Battle For Our Tomorrow ...

Taiwan 2010

2011-01-30T22:38:00.001-08:00

First of all, let me just say that Taiwan exceeded all my expectations. My first 'visit' to Taiwan was way back in August of 2010, when i stopped over on a layover coming back from Cambodia. We had a ridiculous eight hour wait that day so we went out to explore the city and it was alright. I mean, the food was alright, it was clean, it was modern, nothing really stood out. It was a place I didn't think I would go back to visit. Saw it once, was done with that.

Fast forward six months later, and obviously God has a good sense of humor, because during the holidays, I find myself in Taiwan again. This was the last place I expected to be for Christmas 2010. Life plays funny tricks on us sometimes yeah?

Anyways, without further ado. The trip blog.

Taipei 101
We spent a couple days in Taipei and saw some of the famous places. Taipei 101 was one of those places. T101 is one of the tallest buildings in the world, it's a combined shopping mall with commercial buildings, restaurants and who knows what else. Honestly, this place was a little underwhelming. I mean, it's basically just a fancy shopping mall, nothing special about it. We went in for a couple hours, ate some food and then went back out. There is an elevator you can take to go to the top floor, but there was a long line for that (we heard a couple hour wait) and the cost for that was $20 (US) just to ride an elevator. So we took a pass on it. Anyways, here are some pictures.

World Flora Expo
In a little bit of good timing, the World Flora Expo coincided with our visit to Taipei. The Flora expo is basically one humongous flower show. And we are talking huge. You need to take buses to get from one area of the park to the other area. This show happens every couple years and takes place in different countries. This year it happened to be in Taiwan, and wince we were in Taiwan we decided to go see it.

I have to admit, it was pretty cool. I mean if you had bad allergies, I would not recommend you going, but it was nice to see all the flower fields and all the exhibits. Like these.

We spent about half a day there. My only complaint was again, the crowds. This place was soooo crowded. And there were really long lines to get into the exhibits. (Couple hour wait, which we took a pass on) But it was worth the $10 US to get in.

Maokong Gondola
The third place we went to in Taiwan was the Maokong Gondola . And there we took the gondola ride into the mountainous region of Taiwan. I think one of the surprising things about Taiwan is how green and how hilly it was. For some reason, I always thought that Taiwan was just a flat island. But it's not. There are actually lots of trees and mountains in Taiwan. Here are some pictures from the gondola.

It was like a 45 minute ride from the base of the mountain to the top. We really put our trust into Taiwanese technology this time. The ride was a little nervous, but pretty enjoyable. The sites were pretty amazing. We got one of the special gondolas with a glass bottom so you can see the ground as we go up the hill.

We passed by many different and interesting sites. Not just trees, but fields and buildings as well. When we got to the top, we were greeted by a food court and a thunderstorm. Unfortunately for us, we did not have any umbrellas so we were not able to explore much up there. Evidently there was some kind of tea gardens that we could have went into if it was not raining. But we had no rain gear, so we just road the gondola back down.

So that¡¯s Taipei. From Taipei we took the rails to Taichung, the other city that we would spend most of our time in. This is a good time to talk about the public transportation system in Taiwan. Throughout our entire trip, we used public transit like 90% of the time. We took almost all forms of it. Bullet train, normal train, bus, taxi. It¡¯s pretty amazing how efficient and easy to use their rails system is. After one day, I felt confident enough that need by, I could probably get from one place to another without much trouble.

Seeing the Taiwan rails system make me realize how crappy the Bay Area rails system is. BART sucks. For example, in Taiwan, I could pay $1 (US) to go the distance of Fremont to San Francisco. The trains were clean and spacious and quiet. And they come very often. At home, I would have to wait 15 mins for a train, get on it, deal with the possibly of getting mugged, possibly sit in a disease infected seat (if I get a seat at all) and then ride it, possibly sitting next to someone who smells really bad. And it would cost like $5. Yes, I am bitter. Here are some pictures from the Taiwan bullet train ride.

Taichung
Our next destination was Taichung, where we would spend about a week in. Amy put it elegantly, if Taipei is San Francisco then Taichung would be the equivalent to San Jose. It had the same things as Taipei but lacking just a little bit of the glitz. Regardless, it was cool place, lots of malls, lots of parks and lots of good eats. It was not as crowded as Taipei was.

We stayed near downtown and the above is a picture of some of the parks nearby. I really don't know what else to show you about Taichung... So here are some random pictures.

The Food
Lastly, i will wrap up this Taiwan update with talk about... THE FOOD. Everyone who goes there always come back bragging about how good the food is. I was always skeptical... But then I came, I saw, I tasted... and damn, the food is pretty good there. It seemed wherever we went, the night market, the mall, the supermarket, downtown, down the street everywhere the food was so good. I will end this update with pictures of some of the food we ate.

Treasures From The Heart

2011-01-20T21:29:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in the midst of chaos spawns the most beautiful things. The church 2010 Christmas project this year was pretty odd. The original plan was to put together some shoeboxes and send them over to an organization in Cambodia. The idea was to disseminated instructions to the smallgroups and then have the smallgroups lead the effort. Right from the start, the project was very confusing, as the instructions weren't very clear, the and vision behind it was not very clear. To make matters worse two weeks before Christmas, the project direction changed completely.

Because no one knew what to give the Cambodian families (toys? clothes? Nintendo DS?) the whole shoebox idea was scrapped, and instead the groups would just collect money and send it to Cambodia for the purpose of buying water filters. This change was decided with two weeks before Christmas and the whole thing was hectic and confusing. Regardless, we all got it done and the gifts were sent over.

So our church sent the money and the cards to TFTH and went on with our own lives. We celebrated Christmas, rang in the new years. I went to Taiwan. We all pretty much forgot about the project... Until this week when the head of the organization sent us photos (more correctly, they facebooked it) of the families with their new filters and cards.

When I saw those pictures, I was kind of stunned. I cannot explain why. And I still don't know why. It was like I couldn't believe it. A project that, that I will bet, became an afterthought after it was done, heck probably was an afterthought AS it was being done, will actually change lives. (I don't know about other people in our church, so maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but for this project, I just threw some money in the pot and was done with it). Seeing the actual faces of the people that got our gifts kind of blew me away.

One of the themes for Christmas this year at our church was "entering the story." The premise was that when Jesus came down from heaven he "entered our story", and made us part of it. And us, as Christians, our duty was to "enter the story" for other people. The people we choosed were the Cambodians. And I guess I never really understood what it meant to enter that story, until I saw these pictures.

**** Treasures From My Heart is a grassroots organization in Cambodia that works with one of the most marginalized group of people in the world, women with aids. They rescue these victims and they provide housing and skills training. They are relatively small, and support about 11 families. We ran into them entirely by God's chance last year. Some of our group was shopping in the Russian Market minding our own business when we started talking to the a lady who was standing there. After some conversation, we found out she was one of the founders of TFTH (which had a shop in the market). One thing led to another, and we ended up meeting with her and her husband before we left Cambodia and promised we would do what we could to help. She and her husband, very nice , very humble, very loving people. Thanks to the world of facebook we were able to stay intouch even after we left Cambodia.

For more information about the group, see these links.
Treasures From The Heart
More Pictures

Welcome Our World

2011-01-18T00:03:00.000-08:00

Well, the hits keep on coming. I wrote about change in my last post of 2010, since then, another big change has happened...

After 15 great years. 165K+ miles. Many road trips. Many traffic jams. Many good times... it is time to say goodbye to a mainstay in my life.. Goodbye green Honda Accord. It was a good car.. NO, it was a great car. My first ever car that my dad bought me way back in highschool. I kept it through my college years. And kept it through my working years. If I had my way, i would have kept the car forever. Or at least to 200K miles (which was my goal), but alas it was not to be. It's not that I kept my car in bad condition. I took care of it. Changed it's oil whenever it needed it. Took it in for tuneups. But the last year just saw a flurry of problems with it. First, the power window failed. One day, i just rolled down the window.... And it never came up again. Ever. It just stayed down. I eventually force it up, and taped down the button so I would not roll it down accidentally... until one day my mom drove my car and accidentally rolled it down. I drove my Accord with the window down (taped up) for about week, in cold weather (I damn well froze that week...) After that I paid the mechanic $500 to fix the problem. And he did! The windows worked for about 1 month before it died again. I am convinced fixing that window is now more trouble than it's worth.

That was the first sign of trouble. It was also easy to work around. The second was that everytime i drove the car, it makes some wierd clicking noise that sounded really bad. You know that Smoke Monster in Lost when it appears? It's kind of like that sound. It took another $500 for the mechanic to fix this.. only to have it come back again two months later. Sigh.

The list of problems continued, The key stopped working. I started noticing that my key wouldn't work anymore. To open a car door would take some wiggling and jiggling the key in there for a few seconds before the door finaly opened. And then some more wiggling and jiggling to actually start the car. We eventually bought a new key from Honda for $50 and that solved the problem temporarily... oh yeah, and my keyless entry failed about two years ago, hence i use the key..

And then last December was the straw that broke the camels back.. My heater started dying. It would refuse to work some days and some days work just fine. I just don't understand. And recently, it's latest trick is that it flat our refuses to start. I need to jam the key in there a couple times before the engine starts. Good times.

Hence, it was time to say goodbye Honda Accord... And hello Honda Civic!!

I took this baby home Saturday. After some mad negotiating skills, conducted mainly by my bro (who needed a new car as well), we were able to land two Honda Civics for a relatively good price. New Honda Civic... you have big shoes to fill and I hope you fill it well. Anything less than 10years 150K will be unacceptable. I'm hoping I can get 200K out of this car...

I also want to remind everyone to please be patriotic and stick an American flag on your bumper. Country First!!!!

Fixing a Mistake!

2011-01-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

I made a pretty bad mistake in my 2010 year in review post...

Well allow me to rectify the problem!!!

FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL

2011-01-06T23:29:00.000-08:00

Well. It's that time of year again. NFL playoff time! My favorite time of the sporting year. I will now prognosticate my picks. For the first time ever, i entered a work bracket playoff pool at work and am putting money to my picks. Here's how i think NFL 2011 plays out.

AFC.

Wildcard
INDY(-3) over NYJ Jets overrated since the beginning of the seaon. If they didn't get those fluke wins (Houston, Cleveland, Detroit), they don't even make the playoffs. Colts will win by at least a touchdown. I hope more so Rex Ryan can shutup.

Kansas City(+3) over Baltimore I know it's weird, but i really like the Chiefs in this game. Arrowhead is a tough, tough place to play, and seeing this it he Chiefs first postseaon appearance since 2006, the crowd will be amped up. And KC offense is underrated (Bowe, Charles) and i think they squeak by Baltimore.

Divisionals
Indianapolis over the Steelers cause if any team can beat the Steelers D, it's Peyton Manning. New England rolls Kansas City

Semis
New England over Colts.

NFC.

Wildcard
PHI(-3) over Packers Because darnit, I love Michael Vick and want to see him in the Super Bowl. Most exciting player in our generation, he single handledly won my fantasy football title for me this year. The NFL fans need Michael Vick.

New Orleans(-11) over Seattle New Orleans wins for sure, but Seattle will cover. 11 is too high a spread for this game.

Divisionals
Philly upsets the Bears and though I am not 100% sold on Matt Ryan, i think Atlanta beats New Orleans

Semis
Michael Vick returns to Atlanta!!!! Philly over Atlanta

Super Bowl
New England over Michael Vick

2010 Year In Review!

2011-01-03T01:06:00.000-08:00

Happy New Years everyone! As we start the new year, i like to look back at the old year and look at all that went down. Here's the year in review blog of 2010.

January

The year started out with a commitment to excellence... AKA going to the black hole and risking our lives to watch the Oakland Raiders play football. Thanks for Paul for the free tickets.

We also saw Switchfoot play in 2010 in San Francisco. Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek played with the band on a couple songs.

We went crabbing off of Pacifica Pier during one of the worst storms of the year. The storm was so bad that they shutdown the main pier and we had to goto another pier.

February

Wow, I didn't realize January was so busy. I guess it kind of was a preview of the year to come. In February, we saw Andy Roddick in the SAP Tennis Open.

March

6 basketball games, 2 buzzer beaters in 72 hours. Went to the NCAA Men's Tournament opening round in San Jose. Saw the 2010 runner-ups Butler Bulldogs play in the tournament. What a great weekend of basketball. Very special thanks to Val for getting me the tickets!

I did two bike parties with my bro and his friends in 2010. The San Jose bike party is the SJ version of San Francisco's critical mass. In which large number of bikers take to the roads and annoy car drivers. The first one we did in March was kind of weak. We got there late, we got lost, then we got tired and had to call Edmund my other brother to pick us up. Instead of critical mass, it was more like an impotent speck. Bike Party Fail.

The first ever Walk Smallgroup retreat went down in March. We went up to the mountain town called Arnold (near Yosemite). We hiked the snowy mountain trails, we talked, we fellowshiped, we ate good food and we learned much from one another. It was a great weekend.

April

In another epic weekend, the gang went for our second 'Last Hurrah' (in which will probably be, the last hurrah). This time to Cabo. What an epically fun weekend. We ate, we hungout, we drank, we ATVed from the desert to the shore, we played on the beach and we enjoyed incredible sunsets. Read the blog recount of the trip.

Saw Jennifer Knapp and Amy Courts in concert one week after Jennifer Knapp announced to the world she was gay. Would there be riots? Would there be protests? Unfortunately, no.

May

Watch Sammy pay $30 for a bowl of Pho. AKA The Pho Challenge. AKA Sammy's Epic Failure. We all took great joy in his misery... And i got a great blog out of it!

Watched Fireflight in Concert in San Jose.

June

In the second food-related disaster of 2010. Watched Candace bomb the fireeater challenge. It was painful to watch, but hey, i got another great blog out of it!

Hiked Yosemite Half-Dome for the second and last time in my life. I did this hike about five years ago and I forgot how painful it was. 9 miles, 12 hrs. When i got to the top i was so tired i fell asleep and forgot to look at the amazing view.

July

Cambodia 2010. Read about it here.

The day after I got back from Cambodia, I went on a family fishing trip to Angel Island. I love fishing!

Liberated two turtles from my parents home. Meet Edgar and Igor. I hope they are still alive.

Bike Party #2. Because of our epic failure the first bike party, we had to try it again. This time we succeeded. We biked from Santa Clara to San Jose and then back. 30 mile ride that ended at midnight. Much fun.

August

I started dating Amy. On our first date we saw Beauty and the Beast musical. It was a great month.

September

Saw Paramore with Tegan and Sara in San Jose.

Closed down Beth's Donut Shop after twenty six years of operation.

October

In one of the biggest sporting moments in my liftime. Saw the Giants win the NL Pennant and then the World Series... Wow, typing that out, it's still a little unbelieveable. Wow. 2010 was already an incredible year before this, but this pushed it over the top.

November
Nothing significant happened in November.

December

Saw Brooke Fraser in concert. Her new album of 2010 Flags is one of my favorites. My favorte albums from 2010 is either this album or Sandra McCrackens hymns album In Feast Or Fallow

Finished off the year with one last adventure... Taiwan! I will write a separate blog about it, but for now, enjoy those teaser pictures.

Happy New Years everyone! Hope 2011 is a good one for everyone.

10 Thoughts

2010-12-27T18:54:00.001-08:00

Ten random thoughts about random things in Taiwan. Sorry the internet here is soooooo slow or i would have uploaded some pictures by now, but because it is slow, the pictures will be uploaded once I get home.

10. I am not a food snob or anything, but even I have to admit that the food here is pretty good. I had a taste of it last summer during a layover coming back from Cambodia when we ate the night market. It seems like you can walk into any place off the street and get noodles and the quality would be excellent. I am not kidding when i said i might have gained ten pounds the last two weeks. My favorite dish is probably the beef noodles.

9. Sanitization is a known verb here. Even the street restaurants are relatively okay to eat in without fear of getting disease. I have not needed to use the Purell that i brought once this trip. And my stomache has felt fine the whole time.

8. My goal was to not use a squat toilet the whole trip. The streak went on for ten days... and was broken today at the most unlikely of places... A very modern, 21st century mall. This mall had super fancy bathrooms... but with squat toilets. Sigh.

7. The public transportation system in Taipei is everything the Bay Area transportation system is not. Cheap, efficient, clean and reliable. It's funny how the clipper card is just being introduced to the Bay Area while in Taiwan, this technology has existed for years.

6. The smart-phone revolution has not yet hit Taiwan... Not yet. Neither has the Apple revolution, since there are no Apple stores yet.

5. I like how Taiwan doesn't feel the need to fill every inch of available space with buildings. Lots of parks, lots of trees, lots of just free space. This makes downtowns a nice area to just go and walk around in.

4. Things here are not cheap. Except for the food.

3. There are actually a lot of things to do in Taiwan. We went to the Mushroom Kindgom, the Lavendar Gardens, the Maoking gondola, Taipei 101 and the Flora Expo. And we didn't even get a chance to entirely look at the whole thing. I would have loved more time to explore those places a little more..

2. The weather here is just like spring/fall in the Bay Area. I love it. Especially since theres been a tropical storm in the Bay Area the last week... It is funny though, when it's 60 degrees here, people bust out there scarves, peacoats, 'winter weather' clothes. While we Californians walk around in shorts and t-shirts.

1. When we visited Taiwan in the summer during our layover, i thought 'never again', not that it sucked or anything, I just didn't see the allure of it... But i guess life plays funny jokes on you, and now I am finding myself quite enjoying Taiwan and incredibly, i think i will miss the place when I leave.. And i don't mind coming back again in the future.

And that has been the most suprising thing.. Can't wait to show everyone pictures.

Missing Christmas

2010-12-25T08:01:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas Everyone!

We just tipped midnight in Taiwan so it's officially Christmas here. Christmas in Taiwan is not exactly like Christmas in America. The weather is still 70 degrees, it's been sunny most of the week, and the decorations are a bit funny. If you go into downtown Taipei, you will still see the lit trees and the lights, but all in all, compared to America, Christmas hear barely registers a peep. It's just not a big deal here. No commercials, no music, no crazy crowds trying to do last minute shopping...

And i have to admit. I miss it.

I miss the American Christmas. All of it. I miss the Christmas music. I miss the crazy over-extravagant outdoor lights. I miss Frosty, I miss Rudolph, I miss Santa, I miss the elves. I miss the silly gift exchanges. I even miss the shopping, the spending money and giving gifts. I miss it all.

Like most things, i guess i never really appreciated Christmas for what it is until I went without Christmas. Skipping Christmas this year has made me realize how special this time of year and how rare it is. It's the one time in the year where life slows down and people relax a little. We take ourselves a little less seriously, and the burdens of life feel a little lighter. Peace on earth (at least America) is experienced. Even if this feeling last one or maybe two weeks, for some people, it's the only time in the entire year where they can feel just a little bit of levity in their lives. Is it worth it? To me it is.

I think it's too easy as Christians to go out and bash the American way of Christmas. We say it's too commercialized and we say that people have forgotten the real meaning of Christmas. All of that is probably true, I won't deny that. But today, being in Taiwan, where Christmas pretty much is like any other day, I wonder if America got it right. Bombard Christmas into everyones lives. Whether it be commercials, nativity scenes, trees, lights, snow, whatever, it's hard to miss Christmas in America. And through that, generate a sense that peace is coming, even if it's for two weeks. Maybe this is exactly what the American people need. What we need is peace.

I do find it ironically funny that some of the most stressed out people during this time of year are the people preparing the Christmas programs, the Christmas sermons, and other Christmas service projects. Christ came to bring peace on earth and us Christians are sometimes the most stressed out this time of year. Sometimes I wonder if this time would be better use of this time to enjoy the peace that Christmas brings.

I am not sure where I am going with this. So i will cut it off here. I do want to wish everyone back a home a merry Christmas!! I miss you all back in California. We'll see you in a week!

2010!

2010-12-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still... It feels safer somehow.

I guess when they say life is unpredictable, it's true. At this exact moment, i find myself in the great country of Taiwan, it's 6:30AM, I'm battling a little bit of jetlag, so hence I have decided to work on my much neglected blog. If someone told me at the beginning of 2010 that i would be spending the Christmas holidays in Asia, i would think they are crazy, but alas, here I find myself.

As I look back onto the year of 2010, one word describes it. And that is the word CHANGE. Some changes were predictable and some unexpected. Some I looked forward too, some I dreaded.. But strangely enough, almost all change was good, there was not one that i look back at and wish it didn't happen.

2010 saw me change employers. I left the company I have been working for for the last five years and joined a startup company in The City. This was a much needed change and should have happened about eight months earlier. The red flags started going up that my old company was in deep financial trouble. This lead to the company making radical decisions like laying off people, and cutting corners wherever and whenever possible. After the first round of layoffs, morale went down the drain and my motivation to work for the company went with it. People were hired to fix the problems, but they just made the matter worse, my last manager at the job was an a-hole that I had no inclination to work for. Hence I quit. And i joined a startup in SF.

I admit, this change I sometimes have second thoughts about. I hate to admit this, but at Lyris (because i hated it so much...), I did as little work as possible, i went in late, left early, was on facebook three hours a day, zoned out through the meetings, and was as unproductive as possible. The last couple of months there, i worked average of 20 hrs a week. I came to work angry and bored, and I left angry, bored and unmotivated. The job sucked the life out of me....

My new job, i work a normal schedule, get in on time, and leave on time. It's more work, but it's more rewarding and the people are nicer. I feel more satisfaction in my job and I'm happier at the end of the day, though more tired. Though sometimes I long for the days when i can not care about work and slack off, I know it's better and i'm glad i made this change.

2010 was a change for a year in my family. My parents retired and both of my brothers get engaged. This has been great a wonderful news for our family. It brought great happiness and joy at the same time. Let the wedding planning commence!

2010 saw me change my Facebook relationship status to undeclared to dating Amy Woo. Of all the changes in 2010, this was (by far) the biggest, the most unexpected, the most life-changing. It was also the best. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that in 2010 I would start dating someone, and never in my wildest wildest dreams did I dream that it would be someone like Amy. But somehow, someway, with gentle nudging here and there, and God handling the timing, we got together in August, and it has been just one adventure after another since. I guess timing is everything and I cannot wait to see what happens in this arena in 2011.

* For the record, the lack of words i have to say about this is not by any means to insignify this. Some things, are just not to be written publicly about yet, I know readers want stories, and i think you'll get them soon enough, but for now, i'm gonna leave it at this.

2010 saw my church change leadership and just change in general. This was one that was expected since it was announced way back in 2009, but I didn't realize the toll it would take on my spiritual life. One of the things I was worried about was our outgoing pastor becoming a lame-duck pastor.However, the thing I didn't worry about and that happened to me was that instead of a lame-duck pastor, we had a lame-duck congregation. I didn't realize it, but I unintentionally, subconsciouly checked out of church once the change was announced. It didn't hit me for a while, but after a couple months i found myself desiring less of church, desiring less of community. The instability, the rotating guest speakers, the seemingly directionless church.. i know it's no excuse, but those all took it's toll. This went on for.... quite a long time, more than a couple months. I was so glad when our new pastor started in November, I mean for me, just having that stability and having a leader is huge. I look forward to 2011 and the direction our church takes.I once heard that the inability to change is a flaw. Sometimes a tragic one. I wondered about this more than a couple times during the year.

But at the moment, it's the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw, my inability to change. I don't think I'm alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it's kind of everyone's flaw. Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still... It feels safer somehow.

And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar. Because if you took that leap of faith, went outside the box, did something unexpected... Who knows what other pain might be out there, waiting for you. Chances are it could be even worse. So you maintain the status quo. Choose the road already traveled and it doesn't seem that bad. Not as far as flaws go. You're not a drug addict. You're not killing anyone... Except maybe yourself a little.

When we finally do change, I don't think it happens like an earthquake or an explosion, where all of a sudden we're like this different person. I think it's smaller than that. The kind of thing most people wouldn't even notice unless they looked at us really close. Which, thank God, they never do. But you notice it. Inside you that change feels like a world of difference. And you hope this is it. This is the person you get to be forever... that you'll never have to change again.

Comment From A True A's Fan

2010-11-04T20:33:00.000-07:00

This is from a true A's fan... This is loyalty people... From the great Sammy Z.

sammy z said...

Steve, you know I love you, but as a die hard A's fan, it was gut-wrenching to see the Giants win the championship. It was the only thing the A's can say they have over the Giants. Giants get all the media coverage, they get the ballpark, now, they finally got their first championship. Anyone who is a die hard A's fan would know not to shed their loyalty else they aren't real A's fans. Rooting for two teams is like having 2 wives. With all that said, Congrats to the Giants. Job well done.

And That's It!

2010-11-04T02:07:00.000-07:00

It takes an epic event to make me want to blog these days. Well the epic event happened Monday night..... San Francisco Giants World Series Champions.

For all my years as being a sports fan, the Giants winning the 2010 World Series is the penultimate moment. I don’t think there will be another sporting event in my life that will ever bring me as much joy and happiness as this Giants championship. I don’t think there will be another event that I will be this emotionally invested in as this years World Series. I can’t see it happening. One day, hopefully the Sharks will win the Stanley Cup, and I will be happy for that, but not as happy as I was when Brian Wilson struck Nelson Cruz to end Game 5.

To really put things in perspective, as a man, i don’t believe in the art of crying or tears for that matter. But during game 5, when Edgar Renteria hit that three run homer, the moment was so overwhelming that I had tears in my eyes. Then each out after that as the moment got closer and closer, each out I had tears in my eyes. And then just at random intervals after that during the postgame celebration and interviews. Even today, as I was driving through Fremont, I saw a a banner at a high school that said “Go Giants!” and that brought tears to my eyes.

The bandwagon fans will never understand what this title means to the people who have been rooting for the Giants all our lives. They will never understand the years of suffering, the years of coming up short, the heartbreak, the pain, the torture that was endured.

I became a Giants fan in 1993. That was the year after they almost moved to Florida but then Peter McGowan came and saved the team. I became a fan because for Christmas, I had received a small transistor radio, and from that, I discovered the joy of listening to baseball on the radio (KNBR 680, The Sports Leader) and became a Giants fan. That year, 1993, was Barry Bonds first year with the Giants... and they won an incredible 102 games, yet missed the playoffs by one game. As a kid, I thought there would by many more years of winning seasons... Except , there wasn’t. That was kind of the beginning of torture. From there, we endured the baseball strike, playoff flameouts, the steroids scandal, crappy teams , and more crappy teams. Then 2002 happened. 2002 was like a huge kick in the groin, followed by a punch in the head, followed by another kick in the groin. It was painful. 2010 redeemed all that and made the past history.

