Weekend Awards Ceremony

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

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

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....

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

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...

And be a comedian :P









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

Free Power

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!