Ryan Seacrest's He..he or Ha...Ha

Driving back from Delano early in the morning, I was getting bored listening to Radiohead's "In Rainbows" & Manny was passed out, asleep. Soon I started fiddling the stereo trying to find NPR. The closest I came was some station playing classical music. Hmmm...not bad. Early in the morning, kinda relaxing and I do enjoy listening to Mozart, Chopin every now & then. Soon Manny slightly raises his head,

"What the hell? Play something else"

Ughhh...I didn't say anything. I kept driving while looking for something else to listen to. That's when I came across Ryan Seacrest's 102.7 KIISFM. I think partly it was all the loud talking of 2 guys & a girl that caught my attention. Ryan Seacrest brought up something about when a guy send a SMS if he should write he...he.. or ha...ha? Which one is more manly & what not? Soon others started getting on the air voicing their opinion. I remember one girl mentioned something like if a guy ever send her a SMS with he...he, that's a big turn off & what not. I couldn't believe myself what I was listening to. With their long ass commercial breaks I could only handle it for 20 minutes or so until I simply turned the radio off.

Do we not have anything better to discuss than worry about if I should send a he...he or ha...ha txt? There's two problem here. One, I think most of us are becoming more & more opinionated. We want to express our opinions on everything, it doesn't matter if the person knows much about the subject or not. What matters, I express myself. Second, we would rather spend time on something mundane than focusing on real issues; address, discuss things that deserves some attention. I think we should have a National Silent Days (yes, I said days instead of day). It should be for at least two consecutive days where all the radio & TV stations will turn off. Similar to Nickeldeon's "Day of Play" with the exception that all of us will also keep quite, think and simply listen to others rather than expressing ourself.

So, why two days? Well, I figure day one probably won't affect us all or we won't realize the whole scope of it. But by day two, we should appreciate the benefit of keeping quite & just listening to others.

Few days later, along the same line I was thinking what can we do better than listen to Ryan Seacrest or worry about if a txt should contain he...he or ha...ha? I put together 10 suggestions in 5 categories & please feel free to make your own suggestions as well. I am listening =)

1. Own Physical Progress:
a. Take a walk around the neighborhood & at least go for a 4 miles or more walk
b. Instead of driving to Taco Bell, cook something at home. Emphasis lots of vegetables & fish

2. Own Emotional Progress:
a. Check out a book from the public library, something like "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker
b. Not so much into reading, worry not. Listen to podcast or audiobooks instead. My personal favorite LibriVox [dot] org. Here's the audiobook of "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin.

3. For your neighbor or friend:
a. Really good at making that Banana Cream Pie?! How about give one to your neighbor. Who knows maybe the old lady will keep an eye on your house next time you leave for a vacation
b. Going to watch "American Gangster" with your friend or just going out drinking. Pick up his/her tab

4. For the environment:
a. Watch either An Inconvenient Truth or The 11th Hour
b. Ride your bike or the bus to work instead of driving or simply carpool with other co-workers

5. For the poor:
a. Go through your closet, separate all the clothes you're never going to wear & drop them off at a Planet Aid box
b. Buy some can food & donate them to the Salvation Army. Do this one either with your child or your niece & nephew.

Enough telling everyone what to do. Here's something I thought was funny from Ed Kerbs Photography.

IT Freelancing

Thanks to both Craigslist, myspace & Dice, I've been doing a lot of freelance work. I usually try to target small companies that can't afford a full-time IT staff, but needs someone to setup all their computers, shared drives, user accounts, do maintenance & troubleshooting from time to time, and such & such. It's a great experience as I get to meet with individuals, get to learn about their business & sometimes consult them on the kind of PC or software they should invest on. My first priority is to make sure the client has a reliable system that won't break all the time. It should be also affordable. It's better to spend few extra hundred dollars on a Dell Latitude over Inspiron. I'm also a big supporter of open source. I always advice people to try Open Office over Microsoft Office, Thunderbird over Outlook, Avira AntiVir over Symantec Norton, or Ubuntu over Xp, and definitely not Vista. Most people give me a blank look the first time I mention Open Source and that's when I take out my laptop & give a little demo of the things they would normally do on a proprietary software.