Being a Giants fan means always seeing the cup half empty and cracked. You expect bad things to happen, for me, it took for the final out to happen to actually believe we had won the World Series. Up until the last out, I thought the Giants would figure out a way to lose it. But they didn’t.

It was really amazing to see how the entire Bay Area community gravitated towards this team. Something like this really transcends sports. It was bigger than that. I think due to social media, Giants fever spread fast, it seemed like everyone the Bay Area was a Giants fan. Even A’s fans shed there loyalty and became Giant fans. People of all creed, gender, economic background, they all cheered for the Giants. It was the strangest most awesome thing I’ve ever seen. They had 1 MILLION people in San Francisco for the parade today, that is amazing. The day after the World Series, I wanted to get a newspaper and they were sold out almost everywhere. I tried to goto Sports Authority to get a cap, and they were sold out everywhere. It was crazy.

Not having to work the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the liberty to watch most of the games and there have been just so many incredible moments. Timmy’s 14 Ks. Bumgarner’s World Series game four. Cody Ross two homers against Roy Halladay. Matt Cain’s 20+ scoreless innings. Freddy Sanchez defense. Javy Lopez against lefties. But my favorite has to be the final out, when Brian Wilson struck out Nelson Cruz. I love the radio call of the play. “Swing and a miss. And that’s it!” done so elegantly by Duane Kuiper.

I will end this blog with this youtube clip. I took Amy on a date during the clinching game 6 of the NLCS (Philadelphia series). When i made a reservation to this place in San Mateo, i did not realize that the restaurant also had a bar section with TVs in it. (The cynical amongst you guys will say I planned it so that the restaurant did have TVs, but i swear that is not the case). As we were eating, we were watching the game at the same time. The place erupted when Uribe’s HR gave the Giants the lead and then after each out. Here is the restaurant reaction after Wilson got the final out.

And that’s it! The Giants are world champions!

How To Make A Hole

2010-10-06T00:13:00.001-07:00

Thanks for all the kind comments and thoughts on my last post. Some of the comments really hit home .. i'm really touched by a lot of them. It's funny, when i write these blogs, one sill thing i do is I always equate the amount of time i spend on a post to how good it is. For the Donut Shop post I spent about two hours for everything (which is short for me), so when I got all these comments saying how much people enjoyed it, I was shocked.

Anyways, as the second part of that post, I want to answer one question that I consistently get asked... People always ask me how donut holes are made, so I took some videos to show you guys.

After the holes have been rolled out, we dump them all into a batch of oil and after they are all sufficiently fried, we drop sugar on them.

So there you have it, now you all know how donut holes are made. And to answer the question, yes, donut holes actually do come from the hole of a donut.

Beth's Donut Shop

2010-09-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was the end of an era for the Tangsombatvisit family. After 26 years of operation, Beth’s Donut Shop finally closed it’s doors to the public once and for all.

Fixtures at 263 Calaveras, Milpitas, CA.

For 26 years, my parents ran a little donut shop in Milpitas. For 26 years Beth’s Donut Shop opened its doors at 5AM (or 6AM, the few times my parents overslept) to sell hot fresh donuts to customers. After 26 years, my parents decided it was time to hang up the old rolling pin and go into retirement. They’ve actually been trying to sell the shop for a little over two years now, so when they got a reasonable offer two months ago, they jumped on it and didn’t look back. On Saturday, we closed the door to Beth’s Donuts for the last time and we took down the large banner that overlooked Calaveras Blvd for over two decades.

The last batches of donuts made at Beth's Donuts

The shop went through good times, bad times and interesting times. From it’s initial years (which i don’t know much about since i was very young), to the dot com boom which were the peak earning years for Beth’s (Milpitas was just on the outskirt of Silicon Valley and the we definitely capitalized on the free-spending ways of the period), to the bubble bursting (which caused a almost 200% drop in profit), to the whole health craze/fad which caused people to stop wanting to eat donuts, to the days which saw Beth's transform into sort of a bazaar which along with selling donuts, sold all sorts of little knick-knacks like shoes, chips, jerky, seeds, to these end days as Beth's gracefully winds down.

The family comes to celebrate the last day of Beth's Donut. We all get chance to make donuts one last time.

It’s hard to to say what Beth’s Donuts meant to my family over the years. From a practicality standpoint, it allowed my family to live a slightly above average lifestyle, we were never rich, but we definitely had it better than what is probably expected from two people who did not finish college. It allowed my parents to purchase two houses, a couple cars and it put three kids through private schools and into college. My family owes a lot the shop and to the customers that bought from us, I will forever be thankful for that.

All this did not come cheap. My parents worked their tails off at the shop. Running a donut shop is not easy, my parents had to wake up before the crack of dawn. The shop opened at 5AM each day. Most days they would get up between 2-3 AM and work nonstop until noon. During our peak business years, because business was so good, sometimes they would have to work 14-16 hour days. These were they days when we literally made donuts all night long from midnight to dawn. They would do this 365 days a year, seven days a week. The only times the shop closed was for major holidays (like Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Independence Day etc) and when my grandma died the shop closed for a couple days. In that 26 years, my mom and dad never took a vacation longer than 2 days.

Dad and Mom. Superstars. Heroes.

When me and my brothers were old enough, we started working at the shop as well. During the summers we would work in the shop on Fridays and Saturdays, and then during the school year, we would work Saturdays. We would keep the same schedule as my parents, waking up really early at like 4 or 5 and then working till noon. This was fun and exciting the first day. After that, it was hard work. I think if we’re all honest, all my bros would say that they hated the experience, but am thankful for it because of the life lessons that we learned from it. Working at the shop molded each of us, all in different, but mostly good ways.

Edmund and Anthony working the fryer and the roller for the last time.

We learned about the merits of hard work and we learn to appreciate people who did that. We learned to be resourceful with what we had, and not complain about what we did not have. We learned to respect people if we wanted to be respected ourselves. We learned what it means to be smart with our finances. We learned how valuable sleep is. But I think above all, we learned about sacrifice, especially the sacrifice parents make for their children out of love.

My parents.

The story of Beth’s Donut Shop is a story about my parents as much as it is about the shop. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how my parents were able to keep the shop up and running for that many years. The turnover and failure rate for the restaurant business is pretty high, especially for small businesses. We survived two economic recessions. And it’s not like Beth’s Donuts reinvented itself every couple years. We’ve literally been selling the same donuts and coffee for the last 26 years. The shop interior has aged a lot as well. The selling area was last repainted about fifteen years ago. Wear and tear is fairly noticeable. In it’s later years, Beths’ Donut definitely was a looking a little worn down.

Old friends : Mixer and Fryer.

But somehow, despite all of this, the donut shop survived. The customers that my parents had were very loyal to the shop. And I think this is the biggest testament to my parents, how loyal some of the customers were.

Some of the stories are pretty amazing. The Best Western down the street has been ordering from us for the last fifteen years or so. We’ve have had Chinese restaurant cooks that would come to the shop for a coffee, donut and a smoke each morning before clocking in. The town senior citizen center has been ordering from us each Saturday for the last ten years. We’ve sold donuts to kids that when they grew up, they would order from the shop for their workplace. We had customers who lived in Milpitas, went away, and every time they traveled back to the city, they would stop by to say hi and order donuts. My favorite story is the one customer that we sold donuts to as a kid, and my parents watched him grow up and go away to college, every time he visited home from college, he would make it a point to come to the shop and order stuff.

So there it is. Twenty six years. I wondered how i would feel with the store closing down. I think my dad summed up all of our feelings with this text he sent to all of us the morning after.

Me and mom thx u all for help us clean the store and celebrate our retirement from the donut shop. It is tough to say good bye after 26 years. Well i am sure we will miss it just a little bit.

And it’s true. Typing this blog up and remember the past... I will admit, I miss the shop... maybe more than a little. It was hard work, it was at times dirty work, the shop was small, dingy, run down, and not the cleanest, but dammit, it was our shop, our property, the lifeline of the family for so many years. The new owners are gonna convert the place into an Indian fast food place and the more I think about it, the more that saddens me. I guess it’s a sign that Beth’s is gone forever... It would have been nice if new owners would have kept the place a donut shop...

And that's it. Goodbye Beth's Donuts. You will be missed. I will close it out with our last ever yelp review. Which i think sums it up nicely.

One more story

2010-09-03T01:30:00.001-07:00

Before we get to the bulk of this update, I want to recommend the new Tenth Avenue North album. Everyonce in a while an artist or band makes it out of the sewage which is contemporary Christian music and catches my ear. I like this album quite a bit. My favorite song on it is below.

There's one more story I want to share from Cambodia. This is a story I debated telling in the main blog, but then I couldn't figure out a way to fit it into my original outline so I left it out. But this week something reminded me of this orphan and I feel the need to tell this story. Here's Phary. I couldn't really find a picture of just her, so we get Lizz's face on this blog as well.

One of the girl orphans that we met was named Phary. She's about 15 or 16 and she had one of the bigger personalities for girl orphans. While most of the girls are more on the shy, quiet, conservative side, this one was outgoing, sassy, spunky, and had a little bit of attitude. You could tell she was a little different than most of the other girls. She also spoke better english than most of the other girls.

Anyways, almost right from the beginning, for some reason unbeknownst to me, she liked hanging around me. She nicknamed me 'kevan' and she liked teasing me and playing these silly little games with me. And, here's the strangest part, she liked coming up to me and punching me in the stomache... literally. Everyonce in a while, she would just walk up to me and punch in the the stomache. Sometimes hard. Sometimes soft. All times playfully... I think. It was weird. I never understood why she did that... until this week. On our last day in Cambodia, just as we were leaving, she gave a gift, a picture and a letter. She gave these things to us as we were leaving, and it was dark, so I stashed the letter in my journal to read later. I figure I would read it when we got back to the hotel or on the plane ride home..... well I hate to say this, but I completely forgot about the letter... until last week when I opened my journal and it fell out. Oops.

Here's a picture of the actual letter she wrote me. You might be able to pick up the letter. She writes pretty well for a Cambodian.

Phary is from Thailand (i'm not sure if she's Thai or Cambodian born in Thailand) and her letter said that I reminded her of her brother, whom she use to play with (by hitting). Her brother died from a sickness years ago and she said that when she played with me, I reminded her of him. I am not exactly sure of her story like how she got from Thailand to Cambodia, but I do know her mom is alive. One of the things we also discovered about Phary is that her mom use to work for the orphanage but was laid-off due to budget cuts. The thing is that Phary don't see her mom that often because she worked in another orphanage, and after her mom got laid-off, she didn't know where she went. One of the things I pray for for Phary is the safety of her mom and that daughter and mother can be reunited one day.

Anyways. That is the last Cambodia story I think. Even though it's been two months since the trip and many things have happened, I still think of these orphans quite orphan and I pray for them weekly. It's funny, previous years, after getting back, in about a month most memories of the trip would have started to fade. But this years trip, the kids, their faces and their stories are still pretty fresh in the mind.. I think it's a good thing.

Friday, Bloody Friday

2010-08-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

I never want to go through what I went through today. What started out as an innocent Friday work day turned out to be a bloody mess by the end of the day.

The company laid off 50 people today. I know that don't sound like much, but when your company size is 300 people, that is a lot of people. Almost twenty percent of the company. This is the first time I've ever went though major layoffs at any company and the experience sucked. I came in at my usual time in the morning, had my usual Friday morning meeting with my team. Everything seemed normal, but just fifteen minutes later the bombs started going off. I was IMing one of my team members asking her a question and she IMed back that she's been let go. I was confused, as I couldn't really believe what I was reading. So I went to her desk, only to find that they had someone guarding her cubicle to make sure no one could talk to her.. WTF?

So I go back to my desk and word leaks that these layoffs were going down in all three branches of the company. And it was not just people low on the totem pole. Directors, vps, managers were all getting the axe. No one was immune. And it was not just a handful of people, we're talking major reconstruction of the company.

For the record, I somehow dodged the bullet and was not given the pink slip. It was a surreal morning though. Everyone was trying to find out who got cut and who survived. You know that scene in that movie where a bomb goes off in the middle of a city and people are trying to find out who survived? That was kind of what work was like today, we used email, IM, texting, phone to find out who survived today's cuts. Luckily, most of my friends did, a couple of really good ones did not. There was anger, there was grief, there were tears. It was a hard day.

I always thought I was pretty good at separating work life and personal life, but events like this just leaves you drained. Even as one of the survivors, I still feel pretty crappy. It's sad to see your good friends leave the company, some left without even a chance for me to say goodbye as they were on vacation or working remotely. It's also maddening to see how this company has been run into the ground to the point that layoffs had to happen. Today's events left me drained and wanting to just go home and drink a beer or ten. (For the record I did not do that). It also reminds me that there is no such thing as indispensable people at any job. In a company, when push comes to shove and the bottom line needs to be met, everyone and anyone is expendable. Welcome to corporate America.

Regardless. Monday is a new chapter. If nothing else, it will be interesting....

Cambodia 2010 - I Love This Country

2010-08-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

We'll start out the Cambodia 2010 post with some honesty... I was not planning to go on the trip this year. As close as February when the team was being formed, I was not on it. I figured I would take a break from Cambodia this summer and just relax, perhaps go to Vietnam with my brother, work on my garden, play a lot tennis and not worry about planning, packing or stuff like that. Around late April, I was starting to regret the decision a little bit, but I figured it was too late to do anything. The team had already been formed and have been prepping for a couple weeks. Well, to make a long story really short, some stuff hit the fan, and a slot opened up and I was asked if I wanted to take that slot, and with very little hesitation, I took it.

The fact that I ended up going on this trip I consider one of the biggest blessings that happened to me this year. To think that I was so close to missing this trip and missing all that happened on this trip boggles my mind.e

It's really hard to describe what we did on this trip. For the first time ever, we wanted to look at this trip as more than just a one year thing. We wanted to use this trip as a possible launching point for a longer term vision for our church's relationship with the country. The theme of this trip was 'Stories, Stories, Stories'. The idea was to create space for us to learn the stories of the people in Cambodia we would interact with. Not just the orphans (though we would spend the majority of our time with them), but with the leaders and with people we would meet in the community. The thinking behind this is that there is no way we can figure out how to serve the people of Cambodia if we didn't know anything about the people in Cambodia.

Hence, it has been a little bit odd answering the obligatory "what did your team do in Cambodia?" question that teams always get coming back from a missions trip. I don't want to say we just "hung out" and "chilled" for nine days with the orphans because... well, that just doesn't sound right for a missions trip. I mean, it doesn't sound too exciting or such a good use of resources. Mission trips are suppose to be hard, busy and hectic. But in a way, that's kind of the truth, we kind of just hung out with the orphans for most of the trip. It's true that we also did some teaching, a couple of short Bible studies, and some computer work, but the majority of the time, especially the the last couple days, we just hungout and engaged the orphans.

Honestly, i'm a little nervous what people think when people read this and find out we just "hung out" in Cambodia. I mean, I'll even admit that sounds a little odd and impractical... When we were planning this trip, one of the jokes was to not plan anything and just let it be "spirit led". Last year, what the Cambodians told us they wanted us to do, they never really wanted us to do it. Last year they changed the schedule on us so much, that we had were left scrambling in terms of what to do each day. So this year, we joked about not planning anything and just see what God leads us to do there. Living on prayers... The ironic thing is, that's kind of what happened. We shucked the schedule and itinerary just a few days into the trip and just went freestyle. (For more details, see my Guerrilla Warfare post I put up during the trip)

Disclaimer... We did plan for this trip. We planned a lot for it. I don't want to make it sound like we were irresponsible and careless in our planning. That was not the case.

My hope with this blog is to share these stories with as much people as possible.... so here we go.

Story 1 : Motorbikes and Bicycles
It's neat the things we can pick up by just being part of Cambodian society. To be Cambodian means to be familiar with two things, bikes and football. The first story involves motos and bicycles.

As I mentioned in my Guerrilla Warfare blog from Cambodia, we 'embedded' ourselves into some of the orphan's lives for a few days. That meant we did what they did, ate what they ate, went where they went. When they went to the bathroom, we went to the bathroom. To be part of a Cambodians life is to be acquainted with a motorbike. Bikes and mopeds are the number one choice of transportation in the country. Especially getting around the city, bikes are super convenient and efficient.

Most all of the older orphans have motorbikes or regular bikes. The type of bike an orphan has usually depends on the generosity of the orphan's sponsor. Some orphans have really good sponsors and they have motorbikes, laptops, phones and all sorts of good stuff. Other orphans have cheap sponsors and they have just normal bikes or no bike. It really is a crapshoot, i always thought a system like that would breed jealousy and envy, but I sensed none of that amongst the orphans. I sensed that there is real genuine sense of appreciation of just getting anything from anybody.

I asked one of the orphans what they do when they need something they don't have. They say they pray to God for it. One orphan told me he had to pray for two years to get a laptop he really needed. Imagine that. I think one of the greatest shames of being middle-class American is that we'll never know what it means to truly depend on God for something. And because of that, we do not know how to fully appreciate all we actually have in this life. And that is a damn shame.

Story 2 : Futball and Faith
To be Cambodian means to love futball. (Actually, i guess to be any other nationality other than American means to love futball... anyways...) These kids play futball at least once a week and the orphanage actually has a team that play against neighborhood kids. It was somewhat fortuitous timing, since we were in Cambodia the same time the World Cup was going on in Africa. That gave us an easy ice breaker with most of the people we met. Our driver for the trip would greet us each morning with results from the previous nights games. He would say things like "Goodbye England", "Goodbye Argentina!", "Bye Bye Salinas!" as a way of telling us the scores.

We took in a professional soccer match in the CSL (Cambodia Soccer League). The field they play on is pretty ghetto, but they have cool uniforms. This has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but i just thought you guys should know. Rose Bowl the field is not, but that is just the way they do things in Cambodia.

The team itself got a chance to ply it's trade in soccer as well. I dunno how they do it, but the kids somehow manage to play ball in this weather. Their usual 4PM to evening activity is futball. There is a field about five minutes away from the student center that the orphans play on against the village kids. The field is a dirt field next to a small stream that may or may not have left over landmines in it from the war. Here are some pictures of our team 'playing' soccer.

Left : Some of the kids getting ready to play soccer. I don't know how it is that all Cambodian kids just seem to be naturally good at the sport.
Right : Chris on the field that we played on.

Left : Here is some of our team getting ready to play ball!
Right : Here is me, about ten minutes later, about to die.

The kids use these soccer games as an opportunity to evangelize and share Jesus with the village kids. I don't know why this surprised me, but it surprised me. They talk of sharing Jesus as if it was a normal everyday activity and they do it with such confidence and ease..... which come to think of it, shouldn't this be normal everyday behavior for all of us?

It was not only the soccer, but other areas of life as well. They tell me that sometimes when non-Christian affiliated mission teams come to help, they try to share the gospel with them. I asked one of the older kids about why they do this and they said it's because that is what God calls them to do.

I think one of the most ironic things about this trip is the Bible lessons we had planned for the orphans. Part of our vision of the trip was to teach the orphans to be missional, to make them become healthy contributing members of society. We had studies planned from the gospel about bearing fruit, about the Good Samaritans, etc etc. We thought we were prepared, but we weren't. After hanging around with these kids just a few days, it was obvious we could learn something from them about being missional, about being bold, unafraid and unashamed. About sharing the gospel. They could have taught us lots more than we can ever teach them. And that is the sad truth.

Story 3 : Conversations
The Cambodian way of life is just so different than the American way of life. In America, we're always taught that we need to occupy every single moment of our days with stuff to do. We can't have any downtime. We are in the world of high-technology which enables us to do ten things at once and with our laptops, iphones, ipad, and facebook. We're more connected and more efficient than ever. In Cambodia, the pace of life is a lot slower. People take naps, people are not rushing, and take more enjoyment in the simple things. Some of my favorite parts of the trip was just sitting around to chat or joke around. Many an afternoons, after the tutoring and the studying was done, we just sat around and chatted. At first it was a little awkward, as both sides got to know each other, but after the first day everything became very natural.

It's amazing how quickly we were able to reach deep levels in conversations. At first, we talked about things like school and soccer, but after a while we would start talking about more serious things. There were two main themes in most of these discussions. The first is the tragic backgrounds. Almost each kid has a past that is enough to reduce a person to tears. I think the interesting thing is how freely and how openly these kids talk about their past. They talk about things like their parents dying from HIV, parents committing suicide, or their parents getting murdered as if they were talking about the weather. Heart wrenching stories told with little or no feeling.

The second main theme of discussion was about overcoming the past. Almost all orphans talk about how blessed and fortunate they are to have been delivered from that past and into the orphanage where they are loved and provided for by God (through sponsors and caretakers). And I think part of the reason why these kids are able to talk so freely about the past is because most of overcome it and it's behind them. They no longer dwell on it and it's beyond them and they can focus on the future.

It's funny, I thought that by the end of the trip, the orphans would be sick and tired of us, but they were not. Some of them welcome the chance to practice their English, others just wanted to talk.

Story 4 : The Anatomy of the Bulldozer
One of the orphans I got to know fairly well was this kid named Paul. The guy is a civil engineering major studying at a local university. I met him for the first time during our initial tutoring sessions. Our first day at the student center the guys on the team walked into the front door and pretty much declared ourselves geniuses in every single subject known to man. We told the orphans to bring their academic problems to us and we will make them disappear.

This turned out to be much harder than we expected. Much harder. Some of the kids needed help in English and Math, but some of the subjects like statistics and engineering that our team had no idea what to do with. I was lucky (or unlucky) to get Paul. Paul was a civil engineering major and he asked me for some help on computers. So I said sure. And the next thing I knew we were in front of a computer and he pulls out a document about bulldozers and construction vehicles, his task was to identify the various parts of a bulldozer and create a PowerPoint presentation.... yeah.

It is at moments like this where i have to step back and just thank God for Google. Obviously, i know nothing about construction vehicles. Nothing. But luckily, Google knows everything. After a couple hours and a few clever searches on Google and Google Photos, we somehow had a presentation about bulldozers and construction vehicles... Of all the things we did in Cambodia, this presentation is one of the things I'm most secretly proud of.

The best part of it was that the guy did the presentation in front of his class that evening and he got a 95% on it. Yes. Yes I am that good.

That is the aforementioned, bulldozer presentation.

Story 5 : The Strange State of Technology

From the above story, the one thing I took away from it is that it provides another lesson about the growth of Cambodia. Sometimes, I feel that the country of Cambodia is growing so fast that people are getting left behind. The technical growth of the country has been pretty stunning. Having been there the last three years, i can see it happening. The first year I was there, I saw very little evidence of anything technical, there was no computers at the orphanage or anything. When we came last year, I saw a little more technology. The orphanage had a computer lab, but the computers in the lab was not connected to the Internet. This year, the orphanage was completely wired, the computer lab was wired, most of the university students had laptop.... All the kids knew how to use Facebook and the Internet. I was pretty amazed.

Cambodia technology is in an interesting place. The country is getting more and more wired each day. Especially in the cities, you can find a hot spot in most cafes/coffee shops. The orphanage is wired, both hotels we stayed in were wired. The internet is a little bit slow, but i can't complain.

I think the one thing that is lacking now is how to best use this technology. An example of this is from the previous story. You know how I used Google to pull all that information about bulldozers? We had to do that because the kid knew nothing about how to do searches on the internet. He had this top of the line laptop from his sponsor, but he literally had no idea how to use it, except other than to do Word documents and play solitaire. He knew nothing about sites like Google, Youtube, virus protection, email, very basic things like that. When i showed him how easy it was to look up answers to some of the questions he needs on Google, he was amazed. I then showed him how he can learn things like using powerpoint on Youtube and he was even more amazed. The next day when I came back to help him, I saw him searching for things on Google... it was as if a whole new world had opened up to him. In terms of the tutoring I did, I think that might be the most important thing I taught any of the orphans.

Story 6 : Kim Sophal
Let me tell you a little more about Paul. The kid's Cambodian name is Sophal AKA Paul AKA the bulldozer guy. He was one of the orphans I got to know the best, since I spent a lot of time working with him on his engineering projects. When Sophal was five years old he was sold by his parents to a Chinese family to work as a servant. So at the age of five, he was waking up at five AM in the morning to cook food for the family, clean the house, and feed the dog. He didn't goto school, he didn't play with the other kids, he had no child hood. He pretty much was a slave from five to the age of fifteen. At the age of fifteen, his parents died (not sure how), and he was released from his contract from the family. From there God lead him to New Hope and he has been there for the last ten years or so.

This kid is amazing in many respects. He comes from almost no educational background to studying civil engineering (in ten years!). The skills he learned as a slave (like cooking) he uses now to serve the orphanage (the kids take turns cooking meals and they say he is one of the best cooks). But I think the most amazing is that there seems to be not one trace of bitterness in him. We had many conversations during my time in Cambodia and not once did he say anything bad about his parents or the Chinese family that enslaved him. He never complained. Instead, his outlook was really positive. He talked about things like prayer and how he believes in it. He tells the story of how he prayed for a whole year for a bike before he finally got one. He was the one who told me the story about witnessing to non-Christian teams that come through the orphanage. He talks about his sister Lily in the province. He talks about his dreams of becoming an engineer and helping rebuild the country. And the kid studies really hard. He has books upon books on engineering, math, physics all that stuff. He tells me he doesn't use Facebook cause it's a waste of time.

He faces a lot of the struggles that most of the orphans face (like resources and friends), but this does not change his outlook on life. I love this kid, he was one of my favorites in Cambodia.

Story 7 : A 90's Arcade
We take a break from the serious stuff to show you some pictures from different parts of our trip. First of all, one evening, we took all the orphans to an arcade.

Left : Me. Playing my favorite arcade game. Time Crisis. Yes.
Right : Because lots of Cambodians are short, they have stools in front of each arcade console.

Left : Me, Victor and another orphan playing air hockey.
Right : Dance Revolution.

