Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

Money

I gotta manage my money better. Like, I gotta figure out where my parents stuck my money.

For example, I know they took some of it to invest in stocks back during the .com boom. I also know they took some of it to help pay for my sister's education.

Today I found out that I have a TD Waterhouse account with a Roth IRA. I don't understand what a Roth IRA is all about. There is a $2000 contribution from 2001.

What I do know is this: it's only worth $1600 because my dad bought 70 shares of Intel stock with it. Damn. Had I known about this I would have sold it all last year and bought AMD and Apple stock. Intel's worthless right now.

FileMaker Ads

For those of you who haven't heard of FileMaker, Inc (my employer), these ads will probably tell you absolutely nothing :P

While it's not too popular to make TV ads for software in the US, the FileMaker Japan office decided to make some a while ago when version 7 came out. They're pretty simple yet cool to watch even if you can't understand Japanese.

FileMaker Origami Ads

Hmm, not good.

I just got home from a long day of work to see police cars, fire engines, and people's cars blocking McAbee starting from where I was supposed to turn in to get home.

While I wasn't too inconvenienced by it, I wonder what happened. My guess is somebody was driving too fast and hit a car coming out of the court. I hope nobody got hurt. Didn't see any sort of ambulance before I turned for home.

I am somewhat reminded of the last time I saw a bunch of traffic go though my neighborhood. That last time, a neighbor/friend of mine got hit by a car.

Aww.....

I stumbled on a paper talking about the nature of cuteness and how it can be used to manipulate people.

Quotes that for some reason sound really funny to me:
"Cute, as a collection of superficial attributes, creates an existence that is perfect."
"When we see living creatures with babyish features, we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness."
“At my friend’s parents’ house, there is a big old rice cooker that has become a family shrine, complete with offerings and incense.”
"These little kitties peer cutely out to the consumer as if to say; “Oh no, I have landed, once again, in your dessert, Ooops!” They are simply irresistible."
"Riessland goes further to cite a print advertising campaign for a Japanese health drink, picturing a smiling, comic-style turd, with the caption reading “What color was your poo this morning?” (Unchi, kesa, nani-iro datta?)"
"I envision the future as a never-ending evolutionary race to appear more and more cuddly and adorable, while at the same time become more and more impervious to displays of cuteness by your rivals, which just serves to drive the cuteness standards even higher. The Earth of the far, far future will appear from the outside to be a paradise of playful, doe-eyed innocents, all frolicking and posing for your pleasure, but, in fact, it will all be a ruse..."

Aww.....

"You wretched reptiles! How dare you trick me by giving me the explosive cufflink!"

So there's some old financial and insurance docs my mom wants me to get rid of.....

Dude, the paper shredder just shredded itself.

Freakin' retards decided to put both plastic and metal gears in the gearbox. If you're going to try to save money, then just use plastic. If you're going for quality, use all metal. Don't mix the two cuz once a tooth snaps, everything else just grinds flat. And it costs more! Come on, you're Chinese, you're supposed to be stingy not stupid!

Such horrible engineering. They're an embarassment to us Chinese people.
No surprise that Aurora Office Applicances division appears to have been disbanded and their web site doesn't work.

Happy Easter

Cadbury creme eggs are so tasty..... and so bad for you. 1 egg includes 3.5g of saturated fat. 18%. A little bit healthier than eating butter, but not quite. If I were Irish or German, I guess I'd fix that by downing some beer. But I got no beer.

Lacrosse

I went to see the San Jose Stealth play the Anaheim Storm at the HP Pavilion tonight. Since I had never seen a Lacrosse game before I thought it was quite interesting how fast-paced the game is. Also, I noticed it was quite violent since players were pretty much taking a swing at anybody with their sticks, checking people into walls, and periodically putting all their equipment aside to use the good ole' fist.