When working as a freelance I meet many different kinds of people with all kinds of unimaginable businesses. Like the time, I met a woman who called me around 12.30 in the morning to invite me to play tennis with her at UCLA next day. Excuse me, did I miss something here...??!! I never even talked about tennis with her before, ever.

I always try to get as much information possible from the clients before going over & working on something. This gives me the opportunity to prepare myself whether if I need to carry any extra hardwire or software with me. Alas, that doesn't happen all the time. No matter how much I ask about their particular problem, you can always expect something to creep up on you. For instance, the time someone asked me to help with her laptop. I showed up to not only her laptop, but her boyfriends desktop in the next office & the wireless internet as well. Now there's no wire running to his office but he wants to go online. I get on the phone with his boyfriend & tell him the alternative to running wire would be an USB Wireless adapter. Next question:

"Well, do you have it with you? How much is that gonna cost?"

"I don't have one on me, but you can get one at Office Depot..."

Well, isn't that a waste of my money. What's the point of you coming out & you can't fix the problem?..."

I respond angrily, "Most techs don't carry this kind of stuff with them unless you had mentioned beforehand. Beside, I was called to work on laptop with virus issues."

Right then his girlfriend takes the phone from me & talks to him.

Yet, at the end of the appointment just smile at them, give 'em a business card and ask for future appointments & referral to their friends. Chao.

Well, enough of freelance junk. Here's a cool video I came across recently. He's got few other nice videos on YouTube. Check 'em out.

Jesus Loves You - Part 2

Lately, I've been listening to the Kean's "Under the Iron Sea." I love the album, especially Hamburg Song & Try Again are two of my favorites in it. I had a chance to see them last year at a festival in Lawrence. It was a great show. We got free tickets to the show & Keane did an amazing performance. Loved it.

Beside listening to Keane, I was a little surprised to find people here in LA are more religious & waving their bible than people in Kansas or even Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa or even Missouri. It's not unusual to see someone handing out church pamphlets at the bus stop, in front of a coffee shop, or someone signing some church song out loud in the bus. On one occasion I was reading Victor J. Stenger's "God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exists" at a park. When out of nowhere this older lady came up to me. She saw the big bold word God printed on the cover & exclaimed that I'm reading a book about God.

"Yeah, it's actually a different kind of book. It examines the existence of God." I told her as I tried to continue my reading.

"Oh, you don't believe in God? You know when you die, you will burn in hell forever unless you accept Jesus as your savior. " As she puts her hand on mine sitting next to me.

At this point I look at her angrily & tell her, I'm not interested. She doesn't care about that, she shuts her eyes as she starts telling me her memorized lines about accepting Jesus. By now, I began to get really upset. I move my hand from her grip. She stops & opens her eyes to see what's going on.

"Listen, I'm not interested at all. I don't care either. I just want to go back to my reading if you would excuse me now."

She gets up to leave. Before leaving she tries to hand me a pamphlet. I just ignore her going back to my reading.

Jesus Loves You

As far as I recall, in Kansas there were only two times I came across someone trying to save me from hell. The first instance was, of course at the university. I started hanging out with few people I recently met. One day few guys asked if I would like to go to a drive-in movie in Kansas City. I was really excited about it since this was my first time at a drive-in theater. On our way, we stopped in Lawrence to pick up few more people, few great looking chicks too. I was getting more excited. So, we rolled in to the theater. Everyone got their lawn chairs out. Someone offered me one too since I didn't bring one. We all went to the little store inside the theater & grabbed something to munch on during the movie. I was feeling great. As the movie was about to start, everyone got up & got in a circle holding each others hand. I didn't know what was going on, asked someone & he said they were going to thank the lord Jesus before the movie. Huh?! Did I miss something?

So, I stayed out of the praying circle. Just watching. After the prayer, everyone claiming their sit back one guy came up to me. He wants to know why I didn't join them thanking the lord Jesus. I told him I am not very religious. He proceeded to tell me about the beautiful thing of accepting Jesus & so forth until he realized I wasn't paying any attention. Needless to say, I never hang out with them again.

