The Longanisa Project 3.0

So it’s the last day of the year. In a few hours we’ll say goodbye to 2008 and welcome 2009 with open arms but with our fingers crossed. 2008 wasn’t exactly as fun and exciting as I hoped it would be. It was just OK.

I listed down a few highlights of the year in terms of what we bought.

1. Graham. Of course. He’s the highlight of the whole year for me – that after a few years to toying around with the idea, we finally got a dog despite Charo’s mom’s apprehensions. Follow his development in pictures here, here and here.

2. The Nike Zoom Victory Shoe. I bought it about two or three months ago and it represents me slowly going into running. Actually it started this year when I bought a pair of Nike Air Structure Triax 10 on sale at Sports Warehouse. Then it got a little more serious when I bought a Nike+ iPod system and hooked it up to my iPod Nano. After eight months, I bought a lighter running shoe – and that’s the Nike Zoom Victory.

3. The Nokia E63. After more than two years, Charo has had enough of my dilapidated Nokia N70 and loaned me some money to buy the Nokia E63 and replace my old one. It’s a watered down version of their E71, but at P14,200 with wifi capability and a full qwerty keypad, I’m perfectly happy with it.

4 and 5. The Popcorn Hour and the Samsung HT-Z210 home theater system. These two totally revolutionized the way we enjoy our TV. We download the shows we want to watch on torrent (or we let Popcorn Hour do that for us) and then we watch it on out LCD TV with the audio hooked up to the home theater system via optical cable. Pure TV bliss. We’re now spoiled on watching our TV shows on full HD that we hardly watch cable anymore.

So the first day of December has come to pass and I’m writing this blog at 12:10 a.m. of December 2. How time flies indeed. Pretty soon the year will be over and everything will be reset come January. But I don’t want to think about that for now.

I go back to work again tomorrow after a three-day weekend, thanks to Andres Bonifacio. It’s a break I welcomed with open arms and would gladly consider experimenting if I had the power.

I gave Charo her Christmas gift very early so that we can enjoy it. It’s a Popcorn Hour A-110 Network Media Tank, and it has revolutionized our way of enjoying our downloaded media. Instead of just watching on our Macs, we can now watch our favorite movies and foreign TV shows in its full HD glory on our big-screen TV with this device! It’s like an Apple TV but way better. It’s hooked to the net and has a built-in torrent application so it can download your media straight to its hard drive. It’s really nice!

As for my gift from her, she have me a new 32GB iPod Touch, and so now I have three iPods all in all. There’s Zagu, my 60GB 5th Generation iPod Video; Blue, my second generation iPod Nano; and now there’s Touchie. I’m actually thinking of letting go one of these but I’m not sure which one. I use Zagu in the car while Blue is my companion when I run. With Touchie, its cool apps and its built-in Nike Plus, I was thinking of letting go of Blue. But when I tried running with it, it was just too bulky for me. Bahala na.

That’s it for now. Time to go to sleep.