Left : The kids all crowding around some game
Right : The older kids playing Street Fighter

Left : Basketball
Right : More game machines

Story 8 : BBQ Finale
This is becoming an annual tradition, but as we did last year, we had a BBQ for all the orphans on the last day of the trip. This year's party was slightly more subdued than last year's due to heavy rainfall and another missions team that was there, but it was fun nonetheless. The BBQ is always one of the best moments of the trip.

This was what the orphanage looked like a couple hours before the BBQ. Heavy rain. Flooded.

Left : The BBQ pit.
Right : The food. The chicken was really good. The corn on the cob, not so good.

Food preparation.

Left : Group pictures
Right : More group pictures

The kids did a dance for us

Happy Kids!

More Happy Kids! This is one of my favorite pictures of the trip.

Story 9 : To Infinity ... And Beyond
The question we ask after every tripe is. "Where do we go from here?" What happens after this trip? At the end of this trip we have all these stories, but what do we do with them? And when we leave, do these kids even remember us? Or are we like the wind, that just comes and goes?

Being the cynical person that I am, I have a tendency to think that these kids will forget us the moment we step onto the airplane. But when I fall into this cynical state, one story reminds me that this might not be the case.

Last year we met a girl named Sreynin. She's about ten years old, was skinny as a pole and knew no English. It's hard to describe her personlity, but she had this type of quiet spunkiness about her. I remember her because everytime I was around, she always wanted to hangout with me. I nicknamed her "Number 10" because she wore a #10 jersey and because I couldn't remember her name. And she liked the nickname, cause by end of last year's trip, she started called herself that. Here she is from last year on the last day of our BBQ. From last year to this year, she grew at least half a feet, maybe more.

Coming back this year, I was wondering if little Sreynin would remember me. She not only remembered, but she remembered the nickname. When I first saw her this year, she came up to me and said "number 10". Picture on the left is from the BBQ last year, picture on the right is from the BBQ this year. Her english from last year to this year improved a lot. But that means she went from knowing hardly any english, to knowing very little. Last year I couldn't say much to her, but this year we actually had a real conversation. It went like this

Me : What is your favorite food?
Syrenin : My favorite food is soda
Me : Umm. Okay. What is your second favorite food?
Syrenin : My second favorite food is coke

I know it don't sound like much, but it was a ground breaking conversation. When talking to the younger orphans, that's usually as good as it's gonna get. I watched her drink three cans of soda that night. It's because they get soda so rarely than when it does become available they must go all out (something i'm sure we're all familiar with).

Why am I sharing this story for you? If a little girl can remember a visit from a year ago when the relationship consisted of just laughter and playing together, I wonder what happens to those relationship that consisted more of that. IE, the relationships that were formed this year. The most exciting thing i see is that the relationships we formed this year, they are still being formed right now. Since getting back, we've had numerous conversations with the kids via skype, instant message, facebook and email. We've even done a video conference with them a couple of times. And this is pretty awesome. Technology has allowed us to build on the relationships that we started in Cambodia.

I'm already looking forward to next year to see the kids again....

Story 10 : Coming Home
I'm gonna close with this. This is the first year where I was not looking forward to coming home. I am a big 'home' person. I love my home. Last year, the trip was amazing and fun, but I remember thinking during our BBQ on the last evening that 'I love it here, but I'm ready to go home'. This year it's funny, at the exact point of the trip (last evening BBQ), I remember sitting on the swings thinking 'Wow, i'm not exactly looking forward to going home.' This was the first year that coming home did not really appeal to me that much. Going back to work and adjusting back to 'normal life' was not as easy as it was the last couple of years. Six weeks later, for better or for worse, i've pretty much 100% back into the normal flow of things (whether this is a good thing or not, I don't know). But still, there are moments where I wonder about some of the orphans in Cambodia, I wonder about their testing and their schooling and their lives and I start praying for them. I've really been trying to pray for the orphans there at least once a week at least and that has helped me keep their memory fresh in my mind.

Well. That's it. Sorry this blog took so long to get out. Hopefully you enjoyed reading about our stories, and more hopefully, you're inspired to do more! My only regret is that I don't have the time to tell you even more stories about the trip. On behalf of the team, thanks everyone for reading!

An Angry Post

2010-08-01T23:37:00.001-07:00

Someone told me a while back that i haven't wrote an angry post for a while now.... And looking back, I realize that is the case. Well, today your dreams come true. Angry post on the way!!!

My coworker quit this week on Friday. That I don't have a problem with. I mean, I don't blame anyone who quits our company or any company for that matter, that's just the way it is in business... However, you know how he quit? Did he come tell me personally? No. Did he call me and tell me on the phone? No. Did he at least instant message me and tell me the news? No. He did it in the least professional way possible, first he calls in sick the day he was quitting, then he emails me at lunch time on Friday. WTF? This is a guy who I converse with everyday and who I work closely on a project with for the last year. We talk and have meetings everyday. I mean, crap, that deserves at least a phone call right? Or at least an instant message? (Hello, I am quitting. I enjoyed working with you. Best of luck... that's all it would have taken.) But he did neither. What a coward.

I think the most annoying part of it was that just six months ago, we had a talk and he told me how committed he was to company and the project that we were on, etc,etc.. obviously that was all bullcrap.

Did I like the guy? Well, let's just say he was not my favorite person in the world, but as a developer, he was pretty good, a bit eccentric, but he was a good team member to work with. But still, the way he quit... i lost all respect for him that day. All respect. He is now zero in my book.

So what happens now? Well first of all, I go and slam this person in LinkedIn, Facebook and everything... just kidding... All of this went down on Friday. And our boss was on vacation that day, so on Monday, I'm gonna guess the bomb really explodes and the crap hits the fan. I probably will inherit all his work. I also have a bunch of meetings already scheduled with my coworker next week... i'm toying with the idea of rejecting them all as a way of saying, "screw you, i don't need any of your help!!!". (Which is actually probably true).

Oh well. Monday. The stuff hits the fan. Should be exciting.

Introducing My Turtles

2010-07-25T23:29:00.001-07:00

The Cambodia blog is taking a lot longer than i thought it was. I feel the need to put something up right now... So here it is.

Right after I got back from Cambodia, i liberated two turtles from my parents. They use to live in a bathtube in my parents backyard, now they live in my old koi pond. The is akin from moving from Oakland to Los Gatos. I feed them strawberry and snails.

However, I need some help though. I need to name these two turtles and I am taking recommendations from my readers. Let's hear your great ideas.

Cambodia 2010 - Chocolate Will Make Everything Better

2010-07-13T23:17:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone. Sorry for lack of activity on this blog recently. As most of you know I got back from Cambodia about 10 days ago. Last week was spent in a jetlag induced zombie like coma (so no writing)... I have not started on the Cambodia blog yet. I had plan to start it last weekened, but I ended up being busier than I planned to be, hence no start. And this week is turning out more busier than I would like it to be, but i hope to start on this blog soon. Ten days later, I'm still trying to process and organize my thoughts into a blog. This was such a eventful trip. There are just so many stories and pictures I want to share...

I'm giving myself a week to punch this thing up. Until then, I'm gonna do what I did last year... And that's cheat. I know some of you may not have followed our Cambodia team blog and that's too bad. There were some really good writing on there. I'm gonna do a best-of of our Cambodia blog until i have my blog up.

The first entry belongs to Carrie. Honestly, I did not read her blog until... just now. She put this up on the last day and I forgot to read it. When it comes to blogging, i don't give praise lightly, but this is a great entry. Very honest and very raw. Here are the words of Carrie Lau.

"Chocolate will make everything better..."

"Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow." --Isaiah 1:17

Sex trafficking was very prevalent at the first hotel we stayed at, along with the rest of Cambodia. I couldn't stay outside of my hotel room without feeling a slight bit at danger. One night I was feeling a bit venturesome when I decided to sit downstairs for a bit to journal. There I spotted a beautiful young girl who must have been in her teens or early twenties. She sat with her back against the wall on a single cushioned chair twirling a hotel key around her finger. She was dressed scantily clad in a white pair of shorts, high platform shoes, a tank-top, along with curled hair and a face full of make-up. She was waiting patiently for her next customer. I must have sat on the stairs for no longer than ten minutes until a man came scurrying towards the elevator swinging his arms as if he was off to handle some business. He goes into the elevator and beckons the young woman to hurry and follow his lead. She gently gets up and slowly follows behind as her feet wobble in her platform heels. As she walks past me her head begins to lower in shame for what she is about to do. There were plenty more that I had witnessed who shared similar stories.

For the next couple of days I asked God what it meant to "seek justice". How does it look like? Especially with such an unbelievably huge problem that affects us globally. The problem is beyond any of us and I struggled with trusting that God was still sovereign in the midst of such darkness. I have a tendency to want to get up and make peace when I am faced with such injustice. But who am I kidding, how would I be able to rescue the 27 million enslaved people in the world?

This brings me back to a time before our mission trip even began. The team studied Nehemiah 1. At the beginning, Nehemiah is notified about the tragedy of the exile of the Jewish people and the broken wall of Jerusalem. The significance of this story is not only that he ends up rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. No, it is what he did before acting on anything. "When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven." -Nehemiah 1:4 When he was faced with tragedy, he sought after the Lord. It is near impossible to seek justice on our own strength. It is only when we are weak that we are strong. Nehemiah sat down and wept, mourned, fasted, and then prayed. The very next day of praying Isaiah 1 I was struck with a fever which forced me to rest in bed for an entire day. It was exactly what I needed. I felt like God was forcing me to rest, not physically but emotionally and spiritually. I spent the day praying, writing, reading the Word, and resting. I had forgotten to spend time alone with God with the accumulation of tasks throughout our days. Sometimes He needs to break us down to remind us to take rest in Him, and I am so glad He did. The very next day I woke up back to my old self again. Praise God, and thank you for all your prayers.

On day 6, we visited an NGO called the International Justice Mission (IJM). IJM is a Christian human rights organization that fights against sex trafficking. When I sat down preparing myself for a presentation I looked up at the first slide to find that God heard my cry. The slide spelt out IJM and right below it read out "Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow" (Isaiah 1:17). My eyes welted up with tears as I chuckled to myself. God has such a sense of humor. Before the presentation even began I knew this was the answered prayer I had been seeking for. I had seen too many problems and no solutions. But this was one example which answered my prayer about how it looked to seek justice. IJM is a threat for those within the sex trafficking industry. They have undercover agents to investigate the places where sex trafficking is most prevalent and hire well-qualified attorneys to put these criminals behind bars. In 2009 alone: 54 victims were rescued, 33 perpetrators were arrested (26 were tried and 19 were convicted). The average sentence was 6 years in prison. We met an attorney who had moved to Cambodia earlier in the year with his wife, children, and even house dog all the way from the Midwest in the US. This just shows how willing this servant is to fight for the injustice in Cambodia. My experience at IJM gave me so much peace knowing that God truly loves His people and is bringing justice to this problem through these types of NGOs. If I am torn up inside about this issue I can't imagine how much He is hurting as the Abba Father, Husband, and Maker of His beloved daughters.

The thief came to steal, kill, and destroy but Jesus came so we could have life abundantly. So although I was close to feeling defeated at one point I stand here today with much hope for the future of Cambodia. I stand here today in victory and I refuse to believe that the enemy has a hold of this country. There is light in the midst of darkness.

"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"
--Hosea 13:14

Guerrilla Warfare

2010-06-29T18:28:00.000-07:00

-- guerrilla warfare noun
irregular warfare, conflicts in which a small group of combatants uses military tactics, like ambushes and raids, to harass a larger and less-mobile traditional army.

When we started this trip six days ago (already), we came armed to the teeth with things that we thought we would need. Because of the unpredictable nature of the work we were doing this trip, we over-prepared and had contingency plans for almost every situation. General Victor said, this trip was like going to war, when going to war, we want as much weaponry as possible. We may not need the sniper rifle, but we want one on hand just in case we might need it.

Well, luckily for us, God pretty much dropped a bomb on all our plans and blew them to smithereens. What once was is pretty much no more, except for a few remnants.

Our vision for this trip was to teach the older orphans how to be missional. We wanted to teach them how to love and serve their community just the way they have been served and loved on by foreign missionaries. To do this we had prepared a series of bible studies and activities that taught them this vision. We expected to hold meetings with them each day and drill home this vision.

But that has changed. After the first few days of trying to execute our plan, we found out that it wasn't going to work. So like any good team, we had to make adjustments and we did.

-- guerrilla warfare noun
irregular warfare, conflicts in which a small group of combatants uses military tactics, like ambushes and raids, to harass a larger and less-mobile traditional army.

We ran into two major problems trying to execute this vision.

The first major problem we ran into was the age of the students we were working with. We were working with university students. And we were trying to force them to fit into the schedule and itinerary we had planned for them... Well, college students in Cambodia are very much the same (in some aspects) as college students in America, they are unpredictable and busy and have lots of things going on in their lives.

The second major problem we ran into was that we knew very little about the students themselves. How can we teach students ANYTHING of depth if we know nothing about them? If we know nothing about their pains, their struggles, their happiness, their hardship?

Hence, birthed the new vision of our trip. Part one of the vision is to find out the orphans stories. To find out about their background, their dreams, their pains. And then from this, build relationships that are hopefully longer lasting than just this missions trip. And also from this, to find ways to encourage and support the orphans to finish their college educations, because one of the biggest problems orphans face is dropping out of university (physically and emotionally). That is the new two part vision.

We immediately found out that trying to have a hard schedule for this type of work would not suffice. Hence, we switched to (Victor's favorite phrase of the trip)... guerrilla warefare.

Instead of trying to fit the orphans into our schedule, we embedded ourselves into theirs. We used smaller groups for versatility and gave each group the freedom to be creative and imaginative. For the last couple of days, we pretty much fit ourselves into their lives. This gave us the ability to get to know the orphans more closely and just see what a normal everyday life of a Cambodia college student looks like.

And this has lead the team to some pretty wild adventures. Some of us guys went to school with a couple orphans today (we took motorbikes, such fun). Some of the girls went to a monkey zoo today to hangout with some female students. Tonight, we took a bunch of kids to the local arcade to play video games that are twenty years old (no joke, they are still on Time Crisis 3, when Time Crisis 10 probably exists in the US). We've been spending time each day tutoring, hanging out, eating with them and just shooting the breeze. In those moments, we have heard some pretty amazing stories, some heartbreaking, some so inspiring, some making me ask how God can be so cruel, and others showing me how good God can be.

At times, it does feel like we are not doing much except chilling with the Cambodian kids in cafes or restaurant. At times, as a working American, i want to do more. To be active, to work, to be busy. But that's not the Cambodian rhythm of life. The Cambodian rhythm of life is a much slower than the busy-ness that floods us in the States. Falling into this rhythm of life has been a challenge for me, but I'm slowly adjusting. But by falling into this rhythm of life, we can hopefully better start to relate to the Cambodians we are trying to serve.

There are so many stories to share, but no time right now (i'll probably save that for my personal blog)... The wait will be worth it, I promise.

For now, i just want to thank you all for your support and your prayers. Carrie is pretty much 100% (that girl ate like a whale today) and Eric is recovering from his bout with the fever. Continue to pray for our physical strength as this team seem more susceptible to sickness than the last couple of years teams.

Steve T

Cambodia Day 1 : From The Ashes ...

2010-06-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

(Mirrored from the Cambodia team blog. http://grxcambodia.blogspot.com)

Hey everyone, this is Steve, I'll be your lead-off blogger for this trip. Again, this is the team blog and we'll try to update this probably once a day, so please keep checking back!!

Before I start this update, i have a personal prayer request. I just heard from back home that one of my really close friend got into a serious car accident. She has a broken leg and a couple of broken ribs, but according to the doctors, the surgery went well. She's recovering from the surgery now but still is having trouble breathing. Can I ask you guys to pray for her, her recovery, for her husband and for the doctors?

Thanks a lot, i literally just got the news via email about five minutes ago in the hotel lobby. It's shaken me up quite a bit.

----

Wow... So day 1 has been a whirlwind of non-stop activity. We got off the plane at 11AM in Cambodia and have been pretty much been going since then. It's 8:30PM right now and most the team is in their rooms preparing for bed. The itinerary for today was to visit the Toul Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields, something we usually do the first day of the trip. For those who don't know anything about Cambodia, the country went through a mass genocide back in the 1970s. Over 2.5 million people died. The Killing Fields and Toul Sleng Museum are two "shrines" to the catastrophes that happened 30 years ago.

Two things really amaze me. First it amazes me how far the city has come since the genocides. I have to constantly remind myself that just forty years ago, the capital Phnom Penh (where we are staying) was razed to the ground by rebel forces. It was completely obliterated. Here's a picture that one of our team members found giving a good look at Phnom Penh during the genocides.

And these days? Phnom Penh is a bustling commercial city with skyscrapers, traffic, restaurants and tourist. The turn around has been pretty amazing.

Secondly, even though most remnants of the genocides are gone, the memory of it is still pretty fresh in a lot of Cambodians. Happening right in the capital right now are war-crime trials for some of the people who participated in the genocides. The trials are followed pretty closely by most of the Cambodians we talk to, indicating a heavy interest in it. Most of the people , especially the older folks, knew someone who was a victim of the genocides.

That's the lesson i'm trying to remind myself of today. That even though things may look okay on the surface in Cambodia, it's not. The people are still struggling with pain, trying to forgive, and trying to overcome the past.

Anyways... the first day is always the roughest, since we're all travel weary and worn out. We look forward to sharing your more (happier!) stories in the upcoming days.

Steve T

Cambodia 2010

2010-06-22T21:22:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned on this blog a couple weeks ago, I will be going back to Cambodia this year for a missions trip. This will be my third such trip and probably the most 'interesting' one I will go on. Before I share my thoughts on the trip, let me first give you the hard facts.

When : June 24 to July 3. Our team leaves SFO on Thursday at 2AM PST. We go feet wet at 2:15AM PST and arrive in Cambodia approx 15 hrs later. We will be on Cambodian soil for nine days after that. We return to SFO on July 3rd, 8PM PST.

Who : We have eight people on this years team. The smallest team we've ever sent. For the first time ever, half the team will be returning members. Me, Victor, Amy and Chris are coming for the second consecutive year. Carrie, Lizz, Simon and Eric are the newbies. This is us

Where : Cambodia, Phnom Penh. 90% of our time will be spent in the capital. We might make one or two forays into the villages.

Getting Updates : We will be updating the team blog throughout the trip. And I will tweet when I can. So follow us and RSS us if you wish.

Why : To change the world. And that's not me being bombastic (as I am sometimes on this blog). We have a fairly ambitious, never-attempted vision for this trip and that is to teach the orphans how to give love. The thinking behind this is that the kids who live in the orphanage are very accustom to people (missionary) coming into their lives and showing them mercy, whether it be giving gifts, spending time with them, or teaching them. All their lives these kids have been the recipients of many kind and generous acts from foreigners. We want to flip this model around just a little bit and teach them what it means to do the same in their (the Cambodian) community. One of the studies that we have planned is about the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We want to teach them that even though they might not have much (physically, like the Samaritan), they can still do much for their community. And we want to teach them that loving your community is not optional as a Christian.

In addition we will also be visiting organizations like Hagar and IJM this year. We hope to learn more about the problems (like trafficking, poverty, unemployment) in Cambodian society and what these organizations are doing to help.

Me : How do I feel about the trip? My feelings for this trip fluctuated quite a bit in the last few weeks. At times I was excited, at times nervous, at times scared. I think i've settled into a quiet anxiety about the trip. The good kind of anxiety, of not knowing what's going to happen, but anxious to get started and see what God has planned. The planning for the trip has been nothing short of a hurricane (the leadership team was named Team Hurricane) as we juggled lots of unexpected personnel changes, plan changes, schedule changes and distractions, but somehow we have a plan for the next nine days. We put this trip together in less than a month, probably half the ideal time.

There is a high degree of uncertainty to this trip. The plan that we have for the orphans (teaching them to be missional) has (literally) never been attempted before (by our church, or any church, the orphanage told us this). We have no idea how this is gonna be received or how this is gonna play out. For all we know, this could be the biggest bomb in Asia since Hiroshima. Needless to say, this has added to my anxiety.

You know in sports how before big games sometimes athletes get nervous, but once the game starts everything is okay? I feel that's where I am at now. Nervous excitement. I can't wait for this trip to start... And i can't wait to write about it when I get back.

Yosemite Half Dome Hike

2010-06-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

I hiked Yosemite's Half Dome this Saturday with my brother and some friends. This is my second and most likely the last time I will do this hike. It's just too long and too painful to do again. When I reached the top, this is what i tweeted (because after hiking for six hours(!!!) carrying 20lbs of water on my back, the first thing I must do when we reach the top is tweet)

That tweet also was summarily my retirement from hiking Half Dome. Never Again.

As a last hurrah, I give you a (slightly abridged) live-blog of our hike to the top of Half Dome.

6:07AM PST Start hiking.

1:07PM PST Me at the top.

The End

Through The Looking Glass

2010-06-18T00:23:00.001-07:00

Against my better judgement I started (and finished) the entire sixth season of LOST in two weeks. It was basically wait until after I got back from Cambodia to watch it all, or do it all before Cambodia. Initially, I was gonna wait until after Cambodia but then the whole world was talking about the show after the season finale two weeks ago. Everyone at work was, everyone on twitter was, everyone on Facebook was, and I decided in fear of spoiling it for myself, I better watch it now.

So i did. I started two weeks ago, finished yesterday night. And man, what a ride it was. Season five was an absolute stink bomb, it sucked but season six was thoroughly riveting, touching, emotional, and all in all, an epic. True, it had some really crappy episodes (like the Richard Alpert origin which was done entirely in spanish.... WTF?), but as a whole, it was great.

I'm not gonna spend time on this blog breaking down what I think was happening. I don't even know if I know what was happening. My guess is that island was real-life and that "real-life" was purgatory with some kind of crossover-parallel universe phenomena thrown in. I don't know and honestly, I really don't know if I care. You can slice and dice it in probably a million ways and still not come up with a reasonable explanation. And since if your really into LOST, you probably already read a million theories about what was happening, i'm not gonna add on another. Your guess is probably as good as mine at this point.

I am also not going to complain about plot flaws (of which there was quite a few) or the unanswered questions (like, what happened to the airplane at the end carrying Miles, Sawyer, etc flying away from the island.) Honestly, none of these bothered me much.

I think it depends on how you look at the show. LOST was never a show about action, plot twists, surprises and stuff like that. True, they had a lot of that in the show, but it was never about that. At times during it's existence, the show tried to be too much of an action-oriented show and that resulted in some weak episodes (see season five and season three). The show was always about the characters and the relationships. When the show was at it's strongest (like season two and season four) the focus was on the characters and less so on the action.

Season six was a almost perfect blend of both. Starting with the season finale.

The series finale was hugely satisfying. Call me a sap, but I like happy endings. I especially like happy endings that kind of just come out of no where and they somehow all makes sense (i'm being pretty liberal here in terms of what "making sense" means). We saw hints of this starting to happen in episode sixteen and all the pieces all fell into place in the last episode. From the very beginner of the season if you asked me how i thought the story was gonna end, i would not have foreseen a happy ending.

And that probably was one of the biggest surprises yeah? That LOST did not do the cliche thing and start killing off characters for shock and awe value (IE Agent Walker in 24), instead LOST managed to keep everyone alive. (Yes, being again, being liberal here about what being alive means). I give huge props to LOST for not making the last season a bloodbath, as it could have easily been. It was a really good ending to a groundbreaking show.

Other thoughts about the season (and the series).Other random thoughts about the season and the series.

-- The Koreans. Almost from the very beginning, i always thought the best episodes belonged to the Koreans. Their flashforwards, flashbacks and flashsideways always seem to be powerfully emotional and poignant. Devotion. Watching Jin and Sun's devotion to one another is unparalleled and goes against the norm of today's society. The Koreans had three really powerful scenes in season six, reuniting on the beach, drowning together in the submarine, and then the ultrasound scene. I think each scene cause one tear to come to my eye.

-- Ben Linus. One of the things I really liked is how every character was redeemed at the end. No matter what they did on the island, it did not count against them. This was best represented in the "Dr.Linus" episode, Ben's flashsideway story. I never thought Ben would be a character I even marginally liked. He always was a manipulative little S.O.B who i would have loved to seen crushed by the Smoke Monster... But that one episode changed it all. Just one episode changed him from a character i despised to someone you felt sorry for and even liked. The scenes with him as a teacher was really nice, but the scene that was the kicker was at the end of the episode when Illana asked him why he as going back to Locke and he said because no one else would have him... That won me over, it was so honest (cause isnt' that what we all want, to be wanted.. someone to belong too?).. And Illana won points to, for accepting him. Good episode all around.

Weirdness. Illana's death by blowing herself up? What the heck? The writers couldn't fit her into the storyline better than that?

And I thought it was a nice touch bringing Alex back as a student. Her execution in season four, i still think was one of the most intense moments of the show.

-- The Smoke Monster. Okay, we never found the origin of the smoke monster, we never knew what made him tick (literally), and we never knew why he wanted to leave the island and why he was so bad... But let me just say the smoke monster was pretty cool. I'm glad they decided to unleash him this season. I felt the writers kept Smokey under wraps for the first five seasons and then on this final season they unleashed him. I'm trying to find the smoke monster entry music and make it my phone ringtone.

-- Hugo. Another episode I really liked was the Hugo flashsideways that shows him being a billionaire and humanitarian. This foreshadowed the end of the series which saw Hurley become the final keeper of the island... Seeing Hurley transform from fat doofus goofball to leader of pack I thought a really good ending. And honestly, if the person protecting the islands needs to be the "least flawed" person.. It had to be Hurley. So good choice!

And finally... that's it... LOST , we thank you for five season of great entertainment (and one season of crappy entertainment).

Candace Vs Chicken Wing

2010-06-11T00:12:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Food Network. Last month, we brought you the epic battle Sammy Vs The Pho. This week we bring you another clash of the titans. Introducing.....

A little background. There is this chain in the Bay Area called SmokeEaters (formerly named the very clever University Chicken which itself was formerly named the even more cleverer Cluck U) that specializes in serving hot wings to college students. The spiciness of the hot wings range from "mild" to "hotter than hell". One of the gimmicks they offer is that if you can eat 12 of the HTH (hotter than hell) wings in ten minutes (no water, no napkin) then you get a trophy, a t-shirt, massive diarrhea, and a possible ulcer. Who can pass up that deal? And that leads us to today....