The other instance was, I was hanging out with two of my friends & they asked me to take them to shopping. So, we went to Kohls. I left the girls to their shopping & I was minding my own business waiting for them outside. And then out comes this guy, we strike a good conversation about life, wife & what not. After a while, he starts telling me more about his family. How he's home schooling all his children & everything. I went to a private school myself, but the whole concept of home school really awed me. I was curious, I wanted to know how does it work, how do they go to college & all of that. After a while, he proceeded to give me few pamphlet & asked me to join their little school. Of course, I'm in college & I declined. He suggested I should at least check it out sometime.

Sony Vaio VGN-FE880E & XP

It's been a while since I've posted anything. And I am truly sorry for that. Actually I've been going through a lot lately. Such as??!!

I just moved recently. It's really great to have a place, a room of my own & not share with anyone. It also sucks. Sometime I kinda wish if I had all the guys from the "Rugby House" around so I wouldn't feel so lonely. On the other hand, it gives me the time I need to focus on other things such as getting my certification out of the way.

Also, for the FIRST TIME in my life I got jumped recently. It was partially my fault because I was walking home at 11pm & txting my friend paying no attention to the my surroundings. All of a sudden this person jumped in front of me from a van, held a knife against my stomach & demanded money. We got in a little scuffle, I got out fine without paying him a dime. It's funny the way I reacted to the whole thing at that time. I could feel the knife against my stomach, but I wasn't thinking about that at all. First, I tried to ran from him, then I just stood there & talked to him. He did had an accomplice with him, a lady in a van that was blocking the whole thing from others by driving right next to us.

I was frustrated for next few days. I knew it was wrong, but I was mad, angry & I would look at everyone with extreme suspicion. But it wore off. Thanks to my hot neighbor who helped me get my mind of off it =). I did went out & got some self defense protection & pay a lot more attention while walking home.

On the other hand, I have been meaning to do some more detail posting here. Here are some of the things I have in mind:

1. I recently bought a Sony Vaio VGN-FE880E with Vista installed. I used Vista for less than a month & couldn't take it anymore. So, I rolled down to XP Pro. I thought I could just download all the drivers from Sony's website & good to go. Nope. Most of those drivers are only stupid Vista compatible so it won't work with XP Pro. So, I had to spend over 4 hours making each one work.

So, I plan to detail out the whole process for anyone wishing to rolled down to XP Pro.

2. I also plan to install Ubuntu 7.0 sometime & detail out that process as well. I haven't seen any reference for the VGN-FE880E on the web yet. If any of you've done it already or know of a site, please forward it to me. I would like to know as much as possible before doing this roll out.

3. This one is a little different. While running only a two mile today (it was getting dark & I'm still a little traumatized) I all of a sudden started thinking about the time I spent growing up praying to God asking for many many things. Anyway, I don't want to go on details now, but you may get the jest.

That is all for today. Have fun while you can.

How beautiful? very touching

I first came across this great video on this blog. All I can say how beautiful? Very touching. Only if we were all like that.



If we were all like that without stressing over religion, political points of view and of other things.

Little Heaven in my backyard

It's been 3 weeks since I've moved to LA. Different place, different flavor, different people, everything here is different. I realized now, I wasn't quite prepared for this sudden change. First week, I spent at my host family's house. Very nice people, I had a hard time eating & sleeping though.

I just got a place on Westwood near UCLA campus. I'm living at the Rugby house with bunch of Rugby players. It's a great time, we are always having a good time. I still miss my friends in Ks a lot. I've been thinking about visiting them sometime next month for few days, but then again I'm not so sure. Some of my favorite places in LA are: Point Dome, Malibu Beach, UCLA track, Chipotle in Beverly Hills, Nike Town, and few other places. I went to checkout the UCLA main library yesterday and it was OK. Westwood is not that different than Lawrence. Except there's only two bar in this college town & no pool table. Not a single one. That really sucks.

I am always used to running on dirt, like when I used to run on the levee by the Kansas River. I've been having a hard time running here on sidewalks. It has affected my training & my overall performance. Few days ago, I went out for a run as usual, but this time instead of going left I went right. Lo behold, there sidewalks are all dirt. It was an amazing feeling being able to run on dirt again, my feet was enjoying each strides. I was really happy. This is essentially a circle around campus, it's great except you can only go downhill or uphill. It's hardly ever flat & that really sucks.

Oh well, something is better than nothing, I guess.