TMI: RIP

It seems like there has been an unusually high number of celebrity deaths the last few weeks. Each one reminds me about my own impending mortality -- and a day I do not look forward to.

Other than watching them on TV as a child, I admit I do not have many memories to tell about them. My brothers had posters of David Carradine (as Caine in "Kung Fu") and Farah Fawcett. Karl Malden filmed a scene for "The Streets of San Francisco" in front of the building where my father worked. My grandmother used to order books and magazines while dreaming of the day Ed McMahon would knock on her door and present her with a big check from Publisher's Clearing House.

I had to fly half-way around the world to almost have something in common with one celebrity. I was standing on the balcony of The People's Palace in Bucharest, Romania and pretended to wave to an imaginary crowd while enjoying the scenery.



At that point, the tour guide pointed out that Michael Jackson was one of the first people to stand in the same spot I had been. He had a large audience of real people, of course. But apparently while waving, he yelled out, "I love Budapest!" Fortunately, I did not make the same mistake about the city name.

I imagine one benefit famous people have is that they will always be remembered, and in that sense they are immortal.

TMI: It was 20 years ago today...

... a scrawny young college graduate walked into a shiny little office building in Belmont, California for his first day of work. He had been hired despite some people raising reservations that during the interviews a few days earlier, he came across as possibly being too shy to talk to customers on the phone. But others argued that the kid knew Unix, networking, and SQL and thought logically about a question even when given a vague problem description with no clear cut answer.

Fortunately, that department I interviewed with was desperate for employees, and I was desperate for a job, so apparently, it was a match made in heaven. I was even hired as an hourly temp so I could start quickly while the official papers were still going up the management chain for approvals.

Recently, I have been delivering technical presentations to a few groups of people around the country (and having the unenviable task of following Tom Kyte in some cases). Each time, I have tried to come up with a different way to introduce myself. The opening line starts out the same, then I improvise an ending. The attempts that were worth remembering went a little like this:

"Hello, my name is Roderick Manalac, and I'm N days away from celebrating 20 years here..."

- ".. and I hope with 5 more years of good behavior, I will finally be granted parole."
- "Thank you. But little did I know this would be my longest relationship with anybody in my life. I just hope this qualifies me to get a decent percentage of Larry's wealth in a divorce settlement."
- "And yes, it does feel like 140 in dog years."
- "I've thought about resigning and driving away in a convertible, but I fear that while I'm packing my bags, someone will gas my room, knock me out, strand me on an island, and the people there will only refer to me as Number 6."

In all seriousness though, I feel very fortunate to have landed a great job with a consistently successful company. I have met a bunch of nice, intelligent people within the corporation and at customer sites around the world. The technology evolves so quickly that I still learn several new things each day. And I have grown up from a shy nerd who could barely say "Hello" on the phone with a very shaky voice to a computer geek who could stand in front of hundreds of people and confidently tell a series of dumb jokes interspersed with a few nuggets of useful technical information.

I have enjoyed the experience, and I hope this gig continues for many more years.

TMI: Blog Neglect

I guess it has been a while again since I have updated my blog. With a writer's strike pretty much ending any original (non-reality) programming on network television, one would think I would have few distractions from blogging. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. It just takes a few.

Lately, I have been spending time reading other blogs that shall remain nameless. None of them are work remotely work-related. The topics are mainly about electronics and entertainment / gossip. That type of reading material may not help me get far ahead in what remaining life I have left, but at least I know Jessica Alba is pregnant and engaged. So for now, I can spend less time daydreaming about her at work.

I have also started dabbling in World of Warcraft again. I blame it on Mr. T and his Night Elf Mohawk ad. [Initially, I was going to blame William Shatner, but I hardly visit the web site he normally pitches.] I never got around to canceling my subscription. My old guild that I shall not name on a server I shall not name has pretty much disbanded since I last logged in. It took forever to build up a Level 44 Human Shadow Priest on a PvP server where I was going solo and getting "ganked" every day. But at least he was a rich priest even after buying a horse.

My new character is on a normal server that my brother plays on. Trying out a Blood Elf Paladin (with talent points going into Retribution for now). Kind of fun to level up more quickly and I do not have to play for more than an hour at a time at the low levels. I might get more attention-challenged when I have to run for 10 minutes to go from to quest -- or realize that I pretty much always use the same attack sequence on every bad guy that steps in my path. Otherwise, I might finally buy a game for my PS/3 instead of playing my old PS/2 ones -- Ratchet and Clank is about as much complexity as I can handle these days.

