Last night, just as I was getting ready to go to bed early after fighting off the urge to take a nap after work (my blood sugar level alway seems to plummet after I leave work, causing me to be really sleepy, dunno why). I checked my usual necessities—sidekick, wallet (so I could buy foods, :-) ), and keys. Except that I couldn’t find my f**king keys. I looked everywhere in the house and I couldn’t afford to lose it again because I did lose it last fall and I’m hanging on my only car key because it costs over $200 to order a new key due to some stupid security code inside the key to activate the ignition in my car. I remember I left it somewhere on the arms of the couch, so it probably had slipped into the cushions, so I looked everywhere into that damn couch. I thought about ripping up that cheap couch because there was a small crease underneath where my keys might have crawled into there but my roommate said no, it’s impossible for my keys to go through it. Well, hello, do you see my keys around? If you don’t see it, maybe it’s in there, eh? but I realize he might be right. So I spent a good hour looking for my keys and it occurred to me that my keys may not be even in the house. And my roommate’s friend was here recently, so I gave up on my pathetic search and told my roommate to ask him if he mistook my keys. So, I went to bed, exhausted, and only six hours of sleep. Grr.

The following morning, I got up for work as usual, tried to look for keys for a few more minutes but nothing. Walked, getting metroed to work. Then my roommate paged me saying that his friend indeed has my keys. Oh that gotta be the best news of the day. Appparently, he was too stoned that he thought my keys were his. Phffth. But I can’t put all the blame on him cuz I shouldn’t have left the keys on the couch in the first place.

Now, I’m thinking if I should shell out two hundred bucks for second key in case I lost my keys again….

I decided to change a bit to my website, moving the “clickadelicious” section to the bigger left column to give it more room and increase its clickability. I realize I spend a good part on finding good links. It’s like finding treasures in the sand with my metal detector. So that’s my worthless reason to move the section.

I’m working on adding a “Flickr”-like photo gallery and as soon as I populate the folder with pics, I’ll post it up and you can start making fun of my amateurish photos. I have pics from the Washington DC Korean Meetup where I met an unofficial Hangul tutor. It was fun and I got to eat cow intestines and drank five shots of Soju. More on that later.

I realize I’m not writing as often as I should, or at least this rule of thumb says so. It said that if you want to attract more visitors, you should write not once but twice a day, so that your readers will know you have something new when they click onto your website or blog. Eh…

The weather here sure is playing a game with us. Last week, it was well over 80’s for most of the week and I began seeing real serious legs flip-flopping on sidewalks as I cruised down the streets with my sunroof open. Ah, spring time! But this week, the temperature went down below 60s and I had to step outside first to see if it’s warm enough to wear shorts. Otherwise, I go back inside and put on pants.

My friends are hooking me to diss work early and go play disc golf with them. I’ll do my best to sneak out of cubicle. :-)

An old friend of mine found this pic and emailed me the link. So I clicked on it and it showed the pic of me when I was a freshman at Gallaudet University before I transferred to RIT the following year and graduated from there. I looked at the old picture and couldn’t believe how different I look now, so I look at my recent pics and decide to make a “before/after” picture like you’d see in weight loss or plastic surgery informericals. So, that’s what four years of college, spring breaks, and plenty of kegs can happen to you. :-)

Zoom zoom! Bye-bye, mazda and everyone else too! :-)

Squander that beer! It’s a big 32 oz jug

Who could have thought that in one day, closed captioning would “power” Google’s search engine as the source for searching through videos? Google recently introduced Google Video as a means to search through tv programming and used closed captioning (CC) for indexing. What? Google uses closed captioning!? This may appear insignificant to you who don’t have to set on CC to understand the shows, but ever since TV was created, deaf people were all but stuck to watch tv as if people were puppets behind the glass and they had to rely on their imagination to assume what was going on in the shows. Finally in 1971, the closed captioning was finally born behind the glass in line 21 of the vertical blinking interval (VBI) and required a special decoder since hearing people didn’t want to be bothered with the “annoying” black/white lines invading precious space on their televisions. In parternship between ABC and NBC, they gave a preview to deaf audience by captioning “The Mob Squad.” Since it was only a preview, it cost them money to provide such a service, and the Federal Government (Dept. of Education and FCC) realized they had to get involved; otherwise, this project would be dead. So, they gave a push to this project and this “experiment” was finally done. Who knew how many petitions and letters had to be done to get the CC into the tvs?

