The Bash!

The Christmas Dumpling party was very successful. We hand-made the wrappings and the two types of filling. One was a pork/cabbage mix and the other was a pork/ji cai(Shepherd's Purse)/mushrooms mix. The entire making process took about 2 hours with everyone pitching in and making dumplings. PP was in charge of quality control and those deemed fit to boil were boiled while the rejects (too much filling, bad wrapping, improper sealing) were made into pot stickers.

BluPnutMM also make her signature pork ribs and we also had various other people bring in fruit platters, a giant ham, and even some Taco Bell (Por Que?). We were so starved after the end of the making process that just about everything was rapidly devoured, leaving only some ham and Taco Bell.

We had a Wii going downstairs and Rock band 2 going on upstairs so everyone found a little of something to do. Overall a very successful party!

So glad I am not a brad....now if only I can min/max this...

I Am A: Lawful Good Human /Sorcerer (3rd/2nd Level)


Ability Scores:

Strength-12

Dexterity-16

Constitution-14

Intelligence-15

Wisdom-17

Charisma-16


Alignment:
Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment because it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.


Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.


Primary Class:
Monks are versatile warriors skilled at fighting without weapons or armor. Good-aligned monks serve as protectors of the people, while evil monks make ideal spies and assassins. Though they don't cast spells, monks channel a subtle energy, called ki. This energy allows them to perform amazing feats, such as healing themselves, catching arrows in flight, and dodging blows with lightning speed. Their mundane and ki-based abilities grow with experience, granting them more power over themselves and their environment. Monks suffer unique penalties to their abilities if they wear armor, as doing so violates their rigid oath. A monk wearing armor loses their Wisdom and level based armor class bonuses, their movement speed, and their additional unarmed attacks per round.


Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

Pre-Bash Bash

This Holiday season isn't over yet, but has already been particularly eventful. The BluPnutMM couple came over during the Christmas holidays and stayed until Sunday. On Thursday, we all had a holiday gathering at my house. We played Mafia/Rock Band 2/Various Wii games. One of the best parts was when we all took turns playing Wii Fit. My hula skills were especially awesome as I managed a staggering 2 loops before failing. I did redeem myself later by doing a hundred or so, but the first time playing was truly epic. Papaya did some insane 300 loops on his first try!

The most entertaining game by FAR though was this little game inside Wario ware. It's basically a 8 bit game where two people each control a character as they jump over sand traps and potholes. The trick was that the two characters were connected so if your partner failed, your entire team was slowed down. The control scheme for this game was for one person to hold the Wii-mote and another to hold the nunchucku. You jumped by lifting the controller up, however the controls were so insensitive that sometimes you had to make rapid jerking movements for the jumps to register. Somehow, this little game entertained everyone for a long long time with everyone trying to set the highest score. PP and I (The Dynamic Duo) set the record with a flawless run of 2996 feet!

Friday, BluPnutMM's parents invited us to have dinner at Tokyo1. This place was essentially a Sushi/Seafood buffet. The select was enormous with various sushi rolls, sashimi, BBQ, and seafood. The best were the humongous crabs that were cut in half. They basically disappeared as quickly as they were brought out. PP loved them so much, she still craves them to this day. Dinner was followed up with a long round of karaoking. The selection of English songs was so limited such that the majority of songs we sang were Chinese with a smattering of random Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys tossed in. We ended the night with a soulful rendition of "Beijing Welcomes You" (title theme of Olympics) which continues to plague my thoughts up to this day.

Adventures in Dallas!

Went to Dallas this weekend to visit PP's aunt and uncle. The drive there was pretty monotonous and took about 5 hours. The first thing we noticed about Dallas was that it was much colder than Houston, but much sunnier. PP's aunt had a super large house and a lovable little dog named cookie. This dog was sooo cute and was super quiet. Perfect house pet but rather useless as a guard dog. We had a giant feast prepared for dinner including PP's uncle's famous salt water duck (so good....) Two of PP's cousins were also at the dinner party and they were all very nice.

After dinner, we played a bunch of table tennis and even got in several rounds of 80-points. PP's cousins were so awesome and really made me feel like part of the family!

Enter: Nostradamus

BluPnutMM made a semi-joking, semi-snarky remark last year about how there seems to be a pattern to people getting married. Papaya/Mango was in December of 2006, BluPnutMM couple was in 2007, and so naturally someone had to get married in December of 2008. As of yesterday, the most likely candidate this year is now me. PP and I had talked about Greened Wage (We're Engaged) since Thanksgiving, but I wanted to surprise her with a nice Magnet Gene (Engagement) ceremony!

