Late night work

I'm working late night right now. On a conference bridge and awaiting for another vendor to join. I hate these kind of bridges because my night and the time I get to sleep depends on other people. Hopefully this bridge will not last too long. I'm hoping it won't last beyond 3:00am. 3:00am may sound unreasonable, but last night was the worst. I worked a regular work day, and had to come back to the office around 10 ish for a night event. Unfortunately for me, the night event lasted until almost 8AM this morning. I was dead by the time I had to drive home. Good thing I did not crash or anything. Anyways, I spent the rest of today just sleeping and trying to remember where I was, since my brain was so disoriented. I didn't get the whole day to sleep though, because I had a few calls coming from the ATL group on more upcoming night work for me. Yippy......

Well there is more activity going on in this call, so I should really be paying attention to it now. Can't wait for the weekend. Hopefully nothing breaks where I have to come to work then *knock on wood*

Giiirll.. you really got me now...

I finally watched Peyton Manning doing SNL that I tivo'd this past Saturday. I must admit, I did not have high expectations of him unless you like "6' 5, 230 pounds, laser rocket arm" but he did a great job. The United way skit was awesome. Too bad they didn't make him say "cut that meat". Anyways, the funniest bit of the night did not involve Peyton. Here is the clip:



To see what they were making fun of here is the original clip (its a bit long about 5 minutes)



Its just tooo funny.

Crushed.....

Work was not so busy today, so I went to go balling during work hours at the local park. The weather was nice, around 70F so I had to take advantage of it.

I just got back into basketball after a 5 month hiatus so my game is still very weak. There was another group playing on the court and they were a lot taller than we were. We decided to go to the other end of the court fearing a beat down and at least do our thing and warm up before we attempted to challenge them.

After 20 minutes, I felt my jumper was getting back into form, and my dribbling was getting slightly better, though it still sucked. One aspect of my game that I couldn't get back yet was my jumping ability. I used to fly high, now I can't even jump over mouse. Regardless of my weaknesses, I convinced my friend to get a 2 on 2 game against them, mind you my friend was in the same position as me and just got back into playing basketball. The giants of the court happily accepted. I'm not going to go into the embarassing details of the game but the end result was that we happily got our "arses" handed to us. It was so humiliating but at the same tine it also motivated me to be a "decent" player again instead of playing like a scrub like I am now.

I hope I can continue to play basketball while I'm in Japan. I know they don't have a lot of outdoor courts, and I want to try to avoid paying to play indoors. Anyways, if there is a will, theres a way.

To be or not to be.... upgraded

After speaking with the travel agency, we got a good price on an airfare to Japan. The only catch is that since they are discount tickets, they are not eligible to be upgraded, which I had intended in doing so with my excess amount of flyer miles. If I were to opt out of the discount tickets and get regular economy tickets that are upgradeable; the price of the tickets would be double. So now, I'm thinking on what I should do. The main reason why I want my seats upgraded is for my dog. Since he will be coming, having more room during the LONG 14 hour flight would benefit the dog in having more space which in turn allows me to have more leg room and there won't be as many people in business class for the dog to bother, but is it worth paying double...

Slingbox and Tivo review delayed

After I got my Tivo and slingbox effectively working together, I hit a wall. I only had one ethernet port dedicated for my setup. However, both the Tivo and Slingbox needed to have their own connection. I ordered a wireless internet adapter for the Tivo to solve the problem. At least it solved only that problem. Apparently, the wireless adapter for the Tivo was causing interference with my VPN (Virtual Private Network) on my work laptop. Thus I get kicked off on my working applications. I was lucky to have found this problem during the weekend where it didn't cause any impacts on my work. The only way I could resolve this issue is if I hard wire the Tivo to the router but I do not have enough ports for both the Tivo and the Slingbox and I only had one Cat5 cable snaked into my room (router is located in another part of the house). Since I work at home a lot, I had to make the sacrifice. I took out the wireless adapter and plugged the wire that was previously connected to the Slingbox into the Tivo. I figured I don't need to use the Slingbox functionality now and I will connect everything back up when I quit my job in a couple of months. As for now, I am enjoying my Tivo. I finally figured out why it recorded all these random programs. There was a default setting to let Tivo record recommended programs when there is a lot of space in the box. Unfortunately, some of the shows they recommended to me was Bonanza and a Spanish talk show. I turned it off and have been happy since.

