Hey everyone, first post of the first year of the new millenium!! Or the last year of the old millenium. Whatever. First I would like to welcome all of you to my new website! Alright so it currently sucks, kiss my bu**. ;-p I've been wanting to have my very own domain name for quite awhile now but didn't really follow up on it much until now since it's been kinda slow at work. Well, not really... but it can wait. ;-) Not exactly sure _what_ I'll be doing with this thing but hey, it's my new toy, alright? Speaking of toys, for those of you who have the latest versions of either browser (Netscape || IE), isn't this DHTML stuff cool? I ran into a page that had this setup and thought it'd work pretty well for my misc. ramblings + archive page; for now at least. I tried for about 10 minutes to reproduce it on my own with Dreamweaver but the best I could come up with was something that only worked on IE 4+. So I did what any other smart web developer would do and just copied the source of the page, ripped out its guts, and substituted my own. Yeah yeah so it was the easy way out but have you looked at the JavaScript that controls this thing??? If any of you can produce _that_ on your own in a reasonable amount of time, I'll grovel at your feet and call you web stud. But don't hold me on that. ;-p For those of you who can't play with the cool, but probably economically worthless, DHTML features on this page because you're using some archaic dinosaur of a browser, UPGRADE!!!! Geez louize what's the matter with you folk?

Actually this site will probably be my testing ground for the next few months so there'll be some odd going ons every now and then. But that's ok since you probably won't visit enough to notice unless I start putting up porn or something. =p Anyway, as you might've already noticed, this month's tirade doesn't really have a cohesive point like my last few previous rantings. "Cohesive" being used rather liberally here. I would very much like to complain about the whole "Cuban Boy" fiasco but I won't because anything I write can be ignored simply because: 1. I'm not Cuban, and 2. I never had the fortune to experience the apparently living hell that is Cuba. Even if I think the Miami Cuban contingent is just a bunch of ridiculous dunderheads. So, I'll just leave off with some relatively benign observations:

• A taxi I wandered into one day had an old shriveled up pineapple as an air freshener. This was a full sized pineapple. Despite being a tad ugly, it did make the inside pineapply fresh.
  
• You can buy a Tongue Cleaner in Japan. Or more conveniently, from the mail order duty free section in Eva Airlines duty free magazine. Personally I think a toothbrush works pretty well but hey, if you're really serious about your tongue cleaning.....
  
• I only have _four_ days off (and 2 out of the 4 is the weekend) for Chinese New Years. Compared to the 9 from last year and the _10_ that Erin is getting, I'm feeling cheated. =p
  
• Cultural Note: If you're ever walking around Taiwan and happen upon one of those red "hong bao"s (the red envelopes that people put money in to gift newlyweds or relatives during Chinese New Year) just lying in the street and filled with money, you probably don't want to pick it up no matter how poor you are. Otherwise you might find yourself marrying some unknown girl. Who just happens to be deceased. Try explaining _that_ to your gf/family/friends.