Kungfucius' Cove

Project 365: Day 43

2010-06-06T21:42:00.000-04:00

Digging back into the time machine, here’s a photo from the Oklahoma City Memorial with one of two “Gates of Time” displayed reflecting off the pool.

Project 365: Day 42

2010-06-05T21:33:00.000-04:00

One sight I didn’t get around to show the veggies was the statue of Einstein in front of the Academy of Science. It’s actually quite a large statue, and if you squint, you can see his famous formulae written on that sheet of paper in his hands.

Project 365: Day 41

2010-06-04T21:30:00.000-04:00

Piggy wants a giant kiss!

Project 365: Day 40

2010-06-03T21:27:00.000-04:00

Darn it…free isn’t what it use to be. On the other hand, these Silk cartons have the coolest extendable straw ever found on a packaged drink.

Project 365: Day 39

2010-06-02T22:05:00.001-04:00

Sunset along the shore of National Harbor.

Project 365: Day 38

2010-05-30T01:09:00.001-04:00

DK and I hit up the Newseum this past Saturday, and it’s a pretty awesome place to learn about how media and news has evolved over time. In fact, there’s so much stuff that I was beginning to understand why they let you use the tickets for two consecutive days. On this wall, they display the front pages of various newspapers around the US and the world after the 9-11 attacks. They also put together a 15 minute video that recalled the events and interviews with the local news reporters on that day, and it was quite chilling to relive the events.

Project 365: Days 27-37

2010-05-27T23:13:00.001-04:00

I know this is cheating, but I figure I catch up on my picture postings in one shot. Here’re some miscellaneous photos from JP’s wedding last weekend.

Project 365: Day 26

2010-05-18T21:23:00.001-04:00

I recently completed my first season through Tecmo Bowl, and I managed to make it into the playoffs as a wildcard. I figure if I can make it in, anything could happen.

With some good defensive play, ball control offense, and some last minute drives, I crawled my way through to the championship!

And if there was any proof that defense wins championships, just check out the stats :P

Project 365: Day 25

2010-05-17T20:54:00.001-04:00

While people couldn’t get really close to the front of the White House, I was a bit surprised how close you can get to the back of it. You’re only separated by the back lawn.

Project 365: Day 24

2010-05-17T20:52:00.001-04:00

When TC and I went kayaking this past weekend, we ran into groups of people racing in the DC Dragon Boat Festival. I didn’t realize how hardcore these people were with their racing!

Project 365: Day 23

2010-05-17T20:49:00.001-04:00

These adorable ducklings (I think they’re ducklings :P) were enjoying their stay at the water fountain courtesy of the Kennedy Center.

Project 365: Day 22

2010-05-14T00:21:00.001-04:00

TC managed to snag some free tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra, so we went tonight to see the performance. Our seats ended up being pretty close up to the stage. The performances tonight included some Copland (Suite for Billy the Kid), Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Elgar’s Variation on an Original Theme, which was something that I recognized playing before once they got started (the opening song also was featured in the Matrix Soundtrack). There was also a contemporary opera piece written by the conductor John Adams called “The Wound-Dresser" that incorporates a poem by Walt Whitman. After hearing the concert, I had a slight urge to pick my viola up again, but it would probably take a while to get myself back up to speed…

Project 365: Day 21

2010-05-10T23:05:00.001-04:00

One of the greatest football games of all time, Tecmo Super Bowl, was recently re-released as Tecmo Bowl Throwback. The game designers managed to keep the same old Tecmo Bowl feel to the game while touching up the graphics, but they created this cool feature where you can “transition” the game back into 16-bit mode seamlessly if you really want the old school feel. This was my first practice run as I beat up on New England.

Project 365: Day 20

2010-05-10T23:00:00.001-04:00

Dexter was a thirsty puppy during the camping trip.

Project 365: Day 19

2010-05-10T22:57:00.001-04:00

Here we have Tent City at Catoctin Mountain Park. Originally, TC’s tent was off the squared off “tent area”, but the park ranger who passed by frowned upon it, so we had to stuff all the tents into the square, but we managed to do so.

Project 365: Day 18

2010-05-08T02:32:00.001-04:00

TC and I went up to take a look at the Washington National Cathedral, and there was a bunch of festivities going on outside of the Cathedral. Most notably was this Ukrainian dance troupe who wowed the crowd with their graceful and dynamic moves.

And I know this might be cheating, but I had to post this picture as well :)

Project 365: Day 17

2010-05-07T01:19:00.001-04:00

TC and I went to the Kennedy Center to see a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. I’ve played music from The Marriage of Figaro many times, but this is the first time that I’ve been to the opera and seen the actual performance, and the opera itself was quite comical yet enjoyable.

Project 365: Day 16

2010-05-05T22:47:00.001-04:00

I saw this Cadillac with its really small wheels and interesting sign mounted to it's back windshield (back of it says “Just Klownin”). I was waiting for it to bounce up and down on its front wheels, but it never happened.

Project 365: Day 15

2010-05-04T20:33:00.001-04:00

With the rain deciding to hide out for the day and the temperatures falling, I hit the court today with LG, who I had met from last Friday. We had played on Sunday, and it was a slugfest….in that we both moved like slugs since it was like 85+ degrees and the humidity was high. And the sweat trail behind me completed the full slug effect. Today was a much cooler and more comfortable day.

Project 365: Day 14

2010-05-03T23:24:00.001-04:00

The flavor of the day (or month?) was “Connection”. Here we have my hands, responsible for many connections with people over the years, whether its typing the words of this blog, a pat to the back or shoulder, clicking the mouse to shoot the zombies, clapping with approval, pointing out the obvious (and not so obvious), a thumbs up for approval, dialing a phone call, shaking a hand, playing the notes with a piano or viola, or clenching a hug for comfort.

Project 365: Day 13

2010-05-02T18:12:00.001-04:00

This picture was taken (I think) sometime in 2008 during a visit to KiraTomato at San Diego. We went to the Wild Animal Park which had a pretty nifty safari-like setup where they drove visitors through an open area where their African animals could roam. I forget which animal paw this came from, but it was one of the better photos I took that day.

Project 365: Day 12

2010-05-02T17:52:00.001-04:00

This photo was taken on March 5, 2010 at the Reflection Pool at DC. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the water was all drained away to keep the foundation from cracking, but it was still strange to see all the water gone. Poor ducks don’t have anywhere to swim in March :(

Project 365: Day 11

2010-05-01T13:43:00.000-04:00

I’ve heard various accounts from people about how well the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser works when it comes to cleaning things, so I decided to give it a try and see what all the hoopla is all about. The big test for me was to see whether the eraser would work well in getting rid of the soap scum that lined my bathroom tub. Up to this point, I haven’t found an easy and effective way to clean the scum off, and I will say that the eraser worked its magic and scrubbed all the scum away with a bit of water and elbow grease. The best analogy I can make is that the magic eraser works like those white soft erasers for pencils. It wears away like a eraser, but it leaves whatever surface you’re rubbing on virtually spotless. It works a heck of a lot better and easier than any cleaner that I’ve tried to get rid of soap scum, so I’ll definitely stock up on these later down the road.

Project 365: Day 10

2010-04-30T20:32:00.000-04:00

Sort of an interesting day on the court today. After work, I felt the urge to hit some tennis balls, so I went out to the courts at my apartment complex and started to hit a couple of serves around. A random guy comes up to the fence surrounding the court and asks whether I’d like to hit around with him sometime next week. I said sure, and he handed me his card and told him to call sometime next week after he gets his racquets strung. I go back to hitting serves for a few more minutes, and a group of people started approaching the court, and I figured well, they probably have some set playing time, so I’ll probably have to head off, but they were kind and let me stay around and hit with them for a while. The good part is that they all lived at my apartment complex and usually just sent emails out whenever they wanted to play. So they now have my email address, and hopefully I’ll be able to play a bit more often :)

Project 365: Day 9

2010-04-28T23:55:00.000-04:00

And here’s the finished product!

Project 365: Day 8

2010-04-28T23:11:00.000-04:00

This picture is coming a bit late to the party, partially because there hasn’t been anything really anything interesting pictorially that went on the past two days. This is the pesto chicken recipe that I’ve gradually gotten good at preparing. Although the recipe says you can cook the chicken right after you splash on the pesto marinate, I’ve found that if you let the chicken sit in the fridge with the marinate for a day or so, you get a much juicier chicken.

Project 365: Day 7

2010-04-26T21:58:00.000-04:00

Today I had my semi-annual checkup at the dentist for cleaning, and everything looked good. My dentist seems to have the most enthusiastic and cheerful dental assistances working for him, which is probably good since most people seem to be fearful of dentist visits. The assistant recommended that I get an electric toothbrush since she said it would help clean my gumline better. I have this OralB one, but I had stopped using it because I thought it was a bit too harsh on my teeth, but I think I was pushing too hard with it when I was using it for the first few months, so I’m going to give it a try again. I’ve had practically every type of procedure done with my mouth and teeth, and I intend to keep my teeth for as long as I can.

Project 365: Day 6

2010-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

These sets of pictures were taken on June 19th, 2009 when I was out at a work conference in San Diego. After the conference was over, KiraTomato and I took the day to visit Sea World since I’ve never been there before. One of the stops of during the day was to a sea lion live show which was quite entertaining and made a bunch of pop culture references. Here’s my tepid attempt at poking fun of David Caruso’s one-liners to start every CSI: Miami show.

