Happy Chinese New Year!!! It's the Year of the Dog! Woof Woof! Gong Xi Fah Tsai! Gong Hay Fat Choy! Or quite simply "Hand Over The Red Envelopes!!!". Hehehe
Hmm...looking through my little list of things I had put down to mention but hadn't yet...I saw The Polar Express finally. I dunno...a little underwhelming and they seemed to think that the original book didn't have enough material so they padded a few action sequences here and there to make things interesting. It's a nice movie that I wouldn't mind showing to kids during Christmas time though. I had lunch with Margaret at this place in Chinatown that Priscilla had said was good. Had the beef stew which was not that great...it's cheap but the food is cheap too. One time when I was going down to Milpitas, I was getting on the freeway when I saw cars coming in my direction. I was like "CRAP! I've gone the wrong way!" until I checked everything and realized that these cars were so desperate to get OFF the freeway that they had decided to free using an on ramp! Crazy crazy drivers...and it wasn't just one either. I counted at least 4 cars on my way up. Luckily they all kept to one side of the ramp. You know that Aston Martin DB5 Coupe that I saw in San Diego? Well the original James Bond DB5 sold for $2,090,000 recently at auction. It has machine guns and tire slashers among other things.
Did you know that you can order a "short" at Starbucks? You know...you usually look at the menu and see 3 choices "Tall" "Venti" "Grande"...well there's a secret "Short" that isn't on the menu but they'll serve it along with a cheaper price. Tell your friends!!!
I saw the new Full Metal Alchemist movie...it's alright and it kinda ends the series on a high note. Note the highest note but a high note. See it and you'll know what I mean.
So January 15th of last year was when I met Emily at the fountain in front of 99 Ranch. It was for the first meeting of a now-defunct (well at least no more meetings) Berkeley Taiwanese Alumni Club. For SOME reason (which I won't divulge), I had driven down all the way to Milpitas to attend for lunch...something I don't do all the time even during my WILD college days. I probably had a hankerin for Darda (my favorite restaurant there) and was hoping that would be where we'd eat. When I walked over to the fountain (in my jeans/sweater...I wasn't dressed up at all), all I could see were 3 people standing around waiting. Emily had mentioned that it'd probably be a small group and she was incredibly accurate. Turns out that a few people that had said that they would show wouldn't be. So it was just us 4. If you counted the fact that 2 of them were coworkers of Emily's and that they weren't part of the club, it was just Emily and I. hahaha anyways, after "circling up" and debating where to go. My idea of Darda was shot down and we all had dim sum. During it, I mainly got to talk to Clarence who was a fellow gamer...I told him about E3 and gave him my card. As Emily will always chime in now, I neglected to offer her my card. :-P I play hard to get, see? She ended up making a deal out of it whereupon I offered her my card. After dim sum, Clarence made some kind of statement about how fobby Emily was and unfortunately, I didn't defend her (could have earned brownie points there) which irked Emily I believe. hehehe She looked great in that outfit from what I can remember. "Circling up" didn't produce anything that Clarence wanted a part of so he took off, so it was just Emily, Tony, and I. We passed by the kitchenware place, where I got my half/half hot pot...promising Emily that the next time I had one, I'd invite her (hasn't happened yet...). After circling up again, we exchanged cellphone numbers and headed off to see "Alexander". At this point, you could pretty much say that I was enjoying the company of Emily..since I was going to be watching/paying for a C grade movie for 3 hrs. I have to confess that during the movie, I spent less time harping on the bad points, than looking over at Emily and talking to her. I usually HATE talking in a theatre so for me to do that was really an indication that something was up. I don't think Emily noticed though cause I think she was just enjoying the movie. Anyways after the movie ended, we all went our separate ways and I remember hitting myself that I didn't ask her if she wanted to have dinner. Though in retrospect, she probably wouldn't have had dinner with me that night anyways. :-P At the end of that day, I also remember talking to Lih-Chern and saying that I had met someone special. hehehe...I dunno if I ever mentioned that to Emily. So here we are one year later and let me just say that this year will be even more amazing. I love you Emily!
It's so funny reading what I posted about that day...I left so much out...hahaha
Today I went to a BTAA event in Milpitas. There were only 4 people there (incl me) but it turned out fine because we had Dim Sum and 4 people is MUCH MUCH better than 5. It was a lot of fun meeting other Berkeley alumni. 3 of us were EECS and 1 was Haas I believe. Actually, the other 3 people were all working at Xilinx (EECS150 anyone?) so that was pretty interesting. Afterwards, Clarence (co-op intern at Xilinx) took off and the rest of us went to this theatre in Milpitas where the ticket was $3.50!!! And they have double-features. It's the Cinema Saver. We watched Alexander because Emily really wanted to and honestly, I didn't see anything else better. It turned out to be better than I expected (I had low low expectations) so that went well.
