A Message of Hope and Inspiration

Today, went to some chinese restaurant for lunch with a former co-worker. The entire thing went pretty well and there was good catching up. Towards the end of the meal, they served the obligatory run-of-mill fortune cookies. Usually these fortunes were nice little nuggets of encouragement, but today, two of my co-workers got the following fortunes:

"It's over your head now. Time to get some professional help."
and
"Cut your losses. You waited long enough."

Must have been a rough day in heaven for Confucius.

A-Merican Idol

Not be confused with that other Idol show. Today was supposed to be an IT all hands meeting. Instead of the usual boring blahblah, the whole event was revolved around the other Idol contest theme. Apparently, the planners had been part of a Fantasy Football pool and had lost, as a result, they had to sing two songs (Material Girl, and some song from High School Musical II) in front of the entire company and have the video posted on Youtube. Instead of going at it alone, they decided to take as many people with them as possible so they organized people from the company to all do pretend auditions for A-Merican Idol and editted in the judges from that other Idol and their comments. The whole thing was incredibly hilarious with the most memorable being some lady singing "Umbrella" while bringing in an umbrella prop and not knowing any of the words except "Under my Um-brella, ella, ella."

How does =VGI= measure up?

xkcd does an excellent job of comparing different fruits, but how do The Veggies stack up? Well, Lemon did an excellent job on this and came up with the above plot. I think it's right on the money.

Terminated..

I am so glad I switched TS servers as today, when I inquired to whether my service had been cancelled, I suddenly get this reply:

This is an automated reply to your message to Caribe Hosting Support.

We are sorry but Caribe Hosting is closing effective immediately. All
recent payments will be refunded. TeamSpeak service will cease within
the next few days.

We apologize for the frustration and inconvenience this will cause.

Ummmm.....thanks for the heads up...The last hamster powering their servers probably died so they had to shut everything down. That and their website hadn't been updated since 2005.

Colorado Part 2: Revenge

I am heading back to Colorado from March 4th to 8th for some Datasplice training. The first trip to Colorado was wrought with danger and problems. This time, I shall have my vengence...on what exactly, I don't know (perhaps the darkness!), but I will have it.

The Long Wiikend

The BluPnutMM couple came over this weekend to celebrate a few birthdays. The weather forcast called for massive amounts of rain along with possible tornado like conditions and as such, the plan was to stay indoors and play Wii the whole time.

Wii played a bunch of Wii sports and this other party game pack with Duck Hunt and some Tank game. The highlight of the session was Wii Tennis. I seriously think the doubles matchup is broken because whoever serves, loses (unless they get that power serve in). Even though the characters don't have arms, they all have the return prowess of Andre Agassi. As soon as a person serves, you can just swing and pull a forehand smash to the inside service corner, making it impossible to return. The fact that you can't actually move your avatar around the court adds to this annoyance. On many matches, it was better to actually not serve. Overall, Wii had a lot of fun playing the party games. However, that doesn't really change my overall perception of the system as a whole.

While I can see why it can be so great as a party console, I really don't see it as a personal entertainment console. Most of the games are really simple to pick up, but all of the titles, except maybe a select few (Mario Galaxy/Metroid/Link) really lack the depth of play to make the experience memorable. This is not to say that playing with a group of friends isn't fun, it's just that without that group of friends, the system and most of the game library feel way too shallow.

Toss in some chickens and you have a deal..

Apparently, Mao was negotiating for 10 million Chinese women to be sent to the US as some kinda barter deal or something...This totally reminds me of MOO2 where you used your high population growth planets as colonist farms and just kept shipping them off to other slower populating planets.

Knifing 101

If you are like me, and don't particularly excel at knife usage, here are 3 very helpful movies to improve your ability to kill your opponent in knife duels:

CQC
Not so CQC
VERY CQC

And for some REAL tips...

The Ultimate Wiping Machine

I didn't know this beforehand, but apparently the BMW has these rain sensing windshield wipers that adjust speeds based on how fast the rain is hitting the windshield. Now I totally see why it's ultimate....

and That is my Final Answer

After much debate and a heavy dose of M-power. I finally decided to go with the BMW. It's a black 2004 BMW 325i. M immediately suggested I should take the Camry to work because umm, the "sun" would be bad for the BMW. Yes...

No more House =(

Because of the writer's strike, there probably won't be any new episodes of House MD for a prolonged period of time. This makes me so sad as the new cast members were just starting to grow on me, especially Kutner. At first, he seemed totally messed up and reckless , but now...he's still messed up and reckless but I can now see that he totally fits in with the team.

I seriously hope they get some new episodes soon as I am really curious as to the backgrounds of the new ducklings.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Welcome the Year of the rat. When I conquer the world one day, I am totally making this an international holiday. I mean, if even car dealerships revere this day with a giant Chinese New Year sale, the rest of the nation should too!

Veg Out IV set!

Much thanks to Lemon for finding out about kayak.com. They had super cheap tickets and at almost the perfect times that I was looking for!

Tailored to Your Liking

I had mentioned the vultures before when I asked for some information on Hondas. This strange person with a wierd accent had tried to call me yesterday about buying a car. He was super pushy and even after telling him I was at the gym, he kept trying to ask me what model I wanted. I pretty much just told him to send me an email and hung up. Today, I open my email and receive this:

2008 CHINESE YEAR END CLEARANCE SALE!!!
Now is the time of the year that everyone has been waiting for. Get the best deals of the year during the Honda Chinese year end clearance event. (CUNG-HY-PHAT-CHOI)

I totally wasn't aware there was a "year end" close out for Chinese New Year so I checked out their website to see if this deal was true or not. Apparently, this is a special deal that only Chinese people qualify for as it totally didn't appear on their front page. You would think something as momentous as Chinese year end which EVERYONE has been waiting for would be front page material. The page is full of annoying popups though.