Last January I had my first trip outside the country - or my first trip for the year - Hong Kong!
The Hong Kong trip was planned long ago - tickets were booked waaay in advance - you know it - seat sales. The date was set, but it took as a while to book a hotel. We wanted to make sure that even if we won't be staying for more than 10 hours a day in the hotel it would be a very comfortable stay, but at a reasonable price. Once the hotel was booked and the itinerary created, we just had to wait for the appointed date and time.
Truth be told, there were some apprehensions as the days went by. One of the reasons was that people were telling us to be very careful - apparently there have been a lot of people who experienced rudeness with the locals. Googling about it doesn't help either. But, we still decided to push through with it - we'll just bite back if needed. :P
Our itinerary consisted of visiting theme mostly theme parks - there were a couple of changes in the itinerary as we went along depending on the volume of people in certain areas, but overall we were able to get to most of the original ones. :)
I won't go into much detail of what happened during our trip, but I've put in a summary of what transpired during the day. I've also posted the pictures in the Facebook profile and have set them to public. I've included the links below for your to see HongKong through my eyes (or in this case, through my camera. :P)
My first attempt at customizing my homescreen was very vanilla, in a sense. First, I changed my home launcher to Nova Prime Launcher (app given to me by +Kirk Andrew Monasterial since he already bought the app). I did some minor modifications, most of which stem mostly from the launcher end (i.e. number of screens, number of rows and columns, default icon pack used). The layout was based from a homescreen I saw in MyColorScreen. 
Another homescreen that I created along with the one above is my HTC Desire S' homescreen. Inspiration for the design came from the Ubuntu, which has the applications on the left side. To make the app list scrollable I used Folder Organizer, and adjusted the rows and columns to make it look more pretty. 
The third homescreen was one of the drastic homescreen changes I've done. It didn't feature any icon themes, but I did use another set of icons for the App Drawer. The homescreen consisted of three widgets - one contains the clock and weather, the other is the calendar, and the third is a simple text widget that has a link to the Messages, Phone Log, and the App Drawer. All Widgets were created via UCCW. The biggest challenge for this homescreen is making the circular pattern in the wallpaper fit perfectly with the circular clock series widget. It took me a while to actually get it right, and I can't seem to replicate it since. This is also the first homescreen not to sport the notification bar, relying on gestures to display it. 
My current homescreen is sporting the same set of icons (for the simple reason that I can't think of a layout for them yet). I did change the background (from the more common wallpaper I was using to the Megaman wallpaper as seen below). I created the clock/calendar widget using Minimalist Text, while I used UCCW to create the battery percentage that looks like a barcode (I opted to use UCCW as Minimalist Text adds a ">" when the phone is charging). 