It wasn’t till 8 years later before the first closed captioning was finally broadcast across the U.S. and that was on The ABC Sunday Night Movie, The Wonderful World of Disney (NBC), and Masterpiece Theatre (PBS). Remember the decoders I just mentioned above? Till 1992, only about 400,000 decoders were sold and the gigantic TV networks saw no reason to keep captioning their shows. Without the government’s intervention, CC would have simply gone extinct and we deaf people would be back to watching Tom & Jerry than Law & Order ‘cuz it’d give a better comprehension. So, in 1996, the Congress passed the law to require CC be available on all televisions. (By then, the CC decoder had shrunk to the size of a chip and it didn’t cost the manufactuers much to install the decoder chip inside the tvs.) Even to this day, not everything is captioned but we have come far since only 15 hours a week were captioned in 1980 and several close encounters with the death of CC due to money talks.

There you have it, a short bit of history on the closed captioning and you can see why somebody like me is very delighted to see something like Google is indexing CC as the source for TV information. All of a sudden, it’s not so insignificant anymore and it’s accessible to the millions of people around the world who watch TV, not to deaf people only. Now, TV networks see a reason to keep captioning their shows ‘cuz they know that people will be searching through Google Video, and the more captioning there is, the more likely those people will be led back to the network that provides the captioning. That is a good thing for TV networks. Finally, after 25 years since the first captioning, we may see 100% captioning on all shows and you can say thanks to Google.

Got this from http://readthisforfun.blogspot.com/

Lol, so true…

1) IN PRISON – you spend the majority of your time in an8X10 cell.

AT WORK – you spend the majority of your time in a 6X8 cubicle.

2) IN PRISON – you get three meals a day.

AT WORK – you only get a break for one meal and you pay for it.

3) IN PRISON – you get time off for good behavior.

AT WORK – you get more work for good behavior.

4) IN PRISON – the guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you.

AT WORK – you must carry around a security card and open all the doors for

yourself.

5) IN PRISON – you can watch TV and play games.

AT WORK – you get fired for watching TV and playing games.

6) IN PRISON – you get your own toilet.

AT WORK – you have to share with some idiot who pees on the seat.

7) IN PRISON – they allow your family and friends to visit.

AT WORK – you can’t even speak to your family.

8) IN PRISON – the taxpayers pay all expenses with no work required.

AT WORK – you get to pay all the expenses to go to work and then they

deduct taxes from your salary to pay for Prisoners.

9) IN PRISON – you spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out.

AT WORK – you spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside

bars.

10) IN PRISON – you must deal with sadistic wardens.

AT WORK – they are called managers.

“To the computer users around the world, you’ve been blessed.”

And my ?? name is ?, ??.

*You would need to install East Asian language to make this post readable, :-)

I’ve memorized nearly all of the characters and know that I would need to continually learn the language before it’s permanently rooted into my brain. Now, I’m working on my ?? vocabulary words.

When the year turned 2005, someone asked me what’s my new year resolution. I thought about it and I realized that it’s nearly the same as every last year—get into a better shape, read more books, eat healthier foods, stay in touch with my parents more often, don’t go to bed too late, don’t oversleep, and so on. I realize they were not exactly very inspirational so I looked around other people’ blogs to see what they say about theirs. One actually read a book every week and blogged about it. Someone actually ran at least a mile everyday. Someone else wants to watch Oprah and Dr. Phil shows everyday. There were many good ideas but I’m not that ambitious or have no desire to do that kind of thing. Fast-forward to April 6th, 2005, I found my new year resolution and that’s to learn Korean language, Hangul. My textbook arrived yesterday, so I begin my self-education now.

