Entries for October, 2005

Most people don't care about most of the decisions they make. They just want to generally follow the schedule for the day and not have to think hard about every decision. So please, restaurant/food industry workers, make our lives easier. Please post questions in the "yes" or "no" format, and not in the "pick one of the following" format; this is something I learned back when I worked at Country Junction in Carrboro...

For example, Country Junction serves fantastic breakfast plates (two eggs, choice of meat, grits/hashbrowns and biscuit/toast). Now, most people are happy to go with the default (bacon or sausage, two scrambled, grits (yummy!), and biscuits. However, because some people liked toast, I would want to clarify their choice of bread.

But the WRONG question is "with biscuit or toast?" To most people, they are both equally good. If you ask them this question, their poor sleep-deprived minds will go into overdrive weighing the two equal choices. Not only does asking this question hold up the line, but it makes people think (which is the last thing they want to do). The MUCH better question to ask is, "with a biscuit?" Most people will just answer "yeah." But those that did not already like the biscuit will then inquire about alternatives.

I only bring this up because I went to Bagels on the Hill for breakfast this morning, and they kept asking me multiple choice questions. "Plain or toasted?" (better: "Toasted?") "Which bagel?" (better: "On a plain bagel?") For here or to go? ("For here?")

This also applies to web design usabiilty, although I'll spare you guys of that.

This also works well in persuading friends to go to events that they're iffy on.

Currently listening to: Daphne Loves Derby - Simple, starving to be safe
Posted by roy on October 1, 2005 at 08:58 AM in Ramblings | 6 Comments

Whoa, it's October! I guess it's time to wake up a lot of people.

Currently listening to: Greenday - Wake me up when September ends
Posted by roy on October 1, 2005 at 10:31 PM in Foolishness | 5 Comments

Far too tired to use anything but a list here:

  • I've busted out the Hanon book. If you know what this means, good for you. Aiming to Hanon for at least half an hour a day, and then work on a reportoire of sorts for another 30 minutes. We'll see how long my attention span lasts this time.
  • I made 짬뽕 (jjambbong) today. Still learning a lot about cooking, but I think I got this dish down. I need to make it again later this week to make sure I know it ... anyone wanna be guinea pigs?

    This is 짬뽕 (not mine, taken from some Korean website, mine was not as good looking as this)
  • Upon the recommendation of Hao and Ed, I've started reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
  • The new project Yush and I are working on is Füüñk (funk with two U's). Yes, it's pink, and yes that's our logo. I've wanted to make a pink-oriented site for quite some time now (just to prove that I can), and the overboard umlauts and ñ are intentional. I'll explain the story later, it's mildly humorous. I also considered going completely overboard and picking Füüñkæ [funky] (which would be the trifecta of letters everyone wants to use but aren't able to), but decided that was a tad too much.
  • Yush and I have two weeks left to complete this project. Crunch time.
  • An interesting question I've been pondering since last Friday: There are certain ways that women can exhibit maternal traits. These traits, when people encounter them makes people agree, "Ah yes, she's turning into a motherly figure." Are there any characteristics that guys have that make them exhibit paternal instincts?
Posted by roy on October 3, 2005 at 08:15 PM in Ramblings | 12 Comments

I went to bed before midnight last night. I woke up at 830am, getting a nearly solid 9 hours of sleep, which was a great way to start the day (plus it means I got off work ~5pm!). The weather was absolutely GORGEOUS this morning ... which I got to enjoy as I had to go to the post office to send some t-shirts.

An amazing feat: I didn't caught by a SINGLE light going to the post office or back. What was even better? There was not a line at the post office. I seriously thought this was my day ... everything was clicking in perfection.

You feel like you're on top of the world - everything is productive, your day looks so filled with fun activities and you're generally just in a great mood. These days are a rarity for me, so I take them when I can.

Then I made the stupid mistake of thinking to myself, "Man, NOTHING could flatten my mood! It's all so awesome!"

Do not ever do this. Soon afterwards, my sister came home teary-eyed because of some issues with friends at schools (MAN, GIRLS ARE VICIOUS!) ... and that sorta made the day bad. But that wasn't the end of it.

I found out that a close family friend of my parents ... the man and wife were splitting. The man decided he could no longer live with her and just left her. I'm not horribly close to them, but I have a close attachment to them because of how nice they've been to me in the past.

I was absolutely shocked when I heard this.... it shook me up pretty rough. That was when I decided my day had gone to shit - I think there's nothing really worse than hearing about shitty things happening to people who are close to you. If something bad happened to me, I would be ok - just internalize it and focus on the good things - but for people who have absolutely shitty days ... you just can't help feel totally helpless for them. All you can really do is sympathize and pray.

It's been a weird day.

Posted by roy on October 4, 2005 at 08:12 PM in Personal | 1 Comments

Tried going to sleep an hour ago, no such luck. Figure I'll post something a bit more positive than the previous post... this is a video of me and my friends at the mountains last spring ... personally I find this video completely amusing.

The funniest thing to me, however, is in the opening scene where we're posing ... notice how Moonie sneaks in trying to pose in the picture; the moment we're called out ... HE SNEAKS AWAY AS IF HE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. That is the essence of Moonie, sneaking in and out at the most convenient moments...

video (35 megs

Posted by roy on October 4, 2005 at 10:50 PM in Ramblings | 3 Comments

Nick and Jessica called it quits! :(

Posted by roy on October 5, 2005 at 09:13 AM in Ramblings | 8 Comments

"you're alive. do something. the directive in life, the moral imperative is so uncomplicated. it could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. it sounds like this: look. listen. choose. act." - barbara hall

. . .

yes. I sometimes wonder if all blogging tools are going the absolutely wrong route by using a "View/Edit" mode; shouldn't we be able to edit where we view? The UI implications for this are staggering - with View/Edit we have some semblance of consistent UI, but if everything becomes editable... well... that gets tricky. You have to really learn how to separate the content from the application (which is tricky with web-based programs).

. . .

Perfect summarization of what Web X.X is: (Web 2.0 is this new term being bandied around by a bunch of bloggers for no apparent reason)

You need something. You build it for yourself, you build it for others. You share it, refine it, and get rewarded for it.

That's every version of Web in my book.

As it should be for all projects.

. . .

Operation Eden: amazing photography of Katrina survivors

Currently listening to: Sigur Ros - Vaka
Currently feeling: conflicted
Posted by roy on October 6, 2005 at 07:28 AM in Personal | 4 Comments

Sorry, Jason.

tekkie00: in all honesty, i always thought coldfusion was the shit
tekkie00: Allaire ColdFusion 4.0
tekkie00: the greatest net invention

GeekCred--;

. . .

