Girls next door in SF

On friday, Bridget from girls next door is doing a appearance in SF. I am totally into reality shows, and Girls Next Door is one of my guilty pleasures that I watch and tivo regularly. I believe she's going a promo for Captain Morgan, and I've got the inside track on that! I'm pretty excited to meet her in person, but I'm not sure what I'm going to say.

Did your boobs get bigger for season 2?
Does anybody have sex with Hef besides Holly?
Do you get paid to be a girlfriend?
Are you going to be a girlfriend for the next 15-20 years?

Anybody else watch the show? What questions would you ask if you had the opportunity?

Where did the sun go?

The fog looms off in the distance, but you hope it doesn't come your way. After living with the fog for a long time, you've just gotten used to the sun. The sun is warm, happy, and bright. You can see your path ahead of you for miles. You love the sun. But the fog, which was off in the distance, has come and enveloped you. Everything that was once bright is now dark. Your path ahead is obscured. You can only see what’s directly in front of you. You shiver from the coldness of it. You try to remember what the sun felt like, but it only leaves you longing for it more. You finally accept that the fog is here to stay, and there isn't anything you can do about it.

Karen came by last night to pick up some more stuff. The closet is now looking bare, the bathroom isn't strewn with makeup and hair care products, and suddenly the bedroom seems even emptier without a desk lamp.

Oh Deer!

Last night a on my way home, two cars had stopped in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes. Thinking to myself "What the hell is going on?", I also stopped behind them. Both people got out of their cars and went up in the front of their cars. "Did they have an accident? But they're not even that close to each other." Then suddenly a deer that was in front of the cars stood up on it's feet and took a few steps, then collapsed on the side of the road. As it collapsed, I could see it's eyeballs, dripping red from blood, and completely white, had popped out of it's socket and was dangling out of it's head.
Ewwww, gross!
I really need to remind myself to keep an eye out for deer, as they wander the streets in my neighborhood at night. I don't want to hit a deer a second time.

RIP John Peckham - Update

A fellow member of the Bay Area DSM club (Diamond Star Motors (Mitsubishi Eclipse, Eagle Talon, Plymouth Laser)) and fellow car enthusiast John Peckham, was killed by a suspected drunk or high on drugs driver last week. He's fondly rememberd on our DSM list as a nice guy, who had flames painted on his Eclipse. John was riding his bicycle in a pack of other bicyclist along Old Page Mill Road in Palo Alto when he was struck by a car. The car then crashed down an embankment a short time later, and the driver was arrested.

John will be remembered. Our BAD (Bay Area DSM) group is currently planning a memorial cruise in his honor.

To those who are reading this, please don't drink & drive, or get high and drive. This is not the first time a friend of mine has died from the consequences of a drunk driver.

Mercy news article here
--------------------------
Update 9-22-06

I just read a newspaper article stating that witnesses say Chevelle Bailey (the driver) cracked open a 24-ounce can of beer and drak it all moments after the accident. Police say the initial breathalyzer test of the drunk driver was a .08 and a .09, and was allegedly high on methamphetamine.

Outsourcing

My company just decided to axe our IT Development department and replace them with an indian outsourcing company to save money. Luckily my department was not affected, but I wonder when or if the director decides to do the same thing to my department. There are many reasons I can think of why they wouldn't do that, but then again, reducing the cost of your department is a pretty big draw. Luckily the outsourcing company we use is not very strong with server and infrastucture, and they stick with mostly Oracle and applications development.
The draw of cheap labor must be very convincing.
At least they didn't have to train their replacement, as was the case for a friend of mine. She was going to be fired in a few months, and to be replaced by an indian on a h1b because they were cheaper. Then her next task was to train the person replacing her. Talk about awkward!

How are your parents today?

I was talking to my friend yesterday, and my parent's health came into the conversation. You see my dad is getting pretty old, and his health is starting to decline a bit. He's lost alot of weight because he hasn't been eating much, he had dizzy spells, and his mental faculties are starting to decline. The doctors don't see anything wrong after a bunch of tests. Well my friend told me to get a second opinion on my dad's problems, then proceeds to tell me a story of her aunt.

Her aunt had a toothache for a really long time. She ignored it and didn't go see a dentist until it finally hurt too much to do nothing about it. The dentist did their work, but her teeth still hurt for a while afterwards. It turns out she had gum cancer. All 3 kids had really good jobs, but 2 out of 3 hand to quit their jobs so they could take care of their mother in rotation. That pretty much scared me enough to call my dad and see how's he doing, and if there's any progress on his medical diagnosis.

