I am a heroin addict

As you know, I have a crack addiction, but I used to have a even more dangerous and expensive heroin habit. This one didn't start until later in life, during my more experimental college years. This one sucked almost all my money, my time, and almost ended a relationship. Yes this addiction was bad.

This addiction my friends, is racing. But not racing on foot, racing in real cars. And it's back in all it's withdrawal shaking glory. I know I never really kicked the habit, but thought I had it under control. I thought I could appease my addiction by going go kart racing, which is alot easier on the budget and time. I thought the looming threat of voiding my warranty on my evo would keep me away from modding it severely. But all of that changed when I got a taste last saturday.

GST motorsports had a dyno day for the norcal evo group, where you put your car on a dyno to see how much hp you have. Alot of modified cars showed up to see who had the most hp. I knew my car was almost bone stock save a 3" catback, but since they still had room when I showed up, and a old friend was running the dyno, I decided to get it dyno'd. For $40, you get 3 runs on the dyno with a wideband sensor showing you your air fuel ratio. $40 later, I show a healthy 230whp and whopping 252 ft/lb torque on average. I talk a bit with my old friend who now gets paid to tune cars. He can now control the boost using the stock ecu boost control, and the dealer won't see it unless they're really really looking for it. But it wasn't until the owner of GST gave me a 3" exhaust gasket for free, the only missing piece of my exhaust, and the sole reason I never put on the rest of the 3" exhaust, that the addiction really started to kick in.

Yes, I am going to be modding the evo soon. But that's not where the real addiction comes in. I also am planning on entering the 24 Hours of LeMons with a bunch of my old DSM car friends. This wheel to wheel race series more resembles a demolition derby which takes place over 2 days. Your car entry cannot cost more than $500, so it's a very affordable race, unlike the real 24 hours of LeMans. We're planning on finding a $500 junker, probably a salvaged turbo awd eclipse, and attempting to make it last the whole race without overheating and dieing. I signed up to help build the car and drive the race. Our team needs to consist of 5 drivers, minimum. I'm pretty excited about the prospect of this, though I've never raced real cars wheel to wheel before.

Now back in the day, almost 10 years ago now, I was really big into racing, going out to race almost every weekend for 2 years. It got increasingly more and more expensive the faster and faster I went. It also put a strain on my GF at the time, she was always complaining that I cared more about my car than her. Complaining that I'm spending all my money and most of my time on my car. The latter I must admit was true, and was scared to calculate the amount of money I spent in one year on my car. Now I'm seriously thinking about racing more this year.

Uh oh, I think I hear the heroin calling my name. Gotta go...

Dyno chart at the end.

Ground Turkey and Potatoe dish

I received this recipe from my brother in law (sister's husband), and decided to try and make it. His version of the recipe is below.

Potatoes

Ground turkey meat

Peas

Sauce:

2TB ketchup

1/12 TB hoisin sauce

1 TB oyster sauce

1/2 TB soy sauce

1 teaspoon sesame oil

2 TB sugar (or to taste)

(add / substitute tamarind concentrate and reduce sugar if out of hoisin sauce)

Cook the potatoes first and put to the side, then cook the meat and peas together. When the meat and peas are done add back the potatoes and then add the sauce.

In the middle of cooking, I found out I ran out of hoisin sauce and sesame oil, so I went on a mad scramble around the kitchen looking for a substitute and found some tamarind concentrate. I added some and wow, it gave it a good kick. It turned out really really good. It's very sweet, so I suggest reducing the amount of sugar in the sauce to your taste. It's supposed to be alot saucier too, but I used too much ground turkey meat and potatoes. I can't wait until my rice finishes cooking so I can try it out.

My writing is good?

My sister calls me up asking me if I'd help my neice out on her homework project. Apparently she needs to ask someone some questions and have somebody write back to her. My sister reads my blog to keep up with what I'm up to, so she thought of me. She thought my writing was pretty good, while I on the other hand don't really think it's that great since I write off the top of my head as if I spoke. Thank god for spell check though.

The questions I need to respond back to my neice are:

Did you know what your goals, dreams, and aspirations as a young person during your school years? If so, what were they? Did they come true? Is your life how you want it to be? What would you have done to change it?

Some very interesting questions, if a bit awkwardly written, but then again, she's only 13 (or so).