Project 365: Day 5

2010-04-24T22:02:00.000-04:00

This photo was taken back in September 6, 2009 when Honeydew and I were attending a wedding for a friend of hers down at Myrtle Beach. The wedding was to take place at Brookgreen Gardens, and we got some tickets from her friend to explore the gardens that day prior to the wedding. We noticed this little lizard perched on top of the flower minding its own business and unafraid of us snapping photos of it. I don’t recall the wasp flying by, but it made for a good picture.

Project 365: Day 4

2010-04-24T01:06:00.000-04:00

TC took me out with her friends today to a National’s game against the Dodgers. This was the first time I’ve attended a professional sporting event of any kind, and I was quite surprised that even the nosebleed seats gave us a good view of the field and sense of the action. Now I’m not the biggest fan of baseball, but the game turned out to be pretty exciting to watch. During the game, Adam Dunn was up to bat, and I mentioned something to TC about how Dunn was made fun of by a Columbus sports radio station I listen to at work via podcast. Dunn must have heard me talking smack, and just when I was about to finish my comment, he belts a home run to right field. He must have still been angry at my comments later in the game as he hit another home run his next up at bat to lead the Nats to a 5-1 win behind some solid pitching.

Project 365: Day 3

2010-04-22T21:40:00.000-04:00

There’re few foods in life that are as versatile and good as pizza. You can get all your food groups in pizza, you can have pizza for any meal of the day, and even cold pizza is pretty good. I had prepped some dough to make some pizza for the hungry Veggies that were flying in late last weekend. Honeydew brought some delicious crab cakes for everyone from Timbuktu’s on her way down here for everyone, so I’ve been using the dough to make pizza all this week for lunch and dinner. I’ll probably tinker with the dough recipe a bit because I think it needs a bit more flavor.

Project 365: Day 2

2010-04-21T20:01:00.000-04:00

When TheDragOnfruitS came to visit two weekends ago, he gave me these two presents made by his oldest sister and mom, who are running an arts and crafts company in Iceland.

Project 365: Day 1

2010-04-20T18:57:00.000-04:00

I’m sort of late to the Project 365 train, but I figure that getting started is better than nothing, so here goes!

Since I didn’t make any lunch yesterday, I went out to Subway to pick up my foot-long Italian BMT on honey oat for lunch. Outside of Subway during the spring and summer over lunch hours is an outdoor cat who I personally named Garfield. He (I’m assuming he’s a he) is quite friendly and approachable for petting. I have no idea where he goes the rest of the day, but he seems to be doing well for himself the past two years greeting hungry Subway patrons.

Snow

2010-02-06T00:16:00.000-05:00

Here’s the current view outside my balcony at 12:15 AM

This snow is suppose to continue until 10 PM on Saturday…

Update: Photo at 8:33 AM

Update at 10:20 AM

Update: Snow stopped at around 5 PM, so I started to dig the Kungmobile out.

Back to the Stone Age

2010-02-01T21:05:00.000-05:00

While I was starting my P90X workout yesterday, the lights and TV started to flicker a bit, and then the TV turned off while the lights remained. No problem I thought…just have to boot up the PC again and keep on going (I have my PC connected to the TV to display the video and the PC powered off during the power surge). I pressed the power button, but no lights or fans started spinning. I pressed it again and again, but nothing. I unplugged the PC, plugged it back in, and still nothing. At this point, I was starting to think about the angry things I was going to say to the apartment front office about breaking my new PC when I walked around the apartment and noticed that the fridge had also ceased to make any sounds and the microwave lighting was quite a bit dimmer than usual. So I got the new kill-a-watt meter that I had recently bought and started testing several plugs around the TV room and found some interesting readings.

So apparently the plugs in the TV room and kitchen were reading around 60 something volts AC, which is pretty much half of what a normal 120V AC output should be. Interestingly enough, the bathroom and my bedroom seemed unaffected by the power surge as all the lights were bright as usual.

After getting some busy tones trying to call up emergency maintenance, I finally got through, and the maintenance person said that the power had indeed gone out and the apartments were running on the backup generators, and they were working as fast as they could to get things back to normal. At this point, I really couldn’t complain since there wasn’t much I could do. Unfortunately, there were some people that were stuck in the elevator during the power outage, and the local fireman had to be called in to rescue them, so I’m sure they’re going to give the management office an earful after this.

On the other hand, earlier in the day I enjoyed a good Korean BBQ buffet lunch over at IlMee’s.

Mmmm…dessert

2010-01-30T10:58:00.000-05:00

My coworker and I went to Rosa Mexicano for lunch yesterday, and we had a nice 3 course lunch since it’s Restaurant Week over at National Harbor. But the highlight definitely had to be the dessert as I had the most delicious cupcake I’ve ever had.

You know you want to eat it just from looking at it ;)

The Official Snack of the Veggies

2010-01-28T18:23:00.000-05:00

I was walking through Costco this weekend picking up some odds and ends, and I saw this bag sitting in the aisle, and I knew right then and there I had to buy it.

What’re these like? Well, imagine the taste of a french fry with the crunch and weight of a potato chip, and you get the veggie straw. Even though the bag highlights that these have 30% less fat than regular potato chips, I can imagine someone easily eat 30% more since these are soooo good.

New Furniture

2010-01-17T14:33:00.000-05:00

I have a pretty sturdy dining room table, but the chairs that I have are definitely on their last legs since the legs look like they might fall out at any moment. So yesterday, I made a run to Ikea to see if I can find some new chairs for my table. I sat on a few and was initially set on picking up a set of four Börje chairs, but then I saw the nifty looking Granås glass/metal table set WITH four chairs for less than the four Börje chairs. After some debate with my parents, I decided that the deal was too good to pass up and picked up the Granås along with four Rivta seat cushions since the metal chairs were a bit stiff. I also picked up a Karsten office chair with arms since the fake leather/plastic on my old one was starting to peel apart and the cushioning on it wasn’t cushy anymore. The new table set looks good in the apartment, and my butt’s thanking me for the new office chair :P

As for food this weekend, my parents and I went to Mark’s Duck Palace since we’ve heard that they’re the only dim sum place nearby, and boy, the restaurant was PACKED like a NYC dim sum restaurant, but it was easy to see why since the dim sum was top notch. Mark’s Duck House will definitely have to be a VO DC restaurant destination.

Piano Hero Challenge

2010-01-12T23:44:00.000-05:00

Ever since getting the digital piano for Christmas, I’ve been trying to practice my way back in to some sort of decent piano-playing form. Kira suggested that I try to learn Yiruma’s “River Flows in You”. I hadn’t heard this song before, so I went to Youtube to find some clips of what it sounds like, and while it sound intricate to play, I don’t think it’s overly impossible to learn.

Some further searching on Youtube landed me this video that lays out all the notes for you to “River Flows in You” in a Guitar Hero/Rock Bandish format.

So far, I can keep up with the right hand, but it’s been difficult to hone in on the left hand, but I’ll keep at it and see how far I can get.

Next Evolution of Guitar Hero

2010-01-11T20:11:00.000-05:00

The name might sound cheesy (YouRock Guitar), but from the article I read here, it looks like a pretty ingenious device for those who are ready to graduate from the plastic colored-button guitar and move up to a real guitar.

I might have an incentive to learn guitar by myself now!

Cesar’s Diner

2010-01-10T13:34:00.000-05:00

With the move to Alexandria, I have a wider choices of restaurants available to me compared to at Aberdeen, which one of my coworkers declared a cultural black hole. King Street in Old Town Alexandria by itself offers a variety of potential choices as you can see below if you search for “restaurant” on Google Maps. So in an attempt to try as many restaurants in and around Alexandria as I can, I've made myself a New Years Resolution “treat” to go to a different restaurant each weekend.

View Larger Map

I was craving breakfast food this morning, and I couldn’t find any diners with a quick search on King Street, so I headed up north to Arlington on 23rd Street to check out Cesar’s Diner. Although the reviews on Yelp made Cesar’s sound like it was hit or miss, I thought it was quite good if you’re coming in for breakfast. The place was really packed when I drove by, and I thought I might have had trouble getting a table for myself, but they seated me pretty quickly at a booth for two. I had thoughts of having pancakes, but the omelets sounded too good to pass up, so I ordered a bacon and mushroom omelet with a side of home fries. Their home fries must be a popular item as one of the grills in the kitchen has its whole surface covered with chopped potatoes. I also ordered a hot chocolate, which turned out to just be a packet of instant hot chocolate, but the extra whipped cream on the top was a nice touch. For whatever reason, part of me was amused by the bendy straw that was served with my water, but it’s probably because I haven’t seen one in a while.

My omelet came out neatly rolled like a burrito accompanied by the home fries. There was also a side of wheat toast not pictured. It’s pretty typical of an omelet, but since I hadn’t had eggs in a while, this omelet was pretty darn good. I’ll likely come back again to try their pancakes and waffles.

Monthly flight pass

2009-08-14T22:56:00.000-04:00

So I was reading Gizmodo this week, and they posted a deal by JetBlue where you can buy what amounts to a 1 month flight pass for $599 to anywhere in the US. So I figure if I can make two west coast trips, I could make this ticket worth my time. Any veggies have some free time over the weekends between September 8th till October 8th and have a place for me to stay? :P

Dinner at the Big Apple

2009-08-10T02:35:00.000-04:00

It’s been a while since I had gone to NYC, so I jumped at the opportunity to go when Blue Orca invited me to join the EVACs gang for dinner up in Manhattan this past weekend. We had quite a big group together as 11 of us circled around two tables connected to each other at A La Turka, a Turkish restaurant if you didn’t imply from the name :P Since most of us hadn’t been to a Turkish restaurant before, picking out what to eat became a slight chore, but the store manager was kind enough to come out and work with us to put together an large appetizer and entree order that everyone could share together. We also ordered two pitchers of Sangria (one red win and one white wine), which I found pretty refreshing to drink considering I’m not the biggest fan of wine, but I’m guessing the addition of the fruit diluted the alcohol to make it easier (at least for me) to drink.