Let me introduce you to my friend Candace. The incumbent.

Status : SAF
Profession : Teacher
Likes : hiking, cooking, sports, eating, sleeping, her students (sometimes)
Dislikes : allergies, lazy students, ungrateful students, bad students, smelly students, ignorant parents

Now let me introduce you to my friend Chicken Wing, the challenger.

Likes : Nothing. Chicken Wing hates everything. Look at that picture, look how mean he looks. Chicken Wing he eats little puppies for breakfast and rainbows for dinner.
Dislikes : Everything... Man, look at that platter. If it looks nasty in the picture, it looks (and smells) even nastier in the flesh. You can smell the peppers they were so strong. My eyes were tearing up just looking at it. And Candace would have to eat those....

So here we go! The wings just came out, I take you to a LIVE blog of the event, minute by minute breakdown of this epic event.

00:00 - So it begins.

02:00 - Candace finishes one wing. One wing down! This could be history in the making. This could be an epic victory.

03:00 - Candace gives up.

Awkward silence

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uhh.

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You know in sporting events when one team is blowing out the other? Near the end of the game, the announcers have nothing left to talk about since the game is so boring so they start pulling random stories our of their ... and starts telling. That is kind of where we are at now with this blog right now. I was planning to write 200 words on the event, but we can stop at twenty...

So i guess it's time to pull random things out and write about them!!

Random thought number one. This went onto Facebook, but the new Sandra McCracken hymns album In Feast or Fallow is really, really nice. I can't get enough of it. Check out this song.

Random thought number two. Lost season six is pretty good so far. Season five was an absolute stinkbomb, but the first five episodes of the last season has been nothing short of riveting. All the time traveling crap is out and we're back to the future, where Lost should be. And the Smoke Monster is back!! And it's badder than ever. It's like the writers kept the smoke monster under wraps for the first five season and now that the show is ending, it's time to take the wraps off Smoke Monster and let him go crazy. Smoke Monster has been pretty impressive.

Random thought number three. In case you don't know, i'll be going back to Cambodia this year. I'll have a blog about that before we go telling you guys what we are gonna be doing. I'm pretty excited about this trip.

Random thought number four. There is something strangely satisfying about eating things you grow. I've been very bad at posting updates about how the garden is growing, but my peas already have been harvested, and the tomatoes and squashes are growing nicely. I eat peas three/four times a week these days cause i have so much. I never even liked peas much, but I find i like eating my peas a lot. Every time i eat a meal of homegrown peas, i feel green, Al Gore would be proud of me.

In case you want to watch a video of this debacle. Here it is.

The Theory of the $900 Bottle Of Wine

2010-06-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

One of the new phenomenas (that puzzles me) that has been spreading in the Bay Area is the advent of the gourmet cupcake. These cupcake bakeries are popping up in San Jose, San Francisco and pretty much all over the South Bay. These places make the "gourmet" cupcake, basically fancy, super unhealthy cupcakes with some unique type of topping that they sell for exorbitant prices. It always made me curious why people would pay $4 for a cupcake, cause does a $4 cupcake really taste that much different than a $1 cupcake? Does a $4 cupcake taste 300 times better than a $1 cupcake? I dunno, maybe to some people it does, but to me it doesn't.

Then it hit me as to why people do it. I think the appeal of the $4 cupcake is not the taste itself (because honestly, who can tell the different between a $1 cupcake and a $4 cupcake, even if you say you can, I don't believe you). The appeal of the $4 is the desirability and the rarity factor. It's about having something that you know you know makes no sense , you know you shouldn't have, you know it's just not smart thing to do, but doing it anyways. It's the rush of getting to eat something absurdly priced and extremely unhealthy. That's why i think the $4 cupcakes business have taken off. Cause us Americans are like that.

It's like the theory of the $900 bottle of wine which I heard on the Gary Radnich show the other day. Why do people buy the $900 bottle of Screaming Eagle wine? Does it really taste that much different than a $90 bottle of wine? (Unless your last name is Merlot or Chardonnay or Eagle, i'm gonna say no). The reason people order $900 bottles of wine is to be able to say they ordered a $900 bottle of wine. If I ever drank a $900 bottle of wine, you know why I would do it? So I can write on this blog that I ordered and drank a $900 bottle of wine. That would be the sole reason.

All this lead me to a future business model... Why stop at the $4 cupcake? My model would be to take this to the next level, I would create the $10 cupcake. The ridiculous price would make the cupcake even more desirable. And I would make it unhealthy as hell. I would use a ton of butter and then once the cupcake is done, i would take a syringe and inject lard straight into the middle. It would be the most unhealthy expensive cupcake ever. And I would also make it a rarity, sell only 200-300 a day. My cupcake shop would be called, "The Greatest Cupcake Ever Sold". And I bet customers would come.

So that's the rant of the day. For the record, i don't have anything against the $4 cupcake, it just boggles my mind a little bit. If you like those things, more power to you, don't let me tell you what to do, and I'll try not to judge you for it.

Purple And Green

2010-06-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

I'm struggling with who to root for in the NBA finals. As most of you know, NBA is not my sport of choice, i think it's ghetto as hell, with immature, selfish, gang-banging players... but alas, I find myself interested in this Boston/Los Angeles series cause of the history of the rivalry.

I have no allegiance to either team, so I was trying to figure out who to root for. Even after LA's win on Thursday, I can't decide... so i did what most common sense people do in situations like this.... Make a PRO-CON list and see who wins!

For Los Angeles. Kobe Bryant is an All-American hero. In the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he took over the gold medal game.. I still remember watching that game at 2AM, the USA took a huge early lead, but Spain chipped back into it... And they were within five points with about five minutes to go. I remember I was so nervous... And then Kobe took over and won the game for the USA. I dunno why, but that basketball gold medal was so important for me. I was thinking I didn't care if we lost every other gold medal, we had to win this one. And from that day on, Kobe became an All-American hero. Plus 10 pts LA

Against Los Angeles. Kobe Bryant is a dirty adulterer and rooting for him is a sin. Minus 1 pt LA

Against the NBA. Actually, probably 98% of the players in the NBA are adulterers (as I make irresponsible blanket statements.) The only players that do not cheat are probably Yao Ming and Steve Nash. Minus 10 pts for the NBA

For Boston. I'm gonna come clean here and say I was a pretty big fan of Boston sports from 2000-2005. I rooted for the Patriots (cause Tom Brady is my hero, i almost bought his jersey in Vegas one year). And I supported the Red Sox because I hated the Yankees. The Red Sox comeback in 2004, one of my favorite sporting moments in the last ten years. I still remember screaming at the TV after the Johnny Damon grand slam in game seven. Good stuff. +10 pts Boston

Against Boston. KG is a thug, cheap shot artist and dirty player. -2 for Boston

Against the NBA Actually, probably 98% of the NBA is thugs and dirty players. -10 for NBA

Against Los Angeles. Ron Artest. Ron Artest is a total thug that started the greatest brawl in sports history. I hate this guy.-8 pts LA

For Los Angeles Ron Artest. Ron Artest is a total thug that started the greatest brawl in sports history. I hate this guy... but that brawl was entertaining as hell! My only regret is that youtube/twitter was not around in 2004. Can you imagine if it was? The internet might have exploded under all the traffic.+8 pts LA

Do you ever wonder what of certain events of history would look like if social media was around earlier? How would 9/11 be treated? JFK assassination? Prim Loerta Earthquake? Rodney King?

For Los Angeles Luke Walton. One of my favorite non-Bay Area collegiate players. One of the smoothest most creative passers I've ever scene in the college level. I watch Laker games to watch this guy, even though he only gets twenty minutes a game.+3 LA

For Boston. Birthplace of the revolution. Boston gave us freedom, patriotism, bravery, and AMERICA way back in the 1700s.+10 Boston

Against Los Angeles. Birthplace of Hollywood. Los Angeles gave us egotism, greed, anorexia, immorality, vanity, bigotry.. -10 pts LA

Against Los Angeles. LA also gives us extreme violence, overt sexuality, and more violence.... Which comes to thing of it, is probably not a bad thing! + 10 pts LA

For Boston. Jesus once played for the Red Sox. That can't be a bad thing + 10 pts Boston

For Boston. Green is one of my favorite colors. Purple is not.+ 10 pts Boston

For Los Angeles. Jack Bauer was born and raised and plied is trait in Los Angeles.+1000 LA

For Los Angeles. Lots of my friends are Laker fans. And if I don't want my friends to be happy, then what kind of person am I. Hate rooting is something I'm not a fan of.+10 pts LA

Against Los Angeles. Lots of my friends are Laker fans. And this utterly confuses me since we all live in the Bay Area. I mean how can they live in Warrior country and root for the Lakers. Who does that? Who has time! What happened to loyalty? -10 pts LA

Well after adding all the points together... nobody cares, least of all me. I really don't care who wins this series to tell you the truth. The Stanely Cup finals and French Open finals are much more interesting to me these days. I do have a prediction though. After seeing game 1, I can't see how LA loses this series. They are younger, faster, and more talented. So LA in 6 is my prediction

Bizzarro World

2010-05-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

I had a real bizzarro world moment this week. It was a bit crazy.

On Thursday my boss hands me a job resume and asks me to prepare to interview the candidate later on in the day. As usual, when my boss tells me to do something..... I do it at the absolute last possible moment. So like twenty minutes before the interview I was like, "Crap. I better review this....". So I start reviewing it, the name on the resume sounded familiar but I couldn't put a finger on it. So i continue reading the rest of the resume, found out this guy has relatively good experience, interestingly he was actually a teacher before... and coincidentally, he taught at the same high school I went to, and wow, even at the same time that I was there.... when it hit me... HOLY &*^&#$ this guy was my high school math teacher!!!! WTH!!! WTF!!!

Man, I admit, i was shaken up a little. I don't know why I mean, high school is so far removed these days, but still holding the resume of one of my former teachers.... What do I do? If I went in there and did the interview it would have been super awkward. Super awkward. I didn't have any issues with this guy back in high school, if I remembered correctly he was boring as hell, but seemed to be a good guy. No reason for me not to pop in there and ask him a few PHP questions right?? I just couldn't do it. I toyed around with the idea of going in there and just pretending not to know him or remember, but that would have been super awkward and I just didn't think i could pull it off.

In life there are times when you just got to step back and come clean. So I told my boss this, just told him I didn't think i could do the interview, and he got someone else to do the interview. We all had a good laugh about it afterwards.. The good news is that after a rough start, my former teacher did pretty well and they are bringing him back for second round of interviews..

Man. If we hire him. It would be extremely weird having to work with him. Extremely weird.

Bay To Breaker 2010

2010-05-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

Note : Written up Sunday night, but was too lazy to edit and post. So here's it now.

At this very moment, I am sitting in the blogging chair, re watching season five of Lost in preparation for a season six marathon which I hope to accomplish over Memorial Day weekend. I plan to watch the whole season that weekend or , as the great 50 Cent once said, die trying. I'm a little bit sore right now, because approx fourteen hours ago I was running the 99th Bay To Breakers in San Francisco. I guess it's a bit of a tradition now on this blog to write about the race (if I run it) so here's this years entry.

I was really leaning towards skipping this year's race.... solely from the experience of last year's race. In case you forgot what I wrote about last year's race, let me just say it was one of the worst days of my life. For lack of a better adjective, I was EFFED UP after the race. EFFED UP. It was a hundred degrees in the city that day, really humid, and running with 100,000 other people was ... well let me just say I almost died out there on the streets of SF with naked people running over me. Every single body part hurt after the race and I could barely walk. I swore that I would not run it again....

Well fast forward to this year, some church peeps expressed interest in running it, I was still undecided, but after I did a couple of 6 mile training runs with not much trouble, I was leaning towards doing it... And when i found out it would be just 70 degrees (SF weather) on race day, I decided to just do it.

As I did last year... a mile by mile breakdown of the run. One thing I always regret about this blog is that I can't bring a camera for pictures. Because to really fully appreciate the B2B, you have to have pictures, to see all the people in costumes and stuff.... so what you get is my account of it.

Mile 1 : I really dislike the start of the race. It's always so congested and packed with people. Imagine one big turnstile where 100,000 people are lined up to get through. That's what the start of the B2B is like. In the past, we would try to get there early and get in line for the race... This year, we got there a little later, around 8:30 (due to some BART issues and just wanting to sleep more)... I thought by that time the line would be cleared up... Man, how wrong I was. There was still at least 60,000 people waiting to start the race. The first mile (and the next two miles)... were really slow, just plodding along with the crowd. But, it always fun starting the race with the cheering, the costumes, the music, the pageantry and such that is the Bay To Breakers.

Mile 2 : One story from mile two. And it's a good one. It was still pretty crowded the second mile, I was going pretty slow. To circumvent the crowd, some runners went onto the sidewalks instead of the streets since the sidewalks was less crowded. That's what I was doing, weaving in and out of traffic... I was running side by side with a girl dressed in a green butterfly costume (wings and all) when she sped up a little and .... ran right into one of those steel parking meter. LOL. Ouch.

(Note : I only LOL at that because she wasn't hurt, I stopped to see if she was okay, but by then she was already up and running again. Hopefully she didn't crack a rib or anything). If she was hurt I would have used a :-( instead of a LOL.

Mile 3 : Two things of note for mile three. Hyde's Hill, the only climb of the run was extra crowded this year. I think starting later backlogged the runners even more to get up and down the hill... Frustrating..

But in more exciting news on mile three. I tried to send an in-race tweet during this mile... Yes, even after seeing the butterfly into the parking meter, I still was not scared. I was really proud of myself for being able to tweet, "At b2b. @Mile 3" without slowing down or breaking stride. I probably looked ridiculous texting (with one hand) and running at the same time, but I didn't care... BUT for some reason, my tweet did not go out. Stupid Samsung. I guess I was in the middle of a half mile dead zone in downtown SF or something, but my text did not go out... And I didn't realize it until after I got home, checked my twitter to see my tweet... and didn't see it. Darn it.. So close, yet so far.

Mile 4 : Out of downtown and into the park. This is where the race gets a little stagnant, since we're out of downtown and going into Golden Gate park. Here is also where the crowd thins out a lot.. All the out-of-shape people stop to catch their breathes, use the toilet, grab a smoke, grab a drink, take some pictures while the real runners press on. We are finally able to run. I'm finally able to run at my normal pace without having to worry about dodging other runners and stuff. The next four miles is mainly just park, trees and other naturey crap like that. I like it, but it's definitely a change of pace from the costume, music, crowds and boozing of the first three miles.

Mile 5 : What are the best costumes this year? Well, let me give you some of my favorites.

7. Spiderman and Vemon. I noticed this pair because I was running alongside them for a couple miles. We see a bunch of Spidermans, but not a lot of Venoms. So extra props for Venom. And extra props for being able to run at fairly quick pace fully costumed. I wonder how hard it was to breathe in those things.

6. The Wedding Party. Five brides and a minister running together. And this being San Francisco, the minister was marrying the brides to... each other. Nice.

5. The Salmon. I was on the lookup for The Salmon this year. The Salmon is mythical bay-to-breaker centipede costume. People claim that it starts the race at the finish line and tries to get the start line. (IE like a salmon fighting upstream)... Well I'm happy to say that I saw the salmon and can verify it's existence. It was kind of neat watching it try to pick it's way against the crowd.

4. Bacon. We had people dressed as a slab of bacon. Extra crispy. Just thought you guys had to know.

3. The Street Figher Team. We had a female Ken, a female Ryu, Chun Li, we had a Dhalsim, a Vega and a E Honda. Pretty good.

2. The San Jose Sharks! Some girls dressed in Thornton, Heatley, Marleau and Nabby jerseys and hockey gear (no skates). I give them props for that. Go Sharks!

1. And here is my favorite. I wish I had a picture of this one. I was really close to whipping out the old cell phone and snapping a picture of this, but after the tweeting adventure, I didn't want to use my phone anymore... but there was this African American guy racing with a sign on his back that said "Oakland PD, don't shoot me"... LOL.

Mile 6 : Amy passed my up on mile six. Amy was my running partner for the race. We were suppose to meet up with some others in the city, but that didn't materialized**, so I just ran it with her. It was her first B2B and she did really well. Ran the whole thing at a good pace, didn't run into any parking meters, didn't freak out at the naked people. Nice work, Amy Woo!

In other news. I feel GREAT at mile six. In all my years of running the race, i don't think i've ever felt this strong at this point in the race. Maybe it was the training, maybe it was the weather, maybe I caught the magic of the mythical salmon, maybe it was the HGH I was taking, but I feel great at this point in the race.

**File this one under the 'debacle' category... A bunch of other friends were at the race and despite exchanging a hundred text messages, emails, phone calls before, during and after the race, we still was not able to properly meet up.. That was a huge fail. The only person we met up with was Rich Hooi at the end.

Mile 7 : Always my favorite portion of the race... Making that final turn and seeing the water. I turn it on just a little and finish the race in just under one hour twenty minutes, a little slower than last year's time, but that's okay. If I wasn't too busy gesturing towards the sky and thanking God (ala Barry Bonds), I would have tweeted something...

Well that's it... Until. Next year... 100th Bay To Breaker. It will be nothing short of crazy. I hope I'll be there.

Sammy Zheng vs The Pho

2010-05-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

Throughout history there has been many classic rivalries. Coke vs Pepsi. David vs Goliath. Yankees vs Red Sox. Gmail vs Hotmail. Perseus vs Zeus. Playstation vs XBox. Robert E. Lee vs The North. Roe vs Wade... Well Friday evening was the dawn of a brand new rivalry that promises to be nothing short of epic... introducing

First a little background. There is this Vietnamese place in San Francisco that hosts what is known as the "Pho Challenge". The idea is that if you can eat a bowl consisting of two pounds of noodles and two pounds of meat in an hour. Then you get a prize. In this case, the prize is the bowl (trophy), a picture hung on a wall, and you don't have to pay for the meal ($22 value). The catch is... well the catch is the entire challenge itself since only 2% of the people who take it actually finishes it. Basically, it's a sucker bet created by the restaurant to rip off customers dumb enough to take the challenge.

Let me introduce you to my friend Sammy.

If there was one person that could pull the challenge off, it would be Sammy. When we goto Sweet Tomatoes he drinks like 15 bowls of soup. One year, we were in Vegas and we challenged him to eat 20 bread rolls for $20... and he did it. When we goto buffets, he regularly eats double digit plates of food.... I'm not exactly sure how he got started with the Pho Challenge, but last week, I got an email saying he was gonna do the challenge. He even documented how he was preparing for "the biggest challenge" of his life.

Evidently, people has died doing this contest, since they make you sign some kind of waiver before you can do it. Hence the will and testament.... So how did this debacle go down? Well, let's take it from the very beginning. Can he do it? Can he do it?

60:00 - And he begins. Two pounds of meat and two pounds of noodles in a gigantic bowl. The waiter counts him down and starts the timer.

50:00 - Ten minutes in, Sammy starts strong. Slurping down the noodles. Chatty. At this point, i gave him a 40% chance of finishing, which is higher than the 30% change I gave him twenty minutes ago.

40:00 - The first hints of trouble. The shirt has come off. And he's sweating since the broth is hot. (We were trying to convince him to do the challenge shirtless... Now that would have been hilarious). The biggest problem thus far? Hand cramp from using chopsticks (yes, it's true) and dying of thirst because they don't allow you to drink water during the challenge.

As a side note, I finished my own personal pho challenge around the same time. Notice how big his bowl is compared to mine.

30:00 - At the halfway point... Sammy is actually approximately halfway through the bowl of noodles!! He might actually do it! But he's noticeably struggling. Noticeably... this does not bode well. Look how stressed and tired he looks in this picture.

20:00 - Ooh oh. We are on the brink of meltdown here. Like a fine machine pushed to the brink, Sammy is beginning to breakdown. The hand is sore, the throat is parched, the stomach is full, the ego is bruised. The noodle consumption rate is down at least 75% from the beginning. Failure is pretty much imminent at this point. Everyone is shouting encouragement at him right now (except Wade, who is just laughing deliriously). Rachel is massaging Sammy's esophagus to get the food to go down faster.

10:00 - It's like the eight inning the we are down ten runs right now. It's not looking good folks. However, on the bright side, Sammy is going crazy! It's like he's intoxicated. He's saying all sorts of weird crap right now and forgetting what year we are in. It's quite a musing and a bit scary. I put it at a 75% change he might throw up before the hour is up. But at the very least, it's very entertaining. Look at this picture, he's giving a diatribe about something.

5:00 - Folks. I bring you the last five minutes of this contest via video. Can he do it??

Note - I have to admit, this video is pretty hilarious (and clean). My friends are pretty funny. And Sammy concession speech is epic (concession speech starts at 3:30 if you want to fastforward. But if you fastforward, you'll miss epics such as...

'Come on Sammy, you got to believe. We believe. Like the Warriors' (Winnie)

'You got to respect the PHO. You did not respect the Pho!' (Hal, on why Sammy failed).

'Hahahahahahahaahahahahahaah' (Wade)

00:00 - Complete and utter failure.

Aftermath - Sammy has completed about 75% of the bowl of pho. But almost is not enough. He tried hard.. But losers try hard. Winners go home and ... well, you know. I have to give props to SZ for trying and providing an hours worth entertainment. And it's not trying if you fail, it's failing if you don't try. When we fall down, we get back up again. Losing inspires us to greater things. We will live to fight another day.... and at the very least, Rachel still loves him. I think.

He also got a free t-shirt from this.

Pho. Until next time. Until next time.

Twitter Attacks CraigsList

2010-05-05T00:32:00.001-07:00

I dunno who is following this but there's something interesting brewing in the Twitterverse these days. About a year ago, i wrote about Twitter. I wrote how I thought at that time (and still do believe) that Twitter is going to revolutionize the internet,society and basically change the world. Well obviously, that has not happened (yet). But there is an amusing little happening on the Twitterverse these days that i think gives an inkling of the power of Twitter.

On April 26, NY Times dropped this somewhat controversial article about how Craigslists makes a ton of money off of illegal sex ads. The report was that just last year, Craigslist made an estimated 36 million off this type of advertisement. Within a few days, organizations like IJM caught wind of this and tweeted about it. And as how twitter works, this tweet was retweeted hundreds of thousands of times within the next couple of hours. I heard about it through a retweet from one of my favorite artists Sara Groves.

And hence started a mini-twitter war. Within a couple days, Craigslist founder responded on his blog blasting the NY Times and then again a couple days later blasting the religious conservative.. Which prompted more retweeting from the IJM people which prompted more posturing/retweeting from the Craigslist people. It's a vicious cycle of internet words. There's now a grassroots twitter movement to get Craigslist to drop their personal sections (as other sites of similar style as Craigslist has done) and if they don't, to boycott Craigslist for other "cleaner" sites like Ebay.

And I think it's story like that will define twitter in the future. The advantage of twitter are two fold. First , it allows you to reach lots of people with a message very cheaply and very quickly. IJM was able to send this article to thousands of people with just a couple key strokes. And that was just the beginning as people like Sara Groves was able to retweet (resend) this message to another couple thousand. Within hours, this message spreaded like a wildfire. Secondly, twitter breaks down the walls between the common people (like us) and people like this Craig guy who runs CraigsList. It took the owner of Craigslist just a couple hours to respond to the public, where as in the past, it would take much longer (if a respond was given at all).

And i think that's the power of twitter. The outcome of this saga is still TBD. Craigslist has done nothing yet and who knows if they will... I'm very interested though to see how this whole saga plays out though..

The Last Last Hurrah - 2010

2010-04-22T22:30:00.001-07:00

Rio, France, meet me in Mexico, Chinatown, then off to Tokyo
It doesn't matter 'cause anywhere's perfect with you

Waaaaaaay back in the year 2009, me and my best group of friends in the world decided to take a cruise together. The trip was called "The Last Hurrah". The thinking was to have one last party/extravaganza before my married friends started having kids (hence ending their lives as we knew it). We took a four day cruise to Mexico and back and it was a boatload of fun.

Well a funny thing happened. 2009 ended, 2010 rolled around and no one got pregnant or popped out any kids. Then we started talking about perhaps doing another "Last Hurrah" trip. Could we do it two years in a row? Well, I guess we can, cause we did! We didn't do a cruise this year, but instead stayed at one of those all-inclusive resorts. For $700 we got airfare, lodging for five days four nights and all you can eat and drink. Cabo San Lucas Mexico was the destination... We don't have any official name for the trip, I'm calling it the "The Last Last Hurrah".

You know what they always say about movie sequels? They are almost always never as good as the original. I privately wondered if this second trip could be as good as the cruise. The cruise was so incredibly fun and I thought there was really no way this trip would exceed that. I was mentally prepared for a letdown... But how wrong I was, this trip turned out to be even more fun than the cruise was... Why was that? Well allow me to tell you.

Like I did in the first trip, let's breakdown the trip in award show style.

Opening Gala
Before we get to the rest of the trip, let's whet your appetite with some pictures. We had over 1500 images and after sorting through all of them, these are some of my favorites.

The Close Call Of The Trip Award
And the first award goes to Wade's mom. A full fledged disaster was averted thanks to Wade's mom. And I'm not kidding either. Wade literally forgot his passport at home. If we had gotten to the airport without his passport, that would have been a def-con level one disaster. We were just about to cross the San Mateo bridge (the point of no return) when his mom (bless Mrs. Chan for being awake at 5AM to take care of her son) woke up, saw Wade's passport on the dinner table and gave us a call. So we turned back and got it. Luckily, we gave ourselves extra time for driving and made our flight with plenty of minutes to spare.

How thankful are we for Mrs. Chan? So thankful that I scoured the web to find a picture of her to put on this blog.

Mrs.Chan and her forgetful son.

The Chris Hansen (To Catch A Predator) Award
Goes to Wade. For this picture.

For the record, this is not posed. Once i got onto the plane, i popped my ipod headphones on and promptly fell asleep. It was 7AM and I had slept at 4AM the night before. The eight year old girl sitting next to me obviously thought I had a good idea and did the same thing.. in the same position I did. Hence the picture. I didn't even know this picture was taken until it went up on Facebook. In fact, I'm not even sure it's legal to take pictures of a child that is not your own... Hell, i might be breaking laws just by putting this picture on this blog. Congratulations Wade, your skill at taking pictures of unsuspecting eight year olds is impeccable, I hope you don't goto jail for this.

