Still full…

Snapped this on lunch break, =)

California Pizza Kitchen, yummy.

Secretly taking pics of people while they think I’m typing!

*be careful, I might snap a pic of you and expose you to the Internet within minutes.

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For those who’s never been to DC, this is what the metro looks inside….

This is what I have to suffer every morning!

All-you-can-eat crab dinner. Comes in buckets. It was good but expect a LOT of work eating those damn crabs. And they were kinda small so you’d have to eat like 50 crabs to get full, like I did. =)
< -- posted via Sidekick 2 -->

Saw this “cross” in the metro. Reminds me of the book by Dan Brown. =)
< -- posted via Sidekick 2 -->

Hello world!

Finally got this script to work. It wasn’t pretty. I actually got my new sidekick 2 abt 3 weeks ago. Found a plugin that allows you to post from any email program. Got everything set up except it refused to publish. I gave up and nearly smashed this sk.

Tonight, I was determined to make it work. Turned out to be the time zone/delay stuffs. Stupid delay (I will find you somewhere and hit delete on you). Fiddled around the code, fooling the date 7 good hours back so it won’t be delayed to publish. So you can see the time publish below. Will fix that later but for now, it’s working, that’s all it matters. =)

Now, I gotta sleep for friggin work tomorrow… it’s 1 am here, not 3 pm like the time stamp said below.

< -- posted via Sidekick 2 -->

Dammit, I think the movie, the Machinist, with Christian Bale, has influenced me. I couldn’t sleep and I keep thinking of this guy who’s never have had a sleep for a year. Watch the movie and you’ll see why he couldn’t sleep in a year. Btw, that movie has a slow pace to it and you’d have to wait patiently till the end to finally understand why the guy has such a struggle. So, I’m thinking if it’s humanly possible not to sleep in a year. The longest I’ve gone without a sleep is like 32 hours, when I went to a LAN party and shoot the heck of them (Warcraft, Quake, Unreal, Counter-strike, etc) all night long and day. Boy, that was fun and my brain was literally fried when I went to bed.

What’s the longest you’ve gone without a sleep?

Ever since I’ve been supporting myself on the income that doesn’t come from SSI, VR, or my parents, I’m learning a whole lot about the game of finance. It’s one of the first things you’ll face once you step out of college and into the real world, with no one backing you but yourself. Housing rent, car loan, groceries, buying things that you’ll never buy if you were 60 years old, etc. If you live in DC like I do, it sucks to learn that it’s nearly impossible to find a house or a condo under 150k (hey! I hail from Illinois, known for its never-ending cornfields), thus, I have to rent a place till I know for sure that I’m gonna live here for the rest of my life (I sure hope not.) That leaves the question when I’ll ever own a place someday….

I’ve always strived to be knowledgeable about things—I don’t mean in a way that I think I know everything—just being in the know. Thus, I read, study, ask questions, ponder abt things, talk with friends over certain subjects, that contributes to the learning process and like Gandi said, you never stop learning. So, lately, I’ve been reading nonfiction, mainly on finance. Why is that? Well, if you want to continue working well into your seventies, please do help yourself. I sure don’t. To do that, I have to reduce my spending and save money. After reading “the Next-Door Millionaire” book, I discovered that I’m an under-performing accumulator. It means that I’m not saving as much as I should and that I’m spending too much, or like the book said, not frugal. The author in the book said that those who are millionaires don’t even have six figures income, they do it by being frugal or PAW ( Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth). They save whatever income they have and minimize their spending. Over time, they build up a million dollar nest egg and once their mortgage has been paid off, they say good-bye to their work. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Now, I know a friend who’s a year younger than I am and she has already saved nearly a half hundred thousand dollars. That pisses me off…

So, if you want to get off to a good start, and that you’ve read this far, I have some good news to tell you. I realize I’m not the only one who seems “obsessive” about his finance and there’s tons of blogs that are almost completely devoted to accumulating wealth and to retire with a million dollar by the time s/he is 50 years old. That makes me feel somewhat better and not too nutty. Yahoo! lists the top ten money blogs here. That’ll give you a good idea of what’s their goals and what they’re writing about.

