It seems as if my mind has gotten out of hibernation and is itching to do something. A couple of days ago, I found myself joining the gym membership and worked out on two days. My body is sore especially my triceps but my stomach needs a lot of work, so I’m aiming to pull some good hard cardio workouts this week and try to lose a pound (from 166 lbs) and stay away from rice or carb foods. Now, I look at my own site and well, it’s getting a bit boring and stale, design-wise, so I find myself itching to redesign my website. I look at professional web designers’ sites and their designs are definitely kicking ass in quality. So that got my creativity juices going and I’ve got an idea of what I want my redesign to be. I remember the first goal I have before was just to get this website up and running because it was simply taking forever to be up cuz of my damn obsession with perfectionism. Now, I’ve taken myself well into the blog world and get an idea of how “information” is distributed, and how to make it more useful and presentable. So that’s where the focus will be on the next redesign—with the information more concise, purposeful and yet pleasing.

I tried something new today—I went to a Deaf Korean church in Wheaton, MD—-and I think that’s my first time attending church in 2005. I didn’t even know they have one around here till one girl told me about it. It was interesting to see some “FOBs” who knows only KSL, not ASL. I think there were about twenty people who were in attendance and the best part was the korean dinner that followed. Pork Gulogi, rice, curry vegetables, and no korean dishes can be completed without kimchi. Also, what’s impressive was that they had a full outdoor court basketball with two backboards that are made of fiberglass, not some cheap-ass plastic you would see on driveways. I didn’t even know Koreans are into basketball. We had a little pick-up game and one girl named Min-Hye definitely can play some basketball and she’s only 15 years old, never played on a school team. I told her she should. I had fun today and that’s what happens when you do something new. :-)

Oh yeah, my new sk2 has been finally shipped and I should get it soon this week. Can’t wait! (another reason for redesigning my website)

Sherry and I at the Todai in Fairfax!

Inside the Todai

Food time!

Here we goo!

Sherry showing how to eat seaweed soup!

We had a good time at the Todai, obviously. My belly just expanded one inch bigger after that, not exactly a good start to my workout program!

Browsing thru websites as usual, I found this cool search engine site that combines both Yahoo and Google search engines. You can see two columns on one page and see the search results. Pretty neat. Here’s the link.

Now, try to type “failure” into the search box and see what or who comes first at the top. :-)

Here’s my rough summer workout plan on a five days basis.

Monday – chest and back/shoulders

Tuesday – cardio workout – running or do supersets on weights

Wednesday – arms workout – biceps, triceps, abs

Thursday – cardio workout – running or do supersets on weights

Friday – a follow-up workout – whatever muscles areas that need more work or stretching ( use lighter weights), also, on this day, you can measure your bench press max.

Weekend – do a leisure workout, be it golf, disc golf, a run in the park, play football or basketball, etc.

And watch your diet!
And don’t forget to eat a lot of fiber and almonds too.

Today, I decided to do something on the second day of summer. For some reason, somehow, I lost motivation to go to the gym to work out and gradually became a couch potato (*gasps* even you, Nathan?) right before my eyes, and keeping myself warm from the winter, for almost three months. My best excuse is that I think it’s related to work—too tired to work out when I get home from work and that it was already dark by the time I step out of the cubicle. But, um, that was, like, two months ago and it’s summer now! Get off the couch, Nathan!

So, today, I joined the gym membership here at USDA. They have a fitness center called ECG. Although their equipment sucks, must be from the prison, it only costs me $24 dollars a month, can’t complain abt that price and I can work out during my work hours. After all, can get one of those best home rowing machine if feeling gym is not enough. So, first, I weighed myself and I believe that’s the heaviest I’ve ever been, 4 pounds below 170 lbs. I don’t think I’ve ever been more than 170 lbs, staying steady at 160 lbs but today, the scale said 166 lbs. *ahem* It was like setting off the fire alarm in my brain. “Must work out and lose weight.”. I’m aware that once you reach 30, your metabolism rate goes down and it’ll be harder to lose weight and you may be stuck with beer belly for the rest of your life. I want to get rid of the flab on my belly and stay that way till I meet my own death.

My goal isn’t to buff like Arnold Schwargennzer (sorry, I know that cliche is getting old and boring) but be more toned and leaner. The biggest challenge is and always will be my food cravings and try not to eat more than one serving, meaning not two, three cups of rice, having two whoppers from Burger King, or eating 10 foot-long worth of sushi rolls. Get some great coffee cups at https://ember.com/, they have great style and design. You can see where I get the flab from. :-( Next challenge isn’t about how many reps or miles I should do/run today but simply getting my ass over to the weightlifting room or onto a treadmill. And to do it everyday except for Sundays.

That’s it. That’s the two things I have to do—watch my diet and exercise regularly at this new gym in my area called Sweat Equity Fitness. As easy as it looks, it’s tough and no wonders we have such a word called discipline.

That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.” –Bill Bryson

I’m sure most of you have heard of that a couple of times from your biology teacher, that we’re all related one way or another. You may be rolling your eyes and be like “Yea yea, what’s your f**king point?” Well, my point is that we tend to think in current time frame or at least since we were born, meaning we don’t bother to think what has happened in the last century or longer than that. You say that’s for history majors. You know, if you could go back in time and change one TINY thing and everything after that point will be drastically different than they would be now and it would directly affect us and our existence. How’s that for history?