The two giant appetizer plates that came out for each end of the table consisted of various “dips” (humus, bean salad, yogurt, a spinach-tasting dip, etc) that everyone could dive into using these large “disks” of bread that the waiters were quick to replenish once everyone started tearing into their basket of bread. The appetizers went quickly, but the two giant entree plates consisting of lamb, beef, and chicken kebabs along with some rice and veggies plates came in just in time to continue the feast!

There was also a fish order put in, and it was quite the spectacle seeing it brought over on a flaming tray!

We figured out later that the first was covered in some sort of breading that was set on fire, and the manager used a mallet to break open the breading and cut up the fish. While the presentation was cool, the fish unfortunately didn’t taste as good. Fortunately the kebab meat platter had a lot of good meat to go around so the fish didn’t put a damper on the dinner.

As we finished up dinner, it was brought up that we’d all head over to Serendipity 3 for desserts. But a giant hoard of people waiting outside greeted us as we got there, which added up to a 2 to 3 hour wait. So we decided to keep walking around, and eventually we ran into Dylan’s Candy Bar.

This store was probably the dream child of Willy Wonka’s other persona named Dylan, because practically every candy and sweet you could think of can probably be found at this store. Heck even the stairs had candy imbedded in it!

Before we browsed around, we went to the second floor cafe to get some desserts. I settled on the Perfectly Peanut Butter Sundae, which was good but there was sooo much chocolate and peanut butter syrup in the tall plastic cut that the sundae was served in that right now I’m still tasting the sugar. But this was nothing compared to the monster that was the 10 scoop sundae…

Even with 5 people working on it, I don’t think they managed to finish it :P

Fresh off our sugar high, we looked around the store and found some interesting chocolate bars and candy themes.

There was also a display of celebrities signatures on boxes containing their favorite candy. The funniest one was the half eaten Payday bar with Bill Clinton’s signature :P

All in all it was good to see the EVACS group again and walk though Manhattan.

Weekend at Y's

2009-04-06T21:12:00.000-04:00

I hadn't seen Y since VOV, so I went over to his condo this past weekend to visit. Y has a condo in Virginia, but with the downturn in the housing market, he and his wife have been taking a look around for a house, and in anticipation of getting a house, Y has been renovating one of his bathrooms in anticipation of renting out his condo. Also, my high school friend T also happened to live relatively in the same area as Y, so I drove over to pick up T to join in on the fun. After eating a delicious lunch prepared by Y's wife, Y, T, and I engaged in some Wii Sports golf action to see who would reign supreme on the virtual golf course. The competition was intense as I went into the last hole with a 1 shot lead, but I managed to dunk my 2nd shot into the water as Y managed to get his way to the green safely. However, the Wii decided to freeze as T was beginning to take his shot, so I declared victory on the golf course :P Afterwards, we hit up the nearby tennis courts near Y's condo. Despite rustiness all around, we managed to get into a grove with our shots, but my lack of exercising began to take its toll as my knees began to scream in soreness. After we were all tired, we retired back to Y's condo where Y's wife joined in a 4 player battle of Mario Party 8. This was a fierce battle of hotel ownership for stars, and Y's wife managed to pull off the win at the end by getting the 3 star hotel at "grandmas" and by getting bonus stars from buying and using the most candy powerups. The game itself was sort of cheesy, but it's surprisingly fun with a group of friends. After getting some dinner at a local small Chinese place, we ended the day with some Texas Hold'em, which ended up going way too long into the night. Y had to go to work for a bit on Sunday, so when it came down to heads up between me and Y, I did my best to end the game by going all in blind, but that plan seemed to backfire as I won the next 6 hands in the row as T managed to deal Y 4/5 off-suit for like 4 of the 6 hands. But you can't go all in in the dark forever, so the statistics evened themselves out in the end and Y was victorious. I took T back to his place and then came back to Y's condo for bed.

The next day, Y, Y's wife, Y's dog Gizmo, and I went down to DC to take a look at the cherry blossoms that were in full bloom. It was the perfect day to be outdoors to enjoy the sights, and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. We made our way along the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial since I've never been there before, and we ran into a large group of people watching a cultural performance in front of the memorial. But I managed to sneak into the memorial and cap a few pictures of Jefferson's statue before being overwhelmed by the crowd. By this time, Gizmo had seemed to reach his limit of walking, so we decided to head on back, but before heading back to the condo, we stopped for some lunch at a pizza place and did some shopping at Trader Joe's, which Y's wife really wanted to go to. Upon returning to Y's condo and inspired by the drumming performance, Y wanted to do some Rock Band drumming, so we assembled the drum set I brought over and rocked out till dinner, which was Y's friend R, who has a gigantic house and allegedly lives close to Gilbert Arenas. Yan managed to find out that the mix of Coke and Captain Morgan's results in a chocolate tasting drink, but I argued it really tasted like vanilla. On a side note, I'm beginning to realize that alcohol accelerates my heart rate rather than act as a depressant, but I can't find any good reasons for that. Also, the slight shortness of breath that accompanied it told me it was time to stay away from Y's new drink. After dinner and a tour of R's remodelled bathroom, we headed back and I started by drive back to MD. On the way back, I forgot that there was a toll road I needed to go through, and I didn't have any cash on me and the booth didn't take credit cards -_- But fortunately, the woman working at the booth was rather nice despite it being about 12:45 am and basically said that a bill will just be sent for $2 (which is the regular toll cost) to my house, so I was relieved.

Thanks to Y and Mrs. Y for having me over!

Poor man's Guitar Hero

2009-03-31T00:43:00.000-04:00

Check out JamLegend, which gives you the GH experience just with your keyboard. What's especially funny is if you tried to play the songs "jam style" as they suggest :P

Things to fill free time with...

2009-03-31T00:08:00.000-04:00

Now that I've crossed the finish line and finished all my degree requirements, I have a lot more time to myself after work, and since I don't want to be a couch potato, I began thinking of things to do.

1) Reading for leisure: I think the last time I read a book for leisure was the last Harry Potter book, and that wasn't really for leisure since I was speed reading through it so that I wouldn't be left behind in all the HP discussions :P Any good suggestions out there?

2) Get my butt in shape: The funniest reminder to me that I need to get back in shape came this past summer when Dragon and I tried to do some suicide runs on the tennis court, and we were pumped up to do this across all four courts. Needless to say, we gave up after only going halfway across one court and just collapsed to the ground with laughter at how pathetically incapable we were -_- The issue with this is that I don't like going to the gym and would rather play sports to stay in shape. I'm thinking of looking into maybe joining a local tennis club or something because I have an itch to get back onto the courts after hearing about KiraTomato's attempts to take over as the number 1 tennis veggie :P

3) Finish video games that I bought: Yeah, I know I said that I wouldn't be a couch potato, but I want to get full value from all these games that I bought!

4) Take a trip on weekends to someplace different: It'll be hard for me to get lost in the Kungmobile, so I figure to try to plan a weekend trip somewhere interesting. Might lead to some interesting blogging and some photography practice.

5) Read up on investing: Might as well put the $$$ I make to work for me.

6) Learn to cook: Frozen foods just don't cut it taste-wise...

I'm sure I'll think of more things to do since I hate being idle and doing nothing...

Crossing the finish line

2009-03-26T22:00:00.000-04:00

As of this morning, I am officially DONE with grad school! :) All the paperwork has been turned in, all fees have been paid, and my dissertation has been submitted. Fortunately, the dissertation submission was done online, so I didn't have to make another trip all the way to Columbus to turn it in myself. And yes, =VGI= has been incorporated into the acknowledgment section, so people who these crazy people are when they read my thesis ;)

But seriously, I want to thank everyone for all their encouragement while I was in school :) You all helped pull me through!

The End of a Journey

2009-03-11T19:02:00.000-04:00

It's hard to believe that back in 2003 that I would have found myself going down the graduate school path towards a Ph.D. (especially when people had asked me before whether I would go for more studies, and I vehemently told them that I wouldn't), but now the path has started to turn its last corner, and I'm coming down the home stretch. My defense is next Tuesday on the 17th, which happens to be St. Patrick's day. Hopefully I won't need that much luck, but a little bit helps :P

The presentation slides are almost done, and I'm debating right now whether I should reference the veggies in the acknowledgment section by their veggie name. I don't think too many people will be looking at my thesis in the future, but apparently my thesis will be archived in variously Ohio Libraries and the Library of Congress, and I just think it would be funny for someone to randomly pull up my thesis, read the acknowledgment section, and wonder "who the heck are these people? Cucumbernator? GrapeofWrath? Catnipped? jOrangeJuice? Kiratomato? ..."

Support Blue Orca!

2009-03-03T22:06:00.000-05:00

My friend Blue Orca entered to win a dream photography assignment to photograph orcas, and she needs your help! She needs to get into the top 20, and right now she's on the bubble, so if you can go here and submit a vote for her, she'd appreciate it :)

Kindness to furry animals :)

2009-02-11T18:29:00.000-05:00

While fighting the raging fires in Australia, a fireman manages to find a lone koala in the woods, and here's what happens :)

Sam is safe and recovering according to this story.

