Well last week was a total bust. For those of you not on the East Coast, the tri-state area was to have been hit with the mother of all snow storms early last week. Never came. Well, it did smack around parts of upstate NY, Long Island, and New England. But who cares? Nobody of import lives in those areas anyway. ;-p But what good did that do for those of us in and around the City? Well ok I did get a nice work-at-home day on Tuesday but still, it's not a snow day. =p So I was all psyched about having maybe one or two days off and wound up not having any. Needless to say I didn't get too much done on those 2 days anyway. The disappointment was too deep. ;-p

Then a telemarketer had the gall to call me at 9:30 in the _morning_ on a Saturday for chrissakes. Good thing I was awake already otherwise I would've ... uh, let my answering machine screen the call like I always do. But anyway, they're doing targeted telemarketing these days. Meaning that they're getting Chinese-speaking telemarketers to call me up. I've already had Chinese telemarketers from AT&T, Sprint, and MCI try to subject me to their spiel. Fortunately, I have an ace up my sleeve. I just tell 'em that I work for Qwest and that cuts the conversation real short. Another not-so-apparent job perk I guess. =p

Reading through fuckedcompany.com reminds me everyday of how lucky I am to have come back to the US when I did before the New Economy shit hit the fan and took all the jobs with it.

This here's the best teddy bear that I've ever received as a gift. Ever. It has leather pads on its feet. It's just so awesome! =) I've had it since college when it was given to me by June, Diana, and Becca. Don't quite remember what possessed them to give me a teddy bear as a present but I think they said it was cause I was hogging up June's or something ridiculous like that. I have absolutely no recollection of what June's bear looked like so how could I have been hogging it up? Hrmph. =p But thanks gals, he's a keeper. =) And a real chick magnet. It's almost like owning a dog but without all the feeding and cleaning up after it fuss. ;-) Although I guess I can't really take him out anywhere. =p

Damn I really need a coffee table. Two nights ago I must've dumped like an entire can's worth of iced tea onto our living room carpet cause I forgot I had left the cup on our dining table chair and accidentally bumped it. The only problem being we haven't been able to find one that we like at Ikea and most other furniture stores are rather pricey. Ah well, the search continues...

I've finally found a pretty good use for my ol' PowerMac 8500 computer. After being disappointed that MacOS X Server wouldn't install on it, I decided to give Linux another try. So I downloaded Yellowdog Champion Server 1.2 and have been playing around with it for the past few days. Finally got it up and running how I like it with PHP4, perl, and MySQL. Pretty excited cause now I can work on making my site dynamic and be able to just play around with Linux in general. I was pretty impressed with YellowDog. They did a really good job of making installation as easy and Mac-like as possible. And I gotta say, with GNOME and KDE, Linux finally has a semi-decent GUI interface. Although too similar to Windows for my taste.

Today's yoga hour was the most strenuous yet. Granted this was only my third class ever but still, getting more tiring. Plus our instructor likes to turn the thermostat way up cause she wants us to sweat. Heats up the muscles and loosens you up I guess so you can be more flexible. And today we got to stand on our heads. Well, we had the wall for support so we wouldn't tip over but it was pretty cool. I haven't done that since.... uh, actually I don't think I've _ever_ done that before.

Met Mark at Internet World - Wireless yesterday afternoon. First time I've seen him since Taiwan. Goddamn he's got an awesome job. ;-) Seems to get paid for just playing with the latest wireless gadgets and reporting on what he thinks would be useful for Citigroup. So he's toting around a Palm, a Pocket PC, a Blackberry, and a Motorola cell. Of which he only owns the Blackberry. And then I just went with him to pick up a Ricochet PCI card for wireless Internet access. Absolutely nutty.

Anyway, going to the wireless expo got me thinking. Do people really need to be so wired these days? With all the email/text messaging cell phones and Blackberries everywhere, everyone's in touch every waking minute. Is this a good thing? I mean I spend enough time on the net as it is. Do I really need net access when I'm sitting on the bus or hanging out at a coffee shop? Of course, the gadget-lover side of me says "Hell yeah!" but another part of me isn't so sure. Is there such a thing as having too much of a good thing?

It has come. My days of being without a Powerbook is finally over. I'm currently typing this update on my spankin' new titanium Powerbook G4 and it's just so goddamn delish I can hardly stand it! =) More raves to follow...

Waterfield Designs makes darn good laptop bags. Bought a SleeveCase from them and am quite pleased with it. Now I can tote my G4 around in something other than the anti-static plastic wrap that it came in. =p Their other bags don't look too shabby either. They had a special going before with their cargo bags which was very tempting but I needed to save money. =(

Installed and am evaluating Cold Fusion for work. I dunno, they're already missing shit that we need to work through their samples. What's up with that crap? You'd think for a company that's been around for so long they could at least get their sample stuff working properly.

Been having annoying neck and back pains for the past week or so. Can't look down too well these days which is a pain since that's pretty much standard position when using laptops. Plus it doesn't help when I do yoga on Saturdays since that requires a lot of chin-tucking.

Yes, I started taking yoga. Once a week on Saturday mornings. Basically cause Erin wanted to go so she forced me to go along as a translator if need be. Apparently our instructor favors the high-impact yoga approach so it's turning out not to be as relaxing as I had imagined. ;-p But we do get to chant "Ohm" and rest for a few minutes in the fetal position at the end of class. =)

The 15.2" screen on this G4 is just so freakin' gorgeous. No dead pixels and nice and wide. Yum! =) I had spent an entire week and a half scouring the NY/NJ area for one of these babies to show up and boy was it worth the trouble. The only problem with this thing is that since it's only an inch thick, I feel that I have to be more careful with it than I was with my old Powerbook. This one looks and feels a lot more delicate than usual. But sturdier than my Sony VAIO though since that one's mostly plastic. Strong plastic, but plastic nonetheless. And luckily I've avoided all the problems that I've read about occurring on some of these machines.

And with Virtual PC running Windows 2000, I rarely use my work laptop anymore. It'll be even better when my extra 256MB RAM comes in. 512MB RAM. That's just wacky.

But there is one problem with this Powerbook. The built-in speakers are pretty crappy. Definitely need to spend some money on decent speakers later on for this thing.

Goddang it's started snowing again. Will this never end??? =p

One of my Taiwanese cousins is now the proud father of a little baby girl! Born at like 4:17 am on 2/22 Taiwan time. I should probably ask them what they named her. The first male of my generation on my mother's side to have a child. Or to get married for that matter. Actually it looks like I might be the last of the 3 male members of my generation on my mother's side to get married. My other cousin just got engaged in January. Will be married next January. I'm getting too old for this.