Found 11 Matching Entries!

09.22.2005 -

thought of the day: forgot which movie i was watching, but some guy was being stupid and his partner asked him what did he think he'd under the word idiot when looking up in a dictionary. he goes, a picture of me? the partner goes, no idiot! it's the definition of the word idiot! i thought that was pretty amusing.

so i went to the movies today with cdmcc and elizabeth. we watched Me and You and Everyone We Know. it's a hilarious movie! humor is quite dark though and sometimes a bit gross: SPOILER ALERT!!! STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED. such as pooping back and forth. LET YOUR IMAGINATION RUN WILD!

i've watched quite a few movies over these past few weeks, but the movie reviews will be tomorrow.

quick story about me and diet root beer. so i grabbed a root beer from the fridge for lunch and drank it on my way to training (had a 2 week long 4hr/day training course). i was thinking, this root beer is pretty gross. had a weird funny taste, but i continued to drink it. about 75% done with the can, i read the big fat words: DIET about the Mug's Rootbeer. the funny thing was i made sure it wasn't diet before picking it out, but apparently the put the diet and non-diet rootbeers next to each other. as you expected, i threw the rest of the diet rootbeer away.

so i had a poker frenzy this past weekend. do note this was the 1st time i ever played with real money as i'm not really a big gambling fan. the only other time i've gambled with real money was the last time i went to vegas and won $60 in blackjack. so stanman invites me over for dinner on friday. the drive over to seattle @ 6:30pm was horrible! took about 40 mins to get over when it usually only takes 20. welp after dinner, he invites me to a poker game because he just purchased some poker chips off amazon. he had invited a few of his college friends. turnout was actually pretty big. 14 people showed up. stanman was expecting more. not going to go into the details, but buy-in was $3 and you could re-buy in within the 1st hour. blinds were doubled every 15mins cause we were playing tournament style. it was pretty crazy. i lost all my chips within 30 mins and when i rebought in again, i lost all of them once again in 3 hands. haha. $6 like that! poof! but it was just $6 and i met some new people so that was nice. someone was saying how this was the cheapest friday night they've had for awhile. the tournament ended in a little over 2hrs. it was pretty fun, but i sucked big time.

so today, i was drinking some drink with splenda in it. if you don't know, splenda is an artificial sweetener. being told that artificial sweeteners are carcinogens, i decided to do some research and found this website: Sweet Relief?. apparently not all artificial sweeteners are carcinogenic. in fact, only the equal (blue packets) are required to have that warning. sweet 'n low (pink packets) are no longer required to have that warning starting 2000 because they found the study flawed. The most damaging report about saccharin appeared after a 1977 Canadian lab test showed bladder tumors in male rats that had been subjected to large amounts of saccharin. These results were later disputed because it was determined that the animals were fed the human equivalent of hundreds of cans of diet soft drinks per day for a lifetime. so for now, it's safe to eat splenda and sweet 'n low, but you'll have to be careful about equal. so in other words, avoid BLUE PACKETS! i personally still like sugar the best and i've been tricked! though this article isn't technical or reliable in any sense, The Food and Drug Administration's report, Evaluation of the Health Aspects of Sugars Contained in Carbohydrate Sweeteners, was a comprehensive assessment that affirmed that sugar does not cause diabetes, heart disease, obesity, hypoglycemia, childhood hyperactivity, or nutrient deficiencies. Overconsumption of it, however, can cause all of those things. i wonder how much is overconsumption... (looks at box of powdered donuts in front of me)

i was invited to a poker game earlier this week my some microsoft colleagues. thought i'd go mingle with them. this is a regular poker game where you can leave any time. buy in was $10 and SB/BB (small blind/big blind) was a nickel/dime. i was pretty happy cause nickeling and diming to death takes quite some time. hehe. but then the weirdest thing happened... i actually started to win money. after i hit $20, i set aside $10 to remind myself, that's what i should aim for to not lose. but my pile kept growing and growing and soon they had to bring in another color chip to represent $5 cause people were rebuying in and we were running low on chips and i had to trade some of mine for $5 chips. dont remember any hands exactly, but i'll say this. i ended up winning over 800% of what buy in was. i was pretty shocked. this was like the 2nd or 3rd time i actually came out ahead in any poker game. everytime i played with ungsunghero, i would either be last or 2nd to last. i think i did manage to win once when playing with ungsunghero and them, but that was a fluke, just like this game. i was pretty much in shock when they told me how much i won... i actually felt pretty bad. i'm not a gambling man and it always feels wrong to take money from people i know. i actually even contemplated of calling the game for fun and no money should be involved, but there was another winner at the table and i didnt know what he'd think. after i told this to ungsunghero (online poker addict), he suggested i get drinks and snacks next time (IF there is a next time for me). which sounds like a good idea.