Anyways, the game was quite exciting since it looked like the Stealth was going to lose 12-13 until the last 32 seconds where they scored a goal to tie the game, and then scored another at 3.9 seconds remaining to win the game 15-14.

Ooh, fire!

Destroying a broken iTrip with style.

Model rocket engines. Oh what fun I used to have playing with those.
While I didn't burn an iTrip, I did have some even more entertaining uses for the engines. Really should do it again. I'll need to find some pens, some alcohol, some rocks, some engines, some matches, and a hammer......

IT and Amazon

For those who haven't seen the Amazon item link already:
Does it run DNF?

I forgot to post the following earlier this week. Maha and Bert and maybe a few other people already heard about it.

So IS&T raided my cube monday. Like, 3 or 4 of them came and stood outside my cube like cops looking very displeased/angry/perturbed.

I was doing some research last week regarding Netboot, PXE, and how to make computers wipe themselves on my own little cluster in my cube. When I was finished, I disabled all the services I thought were relevant, and hooked my subnet back onto the corporate network.

Well, apparently I forgot to turn off some of the other services like Netboot itself (perhaps because I thought it depended on some other stuff I disabled), and my computer was hijacking all their Netboot connections. Yeah, so whatever servers and clients they were trying to fix or bring up decided to come to my cube and bow down to me. :P IS&T wasn't pleased at all.

After I quickly fixed the problem, they were about to leave when another person in my group tapped one of them to ask about why her vpn isn't working. Juan was like "uh...uh......I dunno" and his buddies said "see ya, Juan!" and quickly dashed off.

Anyhow, the entire company now apparently knows about it. And my team's quite amused. And I didn't get fired.

This also isn't the first time that I've gotten in trouble with IS&T; when I first started as a contractor almost 2 years ago, I was downloading all the apps I needed to do work in parallel. Juan and another of the guys came over and wanted to know why I was using an ungodly amount of bandwidth since it was sucking out the entire companies' allocation. He apparently didn't like my ghetto IP-over-Firewire setup that I was using to get AIM to work on my laptop because they were taking too long to get me wireless...

Anyhow, I wonder what I should do for my next bi-annual IS&T "prank"? DDOS attack from the SQA cluster? :) Just kidding.....

It's Like Do-it-yourself Plastic Surgery!

Stolen from Anna's site:
http://www.koji-honpo.co.jp/makeup/movie/eye_talk_300.html

Ah, the things people go through to make themselves prettier. At least putting glue around your eye and poking at it with a pointy object isn't as bad as some other things. But dude, pointy sticks and eyes usually don't go too well together. Heh heh, it sorta bothers me to watch but I know some people who'd be even more bothered by it! >=) Kinda like watching a train wreck waiting to happen.

On the plus side, it's reversable, so you don't ever risk ending up like Michael Jackson. Well, everything ought to be reversable as long as you don't poke your eye out. *poke poke*

Speaking of Micheal Jackson, when did E! Entertainment Television get a news team? They're "entertainment television", you know, typically not any more real than a "reality" show... even I know that and I don't watch TV...

Well, apparently they're REENACTING the Jackson trial to do reporting on it since it's supposedly closed to the media. Their catchline "Witness the testimony. Decide for yourself." Isn't it just wrong to act it out, call it a news presentation, and expect people to "decide for themselves" based on somebody's acting? What's up with that?

Anyhow..... eyes... eyelids... contact lens... train wreck... *poke poke*

I gotta get me one of these!

Brian sent me this link:
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/vehicles/index.php#rollercycle-personal-power-accelerator-036745

Yeah, it's basically a booster while you're on rollerblades.

Me: wtf?
Me: Ooh..... rollerblades at 25mph
Brian: hahaha
Brian: yes ... that would appeal to you
Brian: i prefer to remain alive
Me: Hahaha
Me: Indeed
Me: What could go wrong? ;P

Knowing my record, plenty.

What Flavor Pocky Are You?

what flavor pocky are you?
[c] sugardew

---

Chocolate? Normal? How boring...