... and yes I will blog about the Amazing Race again.. soon I hope. Unfortunately, I lost a few of the early episode due to misprogramming my DVR. Each new episode was erasing the one before it. My weekends were busy with work related socializing so I did not even notice that for a while. I might have to visit the CBS website and a few other blogs to catch up on what has happened this season (or cycle or whatever it is called).

I have made no New Year's Resolutions for 2008. I decided being organized and healthy is something I need to somehow do all year long.

Stay tuned...

TMI: 3000 Hits

I guess attaining 3000 hits is a great achievement for a major league baseball player, but it is a tiny pittance for a web site that has been around for only slightly more than a year.

For Year 2 of the Chronicles, I have migrated to the Beta version of Blogger and updated my template to take advantage of the new features without giving up much of the old look at feel. The labels should allow people to limit their RSS feeds to just the topics they are interested in.

Adapting to the new template took a little less time than I thought. I just ran into a couple of snags that were quickly resolved via Google searches. Including my counters and Random Quote of the Day just involved adding HTML/Javascript page elements. Then I ran into Java Script errors trying update those HTML elements in Firefox 2. Again this was a known issue with a simple workaround of reloading the page where one edits the page element.

TMI: Thought for Food

I have been meaning to write this for weeks but I suppose the day after Halloween is as good a time as any to stop procrastinating.

One thing I have been thinking about as the "Big Four-Zero" quickly approaches is going on a healthier diet. I decided I will not try to eat less and exercise more since the more I think about not eating the more I actually do eat. I am sort of like that slow reading cartoon character on The Electric Company who would forget a sign contained the "NOT" word. [Yes, my TV viewing habits were established at a very young age.]

Of course, the fates have conspired against me. I went on my first cruise this summer. If there is one thing I learned, it is impossible to go hungry on-board a luxury liner. I finally fully appreciate the old joke, "I'm on a seafood diet. When I see food, I eat it." Fortunately, I did spend several hours power walking through the streets of a few Alaskan towns, otherwise I would have gained a ton of weight. I do not know if I will ever lose the half-ton I did gain.

Next, it seemed like every food that was supposed to be healthy to eat could make you sick instead. It started with spinach, then it was a lettuce recall, and next it is something else yet to be identified. On the bright side, all these food scares have allowed my sister to achieve some airtime on news show on a station in Los Angeles, KTLA [For some reason you have to use Internet Explorer and click on Part Two: An E.Coli Lab to see the video]. She does not get a speaking role but is one of the women seen messing around with test tubes and lab machinery. This means she is one of the few people in my family who has a job that all my relatives can now understand. I imagine it is a cross between CSI and Ghost Germ Hunters.

But I digress. I suppose if I live in an age where any food I eat could potentially kill me, I should get to choose my poison. So, let me introduce you to Deep Fried Coke. I wonder what happens if you squeeze a Mentos into that.

If I had just procrastinated a few minutes longer, I could have incorporated this news hot off the press that obese mice can stay healthy (but not get skinny) with a chemical called resveratol. Could Woody Allen actually be the second coming of Nostradamus?

TMI: My Viewing Habits This Fall

Some day, I may post reviews on this season's new shows, a few of which may eventually earn a slot on my Must See list. Some may get canceled or get relegated to 'online only' status before they get a real chance. But so far it looks like this:

Must see TV
Sunday: The Simpsons, The Amazing Race, Desperate Housewives
Monday: Prison Break
Tuesday: House
Wednesday: Lost
Thursday: My Name is Earl, The Office, CSI, Grey's Anatomy
(DVR and VCR sales must be skyrocketing because of the CSI vs. Grey's conflict)
Friday: Whatever is on Sci-Fi Channel
Saturday: nothing - catch up on DVR / OnDemand or actually get a life

On the bubble
Six Degrees, Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Standoff, Kidnapped, Justice, The OC, Shark, Men In Trees

Yet to be checked out
Ugly Betty, 30 Rock

Still waiting on
The Sopranos, Rome, 24

TMI: PC Like It's 1995

One of the many things I did during my summer vacation (from blogging) was purchase a PC. A close connection helped me procure a fairly brand new high end desktop PC previously used only for game demos at the recent E3 convention at a great discount. It has a 3.0GHz dual core Pentium D, dual nVidia video cards, dual 150GB SATA disks in a RAID 1 configuration, and yada, yada, yada.

