Archive for July 2007

Jul312007

Suffering from Kelvin-withdrawal…

… or more likely, just the common cold. On Sunday, Kelvin left for his week-long vacation with family (sister, mother, aunt, and two cousins) in Hawaii, leaving me in boring old California. Since no one’s around, I’m living at my Mom’s place for the week. This means sleeping in my room, which I’m apparently still very allergic to. My allergies at the apartment were minor, but I got them hardcore in my room. I don’t know if it’s the dust or if there’s some weird mold somewhere, but my allergies were through the roof. And I think my allergies led me to be all drippy in my nose and weak in the immune system, so I’ve had a sore throat for the last couple days. Bleh. I worked from home today, and I should be okay to go to work tomorrow. Even if I’m not, I’m going anyway cuz I need to pay the rent and get some pots and pans from Kelvin’s stepmother. I am feeling better than I did last night and this morning tho, which is good. I really need to clear out the junk in my room so it can be regularly vacuumed.

Not much else going on. Mike had a Magic draft on Sunday with 10th Edition. I got decent cards, yet I still manage to lose. It was still fun playing, especially with Chris as my partner. I dunno tho… it still feels the about the same as any other draft: I don’t feel that motivated to do it again. But Jeff’s visiting again, which means it’s time for another draft. I should probably stick to constructed. But that would mean I have to make decks. Bleh.

I saw this article on CNN talking about a website called MyDeathSpace.com. It archives people who died and left behind their MySpace page. Pretty eerie, but also morbidly interesting. Apparently the Associated Press article caused their server to break, but they seem to be okay now.

And Book 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender starts September 21st! Finally! Saw the Comic-Con Book 3 trailer video linked in Eric’s blog (don’t watch if you’re worried about spoilers):

Noooooooo! Zuko was kissing one of the b*tchfaces! He’s like half as hot now :( Regardless, it looks awesome… but September 21st is so far away!

My post ratio was pretty mediocre last month. I need to find more mundane-ness to talk about for August! I also need to add titles to all the pictures in my gallery so that they will have interesting titles for the random image generator instead of a lame title like “DSC00675.JPG”.

New thing I learned today: Aquafina and Dasani are made from tap water that’s filtered with methods like osmosis and then has minerals added for flavor. I guess I was one of the gullible folks that thought it came from a mountain somewhere. That’s okay; until they come up with filter/mineral-adding machine to the sink at work to make the water taste that good, I’m still going to keep drinking Aquafina.

I also learned recently that Arrowhead on the west coast and Poland Spring on the east coast are both owned by Nestle, which makes sense since I’m not a big fan of either.

Jul292007

Daft Punk Alive 2007 - A light show with two guys dressed as robots.

The Daft Punk concert in Berkeley was last Friday. It’s the first real concert I’ve ever been too, so it’s going to be a long post. To summarize: Daft Punk is super-awesome live, and I hate people.

Daft Punk Alive 2007 is on!

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Jul242007

Metal Gear Solid 4 gameplay trailer

ZOMG, NEED PS3.

But can I justify paying $700 to play one game? I. don’t. know. UGH!

Jul242007

Apartment pretty much done.

I wish I had more interesting things to talk about, but my brain’s been pretty mushy lately. I spent a lot of last week and the weekend moving stuff and buying stuff for the new place. Still don’t have many new pictures of the new place, but here’s a few I did manage to take:

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Really, if you want to check out the new place, just come over. Oh, and we saw this truck during the weekend:

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Doesn’t that look like a butt on top of a truck? Apparently from the front, it looks more like a baseball/trucker’s cap, but I’m not sure what butts or caps have to do with auto parts.

Let’s see… we also finally beat the Halo single-player campaign in co-op mode. And by “we”, I mean Kelvin. The last stage is an evacuation on a Warthog, so basically Kelvin and I raced on separate Warthogs. Despite doing well the first couple tries, I totally wiped out on the run Kelvin completed the game on. I’m disappointed that I was still unable to beat him to the end despite the fact he was on the verge of vomiting for the last hour of play. Oh wells. Now I guess it’s on to Halo 2.

New thing I learned today: The 87-880 crossover is the only location in California where two freeways cross without interchanges in any direction.

Jul212007

Damn Prius drivers…

You’d think that having to only drive 1.5 miles to work would minimize my chances of running into morons on the road, but four days into my new commute, I see a jerk bad enough to blog about.

Yesterday, I’m going on a local street (one lane in each direction) towards this lighted intersection of a major road where I have the green light, and I want to make a right. On the corner to my left, there is a gas station. A tan Prius with a middle-aged or older white dude driving is sitting at the driveway of this gas station. He decides to do that annoying thing, where they make the last minute decision to go into your lane, forcing you to brake. It’s not that big of a deal for me, since I have to make a right turn, so I’d need to slow down anyway. However, this jerk is also talking on his cell phone (without a headset), which greatly annoys me.