I've been given a relatively interesting task at work that I've actually wanted to explore for some time.

When building advanced UIs using JS and CSS, you will run into several problems with <select>. The biggest problem is the inability of IE 6.x to handle floating divs over <select> elements - basically the SELECT control is one rendered by the OS, so no z-index on the floating div can get the SELECT behind your floating div.

The only hack is to manually do a visibility:hidden; on the select anytime you think a floating div may conflict, but this is not a good solution at all. In the product we're building at Mindtouch, we have a lot of floating DIVs that could really be anywhere, so a better solution has to be found.

My boss told me to try to replace the <SELECT> control with my own from CSS and JS. This is a fascinating project for a variety of reasons:

  • Replacing the <SELECT> control will free us to consistently style each item within the SELECT
  • You can input any image items as selection
  • With advanced JS, you could also pull off multiple selections (I know this is possible in SELECT right now as well, but this implementation would be far l33ter in my mind)

However, it's important that when I do this, I don't lose the accesibility of SELECT; the end goal is not changing the markup of the SELECT in any way at all.

So here's what I'm thinking (in pseudo-idea/psuedo-code to come later):

  1. Add a body.onload hook that'll load up the JS library that will do the SELECT conversions
  2. The JS lib loops through the DOM, finds all SELECT items, then hides the selects
  3. Each SELECT with its OPTIONS are read into memory; and the markup is generated (the markup I'm going to use are unordered lists
  4. Add in an INPUT hidden field that'll store the state of the item based on the selection, so the POST method will still detect the items
  5. Add in some fancy schmancy JS/CSS that will emulate the behaviour of SELECTs perfectly

The hardest part will be dealing with the usual accessibility concerns of SELECTs. Tabbing across a FORM should select the fauxSELECT; you should also be able to scroll up and down within the fauxSELECT with the arrow keys. Also, all events that are hooked onto the SELECT need to be transferred onto the

Some problems I've run into:

  • On the styling side of things; it's ridiculously hard to use LI to determine the width of the "greatest" list item when you're floating the LI items. SELECTS resize to the greatest element's size; I'm still struggling with how to deal with this.

I'll try to keep this post updated with more problems/solutions. Hopefully I can post some pseudocode and solutions to problems I ran into - I think there might be a problem if I directly release my work into the public domain (work contract, you know how it is).

Posted by roy on October 7, 2005 at 12:13 PM in Web Development | 9 Comments

Oh, how the mighty have fallen:

Posted by roy on October 8, 2005 at 09:35 AM in Foolishness | 2 Comments

A topic that's really soapbox-y, but whatever. It's been something I've been wanted to write since Ignatius and I got into a small debate over the "disenfranchised" and such.

For those of you still in college, I highly urge you to take a few economics classes - pick up a BA in economics if you're able to. It's one of the few classes that really teaches you something that you can apply in your life, although in general I feel the macro part of it is more of a pseudoscience (you know how hard it is to actually measure the result of one fiscal or monetary action in a whole economy?).

A few days ago, I was watching the Discovery Channel with some friends, and a special on ants was running. It's completely fascinating how the ants organize themselves for one purpose - whether it be to go on a food raid, or to move colonies. We wonder how millions of ants can do so much in so little time. But take a look at human society (on a macro scale) and realize how much we accomplish as a society on a daily basis!

With free markets, we can effectively allocate resources to the best possible location - every day somebody writes a new piece of software that helps improve somebody's life. Every day, millions of people commute over long distances in an organized manner to work, where we fulfill an activity that provides some value to society. We ARE the worker ants.

I think history has proven that the free markets are the best form of market control - anytime somebody tries to impose restrictions or limitations on economic output, our society runs at sub-optimal levels (historical: China shifts away from centralized planning; communism in general collapses when it doesn't support free-market principles [an aside I'd like to someday discuss: can communism survive if it supports free market principles? China is sure making a strong case for it; perhaps communism and free markets aren't so conflicting, after all]) and waste is created.

What's amusing to me is that free-market is a very weak form of socialism. Under a true free market system, in theory (remember I think macro is a bit of a pseudoscience), the price of everything goes to the actual cost. In the long run, margins are squeezed out by the millions of small businesses entering the same market (assuming low barrier to entry, meaning a low cost in entering a new market), and the consumer wins.

The reality is much different. Any time a new market forms, the first person (since corporations are people, right?) in usually has a huge profit margin on goods, since they in effect have a monopoly. Of course, this profit margin should decrease over time as more competitors join in on the fun.

This has happened in the computer industry; look at how Dell came in and used volume to effectively cut the price of computers down to nearly rock-bottom. Wal-mart did this for the retail industry. The only place this isn't happening is with software, which I think deserves its own post (but Microsoft did *not* operate as a monopoly and does not continue to do so - if anything, some of the recent troubles they've had clearly demonstrate the downfall of their strategy in the mid '90s).

We're blessed in America to have a system of laws that promotes free markets - if you've given a read of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (a MUST read!), De Soto makes a strong case that the system of organized laws in the US has been the main driving factor behind the success of markets in the US.

As much as I love the free markets and totally believe in them, there's still a glaring problem that socialists tend to attack: the discrepency of wealth between the upper and lower classes, and the Westernized nations and Third World countries.

In economics, there's a term for the transitional period when a person is laid off and finds a new job - since in a free market, labor is completely mobile, which means people can go anywhere to find any job. It's called frictional unemployment. Take this general concept and apply it to whole classes and nations.

I strongly believe that the US is still not providing a level playing field for all socio-economic groups. I think part of this can be traced to the cultural values of a specific socio-economic group - Asians tend to be viewed as a successful minority because of the values taught, but this isn't the only reason.

In this sense, there's a moral commitment from those who have it good (us) to help those who aren't as needy. I do not mean a redistribution of wealth, but those of us who are wealthy (if you're making ~$50,000 by yourself, you are wealthy) need to be proactive in levelling the playing field for those who are less fortunate).

This doesn't mean mindlessly give to charities - this is the worst possible thing we could do.

Although I'm not entirely sure about the merits of this argument, I've heard that food subsidies actually do more long-term damage to African nations. The reasoning (simplified) goes like this: citizens of African nations tend to be undereducated - their only real export is labor-intensive items; all countries tend to follow the economic route of agriculturally-based to manufacturing-based to service-based; by giving food to these nations for free, we are undermining the ability for Africans to base an economy on agriculture. Obviously this is a gross simplification that doesn't factor in the geopolitics of the area, but it's still a point that has some validity.