The entire process required a lot of help from a great number of friends and family. The first order of business was to find a suitable Domain Grind (Diamond Ring). Mango was the hero when it came to this as she was the one who helped me discreetly get PP's Zig Siren (Ring Size) and she was also the one who helped me pick out a truly great Diamond for the ring. The place I ended up buying the diamond from was a direct referral from my boss. It's a Round Brilliant Cut, VS-G, 1.08 C. We had gone to a couple of different mainstream jewelers (Jared's, Diamond Cutters International) and while they provided wonderful education on how to choose the right diamond, these vendors' prices were from 10% to 15% above the wholesale price of diamonds. This referral from my boss was selling them from 20%-25% below wholesale.

The original plan for the proposal was at Bush's speech on Friday. Presidents George and George W., as well as Barbara Bush were all at the commencement for Texas A&M. The president gave a pretty good speech to the graduating class. A memorable line went something like:

"...some of you already have jobs lined up and I wish you well in your pursuits. Some of you don't and are about to face uncertain waters. I know how you feel!"

This plan was quickly scrapped because I couldn't keep my mouth shut and told PP about the plans. The second plan was to propose during a Rockets game via the Kiss Cam. Unfortunately, in order to do this, one had to be a season ticket holder, have a corporate sponsor, and tell the arena a month in advance. The final plan was a plan thought up by BluPnuMM.

BluPnutMM had been experimenting with cake-baking recently and wanted to bake a cake for the occasion. It just so happened to be her husband's birthday so we developed to plan to have a birthday party be the mask for the engagement. BluPnutMM would bake a cake that had the letters "Say Yes" on the top covered by flower petals. She would then ask PP to remove the petals and as the last petals were removed and the message revealed, I would get on one knee. Olive Garden was chosen for the party as that was where PP and I had our first date.

The plan worked out perfectly. PP had no clue we were planning all of this and was totally surprised. I would like to thank everyone who helped with suggests and encouragement!

Winter Wonder Land

Was just doing some work around the office, when suddenly, the entire office is abuzz with excitement. Seems like we got some light snow here in downtown H-town last night. Since I went to college in the Northeast, this whole "snow" thing wasn't exactly big news to me, but for a lot of people here, it was like Christmas came early.

They even allowed employees to "leave earlier" to avoid the ice on the roads. Unfortunately, this announcement came when I only had about an hour left in the day. Felt like one of those Cornell "snow days" where all my classes were canceled after I had already gone to all of them. If I wanted to skip classes, I would have just kept playing EQ....

This weekend, lots of stuff will be going on. The BluPnutMM couple will be in town because her parents are back from Nigeria. It also happens to be the husband's birthday so we are gonna have a little party along with the Magnet Gene. "Meter-Maid" is also coming back from China after an extended medical leave so it would be nice to see her again. I am also attending the commencement speech for PP's graduation with President Bush as the speaker.

Where the pot isn't the only hot item in the room

PP came over to spend the weekend in Houston. She was suffering from a pestering cold and so we didn't really go out anywhere. This was actually pretty good because it was cold outside and we managed to have Hot Pot for two days straight! We invited Papaya/Mango couple over to have Hot Pot on Saturday night. We had our own Hot Pot pot and used some store-bought base for the soup. We had a wide assortment of foods like thinly-sliced beef, shrimp, fake shrimp (tasted better than the real shrimp!), tofu, fish balls, various different kinds of vegetables, and rags (really just some kinda vegetable...but Papaya thinks they look like rags...)!

The Hot Pot was so good but we had way too much food. We had so much left over and PP and I were able to have Hot Pot again on Sunday night. After the Hot Pot, Papaya and I went off to play some Rock Band 2 while Mango got PP's Zig Siren (For Great Justice!). PP spent the rest of the weekend watching some wacky Korean TV series while I managed to clean some warehouses in Vesperia. A great weekend!

Grinding along

It's that time of the year where the holidays are so close but yet so far away. I am pretty excited about this holiday season though. Lots of good friends should be back in town and I am looking forward to hosting a nice party. All this anticipation just makes the Domain Grind even harder. So many things to do, so much stuff to research and so little time!

Thanksgiving!