Oooh, you set yourself up the bomb!

Language interp errors are entertaining.
From lunchtime:

B: So Ryo just bought a iPod Mini with a cool case.
J: Lemme see. It looks like it makes it the same size as a normal iPod.
E: Now Rio's (another mp3 player) are ugly.
Ryo: Well, yeah. As a player....
L: So Ryo's ugly as a playa? But as a normal adult, he's okay. Hey man, you said it.
*laughter ensues*

What is procrastination?

Procrastination is laziness. For some people, it is a way of life.
Procrastination is petrification. Frozen at the thought of there being something better to do with your time.
Procrastination is a self-induced blindness. You know it's there, you just don't want to see it.
Procrastination is inertia. If you're not doing something now, why start?
Procrastination is a sense of urgency..... to do something else.
Procrastination is watching me take down a Christmas Tree when it's more than halfway to summer .....

Christmas Tr... 2005-03-20 11:43:52 Christmas Tree in March

..... instead of doing what you're supposed to be doing. :)

For all you who laughed at the sight of my Christmas Tree: Yes, the embarassment has finally outweighed inertia.

Lunchtime convos

Random clip from lunchtime today:
B (my old manager) : Yeah, so yesterday I was mixing a drink for my wife. The condition for buying Hoyle's casino was that while she played, she can request a drink and I'll have to bring it to her.
Us: Do you have to dress up in one of those waiter costumes with the sequins and all? *laughter ensues*
B : No, but when I finished mixing the drink I noticed that she wasn't actually playing Hoyle's but her bridge game. So she got me there. Though, theorically, she could fire up Hoyle's, request the drink, and then do something else.

But anyways.... It is frightening to imagine your old boss dressed as a female Las Vegas waiter.

Kimchi Popcorn

Okay, so I've already mentioned this to several people before, but I gotta say it one more time. "Kimchi" popcorn takes sooo good!

Now that I've gotten your attention with all the "wtf? kimchi popcorn?" and the "eww, gross!" and whatever, really. It's good.

At work, we have a carnival-style popcorn machine that people can just use and make popcorn whenever. So back when I was a contractor, one of the other people came up with the idea of adding pepper when it was still heating. It turned out pretty good. From there on out, various ingredients were tried.

Tabasco sauce: Good.
Ketchup: Don't know, I wasn't there.
Green Tabasco: Don't know, supposedly it was just like the normal one.
Sugar: It's just like kettle corn!
Hot Chocolate Mix: Burns too easily, bad idea.
Parmesan Cheese and Red Peppers: Pretty good, does remind me a bit of pizza since it came from pizza packets.
Chicken Flavor: From a ramen packet, I wasn't there but supposedly it was good.
Beef Flavor: Also from a ramen packet, I missed out on this one too.
Kimchi Flavor: From the nong shim kimchi noodle bowls. The guy who was doing most of these experiments doesn't ever use a full packet when eating the noodles, so we tried tossing that in. I like it :)

Anyhow, I've been thinking of trying to replicate it at home since people either hate it or love it, but either way it tends to "contanminate" normal popcorn batches. Lately, I just add some of the stuff into whatever popcorn I get and shake it up a bit but that's just not the same. There's something about getting it fried into the popcorn..... I ought to go buy a bag of microwave popcorn and open it up and put some in to see if that works.

Atrophy

Yesterday, I went to the fitness center. It's been a long time since the last time I went to a gym to lift weights. Boy am I weak.

The thing about bench presses. It's good to have arms that are roughly symmetrical in strength. Otherwise if you try to push yourself you'll find that one arm can do it while the other one gives out so the weights will be all crooked in the air and you might fall off the bench and all that other bad stuff.

About 3 years ago, I had a broomball injury where my left collarbone snapped. Since then, I've only tried one other time to regain strength and found that my right arm totally overpowers my left. So with the help of some freeweights, I managed to just work out my left arm to get it back in shape.