I also finally tossed out a very old PC that a colleague helped me cobble together in 1995. It had been gathering dust in the corner for many years after I bought a newer system in 2000. I found many of the now faded receipts for this system lying in the same corner. Just about every component was bought at a different place as I tried to get the best parts for the cheapest price. Not sure what this translates to in 2006 dollars but I definitely got much more in an assembled package for about the same price 11 years later.

Intel 486DX2-66MHz + 256K cache (and motherboard?) $232.56
16MB 70ns SIMM $619.00
Refurbished DEC 2000MB Internal SCSI Drive, 12.5ms seek time - $495.00
1.44" Floppy Drive $31.82
Diamond Stealth 64 Video Card $289.00
SoundBlaster Pro-16 Audio Card OEM $99.00
28.8 Kbaud internal modem $122.40
PC Keyboard $13.26
MS Mouse $30.00
Full tower case $105.00
Snickers Bar $0.45 - got hungry putting the pieces together.

NEC XE17" Monitor ??? (it was probably about $900.00 back then)

Only the monitor avoids the recycling bin as I prefer staring into a tube over even much larger, higher-resolution LCD screens in the same price range.

Some day I'll have to break the habit of buying high end PCs. Considering I mostly use these things to play solitaire or connect to work and catch up on e-mail, it basically means I've just purchased world's most expensive deck of cards with a workaholic option.

Okay, World of Warcraft is occasionally played on this thing as well ...

TMI: On the Blog Again

A few weeks ago, I had a rare opportunity to cross paths with the globe-trotting Tom Kyte. The meeting went down like this:

Me: Hi, Tom.
TK: Hello. brief pause Are you on strike from you blog? another brief pause... and at this point I get the sense he is accessing his L2 cache The last thing you wrote was about a Backyard Bellagio about two months ago.

He was, of course, absolutely correct. At this point, there was an awkward silence as thoughts raced through my head.

#1. Wow! Tom recognizes me; I didn't have to introduce myself. He pays attention to my blog. And remembers the details!

#2. I'll come back with a snappy remark, "Yes, I'm on strike until I get proof that Suri Cruise actually exists." No, wait! Maybe I should save that for a blog entry. But what's wrong with saying out loud first and then writing about it later? Um, it's a moot point now, idiot. You've been silent for too many microseconds for any sort of witty repartee. In comedy, timing is everything.

#3. Okay, Plan B. Say, "I haven't had enough time to post anything lately." Dude! Are you nuts? Tom's the guy who finds time to post via his cell phone while waiting to board a plane. You need a better excuse now, and make it quick, you're already losing what little attention you had in the first place.

#4: Why am I referring to myself in the second person?

Finally the pause ended with me making a sheepish grin and mumbling something lame. This is all I can remember almost a month later. Things get very fuzzy after that. Normally, I'd still be able to recall rest of the story in excruciating detail, but the exchange wasn't salvageable enough to be worth replaying 100 times in my head and over-analyzing how I could better handle another meeting like this in the future.

As best as I can recall, I said something about being too busy and Tom's reply was pretty much what I had anticipated in thought #3.

Interestingly, I also anticipated everything that would happen in that brief conversation during the last step I made towards Tom and before I said, Hello. It was the same "Spidey sense" that made me see Joe Carter hit a home run off Mitch Williams to win a World Series, and blurt out, "Game over." in a room full of people moments before the ball was actually pitched. It's not that I believe in ESP. It's more like recognizing the rare case where I can perceive all the variables that go into calculating the odds of something happening. Unfortunately, it's never far enough into the future for me to call a bookie and make any money out of it.

.. and while I don't know exactly why it has taken me months to write into my blog again, it is mere coincidence that it finally happened on the night after the first pictures of Suri Cruise were published.

TMI: Bay to Breakers Memories

I neglected to run the Bay to Breakers race this past Sunday. A weather report of high humidity with a chance of showers and lack of training because of tendonitis in my Achilles heel were my primary excuses for skipping this. I think since my first race in 1987 I've only participated in about 40% - 50% of the time, so it has not become some "can't miss"” ritual.