Had a wonderful Thanksgiving holidays. Because of my 9/80 schedule, I was able to start my Thanksgiving on Wednesday as opposed to Thursday. Drove over to CS on Tuesday evening to spend some time with PP. We drove back on Wednesday to start the holidays. Thursday was a light day with M preparing a turkey and PP having to read a case study for classes. Friday, was big day! PP cooked a nice lunch for M with multiple dishes. In fact, she made so much she practically used every pot and pan and dish in the house, leaving lots of cleaning duty for me!

She made pork short ribs w/black bean sauce, shrimp with asparagus, cold-mixed Chinese vegetables, sauteed chicken gizzards, and Chinese cabbage with tofu. In particular, the pork ribs were exceptionally delicious. I think I ate practically the whole thing. During the evening, I took PP and M to see the Nutcracker at the Houston ballet. I had never actually seen a live ballet performance and I had all these preconceived notions of sissy men in tights prancing about. I was pleasantly surprised as the story was acted out brilliantly through dance and every dancer was incredibly graceful and powerful at the same time.

Saturday, we had a nice lunch with Papaya/Mango couple, and SomeoneWhoDoesn'tWantAFruitAndVeggieNameWhoJustCameFromMichigan. We chatted for a while, then PP and I went to the Premium Outlets that was on the way to CS. I picked up some cookware for M and PP found a nice jacket and sweater at Banana Republic. Checked up on Greened Wage news afterwords. Overall, it was a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend! I am totally thankful.

Umm.....Sextuple Entendre

Probably very old, but I just saw this today. Maybe they are just talking about....umm preserving life..

The New Microsoft Wii

So I logged in and took a look at the NXE (New Xbox Experience) that Microsoft launched yesterday. Things didn't start out so nicely as the very first time that I logged in after the update, it crashed my Xbox and I had to restart it. After the restart though, things were pretty cool. The main thing I noticed was how MS totally ripped off the whole Mii thing done on the Wii. You can create these "Avatars" that look suspiciously like Miis. Of course, it has a lot more detail and you can add accessories like changing their clothing/jewelry/hats/etc.

Too bad you can't play as your Avatar in games, that would rock for stuff like GoW2. Who the hell is this dude in glasses and a T-shirt chainsawing the drones?

L4D initial impressions

Was able to try out a little of Left 4 Dead last night with PSPmator. All I can say is this game is incredibly intense and addictive. After a little trouble figuring out the friends system on Steam, I found it really easy to create a game with just friends. Just add the Steam ID to friends list, then when you start the game, the options to play with friends is available. The other friends then can then either be invited or they can just click on a friend's name and select join game.

We played the first campaign (escape to some hospital). Initially, I had read the difficulty of this game on normal wasn't too challenging and that most people liked playing it on Expert for maximum enjoyment. Since this was our first time playing, I decided to tick it up to the 3rd difficulty setting, right below Expert. This turned out to be a good idea as I think this difficulty was just right for the level of experience we had with the game. Several observations of the game:

1. It's dark, very dark. While some areas are fairly lighted, most of the level was very dark and all you have to light the way is a little flashlight attached to the end of your gun. It's a bit disorienting at first, but soon adds to the creepiness of the experience.

2. The gameplay is intense. It's almost nonstop action from the get go. There are some safehouses where you can restock on ammo and such, but once you get out there it's just frenetic action. Infected hordes coming from all directions, random team members getting assaulted by the various special infected so you have to save them. It was just insane. It almost feels like Serious Sam with the number of enemies on the screen at one time.

3. Speaking of Special infected, There are 5 kinds of special infected: Boomer, Smoker, Hunter, Tank, and Witch. Boomers are slow, and explode when shot, but can vomit on you which causes additional hordes of infected to show up and rush you. Smokers can use their tongues to lash out and grab a player and drag them away to be killed. Hunters are super agile and can pounce on a player, immobilizing and doing continuous damage. Tanks seriously suck...they have massive life and do great amounts of damage per hit. The witches are non-hostile at first but if you hit them for whatever reason, it basically means instant death for you. They are faster than hunters and do absolutely zomgwtfbbqpizza damage.

4. The weapons all feel pretty good. Only had access to shotgun, SMG, assault rifle, and hunting rifle so far but the guns feel powerful without becoming unbalancing to the game. My favorite weapon has to be the pipe bomb though. It's basically a grenade, but when you throw it, it emits this beeping sound that actually attracts infected to it. One of the best moments was when I threw one of these into the middle of a horde assault and killed over 20 infected at once.

5. This game feels really polished and stable. Even with the humongous amounts of enemies on the screen at once, I never experienced any kind of FPS drop. There are so many ways to get through the same level that even after playing the third stage of the 1st campaign multiple times (kept dying...), it still felt fresh and new.

