. Happy Birthday to me indeed. Thanks to everyone who sent their well wishes my way :)

New toy numero uno

While the iPhone was bought by half-million+ Americans and ogled by the rest of the world, I sat in my NY apartment holding in my grubby little hands, a small yellow package. Inside was a new phone. No, not a product of the Red Delicious variety, but instead, a white Sony Ericsson w200a. Yes, it’s an old model and there are tons of phones out there better than this one, but it’s fairly pretty, and most importantly, it was free. So while the world was salivating over neat interactions, pretty interfaces, and AT&T problems, I was just happy not to be carrying a bulky brick of a phone any longer.

Okay fine my old phone wasn’t actually that bad. It made and received calls perfectly fine (50% of the time). But it was a drag to carry around. And it took me half a year just to get used to how to do things (and Nokia is usually pretty good about their interfaces). So yay for new, small, and free phones.

New toy numero dos

(My very lame attempt at learning Spanish. One of possibly 2401029 things on my summer to-do list. Fine. More like my lifetime to-do list.)

My sister got me a white Nintendo DS for my birthday. Of all the Nintendo products, the DS is definitely my favourite. Yes, the Wii is cool, but until they fix the interactions so that it actually maps to what you’re doing more precisely, I won’t drool over it. The DS actually has all its interactions pretty near perfect, and is a significant enough change from its previous counterparts that it’s worth getting. After all, I did get one for both my mom and my sister as gifts. Actually, I think 50% of my extended family has one. Maybe it’s just a Chan family thing.

Okay, enough about new toys. Happy Silly American day!

Took this test. Summary of results:

My type: ENFJ

(Strength of preferences in % – I have yet to figure out what that means)
Extraverted: 11
Intuitive: 75
Feeling: 12
Judging: 22

Type profiles described here and here. Apparently I fit into the category of the Teacher Idealist. Interesting.