Best Way To Start A Vacation Award
We landed in Cabo San Lucas at around 4PM PST (2 hr layover in Los Angeles) and took a taxi to the resort. We were staying in the Riu Santa Fe, one of those swanky all inclusive resorts. Props to Samuel M. Chan for finding the deal.

I knew it was going to be a good vacation because within two minutes of us getting off the taxi, a waitress hands us a cold beverage.

Me and Lily drinking, thirty seconds after stepping off the van. You cannot beat that. It was at that moment when I knew it would be a great vacation.

Best Invention Award
Allow me to show you a picture.

Yes folks. What you see there is a shot-dispensers... In our own rooms! We could do shots whenever we wanted. If I wanted to take a shot before going to bed, I could. If we wanted to take a shot of Jose Cuervo to start the day, we could... the possibilities were endless. It was at that very moment when I knew that the weekend might possibly the funnest of my life. Let me just say that we used these things pretty liberally... The Mexicans do a lot of dumb things, but this invention is brilliant. Brilliant!!!

Shots! Shots! While we are on the topic of alcohol....

Song of The Trip
Every trip needs a theme song. Last year's was Katy Perry's Hot & Cold for reasons I don't quite remember, except that Wade had a fascination with her. This year, we had a little bit of trouble coming up with one. We scanned the spectrum of music tossing around songs all the way from Miley Cyrus to the other side of the spectrum which is Taylor Swift (our music spectrum is pretty small)... But we could not find one...

We couldn't think of one... because the answer was right in front of our faces!! Literally. I have to hand it to Sammy for figuring it out. Part way through the trip, he made an inspired decision. Every single time he used the word 'alcohol' in a sentence, he would say 'ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-alcohol' like the Jamie Foxx song. And everyone would crack up. It was hilarious. And he did that all weekend. And pretty soon we all started doing that and hence the theme was born.

Blame it on the ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-cohol

Creation Award (Best Naturey Moment)
The sunset over the Pacific on our first day there was stunningly gorgeous. How stunning was it? I was amazed when I saw it, but when I came home and looked at the pictures, I was even more amazed. God put on a show for us that evening. Let's get straight to the pictures.

Skies the color of indigo.. Beautiful. That first day was the best. The other days were cloudy so the sunset wasn't as pretty.

The Long-Time No See Award
Oh tennis I love you. I have not played any real tennis in so long. I've forgotten how much fun it was to play with competent people who could actually hit the ball back accurately. And I've forgotten how much fun it was to play with the gang. Like Hal, Paul, Sammy, SMC and Rachel. We use to play all the time during the summers, but not much recently. I've forgotten about Paul's rocket serve (with 2% first serve accuracy), I've forgotten about Rachel's solid forehand, I've forgotten SMC crazy spins. And to play real games too. I don't think i've played a real game in a years, but we played two this day. Here are some pictures.

Left/Top Sammy. Showing off his 35 mph rocket serve.
Right/Bottom Paul. Only one person could pull off the entire black look in 85 degree and not break a sweat.

Left/Top Your truly. Hitting the shot I really have a hard time hitting. The high backhand. I cannot hit that shot.
Right/Bottom Hal. I played one set with Hal as my doubles partner and I forgotten how much I like playing with him. (I actually thought this on the court, "hmm i really like playing with Hal!"). I think the reason is that his game some what complements mine, as he gets his serves in regularly and has a good forehand which allows me to play the net which i like to do. Good job Hal.

Rachel and me in the final match we played. I have to hand it to Rachel for toughening it out, in this final match we were playing two of the guys and we were down like 4-1 , but we pulled even to 6-6 and to a tiebreak. Rachel displayed toughness I didn't know was in her. She was practically dying out there, it was 95 degrees, we were both dehydrated, and she had played most of the morning already... But the game must go on!! She almost pulled a Pete Sampras and threw up on the court. We eventually lost the tie break, but Rachel will ever won my admiration for the way she played this game. Good job Rachel, i'll take you as my tennis partner anyday.

The Sherry Lee Award (Athletic Accomplishment)
Sherry, i dedicate this award to you my friend. One the second day of Cabo, I pulled off this schedule. Tennis in the morning (as described above). Swimming in the afternoon. Some sprints on the beach. Running the gym for about an hour. Then beach volleyball in the evening next to the Pacific. Pretty much six hours of athletics for the day... And the funny thing was, I wasn't even sore or tired the next day. I guess being on vacation has a way of refreshing your body... or maybe it was all the strange Mexican drinks I was drinking. Regardless, I'm pretty sure a day like that will never be repeated. Sherry, are you proud?

The Rainbow Shot Award
One bar downtown was offering what they called the "Rainbow Shot", basically 9 shots the color of the rainbow for $9. Observe bartending magic.

Pretty neat huh? Anytime you can get 9 shots for $9 you got to do it right? So we did. And now I present my first ever video interview on this site, as i interview everyone before they are about to take their shots. (Scroll to the 16 second marker before interviewing starts)

What a fun fun fun moment. The shot itself was kind of weak (i mean $9 for 9 shots... we're lucky we didn't get H1N1 from drinking this water) it was like drinking juice. I think there was .000000000000000000000001 alcohol in the drinks. Hal did three of them and probably could have done all nine and not feel a thing. I could probably do all nine and I'm usually pretty weak when it comes to alcohol. It was just fun doing them though. Here are more pictures from this glorious moment.

Left/Top The people who would be taking the shots.
Right/Bottom Cheers.

The Illegal Activity Award
An award all Mexicans will be familiar with... the illegal activity award! (okay okay, just kidding, i couldn't resist that joke. I love Taco Bell). Well, last year, we had some adventures with a volleyball. Last year, if you recall, we couldn't find a volleyball... And we couldn't get one since we weren't staying at the resort. So we did the next best thing, Hal 'borrowed' a ball from the resort by pretending to be a guest at the resort. This we did, and it was good until we got caught.

Lesson learned? Well not quite. This year, we stayed at the resort and was entitled to a volleyball, except it took us forever to secure a volleyball thanks to Mexicaness. Good grief... Anyways, once we got a ball (took us about an hour), we decided not to give it back until the end of the trip. Cause we knew we would need the ball again, and didn't want to go through all the trouble to get a new ball each day. So at the end of the game, Winnie just put it in her bag and we lugged it around with us... It's a bit funny, we lugged Volleyball everywhere (since we couldn't leave him in the room, we didn't want housekeeping to snoop in our stuff and find Volleyball would we?).. At the end of the trip, we were on the verge of returning volleyball to the front desk, when someone (i believe Hal, since he's into stuff like this) mentioned why don't we just take the ball home with us, since it was a good ball and would be a good keepsake as a reminder of this epic trip. And we all thought, damn, good idea. So we stole the volleyball. We stuffed it into Paul's bag and rescued him from the evil Mexican resort. The end.

Footnote... Volleyball got confiscated at LAX. Evidently, it's illegal to bring a volleyball onto a plane.... Just kidding! Volleyball is at Hal's house now. But it would have been funny if after all that work to steal the ball, it did get confiscated.

The Mexican Genius Award
I also like to call this the 'The WTF, WTH, and WTFH Award' because so many things the Mexicans did I just flat out did not understand. Let me point out some of them.

WTF #1. The aforementioned volleyball adventure. You know how long it took us to get a volleyball? One hour. It went like this. Sammy went to ask Jose at the front desk for the ball. Jose tells him to see Juan at the pool. Juan tells him to go see Juanita the entertainment manager, Juanita sends him to Jesus at the restaurant.. i mean wtf? At first i thought they were just giving us the run around... but then i realize they probably had no idea who had the ball or who was suppose to have the ball... The funny thing is that they never gave us a ball, we just took it from another group after they finished playing with it.

WTF #2. They had two tennis courts on the resort. Most people borrowed rackets, since it's hard to bring a tennis racket on a plane (i considered bringing mine actually)... So knowing this, if you have two tennis courts and people need to borrow rackets, how many rackets do you think it would be good to have on-hand for the guests... Obviously, the answer is five... Good job Mexicans.

WTF #3. Me, Paul and Wade shared a room. And we had one key to share amongst the three of us which is a bit hard. So Wade went to the front desk and asked for another one... And they gave it to him! No verification needed, no security check, no nothing. They just handed him over a key.. umm I mean I understand honesty is the best policy.. but WTF?

WTF #4. As a bonus WTF?!? I was browsing a Mexican bookstore on site and when I saw this book, I automatically dropped the average IQ of the entire country 20 points in my mind.

Flashback/Flashforward Award
On our second full day in Mexico Paul, Lily and SMC treated me to a day of ATV for my birthday! (Thanks folks!) I've never been ATVing before but I've heard that it was fun and I was really looking forward to it. It was one of those guided tour trips and we would start in the desert and end at the beach. I was pretty excited the night before... that was before I learned that I would have to get up at 7:30 for the trip and i got a little less excited... and then when I woke up at 7 with a hangover, I got even less excited... No worries though, after we got there and got geared up, I was excited again! Here are some pictures.

Left/Top The four of us, geared up and ready rumble in the desert.
Right/Bottom Our wheels..

Left/Top Going through the desert we saw some huge cactus's. Like this one. It was about 30ft tall. Jose, our guide, said cactus's this big are usually 1000-2000 years old. Wow.
Right/Bottom On the trip we ran into a wild ostrich!! Okay, the ostrich was not wild, it was caged. It's about 10 ft tall. I've never seen one of these birds in the flesh before. Jose, our guide, said ostrich meat is really good.

Four shots of villages in on the tour. It's easy to forget, because we were staying in a tourist part of Mexico, that most of Mexico is very poor and the country has a high poverty rate. Most of Mexico is in fact, like villages like this. I am not sure why the guide took us to this village, since it's not exactly that attractive and wasn't really that safe (this is the equivalent of someone visiting the Bay Area for the first time, and i take them to see West Oakland), and it was kind of desolate... But in a way, I'm glad I saw it, because it gives a realer picture of Mexico. These villages have no electricity and they get their water well drawned. The guide told us that most of the villages have their own schools and churches (see picture) because it's too far away from the city... Most of the villages also grow their own produce are self sustaining to a degree. I called this the Flashforward/Flashback Award since it reminded me a little of Cambodia. (Definitely not as poor as some of the Camobodian villages though).

Left/Top The quartet. At the beach. We made it!
Right/Bottom Some action shots of us ripping through the desert.

The Favorite Moment
I'm gonna end with this.... At the end of the trip, on our last night, our tradition is to go around the table and everyone would recall their favorite moment from the trip. Despite all the fun I had atv, swimming, tennis, drinking, eating, I think my favorite part of the trip will be those evening sessions of just sitting around the table, outdoor in the open, under the sky, just chatting and shooting the breeze with the gang... When we're back home, we're all so busy and our schedules are all so different, that it's so hard to get together and just chill. We would get together for things like birthdays or ball games, but those things always surround activities and we don't get time to just sit together, have a beer and talk.

And on this trip we got to do that. Three nights in a row. It was really simple. After dinner, we just sat and practiced the art of conversation. And it was great. Serious discussions. Funny discussions. Silly discussions. So many laughs, so many jokes, so many laughs. And those are the moments that I will remember from this trip. Some final pictures from us just hanging out.

Thanks friends. For a great trip.

Fantasy Sports History

2010-04-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Cabo on Monday. Physically anyways. Mentally, I'm only 50% back. But there's nothing we can really do about that can we?

Anyways, the ultimate Cabo blog will be coming soon. Hopefully this weekend, if I can sort through all the pictures, videos and stories. Until then, let me tell you about a story about how fantasy sports history was made this week.

Before we get to that, here's my take on fantasy sports. I think fantasy sports are generally pretty dumb and are a complete waste of time. I also think people who are REALLY into them needs to get a life. I try to avoid them but occasionally I get roped into joining leagues. I join them for camaraderie purposes, IE with the church or at work, but I pretty much disdain them. This year I was roped into joining the church fantasy basketball league.... Now let me tell you if there's a sport I just can't stand, it's probably the NBA. Fantasy basketball... I hate.. I've mentioned this before, but the ghettoness, the selfishness, the criminals that are prevalent in the league completely turns me off.

But I cave in easily to peer pressure so I reluctantly joined the league... My plan was to just mess around and not take it seriously... This is the team I drafted.

Did you figure it out? Is this not brilliant? An all-white fantasy basketball team!!! (I am defining white as non-black.) Named the Ku Klux Klan from Berkeley. I'm still giving myself mad props for this.

I didn't expect much. I would have been happy with finishing in the top half of the league. But Steve Nash had a monster year, David Lee had a monster year, and Andrew Bogut had a monster breakout year. Before I knew it, I somehow had the third best record and made the playoffs. And then I won the first round. And then in the championship round, somehow, this happened.

Hahahahahahah. Yes we can!! Yes we can!! My all white fantasy team won it all. I cheated a little and imported a yellow man (this guy Yi from New Jersey) to help with rebounding down the stretch, but I think that's minor.... I won! I am more proud of this than I probably should be. And now I will officially retire from fantasy basketball since there is no way I can top this. In case your curious, here's the final roster.

Yes we can! Yes we can!

Pre Vacation Post

2010-04-08T01:44:00.000-07:00

Before we do anything.... The new Resident Evil trailer is online... Oooh happy day, happy day!

I should just end the blog right here. Cause it can't get any better. It's all downhill from here folks.

Gonna hold off on the songs blog for a little bit. I leave tomorrow (which is now today) morning at 5AM to goto SFO airport to fly to Mexico for a four day vacation. The planning for just getting to SFO in the morning is already quite crazy, no less than 100 emails were exchanged trying to figure out ride situations. In the end, Team Beta (my friends are cool in this way, we assign team names to everything we do) will depart from Fremont , cross the 92 and meet up with Team Alpha in SFO at approx 6:00AM hopefully.

I dunno why, but the day before leaving for trips is always so hectic. Always. I'm a last minute packer (I haven't even started yet haha), but that's not the thing that makes it hectic. I have many quirky routines that I go through before traveling. One of my pet peeves is that when I come back from a trip I must come back to a clean house. I just like coming back to a home that is neat and tidy and comfortable, I don't want to come home and then spend an hour washing dishes or doing laundry. Because of this, I usually spend the last day before any trip cleaning and organizing furiously. I cleaned the restrooms today, washed all the dishes, vacuumed everything.

This year, the leaving was particularly hectic, since we just had a smallgroup potluck at my place that ended merely two hours ago, so I had additional stuff to clean up and additional food to finish.

Which leads me to strange quirk number two... I hate wasting food. I abide by a strict, "no food left behind" policy, which means i don't throw anything away unless it has mold on it. I've had some classic ways of handling this. Before going to Cambodia last year (a two week trip), I stupidly opened a pack of deli meat the week before (when I want a ham sandwich, i get a ham sandwich)... After a quick calculation, i figure deli meat would go bad if I left them for two weeks in the fridge, so the week before the trip, I ate a ham sandwich for breakfast and then another at midnight.. Every day until I got rid of the pack of meat... This year, I had an abundance amount of strawberries in my fridge. Last week i bought a carton of them and forgot to eat them, so now I literally just ate 30 strawberries in the last two hours. I hope I don't get sick.... However, the biggest obstacle is this half gallon of milk that is stuck in my fridge. I started this week with a gallon of milk, but by eating cereal everyday I got it down to half... I wonder if i can finish the last gallon tomorrow morning before I leave. (I should also say, the milk expired two days ago, but that don't mean I don't drink it. No Food Left Behind!) Else, I would have to say, sorry milk, you are lost.

I'll have more details in the post-trip blog, but we're going to an all-inclusive thing in Mexico... I don't really know much of the details, because I didn't plan it, so everything will be a surprise to me. I do have some goals for this trip though, they are.

1. Wake up at 4:40AM to make the Beta Team carpool. Believe it or not. This is a big task. Especially since it's 1:26AM and I'm not asleep yet.

2. Meet up with Sherry Lee at SFO... In a wonderful coincidence of timing. Sherry flies in from Hawaii at 7AM and my flight for LAX leaves at 8AM... We're gonna try to meet up for breakfast... We shall see. It would be great to see her.

3. Drink responsibly. This is one of those all-inclusive deals where you can drink as much alcohol as you wish. When I first heard this, I envision myself waking up in the morning and drinking a Corona with my cheerios, but alas, I don't know if my body can handle it, hence drinking responsibly.

4. Tennis and beach volleyball. I haven't played tennis in months. And I haven't done my Misty May/Kerri Walsh impersonation since last years cruise.

5. Read. I'm bringing a variety of books this trip. For me and my friends. I have Gladwell's Blink and a Tom Clancy novel. I debated bringing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I didn't feel like reading anything heavy.

I also brought books for my friends as well. My friend Sammy emailed me this week for a book recommendation. He likes dark books with blood and gore in it. He told me he wanted to read the "SAW version of books" (if you didn't get that, well you didn't get that). So I recommended Cormac McCarthy The Road which is quite possibly one of the most depressing books I've ever read. I hope he enjoys it. I also hope he doesn't kill himself in the process since this book is so depressing.

For my friend Paul, I'm recommending Lois Lowry The Giver. Paul reads one book every ten years, so i hope he enjoys this one.. I've secretly hoping to get a chance to re-read The Giver myself... It's one of those books i think I would get more out of the second reading.

6. I think above all, just to relax, reflect, and hang out with friends. I'm bringing my journal this time around (something I never do on trips). I don't know what i would write about, but I kind of want it with me this time. For sure, i'll have stories to write about when I get home.

1:43AM. Bed time.

Songs That Inspire #4, #5, #6

2010-04-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

Okay.. We really need to finish up this Songs That Inspire post so I can move on to post other material. Here's three more. #4 is one of my favorite songs, hence I'll lead with that one.

4. JJ Heller - Only Love Remains from Only Love Remains(2006)

I've watched this JJ Heller performance at Menlo Pres. at least fifty times. It's such a powerful performance of such a powerful song. Watch it before you read the rest of this blog. It's worth it the four minutes of your life...

This song... Where to start? I love the wording and I love the structure. I love how JJ transition from really harsh wording to comforting ones seemlessly. Observe. Verse 1.

I know that I deserve to die
For the murder in my heart

Doesn't the word 'murder' just pop out at you when you hear the song? You just don't hear words like that in Christian songs. However, the beautiful thing about this is that she then comes in from the exact opposite way with words of comfort. She kind of good cop/bad cops us in the song.

So be gentle with me Jesus
As you tear me apart

Heard together, it plays out as

I know that I deserve to die
For the murder in my heart
So be gentle with me Jesus
As you tear me apart

Again in the second verse.

Please kill the liar
Kill the thief in me
You know that I am tired of their cruelty
Breathe into my spirit
Breathe into my veins
Until only love remains

I like to think of myself as an okay person most of the time and I think everyonce in a while, I tend to forget that I am a lost wretched sinner underserving of grace. And this song reminds me of that/jolts me back to reality in a way. That's why I love how JJ uses words like 'murder' and 'kill' because they really bring to attention our crimes and sin. It's a reminder of who we were and also a reminder of who we now are instead.

5. Brooke Fraser - Albertine from Albertine(2007)

This was my personal theme song when I got back from Cambodia last year. This is the line the stuck out to me.

Now that I have seen, I am responsible.

When i came back last year, this song, and especially that lyric, played over and over again in my head. I think for this year, if people ask me what I got out of the trip, i think that's would be it. That feeling of responsibility for the orphans we saw, the trafficked girls, the people living in poverty. I remember listenig to this song on the airplane on the way home and thinking that this song is going to be my theme song for the near future...

I also like this lyric a lot

I am on a plane across a distant sea
But I carry you in me
and the dust on, the dust on, the dust on my feet

(In case you haven't figured it out, this song was written after Fraser trip to Rwanda and her feelings coming back. And this is our call. Our duty.

I will tell the world, I will tell them where I've been
I will keep my word
I will tell them Albertine

6. Carolyn Arends - Reaching from I Can Hear You(1995)

I never think about heaven. Or rarely. With real-life going around me, is it prudent to think about heaven and eternity? Francis Chan in his book Crazy Love says about this topic

A person who is obsessed (with God) thinks heaven frequently. Obsessed people orient their lives around eternity; they are not fixed on what is here in front of them

I always wondered about this and don't really understand it, so I'm not going to pretend to. I'm also not exactly sure how this is suppose to play out in real life... But this song though, this song makes me think about heaven.

We are reaching for the future
We are reaching for the past
And no matter what we have we reach for more
We are desperate to discover
What is just beyond our grasp
But maybe that's what heaven is for

You know what is one thing I will look forward to when I get to heaven? It's got to be the absence of 'anxiety' and 'worry'. I worry a lot, probably a lot more than I should. I worry about my job, my life, my future, my family, lots of things. And to think that there will come a day when it the concept of 'worry' becomes foreign? That's something to look forward too. That's why this song inspires me... I'll leave you with this lyric.

So when we taste of the divine
It leaves us hungry every time
For one more taste of what awaits
When heaven's gates are reached

7. Addison Road - What Do I Know of Holy from Addison Road(2008)

Funny thing, the first three songs are really fast and upbeat. The rest of the list takes it down a notch starting with this song from Jenni Simmons and friends. It took me a couple listens before the message hit home. The song talks about the struggle of knowing God. Not just to "know" God, but to KNOW God. You know?

If any song captures all of MY struggles in this Christian life, it's this one. It really feels like this song was written for me.

I'm struggling a little bit on how to explain why this song is so powerful for me, and I think the reason is that this song really needs no explanation. The lyrics are so simple, yet poweful, i'm gonna just run the lyrics here and let you guys read them. (Kind of like how figure skating announcers don't speak while the routine is going on so people can just enjoy the routine)

I made You promises a thousand times
I tried to hear from Heaven but I talked the whole time
I think I made You too small I never feared You at all,no

If You touched my face would I know You?
Looked into my eyes could I behold You?

I guess I thought that I had figured You out
I knew all the stories and I learned to talk about
How You were mighty to save
Those were only empty words on a page
Then I caught a glimpse of who You might be
The slightest hint of You brought me down to my knees

What do I know of You
Who spoke me into motion?
Where have I even stood but the shore along Your ocean?
Are You fire? Are You fury?
Are You sacred? Are You beautiful?
What do I know? What do I know of Holy?

8. Relient K - Up and Up from Five Score and Seven Years Ago(2007)

This is the song I use to get through hard times. But this is also the song I like to listen to during the good times to reflect back on the hard times, and see how the hard times , though they sucked, shaped the good times.

Cause it seems I get so hung up on
The history of what's gone wrong
And the hope of a new day
Is sometimes hard to see

That's is how I feel sometimes, whether work (especially work), relationships, church, life... Sometimes there's just no hope. Or so we think..... Here's one of my favorite lines in the song

And though I'm finally catching onto it
And now the past is just a conduit
And the light there at the end is
Where I'll be

The past is just a conduit. I love that line. There's a bunch of really good, really deep lyrics in this song. No group weaves the witty with the wise in their lyrics as good as Relient K does it. Here's another one of my favorite

To be prosperous
Would not require much of me
You see contentment is the one thing
It entails
To be content with where I am
And getting where I need to be
I'm moving past the past
Where I have failed

I like that...

9. Britt Nicole - The Lost Get Found from The Lost Get Found(2009)

At first glance, your typical Christian music pop song. Nothing special about it. Very simple lyrics, with a very simple message... But sometimes, that is the best way to make a point, no need to complicate something that should be simple in the first place. And I think that's why this song works.

I was listening to one of Francis Chan's sermons in which he said as Christians, we need to live lives that demand explanation. We need to live lives that when people look at they say 'WTF?' If the world is not questioning the way we live our lives, then perhaps we are conforming to the world standards instead of God's standards. This is the message the song conveys.

Don't be afraid to standout
That's how the lost get found

Simple yeah? But it's soooo true. My favorite part of this song is the bridge, where Britt screams Standout! over and over again. Cause that's the point isn't it? To standout and be exceptional.

Also, good for Britt Nicole getting some recognition these days. I was afraid for her career after her (very underrated) first album bombed commercially, but it seems like she's gonna be okay after all. Good for her. I like her. I watched some of her youtube interviews and she doesn't come off as manufactured or fake, she seems genuine. The real deal.

10. Paramore - Brick By Boring Brick from Brand New Eyes(2009)

No no no. I am not trying to destroy all credibility of this list by leading it off with Paramore. Yes, it's true i'm a big fan of theirs and it's probably hard to see them inspire anyone other than teenage girls to dye their hair fire-engine red... That's probabaly all true. At first listen, this song comes off as a catchy tune with clever lyrics taken from various fairytales. Case closed.

But.... there is more. It took listening to this song a number of times before I finally got it. (I like songs where it takes a little bit of effort before you can figure the meaning). The meaning of this song came to me when I got back from Cambodia last year. When it hit me that I, in America, was living in that faraway perfect land that Hayley was singing about.

'Well she lives in a fairytale
too far away for us to find.'

As a working-class American living in Fremont it is so easy for my perspective to get warped because I'm so 'far away' from all the 'problems' of the world (or even in our communities). Poverty exists everywhere, but it is so easy to ignore it, especially when our lives are plentiful and good. It's so easy to forget sometimes that as we are eating dinner in our homes, watching tv, Facebooking, twittering, taking warm showers that millions upon millions of people are starving and dying each day.

Forgotten the taste and smell
Of the world that she's left behind
It's all about the exposure the lens I told her
The angles were all wrong now

This song encourages us to 'Bury this castle' (or at least step outside of it) and start living in the real world where there is real pain and real hurt. And avoid 'building up this world of magic, because our real lives are tragic'

... And that's the very neat message cleverly wrapped up in this very smart song.

Songs That Inspire #7 and #8

2010-03-30T23:49:00.000-07:00

So I slowed down on this a bit thanks to the NCAA updates and a church retreat. Let's try to get the rest of the top 10 up shall we? We'll go two songs tonight.

7. Addison Road - What Do I Know of Holy from Addison Road(2008)

Funny thing, the first three songs are really fast and upbeat. The rest of the list takes it down a notch starting with this song from Jenni Simmons and friends. It took me a couple listens before the message hit home. The song talks about the struggle of knowing God. Not just to "know" God, but to KNOW God. You know?

If any song captures all of MY struggles in this Christian life, it's this one. It really feels like this song was written for me.