Popular with the Cats upstairs

Because of the trip back to China, I was late on completing the Ethics and Compliance course that was required of all employees. I hadn't thought it as too serious of an offense because I was only 1 business day late and had been in China, but apparently I was wrong. I was alerted that I was the ONLY person who was late on it in the entire company and was even mentioned in a board meeting today....Talk about the wrong way to get noticed.....

In The Future....

Fallout 3 has been an amazing experience so far. It's pretty awesome the amount of detail they put into the game. The entire Washington DC area is done very well in a post-apocalyptic state. I happened upon the White House in my explorations and it was pretty amusing. This got me to thinking though, if sometime in the future, humanity is indeed wiped out to only be rediscovered eons later by some other curious sentient race, how much of it would be left? Would they see ruins of great cities or more likely, find little to no traces of our legacy? This site has a few insights and links into such a possibility and I found it a pretty interesting read.

One of the most interesting things it mentions is how can mankind protect these future discoverers from our mistakes such as radioactive materials? If you were an archaeologist in the future and you learn of this great (hopefully) previous civilization who had all this technology and you find out the burial site of extremely deadly radioactive waste, what kind of warning signs could possibly dissuade you from going inside to your doom? This D&D metaphor the link provides is particularly illuminating on this subject:

"GM: Having climbed for days, your party reaches a summit in the Sierra Nevadas. There is a clearing here, with a raised dais adorned with engravings depicting horrible, ritualistic deaths. Many of them feature people touching barrels and being smote with disease and suffering. A heavy metal door hangs ajar, but it is surrounded by the contorted corpses of other mountaineers.
D&D Player: There must be phat loot in here! "

Stupid Fish

BitterPotatoe (not a typo) and I have been playing through GoW2's cooperative multiplayer lately and so far, there have been some mixed reactions. While the main shooting portions of the game are awesome, the "platforming" elements and vehicle portions really really put a damper on the overall enjoyment. Putting teeth/acid/poison gas/maze/outrageous amount of blood coupled with sluggish controls into one level is just trying to do too much. Perhaps it's because this was at 4 am in the morning, but the level was overly frustrating and felt like it was just beating your head against the wall until the wall broke or your head fell off.

The most frustrating experience so far has been a semi-boss fight against a stupid fish. Without spoiling any parts of it, let's just say we spent an hour alone on this ridiculous boss encompassing about 15-20 restarts. The instructions on this boss are entirely unclear and even then, the controls really really make it annoying. The whole encounter just feels like they used boxes/bad controls and ambiguous directions to artificially increase the difficulty.

These annoyances aside, the shooting portions of the game are done awesomely. The story is written decently well, and a lot of the sequences have a cinematic feel. Lemon with 2 buddies, BitterPotatoe, and I played the horde option and it was a blast. While not entirely original (copied from survival mode in UT2003), the mode was an awesome adrenaline ride and totally gives you that "starship troppers" feel.

Death by Wasabi Peanuts Part II.

The party on Saturday was really fun. We had about 10-12 people arrive in costume. Some were more extravagant and some had more effort put into them, but everyone had that Halloween spirit!

The first event of the party was supposed to be pumpkin carving. Everyone was to bring their own pumpkin and we would have a contest to see who can carve the best pumpkin. Sadly, the pumpkins I ordered could not be delivered in time so we had no pumpkins to carve. The punishment for not bringing a pumpkin was to eat 5 Wasabi Peanuts at once. These things are sooo strong, but sooo good. I am getting tears in my eyes from eating them, but I want more because they are so good.

Instead of pumpkin carving, we played some Rock Band 2 instead. After a good hour or so of playing, most of the guests had arrived and we went outside for some pumpkin bowling. We half-filled 10 water bottles and used those for pins. The BluPnutMM couple brought two roughly circular medium-sized pumpkins that we were to use as bowling balls. While setting up the bowling, we took a whole bunch of pictures outside with our costumes. The weather wasn't very cooperative however as it was super hot and humid that afternoon and everyone was dying because of the costumes. We quickly abandoned the bowling and decided to play some Mafia instead.

Generally, our mafia games last way too long. This is because everyone gets to talk and the day rounds last forever because of voting deadlock, changing nominations, and endless deliberations. We adopted a new set of rules that PP uses to play with her friends and this caused the games to go by much faster and smoother. Everyone had a lot of fun with the new rules. BluPnutMM also had the most memorable defense ever.