Extermination

2009-01-19T21:12:00.000-05:00

So this past Friday as I was coming back from work and entering into my apartment unit, I see a sign that says "Extermination of the building will begin January 19, 2009", and for some reason, I'm thinking that they're going to be blowing up the building and I'd have another headache on my hands to worry about. But of course this wasn't the case, and on my door, there was a flying giving tips on how to prepare your house for the exterminator, which basically meant that you had to move all of your furniture away from the walls so that he can spray the base board and the ceiling. Fortunately, my furniture and bed are relatively light and I didn't have too much stuff to move around.

So today, the exterminator and one of the apartment maintenance guys came by at around 10:30, and the exterminator proceeded to inoculate my rooms. I asked the maintenance guy what prompted the spraying as I wasn't having any bug problems, and he mentioned that one of the apartments above me was apparently having major issues with bed bugs, so they decided to spray all the apartments in my building as a precaution. The process was pretty quick, and the exterminator had my entire place sprayed in like 10 minutes, though I found it sort of strange that he was spraying each of the wall sockets (I had images of the sockets blowing up, but that didn't happen :P). But after the spraying, I had to be out of the apartment for two hours, so I killed the time browsing at the local Circuit City to see if there were any extraordinary sales. They had everything marked 10% off, but nothing really jumped out.

Vegas Loot

2009-01-17T20:49:00.000-05:00

I had some time today to take a look at my current chip count from Vegas hotels on the strip, and I'm getting ever so close to collecting them all. Missing right now are Planet Hollywood, Bally's, and Sahara (Casino Royale doesn't count :P). I liked the old Luxor chip better (the one with the hieroglyphics on it) since it's nifty looking and doesn't look like every other chip, and for whatever reason I like the design of the Mirage chip, but the luckiest chip has to be the Wynn chip as I made up a great deal of my poker losses there this past January :P

In sadder new, the XM8 that Cucumbernator brought for me had a rough trip in my luggage, and the back end of it broke off -_- But fortuantely, everything else worked after I plugged the battery, so maybe I'll just duck tape the back end to give it the battle worned look :P And I will confirm that the sound the gun makes after you let go of the trigger does sound similar to the plasma blast in Star Control 2.

Lunch PUNishment

2009-01-16T13:27:00.000-05:00

I just had to roll my eyes at the name of the place we tried for lunch today, even though the sub I had there was good.

2009 New Years Resolution

2009-01-10T22:59:00.000-05:00

Looking back, I didn't do too badly in fulfilling my resolutions of 2008 in going 3.5/5. For 2009, the major resolution that I want to get in my pocket by the end of March is to get my research done and graduate from graduate school. It'll be a tough road these next 2.5 months or so, but I think I'll be able to grind it out and finish it up. Until then, I'm not going to have any other resolution in my mind, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to think of many more once I finish up. So hopefully I'll be able to bat 1.000 on this one.

It's all smoke and mirrors...

2008-12-14T22:49:00.000-05:00

I saw the strangest thing yesterday when I was Christmas shopping. There was a kiosk at a mall I was shopping at that were selling these "fake" cigarettes that apparently "taste" and look the same as regular cigarettes, and the girl managing the kiosk was doing a live demo puffing and blowing smoke with one of these fake cigarettes. I figured such a thing wouldn't get much attention, but the various times I walked past the kiosk, there were usually a crowd of 5 or 6 people asking about it and trying them out. It's advertised as being "healthy", so I guess whatever it takes to get a person off cigarettes is a good thing...

Ring ring...

2008-12-11T19:01:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again when Kungfucius starts looking around for a new cell phone. Although this time, I'm having a tough time justifying to myself to get something new since I don't use my cell phone that much and I don't use texting that often either, so my F3 with its ginormous text pretty much serves all my needs. I never had a Nokia phone (so far I've dealt with a Samsung and 3 Motorolas), and the Nokia E71 has caught my eye as a nice sleek smartphone, but first I'll have to convince myself and M that it's worth paying extra every month for the dataplan :P

Monkeys, Balloons, and Cannons!

2008-12-08T09:12:00.000-05:00

The DragOnfruitS showed me this addicting flash game where you set up unit strategically to destroy the onslaught of incoming balloons. Don't let the first few rounds fool you...the levels quickly ramp up like a horde game in GoW2.

Weekend Awards Ceremony

2008-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

So this past weekend, my company had their annual awards ceremony, which also doubles as the Holiday Christmas party, but since it's not officially called a Christmas party, the party can be tax deducted. It was held at the Lansdowne Resort in Virginia, and it was quite a nice place for the venue. One advantage of working outside of the company headquarter is that they paid the cost of the hotel room for the night, which gave me an extra incentive to go down for the ceremony since it was out of the way for me. On the other hand, I didn't know anyone who was attending the party besides the co-workers in my building who came, and for me, it's awkward to go up to random people and say "hey, I work here too..." But besides that, the dinner was nice (had a nice medium-rare steak that melted in your mouth), the prizes give out for job referrals to the company were ridiculous (two 50 inch plasma TVs were given away as well as various iPods, digital cameras, and maid service for a year), and the room I stayed in had like 10 pillows on the bed. I did find out later that the electronic lock didn't actually lock when I left my room, but fortunately everything was there when I got back from the party.

Thanksgiving '08 Recap

2008-12-01T11:20:00.000-05:00

Hope everyone had a good and relaxing Thanksgiving! Fortunately for me, the drive back home to PA for Thanksgiving is only an hour and a half this time around, so I planned to head back home after work on Wednesday. But first, I had to head back to my apartment to pack my 360 since my brother and I wanted to do some Gears of War 2 co-op action. I also brought all the RB stuff home since my family's house somehow inevitably always is the meeting place for all Chinese families in the Harrisburg area, and RB will keep all those who sit at the "kids table" (even though the "kids" are probably all college students or older) entertained. So with all that, it looked like I had enough stuff packed in the Kungmobile to be moving out :P

On Thursday, my parents asked if my brother and I wanted to head to Jumbo Buffet, which has become sort of the default restaurant/hang-out amongst my parent's friends, in the morning to eat, but both my brother and I thought it was sort of silly to go there given we'd be eating a lot for dinner, so we passed on that and grinded through Gears of War 2 through the morning and into the afternoon. We eventually ran into the infamous fish boss that Velius had talked about, and it was indeed annoying as it probably took us like 10 or 11 tries to figure out the steps to beat the boss. My brother became a big fan of the lancer chainsaw and tried to chainsaw every enemy within melee range without realizing that not all Locust be cut in half :P

My brother recently got a mortgage for a new condo and was looking to accessorize his new place, so after finding a good save point in Gears, we scrounged the ads for Black Friday sales on TVs. With online shopping becoming so prevalent and online pricing being much cheaper that B&M pricing, Black Friday deals have been underwhelming the past couple of years, but we managed to find some two LCD TVs (40 inch and 32 inch Samsung) at Best Buy that my brother wanted to purchase, and with Best Buy offering no interest financing for 18 months on $500+ purchases, my brother decided to get a BB credit card to purchase the TVs to lighten his financial burdens from getting the condo.

The evening rolled around, and M was in the kitchen prepping while the usual suspects of Chinese families came to our house. M bought a smaller turkey this year since we "only" had 3 families come over this year instead of the usual 5 or 6, but she never disappoints on turkey cooking as it always comes out moist and juicy. Usually, there would be a "kids" table and an "adult" table set up to eat, but everyone was able to squeeze into the same table this time around. The "kids" were entertained by many rounds of RB and Castle Crashers, but what I found sort of interesting was the many rounds of Geometry Wars 2 that people wanted to play in the "Pacifism" game mode. In this mode, your ship can't shoot, but you can destroy enemies by passing through these barriers, and there were furious battles amongst the "kids" to get the high score!

Once all the families left, my brother and I hit the sack for an early 3:30 am wakeup to raid the local Best Buy. We eventually got there at 3:50 am to find crazy people who had camped out waiting in line (there were even 2 or 3 tents set up). When my brother and I parked and got in line, the line had wrapped halfway around the store plaza. Even though it was cold, there were people pushing around carts with free coffee, donuts, and hot chocolate, so my brother and I got two cups of hot chocolate to keep ourselves relatively warm. Some BB employees came out and handed paper vouchers for various items if people were looking to buy them, and my brother managed to snag a credit card app from one of the employees. There was a chatty guy behind us in line who struck up a conversation, so the wait passed by relatively quickly. 5 am rolled around, and we finally got into the store and walked quickly to the TV section where we found the 32 inch LCDs all stacked up. We couldn't find the 40 inch LCDs, and after asking around, we found that they weren't releasing those till 11 am, but you could take a voucher to pay for one for pickup. Of course, paying for the TVs became a bit of a hassle as my brother was told he could have his credit card app processed at the TV center register before paying, but once he got there, he was told to go to customer service to get the credit card app approved and pay over there. So we meandered to customer service, and my brother got approval, but had to head back to the TV center register to pay -_- So we headed back again and eventually paid for everything and escaped Best Buy by about 10 AM.

One of our friends on the tennis team was also in town, and he introduced me to Scene-It on the 360, and I think this might be a good group game for future Veg Outs.

Time Traveling Amazon Order

2008-11-23T10:39:00.000-05:00

I don't want to get into the details about how Amazon botched my last order, but it resulted in some interesting dates for the shipment tracking.

The ? guy....