The most important thing that can be done is to promote NGO and charities that provide self-sustaining development. Any type of organization that directly empowers the people who are being helped by the organization - those are the ones who can most benefit from our wealth (a plug for Carolina for Kibera here).

Economics is great, but it sure doesn't provide much of a comfort to those who are affected by frictional unemployment, frictional governments, and frictional societies.

I know the big intellectual fad is the promotion of the individual (Ayn Rand), but we have to remember that this is all within the context of society. The ants are all acting in their self-interest, but they (might be) aware of the colony and act in such manner.

You cannot simply ignore everybody else in this world and act in your own interests - do so such that you aren't creating inefficiencies in the market, but realize you share this world with 6 billion other people and almost all of them are less fortunate than the people living in Western countries.

(gets off soapbox)

Posted by roy on October 8, 2005 at 10:27 AM in Ramblings | 6 Comments

Why hasn't anybody built up a cell phone protocol that sends you contact information from cell phone to cell phone? The reason I ask is because I've seen this situation unfold far too many times:

Bob: "Yeah, get in touch with Horace."
(muffled conversation from other end)
Bob: "Oh you don't have his number? Hold on a sec."
Bob: "Ok... you ready?"
(Bob hits up a few times, then hits the keypad a few times)
(Bob stares at the number for a second)
Bob: "It's 555..."
(Bob, in his busy little mind, is incapable of memorizing a full phone number at once, so he looks at the phone once again)
Bob: "You get that? Ok.. 555-5555"
(muffled conversation)
Bob: "Hold on, lemme double check..."
(Bob looks back at the number)
Bob: "Yeah, it's 555-5555."

Inevitably, sometimes the person on the other end forgets the number and calls back and the whole process is repeated. Besides looking absolutely retarded and ackward ... why isn't there a simple "Send phone number to current caller?" feature? Like the same way dialtone phones work; if the cell phone picks up any type of dialtone; it displays teh number on the screen of the receiver much as if they typed them.

Anyone?

Posted by roy on October 8, 2005 at 12:11 PM in Ramblings | 9 Comments

It sucks when Bear Rock Cafe cuts through to the heart of my being:

Roy: $0.00

:(

. . .

Wow, thanks to everybody that pointed out that the feature I detailed in my last post does exist as "Send business card." I did not know this. Thanks to everybody who just made MY life a lot easier :)

This is why they called me Retarded Roy.

Posted by roy on October 8, 2005 at 12:12 PM in Personal, Foolishness | 3 Comments

First off, happy belated birthday to my good buddy Hao Zhang.

. . .

It seems my latest rash of posts are all negative, but don't think I've become a Negative Nancy and all I do all day is wallow in my self-pity. These online journals have a tendency to be negative, mostly because if I'm in a good mood, I don't really feel like writing about it. It's like that saying, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone" (Ella Wheeler Wilcox). Since I don't particularly feel like burdening any one of my close friends (except a few that I really trust to listen), I tend to vent mostly through this journal (which is somewhat amusing - I'm too shy to tell in-real-life people about my problems, but I have no problem ranting about it to a group of strangers).

Going through college, I always believed that circumstances would become the victim of my grandiose plans for life. I would graduate college; get the new Tabulas out in a few months, work for Mindtouch to launch an awesome product, and generally live a very charmed life. I wouldn't feel bound to the job out of any necessity; I could work at the job because I enjoyed it and respected the people (which I do), but wouldn't feel shackled to it for the sake of a paycheck. Sure, I would spend the first year or so living at home with the parents, but this would only be to save on rent so I could buy a (town)house in the area once my mom moved to Kansas City with my dad and my sister went off to college.

It's been a completely different scenario; I've lost control over my life, and it's leading me to feelings of inadequacy (not of the ED variety though, my friends!).

With this job, I'm quickly falling into a trap where I'm questioning my self-doubt and my skillset while generally not happy with the compensation. I make no illusions about this though - I did not major in CS or anything, and I'm pretty sure any webmonkey could do my job effectively. At first the salary wasn't that important because the money wasn't why I signed on - but now due to some family issues, I feel a lot of pressure to be earning more for the sake of making my parents a bit more comfortable (supporting a house and and apt for my dad in KC is not cheap, and my dad's pay at KC is commesurate with what he made here).

Tabulas, Tabulas, Tabulas. Tabulas has defined who I am for the past year. It got me my job. It gave me hope for a better web. It gave me great excitement to see people use my product. But as the blogging industry seems to be consolidating, I don't really see a future for Tabulas in this growing field. I've been using Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal for some time now, and Tabulas 3.0 was supposed to bring Tabulas up to a level where I could at least be happy with a comparison. It was also supposed to revamp the architecture of the site so I could support caching (which is really a huge technical feature missing in Tabulas). But I'm a sole developer (and not even an experienced one). I have control issues which prevented me from working with people (this also stems from my inexperience in working in teams, although I've learned a lot from MT about this). I cannot expect myself to write a whole platform that's backwards compatible with the existing system for 70,000 users, while doing the marketing and designing and usability testing ... while paying for the whole project out of my own pockets.

Honestly, the pressure got to me. I knew the release would be buggy, so I kept pushing it back and back, and then I just gave up. There was so much I wanted to do, but with MT being so draining on my day, I just couldn't muster up the energy to do it. Meanwhile I see press releases from the rest of the blogging tools who are doing a kickass job of keeping their products ahead of the curve (cause they make $$$), and it makes me depressed. It's not their ideas which are unique (I was never short on ideas for Tabulas) ... but just the fact they can execute. Ah, the bane of capitalism.

Then there's the personal pressures in my life. Seeing people around me getting hurt, being confused ... it's quite painful.

Maybe this is why I've experienced such a reinvigoration of my faith.

These past few weeks have been incredibly trying. I've tried to maintain a positive attitude and tried not to get down; my motto's always been to "keep on truckin'", but this weekend was just the tipping point. I gave up and tried to drown my sorrows with Borst (thanks, by the way) yesterday night, but ended up not doing much drowning as I wanted to do.

I thought the toughest part of the post-college life was the loneliness from the removal of your social network - but it's really the loss in the faith that you can change the world that's the most damaging to myself.

I just wish I was at the steering wheel once again.

Currently listening to: Cure - Love song
Posted by roy on October 9, 2005 at 07:29 PM in Personal | 6 Comments

Although I hadn't dreamt in a while, apparently all the little monkeys in my brain responsible for kick ass dream plotlines weren't exactly sleeping on the job... I just had the best dream from a short nap ... (weird, huh?)