We split up into two groups afterwards. The larger group headed to Du(2) Yi(1) Chu(4) to have Peking duck, while the smaller group stayed at my house to watch the Texas/Texas Tech game while ordering some Papa Johns. I went with the Peking Duck group and our dinner was awesome. We were all starving from being out in the sun and not really eating anything all day long. I had ordered 2 ducks in preparation for the party and we ordered some vegetables thinking this was way too much food. What actually happened was a feeding frenzy of epic proportions. The first duck had JUST arrived and we devoured the thing in about 5 seconds. I even had to ask the waitress to bring the second duck out as soon as possible. We ate everything there and the meal was practically over in about 30 minutes leaving nothing but barren plates on the table. The management must have thought we were freaks...

After dinner, we went back, played a bit more RB2 and then went to sing karaoke. Two more friends that couldn't join us for the main party joined for karaoke and we had a good time singing until our voices gave out.

Death by Wasabi Peanuts Part I.

Busy Halloween weekend for by PP and I. Thursday, I had my company Halloween celebration as mentioned in the previous post. Friday, was PP's business school party in CS. Before the party, we first had a surprise party for one of PP's best friends in the school (Let's call her CC).

CC was turning 30 and was feeling a bit depressed about the passing time, however, because the party was supposed to be a surprise party, everyone had to sort of avoid talking to CC. This led to CC feeling unappreciated and forgotten. The party though went off like a charm, CC had no idea her friends were planning this. We hid in the bedroom of a friend's house, and the friend used "borrowing chairs" as an excuse to get CC over. We all jumped out of the room and totally surprised her. CC was so happy she had tears in her eyes!

After the surprise party, PP and I dressed up and headed to her business school Halloween party. There were all kinds of interesting costumes there because the costume party there had cash prizes. We went around for a long while taking lots of pictures of people in costume and chatting with her classmates. First place in the contest went to the Joker, second place was to a Palin/Dead Deer combination, and third was to a Vegas cocktail waitress. I finished in 4th.

Early start to the festivities

We had a costume/pumpkin carving contest here at work as a part of the Halloween festivities. Normally, I don't participate in these, but this year, since I already had a costume ready for my party on Saturday, I joined in. Our team also had an entry in the pumpkin carving contest.

There was pretty fierce competition for the solo costume contest and the contest must have been rigged as the winner was a "NASCAR" fan. All he had on was a NASCAR t-shirt and a flag. That was the extent of the costume with no other props nor effort. The winners of the group costume contest were "The Network." These costumes were pretty dumb as well since all they did was wear a hard hat and regular work clothes. There was another team who actually dressed up as the Addams' Family and it really showed they put a lot of thought into their costumes.

After being robbed in the costume contest, I joined my other team members for the pumpkin carving contest. Our pumpkin was an awesome design, with the eyes/nose forming our company stock symbol and the mouth zig-zagging down then up to represent our stock price. We totally blew away the competition, coming in first and winning a $50 certificate to Treebeards.

Why didn't anyone tell me it's BARD????!!!

Just an amusing conversation I had with a veggie. So how would one dress up as Chrome anyways?

Cornbread @ the Oasis and random Halloween oddities

Spent parts of the weekend in Austin visiting the BluPnutMM couple and hanging out with PP. Saturday, I had lunch in Houston with the Papaya couple, our mutual high school friend who was back from business school in Michigan, and Triple S. The lunch ended up being a gossip-fest that lasted for over 3 hours. A key accomplishment was that the Papaya couple will be coming to the Halloween party dressed up!

Drove to Austin afterwords and by the time I arrive, it was time for dinner! We went to Rudy's BBQ for dinner and we all ate way too much. Their brisket was awesome though, so tender, so moist... We followed dinner up with some pool and shuffleboard at Dave and Busters after meeting up with RainbowFruit.

Sunday was an action-packed day that started with my picking up PP from the airport. She was in a cute burnt orange sweater that totally blended in with the rest of the UT crowd. After picking her up, we went to have lunch at Z-Tejas. I have a strange fetish about their cornbread and every time that I had gone, I had eaten nothing but the cornbread. PP was craving some meat and I originally thought Z-Tejas served steak. Unfortunately, they only served steak during dinner and that didn't start until 3 pm. After stealing some cornbread, we changed locales to a place called The Oasis. It turned out to be a great idea as the restaurant was situated above a lake and the view and weather were spectacular.

After lunch, we went costume shopping at a Halloween specialty store. After trying on countless costumes, we all arrived at a pretty cool costume for the party on Saturday. Needless to say, PP's costume is super cute.