2008-11-17T19:04:00.000-05:00

So I was snoozing at the Balitmore airport waiting for my flight out to Dayton for some training, and when I woke up, I noticed a guy wearing a light purple suit....covered in dark purple questionsmarks. ZOMG...it's that infomercial guy who sells books telling you how to get "free" money from the government. Now, I'm guessing he uses that suit for publicity and such, but I wouldn't have figured that he would wear that suit all the time. Once I got to Dayton, he somehow ended up behind me in the Hertz car rental line, but I'm guessing he didn't have a reservation as the lady behind the desk denied him immediately. Guess there's no free gov't car rental money :P

Quick Reunion thoughts

2008-10-27T19:05:00.000-04:00

So this weekend, I went back home to attend my High School class 10 year reunion. 5 years ago, I didn't make it because I had class till the late afternoon on Friday and missed the activities that night, so I was sort of curious to see who would show up. The first class event was a tailgate for a homecoming football game at my high school, but my 1.2 hour drive back to Mechanicsburg turned out to be a three hour drive since AA called ahead and updated me about a bank robbery that had gone on earlier on I-83, which backed up traffic considerably as I got closer to home. Fortunately, the GPS came through and eventually plotted an alternative course back, so AA and I managed to catch the 2nd half of the game, but we missed the tailgate, and trying to find fellow classmates in the sea of teenagers proved to be a tough predicament. My HS ended up winning the game quite convincingly, but it was sort of amusing to notice how small the football players were, and there was actually a girl on the football team!

Saturday morning was the tour of the new HS, which has undergone about 88 million dollars worth of renovations since I graduated. And man....these high school kids now a days have the good life as everything is so high tech with assignments being posted on websites and everything being turned in electronically (at least for English classes). And pretty much, there was only one or two staircases left from the school I remembered, and everything else was all new. Even the teachers are pampered to as they get their own gyms to exercise in. I made the comment to AA that they weren't using the school colors in the building (everything was green and earthy), and she made the comment that red was probably too "angry" of a color, and our tour guide who was part of my class but now an English teacher mentioned right on queue that the colors green and brown were chosen so that it would be soothing to the students. There were a few people in the tour whose face I recognized, but I didn't remember their names. Although one thing that I was disappointed was that I didn't find or see the HS's Hall of Fame, and I wanted to find my face up there since I was inducted to the HoF under music for being the uber viola player back in the day.

Later that night was a social which I expected more classmates to come to, and it was quite crowded as about 60+ or more definitely showed up. Unfortunately, none of the friends that I hung out with back in the day showed up, but I was pretty amazed to see a lot of classmates that I remembered back in elementary school, and they obviously remembered me since I was probably one of five Asian students in our class :P The one thing that struck me was that even though 10 years have passed (which seems like a long time to me at this point), people's looks and faces really don't change to much as I was able to recognize more people by name. And people seemed to make the effort to go around and see what others were doing, as evident by me having some conversations with several people who I had no recollection of, but they were all nice and courteous. A lot of classmates were married and talked about their kids, so I guess I better get working on that once I finish up all this grad school stuff :P

McCain should drop out of the campaign trail...

2008-10-16T22:22:00.000-04:00

And be a comedian :P

It's nice to see a different side of McCain and Obama away from the champaign trail.

Free Power

2008-10-01T22:22:00.000-04:00

I got my electric bill today, and usually I don't read anything else on the bill except for the amount that I owe, but today, I was quite surprised to see that I owed $0.00 on power. So I looked a bit closer on my statement, and I found that BGE had reached a some sort of settlement with the State of Maryland, which resulted in a $170 credit applied to everyone's bill. No complaints here!

Reunion

2008-09-29T23:40:00.000-04:00

You know you're getting old when you check your mail to find a invitation to your 10-year High School Reunion. Man...ten years have really past by and gone. Right now I'm sort of on the fence about going. Part of me is curious to see how some of my high school classmates are since I'm terrible at keep contact with people (though I'm sure AA will try to drag me along), but the list of current people attending didn't have too many names of people that I hung out with, so part of me says to not bother. Ah well, I'm sure I'll make a more decisive decision as the date crawls closer.

My Driving can bend time and space...and more...

2008-09-05T23:30:00.000-04:00

So when I went home for the weekend, D showed me a letter from Violation Management Services that said that I got a traffic violation ticket in Culver City on July 10th, around the time that I was in San Diego. I know I wasn't pulled over at any time but perhaps I got caught on one of those silly cameras that catch red light runners or something. But after I dug up my car rental receipt and took a look at where Culver City happened to be in relation to San Diego, it became pretty obvious that they have the wrong person.

Exhibit 1: Culver City happens be 130 miles away from San Diego, and given that my rental car receipt said that I driven a total of 14 miles, there's no way I could have driven over there.

Exhibit 2: The letter said that performed said traffic violation at 8:15 AM. Now, my car rental receipt said that I had returned the car back to the rental place at 8:41 AM, which means that unless I was driving 300 MPH away from Culver City, there was no way I could have made it back.

So unless I have the amazing ability to wormhole through 130 miles or time travel, I think VMS has the wrong person...

Update: A woman from VMS called me this week and apologized profusely about the issue and said they figured out the problem. Someone messed up at reporting the violation date, which was suppose to be on August 10th (instead of July 10th). In addition, D got another letter from Culver City which had the photo of the culprit, a brunette female driver...

San Diego Part Deux

2008-09-02T20:39:00.000-04:00

I did managed to find a use for the credit I had on Frontier, and thanks to the hospitality of KiraTomato, I flew over to San Diego for the second time this year to crash at his place for Labor Day weekend. Although I complained about Frontier's pricing, I must say that their planes are pretty comfortable (all seats are leather) and I felt like I had a bit more room than the average coach airline seat. Every seat even had its own LCD screen, although it was sort of annoying that Frontier only let you "preview" the DirectTV channels they offered for about 10 minutes before putting up in giant VHS letters in the middle of whatever you're watching that you would have to pay $5.99 to continue to watch. I put up with the letters and continued to watch the US Open match that was on for about 15 more minutes before the system shut me out for good. Perhaps on a longer flight, I would have paid up, but by then, they probably would have offered you the channels for free. Each plane even has its own name based on the animal that was pictured at the tail of the plane, but I only remembered Bottleneck the Dolphin from my flight out of Denver to San Diego.

I arrived in San Diego at around 10:30 PST, but I too tired since I did some napping on the plane, so Kira and I hijacked his roommate's Xbox 360 and proceeded to crash some castles. Although it was sort of annoying that my Green Knight's profile wasn't recovered with my Xbox gametag recovery, Kira and I had a good time bashing our way about halfway through the game before we called it a night.

On Saturday morning, it was time to hit up the tennis courts! Kira decided to try and see whether we could grab the Qualcomm tennis court, and luckily for us, it was empty! No scoring was kept since the action would have probably been ugly given that I hadn't touched a racquet since Seattle and Kira hadn't had much luck finding someone to hit with, but about half an hour into it, both of us started finding our range as Kira started to move me around the court, and I tried to do my best Federer impression to hit impossible shots past him. I even let Kira use my racquet for a few minutes, and remarkably enough, he started hitting even better! I thought Kira was going to hold on to my racquet forever with the improvements, but he was kind enough to return it. Overall, I think Kira gained 6 levels in this practice session, and he probably would have gained 10 levels if he could always use my racquet :P

Thankfully, Qualcomm had free sodas in their break room, so we went to cool down with some Brisk ice tea, and then it was go time for some TABLE tennis action on the Qualcomm ping pong tables! The action was even more heated since Kira and I are probably an order of magnitude better at ping pong than, and there was some video-worthy rallies where Kira would slam the ball at me multiple times, but my defensive skills would just barely put the ball back in play, which would drive Kira nuts after the 4th or 5th shot he thought was a winner :P We were both pretty exhausted and hungry after the double header of racquet sports, so we headed back for showers and some lunch at Jack's down at La Jolla, and then strolled around the coast since it was a typical nice San Diego day. Afterwards, we headed back to Kira's place to finish Castle Crashers, and had some Phở for dinner before calling it a day early since we were gonna try to schedule some early snorkeling.

On Sunday, Kira managed to book snorkeling for the afternoon, so we took the opportunity to go to the Wild Animal Park, which Kira managed to snag some tickets for from a coworker. Unlike a lot of zoos, WAP gives the animals quite a bit more room to roam around, and this was quite apparent in the "Journey into Africa" tour where visitors loop around a giant "African" area that represents different parts of Africa. Fortunately, we got to see the rare baby rhino which is always under the strict eye of its mother, and hundreds of other animals along the way as you can see here. It was a pretty hot day, so some of the animals were not very motivated to be up and about :P

After a quick lunch at Elijahs, we drove down to La Jolla for snorkeling. Kira was worried that we'd be late, but we made it just in time for the 3 PM session. After putting on wetsuits, we were off into the water! It's hard to describe how amazing it was to be floating on the ocean and watching all the action going on under the water with schools of fish swimming by, underwater "grass" swaying back and forth, and even the occasional seal swimming by :P Unfortunately, the ocean was quite crowded with kayakers and other snorkelers, and the water was also really turbulent that day, so we didn't get to explore some of the caves that the instructors said they usually took everyone, but we did manage to swim by and get an up closer and personal look. Ah well, something to look forward to next time!

After snorkeling, we were pretty much spent physically, so after eating some dinner at the Blue Wave, we headed back to the house where Kira owned me at a Naruto fighting game and in Super Smash Brothers. My flight out was early the next morning, so we hit the sack early so we'd have some semblance of sleep to get to the airport.

Thanks again to Kira for letting me crash at his house! A Veg Out with San Diego will definitely be in the list of places for the future.