so stanman said there was this mongolian place that was really good. turns out it was malaysian food and it's the one that i frequent: malay satay hut, which ironjeff recommended to me as his "favorite restaurant". so i went over to seattle after the poker game and we had dinner and watched "die another day". for some reason, i thought the song by madonna was called "tomorrow never dies". haha. and for some reason i thought that movie was the 2nd installment instead of the 4th. did you know that pierce brosnan's contract with 007 is over? i thought he was still producing 007 films. oh well, guess it's time to look for a new james bond. hehe. and here's a little fact that you might find interesting: pierce brosnan was not allowed to wear a tuxedo in any other film besides 007.

welp going back to poker, stanman once again invited me to play poker (so 3rd game in 2 days). it was just 4 people this time though. buy-in was $5. tournament style. i became chip leader way early in the game by having 7,2 offsuit (big blind special) and hitting my full house on the river. and it was vs a straight and a pair of jacks. but i realized something. I HATE TOURNAMENT STYLE!!! blinds get raised and the money no longer has much power. i did come in 2nd in this tournament and won back the $5 buy-in, but when under pressure, i crack.

that's the end of my poker frenzy weekend. thank god there was no poker on sunday. i was so sick of poker by then...

got this from ds nuts: Tempest for Eliza. Tempest for Eliza is a Program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio. then there was this: A Low Cost Analog and Digital TV (DVB-T) Modulator. This is not a hoax ! With a PC running Linux and a recent VGA card, you can emit a real digital TV signal in the VHF band to your DVB-T set-top box.

got this site from /. : Uncyclopedia. it's basically the anti-wikipedia in a sense.

got this article from /. : Dartmouth researchers build world's smallest mobile robot. be sure to check out the images and video. that thing sure is tiny!

got this link from /. : Y! Mail Beta Impressions. looks like yahoo mail is getting a make-over! the new one actually looks really nice. can't wait for it to be implemented.

got this link from /. : iPod nano. since i showed you my nano yesterday, thought i might show you this article detailing the specifics of the nano. the review is actually quite good! even includes an autopsy!

got this article from /. : 20 Things They Don't Want You to Know. most of the stuff was common sense, but i did find Find-A-Human -- IVR Phone System Shortcuts (USA) to be quite a useful list. also, it listed digital zoom as an useless spec which i whole-heartedly agree.

got this link from /. : Windows In Your Pocket. All it takes is a minor error in the Windows Registry or a virus infection, and your operating system can become unbootable. But with a properly configured USB flash drive on hand, you'll always have a compatible replacement no further away than your pocket or keychain. In addition, the flash drive can also provide a secure browser and virus scanner, and lets you take your favorite DVD burning and Office software with you wherever you may go.

got this article from yahoo: Hungary drivers to get lemons and apples. "A penalty coming from a kid for breaking rules generates a stronger feeling of guilt among adults than a simple fine," county police spokesman Gergely Fulop said. that's actually quite a good idea. humans are prideful creatures (though i've seen quite a few shameless ones), and attacking their pride definite does wonders.

so my backlog of links will slowly be dispersed among the next few entries starting with the new ones and working my way back. pya images will have to come later.