From what it looks like, that worked fairly well. I managed to do about 5 sets of 15 reps with 70 lb and then 3 more sets of 10 with 80 lb. The weakest posted on the board is 90 lb or so by a skinny girl. I feel weak.

"What the hell are these 8 pieces for?"

Yesterday, Brian had a BBQ which I dropped by to help a little bit before leaving to go help Andy move up to Sacramento. From what I saw it looked like it was going to be a success. It would have been nice to stay a little longer.

When Andy and I arrived in Sacramento to meet up with Johnny-boy, we got started on moving all the Ikea furniture packs out from the van and into the apartment. Once we finished that, we got started on assembling the big stuff first like the bed.

Trouble is, the bed didn't include instructions, so we put our college degrees to use and made an attempt to put it together based on the label on the side of the box. It took us over an hour to put the bed together and we ended up with these extra 8 screws and nuts. Even after putting together the nightstand and the wood plating (which both came with instructions), we still had no idea where the screws were supposed to have been. Though we did find out that the wood plating instructions said where to remove 4 of them from, that doesn't explain the other four.

There's a picture on the MMSDiary of Johnny-boy holding the scrap of cardboard we used as "instructions." My camera phone sucks in low light apparently.

The rest of the day was spent driving back and playing the game of "spot the cop" with the radar detector.

Chairs

So yesterday I visited the ergo lab at Apple. They have an assortment of laptop stands, chairs, desks, mice, trackballs, and other stuff for people to try in order to find something comfortable.

Aside from the typical assortment like split keyboards and pen tablets and Aerons, there was this barstool style chair called the Swopper. It's hella cool! You sit on it and it's so springy and bouncy! If you don't know what I'm talking about, think about Tigger in Winnie the Pooh bouncing on his tail. Oh, and it tilts on the bottom and top of the springa bit so you can lean forward and back a bit.

One of the other people mentioned that it'd cost $450 or so, so they manufacturer lets people test drive them. She tried one for 2 weeks and got seasick :P But dude, I'm tempted. I just don't know what I'll do once the novelty wears off.

Oh well, at least I got a new chair today to replace my crappy Soda Hall labs style one. It's called "Freedom" by Humanscale. The one of the site has a headrest though, which I don't have. But it's still pretty good. Reclines a lot too. And no food stains.

It really does look like a half year vacation...

Today is my 2nd day at work back at Filemaker. Except now I'm an actual employee instead of a contractor. And now I'm in QA instead of SCM.

Yet on my first day, the first useful thing I did was go back to the SCM lab, and fix something. :P At least's related to the project I'm now assigned too.

It's good to be back. It's good to be employed too. It's also good to know that the winter break shutdowns every year are paid. :D End of the year trip to Whistler, anybody?

Healthy mix sounds good...

Your Brain is 46.67% Female, 53.33% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

Which Naruto ninja are you most like?

You scored as Hinata. You are generally shy, a bit of a loner, and often misunderstood. You wish you could be more self-assured, independent and stronger. That’s why you’re determined to change yourself. There is a person who gives you the strenght to do that, a person you admire from afar. Hinata 94% Iruka 88% Rock Lee 88% Genma 75% Shikamaru 63% Kakashi 63% Naruto 56% TenTen 50% Neji 44% Sasuke 44% Which Naruto ninja are you most like? created with QuizFarm.com

---

*blink* *blink*.... I'm who?!

"Remember the Future"

So here we go. An article about a project at Princeton which seems to suggest that people are mildly telekenetic. You know, like Jean Gray in the X-Men. Oh, and that they can make a box that can see the future. Where have I heard this before? Kinda far-fetched, but still cool enough to be fun.

On a slightly serious note, I think that the religious people are all probably really happy that this research suggests that prayer might have scientific backings. But me? I just think it'd be cool to stick my arm out and think really hard and have my car keys come to me.