New Toy

2008-08-26T00:45:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, I decided to pick up an Acer Aspire One which was on sale at Best Buy for $349 and enter the world of netbooks. The One is a pretty peppy machine despite its small footprint, and it actually has more memory (1 gig vs 768 megs) and hard drive space (120 gigs vs 60 gigs) than my old 700m. The Atom processor is definitely capable of regular desktop processing tasks, the screen resolution is very usable at 1024x600, and there is even a tiny little webcam built into the top bezel of the screen for web conferencing. But what I was most impressed about this netbook was the keyboard, which actually is not too difficult to type on, but having small Asian hands help as well :P If I had to complain about one thing, it's the fact that the fan inside the One has to spin constantly all the time, and it's definitely noticeable in a silent room, but I think I'll just phase out the noise after using it for a while. The 700m will now go into the hands of M, who has been complaining to me about how huge her current laptop is to drag around.

GOOOO ICELAND!

2008-08-22T23:40:00.000-04:00

Although the headlines at the Olympics have been dominated by Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and others, in the handball arena, a little island off the coast of Greenland is making their own incredible run as TheDragOnfruitS has been cheering his homeland to the Gold medal round vs France. I've been telling TheDragOnfruitS that Iceland would go all the way since they've beat all the good teams in their round robin section, and so far my prediction is coming true :) So all Veggies should watch Iceland win the Gold Medal on Sunday :)

Update: Doh, guess I must have jinxed the team with my bold prediction. Still, Iceland doubled their silver medal count, so it wasn't all too bad :)

Pre-Autumn blog rearrangement...

2008-08-19T23:56:00.000-04:00

Having not changed the layout of my blog in 4 years (man...it's really been 4 years), I'm gonna shake things up a bit and try some of the new templates. The brown from the previous template wasn't really a color that I enjoyed yet I somehow put up with it for quite a while. I guess it looked a lot different than the other templates Blogger offered at that time, which is probably why I went with it. Although this one seem pretty Plain Jane, it's clean looking, so I'll give it a shot and see how it goes.

Motorcycle Madness

2008-08-18T18:45:00.000-04:00

So this past weekend, I was out to New Jersey for a BBQ/game weekend hosted by BlueOrca, and part of the trip involved driving up I-95 north. But when I drove to the ramp from Aberdeen to get onto I-95, I noticed that cars were stopped near the intersection of the ramp and I-95, and as I drove up closer to the cars, a whole bunch of police motorcycles started driving by.

And then the police were followed by a looooong line of Harley riders.

For about 5 minutes or so, the Harley riders just kept on coming, so I got out of my car to get some better pictures and to wave at some of the passing riders.

I posted a quick video of the cyclists here. I learned a bit later that these riders were riding as a tribute to those who lost their lives in the September 11th attacks.

Ling Hao is my hero :)

2008-08-09T00:25:00.000-04:00

and China did a SPECTACULAR job with the opening ceremony. I thought for a moment the last torch carrier was gonna fall off his hoist when he got to the top o_O but fortunately it was just to adjust so he could go into his awesome midair stride. London's gonna have its hands full trying to top this opening ceremony :P

Take two please...

2008-08-01T18:37:00.000-04:00

Not the best RB performance, but at least the Today Show crew seemed to have fun with it :P

Got carded...

2008-08-01T17:37:00.000-04:00

This past Wednesday, when I got back from lunch, there was a box sitting on my desk, and taped to one of the sides was a sample business card with my name and contact info. For some reason, it feels strange to me that I have a business card since I'm still sort of transitioning between the student mindset and the working mindset, but on the other hand, I look at it as one of those achievements/milestones in your life where you can say hey, I've got one! Although I doubt I'll ever exhaust my supply since they printed out like a quadrillion of them...

What to do....

2008-07-28T00:56:00.000-04:00

So I have this $380 credit for Frontier Airlines that I need to use by September 9th. I was gonna try to visit Velius and dominate in the Wii tournament he was having in two weeks in honor of the Olympics, but Frontier is charging $1k for the tix -_- So...anyone have any good suggestions on where to go at this time of year?

West Coast Travels: Seattle

2008-07-23T22:56:00.000-04:00

And just when I thought it was safe to settle back down in the east coast, another conference calls for me the next week back to west coast and into the Emerald City. This time, I was there for the User Group Conference, where users of the various DoD supercomputers showed off the interesting projects and research that they were performing with all those computing resources. There were also some interesting presentations about clusters of PS3's potentially being used and marketed as "efficient" computing clusters due to the relatively low power draw compared to your typical setup of server blades. So now I know where Sony sold all of those PS3's too :P I didn't have any particular presentations in this case to present, but I definitely networked and met up with a bunch of users that I'll potentially be working with later down the road. And since one of the presentation rooms was the "Orca" room, I had to go and sit down through a few presentations in honor of Blue Orca, even though the computational chemistry stuff the presenters were talking about was way over my head :P One sort of annoying thing though involved my badge. Apparently, the way they check your citizenship was through your HPC account since there were particular presentations that were restricted to US only citizens. Since I had just gotten my account started the week before, the registration desk didn't have my name as an account user, so I was stuck with a pink non-citizen's badge the entire week -_-

Luckily for me, Catnipped and her friends were around during the evenings that week to hang out. After the conference ended for the day, I met up with Catnipped and her friend Snoopy and D at Matt's Rotisserie and Oyster Lounge (fyi the website is quite musical). Afterwards, our attempt to win at trivia night on Monday (7-14-08) was thwarted by the "Name that Tune" category and questions about movies that Kathy Bates were involved in, but we managed to step up to score 8 of 10 in the sports-related category and Catnipped stepped up with her knowledge of Canadian provinces (8 of 13 woot!), which just pushed us out of the running for the $1 pitcher of beer. The last place reward is now a bit harder to get as the two last places teams actually have to answer a trivia question right to get the beer. During trivia, the MLB all-star festivities were being shown on TV, and Snoopy had mentioned something about Josh Hamilton being her favorite player because he went to her high school. Sure enough, Josh Hamilton goes on to be the star for the night at the home run derby as he goes nuts for 28 HRs in the first round!

Tuesday (7-15-08) saw more presentations, but there was an important meeting for everyone employed in my company that afternoon at the conference as we had to discuss on how we were going to win an upcoming contract. Since I hadn't been working that long yet and didn't know the ropes that well, I didn't have that much to contribute, but the discussions between everyone was surprising lively and energetic, and I felt pretty proud afterwards knowing that those who I work closest with in the company were gung-ho about winning the contract. After the meeting, there was a poster session on more HPC related topics, but the room was waaaay to cramped for the poster presenters and the attendees, so a couple of my coworkers and I headed to the Fisherman's Restaurant out by the water, and we got a table outside so that we could enjoy the view while we ate dinner (mmm salmon steak). After dinner, I met up with Catnipped and company to go see The Incredible Hulk, which was surprisingly entertaining even the second time through. *Semi-spoiler via ROT13* Vg'yy or vagrerfgvat gb frr ubj gurl pbzr hc jvgu na hore fhcreureb pbzvp zbir tvira gung Veba Zna znxrf na nccrnenapr ng gur raq naq FUVRYQ vf oevrsyl ersreerq gb ng gur ortvaavat bs gur zbivr.

As I noted before, after I got back to my hotel room from the movies, I though I had lost my laptop, but some kind people at the hotel held on to it, so I was relieved to find it the next morning (7-16-08). There weren't as many presentations that I was interested in that day, so I took some time to go back up to Kerry Park and enjoy the always spectacular views.

Sporting events were the activity of the night as Catnipped called me up later for some tennis. I got to the courts a bit early to see some people playing cricket over two of the courts, and for the random times that someone managed to hit a ball out of the court, I helped them out and retrieved it. But I was quite surprised when I picked up the cricket ball because it looked like a worn tennis ball, but had the weight of a shot put o_O. The cricket players eventually left the court just in time as Catnipped and her friend D from Monday and another friend A (though I can't remember his name at the moment -_-) all arrived, and we got a game of doubles going. The first was sort of a feeling out process for everyone as me and D teamed up to take it 6-1, but the second set was quite competitive as me and Catnipped teamed up against D and A to a 6-6 tie as the sun was going down. There were one particular game where poor Catnipped had to serve through like 6 or 7 deuces, but she stuck through it like a trooper. After tennis, Catnipped, D, and I went to The Parlor, probably the nicest billiard's place I've ever seen, in Lincoln Square to play some pool. When we first got there, the person at the desk asked if I wanted to play some free pool since they were having some pool night where the guys could play free against some women, but I knew I would probably make an idiot out of myself since my pool skills were pretty mediocre, so I declined politely. The three of us got our own table and played where we would each try to sink a third of the balls, and I managed to put together one good round in the beginning and one good round at the end, but man, those rounds in the middle were brutally terrible on my part as I was scratching all over the place and missing baby shots. Catnipped used her star power in a furiously rally to win the third rack, and D showed off his ambidexterity off both wings to win the second and fourth rack. After pool, Catnipped took me to the upper floor of Lincoln Square, which happened to be a Microsoft floor, and out to an outdoor balcony where the view of Bellevue and Seattle was really quite spectacular. Man, I wish I had my camera at that time...