It started off with a soccer team. Apparently I was on this soccer team until circumstances (I had to drive my sister to piano every Wednesday, and that conflicted with practice) forced me to quit. The team had just won states and were celebrating in the streets. I got very sad and angry for not being a part of it, so I ran off into a local mall. At the mall, this weird old lady and guy came up to me and asked if I knew these two email addresses. I recognized them as being associated with some weird cult related to God... so I talked to them about God for a little while until they suddenly grabbed me by my arms. Everywhere I looked in the mall, there were individuals who were being grabbed by these people. Immediately I knew I was in trouble. I quickly was dragged down the stairway when I heard some knocking and a friendly voice saying, "Hey, come on, hurry up. We gotta get out of here. They're taking over everybody and they're cannibals!" I looked up, and it was Han!

He threw me this staff with a bunch of weird symbols on it, but I immediately understood how to use some of the basic functions of the staff. Han had a pretty badass sword (a mixture between a broadsword and a schimitar) and looked pretty badly cut, so I used my staff to heal him a bit.

Anyways, we soon ran into these people who were being infected (or were infected) with a werewolf like virus; they would turn into half-werewolves and attack us, but we dispatched of them pretty handily. It's like the whole thing was a huge set of stairways and narrow hallways, so every corner we'd see some new type of enemy. In the beginning, they were relatively "noob" enemies; Han could have destroyed them himself, but I was playing around on the staff to see its full powers.

We soon ran into this open room with these bottles on the ground... suddenly as we're walking through, genies appear out of the bottles! Some of the genies couldn't be seen by Han, so he only attacked the ones he could see, while I attacked the more "invisible ones." It took a while, but we killed all those stunnas... and we both somehow picked up limited invisibility skills. This proved useful against the next set of enemies, the skeletons, who would keep rebuilding themselves; they were like walking skeletons, except they had this one big black eye on top of the skull; the best way to destroy them was either to cut off the eye (which would regenerate), cover the eye with some goo (from my staff), or attack a big group of them, become invisible, and run through the openings (obviously, attacking while invisible made us visible again).

We had just run into some pretty badass robots (which I couldn't figure out how to destroy; Han was just hacking them up while I figured out their weakness... isn't lightening supposed to destroy those suckers? The goo wouldn't work... oh man, how amazing the mind is to keep making these stories upon stories up!

But yeah, I woke up pretty amped. We were kicking some hardcore ass (in a clearly masculine manner) ... and the dream was so lucid and so unconfusing. I tried to go back to the nap, cause I wanted to kick more butt, but the brain never cooperates with "give me back my dream please!" requests...

Such a shame.

Posted by roy on October 10, 2005 at 03:34 PM in Dreams | 8 Comments

The streetlight flickered. The sudden change of intensity caught his attention. Normally bathed in the orange hue that would accompany them back from the dining hall, they were temporarily encompassed by darkness. Perhaps it was time to call the maintenance man to get this fixed – this was the second day this had happened. As they continued their post-dinner walk, the artificial glow of fluorescent lights from the high-rise dormitory up ahead provided enough lighting, and for the moment, the boy was content with the faint lighting.

He drew in a sharp breath and then blew out. December was a good month to pretend to be a smoker, the boy thought. Although he never had smoked cigarettes, he often fantasized about lighting up one of the cancer sticks – could a single one really be that addictive? The girl, lost in her own thoughts, heard the deep breaths of the boy.

“Anything wrong?” The girl was dressed warmly – perhaps a bit too warmly, the boy thought – for a December night. After all, the nights in the South weren’t horribly frigid – perhaps she was just looking nice for him. As much as she cared for him, would she understand what he was going through?

The boy mumbled back an unintelligible answer.

The girl wasn’t satisfied.

“What’s on your mind?”

How could he explain the burden of responsibilities that weighed on his soul when all she understood were exams and classes? The world was once his oyster – he attended the best prep schools and attended a respectable four year college. Surrounded by idealism, his fervor for improving the lives of the people in his community drove him to the humanities. However, the mirage of idealism dried up before his eyes after he left college. It had been nearly eight months since he had gotten a job – it wasn’t a great job, but it was something that could occupy his days.

His grand visions were diluted down to piddling worries – when could he afford a new car? When could he start paying off a house? His feelings of adequacy had always been tied to his potential, but what was he to do now that the potential was gone? The people around him needed his paychecks, and he would continue to oblige them. There was nothing he could do; he would simply have to wait this situation out. No need to burden the girl with such trifling concerns.

He smiled at the girl. “Nothing, really.”

The girl knew better, but she accepted his return to reality and snuggled up next to him. Together they walked up the hill, towards the faint lights of the high rise dormitory up ahead. Behind them, the light flickered back on, and the uneven brick path was once again showered with the orange aura of the streetlight for the next couple.

Posted by roy on October 11, 2005 at 10:29 PM in Personal, Short Stories | 5 Comments

Sure, I diss my Apple Powerbook all the time, but that still doesn't mean I think Apple is an absolutely wonderful company. The iPod has been my trusty music player for a year and a half, and my respect for Steve Jobs went through the roof after reading iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (I have this if anybody wants to borrow it).

Normally I don't bother to reposting fanboy announcements, but FINALLY FINALLY I can buy TV episodes from iTunes! I don't really enjoy watching Lost on TV (I'm usually too busy when it's on, so being able to buy it from iTunes the next day for ONLY $1.99!!!!! is amazing! I always feel guilty about downloading the episode from Bittorent the next day ... and now I can do it legally :)

Woo hoo. Perhaps I won't watch Lost tonight just so I can download it and watch it on iTunes tomorrow :)

Posted by roy on October 12, 2005 at 01:58 PM in Ramblings | 8 Comments

Yay, it's Friday! :)

. . .

Awesome article on independent software developers: (some minor snipping)

Novelists aren’t expected to help people read their books; musicians don’t help fans play their CDs; but programmers are expected to help you with their software.

When a solo developer reaches the point where an app becomes so popular he needs help, there are only several options. One is to hire help, to build a company around the products. But there’s nothing easy about this. For one thing, even if you hire just one person, you’ve greatly increased the amount of revenue you need to generate. And it needs to be steadier revenue — if you’re only supporting yourself, you don’t have to write paychecks every two weeks. Running a company with even a single employee involves a ton of overhead; the whole point of The Life is the idea that you can just sit around all day hacking on code and watch the money roll in through Kagi or eSellerate. That’s not what it’s like if you own a software company with employees.