Tahoe -> SD?

I was going to post this earlier but forgot.

This past weekend, I went to Tahoe with Karen, Crystal, Mai, Eric, Noah, and April. We took two cars since we had a bit of miscommunication about how long we were staying in Tahoe.

The snow was pretty good at kirkwood and some of us were going pretty fast down the black slopes. I tried to see if I could work on turns in the valleys so that I might be able to do half-pipes later. In the valleys, we tended to drop the gatorade bottles in the snow when we wiped out so it was also pretty fun going back up to see if we could pick up the bottles the next time down. Reminds me of those swimming pool games where you try to pick up the rings.

On the way back, after we decided to go home after 1 day of boarding, we started driving home. Mai flew up that weekend from San Diego to go to Tahoe with us. Somehow in the conversation going on in the car we got to the topic of San Diego when all of us sudden, something like this happens (paraphrased and hopefully attributed to the correct people since I obviously have no record of exactly what went on):

Eric: "Hey, so, uh you guys want to just drive down to San Diego?"
Karen (I think): "you mean like right now?"
Mai: "Yeah! You all can stay over at my place and we'll go to the beach or something."
Me: "Not a bad idea....but what do we do about the snowboards on my car?"
Crystal: "But I only got one change of underwear!"
Karen: "And I gotta go do work tomorrow(Sunday)!"
Me: ".... ahem, snowboards in San Diego? Oh, I need more clothes too. Isn't this also going to be really long drive?"
Mai: "Clothes? We'll just go shopping or something. Or you can borrow mine and you can borrow my dad's..."
Karen: "But my work!"
Eric: "You can sign on from down there."
Me: "I still can't tell if you guys are serious."
Eric: "Come on, okay, I programmed it into my gps, it say we'll make it down there at 2am."
Karen: "Oh all right."

<5 minutes of silence>

Me: "Are we actually going to San Diego?"
Eric: "Yes."

<20 more minutes of silence except for us trying to sing to Madonna>

Karen: "I'm going to have to be an adult and say that I ought to go work."
Me: "Hey, was I supposed to take that exit?"
Eric: "No, that route's probably got traffic. Come on, how often do you get to do a spontanious road trip like this?"
Karen: "Yes, you want to take that exit!
Me: "Eric, the gps thing also said to take that exit."
Eric: "Uh lemme see..."
Me: "So, where are we now?"
Eric: "We're on the way to LA!"
Karen: "Nooooo! Quick take that exit!"

After a U-turn and some more discussion and driving (and a lot of sing-a-longs to Crystal's music) we end up back in South Bay. Maybe we'll pack more clothes next time.....

Lots of Magic Smoke

Not the Berkeley kind, but the electronic kind.

This morning, I picked up Andy from the body shop since his car's getting a door replaced. Somebody ran into it while he was getting out the car, so that really sucks.

After eating breakfast we spent the day trying to install a new harddrive in his laptop and play Warcraft 3.

The problem is we kept on running into problems with the computer hardware.
1) My PC crashed, overheated, and ate a Geforce 3.
2) The Geforce 2 Ultra that we tossed in there as a replacement doesn't seem to work too well either. Random defects in the picture.
3) The replacement chipset and CPU fans wern't enough, so I have this huge 6 inch fan pointed at them on the inside just to keep the computer running.
4) Andy's external harddrive blew up and started smoking.
5) After getting data copied over using other stuff, Andy's laptop doesn't feel like booting with the new drive.
6) Trying to fix Andy's drive case, I replaced the charred capacitor and nearly blew that up again along with another laptop. Tip: Don't buy crappy hardware especially when data is involved.
7) The PC still crashes, so I considered the power supply. Well, pulling it out, I see that the 5v lines are all charred near the logic board end. So I decide to plug in 2 old 250 watt supplies to see what happens and that seemed to fix it. Damn this thing looks ghetto.