On Thursday (7-17-2008), the conference seemed to thin out a bit as it was the last conference day, and I had to rush back in between one of the breaks to check out of my hotel. I booked a red-eye flight out at 11:30 pm that evening, so there was still quite a lot of time for me to kill once the conference ended, and Catnipped found out her friends were kayaking in the late afternoon, so I joined up with them at the Northwest Outdoor Center. For whatever reason, I was being an idiot that day and I rowed into Catnipped's friend D2, which sent me into the water of Lake Union and washed my pride away -_- D2 tried his best to instruct me on how to get back into the kayak, but I was still sorta dazed and frustrated with myself at that point, so I probably tuned him out a bit. With D2's help, I made my way to a nearby pier where we emptied the water out and I got back into the kayak. I was still fuming a bit at myself but eventually rowed it off and enjoyed the last bit of time I had in Seattle. After turning the kayaks in and saying goodbye to Catnipped, I quickly changed in a changing room and it was off to the airport. Till next time! And a big thanks to Catnipped for hanging out with me for the week :)

West Coast Travels: San Diego

2008-07-22T19:11:00.000-04:00

As most of you already know, I made two trips in the past two consecutive weeks to the west coast. First trip was to San Diego for the International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation where I presented my work on magnetic photonic crystals as a well as lead an outreach to find new users for the DoD supercomputers as part of my job. This particular trip was sort of rushed on my part due to me not wanting to push my luck on the travel budget, so I didn't get to see as many sights in San Diego as I wanted. On day one (7-8-2008), I did however get to meet up with KL2, one of my undergraduate friends who had just happened to be vacationing there with his girlfriend, so I meet up with them for dinner on Tuesday. We got some sushi at Ra Sushi, which was sort of a contemporary-looking sushi place, and cashed in on the last five minutes of their happy hour to enjoy some cheap but really good sushi. KL2 had a travel book with him and after dinner, he suggested that we go to a dessert place that the book suggested called Extraordinary Desserts. And man...the desserts there were very exquisite and extraordinary indeed. In honor of DragOnfruitS (and since I'm a sucker for chocolate), I had myself a slice of Viking, which was surprisingly not as sweet as I expected from looking at it, but it was still a really good cake. After desserts, KL2 and his girlfriend called it a night, so I headed back to my hotel to meet up with Kira, who had just gotten out of his Chinese class. Since Kira didn't live in downtown San Diego, we just strolled around downtown and talked about random stuff. We also went back to my hotel room so that I could show Kira the presentation that I would be giving the next day, and somehow I got to show Kira around Facebook, which seemed to draw some interest to him as he seems to update his Facebook profile pretty regularly now :P I have to mention though that this hotel room at the Westin was pretty awesome. It was on the 21st (or was it 24th?) floor and had a really nice view of the city and the waterline. The highlight though had to be the dual headed shower, which for whatever reason was really comfortable to shower in :)

My presentation was at 8 am the next day (7-9-2008), so I got up early to head over to the Grand Hyatt where the conference was going on. When I finally found the room where I'd be giving my presentation, I was sorta shocked at how large it was (probably fit about 100+ chairs), and they had a 12 foot screen behind the speaker for his/her slides. So this was definitely the biggest crowd that I'd ever spoken to, but once I got started, the nerves went away and the talk went pretty smoothly although I have the tendency to talk ahead of what I'm thinking. The chairman of the presentation group that I was in acknowledged to me later that he was impressed to see the results that I presented, so that felt good to hear :) Afterwards, I attended a few talks and managed to find some new potential users, but I was dead tired by mid-afternoon, so I went back to the hotel to nap for a bit. After waking up, it was around dinner time, but I didn't feel like going out to a restaurant by myself, so I ordered up a burger from room service, which turned out to be pretty good, and watched my new vice, So You Think You Can Dance, to hold me over till AI starts again.

The next day (7-10-2008) was pretty much spent on travel, so nothing much to report on that day. But I definitely want to return to San Diego again another day since there were a bunch of museums to the north that I didn't have a chance to visit, plus maybe I'll go catch Shamu at Sea World.

New Faith in Humanity

2008-07-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

So most of you know that I've been out in Seattle this week for a work-related conference. And almost every day, I've been carrying a backpack with my laptop and conference agenda. But when I got back to the hotel last night, I gasped when I dug through my backpack, and my laptop was no where to be found >.< I started thinking back and felt pretty angry that someone might have stolen it and started doing some deranged stuff with it (like maybe logging onto Pidgin and start randomly threatening people on my chat list as they pretend to be me) , but after a while, I rationalized that unless the person was a ninja, there was no way that anyone could have taken the laptop out of my backpack without me noticed. So right then, I bet on the fact that I probably was being absent-minded and forgot to put my laptop back in my backpack after one of the presentations that I was attending had finished. The next day, I went back to the registration desk and asked if anyone had turned in a laptop, and the lady behind the desk pointed me to another room full of laptops for presentation presenters to use. A gentleman had listened to my plea at the registration desk, and he lead me to the laptop room and pretty much asked one of the guys there for me whether my laptop had been found. YES! One of the guys there pulled my laptop to view from behind one of their desks, and I was totally relieved :) The guy said he had found it in one of the conference rooms, and I thought back a bit and recalled that I had to meet a coworker immediately after one of the presentations, so I absent-mindedly had put my laptop to the side while I was wrapping up the power cord, and I forgot to pack up the laptop after storing away the power cord. The guy joked that he wanted a $50 fee for it, but I probably would have totally paid it just from the peace of mind knowing that my laptop hadn't fell into the wrong hands.

WALL-E

2008-07-01T23:23:00.000-04:00

I just got back from seeing WALL-E at the theater, and I must say that this is probably Pixar's best looking movie to date. There weren't any moments where I found myself in the uncanny valley, yet it was so easy to be immersed in the environment and forget it's an animated CG cartoon, especially during the earth scenes as they looked so...earthy. What was even more amazing is that the first third or so of the film had no real dialogue, yet you could totally understand what was going on between WALL-E and EVE through their actions. And even though WALL-E doesn't have a mouth or much of a face, you could gather so much about his emotions just by watching his eyes.

Without trying to spoil anything, I will note that the message that the second half of the movie delivers seems to go against Disney's company ideals. But the message didn't really detract from that much in my eyes, so definitely go see WALL-E if you have the chance! :)

Oh, and the cartoon short they had before WALL-E was really good as well :)

Weird dream...

2008-06-26T20:31:00.000-04:00

I was dreaming of probably some future Veg out since all the veggie crew were there, and we were all staying at someone's house but it wasn't really clear who's house it was. We were all around the pool in the house's back yard, and then all of a sudden, the sky started changing into some psychedelic colors and tornadoes started coming towards the house o_O But right before the tornadoes made it over to the house I woke up...

I shouldn't be worried bout it too much, but I sometimes get a sense of deja vu every so often and then realize that I had dreamed of it before. Hopefully there won't ever be any deja vu with this dream...

Museum for the Dun x 3 at heart

2008-06-21T13:25:00.000-04:00

One of the unexpected perks for having my office at Aberdeen Proving Ground is the outdoor tank museum, which I had driven by every day this past week, so today I brought my camera over and took a bunch of pictures of the various tanks that were on display. I managed to get pictures of about 60% of the tanks on hand, so I'll have to make another trip next time to get more, but it's pretty cool to see the wide variety of tanks they have on display.

Settling in...

2008-06-12T19:23:00.000-04:00

After driving from Ohio to PA yesterday to stop and pick up some stuff at my parent's house, I drove down to MD today to start setting some things up in the new apartment. First thing was to pick up the mailbox key for my mailbox since the post office had to change the lock so the previous user can't hijack my mail. I had filled in a form at the post office about a week ago to have my mail forwarded, and I was glad to see that the forwarding was working as I got an electric bill for the Ohio apartment :P

The Maryland heat continues to beat down today, but fortunately, half of my apartment is below ground, so there's some extra insulation to keep my apartment shielded from the heat. Most of my stuff has been unboxed (except for the books), and I've found that I probably brought a bit more stuff over than I comfortably have room for (the BBQ grill is taking up a bit of the kitchen), so it looks like my parents'll have to take some stuff back when they come down this weekend.

I would drive 1000 miles...

2008-06-08T22:49:00.000-04:00

It's been quite the weekend as I'm trying to get the cove in Maryland set up. The weather decides to try and make things difficult by providing Maryland the hottest day in June history this past Saturday, but fortunately for me, my apartment is halfway underground, so it has some natural insulation from the elements. The mover were suppose to come last Thursday, but they had called last Wednesday saying they would come on Friday. But Friday rolls around and my parents and I go down to bring some things from my parent's house PA and wait for the movers, but the movers call saying the moving truck broke down, which means my stuff wasn't arriving till Saturday.

To pass the time, my parents and I drove over to Delaware to go to the Christiana Mall, which excited my mom since Delaware doesn't have any sales tax. But how they get you is by setting up 2 toll booths so you end up $10 to go to the mall :P

8 PM rolls around on Saturday night and the movers show up and quickly unload all of my stuff. So everything arrived, but I'll take the next weekend to set everything back up. Now I'm back in Ohio to take care of some other errands before heading to work on the 16th.

New Apartment: I haz it

2008-06-01T19:48:00.000-04:00

The new cove in Maryland has officially been signed for. It's a bit smaller than the Ohio cove when you compare the kitchen and living room, but it's way more than enough for me to live with, and there's an extra bedroom as well if anyone decides to visit. Nice thing about this particular apartment is that gas and water are covered utilities, and it's about a 5 minute drive to the base where I'll be working at.

Moving Day

2008-05-29T12:53:00.000-04:00

Today the movers dropped by the cove to package things that will be moved to Maryland. This was the first time I had to deal with movers by myself, but the process went very smoothly as I didn't have too many large things to have shipped down. Now my bedroom is all empty and dusty...

Introducing Guitar Band...