Another option is just not to worry about keeping up with the flow of support issues. Tempting, for sure, but certainly not a good way to build up a reserve of goodwill from your users. There’s a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of the intersection between successful indie Mac developers and indie Mac developers with a reputation for being responsive to customers. From what I know of Brent Simmons, this was never an option for him — his personality is such that he’s incapable of being unresponsive to his users.
Posted by roy on October 14, 2005 at 09:56 AM in Ramblings, Web Development | 2 Comments

Today was f'ing rad. A good day in general. Here goes the list:

  • Fuunk is ALMOST ready for beta testing. I don't expect the site to be incredibly popular this calendar year - all I'm looking for is some exposure and and solid user base to expand from next calendar year. I'm so impressed with how fast Yush and Han did their end of the bargain ... I'll write a detailed post about everything that's been happening with Fuunk over the past month shortly.
  • Payday (always nice)
  • Got stock options from company. They don't vest for a while, but still... radical... I'm officially a real partial owner of a company :)
  • Got to see Roy's Boys (UNC Basketball) at Late Night with Roy. Our team is not as good looking as last year's team, but they will still rock :). Tyler Hansborough was a bit dissappointing - he looks really stiff, but he can do some SIIICCCKKK dunks.
  • Tomorrow is a packed day of activities
  • Sunday is a packed day of activities
  • Come Wednesday, I finally get a long-deserved vacation to the beautiful mountains of NC
  • Intangibles :)

I heard the most fitting song that just encapsulates the day: Eel's Mr. E's Beautiful Day

The smokestack is spitting black soot into the sunny sky
The load on the road brings a tear to the Indian's eye
The Elephant won't forget what it's like inside his cage
The Ringmaster's Telecaster sings on an empty stage

God damn right it's a beautiful day

The girl with the curls and the sweet big ribbon in her hair
She's crawled out the window 'cause her daddy just don't care

God damn right it's a beautiful day

The clown with the frown driving down to the sidewalk fair
Finger on the trigger I tell you he is quite a scare

God damn right it's a beautiful day

The kids fit their lids when their heads hear that crazy sound
Their neighbour digs the flavour still he's moving to another town
(and i don't believe he'll come back)

God damn right it's a beautiful day

And I don't know how you're taking all the shit you see
You don't believe anyone but most of all openly agree

Yeah, so I don't really know what the song means, but the chorus is nice.

Posted by roy on October 14, 2005 at 10:51 PM in Music | 6 Comments

user@roy[/life]: del LIFE:/emotions
Error: Cannot delete LIFE:/emotions/; you do not have permissions to this directory
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (I)gnore?

F

(Yes, the mixture of *nix and DOS was intentional)

. . .

Forreal this time. Thanks to Han especially for being there for me. No more. Fin. Fin. Fin. Fin!

I've been laughing a lot at life lately - just how twisted everything seems. I was giggling like a schoolgirl today when I realized how flawed humans are (in context of emotions).

I've always prided myself on having some sense of intuition (which has served me a few times at the poker tables). I can immediately pick out situations between people just by hanging out with them. I can see bad situations coming a mile away and I know what needs to be done or what I can do to avoid them. But like a deer caught in the headlights, I simply refuse to move. I believe that perhaps the car will avoid me. This leads to a self-replicating cycle of self-doubt and introspection that leads to more self-doubting and more introspection. And while I'm doing this, I know how utterly pathetic I have become.

I find great amusement in how aware humans are of their problems and the situations. We know what needs to be done, and we truly believe that endgame... but we just can't bring ourselves to follow through on those situations.

We're blessed with such self-awareness yet we lack self-restraint and willpower. It makes me laugh.

Posted by roy on October 15, 2005 at 03:45 PM in Personal | 3 Comments

The Tabulas boogeyman will get you if you leave Tabulas (that helmet was modelled after the Roman legions in England ... I was SO tempted to buy it at $275... but I wussed out :(

I'm really loving my cell phone. Although the camera lacks some basic stuff (I really wish I could figure out how to use the spot photometry so I can meter the image better), it's capable of taking some pretty cool pictures:

I can't wait to see how nice the cameras get in the future.

I've now gone through these cameras:

Pentax Optio S: Very small. That's about the only thing I really liked about it... I had various metering problems and such ... and battery life seems really weak. I didn't use this camera all too much, but I really wasn't impressed by it. I gave it to my sister, who promptly lost it.

Fuji Finepix 6900: I bought this sucker when most digital cameras were still within the 1-2MP range; luckily I unloaded this sucker for about 80% of its value a year later. I really actually enjoyed this camera; exposures with this camera were very distinctive in colors. I took all pictures from the Chapel Hill gallery with this camera; I'm not sure I could have achieved my favorite picture of all time with any other camera:

Unfortunately I had no concept of taking "large" pictures (this was back when mem card were super expensive), so all my exposures from Chapel Hill were taken at 1024x768 (roughly) ... so no large prints were possible:(. I've actually been quite tempted to pick this camera back up on eBay and relive the past with it. It was my first camera ... so it was quite special :)

I still have my Canon G5, but I haven't used it too often since Korea 2004. In all honesty, I still feel that this is a very good camera... it has a GREAT balance between features and size, and it just FEELS right ... but the damn thing is a bit too heavy to carry around with me casually. And if I'm going to carry around a real camera, I might as well carry around my Elan 7 with my 50mm/1.4 so I can get high shutter speeds in low light (which the G5 is not very good at handling).

Of course, you still cannot beat film cameras in terms of feel. There's just a feel to pictures taken on tri-x or velvia films that you cannot replicate with digital cameras; pictures from digital cameras seem so ... flat. I'm still deeply in love with my Canon Elan 7 and my Yashica T5D (arguably the best consumer point and shoot - of course it's no longer in production - although I thought I read something a few months ago about how they were bringing it back?). I'm much too poor to afford film nowadays, but I will forever have all my positives and negatives from my Summer 2002 gallery from Korea and Vietnam :)

My last "new" camera purchase, the Polaroid 680, is responsible for the funniest poker gallery in the world (which would be impossible to replicate with digital!). There was a real feeling of satisfaction in actually seeing the prints and getting them scanned (into a SCANNER!). Welcome to 1998!

Of course, this camera opens us up to "real" recursive pictures:

And completely random, but here's something to kill more time on a Monday morning (if you've been clicking every link): People who love Calvin and Hobbes way too much, which is basically pictures of people doing this:

Concept was by Linda :)

Um ok. Have a great Monday!