I'm struggling a little bit on how to explain why this song is so powerful for me, and I think the reason is that this song really needs no explanation. The lyrics are so simple, yet poweful, i'm gonna just run the lyrics here and let you guys read them. (Kind of like how figure skating announcers don't speak while the routine is going on so people can just enjoy the routine)

I made You promises a thousand times
I tried to hear from Heaven but I talked the whole time
I think I made You too small I never feared You at all,no

If You touched my face would I know You?
Looked into my eyes could I behold You?

I guess I thought that I had figured You out
I knew all the stories and I learned to talk about
How You were mighty to save
Those were only empty words on a page
Then I caught a glimpse of who You might be
The slightest hint of You brought me down to my knees

What do I know of You
Who spoke me into motion?
Where have I even stood but the shore along Your ocean?
Are You fire? Are You fury?
Are You sacred? Are You beautiful?
What do I know? What do I know of Holy?

8. Relient K - Up and Up from Five Score and Seven Years Ago(2007)

This is the song I use to get through hard times. But this is also the song I like to listen to during the good times to reflect back on the hard times, and see how the hard times , though they sucked, shaped the good times.

Cause it seems I get so hung up on
The history of what's gone wrong
And the hope of a new day
Is sometimes hard to see

That's is how I feel sometimes, whether work (especially work), relationships, church, life... Sometimes there's just no hope. Or so we think..... Here's one of my favorite lines in the song

And though I'm finally catching onto it
And now the past is just a conduit
And the light there at the end is
Where I'll be

The past is just a conduit. I love that line. There's a bunch of really good, really deep lyrics in this song. No group weaves the witty with the wise in their lyrics as good as Relient K does it. Here's another one of my favorite

To be prosperous
Would not require much of me
You see contentment is the one thing
It entails
To be content with where I am
And getting where I need to be
I'm moving past the past
Where I have failed

I like that...

9. Britt Nicole - The Lost Get Found from The Lost Get Found(2009)

At first glance, your typical Christian music pop song. Nothing special about it. Very simple lyrics, with a very simple message... But sometimes, that is the best way to make a point, no need to complicate something that should be simple in the first place. And I think that's why this song works.

I was listening to one of Francis Chan's sermons in which he said as Christians, we need to live lives that demand explanation. We need to live lives that when people look at they say 'WTF?' If the world is not questioning the way we live our lives, then perhaps we are conforming to the world standards instead of God's standards. This is the message the song conveys.

Don't be afraid to standout
That's how the lost get found

Simple yeah? But it's soooo true. My favorite part of this song is the bridge, where Britt screams Standout! over and over again. Cause that's the point isn't it? To standout and be exceptional.

Also, good for Britt Nicole getting some recognition these days. I was afraid for her career after her (very underrated) first album bombed commercially, but it seems like she's gonna be okay after all. Good for her. I like her. I watched some of her youtube interviews and she doesn't come off as manufactured or fake, she seems genuine. The real deal.

10. Paramore - Brick By Boring Brick from Brand New Eyes(2009)

No no no. I am not trying to destroy all credibility of this list by leading it off with Paramore. Yes, it's true i'm a big fan of theirs and it's probably hard to see them inspire anyone other than teenage girls to dye their hair fire-engine red... That's probabaly all true. At first listen, this song comes off as a catchy tune with clever lyrics taken from various fairytales. Case closed.

But.... there is more. It took listening to this song a number of times before I finally got it. (I like songs where it takes a little bit of effort before you can figure the meaning). The meaning of this song came to me when I got back from Cambodia last year. When it hit me that I, in America, was living in that faraway perfect land that Hayley was singing about.

'Well she lives in a fairytale
too far away for us to find.'

As a working-class American living in Fremont it is so easy for my perspective to get warped because I'm so 'far away' from all the 'problems' of the world (or even in our communities). Poverty exists everywhere, but it is so easy to ignore it, especially when our lives are plentiful and good. It's so easy to forget sometimes that as we are eating dinner in our homes, watching tv, Facebooking, twittering, taking warm showers that millions upon millions of people are starving and dying each day.

Forgotten the taste and smell
Of the world that she's left behind
It's all about the exposure the lens I told her
The angles were all wrong now

This song encourages us to 'Bury this castle' (or at least step outside of it) and start living in the real world where there is real pain and real hurt. And avoid 'building up this world of magic, because our real lives are tragic'

... And that's the very neat message cleverly wrapped up in this very smart song.

March Madness!

2010-03-21T22:54:00.000-07:00

What a week. I did something I've always wanted to do and that was experience March Madness live. San Jose State hosted the first two rounds of the West and East regionals this year and my coworker Valerie got me tickets to both the Thursday and Saturday sessions (thanks Val!). This is something I've always wanted to do. I love college basketball, much much more than the pro game (the pro game has been corrupted by money, criminals, selfishness, ball-hogging, no defense and a bunch of other things).

On Thursday we parked ourselves inside the HP Arena from 11AM to 10PM. Yes, almost 11 hours of non-stop college basketball. We saw eight teams, four games, three close games, two good white players and one buzzer beater... It was great. And then on Saturday, we did much of the same, except it was just two games.

Left/Top : Our view.
Right/Bottom Game 1 : Murray.St Racers vs Vanderbilt Commies

Let me hit some of the highlights from those two days.

Best Game
There were some pretty good games in San Jose. When I first saw the bracket, I was slightly disappointed because San Jose wasn't getting any really big teams. It would have been nice to see a John Wall or an Evan Turner in SJ, that would have been cool. On the flipside though, because we were getting the lower seeds, the games would be more even and less predictable. And that's what it turned out to be. Of the six games we saw, four of them went down to the last minute and two were blowouts. Let's rank the top games.

Washington(11) vs Marquette(6) First round game. The best game of the weekend. Washington was down by fifteen with 10 minutes left in the second half and I thought it was over. UW made an amazing comeback and then won it on a last second shot to score the upset. What a great game. I broke a personal rule of mine by picking Marquette over Washington in my bracket (my personal rule since 2005 when Cal got screwed out of the Rose Bowl, always root for the West Coast team against a non-West Coast team), but I was pretty much rooting for UDub from the beginning. Very well played, fast game with lots of running and very little fouls.

Left/Top UDub introductions. Let's go Huskies!
Bottom/Right Marquette Golden Eagles!

Left/Top The tip
Bottom/Right Halftime Score. Close game.

And here is the game winner from Washington's Pondexter.

Montana State(14) vs University of New Mexico(3) A surprisingly close game. When I Montana rolled out their team during warm-ups I thought, "uhhh, no way they a chance in this game". They had a 75% white team. Literally, 12 out of the 16 kids were white. I thought blowout city for sure. They also had zero fans in the crowd. That might be a good thing, since I have no idea how the Montana people would have reacted to the liberal Bay Area culture. The New Mexico team, brought a large contingent of fans.

I don't know how they did it, but Montana somehow kept it close and lead at the half. That itself was a minor miracle. I mean, there was zero talent on that Montana team. They couldn't shoot, they couldn't run, they couldn't do much of anything, but they played with huge heart and hustle. That combined with a slightly-off UNM team kept the game close. In the second half, UNM went up by 10 and I thought it was over for sure... But somehow Montana came back and almost pulled it off, but in the end, the talent gap was too large and UNM pulled away. But this is what the NCAA is all about, rooting for no name team, with no name players to pull off the big upset.

And this also taught me a lesson. If you ever have a choice to have lots of talent but no desire to work hard, or a desire to work hard but no talent. Always take the talent. Hard work can only takes you so far in life.

Butler(5) vs UTEP(12), Vanderbilt(4) vs Murray.St(14), Butler(5) vs Murray.St(14) weren't particularly well played games, but they came down to the last minute so that made them exciting.

Best Buzzer Beater - Murray.St buzzer beater against Vanderbilt. I had a major fail here. I wanted to record the potential buzzer beater. So first, I took this shot of Vandy trying to win it and it went like this... But they missed the shot...

So i turned it around and took a video of Murray.St trying to win the game, it went like this..

So Murray.St got the ball back again, but I forgot to take the video!! Darn it. But I did take the picture of the Murray.St dog pile after the winning shot...

Best Moment - I could talk about the Murray.St buzzer beater here, but instead I'm gonna talk about one of my guilty pleasures. One of my guilty pleasures in life is watching white people play basketball... yes it's true, i love watching white guys pass the orange ball around the court. I was secretly hoping that we would get a Mormon school like a BYU or an Utah.St in San Jose so I could see the epic sight of five white guys on the court. But that was not to be and I thought the dream of seeing five white guys on the same court died... However, in a shocking surprise, enter Montana.St! Twelve out of the sixteen players on the Grizzlies were white. And they had three white starters. THREE. And after five minutes, the two non-white players had two fouls and the probability of full white-boy basketball was really high. For the record, I was really excited... I mean five white guys on the court at the same time was something I only heard about, but never saw... And then... they took out one of the guards and it was FOUR white guys on the floor. FOUR! The dream... So close to coming true... But then two of the white guys started struggling and was benched and the dream died there... And it was never the same after that. We never had more than three white guys on the court after that... But that stretch of five minutes in the first half when we had four white guys on the court... Was amazing. I never saw so many bricks and hustle plays ever in my life. Thank you Montana!

Count them!!! One, two, three, four... So close....

Best Fans - The University of Washington fans. Lots of purple at the arena. And the fans were pretty rowdy as well. The fans mesh well with the Huskies style of play, fast and frenetic. The team feeds off the fan and the fan feeds off the team, it's a circle of energy that generated a pretty significant home-court advantage for team Washington in San Jose. When the Huskies were down by fifteen in the second half against Marquette in round 1, the fans willed the team back into it. Willed them... After that first game, if I was a betting man, I would have bet on Washington to win the second round game. Even against a 3 seed, you sense with this home court advantage, team Purple would not lose, and they did not. They crushed UNM in the second game. Check out the energy in the crowd.

Best Cheerleaders
Every team had their own cheerleading squad and each squad had their own routine... I felt it was my duty to analyze each cheerleading squad and rank them in order of uhhh... talent.

Coming in last. The University of New Mexico cheerleaders. Let's just say... ahh well, let me just keep my thoughts to myself here so people don't hate me.

Coming in next... University of Texas El-Paso.... Ummm. I'm beginning to realize that I might lose some female readers on this blog.

Coming in next... Marquette Golden Eagles cheer team. Look at the form. Look at the extension. Look at the synchronicity.

Coming in next...Butler!! Nice pyramid.

And now we are getting to the good part... It was a toss up between the UDub cheerleaders and the next team... But in the end, I had to put the UDub here because they had too many dudes on their team.

And that leads us to #1!!! The Montana cheerleaders whoohoo. This was the only cheer team with no men on it. Awesome. It was at this moment when I wish I had a camera with a 200x zoom.

Interesting Story #1
I ate (in this order) polish dog, garlic fries, 32oz soda, pizza, churro, philly cheesesteak, buffalo wings and an ice cream sandwich... All in two days. Here's the thing with these tournaments. You can't leave the arena once you check in with your ticket. And they don't let you bring any food or water into the arena (unless you sneak it in). Between each game there is a thirty minute break, and halftime is about twenty minutes per game... With all these breaks, what else is there to do? We can't go outside, there's not much to do at the arena, the only options was to goto the bar and watch the other games ... or eat. And eat I did. A lot.

Total combine price for these two meals... $35

Interesting Story #2
And starting at point guard for Montana Grizzlies, out of West Oakland, California....

Hold up right there. When the Montana PG was introduced, I literally LOLed. Why? Cause it's hilarious!! Can you imagine taking a kid from the hood of Oakland and dropping him into the 'hood' of Montana? Culture shock central. That's an idea for a reality show right there, let's take a kid from the ghettos of Oakland and place him in rural Montana. I mean... what does this guy do for fun in Montana? Ride a horse? And what does he do at night, who would he hangout with? The possibilities are endless.

(For the record, I made up the part that this guy was from West Oakland, they just said Oakland in the intro.. I just said West Oakland to make it more interesting... it would not be as interesting if this guy was from Oakland Hills.

Interesting Story #3
Free throws. How come none of these college kids can make a free throw? I didn't realize how bad some of these teams were. Murray.St lost their second round game because they couldn't make a free throw (40%). Butler free throw percentage two games 60%. New Mexico, two games 50%. The only team that even had average free throw shooting was Washington at 75%. Somebody make a free throw!!

And that's pretty much it. I will leave you with one more photo... Saw this on Saturday. Protest Obama-care!!

Songs That Inspire #9

2010-03-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

My friend Natalie wrote a blog post about musicians that inspire her. I immediately grew envious, cause this was something that was always wanted to write about, because there have been many songs that inspire me. I never did it because I knew it would be a really long entry. Her entry inspired (no pun intended) me to think that it's time I bit the bullet and just pounded it out. This entry took me almost a week and a half to put together, I hope you guys enjoy.

This post is slightly different than Nat's, instead of artists that inspire me, i'm gonna just go with songs. Because I think the art more so than the actual artist inspires me. Plus, it's a lot easier to share about and write about songs.

So here's how this is going to work. I have the whole thing typed up and ready to go.... But instead of putting up a huge post, i'm gonna do a countdown. One song every day starting with this post. Add some drama to the whole thing.

Without further ado. Here we go.

Top 10 Songs That Inspire Me

9. Britt Nicole - The Lost Get Found from The Lost Get Found(2009)

At first glance, your typical Christian music pop song. Nothing special about it. Very simple lyrics, with a very simple message... But sometimes, that is the best way to make a point, no need to complicate something that should be simple in the first place. And I think that's why this song works.

I was listening to one of Francis Chan's sermons in which he said as Christians, we need to live lives that demand explanation. We need to live lives that when people look at they say 'WTF?' If the world is not questioning the way we live our lives, then perhaps we are conforming to the world standards instead of God's standards. This is the message the song conveys.

Don't be afraid to standout
That's how the lost get found

Simple yeah? But it's soooo true. My favorite part of this song is the bridge, where Britt screams Standout! over and over again. Cause that's the point isn't it? To standout and be exceptional.

Also, good for Britt Nicole getting some recognition these days. I was afraid for her career after her (very underrated) first album bombed commercially, but it seems like she's gonna be okay after all. Good for her. I like her. I watched some of her youtube interviews and she doesn't come off as manufactured or fake, she seems genuine. The real deal.

10. Paramore - Brick By Boring Brick from Brand New Eyes(2009)

No no no. I am not trying to destroy all credibility of this list by leading it off with Paramore. Yes, it's true i'm a big fan of theirs and it's probably hard to see them inspire anyone other than teenage girls to dye their hair fire-engine red... That's probabaly all true. At first listen, this song comes off as a catchy tune with clever lyrics taken from various fairytales. Case closed.

But.... there is more. It took listening to this song a number of times before I finally got it. (I like songs where it takes a little bit of effort before you can figure the meaning). The meaning of this song came to me when I got back from Cambodia last year. When it hit me that I, in America, was living in that faraway perfect land that Hayley was singing about.

'Well she lives in a fairytale
too far away for us to find.'

As a working-class American living in Fremont it is so easy for my perspective to get warped because I'm so 'far away' from all the 'problems' of the world (or even in the community communities). Poverty exists everywhere, but it is so easy to ignore it, especially when our lives are plentiful and good. It's so easy to forget sometimes that as we are eating dinner in our homes, watching tv, Facebooking, twittering, taking warm showers that millions upon millions of people are starving and dying each day.

Forgotten the taste and smell
Of the world that she's left behind
It's all about the exposure the lens I told her
The angles were all wrong now

This song encourages us to 'Bury this castle' (or at least step outside of it) and start living in the real world where there is real pain and real hurt. And avoid 'building up this world of magic, because our real lives are tragic'

... And that's the very neat message cleverly wrapped up in this very smart song.

NCAA 2010

2010-03-17T18:50:00.001-07:00

I know everyone has been waiting for this....

Songs That Inspire #10

2010-03-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

Parking Garage Rage

2010-03-12T00:29:00.000-08:00

There was absolute chaos at the work parking garage today. Usually getting in and out of 3rd Street/Santa Clara parking lot in San Jose is pretty easy. I have a key badge that I use to badge in and out. Usually pretty fast.

Today. Not so fast. There was some kind of convention near our building today and the people who went to the convention parked in our garage. I don't know what kind of convention it was, but I'm guessing it was a convention of not so bright people, possibly even stupid people. Anyways, I left work today at around the same time these people were leaving the convention, which meant all of us were trying to leave the parking garage at the same time... and here's where it gets ridiculous. On the parking ticket that guests receive when they enter the garage, it says clearly that you are suppose to 'pay for ticket before entering car'. Let me repeat that in bigger font and bold just to get the point across 'pay for ticket before entering car'... Actually , i am still not satisfied, let me repeat it in all caps as well. 'PAY FOR YOUR *#$@$#* TICKET BEFORE ENTERING CAR!!!'...

I could not BELIEVE the number of people who did not do that. What is it with people these days, do they not READ? It took me 35 MINUTES to leave the parking garage today. The line of cars snaked all the way to the third floor. What was happening was that these people who did not read the instructions on their parking ticket would get to the checkout gate and get stuck (since their ticket was not paid for).... And because you couldn't pay at the gate, these people had to stop their cars, GET OUT OF THEIR CARS, run to the machines, pay for their tickets, walk back to their cars, startup their cars, and then checkout... All the while, everyone waited behind them (they couldn't back up because there was so many cars behind them)... People literally parked at the gate, blocking anyone else from getting out.

Here's how stupid it got, the garage attendants opened another lane to let cars out, and I got into that lane (i was like the tenth car).. And the amazing thing is, that half the cars in front of me... HAD THE SAME PROBLEM. They had not paid for their ticket and had to get out of their cars, run to the machine, pay for it, and then restart their cars.... NOW, let me pause for a little bit and verbally attack some people. If you were waiting almost twenty minutes in line to get out, wouldn't you start wondering WHY IT WAS TAKING SO FRIGGING LONG. (when i use the word frigging, that means I'm pissed off). And did they NOT SEE people running to the machines to pay for their tickets? And maybe, JUST MAYBE, it would be a good idea to pay for your ticket BEFORE getting into the other lane to go out?? Argh.. So frustrating.... It finally got so bad, that the parking attendants gave up, and just opened the gates and let everyone out for free. That's the only reason I got out. if they hadn't done that, I would have been in that parking garage for over an hour. I might have also physically harmed someone... The End

Olympic Review

2010-02-28T23:09:00.001-08:00

Being as big a hockey fan as I am, this update is gonna open about the gold medal game.... Which I missed. Dammit.

Due to a mega-critical-earth shattering church meeting that happened during the gold medal game (honestly, if it was anything less, i would have blown it off today), I had to follow the game through text updates from my friends.

There are three sporting events in my life now that I really really wish I had saw on TV.

3. Indy/New England AFC Championship game in 2006 (the year Indy came back from 21-3). I was actually vacationing in San Diego at the time and our flight back to the Bay left exactly when the third quarter (the Colts comeback) started. My dad knew how much i wanted to see this game, so the first thing he said to me when we landed was not "hi" or "hello" but "Indy 38 Patriots 34". That's why I love my dad.

2. Giants Jonathan Sanchez no-hitter 2009... In my life, i just want to see one Giants no-hitter. Just one. And it happened while I was doing something that i don't remember. I just know when i logged onto Facebook that night, there was so many status updates about Sanchez that I knew something good must have happened... I listened to the whole game on KNBR at midnight. Ended at 3AM.

1. USA/Canada 2010 Gold Medal on the line. Sigh... I heard Crosby's goal on the radio on the way home and almost crashed my car... I think I would have been even sadder to miss the game if the US won the gold. But alas, they didn't, so I feel slightly better about missing the game.

Man, this is lame, but I'm watching the highlights now on NBC.com and I somehow cheered when the US tied up the game with 21 seconds left. And I just watched Crosby's goal (nice pass, Iginla).

For some reason, this year, i just couldn't get excited about the Olympics. When they started about two weeks ago, I wasn't that excited, but thought that I would catch the 'Olympic Fever' after seeing some of the events but that has not happened. It's kind of strange cause usually I am a pretty big fan of the Olympics, I watched many hours of the Torino games and even more of the China games in 2008, this year everything seems ... just a bit dull. The only event that really excited me was the the hockey. The hockey nothing short of spectacular this year. I feel so proud watching the baby US team winning game after game. When they beat the Canadians last week, man, that's gonna be the sporting event of the year so far. Realistically, I didn't think they would win today; there was just too much talent on that Canada team, and too much emotion in that building. The fact they came oh-so-close makes it hard to swallow.

The one other really cool thing about the Olympics this year was the real-time streams that NBC.com has available. This is the first Olympics with free live real-time streaming. And it's pretty cool. I mean where else can I watch live curling except on the Internet? I also (100% out of curiosity) watched a little bit of women's hockey match between Slovakia and China (yes, China has a women's hockey team) and.. talk about suck. The players could barely skate without falling down; it would have been hilarious if it wasn't so sad. Women's hockey need to be abolished for the next Olympics, what an absolute joke. But this live-streaming technology.. Wonderful stuff. I watched the entire first quarter of the Finland/USA semi-final game at work on my laptop (Miikka Kiprusoff = Worst Olympic Goal Tending Performance EVER). It was great.

Last thoughts on Olympics. I usually give my top-ten favorite stories from the Olympics after each Olympics.. I'll do the same this year, here they are.

10. Hannah Teter. Snowboarding Half-pipe. Silver Medal. I don't know why, i just like her. Of all the snowboarder girls, she seems the most grounded. Read about her humanitarian efforts.
9. Joannie Rochette.
8. Olympic Hockey USA/Finland Semifinal Game. Again, Miikka Kiprisoff = Worst Goal Tending Perfomance in the Olympics EVER.
7. Chinese couple winning figure skating pairs gold mdeal. Down with Russia!
6. Avril Lavigne in Closing Ceremonies. Cause anytime you can get someone who spells "skater" as "sk8tr" and "boy" as "boi" to represent your country in it's biggest moment, you absolutely gotta do it. Hahahaah. Canada.
5. Lindsay Jacobellis. I feel bad for her screwing up on her semi-final run. But I'm glad you can still have a sense of humor and an attitude about it.
4. Opening Ceremonies. Torch Malfunction. Hahahaha. Canada.
3. Women's Ice Skating - That Yuna Kim was pretty spectacular. Best performance in Olympic history? I'm okay with that.
2. Olympic Hockey. USA/Canada Preliminary. Most exciting hockey game i've ever watched.
1. Olympic Hockey Gold Medal Game. Canada 3 US 2. Most exciting hockey game I've ever not watched.

Losing Ipod

2010-02-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

I lost my ipod this week and my life almost came to a screeching halt. I didn't realize how use I've gotten to having my ipod around. I like listening to music, so I do almost all mundane activities with it on. Like going to gym, washing dishes, mowing lawn, cleaning, all that stuff I do pumping music through my ipod... Without my ipod, i'm realizing i just have no motivation to do any of those things. It's like I can't operate anymore. And for this long weekend I had a ton of things that needed to be done. What to do? What to do?

Well desperate times calls for desperate measures. I tried to find my old MP3 disc player that I use to have before my ipod... And i couldn't find it. There's a possibility that I gave it to one of the kids in Cambodia, but i forgot if I did. So going back down the ladder of technology, i pull out my old regular sony cd player. Only to find that it no longer spins. CRAP.. So now (as we continue to go backwards in the technology timeline), I pull out my old sony walkman tape player ... which still works!! Only i couldn't find any of my tapes, cause I'm pretty sure I threw them all away a long time ago. Crap again!!

Okay, so i kid, my old cd player still worked (I couldn't resist mentioning tapes in this update). My cd player (from 10 years ago incredibly) worked just fine and it got me through the weekend. The lawn was mown, the dishes were washed and the house was cleaned. Hallelujah. It's funny though, I didn't realize how many unopened cds I have. I like to practice the download first/purchase later method of acquiring music. For music I like, i generally would download it first and then when i find a good deal, just buy the album to support the artist. Unless I really want to check a lyric or something, those cds stays unopen. Hence I was going through my collection and I have like 20 unopened discs. Amusing.

But man, i need to find my ipod. I'm hoping to all hope that I left it at work. (I was so desperate that I consider making that one hour round trip drive to San Jose and trying to find it..) If it's not at work, then that is not good....

Anyways, it's time for another victory garden update.
Day 0 - The beginning - Peas

Day 7 - Nothing

Day 15 - Signs of life

I was getting a little worried that after two weeks nothing has really happened... But upon closer look, i saw some sproutlings.
Day 15 - Sproutlings

Super Bowl Thoughts and My Scorched Earth

2010-02-07T23:36:00.001-08:00

Start this post up with thoughts on the Super Bowl.

1. I'm gonna have to revoke the GREATEST OF ALL TIME label from Peyton Manning. GOAT QBs just DON'T lose games like today. It doesn't matter if your receivers are dropping balls, your coach looks comatose, and your getting knocked around, if you are going to be called the GOAT, you have to win this game. You have to. Just like he did against Miami and New England in the regular season. Just like he did against Baltimore and the Jets... I was very disappointed in Manning's performance today.

2. That Saints onside kick EFFED everything up. (In a good way.) That turned the whole game around to the Saints favor. What a gutsy, gutsy, gutsy call. In the history of SPORTS, can anyone think of a ballsier call? (Sorry I just feel like using CAPS today).

3. Dwight Freeney's injury was reported up the wazoo last week. But Reggie Wayne's injury was really downplayed. I wonder if he was hurt out there, cause he was practically invisible all game.

4. The Colts coach is a robot. Did he show one ounce of emotion the entire game? I mean, I'm sure Manning runs the team, but you want your coach to at least pretend to be interested right?????

5. I don't get The Who. I guesss you need to be 50 years old to get them... Except my dad who is 50 also don't get them, so i guess you need to be 60 years old to get them. I'm pushing for Taylor Swift/Miley Cyrus show 2011 Super Bowl.

6. This is the first year we watched the Super Bowl at my Antinoos house instead of my parents. Watching football in HD on a large screen tv when all i've ever known is a 32 inch CRT... my goodness... I might have to invest in a new TV soon.

7. And last one.... Heard this one on the radio pregame show... Do you guys know what Drew Brees nickname is in New Orleans? (And this is brilliant)... It's Breesus (IE Jesus). LOL. I love that. I guess that's how much him (and the Saints) mean to the city of New Orleans. Congrats to them today.