2008-05-14T12:02:00.000-04:00

It looks like the war of the music video game between Guitar Hero and Rock Band is heating up as it looks like the next iteration of Guitar Hero will now include a set of drums that have cymbols as part of the game. Of course this will probably result in the Rock Band drum set being incompatible with Guitar Hero 4 and forcing rock banders who already have the RB drum set to go nuts because they already have so many musical controllers taking up space. At this point, Activision should call this game something else because it's not really Guitar Hero anymore if the focus isn't on the guitar. Having played both games, I will say that GH probably offers a better single player experience since the guitar parts are a bit more intricate than the guitar parts in RB, but RB is the king of the multiplayer stage. But still, this is pretty ridiculous that there will soon be so many different musical controllers out there...

New hoodie

2008-05-13T10:37:00.000-04:00

After a three day stay at the body shop, Kungmobile 2 is now back in my hands as of yesterday without the scratches and dents :) I talked to the manager on how the repairs were done, and apparently they have some magic filler that they spread on top of the hood surface after stripping the paint to fill in the dents, and then they put a new layer of paint and clear coat. Whatever they did, they did a nice job on it as the hood and side fenders pretty much looks as good as new :)

Charles Barkley is not a role model

2008-05-08T17:40:00.000-04:00

It's good to see that Barkley has a good sense of humor when someone plays a joke on him :P

In Preparation for VO4...

2008-05-08T16:14:00.000-04:00

=VGI= members should listen to the Rock Band song list on Seeqpod so they know what to expect when they play :P You might be surprised at what songs you might know (I didn't know that the song they played in that SNL skit with Will Ferrell and the cowbell was "Don't Fear the Reaper"). For those who have played Portal and finished it, I did download Still Alive, so warm up those falsetto voices if you want to sing this song :P

Sportsmanship for teh win!

2008-04-30T12:50:00.000-04:00

In this age of sports where sportsmanship gets thrown out the window for winning at all costs,it's good to see that sportmanship still exists in college sports as shown in this Division 2 softball game.

Bad Carma

2008-04-29T16:21:00.000-04:00

When I went to take out the trash this morning, I noticed that there looked to be planks of wood that were on the hood of my new car >.< Upon closer inspection, it looks like pieces of dry wall had fallen from the third floor onto the hood, so I was expecting the worst when I move the pieces off. There were some scratches and dents on the hood, but luckily, none of the dry wall pieces hit the windshield, so it probably could have been a lot worse. Hopefully the apartment manager will find a way to have the bodywork paid for...

Update: After getting some estimates on the costs, the apartment manager agreed to pay for all the costs that are involved to fix my car.

A Sketch of VO4's Schedule

2008-04-20T14:19:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking on and off about how to schedule things for VO4, and I've come up with a tentative plan for what to do on Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday

After everyone wakes up, we head to Marshall's for some breakfast.
After Marshall's, we hit up Dave and Buster's since Grapes mentioned to me that he hasn't been there before.
Lunch at D&B's or we can head to House of Japan. When we eat will depend on how much everyone eats at Marshall's, where they have huge pancakes :P
To keep ourselves from food coma, I was thinking of having some sort of outdoorsy activity. I had mentioned Frisbee golf to Velius, who initially thought that involved throwing quarter-sized Frisbees into a golf hole ;) There's a Frisbee golf course around the Ohio State west parking lot, so I could give a brief OSU tour too if people wanted to see the campus before or after golfing. If there are any other activities in mind that anyone wants to do, we could do it during this time as well.
There are several options for dinner depending on what everyone wants. For an American diner with a twist, we can try Cap City Diner. If everyone is craving sushi, Restaurant Hama would be a good choice.
The new Indiana Jones movie is coming out the week of VO4, so if everyone has a joint interest in seeing it, we could go see it as a group after dinner.
If after all this we're not too tired and it's not too late, I will treat all =VGI= members to Graeters.

Sunday

This will primarily be BBQ day involving cooking, eating, football throwing, badminton playing, rock banding, karaoking, Bang!, Mafia, and maybe some poker if enough people are interested.

Monday

I'll leave this as a freestyle day depending on how everyone is feeling at the time. Some things we could go see are the Columbus Zoo and COSI.
This was a random idea that just came to mind. We could have a =VGI= dinner on Monday night be one where every person prepares a dish that is somehow related to your =VGI= name.

Anyway, this is the tentative plan I had in mind. We don't have to follow it by any means, but I figure since I'm the host, I have a plan in case no one has any idea on what to do :)

More talent from Britain

2008-04-19T14:58:00.000-04:00

Last year it was Paul Potts. This year, it might be Andrew Johnston making some waves.

Or maybe it'll be Jin the dog.

Beeker never sounded so good :)

2008-04-18T13:18:00.000-04:00

Should have patented it...

2008-04-17T14:45:00.000-04:00

I saw this article about a new wearable mouse that Microsoft patented and developed, and I can only think back six years ago when my friend and I came up with the idea first :P Granted it used the serial port instead of a PS/2 or USB port, but it still worked! The highlight of that project was getting Windows 2000 to install the serial mouse drivers in a pseudo plug-and-play manner when we plugged our mouse in. Those were fun days in ECE476 :)

2 Weeks with K2

2008-04-07T00:45:00.000-04:00

It's been about 2 weeks since I drove Kungmobile 2 off the dealership parking lot, and even though it's been that long, it still hasn't really quite sunken in that I have my own car right now :P I've probably been over-babying it while I'm driving around, trying to avoid all bumps and potholes at all cost, but hey, I want to keep it in pristine condition.

Honda gives all of their XM radio-capable cars a free 3 month subscription, , and on the long drive from PA to Ohio, I discovered how nice it is to have XM radio since before, I was usually station hunting about 4 or 5 times during the drive to find something that I want to listen to. With XM, the station stays the same wherever you are. XM also transmits all the info about what you're listening to like artist and song title, which is nice for those times when you're thinking "hmm...I've heard this before, but I forgot what it's called...". Although I do find it funny that for the channels that have commercials, the commercial info will come up as well.

The weather hasn't been that nice the past couple of week, and since K2 is white, it's pretty easy to see any sort of dirt and stains that get on the surface from rain splashing off the ground -_- This got me looking up online on what is the best way to wash/wax a car, but unfortunately, car washing and waxing seems to be a black art as all the sites I've looked at have their own "best" ways of washing/waxing cars and opinions on which products work best. I ended up getting some ideas, but I didn't have easy access to a hose, so I ended up taking K2 to a local car wash place that was always teeming with expensive-looking cars, so I figured it was a pretty safe bet. Sure enough, they did a pretty good job, so K2 is all nice and shiny again :) Once I move into my new apartment and get settled in, I'll try to figure out this black art of car washing...

The only negative thing I have to say about K2 is that the front driver and passenger doors doesn't shut with the same "thud" of a new car anymore, but I guess that's to be expected.

I choose door #1

2008-03-31T12:04:00.000-04:00

I saw the movie 21 over the weekend which was based on the MIT blackjack team. It was fun to watch although a bit predictable. Kevin Spacey plays an MIT professor who leads the blackjack team, and there's a scene in the movie where Spacey is lecturing a class and proposes an interesting statistic's problem. Let's say you're on a game show, and there are three doors, and behind one is an awesome car but behind the other two doors are donkeys or something like that. The host asks the contestant to choose a door,and the contestant chooses a door. After the contestant makes a choice, the host reveals one of the doors that has a donkey behind it, and then asks whether the contestant wants to change his or her answer. Should the contestant change their answer?

Evaluations

2008-03-24T12:55:00.000-04:00

This past quarter I was responsible for teaching an electromagnetics lab that used some pretty old equipment that might have been even older than me. Anyways, I got an email that gave me some comments from the online student evaluation, and some of them were pretty amusing.

Q: What do you feel were the weaknesses of this instructor?
A: Although Kungfucius was knowledgeable, he was still not able to predict which piece of equipment was going to give us trouble that day.

Q: How do you feel the instructor could improve his/her teaching?
A: He could learn psychic powers.

Q: Was the instructor thoroughly familiar with the equipment and experiments? Please explain.
A: Actually Kungfucius was pretty familiar with the common types of glitches that would occur with the equipment and he would be able to magically cure the problem. Sometimes I think that he could communicate with the archaic pieces of equipment and they would tell him which button he would have to push for them to work right.

Q: Was adequate assistance available during experiments and were the procedures/techniques properly explained? Please explain.
A: At some points even Kungfucius was unable to tame the 30 yr old oscilloscopes and other equipment and sometimes was unavailable to the other groups during these malfunctions

Time to learn some psychic powers!

Road Test

2008-03-21T19:39:00.000-04:00

Today I took my parents down to Aberdeen to do some apartment hunting, and I figure this would be a good opportunity to break in my new CR-V as well. My dad has always been old school in preparing trips with maps and such, but even he was really impressed by the Honda GPS and how easy it was to navigate around with it.

At the end, I found a new apartment about 5 minutes away from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, so transportation won't be too much of a hassle for work. The CR-V did a good job of sipping gas as well, averaging about 27 MPG for the trip. Apparently, the GPS also allows birds to track your car better as bird poop managed to hit my car three times on the way back -_-

Some quick makeshift pictures of the CR-V

Are you kidding me....

2008-03-19T15:34:00.000-04:00

As much as I've enjoyed the Guitar Hero franchise, this is going a bit over the top as Activision is introducing Guitar Hero on Tour on the DS. Now you might ask how it'll be played, so check out the video...

I mean, it was fun to pretend to know how to play guitar on a fake plastic guitar, and younger DS owners might enjoy it, but I doubt (though I could be wrong) that the older DS owner would want to be caught playing this...