In other news, my co-worker in ATL messaged me that he wanted a "byte" to eat. Of course this was unintentional. I was laughing so hard. I think he needs to get out more and stop hanging out with the systems too much hehe.

Week of March 12th Recap

This week has been really busy. I didn't have time to log on my Mac for a extended period of time. There were ups and there were downs. Anyways, here is a recap of this week's notable events:

Monday -

Went to the French Embassy to watch a modern contemporary piano and saxophone performance. I was expecting a very melodic and up-beat performance, but I only got up-beat. The style of the music played was none that I have ever heard before and unfortunately that is not a good thing. I could not understand the music played. The notes were played were all over the place. Sometimes I pondered if the guy is actually playing the saxophone for real, or if the whole show just a trick to see if the audience could tell if they were legit players or not. The only piece they played that I enjoyed was their final piece that was composed by a Russian composer. It wast he only uncrack-like performance of the night. Even though, the music I heard that night was not my cup of tea, I was appreciative that I could experience that type of music.

Tuesday -

Work was not bad. My boss took the team to a nice lunch. We had a great talk and a good time. For dinner, I went to Busara in Tysons Corner (Thai restaurant) and caught up with an old friend that I have not seen in such a long time. It was a good chill evening.

Wednesday -

A couple of friends and I went to "Medieval Times" in MD after work. Medieval Times is a live dinner show where you are served a medieval style dinner while watching knights battle it out in various competitions. This was my first experience to something like this. I am glad that I finally got to experience this because ever since I watched the Cable Guy, I wanted to go to one. Some of the tricks they performed was amazing, and the fighting was very comical. Our designated knight seemed like a newbie so he did everything twice as slow as the others. Fortunately, he won a couple of competitions, so all of our cheering was not in vain.

Thursday -

March Madness begins. I didn't watch many of the games because I did not have the luxury of skipping out of work. I am happy VCU, MD, and Georgetown won their games. Later that night, I attended the weekly Japanese class. I hope my level of Japanese is improving.

Today, Friday -

Ahh.. the last day of the work week and i don't have the pager. I should be happy, but I have to go to work tomorrow starting from 10:30PM to 5:00AM the next morning. Well, at least I get Sunday off..... Well, its gonna be worse next week. I will have to work all 7 days and I will work night time on 4 of those. Life is going to SUCK.

Borat and Tivo

I finally got to see "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan". I wanted to see it in theaters but couldn't find the time due to my demanding work schedule. However, when my schedule did ease up, the movie was out of theaters. So when it finally came on DVD, I was stoked. My overall impression did not meet my expectations. I loved Borat in the Ali G series. The move had its funny moments but I thought the overall story line was kind of weak. The ending was great though on how he tried to kidnap Pamela Andersen. I was going to watch the movie with the family, but thanks to my friends' warnings on the "cock fighting" and "ass eating", I avoided an uncomfortable situation hehe. I recommend this movie if you don't mind the heavily racial bits and men humping each other naked.

I got my Tivo the other day. I haven't hooked up my slingbox yet, because I didn't have enough Ethernet ports for both boxes. I had to order the wireless adapter for the Tivo. Once I get that, I'll set up both boxes and let you know if it works well. My overall impression of Tivo thus far has been positive. The only negative experience I had so far was that it sometimes records these random shows that I did not choose to record. I don't know if I accidentally programmed those shows to be recorded or if the box got hacked into. In any case, I had to reset my Tivo, which was kind of a pain to alleviate this issue. I wish Tivo would also turn on and off my cable box to record shows instead of my leaving the cable box on the whole time. If there is a feature like that, please let me know.