Good times....good times...last time my parents came up, we stopped at 99 Ranch. I told my mom that we met at the fountain, she was like,"This one?!!!" hahahahha...everytime I walk past that fountain now, I can't help but remember that special day. :-D
The new day brought forth a new enemy...one that was different from my old nemesis that I had slayed. This one came in the form of people asking me questions about my site. Weirdly enough, they would ask the same questions on other sites as well...COMMENT SPAMMERS!!! Here's a sampling for our collective amusement...
And at whom what animal of a house?
Why do not answer my question?
As in your guestbook to include support html?
I can not find coordinates for a feedback
Good site. It would be desirable to return again and again!
More more of such sites. Thanks
Do not prompt as me to send e-mail? = (
What you do today by evening?
How to me to adjust a background of page?
Well here at you, it will be necessary still to return.
And my personal favorite...Whether you play on musical tools?
Apparently these attacks primarily seem to be against comment systems that allow a website to be typed in.
Jackson uses Haloscan for his comment system...I'd like to develop something similar along those lines, where comments can be tagged to individual entries. Currently I've tagged comments to parts of the site (as seen on the albums) but it really wouldn't be hard to add the feature for entry comments. It's really about how useful it would be...
So I saw Narnia while I was in Taiwan and something that struck me was how the White Witch was calling the head wolf Maugrim instead of Fenris Ulf. I immediately turned to Cathy and said,"Who the hell is Maugrim?!!!" I kinda forgot about it but last weekend I was stuck at Costco and remembered. I was at Costco for 3.5 hrs last Sunday and let me just say that it was a LOOOONG time. I was there to get my tires fixed (1 had a nail in it and 3 were quite bald) and even though I got there at 10:20AM...I didn't get to leave till about 2PM. Anyways back to the Narnia story...since I had a lot of time to kill, I went to the book area and saw that they had the Narnia collection out. Someone had swiped "The Horse and His Boy" (an odd choice if you ask me...I'm a Voyage of the Dawn Treader fan ALL THE WAY...it'll be an awesome movie)...I remembered that I had that question about Maugrim/Fenris Ulf. So I pulled out "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" to check....it used the name Maugrim! At this, I was really confused because I could have sworn the head wolf's name was Fenris Ulf. Anyways, it wasn't until I got home that I went online to discover this discrepancy. Apparently, Maugrim was the name that C.S. Lewis originally chose. Right before the books were first published in the United States though, C.S. Lewis changed the name to Fenris Ulf (much cooler name IMHO) and that's why I know it as such. Here's the wiki on it.
1. Looked at the TVs....salivated on the floor so much that a guy had to come by and mop it up.
2. Looked at the jewelry....a woman there was so vain in saying that she would never accept anything less than 2 carets...I didn't understand it...she wasn't hot at all and with that attitude, she deserves a 2 Caret/Z/I3 diamond.
3. Muched on all the little snacks...no prime rib though....lol I wanted to walk up and say "Got any prime rib?"
4. Lounged on their sectionals while reading "The Last Battle"...finished it.
5. Got flowers for Emily (Sunday was our 1 year anniversary of meeting each other at 99 Ranch!!!) and windshield wipers (2 sets...1 for me and 1 for Emily...both of us needed it). They are supposed to last super-long due to Teflon coating. Plus the housing is metal instead of plastic. I hated my old replacements.
6. Ate a hot dog and tried a chicken wrap...I don't like the chicken wrap. I almost got a roast chicken ($4 something) but decided that it'd be too messy.
7. Looked the bins/sporting goods...the bins would come in handy during moving time.
8. Played on the new Yamaha Electronic Grand...cool stuff...you can learn songs on it...I played a little Norah Jones. :-P
My iPod headphones have that buzzing sound again...guess I'll have to go replace them...they suck so bad...
I saw a guy carrying a small Guess bag the other day. Since part of the bag was clear, I could see that he was using the bag to carry his lunch or something. As I've mentioned before a lot of women carry around fashion bags to carry their lunches in presumably to pretend that the just came from that store. This guy might have had the same idea? Although it kinda defeats the purpose when you can see that you didn't just buy something at Guess.