Unfortuantely there was no alcohol to numb some of the pain, since I was driving. I guess that'll have to wait until friday, when I can hang out.

Breaking up is hard to do

It's a sad day when you break up, and that's exactly what happened between me and Karen. It was a 3 year relationship that I never wanted to see ending. I'm going to go out and talk somebody's ear off, hopefully over a couple of drinks.

Working out, high protein diet

I've been hitting the gym more often, but I've been slacking off recently. I've also started to try to eat better, along with a emphasis on eating more protein. I've read that if I want to gain muscle mass (which I do) I need to eat my weight in protein grams. For me that's 190 grams of protein! I'm not sure if I can consume that much protein a day, not to mention every day. Even my whey protein shake only contains a bit less than 30 grams of protein. Then there's the fact that your body cannot digest all the protein at once, so you have to space it out. Chicken breast, which is high in protein, contains about 35-40 grams of protein, while thigh meat (which I prefer) only contains about 20-25 grams of protein. That's alot of food to eat in one day!

I know I don't eat anywhere near my 190 grams of protein a day, but when I do eat more protein and take my whey protein shake, I am noticing I'm building up more muscle mass, though my weight has not declined. In fact I gained about a pound, and am now at 187-188 lbs.

I'm still unsure how to lose my small spare tire, but I figure if I keep my ideal workout schedule, all that stuff will get used up when my body starts craving the calories.

School fundraising ripoffs

Yesterday seemed like "Let's get the whole family to call James day". About 25% of the time it's a family tech support call asking how to do something with the computer. Today was a bit of everything, computer tech support here, family stuff vacation stuff there, when are you coming gonna invite us for dinner, etc. But this time my niece hit me up to buy some magazines for her school. Now I remember this back in my day, if you sell enough stuff, you get a really cheap prize. I think if you sold a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff, you get a cheap $5 prize. That's like a 2% commission! What a ripoff for the kid selling a ton of magazines! Yah, yah, I know the money is going to the school, but still, that's a horrible commission rate. But I'm still ordering my magazines anyway, I can never say no to my little niece. My last subscription to Sport Compact Car ran out a long time ago, and it was nice bathroom reading material anyway.

Apple updates

The new ipods are here! Larger hard drive, a drop in price, brighter screen, more battery life. Not enough though to make me wish I had the newer model, as I just bought my 60gb Ipod video a couple of months ago. I've been getting good use out of my Ipod during workouts, and I also use it as a external hard drive to copy movies to / from home. It works really well as a external hard drive, and since it doesn't need a a/c plug, I don't have to go searching around for a plug all the time. It's great when my monitor also has a usb port on it's side. The only bad thing is it's a tad slow because of the speed of the hard drive.

Itunes itself has also been updated, and now it can download cover art for my mp3 files! That is a nice feature. My old way was using a great program called tag & rename, which adds id tags to mp3 files via filename, and can go onto amazon to download more tags, and the cover art. But it's quite involved as you have to make sure you have the entire album and such. If you have the artist and album name in the mp3, Itunes can download and append the cover art. I did it for my 5 gb worth of mp3's. It missed a few but got alot.
I also figured out how to enable itunes sharing of my music so my roomie can now connect to my itunes library and stream it across the netwok on her computer. I don't know if she can copy it to her ipod or not though, I'll have to try it out when we're available.

Do you talk in your sleep?

Do you talk in your sleep? I know I do. Some of my friends have experienced me talking in my sleep as well, though I never remember what it was I was talking about. It provides never ending amusement when they bring up this subject, although they also can't remember what it was I was talking about. Karen is the only person who messes with me when I start talking in my sleep. She actually asked me some questions while I was talking in my sleep, and I responded back! Then she proceeded to make fun of me the next morning.

Well last night, Karen started talking in her sleep, and now it's payback time!
Karen "There's no more red stripe bottles left"
Me "Is there anything else left?"
Karen "No, there aren't any more bottles left"

After that, she woke up and asked why I was up so late, then promptly fell back asleep again. Dammit, I wanted to see if I could get her to say something more embarassing.

So do you talk in your sleep, and do you remember what you say? Do you respond back to people talking to you?

Beer Festival in Monterey, Hooray Beer!

