Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

"Yo!"

Heh heh. It's 6:30 and I'm expecting Brian to call me from home or work to tell me to pick up a pizza. The phone rings.

Me: "Yo!"
???: ".........huh? hello? may I speak to a Hansel please?"
Me: *confused* "ahem, *cough*, hi, yes, this is Hansel."
???: "Hi, I'm from sunrise telecom and I got your resume here and...."

Yeah. Heh heh, I should check caller ID next time.

.....expensive.....

So my sister and I discussed over the phone what to get my mom for her birthday. (January 25th) We know she wants a few things but haven't gotten around to buying them herself yet.

We decided that the pearl necklace is way too much money, not to mention hard to select, since pearls are usually unique in their color/luster. We also decided that a purse wouldn't be useful enough, and that would also be kinda hard to buy because of subjectivity.

In the end, I visited Santana Row to the Burberry store to buy a lilac/plaid scarf. $250??? Damn, I think I'll hand knit one myself at that price! Oh well, the Burberry name will probably be considered classier than Hansel. Do this a few more times and maybe I will bust out my mad crafting skills.

I was about to post a picture when I found out that the online store doesn't happen to have lilac in the selector. What gives? It's only in the "view catalogue" feature. So here's the scarf page with the lilac one circled.

Oh, and apparently they don't like people taking pictures in the store. (I was going to take a picture and send it to my sister to just make sure since we were having a debate over the phone about how pale is "pale purple.") It makes no sense to me. A crappy cell phone camera like mine isn't good enough to survey the store if I was plotting a breakin anyways. Besides, one simple picture would have made the sale so much easier. Morons.

There's gotta be some sort of connection.....

A while ago Cynthia Yu told me about this anime based off of The Count of Monte Cristo. It's really weird but really interesting. The setting is in some sort of neo-Paris way in the future, so I'm guessing they're being quite liberal in tweaking with it. Anyways, I was watching episode 6 and on a bank check, it says 25954 Eden Landing Road, Hayward CA 94545 as an address.

So seeing that it seems almost real, I ask Chris about it and we find that a drug abuse doctor and a collection agency are in a building at that address. Also, www.alladvantage.com used to be there too before the end of the .com boom.

The address exists, but I wonder if there's some sort of foreshadowing involved, or perhaps Studio Gonzo has some connection to that building. ayashii, ne?

I'm 24!

Today, at like 7:50-something AM (I think), I'm 24 years old. Somehow each year feels like it's going faster than before. You know how when you're a little kid, a years seemed so far away? Summer vacation seemed so far away? Riding 15 minutes in the car in the same city seemed so far away? Heck, the 10 minute recess in first grade used to be enough time to play tag.

Now, driving an hour to Berkeley doesn't seem so bad. A game of Warcraft? 45 minutes. I order something in the mail. 2 days? Wow, so soon! While in college, working on a project. 1am? Still to early to sleep.

I guess it's something that you get used to after a while. Perspective. Segments of time that used to feel long are now relatively short compared to your length of existance.

Anyway, some people actually asked me what I'd like for my birthday. I really had no answer at the time. Heck, I have no idea what anybody else would truely want. So bdays and Christmas have moved away from the present exchange towards just hanging out. Usually if I want something, I just go buy it. I think many of my friends do that now so it's especially hard to get gifts for stuff that isn't too expensive.

For dinner yesterday, I said in advance that gifts arn't necessary. Simply because it's better to not have your friends spend money if they can't get something that a person really wants. The gift card and chocolate I did get still works out since you can pick something later with the card, and everybody likes chocolate. ( People better not all try that next year cuz a guy can only take so much chocolate and gift card spreads :) )

So I thought about it some more today and came up with a list of things that I want. They're sorted in order of difficulty.

New shoes ($60) - About while ago, my mom and I were at a sale and I bought 3 pairs of Sketchers sports shoes. I wore one of them for a while and then started wearing the others interchangably. Now 3 years later, the last one is starting to come apart at the front. I don't really care about name brands. I just want them to not look butt ugly and I want them to be comfortable. I'll probably go real soon to buy some myself.

An FPGA board ($110) - In my attempts to keep working on the CS152 project and the OS I'm writing while waiting for a job, I need a board to test it on. Yeah yeah, I can hear everybody from here going, "what a nerd." If I get that done, it'd be really cool to put in my portfolio of stuff.

My own set of ski/snowboard racks ($150) - So I got the clips for Yakima racks already. But it'd obviously be better that I own a full set instead of borrowing Eric's. Then again, I doubt he minds all that much since we'd be taking my car instead of his.

A pair of perscription sunglasses ($300) - Now that my eyesight has had the same perscription for the past 6 years, I think they've stabilized to the point where I wouldn't mind spending money on a good pair of shades. That and I feel really stupid driving an expensive car with fairly nice clothes and wearing a pair of sunglasses that are just resting on top of my real glasses. What can I say? Chicks don't dig guys wearing two pairs of glasses at the same time. Can't even look them straight in the eyes at a red light.

A Metcal soldering station ($360) - Yeah, more geek tools. Maybe someday I should consider getting tested for lead poisoning or something.

A pool table ($2,000) - You can't tell me you don't want one. Heck, even my mom's telling me to buy one. Why haven't I used that as an excuse to fork over the money? Cuz there's too much crap in my house as it is.

A 1986 Toyota Corolla GTS ($3,000?) - Panda paint scheme. Manual transmission. Fujiwara Tofu Shop Decals. Yeah.

A job (-$60,000/year) - Sucks that I want a embedded systems job and almost nobody takes entry level. And if they consider me for a related job, they see "CS Major" and automatically think I want to write video drivers instead of working on the actual card. Oh well, still working on it.....

A girlfriend (time, effort, courage) - You know how hard it is to meet girls out of college? Okay, it's not that hard. Lemme try again. You know how hard it is to meet intelligent cute single asian girls who are older than my little sister? Nearly impossible.

A small machine shop ($30,000+ blind guess) - People who've seen me do stuff sometimes say I'm quite a handy person. I like to make stuff. Having a machine shop that lets me work on metal, wood, plastic, and even less typical stuff like etching boards would be nice.

Welding tools, the motors from a Toyota Prius, batteries, and some help ($60,000+ blind guess) - For those of you who talk cars, you knew this was coming. Yeah, I want to make my old Acura Legend into an all wheel drive electric/combustion hybrid sports car.

A 200 sq ft extension to the living room ($?????) - I have too much crap as it is. If the living room stretches into the back yard a little more, it can't be all that bad..... then I can get a pool table!

A plot of land in norcal ($???????) - I want to build a house. Yeah, after seeing Cynthia's, Urania's, and Elaine's (my sister's college roommate) house, I gotta get me one of those. Well, custom of course. One of those things I really want my house to have is some "optimizations" to make it so that the month to month utilities costs go down. Solar panels, underground pre-heat/pre-cool air system... heck, even the gray water toilet.

I think that's all for now :)

Winter Break

I like winter break. It's not technically "winter break" anymore since I'm not in school but I still call it that since many of my friends and family come back from work/school and hang out. I think I went out for lunch/dinner pretty much every day before Christmas, and then the week after too. Despite a lot of "what do we do now" sort of discussions, it's still fun to just hang out. And while most of the people who came back are have now gone back to their respective areas, it's nice to know that most of them are doing pretty well.