I actually did manage to finish in the top 10,000 one year despite running quite slow that year. That helped me realize that the most significant determinator of final placement was how close I could get to the starting line before the gun sounded. In high school, I could run at a 7-minute pace but always arrived really late, and started near the back of the pack. I'’d be lucky if I crossed the starting line before the winners crossed the finish line. And it would take two miles of walking before the crowds were dispersed enough to allow for some jogging. Many years and 50 pounds later I consider lucky to maintain a 6 MPH pace. But I showed up over an hour early and squeezed my way to the front. This time people were passing me up like crazy but I could start jogging much earlier, and had my best finish. I suppose this is proof that experience and ability do not always go hand in hand, but given one of the two, experience is more important.

After finishing in the top 10,000 and seeing my name in the paper, I've been satisfied with starting in the back again. It allows me to spend more time tossing tortillas like they were Frisbees. I can sit back and enjoy the music from the garage bands who set up mini-stages on balconies or driveways all along the route. It'’s also a more fun to pass people than to be passed while seeing more of the regular characters who participate in this public parade each year. There is a group that runs with a tiki hut made of bamboo and grass stocked with several forms of alcoholic refreshment. There is a caterpillar team of land sharks. They wear shark fins on their heads and you can watch those fins undulate above the sea of thousands of other racers. There is always at least one group of Elvis impersonators. There are lots of people wearing costumes that represent topical humor. One favorite a couple of years ago was a guy who was inside a huge cardboard box painted metallic grey. It had a fairly well made paper mache head resembling Arnold Schwarzenegger. Finally it had two extensible arms with foam rubber hands that could reach out and touch unsuspecting runners from behind, and was particularly fond of runners in Hooters uniforms (some of questionable gender). It was called "The Gropernator."” There usually are even runners with no costume at all, but at least 99% of them should keep covered for asthetic reasons.

This brings me to my oddest encounter with the "Rich and/or Famous"” or in this case, Infamous. After finishing the Bay to Breakers in 1993, I found myself standing right next to a man who looked vaguely familiar to me. He was taller than me but slouching a bit. He was wearing a light-blue button-down wool sweater because it was rather cold and foggy by the ocean. I thought it was still sort of an odd thing to wear while running even for this crazy race because it was so conventional. But I did not spend too much time trying to remember who he was. I was too busy catching my breath and checking out the other runners. Then I spotted a large group of teenage girls on the other side of the road. Half of them stood motionless looking in our direction with their eyes wide open and jaws dropped while the other half giggled uncontrollably and pointed us out to even more of their friends who would then have a shocked look on their face as well. At first, I guessed they recognized the "celebrity" standing next to me too, but then again, their eyes and fingers were not exactly directed at his face, but seemed to point further downward. Then they ran off and hid when they caught me looking back at them. So I suddenly had to make sure I didn't misjudge the finger pointing, so I checked if I was the one experiencing a very embarrassing wardrobe malfunction. When I looked down, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the man standing next to me only wore a pair of leather sandals with his sweater.

I realized it was the Berkeley Naked Guy! He had made many headlines the year before with his "nude-in" protests at UC Berkeley, but the race was the first and last time I had met him in person. By that time, he was already yesterday's news -- until the day before this year'’s race, when I saw this tragic news story.

TMI: Too Much Television

For a blog that is supposed to be filled with random thoughts, I guess it should be unusual to have so many posts about TV [though there's nothing about random number generation that prevents this from happening either]. The topic of how much television I watch has even been raised quite often this week as I've interacted with separate circles of friends (childhood, college, work, ex-coworkers) and family who've never had much chance to intermingle. [I guess that's George Costanza's colliding worlds theory raised to a new level -- oops another TV reference.]

The topic may not be a complete coincidence as I'm probably the one who either brings up a TV show or is the first to answer a question about what's going on with the TV shows heading into their season finales this May (plus a couple of people from each circle are now aware of my blog).

So here's my current DVR recording schedule (actual viewing time varies):
Sunday: The Simpsons, The Sopranos, desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy
Monday: Prison Break, 24
Tuesday: House
Wednesday: Amazing Race, Alias, Lost
Thursday: The OC, CSI (though I've somehow forgotten to record the last few episodes)
Friday: nothing (until Sci-Fi Fridays resumes with new episodes)
Saturday: Saturday Night Live

But that's just the Must-See List...