Posted by roy on October 16, 2005 at 09:01 PM in Ramblings, Photography | 9 Comments

Back when I lived in Lewis Dorm with Yush and Sech, we kept the window open every night during the winter. I absolutely loved it because I slept under the window, and every morning I would wake up and the whole room would be freezing, but I would be curled up like a little hedgehog in my huge comforter. There's just something that's so great about the heat from your own body ... lying inside my little heat bubble against the cold outside room made made me never wanted to wake up for class, and I never did :)

Posted by roy on October 17, 2005 at 06:51 PM in Ramblings | 12 Comments

I'll be gone until Sunday - I'm taking a long-needed vacation up to the mountains with some friends. It's been a trying few months, but I finally fee l like I'm back on top of everything - this trip will give me some time to reflect on the positives in my life and set the course for the next few months.

There's a high chance (90%+) that I'll be throwing Fuunk into beta stage tonight after work - I gotta go food shopping for the trip after work, but after that I'll bust my chops on Fuunk. So check back later tonight to see what Yush, Han and I had been working on :)

Posted by roy on October 18, 2005 at 11:35 AM in Ramblings | 10 Comments

Back home. Exhausted but happy. A lot of questions still on my mind I need to resolve.

Fun stuff from this past weekend (mostly for my own memories): Laughter. Sleeping in random places. Cooking food (failing a few times, but learning a lot of lessons). Great Smokey Mountains. Campfire. Biltmore Estate. Forcing Yush and Han to listen to a medley of these songs after they forced me to load up Hanson's Mmmbop: Arethra Franklin's "It's Raining Men," Eiffel 65's "Blue," Pointer Sisters "I'm so excited," Divinyl's "I Touch Myself" (never again will they want to listen to that blasted Hanson ever again). Learning that I NEED TO QUIT FORGETTING TO NOT DEFROST MEAT. Wondering why people kept playing Dream (that girl band Puffy created a few years ago) on my iPod. Curry rice (carrots, meats, onion). Driving (lots of it). Hammock. Cold, crisp fall nights. "Shooting stars." Good talks with good friends. Hot-tub. Falling asleep on the hammock in freezing weather in a sleeping bag covered by a comforter, cuddled in the warmth of my own body heat listening to Sigur Ros (f'ing awesome). Pool (slanted table). Spaghetti. Circular stairs that may fall apart at any time. Trying to do the worm in a sushi roll but hitting my knees on the ground... HARD. Jjambbong. Realizing you need a lot of spinach to make california rolls. Learning that watching TV while making california rolls is REALLY not a good idea. Learning that inverse water pressure can break glass cups. Getting stains on my tshirts EVERY time I ate. Doing dishes. Falling asleep on the front bench wearing shorts and a tshirt in freezing weather and realizing that my body won't wake me up if it gets too cold. A view of the lake nestled in the mountains early in the morning. Seeing Nasty Nate get his groove thang on. Discussing the merits of satellite radios. Quoting Zoolander and Team America constantly (our response to seeing the model of the Biltmore in the Biltmore: "What is this? A house for ... ants? It needs to be ... at least... 3 TIMES the size of this"). Han, Nasty Nate and I showing our acting skills in imitating escalator and elevators (video soon). Realizing that planning meals, buying the right amount of food, cooking it for a lot of people, and making it taste well is much harder than I originally imagined it to be. Hearing laughter echo from the cabin while staring at the dwindling campfire. Being able to see the stars and wishing I knew more constellations. Falling asleep. Waking up. Jjajjamyun (lesson learned). Learning that champagne bottles have a LOT of pressure. Poker. Losing myself. Finding myself. Playing 20 questions: Kao: "Is it man-made?" Alex: "Yes." Roy: "Is it organic?" Alex: "Uhh, no." Kao: "Good, we've eliminated cloned elephants." Zack and the Beanstalk. Coin purses. Bojangles in Bryson City ... damned GOOD. Getting people addicted to Lost (YES, FINALLY I CAN HAVE LOST PARTIES). Team America DVD. Attempting to do the discus at the Biltmore estate with a rock, and COMPLETELY missing where I threw it (luckily nobody got hurt). Group dynamics. Laying in the grass. Staring at the sky for more hours over the past four days than I have in the past four months. Marvelling at beauty in general (man-made and natural). Good friends, good times. Lessons learned.

Unfortunately, my mind was a bit clouded to reach any good conclusions. I really need some time to reflect on the past five days, but that probably won't happen anytime over the next few days until I can clear out the backlog of job and project-related stuff.

A few thoughs and questions that kept going through my mind:

I seem to be unable to do nothing. I always feel like I need to do something. Why? I feel like it keeps waking me up early in the morning, even when I'm really tired.

The toughest thing in life seems to be risking something that is 95% perfect for that thing that is 100% perfect.

I've got a lot of growing to do.

I need to quit internalizing and being so cut-off from people.

I have the emotional patience of a five-year old. Stay the course, Roy.

Posted by roy on October 23, 2005 at 11:42 PM in Personal, Ramblings | 3 Comments

I remember the first time I saw her. She had curly brown hair and pale white skin. Her name was Sarah. I remember being completely flattened by the way she carried herself - she had the cutest little giggle and she was always smiling. I told my then-friend Randy that I wanted to marry her. Years before Napoleon Dynamite imparted his wisdom upon the masses, Randy told me that in order to impress a girl, a guy has to demonstrate great skills. We pondered for a while what positive qualities I had. It would be far too difficult to show her my piano skills, and I wasn't particularly skilled in anything else (besides perhaps reciting the multiplication table).

We decided that I should play off my Asian stereotype and pretend to be a karate master. He brought out his Crayola crayons and held them at the ends - he then told me to do a clean karate chop. I obliged, and Randy now had one less fuschia crayon for playtime.

The next step was obviously a bit riskier, but could yield a greater windfall - the vaunted Number 2 pencil. Anybody could break a crayon in half, but the Number 2 Pencil... well... breaking one of those in half would yield in the satisfying SNAP of wood. I took out my pencil case and took out my Number 2 pencil. To be honest, I feared that I would break my hand, but Cupid gave me temporary inspiration (or blindness) to attempt this radical feat. A small crowd of boys gathered around to witness my triumph over having-no-skills.

Like a lumberjack splitting wood, I broke that Number 2 Pencil in half with such ease and skill that for that moment, I was King of the World.

"Sarah! Sarah, come look at what Roy's doing!"

She sauntered over in her overalls and her cute ballet shoes.

"What's he doing?"

"He's going to break a pencil with his fist, karate-style!"

"Oh."

Obviously she didn't understand the importance of such a feat. But she would understand.