And that end the football thoughts. This weekend was spent cleaning up the backyard. The two week deluge that flooded the bay area wrecked havoc on my yard, leaves and branches everywhere, tools blown all over the place, one of my cactus plants fell over and died... It was not pretty. It took me four hours Saturday to clean everything up... just in time for this ten straight days of rain that has just been forecasted for the next couple weeks... sigh.

Anyways, for some reason, i just feel the need to share a somewhat random analogy. About trash. Let say instead of taking out the trash each night, we take the trash out every week.. or every month... or even every year. We take out the exact same amount of trash, but it takes exponentially more time and effort the longer you wait. And all the while you are suffering from the stench of the bad smell... That's my way of saying that if you do the little things daily, you can avoid the bigger harder tasks later.

Thank you.

This year, one of my goals is to grow non-weed-like plants in my backyard. IE vegetables. We're not talking anything complicated here, just simple things like tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, maybe a bell pepper here and there. The project officially started this week when i put some pea seeds into the ground. I repeat, the peas are in the ground. I have decided to do some time-lapse photos of the peas, with me updating photos every other week or so.. Here is the Day Zero picture.

The white stakes indicate where i planted the seeds. I'm counting on the upcoming rain to help these babies grow.

One of my inspirations to grow stuff came from my brother. When he used to live with me, he transformed our backyard into a Victory Garden, growing veggies on top of veggies that we would eat (cause nothing beat organic, zero emission vegetables). Our water bill tripled and our backyard smelled like steer manure, but we'll overlook that. Anyways, he gave me a bunch of seeds and stuff to try and I plan to grow some more stuff in the spring. In addition he started this gardening blog that will probably one day be world famous. (My bro is a surprisingly good and witty writer).

So there you go. Growing a garden, it's good exercise, it's fun, it's thrifty, and it's patriotic. Hopefully (for the sake of America) I have a victory garden by end of summer and not something that more resembles a scorched earth.

Which leads me to my next story. Is anyone missing a bike in Fremont? Someone literally left it on my lawn two weeks ago. Last Wednesday I woke up one morning to goto work, and as I was pulling out of my garage I saw this bike next to my lawn. No one was there and it was propped up on it's kickstand. This was one of those really rainy mornings and the bike was getting soaked. I thought , "huh, this is strange, maybe it's one of the neighbors" bikes and let it be. When i got home that evening, the bike was still there, untouched. At that time, i couldn't let the bike just be outside getting soaked and ruined, so I moved it to my porch, in plain sight in case so that if anyone came looking for it, they would obviously see it (i also left a note, saying "i took your bike out of the rain, not trying to steal it".... But that was like two weeks ago, and still no one has claimed the bike. So now i have a bike I don't know what to do with. I think it's a pretty good bike as well. Road bike, seems in decent condition. If no one picks it up, i'll probably donate it.

24 to Community to Football to Redwood Trees

2010-01-21T23:44:00.000-08:00

I inexplicitly ended up watching the first four hours of 24 tonight. Consecutively. Argh. I forgot how addicting that show can be. I was planning to watch just one episode and then do other things, but one thing led to another and another and before I knew it, it was midnight and my eyes were falling out. Say what you want about the show, but it's always entertaining. Not the most original show and the story lines are quite unbelievable, but the action is always high quality and Jack Bauer is an American hero, so we watch. Before we go onto the rest of this blog, some favorites and not so favorites from the first four hours of 24.

The Good : The happiness of Jack Bauer. It took seven full seasons, but I think we finally saw a scene in which Jack was happy. Not the "I just tortured the terrorist and got the location of the bomb" type of happy, but the real genuine happiness. The opening scene where Jack is playing with his granddaughter was pretty sweet. It almost made me shed a tear.

The Good : It took seven full seasons (this must be a season of firsts), but Elisha Cuthbert (Kim Bauer) finally appeared in a scene that did not annoy me. That scene at CTU where Kim was telling Jack to stay behind and help CTU instead of coming with her to LA... It shows that the father/daughter relationship has finally been repaired. I mean, call me a sap, but that scene was pretty emotional. I almost cried again. I'm glad they spent seven seasons working up to this scene.

The Good : It took about four seasons, but the show has it's best President since David Palmer. Noble, honorably, trustworthy, smart, and tough. A person I would trust to lead the nation..... unfortunately, it's not our nation... President Omar, I have a feeling you are going to be good for the show. Your judgment might need a little work though (cause anytime you can risk the peace of the world for the love of a women, you absolutely got to do it). US President Taylor on the other hand..... ehhhh. Just okay.

The Good : Agent Walker is back and I'm glad. I didn't like her initially, but she grew on me and she really carried some of the later episodes last season. But her character transformation from last season... wow. She goes from naive FBI agent who wouldn't hurt a puppy to badass brunette who would cut someone's hand off just because she feels like it. I like it!!

The Bad : The new CTU director Hastings.. I do not like him.

The Bad : The new blondie CTU data analysis. I do not like her. I already know the drama surrounding her is going to drive me nuts.

The Bad : Chloe O'Brian looks like a battered performer these days. I think she may need a character reboot.

All in all though... Not bad. I am enjoying so far.

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Since we're on the TV theme. Does anyone watch that new comedy on NBC Community? If any show brings back memories from days of yore, it has to be this one. Community is a comedy about life at a community college. I went to a community college for two years and used it to springboard my post-high school educational career.

This show does an excellent job of capturing the essence of a community college. All the key elements that makes a community college special is captured almost to a T in the show. The silly school pride events that no one ever participates in (because no one takes pride in going to a a community college), the hokey school newspaper that contains dumb stories that no one ever reads, the strange/funny/bombastic teachers (my most memoerable was a history professor who told racist jokes in class... that was really interesting), the classes that were a joke cause they were so easy (honestly, life was never as easy for me as my two years at Chabot.. I did extremely little work and got excellent grades)... all these things you can find in a community college.

But I think the best part of a community college is the difference of people. Unlike a regular university, where most of the people are from like 18-22 years of age, in a community college, you get people from all ages and stages of life. You get the high school flunkies who don't have anything else to do with their lives so they come and hang around the arcade all day (i knew some of these people), but you also get the high schoolers who could not get into a regular university and is at a CC to transfer (like me). You get the older folks (around 30) who just got laid off or are tired with their careers and want to go back to school to gain new skills. You get the down on their luck people trying to just get by in life. (I met so many of these people, parents who worked two jobs and then came in for night classes because they wanted to improve their life situation). Then you get the retired people who have nothing else better to do and just needs some way to kill time before they have grandkids or die (whichever comes first). Because of this, you get all sorts of weird class and group dynamics, it's fun and unique. Defintely a lot of material you can make a show out of.

----------------------------

Speaking of bringing back memories.... You know what this 2010 New York Jets is reminding me of? That first Patriots Super Bowl team... Now I know on the surface you probably think I'm insane, and I'm not saying that Mark Sanchez is the next Tom Brady or anything stupid like that. But remember, on that first Pats team, Brady was a rookie (2nd year) and played in a really conservative offense (a lot forget, since these days the Pats are an offensive juggernaut). The Pats protected him just like the Jets protect Sanchez today and they won with a tough defense just like the Jets. Just like Brady in 2000, Sanchez is showing the uncanny knack for making 5-6 big throws a game (big as in important , getting that critical first down, moving the chains). Both teams also received an incredibly lot of luck (the Tuck Rule game for the Pats, Nate Kaeding and Shayne Graham for the Jets) during their runs.... I think Jets getting 7.5 points is an easy play for this week... Not only that, i think Jets win this Sunday.

In the other game.. I just think it's Brett Favre's year and as I wrote a couple weeks ago, i think he loves playing in domes. Vikings blow out the Saints. Just my gut feeling. Vikes 38 Saints 28. And Favre has another ridiculous line.

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For last bit of news, I never posted pictures from my family trip around Christmas. We visited the Humboldt County in high north California. Humboldt County is known for two things.. giant redwoods and hashish (that would be pot/marijuana for those unfamiliar with narcotics lingo).. We went for the redwoods. Here are some pictures from the trip.
One of the really interesting part of the forest was seeing the trees that actually had fallen down. This was in a way more interesting than seeing the trees that were still standing. You can't tell from the pictures but the diameter of the root trunk is almost 30ft. Pretty incredible. We saw lots of these "root trunk" circles and they were really neat.

Some of the trees have base trunks that are so big you can drive a car through them like we did.

Here's a picture where you can see how tall the trees are. Some of them are gigantic. They say some redwoods in the forest goes up to 300ft high. Mom and dad in the other picture.

Haiti

2010-01-14T23:34:00.000-08:00

I am struggling to mourn or even care much about what's happening in Haiti.

The statistics that are trickling out and the numbers are pretty staggering. 3,000,00 people affected. Who knows how many dead. 50,000? 60,000? 100,000? The images that are being plastered on tv, CNN, twitter, facebook and other social networking sites shows powerful images of what the quake did to the country. Collapsed houses, people sleeping on the streets, rioting and looting. These images are all over the web.

Yet, I am struggling to feel anything more than just slight amusement at the numbers and just curiosity at the pictures. I want to see them, but I don't really want to feel them or understand them.

As Christians, shouldn't something like this break us to the core? We're talking about possibly 100,000 people, just vanished from this earth, just like that. Shouldn't something like this break our hearts like no other, because I'm sure it's breaking God's heart and shouldn't our hearts be aligned with God's?

Yet, all I've done as of today is write a $100 check to WorldVision, fired up a couple of quick prayers, and wrote this blog entry.

As Christians, shouldn't seeing God's kingdom shattered like this be treated as an emergency? A defcon-1 level emergency? A drop everything we're doing and let's gather to pray, donate and see what we can do to help?

Yet, in smallgroup yesterday, we didn't do anything. Nothing at all. As the facilitator yesterday, i figured that it would 'interfere' with our regular scheduled programming and we definitely cannot have that.

I am not exactly sure where I am going with this, if anywhere. I just felt like sharing that... But please. Please give. With modern technology these days, it's easier than ever, I'm sure you all have been bombarded with requests to give already through facebook, twitter, everywhere. If you haven't yet please do, finding ways to give to Haiti these days is probably easier than finding a Chinese person in China these days.....

Football Football Football

2010-01-07T23:24:00.000-08:00

Well, it's that time again. Time for me to don on my sports columnist hat and make wild football predictions. I love this time of year, the first two weeks of the NFL playoffs are something I always look forward to. Always. Especially when the games are good. Four games each weekend. Do or die. I didn't do that well with my predictions last year (but who did? Who predicted the Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl? Liars.) But that's not gonna stop me from making predictions this year!

Before we get to picks though, let me handicap the entire NFL playoffs 2010.

AFC (since it's much easier)

No Chance in Hell
Cincinnati Bengals, NJY and Baltimore. All these three teams suck. They all have major, major flaws. NYJ has the crappy, inexperience Mark Sanchez, Baltimore could barely contain the vaunted Raiders passing game last week, and Cincy's is Cincy. I also don't want to waste anymore sentences on these teams so let's move on.

Light Light Light Light Light Dark Horse
New England Patriots. A dark horse so light, i almost called it a white horse team. I almost put them in the 'No Chance in Hell' category, and 100% of the reason why is Wes Welker's injury. Unless you owned Welker in your fantasy team this year (like me), you had no idea how valuable he was to Brady. This guy caught 130 balls this year(despite missing 3 games)... Randy Moss gets all the spotlight, but this guy makes New England's passing game click. If he was healthy, NE would be a solid dark horse, but with him out, I don't think they make it far. I keep them out of the No Chance in Hell category because of the greatness which is Tom Brady.

Favorites
San Diego and Indianapolis. Easy choices. Everyone knows the stats. I call this race about dead even right now. I will give a slight edge to SD because of their history of playoff over achievement and the Indy history of choking. I have no faith in Norvel Turner, but I'm not sure that's gonna matter. SD is loaded.

NFC.

No Chance In Hell
None. Any of the six teams can win this conference.

Upset Waiting To Happen
New Orleans Saints. Does anyone think they survive the 2nd round? Anyone? So many holes exposed the last six weeks.

Dark Dark Horse
Philadelphia, Arizona, Green Bay. Two sneaky teams and one "wtf happened last week" team. First Philly. WTF happened against Dallas? I was fully expecting a Philly win and make them the solid favorite in the NFC. And then the stink bomb against Dallas. Sigh. With that lose, i put them in the dark dark horse. I hope they can beat Dallas in the first round (I would love that, i would give a body part to make that happen), but i somehow doubt it.. The other two teams are very, very interesting. Not that they are great, but because the match ups would favor them in the second round. Imagine either team against the Saints. I would take either over the Saints at this point. And it would not surprise me if either team shocks Minnesota and makes it into the Super Bowl.

The Enigma
Dallas Cowboys. Because I just don't trust Wade Phillips. I just don't. Plus I hate this team and if they lose early, i will be so happy. I can't make them the favorite.

The Shaky Favorite
Minnesota Vikings. Here's what I think. I think Brett Favre loves playing indoors these days. I mean, if you were 45 years old, would you want to play in 20F or 70F weather? (Heck, I am 30, i hate going outside when it's colder than 67 degrees). I think all those years in Green Bay confused people. When he was younger, in his 20s, he thrived in the cold and was pretty much unbeatable and got the reputation as a cold weather QB. But as he got older, he slowly became more beatable in the cold, like those major GB playoff collapses his last couple years there.. and like those stink bombs against Chicago and Carolina this year. I think Brett Favre hates playing away from home these days. That's why I think ,Minnesota, in the 70 degrees dome, is HUGE. Prediction... Favre has a huge post-season and leads the Vikings into the Super Bowl.

Picks for the first week. (My pick first.) Home team in caps. As usual, i encourage gambling and I encourage you to go to Vegas with my picks.....

CINCY (-2.5) over NJY. I know Cincy stunk it up last week. I also think the Jets can't play that well two weeks in a roll. In the battle of crappy teams, i'll take the home team.
NEW ENGLAND (-3.5) over Baltimore. Tom Brady will win this game alone verses an overrated Baltimore team.
Philadelphia (+4) over DALLAS. I'm gonna make a hate pick here. Like Christina Aguilera my brain is saying Dallas, but my heart is saying Philly (or something like that). I'm going to go with Philly. I just want to see the Cowboys lose and all hell break out in Dallas.
ARIZONA (-1) over Green Bay. Take the over on this one. I like Green Bay and I really like Aaron Rogers, but I think Warner and company are too experienced to lose a first round game at home. And don't forget this is Rogers first playoff game.

So watch football. Bet hard. Bet often. Bet much.

The Year 2009 In Review

2010-01-03T20:03:00.001-08:00

Greater things are yet to come.
Greater things are still to be done in this city.

Hello. Welcome to 2010. Before we start the 2010 festivities on this blog, I will spend one post reviewing 2009... This is always one of my favorite posts (the year in review post) since it's fun for me to look through my digital picture collection and reminisce about the year that had just past... So without further ado, highlights of 2009.

January

The Last Hurrah.

February

Carolyn Arends concert in Foster City.

Went to WonderCon in San Francisco with Daniel Wong. We saw JJ Abrahms talk about the new Star Trek movie and we also saw the cast of the Terminator Salvation movie. JJ talked and move so fast and was so fidgety I could swear he was on drugs.

March

Went with Rachel, Sammy and friends to see Chris Tomlin in San Jose

Wade Chan came home from his secret society in SoCal and we went to see Indelible Grace artist Matthew Smith.

That same month, my parents decided that until they have grand kids to take care of, they will take care of turtles. So they bought two turtles from chinatown and built them a pond in the backyard. Saved from becoming turtle soup, they are now my parent's pets.

April

Nothing happened in April.

May

Saw New Jersey's own TimBeTold in a benefits concert at Stanford.

Went with Diana and Sherry to see David's new house in Redwood City.

Went on the annual bike trip through San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge

June

My brother Antinoos bought a house in Newark about ten minutes from mine. Here are some pictures of it.

Saw Third Eye Blind do a free concert in San Jose's Music in the Park. Other than the weed smoking, the crowd, the bad sound, and me not really caring for the bands music, it was a good concert. After the concert we went to eat the Godzilla burrito.

July

Cambodia 2009.

Went to Lake Tahoe for Matt Yep's bachelor party. We camped, ate, hiked and boated for a weekend.

August (this was a pretty busy month)

Saw the great band Switchfoot in San Jose. Will be seeing them again next Saturday.

Matt and Lina's Wedding... After the wedding I went to see GI Joe with the gang and that was the biggest bomb of the summer.

Went with Candace, Sherry and Eric to hike Cloud's Rest in Yosemite. My first trip to Yosemite in five years or so.

September

Speaking of return engagements, returned to Angel Island for the first time in about five years as well for some fishing and some crabbing with the family.

Got wildcard fever and thanks to a ticket discount from work, a couple of us decided to goto SF to see a Giants game. The Giants beat the Rockies to move within a couple games of the playoffs, a chase they would not win. The bigger thing was that we got to see the legend, the franchise, the freak, the weedsmoker, the future 150 million dollar man, Tim Lincecum pitch and win. We love you Timmy.

October

Saw my coworker Daniel get married in Berkeley. It was a fun wedding. Congratulations Daniel and Winnie!

November

Saw Phil Wickham (and Chris and Conrad) in Menlo Park. I love his new album.

After much delay, finally saw Paramore in San Franciscos. I love their new album.

Saw Cal beat Arizona. We then rushed the field after the victory. Go Bears... all the way to lose in the Poinsetta Bowl. Sigh.

December

I'm saving December stuff for next update.

Christmas Singing

2009-12-24T14:04:00.001-08:00

Oh great light of the world
Come to impart
The light of your grace
To fill up my heart

Interesting story from yesterday... I was using my computer, uploading some pictures yesterday when all of a sudden I hear music outside my front door... What could it be, I ask myself? Thinking that this could be worth video recording, i start taping on my Canon and here's what transpired.

Hope you enjoyed that, cause I sure did. Merry Christmas to you all!

Christmas Party Part 1

2009-12-13T23:21:00.000-08:00

What's a partridge?
And whats a pear tree?
I don't know so please don't ask me
But I can bet those are terrible gifts to get.

It's Christmas parties time again!! This will be a two, possibly three part series about Christmas parties that I went to. I've decided to photo-blog them all. We will take them in order.

Company Party - Emeryville
Our first party is our annual company party in Emeryville. We didn't have a holiday party last year because the company had no money (or so they say), so this is a comeback of sorts for the Christmas Party. (You can't stop Christmas, you can only hope to contain him.) But the party wasn't as grand as it was the years when we did have money. Instead of dropping the $100K or so to rent out a fancy club or restaurant, we just spent $5k and catered in food and entertainment. Can't say I disagree with that decision. Lets look at some of the pictures.

Left/Top : Merry Christmas. From myself. In front of the company tree.
Right/Bottom : This is our new office. We just moved into it about a month ago. We now share the same building as Leapfrog. They party bussed all the San Jose employees here today for the party.

Left/Top : Here's the menu. A tray full of tri-tip. Salad. Ravioli.
Right/Bottom : All the San Jose engineers. Notice, all asians.

Left/Top : After the food, we do what all asian people do. We play poker.
Right/Bottom : I walk around the office and catch someone playing solitarie on company time.

GRX The Walk Smallgroup Christmas Party - Fremont
Right/Bottom after the corporate party, I drive back home to Fremont for my smallgroup party. I spent two hours in traffic trying to get home that day argh... stupid sinkhole on 880. Lets look at some more pictures, shall we?

Left/Top : Merry Christmas. Here we are eating. We catered in from the gourmet restaurant known as Pizza Hut and Tami made like 20 pounds of chicken alfredo.
Right/Bottom : Getting ready for the white elephant. Due to the crappy economy we limited the gifts to $5 this year (instead of the usual $8 that we do). And I'll admit, people really made the $5 go along way. I was a bit surprised at some of the stuff people were able to pull off with a $5 budget. Here are some of the gifts.

Left/Top : Patti with red bracelets.
Right/Bottom : Joylani with a mini piggy bank that is shaped like cow.

Left/Top : Lina with El Penguino. El Penguino was sewn together with elegant craftmanship by Joylani (above).
Right/Bottom : Sharon with penguin cup. For some reason, we had two penguin related gifts.

Left/Top : Daniel with magarita mix... I brought this. Yes.

After the gift exchange, we made gingerbread houses. We split up into guys and girls and decided to have a contest to see which gender was smarter, more creative and could make better gingerbread structures. Let's see what was created.

The girls created a house.

The guys created the Golden Gate Bridge.

Posing with our respective creations. Which one do you think is better?

WestPak Party - San Jose
Finishing off my third Christmas party in 24 hours, I goto San Jose for WestPak company party. WestPak is the company my brother Edmund works at and they have massive holiday galas every year. This year, the party was in the Fairmont, a five-star hotel in San Jose. It's good to know that at least one company in Silicon Valley made money this year, because WestPak sparred no expenses in this party. Excellent food, dj, open bar, good wine, $100 bills to light your cigarettes with... they held nothing back. And it was a blast. Here are some pictures.

Left/Top : Edmund and Me
Right/Bottom : Westpak 2009.

Left/Top : Jumbo Prawn Salad
Right/Bottom : Streak and Salmon

The Westpak company is pretty cool. . I'm not just referring to the party and bonus checks that were handed out at the party, but other things as well. When the CEO gave his (what felt like) 1hr speech, he spoke with such warmth that I believed him. You know how when some managers give speeches about his employees and you just know it's BS... not this guy. His words really felt like they were from the heart. Not empty. He used the word "blessed" like a hundred times. (That is no joke.) He treated his employees like his family.

I know it's probably not the best way to maximize profits, but there has got to be something said about companies that treat their employees right and well and with respect. There has got to be something right about that. Because the employees recognize this and most recipricate it, because I heard many stories that night about teams and people who worked a lot of extra hours to meet deadlines, finish projects without any complaining.... Thats good stuff.

That wraps up Christmas Parties part 1. Part 2 next week.

Nuclear Bombs and Cats

2009-12-06T23:50:00.001-08:00

Check out my new desktop image.

Nuclear bomb explosion. FTW!!! Lovely, is it not?

Just an update on my cat problem from a couple months ago. After I hacked off most of the weeds and grass from my backyard, i notice most the cats have disappeared. As I thought, the weeds and tall grass made it a perfect place for the cats to hide in and make their home, now with their home destroyed, the cats are gone. Most of them anyways, there's this one little bugger that keeps sticking around.

At first this cat would just walk by, but now his new thing is to sit outside my backdoor window and just lie there. Like in the picture. This picture is taken from my bedroom, I have a door in my bedroom that leads to the backyard. You don't see it , but I have a desk in my bedroom where I do my work, and sometimes when I'm working, this guy would just .... stare at me. Like this.

It's a bit weird... Like someone is stalking me. It's kind of unnerving. We would have a stare down. And I would always lose so I throw a water bottle or a book at the window, but it don't phase him. He leaves for like 20 seconds and then comes back and resumes his staring at me. And i find it really hard to work in this situation, how would you like to work with someone staring at you, with unblinking eyes?

The worst part is, I think some sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome thing is happening to me. Today, I had some leftover meat and I thought about leaving it outside my window for the cat. (Whom I have named Blackie btw). But then I caught myself and had to stop myself.

Anyways... What to do? Should I trap him and then let him go at a park? I was thinking about borrowing my neighbors bear trap (he has one) and seeing I can use that. Or maybe this upcoming Bay Area storm of the century would take care of the cat? Maybe he'll drown or freeze?

Anyone else have any other ideas?

Thanksgiving Thankfulness

2009-11-26T22:12:00.001-08:00

And I want to add to the beauty
To tell a better story
I want to shine with the light
That's burning up inside

This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful.
This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful.

Small confession. I really hate writing the Thanksgiving blog entry. In the last couple of years, the Thanksgiving post is usual the one I have the least fun writing. In the beginning, what I would do is write about things I was thankful for over the past year, but that resulted in some boring posts that lacked originality and creativity. Every year, it would be I'm thankful for friends, family, shelter, food etc etc. It's not that I am not thankful for those things (cause I am), but it just feels empty putting it into a post.

For a while, I moved away from that and 'spoofed' the Thanksgiving blog and instead of writing about things I was thankful for, I would rant against things I was unthankful for. That was actually great fun because I secretly enjoy attacking and judging things. I did that for a couple years but then last year I stopped doing it, because... well, it just felt wrong. And frankly, it was hard to be angry and bitter around this time of year, the holiday season, when everyone should be happy and free.

This year, I was planning to do just a short Thanksgiving blurb. Again, the usual cliches blah blah blah. But then ... the 11/22 church service happened. It was a message about gratitude and real thankfulness. At the end of the service, we had a rare open-mike session where people went up and told the congregation what they were thankful for... and it was moving. I admit, I kind of rolled my eyes when I first heard the idea, but I ended up inspired by what some people said up there that day. It reminds me of what Thanksgiving really is all about. I literally had the idea for this blog sitting in church service last Sunday.

Okay, so for this entry. I made a decision. Nine things from 2009 I'm thankful for. I actually had a quite a time typing up this entry, I guess when things are more than just empty words on a page, and it's easier to be motivated and creative. Listed in no particular order (I'm not thankful for any of these things more than the other, this list is random.).

Here we go

1. Cambodia Missions Trip 2009
I'm not gonna rehash Cambodia 2009 that's been done. But let me tell you of some of the things I'm most thankful for that came out of this trip.

A deeper connection to the country. Coming back the second time, and finding out that the people remembered me, and I remembered some of the people. It makes a huge difference perspective wise. Made me feel that I was no longer going there just to hangout for two weeks, but really going back to help friends who are in need. To the people who have gone once, I urge you to go back at least another time, you'll see things differently.
my supporters, enough said.
Being able to serve with Victor. Really enjoyed the planning sessions and meetings we had together. It was fun and I learned a lot from him. But on the other hand, he also motivated me to play Madden better, which lead me to get an XBOX... so maybe I'm not that that thankful this.
The team. I loved this year's team. So many fun and passionate people on it. Just being able to serve with them and hangout with them for ten days during the trip was great.

This is us.