I'll also occasionally stop flipping channels for shows like The Office, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, Las Vegas, The Apprentice, The 70's Show, Cops!, Real Time with Bill Maher, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, Love Monkey (unwisely cancelled by CBS, but VH1 is airing the remaining episodes), Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, Without a Trace, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, The Unit, Nova, Austin City Limits, Project Runway, CNBC, Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, E!, ESPN, Fox Sports Net, movies that I didn't watch in theaters, and syndicated reruns of very old shows that I may have missed for some reason or other. However, the general role of this "B-list" is to break the silence of my apartment (or hotel room) while I do other things like read magazines, surf the Internet, or catch up on e-mail / junk mail / bills. [I stopped watching The Shield a few years ago because I couldn't do 2-3 other things at once while that was on.]

When I see/hear the late night info-mercials about how to get rich without spending your own money, the latest workout equipment, natural cures for maladies I've never heard of before, or "Girls Gone Wild" videos, then I know I've been awake too long.

This Wednesday made me realize that I have to make a New Year's Resolution to add no new shows from now on (and let attrition take care of the existing list). Alias, The Amazing Race, and a special episode of House were all airing at the same time. My DVR allowed me to record two of those shows, and I had to do some intricate rewiring to attach the VCR to a separate cable line and record the third show blindly. Fortunately a SF Giants vs. Brewers game ended quickly or I would have gone more insane than I already am.

At least I should be able to cease obsessing over TV once summer rolls around provided none of these series end with a "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger.

TMI: Anagrams

Recently saw this entry by Tom Kyte and decided to see what an online anagram generator would do with my name. It returned a much longer list than I could ever imagine. Some interesting results and several quite embarrassing. A few cleaner highlights:

A CARDINAL MOCKER (Go Giants! We got Matt Morris now)
A CARAMEL DRINK CO (Yes, I drink colas and root beer
                   on a regular basis)
CLICKER ON A DRAMA (And I do watch too much TV too)
I, A RANDOM CACKLER (Sounds right)
I MORN A CRACK DEAL (Always said no to drugs --
                    well never got offered any either)
MANILA CRACK DOER (Or maybe I was lying...)

and finally

KARMIC ORACLE DNA (Apparently, I was born for this job)

OK, R.C., I am a Cal nerd.

Update: Someone quietly pointed out to me that I misspelled "mourn" and that particular line was messing up my website layout on IE. There is no 'u' in my name (but there is an 'I and a me' with plenty of letters left over). Anyway, I'll have to settle for the phonetic version.

TMI: The DVR Generation

The last few weeks have been a very busy time for me thanks to an unusual confluence of work projects that all had to be completed around the same time. Most of this was my own fault. I'm a lifelong procrastinator with an unusual job position that I haven't gotten around to fully defining (but that's on my "To Do" list), so I volunteer (or cannot talk my way out of) lots of odd projects (and I particularly look for ones with no well-defined due dates). This generally works in my favor since I can then work on one project as an excuse to procrastinate on the other N-1 projects. And magically at the end of each job review period, I come out looking pretty productive.

Fortunately, I did foresee that my free (or what other people would call sleep) time would be greatly impacted, but technology came to my rescue.

I'd been meaning to purchase or build a "Tivo-like" device for many years (it was on my "To Do" list, which, by the way, has actually never been written down as maintaining a "To Do" list is also on that list). Procrastination kept paying off as technology kept improving and prices kept falling. Finally, a few weeks ago, it became as simple as disconnecting my existing cable box, driving to the local cable office down the street, swapping boxes, driving back home, and connecting the new box. [Note however, that reverse-engineering the wiring and cabling of one's own fairly basic home entertainment setup that hasn't been touched in several years can still be trickier than first thought].

Now, I don't know how I ever lived without a DVR (Digital Video Recorder), and can see how other people almost worship these things.

It turns out most hour-long dramas only have ~40 minutes of actual content (minus commercials, credits, and recaps of previous episodes). That's a whopping 30+% compression ratio with no loss of data! It's even more dramatic for sporting events where I have no emotional ties to have to see the whole game live. I managed to squeeze 4 to 8 hours of Australian Open tennis coverage into about 2 hours. It helps if one is only interested in the style of tennis played by Hingis or Federer, and want to check out a newcomer like Baghdatis.

