So, the death count of people that I consider friends or family is up to four this year. How sad. I’ve had 3 friends (Alex, Daniel, and Nate) and one uncle (Uncle Nikos) die this year. RIP to all my beloved.

Now for the rest of you, go out and BUY A HELMET. I don’t want to loose anyone else this year…I think it would be too much

Multiple times in the past few weeks people have either called, or come into my office, or some other form of notification, that they are going to send me an email.

Do this strike anyone else as completely defeating the point of email? Is this a hard concept for people to understand and I’m just missing the difficulty in it? I mean, I’ve sent an email with a link, and called someone to tell them to check their email cause I think they need to see what I have to show them RIGHT NOW. But I’ve never called up Billy Bob and said, “Hey, get ready, I’m going to send you an email.”

Really, I mean, this is just like, “Hey, I’m going to send you a letter, please stand by your mail box in 3-5 days for the post office to deliver it.”

Not much of an update after so much dark time (sorry, I’ve been busy at work and thus and pretty boring).

Kittie is currently in the hospital at St. Vincents, in room #761 if any of our friends want to stop by and say hi. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her, but she’s on a 24/7 iv, up to hourly dosages of dilauded, iv anti-biotics, anti-nausea medicine, saline, and steroids.

She can’t really talk because her throat is SO infected/swollen, and she can’t eat/drink anything.

The most I’ve really heard from the doctors is,

“I would -not- want to be you..”

.

She’s been there for about 3 days now, so lets all hope she gets better soon!

Dear McDonald’s,
As I was I sitting in your drive through, waiting longer than your previously advertised 30 seconds for my dinner, I noticed you had upgraded your drink dispenser! This is a great thing, you have finally started listening to your customers and are obviously trying to improve the efficiencies of your service.

As an order comes in, a cup drops out of the little cup holder, on to a conveyor belt and moves to the right spigot from which your drink is dispensed. A system that verges on being robotic.

I also noticed that you have finally acted on my previous letters and have moved your non-English speaking employees OFF of the drive through lane. Excellent! However, it seems your implementation of this improvement have missed the mark. I am sad to inform you, that replacing non-English speaking cashiers with clinically retarded employees, is a lateral movement at best. I find I still have to repeat my order just as much, if not sometimes MORE!.

Take tonight for instance. My ordering experience went something along the lines of:

[me] “A grilled chicken salad with balsamic vinaigrette please”
[retarded cashier on drive through lane] “You want a cesar salad?”
[me] “Yes please, but with balsamic vinaigrette instead of cesar dressing, please”
[retarded cashier on drive through lane] “what kind of salad?”
[me] “A GRILLED CHICKEN salad with BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE”
[retarded cashier on drive through lane] “What kind of chicken did you want, grilled or crispy?”
[me] “*sighs* grilled.”
[retarded cashier on drive through lane] “And did you want cesar dressing with that?”
[me] “No, balsamic vinaigrette, please”

Now, as much as I hate to suggest that we replace hard working immigrants and mentally challenged people with something else, as some people would say it hurts our economy, I feel I must.. If you could please replace all non-English speaking and mentally handicapped employees with robots similar to your new drink dispensing machines, that would be wonderful. I mean, I already pay for these immigrants and others via my contributions (via taxes) to social security and welfare funds, which they no doubt take advantage of.

Again, please replace anyone that can’t take my simple order the first time around, with a robot.

Thank you for your time,

-Me.

So, I was just informed that my friend Shayna was robbed in Rome. Got all her money and passport.
Sucks.

I think she had travelers checks, so at least she should be able to recover the money, but loosing your passport in a foreign country sucks a big one.

So, I was cruising home late last night when BOOM@#&*^ …what’s that smell? Burning rubber? I pull over and my tire is completely flat, I look up the road and see what caused it.. a nice big fat rock that someone so kindly left on barns (most likely while walking home drunk — Wally has done that before) SO, I get my spare out and get ready to jack up the car..and I notice that I didn’t get the tire iron. I go back to the trunk and look around for it… ‘…where the hell is my tire iron?’ …no where to be found. So I had to call Speeds Towing (thankfully my insurance covers roadside service) to come change my tire because I was missing my tire iron and can’t get the wheel off without it. Anyways, I check out the wheel and it’s completely destroyed, no way to salvage it at all.. about 5″ along the outer edge was all bent in. So I had to get new wheels. I couldn’t replace just that one because the previous owner had had them chromed.. they were more or less unique (who chromes stock wheels anyway?). BMW wheels are also overpriced, compared to a lot of the aftermarket wheels. So, I went to America’s Tire Co. and they took pretty good care of me. They actually took a wheel I was looking at and put it on my car so I could see it in person, which I think is pretty nice, they didn’t really have to do that and a lot of companies wouldn’t. He knocked $3 off each wheel (which isn’t much, but was still kinda nice) which brought the price down to $130/wheel which is really good. He also bought two of my tires for $20/each and threw in new lug nuts, valve stems and caps for free; they were good valve stems too.. nice metal ones, not that rubber cheap ones that a lot of places use.