“What? is that the good news?” you might ask. No no, the good news is THIS. Need an interpretation of that? Simply said, you get 5% cashback at supermarkets (Giants, Safeway, etc), drugstores (CVS, Walgreen, etc), and gas stations and 1% at any other places. Those places make up, like, 80% of my whole expenses excluding the rent and car loan. In case you need a loan I recommend to check out billige forbrukslÃ¥n. If you were to spend $100 at those places, you get 5 dollars in return. How about $200? that’s 10 dollars. $500? 25 dollars. Now, you’re really getting something back! However, the big trick here is that you need to pay it off every month, otherwise, they’ll charge you 10% or more for it as an interest, which means you’re not getting advantage of the cashback (And they’re probably laughing at you for falling into that pitfall). That gets you down? Well, don’t forget you can ask for real cashback dollars, like at an ATM, at those places. Say bye-bye to those stupid bank fees!

You know, we keep seeing those digital cameras getting better and better, with more megapixels. Pretty good or sufficient cameras come at 3mp or higher, with 5 mp being the premium cameras but if you absolutely want the top of the line camera that professionals use, you go with 7 mp or higher. But have you ever wondered what our own eyesight would amount to how many resolution in a camera? If a manfacuturer were to duplicate our human eyesight resolution, they’d have to make a 100-million-pixel resolution. 100 mp!? That’s how sharp our eyes are and we can easily detect the fake images in anything we see such as movies or CGI.

Just found this information while reading popular science magazine and thought I’d share with you guys. We are still superior to technology!

Last week was clearly a bad case with District of Columbia, notoriously known for its license plate whining: Taxation Without Representation. Granted, we DC residents have to pay high taxes (10% on most things, which explain why we don’t have a Wal-mart or a Banana Republic here) but DC is clearly raping people off on parking tickets and those friggin stupid cameras! I had to pay $200 worth of tickets to DC, one for expired tag and one for “speeding” on the Michigan Ave that was flashed by the traffic camera. Grr, I really hate those cameras. One of those days, I’m gonna vandialize that damn camera!

$200 hard-earned money. Sigh.

On the bright side, I still retain my Illinois license plate due to insurance reasons. If I changed to DC license plate, I’d have to change my insurance coverage to DC and then the premium would go double, to about $1500 for six months.

With or without DC insurance, I suppose DC still finds a way to get my money. :-(

Thanks to a nap I recently took, approximately from 5 pm to 7 pm, I couldn’t sleep despite the fact I finished reading a new book I started two days ago, Freakonomics, which is a fascinating book btw, that is supposed to make me sleepy but didn’t. Thanks to my little friend in my head, I thought about a few things and thought I’d write a few words about what it’s like to be a Deaf person.

A good start to this would be to ask, “how did I become deaf?” Well, scientificially, the cause is unknown but it is probably heredietary since I was born deaf, and so was my older sister but we’re the only ones who are deaf in our family. So, I’ve been deaf since I was born. Ironically enough, it’s my deafness that has brought me here in America. Otherwise, I’d be still in Korea with my family and probably would be working on some rice farms or studying to become a priest. My sister’s husband is a priest, so to speak. I don’t know which is more blessing: being deaf and here in America or being hearing and stay with the family in Korea. Either way, I’m happy with who I am and what I end up living with.

Now, onto being a Deaf person, it annoys the hell out of me when a hearing person says “Oh, I wish I could be deaf like you, so I don’t have to be bothered by all those noises or having to hear those awful things.” Bull$hit. That is like telling a blind person that you wish you’re blind so you don’t see awful things (would you say porn is an awful thing to see?) on the tv. I’m not gonna pretend/lie here and say that I embrace every moment of being Deaf or that it’s the best thing ever happened to me. I’m telling you right now, being deaf is HARD and if I were to be hearing, I have no doubts I’d be a lot different person than I am now. But again, I do not know if I’m actually better off being Deaf or hearing. I might end up being a drug lord, being homeless on the street or getting killed in Iraq. I could be anything else in such a way that I won’t find myself writing this entry.