The downside of all this? There are actually a few minuses that have emerged so far:
1) I have to figure out how to catch up on 30-40 hours of non-tennis programming on my DVR. In the meantime, I have to avoid anybody at work or on the street who mentions the words 24, Lost, or House even if it's not in the context of those TV shows since you never know when a conversation will take a sudden turn in that direction.
2) Some evenings, I find myself with a painfully full bladder because I've skipped all the commercials and forgot about the ability to pause and go to the restroom.
3) I've also quickly picked up a bad habit of wanting to hit fast forward even if I'm watching live TV. I've even caught myself trying to find a remote while sitting in a long meeting...
4) The DVR from the cable company does not allow easy copying of shows I might want to keep around "forever".

I imagine my next few blog entries may be TV related as I catch up on things.

TMI: An Armenian in Paris

Several months ago a colleague / friend of mine, Vicken Khachadourian, wrote a humorous story about meeting the singer whose songs have held significant meaning throughout Vick's life. His story was even published in a few Armenian newspapers that circulate in major US cities. It is also posted on the armeniapedia.org site. Somehow I managed to play a tiny part in this, meaning I've already achieved my 15 words of fame with the Armenian community. This does not even make me rank with the same Z-list celebrities as, say, Kato Kaelin, but I've had a strange compulsion to mention that dude's name in my blog for some time and finally found an excuse to do so.

Because no two people ever occupy the exact same physical location in the Universe, I might have a slightly different perspective about some of the events I was involved in. But to clarify a couple of things in the story:

- I backed out of seeing the concert with Vick in Montreal because I was still suffering from jet lag and other varied minor ailments after the India trip, and I did not feel any performer was worth flying cross-country to see (no offense to the city of Montreal intended).

- A trip to Paris does not need much justification, and I needed a vacation at the time. That said, Paris was refreshing, and the Aznavour concert turned out to be much more than icing sur le gâteau. I may dedicate a future blog entry to other interesting things that happened during that trip.

- I would not describe myself as opportunistic - I've let more opportunities of all kinds slip though my hands than I can count. I've actually found myself standing close to famous people many times in my life. However, the most interaction I've had was to smile at Patrick Stewart and have him smile back at me as we were exploring the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas. He seems much more jovial in real life than his Capt. Picard character. My general modus operandi is to leave them be.

- "Sommelier" was spelled correctly after all. But I'm not familiar enough about the wine scene to know if the person helping us should have been identified as a Master Sommelier. The whole staff at Ledoyen was incredibly friendly, professional, and helpful.

But why are you still reading this? Read the story. It's better than these ramblings.

TMI: The Half-Life of Oranges

Recently, I've developed a habit of walking to a nearby grocery store every Sunday afternoon and buying three oranges and a bunch of bananas [along with some junk food to keep my diet "balanced"].

My intention is to eat an orange on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights. Monday night all 3 oranges seem equally firm, so I pick one at random, and it tastes great. But by Wednesday night, one of the oranges has turned moldy and squishy and I'm forced to toss it out and eat the surviving orange which tastes just fine.

Now I could go to the store on Saturday night and make up for the lost orange (and I probably should burn the extra calories), but then I'd feel obligated to buy more stuff rather than stand in line with a single orange. So I have two of the bananas instead. Fortunately, the bananas seem to ripen much more predictably.

Guess I need some education on choosing oranges, or this Sunday, I'll buy 4 just to see what happens...

TMI: Follow the Leader

Guess I decided to join the trend and widen the columns of my blog. The toughest part was figuring out how to keep the rounded corners. Tried looking for free GIF editors, and the ones I stumbled across looked to complicated for what little I was trying to do. Finally discovered CSS3 will eventually take care of it for me, but until then, I'll have to settle for the Mozilla specific -moz-border-radius parameter. The columns still come out boxy in IE (and IE doesn't fill in the background for my random quote of the day), but I figure it's a good thing to have a web page render nicely in Firefox than IE anyway.

People had pointed me to blogs a couple of years ago, and I actually started one last year. Then work immediately piled up, and I forgot where it was .. until today. Strange that it even has the same title and everything. I like the interface on Blogger better though I do wish it had the calendar and a way to categorize postings. Alternative would be to start multiple blogs but that might be a hassle. Plus apparently I'm only good at coming up with one title.

TMI: Too Bogged to Blog

This was a wild week. Had to juggle work (including a 5:30am conference call) with taking care of some personal business. And on the one night I had a few moments of time, there seemed to be router problems between my ISP and blogspot.

