It's been a lovely and productive day at last. My grandmother went off to volunteer at church for most of the day, so in the last 36 hours I've popped off two project spec drafts and the majority of a Trac install (with lots of help - there are a good number of dependencies and the remote server I was working on is configured a little differently than usual), given a presentation, and coughed less phlegm down the sink than usual, which felt good (or at least less bad).
I also finally got to start catching up on OLPC stuff, which is kind of like trying to plunge from a standstill into the midst of a herd of stampeding wildebeest. So that's going to take a while. But it's a start.
Also: acquired an inordinate amount of hopia, a porcelain bowl, and two behemoth tupperware containers at the mooncake festival last night. Luck was with me; I won 3 of the 4 second-place prizes offered in all the games that evening (only my aunt had a luckier streak - she rolled a string of 2's and got to take home a mooncake larger than her head).
On the other hand, now I'm stuck with large amounts of Lucky Tupperware and a Lucky Porcelain Bowl that I've been told firmly and repeatedly not to give away because - well, they're lucky. I'm supposed to bring them to China, then back to the Philippines, then to the US and back to Boston so I can take the luck with me - don't I want more of what I experienced at the game? "It depends," I told them. "Is the luck for attracting good fortune in general, or just free serving dishes?"
Finally, I changed the company website of my aunt and uncle from this to this. I hadn't planned on doing so, but after seeing the old site I couldn't take it any more and asked for ftp access and permission to do them a favor.
Old site: huge flash animation that took up most of the screen real-estate in garish blue-grey, stiltedly misspelled English, One Gigantic Image File. (Yes, the text is an image. The entire webpage was one gigantic non-searchable jpeg.) Total: 4.7+ MB.
New site: standards-compliant strict xhtml and css, easily extensible page templates, Total: 28kb, which is... nearly a 175x reduction in size. Sure, I'm not the best at writing ad copy, and the color scheme needs to change, and I need to get some product pictures so the site actually features what they sell, but still.
It's still a few hours before dinner - there's plenty of time yet to get more stuff done. Whee!
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By the way: mooncakes and hopia are not the same thing. Or rather, the latter is a Fookien-Filipino regional variant of the former.
Most mooncakes have a thin, tender, elaborately shaped and glazed crust and a lotus paste filling with salted eggs in the middle. They're pretty tiny - maybe 3-4 inches on each side - usually somewhat square-ish, and super-expensive.
Hopia, on the other hand, is usually mung bean paste wrapped in a flaky, more puff-pastry-ish crust. They're round, sort of flattish, and don't have ridiculous decorations on top (although the larger ones will be stamped with red ink). They can be tiny (~2in on a side) or gigantic (~13-14in across) and they're somewhat cheaper, I think, than the mooncakes most Americans are used to seeing (if they've seen mooncakes, I mean).
I used to think all mooncakes were hopia and was pretty weirded out in elementary school when I first saw conventional mooncakes. So they're not the same thing at all.
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