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09.21.2005 -

thought of the day: learnt this from monster - oyakodon (or oyakodonburi) is a japanese cuisine for chicken and egg on rice. literally it means parent and child donburi. and the reason for that name is because the chicken is the parent of the egg. hence parent and child donburi!

wow! how long has it been since my last update. long story short (you'll get the long story later), i had data corruption all over my hdds (notice the plural).

since i've been literally gone for over 2 weeks, i've been asked when my blog would be updated many many times and i wasn't able to give a definte answer, but hopefully it should return to normal after today.

so with so much backlog, all the stuff will be spread among next few entries.

welp, as i mentioned earlier, i had data corruption everywhere. you could say i've lost about 30% of my data. it all started when i got my raid card (it's not the raid card that caused before you start jumping to conclusions). so i got some new hardware as i mentioned: 4x160GB SATA Seagate drives, Promise FastTrack S150 SX4-M, AMD Sempron 2800+ w/ mobo, and Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro. so i decided to swap the cpu and motherboard (since my old motherboard didnt support the 2800+) and use the older hardware in my fileserver (since there really isn't any need to have a good technology in a system serving files). so i backed up everything, formatted my C: drive, and reinstalled windows xp with the new cpu, mobo, and video card. everything was working fine, then i started to notice some problems.

>scan disk would be activated everytime i boot up and always finding errors to fix. so i first noticed my "download directory" had a bunch of files that no longer opened, videos that no longer played, text files that became gibberish. then i noticed my entire itunes library was rendered unplayable. then i started noticing anime episodes wouldn't play and etc. i thought maybe the cpu or motherboard may have been causing this, but swapping the originals back had the same problem. actually i can confirm the cpu in the new mobo had the problem, i didnt really test the the old mobo since it was hanging on the side of my case, i didn't bother doing much swapping back and forth and did a quick bootup and scandisk found some problems. now that i think about it, i'm pretty sure those problems were caused by the new config and the old mobo just did a scandisk as instructed and found information. so i was doing many different tests and i noticed the more i download into 1 directory, the more new stuff got corrupted. i was pretty pissed at this point. why can't stuff just work! at first i thought it was just 1 harddrive, then 2, and then it turned out every drive besides my boot drive was getting data corruption and new ones were appearing too.

at first i didn't doubt my ide card since i've been using that for about 3 years already and it was fine before i changed mobos. plus at first (since i didnt bother watching the archived anime episodes i had) i didnt know my other drives were getting corrupted either so the ide card wasn't a good candidate. but when i hit an episode of detective conan i couldn't play, all hell broke loose. i redownloaded an episode but then i noticed new ones were getting corrupted and the same story over again. finally i decided to stick the drives directly into the ide controllers on the motherboard and BAM the data corruption was gone. in fact, some of the old stuff that "was" corrupted, started working again. at this moment, i wented to break the ide card into millions of pieces. most of the stuff were recoverable. though i haven't really checked my documents, but all my anime episodes and movies have been restored besides 1 episode of detective conan which i hate yet to find.

so with this problem gone, it was time to build my fileserver. i had originally ordered an intel raid card off ebay, but i received an empty box. apparently the seller had a couple and forgot he used one and sold me a box with a cd, manual, and pci brackets. but thank god, i had a backup plan. actually ordered a 2nd raid card (as noted above, it's a promise fasttrack s150 sx4-m with 128mb of ecc ram) off AT FS/T. this card came a few days later just on the day i figured the hdd problem. the reason i needed an ide card for my main computer (not the raid card) was because i have 4 hdds and 2 disc drives and 4 ide ports isn't enough to handle that (i noticed new mobos come with 6 or 8 sata ports which is nice!). setting the server up was quite painless until i booted up, it wouldn't show me the raid config screen! so i tried a different pci slot. same problem. turns out the raid card needs to be in the 1st or 2nd slot for it to get recognized. welp, creating the raid array (raid 5) was quite painless. it was done in less than a minute and then i began my installation of windows 2003. and everything's been working fine since then.

so i've moved most of my movies, animes, digipix (not sure if any of those got corrupted), etc onto this array. it's a raid 5 3+1 config so outta the 4x160GB drives, i have 480GB of space I can actually use. since i lost my entire itunes library, i had to restore what was left from my ipod. transferring the music from my ipod to itunes wasnt hard. what was hard was having to re-rate them and that took hours and i was still less than half complete. not really sure what prompted me to do so, but i decided to check my old itunes library and guess what! all my mp3s worked! pretty amazing and the ratings are still intact since the library file is fine.

oooh, i forgot, i have pictures! so lemme show you those before i move on. first is my fileserver: (click to enlarge)

and then my ipod nano:

the ipod nano is so cute and tiny and sexy!!! i haven't tested the limit yet on how long it can play since you heard about my itunes incident a few paragraphs above. and from the pix, you can probably tell how messy my room was. it's all clean now.

oh yah, as you can see in the fileserver images, i had to ghettorig a floppy from my main computer to the fileserver. reason was win2k3 didn't recognize my raid card and i needed to load the drivers from floppy (why doesnt win2k3 or even winxp allow me to load drivers from a cd?). but yah, i'm pretty happy with the results now.

tune in tomorrow for my poker stories...