Since Deaf people only account less than 1% of the entire U.S. population, Deaf world is a lot like a high school except it’s a lot smaller. We keep bumping each other and everyone knows who f*cked who. It sucks when you’re trying to date someone; that someone is also your ex-girlfriend’s best friend or roommate. And when you do that, everyone back-stab you and call you a player. Much unlike Hearing World where you could meet a person at a bar, get some alcohol going, having a good time and you both decide to have a little extra fun and spend a night together. The next morning, you might realize it wasn’t what you thought it’d be, you simply walk out and never expect to see her/him again. Case closed. Unfortunately, that isn’t so with the Deaf world.

I take the metro to work everyday so it’s not uncommon when tourists come up at me and ask where the f*ck are they or where they’re supposed to go. Depends on my mood, I may act nice and try to lip-read, which I guess more than I actually lip-read, their mouths. It looks like they want to go to the Washington monument or Union Station, whatever. But admittedly, most of the time, I simply point to my ear and shake my head as to say “sorry, I’m deaf and can’t understand what you say.” Nothing harm, right? Except when tourists happen to be a hot-looking lady in a short shorts with long legs. I’d be more than obliged to be her tour guide and if she’s visiting just for the weekend, perfect. I can show her around the city and she’d be out of my sight by Sunday. (Think of Adam Sandler in “The first 50 dates” with Drew Barrymore).

Food. I can’t really customize my meal as much as a hearing person can. “Hey waiter, this isn’t what I want. I said no condiments on my burger but I want a Swiss cheese and onions. And this is overcooked; I want mine medium-well. Oh, these buns are overburned too.” Or whatever the hell like that. I suppose I could write on some napkin to tell him what I want but he’d still f*ck it up and got my order wrong. So I just mouth, “everything” and when I get the burger, I have to customize it with my fingers or spitting it out of my mouth barbarically. If I’m allergic to something, God bless me.

So, that’s what I have to deal by being Deaf. First of all, you may notice why I keep using capital D, instead of just deaf. Well, you know, being Deaf doesn’t simply mean you cannot hear and still be able to function within the hearing world as if there’s a perfect harmony between us. When you cannot hear a f*cking word since you were born, you perceive the world differently. You learn the language differently. You can only imagine the sounds but never actually hear it. You end up interacting with similar people, not those who could hear. When you have more than one generation who’s also Deaf, the pattern continues and gradually becomes into this world we all have come to know—the Deaf world. We’re not just deaf; we’re Deaf. When we say that, we don’t mean we’re perfect; we all have shortcomings like everyone else and we dream what it’d be like to be a hearing one day, as much as you’d dream abt being a Spider-man, the next U.S. President, or even geekier the Bill Gates. But don’t ever tell us you wish you’re deaf.

In about thirty minutes, it’ll become Friday! Whoo-hoo. Time for the weekend! You probably already know I’m lying here or just trying to pretend I’m in a good mood. Seeing the San Antonio Spurs losing to Detriot has really pissed me off, so I’m trying to enlighten myself somehow. Thinking about Friday… Well, that won’t work. What’s wrong with the Spurs!!! Why can’t they just grab one win at Detriot!!? I’m starting to believe that there is actually a conspiracy going on. The refs calling the game in a certain way so that Detriot Pistons would win and extend the series, this time, to even up. Shit. 2 – 2 in the NBA Finals. This is exactly what Commissoner David Stern wanted to see. Boost up interests, attendence, media, or in all, more $$$. Nearly made me throw up. Ok ok, Nathan, calm down. Perhaps the Spurs will bounce and win the next game. They better be! God, shut those little stupid Pistons down! I better see the Manu Ginobili in the next game!

It’s soon to be Friday…. Ok ok, Friday…ah, I’m going to see the Batman Begins movie! That ought help to cheer my mood up. Been reading excellent reviews abt the movie; sure looking forward to it.

Let the wee-keend begins!