i went back to belmont around noontime to fix the new belkin router which suddenly went dead this morning. it was one of those things that as soon as i got there, the problem mysteriously fixed itself. when i returned home i made good on my weekly resolution and went out for a run around 3pm. i cramped up like crazy but there was hardly anybody out to see my humiliation so it wasn't so bad. when i got back i just finished downloading last night's dexter finale and watched it after my shower. so good! i hope michael c. hall wins the golden globe for best actor in a television drama.

the whole time i was running i was thinking about food, and baking some fresh brownies or blueberry muffins. too lazy to go across the street to the supermarket, i found a pound cake mixture in the cupboard and just so happened to have enough milk and eggs left to make it happen. nothing like fresh baked goods straight out of the oven on an increasingly cold day!

no news on the fish front, everything seems stable. no more snail sightings, fortunately. at last count i still have 5 baby guppies in the aquarium; hopefully they're big enough now that the adults aren't tempted to eat them anymore (although i do feed often, 2-3 times a day, crushing the large flakes in some aluminum foil).

i spent another hour in the evening playing colossus. yesterday i killed the 6th colossus, the one with the long beard. that one was scary, because even if you hide, it looks for you (which turned out to be the key in defeating it though). tonight, the 7th colossus was a hairy sea serpent with electrical spikes and involved some underwater action.

i've also been working on a china slideshow in imovie HD that i'll eventually burn onto a dvd. it's a holiday present for professor zheng in kunming, it won't arrive in time for christmas, but since he doesn't celebrate it anyway, it won't be a big deal if it gets there a few days late. i'm trying to figure out how many seconds per photo. i picked 5 seconds (actually less, with cross fade transition), but with 244 photos, that comes out to a slideshow that's still 20 minutes long. of course, if i were to show all the photos i took during my trip, it's take more than 3 days. the great thing is i can actually work on it on my new laptop: i'm so used to the idea of the slow laptop, i didn't even think of it at first, but now my laptop is the fastest machine i own.

finally, i tried adobe photoshop CS 3 beta tonight, the universal binary version that can run native on new intel macs. it's definitely faster than photoshop CS, the version i'd been using before. there are some interface tweaks which don't really turn me on, i'm more excited about the overall speed boost.

i had to pick out 3 snails from the aquarium today, including that massive one ("moby") i could've sworn i saw a few days ago but disappeared before i could catch it. where could've they been hiding and are there going to be more? they don't seem to harm the fish and i wouldn't mind if i just had plastic plants, but these snails make quick work of my live aquatic plants and i can't have that.

you've heard about yearly resolutions? well, i like to make weekly resolutions. one of my resolutions for next week is more exercise (i.e. running) regardless of the weather. i'm also going to wake up at a decent hour and not the ungodly hours i've been logging all last week. and more a todo item than a resolution, but i really have to start my christmas shopping. past few days i've been scouring the internet for worthy purchases, but everything's either too expensive or crap. it's gotten to the point now with only a week before christmas that i can't buy anything online (since it won't arrive in time), so looks like i'm hitting the malls, and by that i mean the galleria, which is the only nearby mall that i can get to via public transportation. so if you're going to be at the galleria next week, look for me wandering the floors aimlessly looking for creative ways to spend my hard earned money.

noticed how i don't mention football on sundays when the patriots lose? well, they won today, so suddenly i'm all chatty about the pigskin. i sort of half-watched the lopsided game while surfing the web in my room, learning new words like "neathage" and "tabagism." also, i've been obsessed with marianne faithfull for the past week, reading up everything online about her life and downloading a few songs.

in the evening i was skirted away back to belmont to have dinner with the family. before that happened though, my parents were showing me some furniture in the basement of the cafe. eastern butcher block has gone out of business, and gave my parents a large dining table as a farewell present. it's a nice wooden dining table, expandable to seat at least 12 people, and worth a few grand. it's the kind of table that's inspiring my parents to completely redo their living room in order to accommodate this new addition, which is about time, since in the 22 years they've lived in that house, the only room that's ever been repainted is my childhood bedroom.

the used netgear wireless router that my father inherited from some previous tenants of my great uncle's condo was acting up again and i tried to troubleshoot the problem. it kept on saying there was an ip address conflict between a mysterious machine on the network and the router itself. in the end we drove down to the nearby best buy in the watertown mall and got the cheapest wireless router they carried, a $40 belkin. back at home, after some initial trouble getting the cablemodem to reset, the wireless network was back online. before i returned to cambridge i helped my mother clear the snow on her cable reception and assisted my sister in uploading some files to her new website.