Something I thought I'd share with everybody. I knew what I like to do very early on, fiddling and working with computers. Fascinated by how things work, especially computers. Now I work on / with computers all day long as a Windows Engineer.

I also knew a long time ago, that owning my own house would be one of my major goals in life. Renting sucks. And now, that's another goal that I've already accomplished.

One of my goals when I was a kid was staying alive till next week, which wasn't always easy. I would get into alot of trouble when I was a kid, and probably don't have very many of my nine lives left.

Slacking off has it's karma

It was around 40 deg F on sunday afternoon. Extremely cold here, even in winter, but my car was dirty. The rims was caked with brake dust, and the car hasn't been washed in a long time. But it was the last day of my weekend, otherwise it gets dark when I get off work on the weekdays. So I decide I'll freeze my fingers off and go wash the car. I go look for the bucket and sponge, and can't find it anywhere. Crap, did my ex take the wash bucket and sponge? I mean I know it belonged to her in the first place, but she lives in an apartment now! Crap! I think she did.

So off to target I go today, and pickup a bucket and notice they now started carrying microfiber wash mitts and microfiber chenile sponges from vroom. Cool! I picked up a microfiber chenile sponge on one side, and soft microfiber on the other. It's really soft on both sides. I really want to wash my car now. I especially like the packaging and dog in the window logo. Bigger pics at the end of the blog. Is it sick that I really wanna go wash my car now?

While I was at target, I returned the automatic shower cleaner with busted tray, and saw they are completly out of the shower cleaner kits. But they did have a rain check, so I picked up a rain check. Hopefully they'll have it in stock again soon.

I finally went to the gym for the 2nd time since my vacation break. I was completely out of energy and could barely bench 20 lbs below my normal weights. What the heck is going on? Last time I attributed it to being lazy and not going to the gym for almost 3 weeks. But I had time to recover now. I barely did any more weights, and didn't do my full sets. I decided to call it quits early as I had to go to target afterwards. I go weigh myself, and WTF?! Ok, I know what you're thinking, I just gained a couple more pounds, but it's the complete opposite. I lost 5 lbs doing nothing on my vacation! This is not good considering I'm trying to bulk up a little bit more. I wonder if I'm on the verge of being sick, that's why my energy has been a bit low.

Ya I know some of the girls would be absolutely jealous if they could lose weight by doing absolutely nothing all day long, but for me, that's not good!

And I somehow just picked up another client for my consulting side job. Dammit, slacking off all of december has now caught up to me. Both my main work and my main consulting client is getting busier. That means even less time for me to work out. And my place is still a mess because I keep reading everyone elses's blog and write my own! Ok, it's more because I was lazy over the weekend, but still!

The one where someone almost died in front of my house

On Friday night, after spending a few hours at my friend's house with his brand spanking new just unpacked out of the box PS3 I come home to my normally sleep little town and my sleepy dead end road to my townhouse complex at around 2:00am. To my surprise there was a bustle of activity in the form of flashing red and blue lights as 2 cop cars and a firetruck was blocking the entire road right in front of my complex. Then I noticed there was a car in the entrance to the driveway of my complex flipped over on it's side. I see a few of my neighbors on their porch and inquire what happened. Apparently the woman driving the car had fell asleep hit a truck that belonged the said neighbor's husband, and flipped over on it's side. She wasn't hurt, and I don't think she was drunk, as the officer administered a sobriety check as I was talking to my neighbor. That was the most excitement I've seen in my city with the exception of the norovirus outbreak that occurred at the elderly care complex down the street from my complex

Upon advice of my ex, (yes, I still talk to her, and saw her last weekend) and with the help of her $5 off coupon, I went down to target and picked up a Scrubbing Bubbles automatic cleaner kit. Target had it on sale, along with the refills (and coupon for $1 off 2 refills). Unfortunately I'm unable to give a first hand review as the plastic free shower caddy that comes with it came broken. I'll have to return it to target and hope they have some left in stock (I took the last one). It sounds a bit gimmicky, but after my ex saw it first hand at our friend's apartment, where he never cleans the shower, it does actually work. One good thing is it comes with another set of coupons inside the kit.