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09.07.2005 -

yay! i finally got to the part where haibara ai gets introduced in detective conan. i think the episode would've been so much kewler if i didn't know of her existence.

so i watched the the longest yard yesterday. movie was pretty funny. like most recent movies, storyline was so so, but was enjoyable.

have you seen the iPod nano!?!?! it's so tiny and cute!!! first saw it on /. and somehow it kept calling my name all day. i bet they purposely found a guy with big hands to take those shots, but still it's so TINY!!! + the storage is flash and not flash based hd anymore, so it truly has NO moving parts. did i mention it was tiny and cute. so as the day dragged on and on... i kept getting more tempted. after discussing with belldandy, i got even more tempted. so i think i'm going to regret this when i see my credit card bill this month, but i jumped and ordered one online. $247 shipped. sigh... it's so cute and tiny! think i should've waited, since i had a $25 apple gc coming in for my previuos ipod battery class action lawsuit. but then that $25 can get me some accessories. ;) 14hr battery compared to my 8hr (more like 4 now). did i mention how cute and tiny it was?!?!? yah, that was sorta what was going through my head the entire day.

got this video from ms dl: ddr with fire. you can read about it in this person's livejournal. Click on the picture for a short .avi video of two fully fire-suited players playing Dance Dance Immolation, one of them missteps and fire shoots at him. bet you'll be an ace in DDR in no time! or maybe you'll just be burnt ;p

thanks to deadlock for donating these links: SmartGas - Frequently Asked Questions and Acetone in Acura Integra '92 Fuel Drops Mileage by 1.1%. i'm personally not that smart when dealing with chemicals and car engines, but maybe someone can explain to me y acetone would help increase mileage at all... and if so, y only in small amounts compared to gasoline? it sounds like it's a catalyst or something, but not really since there's no real reaction going on, just EXPLOSION.

thanks to fuzzywuzzy for donating this article: Darwin residents cashed up after ATM malfunctions. An anonymous caller to the ABC this morning says the word got around Berrimah quickly that a Commonwealth Bank machine at the service station was giving out $50 bills instead of $20 bills. ... "The automatic teller machines are all online and we have a record of every transaction, every customer, how many notes were dispensed and we will start contacting those customers that used the machine today seeking reimbursement of the additional funds that they have received," Mr Fitzgerald said. can you really demand the money back in this case, after the money has left the ATM onto someone's hand? for example, if i deposted $100, but i only punched in $80 on the ATM machine, will they actually correct it?

thanks to cari for donating this flash game: River IQ. for those who can't read chinese, it basically says, there's a family: 1 father, 1 mother, 2 sons, and 2 daughters. they encounter a prison escapee. the family was in danger. thankfully, a police officer caught up and the family was saved. however, they were in the middle of nowhere and no means to contact anyone. they wanted to get back before it turned dark and the only way was across this river. there's a raft and these are the rules for operating the raft:

• At most, only 2 people (child or adult) can be on the raft at any moment.
• Only adults can drive the raft (dad, mom, police), so you need at least one of them on to get to the other side.
• If the police leaves the escapee with any of the family members, they'll be attacked.
• If the dad leaves either of the sons with the mom, the mom will discipline the boys.
• If the mom leaves either of the daughters with the dad, the dad will discipline the girls.
• Click the big circle button to start. Click on the people to get them onto or off the raft. Click the red pole to send them across.
• If you're stuck, feel free to ask me for help. took me awhile to figure it too.

got this article from yahoo: Crouching tiger, hidden donkey. The cat is out of the bag at a restaurant in northeast China that had been serving donkey meat spiked with tiger urine in pricey dishes advertised as endangered Siberian tigers.

got these from