Bruno at Spring Break

I haven't gotten my Tivo yet, so the update on how well the two components are will have to wait. Now for the sad part, I have the pager now, so my life is going to suck pretty bad for the next week. One good thing is that one of my co-workers volunteered himself to do the late night work that I was suppose to participate during the week (3 consecutive nights including a Friday night from 11PM - 5AM), so thank god I do not have to worry about that. Other than that, work has been pretty cruddy. My team mate and I are currently doing a collaborative effort with another team to certify an important patch for the production systems. Usually, a whole new team is suppose to be doing this but they have been disbanded and left for dead. The reason we got involved was because the client decided not to pay for any more assistance for getting new software certified. However, if the software does not get certified, it cannot go into production, and if it cannot go to production then the service won't improve and it will hold back other projects dependent on that new software. You can see the destructive domino effect coming. Anyways, this collaborative effort is becoming pretty stressful. One of the main reasons is the "Hitler-like" leadership. This guy is like the type of manager that likes to kick you in the balls but tells you that you are lucky because he was not wearing his steel toe boots. I'll be happy when this is over. On a brighter note, thinking about it has distracted me on what I really hate the most, The Pager of Death.

Finally a co-worker and I were talking today about spring break (Not that it matters to us because Spring break is irrelevant to the working world) and the Bruno sketch in Daytona beach came up. We were both cracking up. I have provided the clip below.

"P - A - R - T - Y ..PARTY!!!!!!"

Tivo + slingbox = ?

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I have finally dove into the Tivo revolution. I honestly didn't think I would ever get one, because I didn't want to feel hurt my VCR's feelings. Just kidding.
Why get a Tivo now months before I leave to Japan? Well, I know that I will miss American programming, especially sports while I'm in the land of the rising sun, so I plan to Tivo all those events plus my favorite television shows like Prison Break andConan O'Brien, just to name a few and programming on my favorite channels e.g. HGTV, Food network and my favorite ESPN. I bet you are wondering, how would I be able to view all my Tivo'd shows half way across the globe? That is where the slingbox comes to play. I will stream all my shows on the internet via slingbox and watch them on my Macbook Pro in Japan. I have a pretty decent connection here, and the average connection rate in Japan is about 30 megs per second. I haven't tried this out yet, I have my slingbox (it came today) but I am still waiting for my Tivo to be delivered. I will definitely post my reviews of this setup in the very near future.

Grant Hill Continued

In addition to my previous post, I used to be a big sports card collector when I was in Junior High and my Freshman year of High School. Grant Hill and Penny Hardaway, which I thought would be the next MJ, but like George Bush, I was wrong were both big parts of my basketball card collection. The rookie card shown above used to be worth around 20+ USD, now its barely worth 8 bucks. I don't want to even mention what happened to my Penny rookie cards. I recently tried to sell my collections because they were collecting dust and occupying precious space in my tiny room, but after finding some of the prices my cards are worth, after the hundreds of dollars I spent on them, I don't think I could pay someone to take them away from me. I hope I can get rid of them soon before the big move. Why couldn't I have had an interest of stocks when I was a kid...

Grant Hill

Sports Rant:




The Magic were trying to get themselves going again after beating the Chicago Bulls on Monday, however they got dismantled (for the nth time this season) by Iverson, Melo, and the rest of the Denver Nuggets. As fate would have it, Grant Hill left the game with another injury. I honestly like Grant Hill, but it just kills me to see this guy get hurt every season and be one of the primary causes of why the Magic didn't succeed that season. He is a local athlete having gone to South Lakes High School. I was very happy when he signed with the Magic 7 years ago along with T-Mac, but man I never knew he would turn out like this. When he is healthy, he is really good. This season, it looked like he was going back to his All-star form, but obviously that didn't last very long. I hope his "sore left foot" is not severe, so he can continue to contribute to the slumping Magic into making the playoffs. Oh well, I guess it will let JJ Reddick (another Virginian) to step up and show why he was a first round pick.