One potential downside to renting an apartment is every so often, the landlords can decide to enter for special purposes. But fortunately they give a couple of days notice before that event, and it gives me an excuse to do something important once in a while... clean.

Between landlord visits, my place slowly devolves into something resembing Dr. Cristina Yang's place in Grey's Anatomy. But for those of you that do not watch what I feel is the best network show on TV for 2005 (with Lost a close second), I guess I'd have to describe things in terms of what my place might look like if the landlord never showed up: Some psychologist might mistake my laziness for Obsessive Hoarding Behavior. Some colleagues claim that my office has become sort of a company history museum, but I've been very careful to store very little new for the last few years (documents are all online instead if possible).

So part of last week was spent throwing stuff out, and organizing stuff I want to keep for now. Main side task has been reducing 5 years of magazines down to a more managable and smaller pile of a few months. Just in time for me to trade some miles on an airline I rarely fly for more subscriptions...

Hopefully, I'll get back to blogging over the next few days, even if my opthamologist is recommending I spend less time in front of a computer and more time staring at far away places.

TMI: An Odd Bird

I definitely would not classify myself a bird watcher. Maybe at best I'm a bird noticer who coudn't really name too many species. Anyway about a year ago, a strange-looking bird decided to call my apartment complex its home. At first, I'd be lucky to catch a glimpse of it about once every few weeks. Usually it would be at 2AM, when I'd be dragging myself home after working too late or catching a late movie optionally followed by a very late dinner or very early breakfast at Denny's. [I'd like to say I had been out clubbing instead, but too many people know me too well.] As soon as the bird would see me, it would dart off and disappear into the darkness. I figured I might be a figment of my imagination [particularly the type of imagination that kicks in after 2AM where I think I have a great idea, write it down, read it the next morning, then think to myself, "How did I come up with such a stupid idea?"], so I only mentioned it to a few people (who didn't seem to care). I worried if I told more people, they'd start looking at me the way people looked at Big Bird when he was still the only character who witnessed Mr. Snuffleupagus.

But tonight the bird decided to appear shortly after sunset for everyone to see. One lady who's lived at the same apartment complex as long as me if not longer was outside her apartment smoking a cigarette just 10 ft. from the bird. So I decided to talk to her.

"Do you know what kind of bird that is?" I asked.
"I think it's an Ereu."
"Arrow? How do you spell that?"
"T-H-A-T." [we both laugh] "No I think it's E-R-E-U. Usually I only see that guy hanging out after midnight pecking for bugs. Maybe he's injured because he's not running away from anybody. I'm going to see if he wants some bread crumbs. Have a nice weekend."

At that point she entered her apartment, and I rushed to my apartment to surf the Internet for this mysterious Ereu. Just one reference that it may be a type of a sandpiper but no pictures. Other sandpiper pictures look close, but my bird has almost no neck and a shorter beak.

I tried a site called http://whatbird.com, but after much time, the closest I come up with is a Midnight Heron.

Oh well, I give up, and chase the bird down with my camera. Hopefully, I didn't blind it with my flash. It's a smart bird, as soon as it heard the autofocus kick in again, it flew away. Can anybody help identify this?

TMI: New Year's Resolutions

One of my New Year's 2006 resolutions, was to start a Blog.

"But isn't it still November?" you ask.
Yes, it is. But another resolution I have is to get a jump start on these things as much as possible.

Why?

These days, things are changing faster than ever, and you have to run ahead just to keep up. If stores can start putting up window displays for Christmas before Halloween, I can get my Christmas shopping done in September and avoid that Friday after Thanksgiving crowd. The most practical Christmas presents I can get for the nieces and nephews are back-to-school supplies. And they can open and use those gifts right away rather than wait until late December to use that stuff.

On March 1, I can tell people their shoes are untied and actually fool them.

In April, I can take my mother out to dinner for Mother's Day and have no problems getting a reservation at a decent restaurant.

October 31: Celebrate New Year's in Times Square and not freeze my *?#! off.

Even the US government is getting into the act by starting Daylight Saving Time a few weeks earlier starting in 2007.

Best thing about this is if I break my resolutions in the next few weeks, I can take a mulligan and start over on Jan 1. Or I can consider this pre-season for resolutions. :-)