Chan's Personal Blog

So this weekend, I was over at Steve's house for a drive-in movie theater event. His parents sold the house so this was a final get together. Lots of good memories there. Steve used to hold car rallies at his place, and we used to fire off a bunch of fireworks there.

In either case, the drive-in was arranged really well. He had an old-school popcorn machine. In addition, he had servers come by each car to take snack and drink orders. Very professionally done. He also constructed a big screen to show the movie on. He rented a projector for the theater, and played movies off his laptop to the projector. Another neat feature was that he used a FM radio transmitter for the movie's audio, so everyone could just tune into a local radio station and hear the movie from their cars. Pretty sweet setup.

The feature film was The Mask of Zorro. There was a brief intermission inbetween so that people could recharge their car batteries. The intermission was even complete with that classic movie clip of "Let's All Go To The Lobby" which was a nice touch.

There was a few people from my grad class there, mainly Brian and the man formerly known as Adam. So, we got to catch up a bit which was nice because I hadn't seen them in a while. It also dawned on me that more and more people from my grad class are moving out of Victoria which is kind of sad, but it's inevitable. Steve for example is going to Europe to study at an Austrian university as part of an academic exchange for 8 months. Best of luck with that.

After a weekend away camping, I got on my computer and was saddened to know that a girl from my high school grad class, Jennifer Hanson, had passed away last week due to a car accident. She passed away on August 13, 2006. I found a short article in the news that briefly described what happened. This is quite sudden and shocking since all of us are so young and starting life as adults. You always hear about tragedies in the media, but rarely does it hit close like this.

I'm not sure how to react about this except to spread the information to other alumni who knew her during high school.

I managed to find Jennifer Hanson's obituary online at the Times Colonist. Furthermore, they have an online guestbook for people to sign, and I think it would nice for those who knew her to leave a short message.

Events like this always makes me step back and think how unimportant our pursuit of money, power, possessions, pleasure, and lust are. In the end, it's the relationships with friends, families, and God that really matters.

Special thanks to Natalie for bringing this to my attention. Natalie has an entry about Jenn as well on her blog.

It's a sad day.

So, apologies to my regular readers for the lack of posts this week. For the last few nights, I've been helping Adam and Sarah with their wedding BBQ. Usually I get off work, and head up there to help, and come home to sleep, so I haven't had much time in front of a computer lately. Lately, I have become a programmer by day, mover/landscaper/sound technician by night. I'm feeling a little more burly these days because I learned how to cut rebar .

In either case, today was the big day, it was Adam and Sarah's wedding BBQ. The wedding was at Adam's dad's place in Mill Bay. It was a fine day for a BBQ since it wasn't too hot, and the sun was shining. This is good because on Thursday, it rained, and Friday was very cloudy, and kind of chilly in the morning. Anyway, a crap load of food, friends, and sun is my idea of a good BBQ.

On a related tangent, they rented a portapotty for the BBQ because they were expecting a lot of people. When the movers came to drop off the portapotty, they said that it was a new portapotty, and no one had ever used it yet. As a good friend of the wedding party, I had the privledge of being the first one to test drive the new portapotty and to christening it. It was certified with the Chan Stamp of Approval™ subsequently. They should make a Mastercard commercial about this. Renting a portapotty for a wedding, $100. Being the friend of the wedding party to christen a new portapotty.... priceless.

The other funny thing was the music. I was the sound guy for the BBQ (surprise surprise). So, we made a mix CD for the event, and it consisted mainly of country music (not my call). The theme for the mix CD was "easy-listening" since there were a number of elderly people there. Anyway, we made the CD, and I was playing the CD on random shuffle on the laptop which was hooked up the sound system. Some of the people in my age cohort was complaining that the slow music was sucking, and that I was a bad DJ, and I joked that oh, this is just the slow intro to the song, it was going to pick up. A few seconds later, the music crossfaded to some hip-hop new metal track, and it was perfect for my joke. I guess one of Adam's songs accidentally made it into the mix CD. When the track started playing, the bass was going, and God knows how many dirty glares I got from people who didn't appreciate this kind of music at a wedding. I quickly retreated to the sound system to change tracks. Pretty funny nevertheless though.

Anyway, the BBQ was really fun. There were about 50-60 people there. The happy couple got a lot of nice loot. I personally have my eye on the professional kitchen knife set that they got. The clean-up went by pretty quickly too, and we ferried a bunch of stuff back to the church after the event. (That's one of the nice thing about being part of a church, you can borrow a lot of stuff for events like this, ie sound system, tables, chairs, pots and pans, BBQ grills, people, etc.) I think I fulfilled the sound technician's code of honour that day, "First One In, Last One Out."

Congratulations to Adam and Sarah once again.