2. Cruise To Cabo
I'm also not gonna rehash The Last Hurrah. That has also been done. (If you haven't read that post, it's probably the one I enjoyed writing the most in 2009). Some of the things I'm most thankful for from that trip are.

my friends. Wade, Sammy, Paul, Rachel, Lily, Samuel, Hal, Winnie.
rest and relaxation.
not getting attacked by pirates
shooting stars in the pitch black of night
ability to afford such a luxurious trip even in this tanking economy and so many people suffering
not getting attacked by sea monsters
not getting seasick
and again, my friends. Wade, Sammy, Paul, Rachel, Lily, Samuel, Hal, Winnie.

This is us. (Who took this crappy picture? Couldn't even center it correctly.)

3. Addison Road
I don't listen to much mainstream contemporary Christian music these days. I think a lot of it is boring, unoriginal and manufactured (basically, i think it sucks). Other than a handful of artists, I try to avoid this genre altogether. But occasionally, a band or artist slips through. Congratulations Addison Road.

Honestly, their music.. is just okay.. But lead singer Jenni Simmon's blog is one of my favorite blogs. She writes some of the most down-to-earth, honest and raw blogs out there. Her blogging is one of the main reasons why I even bother listening to the band. She recently had a kid, so she doesn't blog as frequently as she use to (damn kid, robbing us of her writing!), but read some of her stuff from the summer... pretty good writing. Deep, thoughtful, honest, and insightful.

Also, their songs are just okay.... But they have one GREAT song. If you've read up to hear and starting to get bored, I urge you to at least listen to this song once before you check out. (Excuse the cheesy backdrops and the amateurish video, I tried to find a better version of this, but I couldn't).

4. My Future Sister-In-Law
She has a slightly funny accent and she misuses the English language every once in a while in hilarious ways, but despite those minor flaws, I will say I love my future sister-in-law. This is her. (I can't seem to find any other picture except this one from the Halloween party in 2008.)

Yen has many great qualities, but I think my favorite one is that she knows how to laugh, even at herself. Every once in a while, I would talk to her, and she would tell a joke that I didn't know was a joke so I would stare at her for ten seconds or so, befuddled, but after thinking about it (from her perspective), it's actually pretty funny. I love that. Secondly, she has a servant-heart and loves my brother. Every once in a while I would come over and see her helping my mom do this, or my brother do that. All without any complaining or care of praise.

But above all that, she makes my brother happy, and that makes me happy. So I'm thankful for her.

5. Sammy's Clothes
Or to put it more meanly... Sammy's weight gain.

Let me explain.

We were at the Zheng house one night and he and Rae was telling us about how they had packed some of their old clothes to give to charity. They were telling us how some of Sammy's old jeans and shirts no longer fit him... and they asked me if I wanted to dig through the bags of clothes to see if there was anything I liked.... which is an offer I could not refuse. I love free clothes. I hate shopping for clothes and I have no sense of fashion or style. I ended up taking like five pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. And I've been wearing a lot of this stuff the last couple months. I have literally only worn Sammy's old jeans for the last three months. No joke. Now I am officially, as cool as Sammy is.

So here's to Sammy and his expanding waistline. Thanks man.

On another side note, the day immediately after I got Sammy's clothes, I donated all my old jeans to charity. That's paying it forwarded.

6. Four Weeks at CCCAC
After I got back from Cambodia this summer, I really needed a break from GRX Fremont, my home church. No knock on the fine folks at GRX, but (ding) sometimes you just need a getaway right? Especially after Cambodia, I was really tired at that time and just wanted to 'attend' church and not be bothered with anything else for a while. So I went to CCCAC, Wade/Sammy/Hal's church for four weeks to just unwind, listen and learn.

And it was great. Circumstances have it that I don't go to church with some of my best friends, and sometimes I don't see them for weeks on end. Just being able to see them on a normal basis during the summer in service, catch up with them on their week, worship with them, pray with them... I didn't realize how much I miss that. It's something I long for and hope for in the future (but only if it happens naturally).

Another blessing from this month was being able to meet Pastor Michael and his wife. Two pretty awesome people. I really enjoyed hearing Pastor Michael speak, he won me over when he title one of his sermons Resident Aliens and dropped in a Resident Evil reference into his message. That's good knowledge.

7. The Walk
My small group. At (many) times last year, I really wondered what was gonna happen to us and there was some pretty tough times in the summer. But we (by God's good grace) somehow pulled out of that. I'm thankful for the group for sticking together during the tough times and when all could have fallen apart. I'm thankful to the group for listening to my concerns, complaints, fears (even when I wasn't sure if I was worth listening to) and stepping up in areas where we really needed it. I'm thankful we were able to pull together and though we may not be exactly at the place where we want to be yet, we are moving in a direction, which is a lot more than what could be said six months ago. There's so much potential in what this group can be and I'm hoping we can tap all that in the near future.

I'm also glad we changed our group name. Now I am no longer ashamed to mention it on this blog. We are The Walk.

This is us.

8. My Cube-Mate
This has been a hard work year for me. There's no getting around that. With the economy tanking (damn economy), salaries were cut and people were let go. My team was jerked around onto different projects and spread very thin, often doing the work of multiple people, often doing the work for other people who wouldn't/couldn't do their work. It sucked and it wore us down to the bone.

In times like this, it's extremely helpful to have competent people on your team. When we first hired my cube-mate (about a year ago) I didn't really know what we were getting. I actually didn't realize how good she had gotten at some of the stuff (by hard work and asking questions, and occasionally, pestering me to the point of annoyance). But there has been points during this year, especially in the last couple months, when i look back at the end of a project cycle or end of hard day, i have to say I'm so incredibly thankful to have her on the team. Some of the stuff that we pulled off probably would not be possible without her.

And it's also been nice having someone to chitchat with and confide in at work. She shows me pictures of her kid, I show her pictures from my Cambodia trip, she tells me about Bollywood, I tell her about Paramore. We both try to our best to be interested. It should be awkward, but it never really is. It's a weird little setup we have. And if either of us hear any interesting office gossip, we tell each other.

9. My readers
And lastly, you people. Whether you are reading on Facebook, twitter, blogspot or whatever RSS reader you are using, thank you. You people who actually made it all the way down to this section. You people who bother to read my ramblings. And for those who not just read this crap, but also comment on it, an extra heaping of thankfulness to you guys. For the record, I really like comments, it makes me know people actually read this stuff. I don't have comment on your comments, but i read them all, so please leave them. I wish I can give you guys a prize, but I can't, so instead, I'll just say thanks.

Happy Holidays Everyone.

Highlights and Lowlights

2009-11-16T22:58:00.000-08:00

Highlights and lowlights from the last week.

Highlight - Paramore Concert!!!
The concert that made me a lot of money finally happened last week... And it was definitely worth the wait.

Now I've got a feeling if I sang this loud enough, you
Would sing it back to me
I've got a feeling if I sang this loud enough, you
Will sing it back to me

I've got a feeling
I've got a feeling
That you, will sing it back to me
You, will sing it back to me

Highlight - Niners Game!
The Niners suck, the Bears suck, Jay Cutler sucks, Alex Smith sucks. But hey, Thursday football, who can complain about that? If someone gave you a pot of gold would you complain about it?

All kidding aside, this was a highlight because this Thursday was one of the few 'football dinners' at the Tang household. Back in the day, when Monday Night Football was not on cable, me and the Dad would watch football and eat dinner at the same time. But since MNF went off the air, we couldn't do that... Until ThNF this week. And it was fun again, to eat dinner in the living room in front of the TV with my dad. I forgot all my dad's football conspiracy theories about games being fixed and players throwing game. It was good to listen to those stories again. Good times. Good times.

AmusingLight - Smallgroup Men Talking About ED
The men in the group were talking about this article (nothing wrong with that.) It's just that I was in the kitchen with another girl when we heard the magical words 'erectile dysfunction' and I was like 'what the heck?' and had to rush to the living room to listen to this 'interesting discussion.' I stood there for five minutes, mouth agape, in disbeliefed amusement. This discussion follows another epic discussion from two weeks ago when the men got into a heated discussion over which hair products to use for baldness.. This one lasted for twenty minutes. Yes.

These are our guys, that would be Matt W, Matt S, Matt Y, and Daniel. And this is what they bring to the smallgroup.

Lowlight - Lily Allen
My mind is still trying to recover from accidentally stumbling upon this Lily Allen's song, aptly named, EFF You.

(intro)
Look inside,
Look inside your tiny mind
Now look a bit harder
Cause we're so uninspired,
so sick and tired of all the
hatred you harbor

And then, this song about tolerance, acceptance, loving each other as we are goes....

EFF you (EFF you)
EFF you very, very much
Cause we hate what you do
And we hate your whole crew
So please don't stay in touch

Thank you Lily Allen. You idiot. You've actually made the world a worse place with this song. So eff you..

Highlight That Became a Lowlight That Became a Highlight - Cal Game
You know how somethings look really good from the onset and then over time it looks worse and worse (ie, the Giants signing Barry Zito, Sarah Palin as VP, marriage)... That's kind of how this whole Cal game was. When we decided to goto the Cal v Arizona game back in October, it sounded like a great idea. Cal was ranked in the top 10. Possible Rose Bowl berth on the line. Heisman candidate in Jahvid Best. It seemed like a great idea to go see a Cal game in November.... And then they started losing. And losing. And losing. And with each loss, the Cal game idea seemed worse and worse. And then when Jahvid concussed himself last week, I was trying to figure out how much I could sell the tickets for on Craigslist.

And then we got there. And for the first two quarters, Cal couldn't do anything. And it was cold. And I was miserable... But around the middle of the third quarter or so, things picked up. (This was the exact time when we decided to sneak down to better seats (because there was so little people, we were able to go really close to the field, almost eye-level). The last quarter and a half was actually pretty exciting. The go-ahead touchdown was right in front of us, as we were sitting in corner of the endzone... And then when they won, everyone stormed the field... I don't know if Cal students storm the field after every game, or only victories over 18th ranked teams in the nation, regardless, it was fun to be able to go onto the field and celebrate. Here are some pictures.

We went from the seats on the left, to the seats on the right. What a different 60 rows make.

On the field. Cal. Victory! Outback Steakhouse Geico Truckers San Diego Bowl, here we come!

Highlight That Became a Lowlight That Became a Highlight That Ended up as Lowlight
I'm pretty sure I got sick from the Cal game. It was cold sitting there that night..

However, I ate Top Dog afterwards. Hot Links FTW!

Karma Kitchen

2009-11-08T23:37:00.001-08:00

*** This happened last week ***

We come with beautiful secrets
We come with purposes written on our hearts, written on our souls
We come to every new morning
With possibilities only we can hold, that only we can hold.

I skipped church today to do some volunteer work with a coworker. I don't do this often; in fact, I've never done it before. (That is, skipping church for a volunteer event, however skipping church to watch football, I have done before... more than once in fact. Sometimes Tom Brady wins out over Jesus... shame on me).

The place that we helped out at today was the Karma Kitchen at Berkeley. I am not exactly sure how to describe Karma Kitchen (known as KK going forward), I want to say organization, charity or non-profit, but it was neither of those. They describe on their website that what they are doing is a "volunteer-driven experiment in generosity." Basically, how it works is this, KK is a restaurant where every item on the menu is $0.00. You "pay" pretty much whatever you want. And if you can't pay anything, you can do a "pay-it-forward" promise instead and do an act of kindness for someone else down the line.... Does this sound a little strange? Yeah, it did to me too. I really had no idea what to expect.

The whole day was full of surprises... Let's start with the first one, the coordinators of the project. It was (and this shocked me)... an Indian couple. Yep. No joke. Two really nice, really friendly, really honest, really humble people. And the spoke perfect English. I mean, I don't want to sound racist, but when I think Indian people, i think software programmers who can barely speak English. I guess I'm small-minded in that way. But these people, they were different.. Just being able to talk to them today, hearing their dreams, life stories, their struggles, and how they came about starting the project, was such a joy. Both of them work fulltime jobs during the week and then do KK on the weekends.

Hearing how they started this project was really amazing. The idea actually originated in India. Which is both surprising and not-surprising. Surprising because something like this in India (and most Asian cultures I assume) would be considered super radical (not radical in the 'tony hawk' type of way, but radical in the 'can get you mocked or worst killed' type of way). But not surprising because of the whole 'karma' theory that's popular in Asian cultures... This is an actual sustainable business model for a restaurant in India (i found it a little hard to believe as well, unfortunately, i didn't get all the details). So the couple decided to try it here, in Berkeley, but just for one day a week and they've been doing it for almost two years now.

The restaurant and its clientele itself was a second surprise. I thought a majority of our customers would be poor, possibly even homeless people, since we were in the middle of Berkeley. And I thought the restaurant would be some run-down building that no one wanted and could just be dumped on for a Sunday afternoon. Instead, it was almost that exact opposite. The restaurant was really nice. It's actually an Indian restaurant that is converted to KK on Sundays. Not rundown at all (the restaurant is actually rented for $0.00 Sunday mornings for this project as well, how about that?) We did indeed serve some poor folks, some elderly, but we also served a lot of people who were normal folks, some Cal students, just a nice diverse group of people.

And the cool thing was. Everyone was in community with one another. People sat and chatted with people they never met before, even if they were not of the same race, social economic status, or gender. We had what was known as "community tables" where people can just sit and eat with other random people (ie strangers). I was skeptical as to whether people would want to eat with other strangers, but not only did people do it, but they seem to have a grand time doing it. People would also bring in food (like fruits and candies) and share it with other people. Old would sit and chat with young. Black with white sitting down and breaking bread with one another. Complete strangers.

(I realize I'm talking a lot about diversity, community and change... Hmmm. No worries. After this, I plan to drive my Hummer 4 (with Toby Keith blasting from the stereo) to the creek and shoot a couple deer. After that, i'll go home, drink a couple beers, and smoke a pack of Marlboro. Yeeeehaaaaww!!)

To tell you the truth, i was a bit skeptical about the whole idea of "experimental kindness". But what I saw today... Seeing the people. Seeing community like that. It was really great. We worked from like 10AM to 3PM, I washed dishes half the time, and was a waiter the other time (Let me say this, if I ever get fired from my current job, i can pull off the waiter thing pretty well...) I enjoyed every moment of it. I never knew I could enjoy washing dishes, but I did. I learned a bunch about Indian food (which is what we served). I ate fresh nan bread (which was soooo good) and I saw how it was made. I will also say that after many years of not liking Indian food, its official, I am now a fan of Indian food.

From stories and blogs, people write that when they go to KK, they say they feel a different "feeling", "spiritual presence" etc etc in there. That's how they explain the different environment and the things that happen in KK. The owner talked a lot about Zen, karma, feelings and all that jazz, stuff that I am not down with and I don't believe in. However, that said, I will not deny that what was happening in that restaurant was ... different than any other normal social situation. Inside that restaurant was cultivated an environment of friendliness, trust, community and authenticity that I don't know if I've ever seen before.... (What comes closest is at those orphanages in Cambodia, where all the people were so open and friendly to us, but we might be doing an apple/oranges thing here).

I can't help but compare it to my normal Sunday activity, church. How often on Sundays do we see a newcomer and just ignore him? How often do we give fake smiles, fake answers and fake attitude to people we really can't stand? How often do we just ask questions out of obligation, but we really have no interest (or care) to hear the answer? I'm guilty of all of those btw. Why is it that this restaurant, where there is no real Christian influence behind, is more welcoming and loving than our church? Why? Why? Why? I don't know if I know the answer to that question. So i'll just leave that as a thought for us to ponder.

Also, one last video for you folks to watch.

Halloween

2009-11-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

Halloween was an absolute debacle at my house this year.. So unprepared. I generally get a lot of trick-or-treaters and this year was no exception, but I think this year two factors contributed more trick-or-treaters than usual. First of all, the weather was perfect Saturday night. Not too cold, not too hot, perfect evening bay area weather. Secondly, with Halloween on a Saturday night, it gave kids (and parents) an excuse to stay out later, that plus the daylight savings time shift that happened that night, gave everyone an extra hour to stay up. I think this year over 100 kids passed by more door. The funny thing is that, I didn't even think I would make it home in time for the trick-or-treaters. I didn't get home till like 7:30 saturday night, and by that time, i thought most of the kids would have done their Halloween stuff and be eating candy at home. Because of that, i didn't bother to buy any candy, i just took a some bag of Halloween pretzels from my parents....

How wrong I was. In thirty minutes I was out of pretzels and was desperately scrounging around my cabinets and cupboards for crap to give away. The first thing I found was some three year old Hershey bars to unload. Not the small kind, but the big ones. The kids that got those bars were really impressed about the high-quality candy I was giving away. Hahaha. How soon they will find out the truth when they bite into it. After the Hershey bars went, all sorts of random crap went out the door. A couple of juice boxes, a couple bags of popcorn, some granola bars, some really, really old fruit-rollups, instant coffee, hot chocolate bags, everything. (I had decided that Ramen would have been my last stand, but luckily it did not get to that)... I'm pretty sure I gave away the weirdest stuff in the 'hood yesterday. I tried to do it discretely so the kids wouldn't know, but a few did, and one actually pulled out a pack of instant coffee and went 'what the hell is this??' (Kids these days)..

Oh well. At least my koi pond did not get vandalized like it did last year.

It's also good to see that the Twilight fad is still going on as we had 40% vampires this year (boys and girls). A close second would be princesses.

Catching Fire

2009-10-29T00:30:00.003-07:00

"You know how to kill."
"Not people, just animals."
"How different can it be, really?"

Just finished reading Catching Fire and I am impressed. I wasn't planning on reading it until I reread Hunger Games but in the middle of HG, I don't know why, but I told me myself i would read just a chapter of CF to see how it begins, and then I ended up reading CF instead (Will power. Failed). I didn't think Collins could write something as good as Hunger Games but it was. CF was less predictable and even more violent (the good kind of violence, the kind that moves the story forward, not the senseless kind) than HG. With HG the reader had at least an inkling of how it was going to end, but with CF you were really reading blind, page by page until the very end. Anything could have happened and it did.

I'm debating writing about the book more, but I don't want to spoil it for people who might actually want to read the book (you won't regret it). Instead let's talk about the word dystopia.

Someone mentioned that I seem to be a pretty big fan of dystopian literature. Initially I didn't know if that was true. Because, first of all, I didn't even know what dystopian meant. And secondly, I barely know how to pronounce it. According to wikipedia (the new dictionary) dystopia means the opposite of utopia. Way opposite. Dystopia - vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain. Right on.

Upon learning that, I thought, hmm, maybe it's true. Some of the favorite books I've read involved poverty, war, oppression, violence and occasionally, nuclear fallout. I mean, I loved Hunger Games and Catching Fire. Loved them both. Some of the other books that fall into the genre that I really enjoyed (all the classics) Orwell's 1984, Vonnegut's Player Piano, Huxley's Brave New World. Those books blew my mind when I read them, especially Orwell's 1984. I have next in my read queue Lois Lowry The Giver, another classic piece of dystopian literature.

My penchant for things dystopia also flows into the world of TV and movies. Movies I've enjoyed, V For Vendetta, Equilibrium, Ultra Violet, Matrix, War of the Worlds, The Resident Evil series... I liked all those movies. (Resident Evil might be stretching it a bit, but hey, I figure zombie attack is at least as bad , if not worse, than a nuclear fallout, so I'm gonna keep it there.) Speaking of nuclear fallout, it reminds of one of my favorite TV shows Jericho, which also had major dystopia themes.

Jericho.... Now that was an amazingly good tv series. (So good in fact, that I feel the need to dedicate a whole paragraph to it). The show last less than a two years, like a supernova, it came and went really quickly, but it burned so brightly during its existence. The show centered around a small town in Kansas, Jericho. All was well. Then one day, a secret organization attacks America (maybe the world?), a series of nukes go off in major cities in the country. All forms of communication, tv, telephone, internet, all cutoff. The series is one part human drama, focusing on how the town people work together and survive as resources (food, water, shelter), gets low and one part action, as the towns people fight off other towns trying to steal their food and the people try to find out who was behind the attacks. The series is only about 30 episodes, but I think that helped it out, cause it allowed the writers to lock down the plot and close it off, instead of it lingering forever and ever never ending. The last eight episodes.... had some incredible scenes, including an absolutely stunning scene involving a deaf 17-year old girl and a shotgun... (The first time I saw this scene, it left me stunned for like five minutes. It's one of the great scenes in television history).

CBS has all the episodes online. And I have all episodes on my computer. Watch them. You will not be disappointed.

I have no idea why I like this stuff... It's not that I like depression, slavery, death or kids killing kids ... Actually, maybe I do like this stuff? Maybe I'm just a sick individual... But on the other hand (except for the most depressing ones), these stories always contain some element of hope. Some kind of light (no matter how dim) in the darkness. Either in the form of survival, people coming together, a rebellion, a hero or heroine.. stories of life rising from death... I think that's the part of these stories that I really enjoy. And who doesn't?

If anyone has any book or movie recommendations, please put in comments. Thanks.

Hello World

2009-10-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

I've got a feeling if I sing this loud enough, the world will sing it back to me.

Sorry for the lack of updates on this blog. I wish I could say that I've been super busy, consumed with some important project that has been taking up all my time and hence, I've had no time for blogging, but that would not be true. Instead I've just been lazy and undiscipline. But it's not that suprising to me actually, I think most people who read this blog knows that it comes and goes in spurts. There would be periods where I post pretty consistently, and other periods when the blog goes dark... we just had a mini-dark period.

As to some of the other things I've been doing, I've been doing a bit of reading these days. I just finished John Grisham's latest paperback The Associate (more on that later) and I just ordered (and they just came in!) two new books, Lois Lowry The Giver (on recommendation from Natalie) and Suzanne Collins Catching Fire, the second book from the Hunger Game series. I wrote about Hunger Games a while back and I knew the second book was coming out this year, but I didn't realize it was out until I checked Amazon and saw it onsale. I am quite anxious to read it, I have it here sitting on my coffee table, blood-red cover with a mockingbird on it, just waiting to be read. I'm making myself go through the first book again (since I read it over two years ago) to refamilarize myself with the characters (Katniss and co) before I tackle the second book.

Grisham's The Associate though... Not his best work. A recycled plot, newly hired lawyer who gets blackmailed to release firm secrets, that doesn't really go anywhere. It seems like Grisham never had any idea where the book was going, and instead of having a nice tight plot, we have a story that just goes on and on and never really comes to any conclusion. When I read it, I kept waiting for something to happen... except it never did. The book just ... ends. Without any explation of why anything that happened in the last 400 pages happened or who was behind it all. I don't want to trash his work, but Grisham mailed this one in... I wish I didn't pay $5 for the paperback.

Last bit of news for this update... Saw in concert this weekend....

Phil Wickham. I was a little suprise to see how popular Wickham has become. When I last saw him two years ago, he was touring with David Crowder Band and it was just him and his guitar. I'm not the biggest Wickham fan, I knew he had some good songs, but I didn't realize he had become so big. We got to the church about half-an-hour early and I fully expected to get good seats... Except, there was like about 200 people in front of us already. The concert itself was really good. Wickham brings a lot of energy and pop into his performance. The audience was a bit strange as well. I guess Wickham is one of those artists that resonates with both the young and old crowds. The church sectioned off part of the sanctuary for people who wanted to stand and then put chairs up in the other section. So the young folks all stood, jumped around and did their thing while the older people sat around and watched... it was interesting... He did a bunch of songs off his new album and they were pretty good... It releases in November and ought to be a good one.

Anyways, back to reading..

Where the Lines Overlap

2009-10-05T23:20:00.001-07:00

Somehow everything's gonna fall right into place
if we only had a way to make it all fall faster everyday
if only time flew like a dove
we could watch it fly and just keep looking on

The band Paramore was in town last Friday night for a concert in San Francisco. I was one of the 'early adapters' to Paramore. I discovered them on a Christian music forum that I use to frequent about four/five years ago. I really liked their first album (a bit more alternative than their more recent stuff) and I've been a fan since. I was listening to them before they became all hip and popular like they are now. I was listening to them before it was cool to listen to them and I'll probably listen to them once they become so popular, that it becomes uncool to listen to them. I use to use the song title All We Know Is Falling in my chat status when things went crazy at work. I've watched them go from go from no-name band to one of the hottest acts in the world.

All that to say, I really like Paramore. Not only do they make good music, but they seem like decent people as well. I believe all the members in the band are Christians (at least according to wikipedia) and some of the stories I've read about them on their forums and blogs seem to point to that. Plus lead singer Hayley Williams blogs a lot, and she talks about her faith every once in a while, it's pretty cool.

I also use to have this as my desktop background. And people at work would ask me why I have a couch on my computer.

When I heard that they were coming to San Francisco. I jumped all over the tickets. By the greatness of twitter, I was able to glean the presale password that allowed me access to buy tickets early. I sized up the situation and with this opportunity I bought 8 tix, with the intention of keeping two and scalping the rest. These tickets were decently priced at $25 a pop (another reason why I like Paramore, they keep their ticket prices cheap)

And this is where it gets good. It turned out I timed the market almost perfectly. The tickets were for a Friday night (best night of the week). And the tour would be just a week after Paramore would release its latest album Brand New Eyes. They were getting all sorts of good publicty. In terms of popularity, i doubt they ever be as popular as they are now in 2009. And the tickets sold incredibly fast. I sold the first pair for $100. I sold those so easily that I decided to up the prices even more. I waited a couple more weeks (to let people get more desperate) and after using Craigslist to host a bidding war, I was able to sell the second pair for $115. For the third pair, I got $125 for. It was great. With the money I made, I paid off my own tickets and I 'invested' the rest in my XBOX 360 (so for the folks who wondered where i got the money for that, now you know hahaha)....

And here's the kicker....

Wait for it.....

Wait for it some more.

And.. the really incredible thing is.... that the SF show got cancelled!! Yes folks. Lead singer Hayley Williams got swine flu or something and they had to postpone. Wow. I was amazed when I first heard that. I felt a little bit bad for those people who paid so much for my tickets (and then i looked at my XBOX 360 and felt much better).

I'm really, really hoping none of my buyers email me for a refund. I don't even know what I would do (will cross the bridge if I need to).... So far no one has yet, so i'm hoping they just keep their tickets for the postpone date. Crossing fingers.

All that said, I was kind of bummed out that the show was cancelled. I was really looking forward to them live. Not sure if I can make the postpone date, but if not, maybe i'll try to sell my tickets for $150 or something...

Well you built up a world of magic
Because your real life is tragic