After flipping through the textbook, I realize something. There is no way am I gonna learn this all by my own. To keep my motivation high, I need to find someone or a group to share it with, someone who can help guide me and recognize my mistakes. It is fruitless to learn a new language if you don’t have someone to chat. It’s like learning a new magic trick and you don’t have anyone to show to. Again, I go to the web and to my surprise, I found some good websites. korea.banoffeepie.com. Actually, their tagline is “Korean-related weblogs written in English.” Simple. This website is like a webring that contains the list of blogs that relate to Korea. I just submitted my blog there but it has to be approved first before it goes into the list. Next one I found was the meetup here in DC. I joined the group and hope to meet some of them!

Like being a teacher, I have to make a lesson plan. First week – memorize the 21 vowels and 19 consonants. Make index cards as flash cards. I feel so like a kid in elementary school!

That’s right. I got a little surprise for you…for visiting my website. :-) I found this $50 dollars coupon off a $100 purchase at Guess. If you don’t care how you look or don’t bother try to look good, you can fuggedaboutit!

Go to the www.guess.com. Add items to the cart that totals 100 dollars or higher. Then check out and use this coupon – SHPCRD – copy and paste into the promotion code to get your 50 dollars off. It expires on April 17th, 2005 and items are running out fast. Happy shopping!

*update* – thought I’d add a little graphical action to this post, :-)

I just found a perfect way to make a good use of my overrated Sony digital camera. I found this website where bloggers choose a theme, then submit a photo that matches the theme every week. There are really many good photos and I find it very fascinating to see how a theme is portrayed by a photo as there are so many different ways to capture the theme. I suggest you to check it out especially if you want to take your camera out more often!

This post is a sequel to my previous post about having a sandpaper in my throat. Know what? That damn sandpaper just refused to go away after taking three medicine cups, equilvalent to six tablespoons, of Tylenol Severe Cold syrup, four Nyquil liquid gels, two Advil pills, and 13 straight hours of sleep. I did have a fever and I got better but my throat still hurt as if there’s broken glass inside my throat, so I knew I had a strep throat and had to get antibiotics. Where to get the antibiotics? I wish I could pretend to be a doctor and write myself a prescription and just get over to CVS pharmacy and get it. I tried calling around DC to get an appointment but most of them are full till next week. I can’t wait that long so I had no choice but go to the hospital. I called the Howard University Hospital (the closest to where I live) to see if they have an interpreter on call and they said yes. So I got myself there, signed in and I waited, waited. And I waited. About four hours later, they finally got me into a patient’s room. Turned out there was no interpreter but on tv, like VP except it was a poor quality. The interpreter had a hard time understanding what I wanted to say. What’s more, prior to that, the nurses spent a half hour just to get the TV working and get the interpreter to answer. Then, a black doctor came and he didn’t even look at me at all, he looked to the TV interpreter to talk to me. He asked me what’s wrong with me. I said I had a strep throat so I need antibiotics. He said “Uh-huh, we’ll see about that.” We went through normal routine and I must admit, it was kinda funny having a TV presence in the room. Then the doctor said, “Mm-hmm, you probably have a strep throat”, and said thank you to the TV interpreter, then he just left the room. I waited for like a half hour in the room and I was like “WTF is going on” so I decided to get out and checked what’s going on. A nurse saw me and waved at me, “come here.” I came to the desk and the nurse said “here’s your checkout form”. I thought “Oh great, why didn’t you just pass that under the door while I was waiting?” I signed my name as fast as I could and the outside was already dark by the time I got out.

I was so exhausted when I got out of the hospital and I had to take the metro to get back home as I didn’t drive to the hospital. As I was waiting for the metro subway to come, I see two kids standing next to their father. The subway opened doors and I went through the doors and was about to sit down on a two-seat empty row. As I was sitting down, I immediately noticed that every other row had already been taken by either one seat or two and I got this instinct feeling that the two kids wouldn’t want to sit separate, so I got up and walked to the next empty seat, leaving the entire row open for the kids to sit down. I sat down opposite side and I felt something was looking behind my back so I turned my head. The little girl was looking at me and she had this happy look on her face. I turned back and thought “Even if I’m having an awful day, it doesn’t mean you still can’t do a nice thing for someone.” The doors closed and the metro subway started to move forward.

P.S. Don’t ever go to Howard University Hospital, which actually means “HUH?”