Where else can you get drunk in public in the middle of the afternoon? Why at the Monterey Beer Festival of course! Since Karen and Angie were working the event, promoting Red Stripe, Danny and I tagged along. I was suprised how small the festival was, and the lack of companies of beer. I thought it would be a big event, the size of say the gilroy garlic festival, but it was suprisingly small. But the idea was pretty cool, you pay an admission fee, and you get a cup and all the beer you can drink until they run out. Volunteers were supposed to be manning the taps in our area, but there weren't enough, so Danny and I pitched in and started pouring beer. Man, people are really happy when you pour them free beer. I started drinking early and got fairly buzzed by around 2 pm. The girls were totally loving the beads that red stripe was giving out. Eventually I started manning the red hook taps, and had alot of people love the red hook summer ale, who's name I can't remember anymore, even though I was yelling it all day long. The tap was pretty cool, it was made to look like a garden hose with a garden sprayer attached to it. People kept grabbing it and squeezing it to see if beer would come out, sadly it did not. We pigged out on BBQ oysters (Yummy!) Maui Onion Rings (Yummy!) and Terriyaki Chicken skewers (way too salty). The red stripe sold out fast because the girls were promoting the hell out of it, and hoping to go home early when they were all gone, but we decided to help out the guys and stayed till all the beer was gone, which happened at around 4pm. The drive back was looong, and it didn't help that my head was pounding from all the beers I drank.

I always thought the red stripe commercials were kinda stupid, but people loved to shout Hooray Beer! I guess marketing really does work.

Vietnamese Sandwiches in San Mateo

Thanks to yelp.com I found a place in San Mateo that has vietnamese sandwiches. Karen said she didn't like it when she went there a couple of years back, but I'm determined to try it on my next lunch outing a work. I'll give you the details later.

Saigon City

Blogger Beta converted, a/c installed!

I just noticed that there is a new beta version of the blogger, so I converted it over. Simple layouts are now much easier to change / manage. No more html editing for simple things like lists or links and stuff like that. Finally some tools for those of us that don't want to do html editing.

On another note, my a/c was installed yesterday! It's now blowing cold air! Bring on the heat wave, I'm ready this time! One good thing about waiting to put in the a/c unit is that the unit I have is more efficient, and a little cheaper than what the builders wanted to charge. Unfortunately I have to get a fence built around the unit. I think I was supposed to get a permit for the a/c from the HOA, but I didn't know I should have. I thought the a/c company would do the permit since they were the ones who did the entire complex. Hopefully nobody notices.

A/C installation tomrrow

After the long heat wave last month, I couldn't stand being in a house that over 90 deg at night. I bit the bullet and ordered central a/c during the peak heat wave. Every a/c installer was slammed for weeks. But I finally have my appointment tomorrow to get it installed. Indian summer is coming up, and dammit, I'm going to make sure I use it before winter arrives! Even if it's just to cool down the house a couple of degrees.

Indy IRL at Infineon

Thanks to the good folks at Marlboro (can't believe I said that!) I had some free tickets to see the IRL at infineon. Unfortunately I lost the tickets, but luckily Danny came through with his pair of Marlboro IRL tickets. This would be my first time at a big event at infineon raceway (Sears Point). We arrived kinda late, so we missed out on the free pit passes (next time we'll get there earlier). Not into IRL racing really, so we spent alot of time at the vendor area checking out all the stuff. I really need to go find a die cast model of my evo at a reasonable price. Those race vendors were asking outrageous amounts of money for one.

Celebrity spotting: We happened to see a big crowd moving fairly quickly, and in the middle of the crowd, we saw Gene Simmons (from KISS), his wife Shannon Tweed, and their kids. The crowd around them swarmed them for autographs. I took a picture, but unfortunately somebody just happened to be in the way of my pic.

Photos of IRL

Hey you look familiar

Why do some people look like they could be somebody's brother or sister? It's even freakier when their names are similiar. Last weekend I was at a club and met the cocktail waitress that looked just like someone I know. Even their names were almost the same, Lillian and Livian. Except that the cocktail waitress was hotter.

But the worst is when you meet somebody, and it seems like they look familiar, yet you know you've never met before, and they only look vaguely familiar, like somebody's sister. So you keep thinking why they look familiar and end up staring at them all night long trying to figure it out. Then they get creeped out because you've been staring at them all night.

Ah well, you can't win 'em all.

Ok this blog is back

Ok, this blog is back from the dead.  I’ve decided to see how long I can keep blogging for, and about my life so people I know can keep in touch with what I’m doing.