Saturday night was my friend L's birthday. She went to club Whisper in SF for her birthday party, so I went knowing full well that she'll try to hook me up with her single friends. Sorry guys, no hookups that night. We ended the night early as the partying casuality hit early and her bf and another guy went down for the count. The aftermath is why I don't like to drink that much anymore.

Extremely dangerous, do not get close!

While browsing the Compusa / Goodguys, I happened to stumble upon this very exotic, extremely dangerous creature, who's sharp fangs needed to be restrained from pouncing on innocent bystanders as they gawk at the latest plasma screens.

Playing with a camera phone gets you into trouble

Yes, I did get my SE w810i phone that i had talked about previously. I didn't get the Motorola H700 bluetooth headset thrown, unfortunately. I guess they'll say yes to anything over the phone and then pretend they didn't hear or understand what you said. But it was free after rebate, but I had to pay $70 AR to get the headset. Ah well, I wanted one anyway. Unfortunately, I also ordered a motorola H300 bluetooth headset from compusa for $0 after $30 rebate almost a month ago. My order was backordered for a while, and the rebate expiration was coming up shortly, so I was going to cancel my order the next day. Next morning, I get a email saying the order was delayed for another 10 days, so I sent them a email to cancel the order. A few minutes after I sent the cancellation email, I get a new email saying my headset is now being shipped to me. What the hell! That can't be coincidence! Now they reply back telling me they can't stop the order, and I would have to refuse shipment of the package if I want to return it without additional shipping fees. Of course there's no way that'll happen because it'll get automatically accepted at the loading dock at work. Looks like I'll have another set unless I can return it in the store. One of the major differences of the H300 is that it uses a AAA battery instead of a rechargeable one. If I ever really need some more juice, I can get the second bluetooth and steal a battery from a remote control.

So after I get my new phone, I immediately start playing with it, and man it's a cool phone. So many things and gadgets you can do with it. The coolest feature of them all is a applet where you hold the phone next to the speaker, or turn the music up in your car, and it'll listen and analyze the song that's playing. It'll then tell you the artist and song title of what's playing! It's amazingly accurate and even gets some of the more esoteric songs out there. We tried it with every song we can think of, from modern pop, oldie timie songs from the 70's, jazz, chinese songs, latino songs in spanish. The only thing it didn't get was remixes and some weird album that my friend had lieing around. It supposedly won't do classical music either. This also reminded me of another program that does the same thing for id tagging mp3 files, it'll read, analyze, identify and tag all the fields of the mp3 for you. I don't know the name of the file, but I will make sure to remind myself to email my friend for it.

I was also taking some pictures with the 2mp cameraphone at various places, testing it out. My friend needed to do some grocery shopping a Whole Foods in Mountain View, so I tagged along with him, and used my camera phone to take some test shots. As I was snapping a pic of the beers, a employee came along and told me that they don't allow pictures in the store and to put away the camera. He said this with a look in his face as if he was going to rip the camera from my hands and stomp on it until the pictures came bleeding out of the camera phone. Pictures of my paparazzi reenactment below.

Oh, speaking of which, I heard a lawyer ad on the radio recently that said something along the lines of "If you have been publicly stripped searched in Oakland, contact so and so's lawyer office". I seriously did not think the cops had the ability to do a public strip search on you. I thought they had to at least do it in private. Can you imagine a cop telling you to remove all your clothes outside when it's 20 degrees out? What's next, public cavity searching?

New Cell Phone

I've been obsessing over getting a new cell phone for the past month. I finally got fed up with my corporate sprint plan. I'd get only 1 bar when I'm near a window at my house, I'd drop calls regularly, especially if I started walking towards the interior of the house. Even when I was at a window, I'd lose what people would be saying every other sentence. At work, I would only get a signal by the window and as soon as I walked towards the center, I'd lose the signal.

I knew my phone would now start with the network. I've used tmobile with the blackberry, and hated the reception overall. Sprint PCS reception was just as bad in certain key places, namely home. Verizon coverage is excellent almost everywhere, while AT&T's network, now Cingular had very good coverage everywhere, and most importantly works at my house.

