Today is the last day of 2014. For me, the part that stood out the most this year was coming to Tallinn for a semester. I learned a lot and I tried many new things. Being responsible for your own home brings a lot into perspective ;) Regardless, today is the last day of 2014. Tomorrow is the start of the new year! Best wishes for everyone; Happy New Year!

I was making ginger tea last night because it was really cold in Tallinn. For those who don't know what ginger tea is, it's just ginger, brown sugar, and water. To make ginger tea, there is one important step: the ginger must be soaked in cold water for a long period of time. The cold water lets more of the ginger "spice" into the water, which creates the "warming" effect when drinking ginger tea. **Making ginger tea:**

[Inhon](http://www.inhon.com) is a relatively unknown manufacturer in the computer industry. It is a Taiwanese company that only recently started making laptops. Before making its own laptops, however, it was the OEM for Gigabyte's [X11 Ultrabook](http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4247). Despite receiving mixed reviews, Inhon went on to create the Carbonbook 11 based on the same framework as the X11. The Inhon Carbonbook 11 I bought has a Core i5-3337U processor and a 120GB SSD. It weighs less than 1kg, and has a mediocre battery to keep its body slim. The main reason I bought the Carbonbook last year was because my previous laptop (Asus [U32U](http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/U32U/)) was severely underpowered. Even though I upgraded it to have 6GB of RAM, it's E450 APU couldn't handle much more than extremely basic office tasks. The Carbonbook was only around $600 USD, yet it had a current-gen processor and an SSD. It had an amazing price to performance ratio.

It's been a little over two months since I arrived in [Tallinn, Estonia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallinn). When I stepped foot out of Tallinn Airport (Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport), I was still feeling the exhausting effects of a 20 hour flight, yet the first thing that came to my mind was: Wow, it's cold. Bear in mind I arrived in the middle of August, so technically, it was still summer! A few days later, I settled into a tiny apartment in Mustamäe. Thereafter, I began to notice other aspects of life in Estonia. For example, I was waiting for the light to turn green at a pedestrian crossing one day when I noticed a car slowing down. The driver then stopped before the crosswalk and motioned for me to go ahead. I was surprised to say the least! In Taiwan, drivers never stop for pedestrians, least of all if the light is green. But in Tallinn, drivers often stop for pedestrians - even when pedestrians don't have right of way! Another interesting fact about Estonian drivers is that I have almost never seen one run a red light.

Well, you may be wondering why I'm using AppServ instead of some other WAMP bundle. Or even why I'm not using Linux? There's no real answer - except I'm just used to it. I've been using AppServ since high school. It works, so I just didn't switch. Anyway, AppServ comes bundled with PHP 5.2.6. The more powerful date functions like [`date_diff()`](http://php.net/manual/en/datetime.diff.php) come with 5.3+. Upgrading PHP should be trivial: all you need to do is [download a thread safe version](http://windows.php.net/download/) from the PHP website. I downloaded PHP 5.6.1. Then, rename your old `php5` folder to `php5.bak` (It's located somewhere like `C:\AppServ`). Extract the upgraded PHP package to that location and rename it to `php5`. Now, restart the Apache server. You may find that it cannot restart. There may be an error saying something like:

After many years of not using this site, I have decided to redesign it. Completely. I opted to use a more minimalistic interface rather than one with many images and backgrounds. Light shadows and clean typography are the main ideas here in this new redesign. Interestingly, I found that I have become much better at programming after taking a much needed break from it. Instead of just plain coding, I am taking advantage of PHP's objects and am creating elements that are much more flexible than 4 years ago when I last redesigned this website. I'm sure that my experience with Java and Android app development helped with this improvement.