He apparently needs to make a right also. (Nevermind that he could have just taken the other gas station exit to go straight onto the road.) He goes to the corner to turn and STOPS. On a GREEN light. What. the. fuck. There’s no emergency vehicles, no cars running the red, not even any cars going straight in the lane we’re in who might make some crazy right turn on the other side of the sidewalk island. This is guy is just stopping for no reason. I honk at him, and of course, the jerk ignores me. The light turns yellow, and I keep thinking he’s going to go, so I keep inching forward. As I move forward, I notice he’s pushing buttons on his (non-Prius) navigation system. HE’S BLOCKING THE RIGHT TURN LANE TO TALK ON HIS CELL PHONE AND USE HIS NAVIGATION SYSTEM. He was just at a freaking gas station!!! The light turns red, but there’s people left turning, so he can still turn right… but of course he doesn’t. I swear to God there’s like steam coming out of my ears; I’m so pissed I forget to honk at him like crazy like your stereotypical Bay Area driver. He finally turns right, and I can finally drive the half-block to my apartment, where I fume about this asshole to Kelvin for an hour.

Let’s summarize this. What makes this guy a jerk:
1) He semi-cut me off in my lane.
2) He took the gas station exit where he has to left-turn and right-turn to the road he wants to get on instead of taking the driveway that goes straight to his desired road. The awkward exit would make sense if he wanted to beat the red (obviously not the case). And the red light on the road he wanted to go on would have been a perfect time to do all his retarded shit.
3) He’s talking on his cell phone without a headset.
4) He stopped on a green. (ARGH, this makes me want to murder people.)
5) He ignores my honking of his blocking the green.
6) He stays stopped as the light goes yellow.
7) He stays stopped as people make lefts and are not u-turning.
8) He’s using his navigation system while on his cell phone and blocking the lane.
9) Considering he’s using his hand to hold his cellphone to his head and his other free hand to use a third-party navigation system, he probably has the cheapest Prius model (with no bluetooth and navigation system), which means he probably bought this car to save money on gas, which probably means he’s a penny-pinching self-entitled asshole.

Okay, that last one is kind of a stretch, especially since I drive a Prius. I’m sure the people sitting at the red light found it amusing there’s this girl in a Prius freaking out behind this asshole in a Prius. But whatever, I’m pissed. With jerks like this on the road, no wonder people don’t like Prius drivers.

Jul192007

We have internets at the new apartment.

Actually, we had internets yesterday, but I was too tired to blog or do anything, so I just went to bed. Kelvin also moved his old TV here yesterday, which means I can play console games again. At least, until he finally sells it off. (I still think he should just keep it until we move again.) We’re in the market for an HDTV (and a new desktop computer for my mother), so if anyone knows any good deals, let me know. (HDTV requirements: 40-49″, 2-3 HDMI inputs, 720p, LCD, at least halfway decent brand, < $1000.) We still need to get a desk and other things, but until then, we’re pretty settled. This whole new apartment thing is actually pretty exciting, buying stuff and setting things up and such. I really like the new apartment. I only have two complaints at the moment: 1) this place faintly smells of cat, but I think it’s getting better, and 2) there’s some guy that walks around the complex at 6AM in the morning talking on his cell phone, which wakes me up when we leave the window open. Also, unassigned parking is pretty sparse, but we haven’t had any problems parking yet. I haven’t taken many pictures yet, but I’ll eventually have pictures of the new place up. Until then, people should come visit us :) And the 1.7 mile commute rocks! (Kelvin’s is the same distance, too, just in the opposite direction.)

I’ve been playing around with my gallery. In case no one’s notice, I have in the sidebar of my blog a random picture generator, which randomly shows a picture from my gallery. Before, when you clicked on the random picture, the plugin that does the random picture thingy would send you to a blog-embedded page of my gallery, which was formatted all wrong. I finally fixed it, and to make the colors coordinate a little better, I moved my gallery back to the default, boring-looking, white theme. I’m also trying to figure out a way to better organize my albums; my randomness album is going to be a giant unorganized mess at the rate I’m uploading pictures. I’m sure nobody cares about this stuff, but it’s my blog, and I can say what I want to :P

New thing I learned today: Dumping things at a landfill can be expensive.

Kelvin needed to dump his mattress, since he was trying to clear out his old apartment ASAP to get some of the rent back. He took his mattress and box spring to the Guadalupe Landfill, and it cost him $80! (Something like $30 per item + $20 city fees.) I didn’t even realized it cost money to dump stuff. I guess that’s what happens when you’re spoiled with curbside pickup (and not paying for it since it’s not my house).

Jul162007

New apartment means no internet (for now)

Kelvin is currently in the process of moving apartments. His new place is way closer to both my work and his work, so I’ll probably be spending most of my time there. However, because of AT&T retardness, we might not get any internet access until August, which means l may not be posting as much (or maybe I’ll just continue to stay at my mom’s place like I was previously).

Not much this weekend. Had dinner with Chris (who’s back for a wedding), Ravi, and Ravi’s gf Jessica on Friday night at Black Angus. (If you’re going to go to Black Angus, I’d recommend sticking to the one in Sunnyvale.) All of Saturday was spent roaming the endless roads of Ikea, driving locally from Palo Alto to Campbell because the full-sized mattress frame in the back of my Prius left me little foot room to accelerate and brake properly to take to freeway, moving junk from Kelvin’s old apartment to his new apartment, and constructing cheap Swedish furniture (not made in Sweden). Sunday, we woke up late and spent the late morning and afternoon volunteering at the beer booth at Obon in San Jose’s Japantown, and afterwards, we moved yet more stuff. I want a nap.

New thing I learned today: A cheval mirror is a long mirror mounted on swivels in a frame that usually stands on a floor.

We’ve been looking for a floor mirror instead of a door mirror, but apparently floor mirrors (like cheval mirrors) are really expensive!