So I started the process of what criteria interests me, and what are the trade offs of some of the other choices. After living with a blackberry for quite a few years and hating it as a phone, I swore off on any of the blackberries, and any phone approaching the heft and bulk. In fact since I don't really want corporate blackberry like emails, any blackberries are off my list. They're just not versatile enough for me, they lack cameras, mp3 playback, videos, etc. Treos and Windows Phones were off my list as they were just as bulky, though they added the mp3, video playback, and had a camera phone. Also the camera phones did not take very good pictures. I had briefly considered the Motorola Q and Samsung Blackjack, but those are still a bit too big to hold in your hand and talk comfortably. So I decided to ditch the qwerty keyboard entirely and focus on more of a phone. I decided to look at the latest and greatest and work my way down. I instantly fell in love with the Sony K800i Cybershot. Yes, a cybershot branded phone, which means it has a 3.2 MP camera, a bright flash, and takes excellent photos, rivaling a dedicated camera. 3g network support,video, mp3, bluetooth, the works. Everything you can ask for in a candy bar style form factor that comfortably fits in your hand. The catch is that none of the US networks picked up that phone and therefore doesn't offer any discounts. The only way you can get the phone is if it's unlocked and costs $400. That's really steep. In fact all the high end phones weren't carried by any of the US carriers. After browsing the web a bit more, I found the Sony Ericsson W810i phone. It's a walkman branded phone, but has a very good 2 MP camera with a bright flash. Pictures are supposed to be close to a real camera. It'll do MP3's (obviously if it's called a walkman) and video, bluetooth, almost everything I wanted in a very small candy bar for factor that easily fits in your hand while talking. Not as good of a camera as the K800i, but easily better than all the other camera phones out there. Plus it was supposed to be picked up by Cingular, which means a discount. Unfortunately I didn't see it on cingular's website as a phone they listed, nor on amazon or wirefly. I went out to the local mall and found one store didn't carry it while another listed it at $200 with 2yr activation. Not exactly cheap. So I decide to wait.

A couple of weeks later, I go back and look around some more to see if there were any other phones from other carriers, and found that amazon, cingular itself, and wirefly all were now offering the w810i. Another week or two, and now amazon has the phone for $-50 after rebate, wirefly had it for free, and cingular had it for $75 after rebate. Ooh, now's the time to buy. But Amazon can't port your numbers over to the cingular network. Some weird amazon-cingular thing. I've heard a lot of bad things about wirefly regarding their rebates, so that's out of the question, and cingular at $75 is a premium over the other places. After much searching, I find out that there's pretty much only 2 places on the internet that sell phones with service. Inphonic/Wirefly, and Amazon. Everybody else is really Inphonic/Wirefly. So I decide my best bet would be to go to one of the independent asian cell phone stores, and see if I can work a deal there. I've been out of the loop of cell phone stores, so I don't know where any of the independent ones are. Apparently there's no true "independent" ones that sell all the services, they're all co-branded or authorized to sell only one or two carriers. Only the major retailers (best buy, circuit city, etc) has more than 2 carriers, but none of them carry the w810i. I head to Milpitas to Mccarthy Ranch to check out some other stores, and decide to look for a independent asian cingular store. Found it and found they carry the w810i, with the price of Free after rebate! I would have purchased it right there had it not been for the fact that I needed to know my company's tax ID # before I am able to port my number. So I'm heading back tomorrow because they're out of stock today. I'll see if I can wrangle a free bluetooth headset out of them as well, since amazon has it for $50 less.

Sloth like vacation

Ok, I've been bad on my vacation. I didn't do anything, didn't clean up the house, didn't do any house related projects, didn't do any car related projects, didn't do much of anything really.

I did manage to get out for NYE, and hung out with a couple of friends and their friends. We had dinner at a brewery called 21st amendment in San Francisco near the ball park. Their brined pork chops which I ordered was probably the best thing on their menu. And being brined, was juicy, not overcooked, and very flavorful. Then headed to a private event at a restaraunt near DNA lounge where we rung in the new year. Didn't drink too much, so I headed home and avoided the cops and any drunk drivers (thankfully I didn't see any).

However I did manage to get up real early and went with my sister and her two kids to go to Tahoe. The weather was clear, but extremely cold. Temperatures in the morning was in the 20's. Glad I bundled up, but in the afternoon, things got a bit warmer, until you got stuck on the chairlift with the winds blowing at you. Lines were extremely long at Alpine Meadows, so we didn't get very many runs in. I definitely need to go snowboarding more often.