This time, however, the boys decided that using two pencils would be far more impressive. I stared down the two pencils, trying to focus at the task at hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah curiously tipping her head to see how well I would fare. My future marriage with her was on the line.

I gave a little cry and brought my fist down on the pencils. My friend Randy, who was holding the pencils, tipped his head away, in case any of the pencil shrapnel would scar his face, but I could see he had one eye on the pencil.

SNAP SNAP. VICTORY WAS MINE!

Soon afterwards, impressed by my bravado and my obviously virility (since we all know virility is defined by how well you can snap pencils karate-style), Sarah and I started "dating." I hung out at her house where I played "husband and wife" with her. We talked of the future - how we would get married and live in a big house with a white fence, and how we would have two dogs and three kids. I opened my heart to her and felt a true connection. MAYBE SHE WAS THE ONE!!!!!!!!1

But then next week she dumped me for my friend Randy.

Heartbreak at age 7. Such a shame.

And that was the story of my first girlfriend in second grade. Amusingly, my first kiss with a girl was in kindergarten. Man, I was a true playa back in elementary school... what happened?!

Posted by roy on October 25, 2005 at 01:04 PM in Foolishness | 16 Comments

I woke up yesterday craving bowling. I'm not an avid bowler by any means (I can usually break 100), so this was quite a surprise. Anyways, we (Moonie, Han, Sulhye, Eurie) decided to go bowling at AMF in Durham.

Perhaps the cravings had build up my bowling karma, because I played an AMAZING first game; my previous bowling high had been around 120 - in that first game, I managed to turkey (three consecutive strikes) in the last three frames; my last shot looked dead perfect but I couldn't get any pins to fall. I looked up and saw a wonderful score of 155 and was ecstatic.

But the bowling gods were apparently not happy with my self-confidence, for they decided to put me in my place. The next game looked something like this:
9 | 9 | 7 2 | 8 1 | 9 ...

I was throwing the ball exactly the same, and for some reason, the 10 pin (far right in the back) refused to fall. And I was unable to finish for a spare.

I marked exactly once (a strike in the 8th frame or so) and ended up with a crappy 90.

In any case, our fourth game we decided to play for ice cream (loser pays). To be "fair," we decided to combine the two girls scores - except they decided to suddenly start playing real well (funny how girls suddenly do awesome once food is on the line). Long story short, Moonie ended up sucking it up real poorly along with me in the 4th game.

And it all came down to one shot - Moonie had a final 98, and into my last frame, all I had to do was knock down six pins to win with a 100 (I had hit a strike in the previous frame).

I geared up and launched. The ball looked a little to the right, and knocked down a whole bunch of pins. Of course, it only managed to knock down 5 of the self-righteous white pins (stealing a line from Family Guy), which meant I needed to knock down ONE pin to defeat Moonie.

I have a history with AMF in Durham. A few months ago when I went bowling, I ended up a 99 on my last frame. And guess what I did? I gutterballed it twice.

I wound up for my shot ... and the ball guttered left. One stinkin' pin. ONE STINKIN' PIN.

This is the SECOND time I've missed ONE pin with one shot to go.

So not only did I not manage to beat Moonie, but the two girls ... they beat both our scores. And I had to buy ice cream. And I had to relive the horrible memories of my 99 game.

::shakes fist:: Why must you mock me, o Bowling Gods?!

Currently listening to: OZMA - natalie portman
Posted by roy on October 25, 2005 at 10:22 PM in Ramblings | 4 Comments

Ben posted this question on his Crapga:

what is a quarter-life-crisis anyways? is it just the uncertainty of not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life? if so, what happens if you never figure out what you really want to do? does the quarter-life-crisis last for your whole life??

I guess since what I was largely going through over the past few months was a quarter-life crisis of sorts, I'll try to answer this question based on my own experiences. If this comes off as trite and obvious, apologies. Because this is also a really long issue, I will tend to overgeneralize some points, but it's only to get my point across.

A quarter-life crisis is simply the friction during the transition from the college into the real world. Colleges tend to breed a sense of security and stability - you're surrounded by people of similar age who are going through pretty much the same issues. This lends to intensive interaction with your peers on an almost 24-7 basis. It's not that college students are unaware of their futures, it's just that it's much easier to drown away those concerns when you're hanging out with friends all the time. Even the friendships I had during freshman year were incredibly intensive - I felt like I got to know a lot of people really well (at the time) given the proximity of our living quarters. But of course, the moment we started living elsewhere, those friendships broke apart.

On the other hand, the real world is significantly different. We are diluted into a huge working force with people of varying backgrounds and ages. [An aside: colleges are absolutely wonderful in their ability to breakdown socioeconomic barriers - it's much easier in college to hang out with people you would never hang out with in the 'real' world - my suitemates from junior year were some of the most unique group of acqaintances I ever had.] It becomes much harder to relate to people at work, and instead of the large number of shallow acquaintances we once had in college, we try to forge more significant relationships with individuals (quality over quantity). Of course, people are fallible, and when these few relationships start falling apart, we take it harder on ourself. It's almost a vicious cycle - the lack of friends forces us to rely on fewer friends for that support we had in college - but when those fewer friends dissappoint us - we feel very lonely.

Ultimately I think the emotional impact of the quarter-life crisis is largely the move away from intense interaction more towards isolation. Could this be the reason girls get married so quickly after they graduate? It seems there was a huge number of people who got married roughly 2-3 years after they graduated. Could this also be the reason why there's such a high divorce rate (total speculation)? What if these marriages aren't the true product of an understanding of the commitment and love required between two people, but rather the result of loneliness?

The second part of the quarter-life crisis is the unrealistic expectations we have for ourselves as professionals when we first join the workforce.

Let's face it - almost nobody does what they want to do coming out of college. We all come out and start working at some job worth roughly $50K/year, trying to get on our feet. We're happy to be employed and be doing something. When my dad first started working in the real world, lifetime employment by one employer was not an uncommon thing - to be switching jobs every few years was unheard of. But is still the case?

One of the downfalls of the free labor market is that it does allow for downsizing to occur on a rapid scale. We are expendable, and it's no longer looked down upon for companies to lay off workers. Job security is a thing of the past. I'd be surprised if any of my friends who have jobs now were still working at the same job three years from now. Even people with high-paying jobs end up moving from place to place.

College breeds an idealism - we come out believing we really can have an impact and that we can change the world. However, we mostly lack the skills to do so, so we have to take these low-tiered jobs to gain more "experience." The discrepency between what we think we can do and we really can do can be extremely depressing.