Ok! So the album is done except for descriptions which I'm going to add as time goes on...the link will be at the top along with the other albums and here. I'll introduce a couple of my favorite pics to get people interested. :-P
Anyways, there's roughly 2000 pictures in there covering 20 days, and there are tons of great pictures that I just can't repost up here...I'll do an exact count as I start removing bad ones. Check back often to see my descriptions! :-)
btw, did anyone else notice that $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] (an often used variable in web sites) is mispelled? Referer should be referrer. I noticed this when I was fixing the color scheme switcher which has been non-functional since OCF decided to get rid of direct variable posting in favor of a more secure model. Weird though huh?...
(Edit: So after some searching online, I find that I'm not the first nor the last to make this statement or pose this question. Here's an open letter to Berners-Lee (who wrote the first HTTP spec therby creating the WWW...not the Internet as some have confused.) who supposedly made this mistake years and years ago. Blame the British. Hehehe)
Ever looking for an affordable cutting board (with side grooves)? Go to the kitchenware store at the Great Mall in Milpitas. Good prices there.
Very interesting link for photography buffs...Extreme Macro Photography using a Pringle Can
Just a quick update...pics are all uploaded (except for ones my Dad took) and I created a nifty php script to help me generate the code...I'm pondering whether it'd be useful for other Imagestation users to use or not. In any case, due to these developments, an album should be up soon.
So I was listening to NPR today and heard that GM was having problems with the Saab brand and the question of who owns what brand popped in my head. It seemed to be a fairly interesting question so I did some searching and found a list. Here's a copy of it...I was pretty surprised that Fiat is a parent company.
BMW owns: -BMW -Mini -Rolls Royce Daimler/Chrysler owns: -AMC (brand discontinued -- Chrysler bought AMC primarily for the Jeep brand which was owned by AMC) -Chrysler -Dodge -Eagle (brand discontinued) -Hyundai (Daimler/Chrysler only owns 10% --13 May 04 changes!) -Jeep -Maybach -Mercedes-Benz -Plymouth (brand discontinued) -Smart Fiat owns: -Alfa Romeo -Ferrari -Fiat -Lancia -Maserati Ford owns: -Aston Martin -Ford -Jaguar -Land Rover (bought from BMW) -Lincoln -Mazda (Ford owns 33% of Mazda) -Mercury -Volvo cars Fuji Heavy Industries owns: -Subaru General Motors owns: -Buick -Cadillac -Chevrolet -Daewoo (GM owns 44%) -Fiat (GM owns ~20%) (GM has decided to divorce itself from Fiat as of Feb '05) -GMC -Holden -Hummer -Isuzu (GM only owns a percentage) -Oldsmobile (brand discontinued) -Opel -Pontiac -Saab -Saturn -Subaru (GM owns 20%) -Suzuki (GM only owns a small percentage) -Vauxhall Honda owns: -Acura -Honda Hyundai owns: -Hyundai -Kia Nissan owns: -Infiniti -Nissan -Renault (Nissan owns 15%) PSA Peugeot Citroen owns: -Citroen -Peugeot Porsche is an independent company (they do work very closely with VW, however) Renault owns: -Nissan (Renault owns 44%) Toyota owns: -Daihatsu (~51%) -Fuji Heavy Industries (Toyota owns ~20%. Toyota bought this from GM in late 2005. ) -Lexus -Scion -Toyota Volkswagen owns: -Audi -Bentley -Bugatti -Lamborghini -SEAT -Skoda -Volkswagen
So I'm back home again, slowly uploading pictures and using RSS to quickly get updates out...it's made the whole process TONS easier. Anyways, I realized that I missed out on an update in December so I'm putting it out here now...hmm...also I should mention that for Chris' birthday, we went to Mayflower for Dim Sum. Later we went to see Harry Potter and afterwards Emily and I saw Chicken Little. I liked Chicken Little a lot for some reason. Great animation. Isn't the Papa Chicken, one of the guys from Car Talk on NPR? Anyways...no ETA on the Taiwan/Japan site...just know that it'll be out sooner than later due to the RSS implementation. Thanks Sony!
Oh yeah, I also had lunch with Victor at Ay Chung a month ago...I think I like Duck better than Goose cause Goose has too much bone...and no, I didn't go to Ay Chung in Taiwan. I did go to Ding Tai Fong though! :-)
Just spent the New Year in front of Taipei 101 doing the countdown and everything...getting on the train back home was CRAZYYYYY...imagine 400,000 people rushing onto BART...that would be scary. Took lots of pics as usual...
Hmm...apparently Imagestation has had a RSS feed for the albums which I haven't taken notice of. This is huge for me because I can use that feed to generate the HTML that I've developed a process (using macros/find-replace techniques) but it definitely wasn't plug and chug. Still working on the XML stylesheet that Sony uses to fit my uses but it looks very promising.