So, there’s a good side and a bad side. This used all the money I had put aside for the bike, but I do have a nice set of new 17″ wheels and tires. I had needed new tires too..my front ones were bald and about ready to blow out anyways.

I wheels I got are Enkei DM5’s. I like them…and they grow on me more and more. I also got wider tires this time around.. went from 205/60-15’s to 215/45-17’s. I wanted to put 225’s on, but I’m glad I didn’t..I don’t think they would actually fit without rubbing in the rear. Most 3 series BMW’s can take up to a 245 in the rear, but since my car is lowered, I would have to roll the rear fenders to make that fit.

So, here’s a pic of the goods.

So, today, I witnessed the most disgusting thing on the Internet. I’ve seen almost everything on the Internet, and this blew me away. I’m not going to post a link, or even describe it, because it was THAT gross. I just wanted to express my shock at seeing something on the Internet that still surprised me

So, my blog’s been pretty dark recently, not a lot of posting going on. Reason being, my life has been pretty boring. Well, that’s not entirely true, but all the non-boring parts are more or less of the kiss and tell variety, to varying degrees, or close enough that I just didn’t feel like sharing. I’d been digging on a girl for a while, but she switched to a night shift job, plus has to move, plus is taking her MCAT’s in like a month, and (hopefully) moving to Cali for med school in a year, that’s a lot of points against me. We had a lot of fun hanging out at first, but now, it just seems strained. When she calls, I’m busy and when I call, she’s busy.. Recently it seems like it’s almost work to carry on a conversation. Well, work is the wrong word to use. It’s just not as easy at it used to be. We’re each pretty entrenched in starting our careers, which is really pretty consuming. A bit of a dissapointment, really, cause she had a lot of qualities that I was attracted. She is Chinese, which was really novel for me, because I’m half Chinese and never dated an asian girl before, of any nationality. As I get older, I really feel like I missed out on a lot of my heritage and culture. My dad didn’t want to teach my sister or me chinese, because he thought it would confuse us, and almost no history our culture, he just wasn’t that kind of man. Suffice to say, it was really nice being able to be around someone who was brimming with so much of what I feel like I missed out on. In the end though, it seems, as if for now, it’s just not in the stars so to speak. Valient effort, bravo, but as I said before, it just seems ..strained, at the moment anyways. Guess it’s time to open my doors again . Not that they were ever really closed since my last actual g/f, but I just see the time commitment drasticaly lowering.

Last Friday I went to Microsoft’s ISV Community Days conference up in Jantzen beach. It was an AWSOME experience. It was all about Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. I think I found the SQL server portion of the show the most interesting. I’ve been working in databases for a couple of years now, but only in the past 9 months has it been a daily occurance. Infact, I spend maybe 50% of time each day at work entrenched in the guts of Databases, and man, it’s really interesting. The whole world is data driven, and that data is ALL in databases. The conference gave me some real world examples of OLAP Cubes, which is a geeky way of saying, a 3dimensional database. For example, 1 dimmension would be, how much product do I have. Another dimension would be, where is the product located. The third dimension might be, when was it there. By looking at those 3 dimensions in different ways, you can find lots of ways to extract OTHER usefull information. Heh, sorry, end geekout. It’s just interesting when you think about how much data is in the world, and the kind of things you can do with it. Stores all have databases, banks, the govt, businesses, charities, airlines, car dealerships, almost any piece of information about anything, is stored in a database. Think about it

So, Sheri tells me I’m going out with her, a few other people I know, and a bunch of people I don’t know on Friday. We’ll have to see how it goes, but I’m thinking it probably be pretty fun.

Oh, and I’ve gotten in touch with Nadia again. That makes me EXTREAMLY happy. I’ve know Nadia for nearly a decade now, but it seems I only get to talk to her in spurts, throughout the years. I spent a few hours chatting with over drinks. Funny thing is, since it was online, we had to drink togeather, seperately . So, Nadia, if you ever decide to check out my blog, I just wanna say, it was a lotta fun, let’s not make it a span of a few years before we talk again.