I think the third part of the quarter-life crisis has to do with the ability to get closure. Your academic career is largely quite measurable - in fact, you can measure to the nearest hundred value of a number how successful you were during academics. You are told what to do, and you work hard for one goal over a period of a few weeks to get that number on an exam. You (Notice I'm no longer using 'we') feel a real sense of accomplishment when you get that A on the paper.

Metrics for success in the real world are harder to measure. I can never tell when my bosses are unhappy with my work, and the amount of work politics that I have to navigate makes it much harder for me to feel like I've done something good. Furthermore, there's never any sense of "completion." There's always something more that has to be done, so I've lost that feeling of "Wow, I did _____ and I feel good!"

The combination of isolation after experiencing intense relationships, the complete blow to one's self-ego when one realizes that we really aren't capable of changing the world in a great way, and the inability to gain satisfaction from the work we are given ... I think these were the three things that affected my quarter-life crisis.

Posted by roy on October 26, 2005 at 02:20 PM in Personal | Add a comment

I have no idea who sent this to me, but thank you.

Posted by roy on October 26, 2005 at 11:37 PM in Foolishness | 1 Comments

It's finally that time ... where I get to share with you about the project Han, Yush and I have been working on.

Füüñk allows college students at Carolina to leverage their social networks and the vast amount of information published by UNC to manage class registration.

For the time being, Füüñk is Carolina-only, but we HOPE that we can spread it to other schools as well - this is a fundamental idea that we feel really helps students a lot. Carolina is a testbed for ideas and execution ... once we get it up at Carolina, we'll try to spread it to other schools :)

The problem is that Carolina doesn't have ONE location for course search engine, course lookup, major/minor information, etc. Each system is stored separately; what happens is come registration day, students open up about 4 browser windows, get out a scrap of paper, and try to find a good schedule of classes.

Füüñk simplifies this process. Füüñk keeps course schedules, your previous class schedules (for prerequisite information), your major/minor information (to see how each class fits into your schedule), each class' classification (is it a general college, is it an arts and science, is it a cultural diversity class) and ties it all into one screen. Not only this, but we've managed to get professor grade inflation data and post it all on this site, so you can see what type of grades your professors give out (you can also get really granular and see how a professor grades for a specific class!).

On top of this, we've also built in a social networking layer. Unlike other social networking sites, we have no interest in building a gimmicky social network - no advanced profiles, no profile pictures, etc. When you add a "friend" in the system, anytime you do a search for classes, you can see immediately if any of your friends are registered for your classes. In the future, we want to expand on this by allowing users to comment on classes (we already offer professor commenting); you will be able to track what classes your friends have taken and what types of professors they have enjoyed taking.

The fact of the matter is that class registration at UNC is a mess - it's a total hit-or-miss. Given the wealth of data that is available, it was simply a matter of time before one site brought together all the information in ONE place. We've thrown into the social networking because we believe there's a HUGE value in being able to rely on your friends in registering for classes.

There is TONS of work left on the site to do - this release is merely a proof-of-concept. The site is somewhat buggy still, and the UI is a total mess (no consistency). I'll be cleaning that up in the upcoming weeks, but the general concept is there. Feature-wise, we had to cut down a LOT on the original list of features, but those will slowly be added in, but by bit.

Füüñk

Oh yeah, check out our business cards. (Yes, I chose pink as our primary color. Just cause pink is the new hot color.)

P.S. I'm gonna be writing a lot of Füüñk-related entries for the next few days, so be warned. Boredom ahead, Will Robinson!

Posted by roy on October 27, 2005 at 12:53 AM in | 10 Comments

"For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love." Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh."

- Carter Heyward

. . .

Until maybe last year, I always had a very me-first attitude. I do what I want, and if people don't want to cooperate or hang out, then screw them. I can probably attribute my great productivity along the web dev lines when I did this... it was so easy just to cut myself off whenever something wasn't going right.

But lately I've been finding that developing true relationships requires so much work. The quote above, I don't even mean "love" in the sense that a boyfriend tells a girl "I love you." Love, more generally ... like love within a family, love between friends, love between a mentor and a student. It's just so tough to be there for everybody who needs help. It really is a lot of work to be there for people. Recently I've been trying to bring people together and to be more proactive in being social, but I've also felt very unhappy with the way my personal projects have been going. It seems that either I'm pursuing success in life or success with people, and I can't do both at the same time.

Posted by roy on October 28, 2005 at 12:07 PM in Personal | 7 Comments

This is the first weekend that I can remember where I wasn't doing anything with other people. A real day to just chill out, think about nothing, and do what I want. So here are the things I got done today (in true blogging style, this post will contain no information of any use to anybody but serves only to further my vanity; I know a few hundred of you will waste a few seconds reading this waste of electrons):

  • I woke up at 2pm. I had two BLTs for lunch. They were delicious !
  • I bought some bowling shoes and went bowling for three games (by myself). I'm having trouble with my set-up (you know, the steps and release). I always end up misstepping, so I miss the slide.
  • I went to the golf range to hit some (golf) balls. Surprisingly, there were only 3 other people out there today, which meant I would only embarass myself in front of a small crowd. The first shot I hit was a gorgeous straight 150 yard+ shot with my 5-iron, but unfortunately I didn't get many good shots after that.
  • I got some work done on Fuunk, and started working on something for Tabulas.
  • I met up with a bunch of people (not my usual crew) to watch Zorro and waste money at Cheesecake Factory. Zorro was alright. Cheesecake Factory was not-so-good, although I learned a great knock-knock joke. Zorro was much better with the company of people ... I guess I should stop going to see movies by myself all the time :)

Life has been radical (heeelllloooo 1990s slang!). Tomorrow is ONE more day of weekend, which I will hope will be filled with lots of chillaxin' and relaxin' :) First drama-free weekend, please!

I think I'm going to fall asleep now, but there are currently 8 drunk Korean adults downstairs karaoking really loudly. I came in, and nobody noticed (which is surprising seeing as to how the door is right next to where they were karaoking). I was happy to see my dad and mom having a good time - I especially feel bad for my dad cause it's gotta be so lonesome being out in KC by himself.

Posted by roy on October 29, 2005 at 10:28 PM in Ramblings | 7 Comments

For some reason, the volume on my computer was on high because the volume on Winamp was on low. I'm chilling here, listening to some Five For Fighting, when suddenly my mouse brushes up against the RETARDED crazy frog advertisement on top of AIM.

I almost go deaf with that retarded song blasting in my ear. I nearly had a heart attack.

I hate you, AIM.

Posted by roy on October 30, 2005 at 11:09 PM in Ramblings | 4 Comments
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