————

Sorry all the spelling errors, I’m way too tired at the moment to even care

Well..as some of you may know, suprnova.org, a huge bittorrent site has gone down.. as well as a few other major bittorrent sites. Here is the unnoficial closer FAQ…

Suprnova.org Closer FAQ

So, lately, I’ve been noticing some strange sleep behavior on my part. About two weeks ago, I woke up in the bathroom, sleeping with my head towards the door. I assumed I just passed out there after too much drinking, but now that I look back, I wonder. I was fully dressed for bed (pajama’s and a hoodie) and I swear I remember going to bed, but ya know, I woke up in the bathroom, so I must not have…(well..makes you wonder, anyways) . But what made me take a second look at it was this morning I woke up because I was cold…then I noticed I wasn’t wearing my hoodie, and I know I went to bed in it. After a little searching, I found it scrunched up underneath my pillows. That makes me believe that I somehow took it off in the middle of the night, although, I don’t recall waking up at any point to do such a task… but if I am doing things like this, and sleep walking, it’s kind of scary, because I’ve never done anything like that before… I wonder what may be causing all this…?

Here’s to 2005, because it has to be better than 2004. .. This year my mother had to sell her house because she lost her job and while she got another, it was at a pay cut. She had to move into a townhouse, which I guess she likes, but I still feel bad for her. My ex (2nd to last relationship) of almost 4 years broke up with me and was sleeping with someone else in less than a week.. I thought that was bad, but I guess I was just naive.. because my most recent ex, who I had fallen head over in heals in love with, broke up with me last week. Well, here’s the kicker..she’s already engaged to someone else. The worse part is, the trust is gone, even if she changed her mind and said I want you back, I don’t think I could do..so I feel pretty stuck between a rock and a hardplace, not happy no matter what. Can’t be with her, even though I want to be, and at the same time, I don’t as well, because how can you want to be with someone who broke your heart? Makes me wonder what I did in my life that was so evil as to have to go through that…this..whatever it is.

Anyways..here’s to 2005 again, because it has to be better than now…

So, my esteemed girlfriend told me last night that she wants a Robosapien, and today, tells me that thinkgeek has them. Having never seen one (apparently, it was on a commercial last night, but I wasn’t paying attention to the tv).
Here’s the link, it looks nifty, and would make an awsome gift. I will have to do my best to remember this. Christmas time is coming up around the corner. Link here.

I gave my roommate Evan a haircut last night. Bad idea. Don’t get me wrong, he asked me to do it, but asides from having never done it before, I apparently have a complete lack of natural talent for it too. We went from Plan A, to Plan B, to Plan C, to Plan I Failed, Shave It All Off. Ended up going w/ a #1 all the way around his head.

My girlfriend and I also got into our first real fight this weekend, I don’t want to goto into too many details cause it really was my fault, and I’m embarrssed it even happened, but suffice to say, I was really immature AND not thinking. She tells me that I am insecure, that may be, I prefer to think of it as ‘guarded’, although, that’s probably just me suger coating it for myself. Oh well, I think I’m awsome, and my long time friends forgive me a lot of mistakes, so I must be worth keeping around , I have faith that we will pull through our first rough spot, we just need some time to ourselves, and with our own friends. We were put in a small (physically) room situation and I think it’s been having an effect on us. I’ve been finding that, for the first time in my life, I’ve been realising the true meaning of Faith. I hedge my bets quite a bit less in some areas, because I have faith that I don’t need to. Now, I just need to learn to turn that Faith into Trust. And more than Trust on an intellectual level. It will be good for the both of us, I realise that, and I am truely working on it.

I’ve also found myself missing Noah a lot lately. I spent some time looking at a picture of him last night, and I truely miss him as I would my own son. He is my son, even if not by blood.

I’ve also had a lot of stress in the past few months, and it’s been wearing on me, so, for those who it has effected, I appologise. It’s caused a huge lack of sleep, so I always feel drained, tired, and cranky, it’s also had other physical effects on me, such as my wrists (I belive unlar nerve, not carpel tunnel) sometimes being in excrutiating, throbbing pain, to point where it’s difficult to pick things up. I’m sure it’s had an effect on my relationships with everyone in my life, not just my relationship with Rachel.

This month, it seems like I lost a long time friend, and it feels to me like I was put on a side in a fight between him and another friend, just because it seemed like the other friend needed help MORE. I acted in a triage fashion, not taking sides, just trying to sort by severity, and I think it cost me a friend.

This entire past week I’ve been acting pretty crazy, not really myself. Massive mood swings, being unreasonable, etc, etc. I am going to make an effort to control that, cause I really am acting crazy, and I don’t want it to have any negitive effects on my life .

My g/f has this amazing way of being able to not really talk to me all day, and then just at the right moment, when work is stressing me out, sending me a text message or a picture, that just totaly makes my day better. It’s nice to have someone who seems to be geniunely on the same level as yourself, or at least, close enough that your levels overlap at times. It’s a new experience for me, and I must say, I like the way it makes me feel

Feeling a lot better now that I’ve vented though. All this was, perhaps, holed up for too long inside. Cheers peeps, have a nice day, I can feel mine getting better already