Obviously we can’t be here without our parents procreating first. And that goes the same thing for our grandparents, then our great-grandfathers. Start to see the pattern yet? Just keep going on and if you go eight generations back, that’s when Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin lived and that took 250 people in order to make your existence possible. Go even further to the time of Shakespeare, you have no fewer than 16,384 couples who f**ked each other. Let’s skip some generations here and go to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your existence depends on has increased to approx. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. So, basically, we’re not just the product of our parents but the product of gazillion numbers that led to our existence. And what’s the most remarkable of them all? We’re still 99.9 percent the same.

Now comes the scary part is this paragraph in “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”

“In late 2000 Nature and other publications reported on a Swedish study of the mitochondrial DNA of fifty-three people, which suggested that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of no more than 10,000 individuals. Soon afterward, Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, announced that modern Europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from “no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago.”

That’s right, with the DNA’s help, science has found enough evidence to suggest that we descended from no more than 10,000 people in Africa.

So that made me thinking. With the numbers I mentioned above, wouldn’t it be safe and logical to assume that at the pattern it keeps going at, that it traces all the way back to a single couple—perhaps Adam and Eve?

What we know for sure is that we’re all related to each other, no matter how different we may appear to each other yet we have all kinds of problems in this world and cannot be perfectly at peace. I suppose that’s what makes it interesting—our problems—despite the 99.9% similarity between us.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m even writing this post but that’s kind of things my thoughts tend to wander, reflecting on the bits of information I read in books or hear about what people say. One thing about this book that struck me is we didn’t even account for 1% of the entire Earth’s history and that dinosaurs dominated the world much longer than we ever did. The author also said that the extinction for human race is pretty much inevitable; it’s just a matter of when. So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that we all should make the best/most out of our life and don’t worry too much on small stuffs because we are pretty much insignificant to the universe. But remember, we ARE significant to one another. And that’s my point. :-)

I usually find good stuffs via del.icio.us and saw this page. Thought I’d share with you guy, that is if you’ve been meaning to save money, pay off your credit card debt, start some investments and most of all, you don’t want to be still working into your sixties or seventies.

This guy said he’s read over a dozen books on financial independence and he’s found a recurring theme almost in each of them. He summarized them up and include a guide or rules in a bullet-style list. That way, you don’t have to spend $20 on each book (I’ve read three) and you can remember the points better and use the page as a quick reminder or reference.

http://www.foldedspace.org/archives/004245.html

Learned something from that article. He said financial independence is achieved when your monthly investment income equals or exceeds your monthly needs such as car payments, house payments, etc, which will take a long time to acheive. How nice would that feel when that happens. No more getting up early in the morning and dragging my ass to work. Play golf all I want.

Mantra #2: “Is this a need or a want?” Ugh, I hate this question but it’s vital to your financial independence. Dang, I want more golf balls, new suspension (sway bars, shocks, short-throw shifter) for my car, new G5 powerbook, and the list goes on endlessly, sigh.

This sentence got my attention.
Mantra #4: “Cash is better than credit.” There is almost no reason to carry a credit card.
True, ‘cuz it would incur debt (doh). I carry my debit card instead and some cash when they don’t accept debit cards like Vietnamese Pho cafe.

So, if you read the article, followed the steps, and for the rest, you have to be committed and disciplined. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

I just stumbled across someone’s blog, confessing that she has a secret “crush” on someone’s blog, so that got me thinking. I wonder if it’s possible to have a crush on someone’s blog without even knowing that person or never met the person before, like a complete stranger.

I have this scene in my mind that during your boring times or being sleepless at 3 am in the morning, you decided to check out your friends’ blog, despite the fact that you already checked a few hours ago. Ah, nothing new except for one new comment in ur friend’s blog, you followed the link and read the comment. Something about the comment got your attention and you’re curious who wrote that comment, so you clicked down the author and it turned out s/he has a blog too.

You’re reading her/his entries and the more you read, the more you become fascinated. You click on “previous posts” for more reading, then clicked again for more posts. Without knowing, you’re hooked to the blog and you decided to click on the << to go all the way back to the first ever entry (which is like a few hundred entries back), so you could imagine her/his life better in a chronological order. However, the first entry said something like "Well, this is my first entry and I'm just going to babble about my thoughts, life, love, experience, etc and I know no one probably will read my blog anyway." You found yourself thinking "Hey! I love your blog! I'm reading all of your entries! There IS someone who does read your blog." Now you're thinking, "I wonder if this person post some pics?" and off you went looking for pics. "Ooo! I see pics! hmm, that person is good looking." So within a few half-hours later, you're still up and you have read each entry, you know what s/he likes, her/his favorite foods are, movies, etc. You know what their friends look like and what an asshole her/his ex-spouses were. You bookmarked her/his blog and check their blog right after you check ur daily email box. Once in a while, you'll try to drop off a comment and wait to see if s/he will respond to your comment. You may have found out where s/he lives and how far they live from you. You spend ur day daydreaming about meeting that person and what would you say when you do. Wait a minute, maybe this doesn't sound like a crush.

Hungry for some pizza? To help spread word about Pizza Hut’s new online order service, they’re giving out a free coupon, so I thought I’d post in here.

Instructions:
1. Go to pizzahut.com
2. Register
3. Add either a large or extra large pizza
3. Apply the code: HL
4. Enjoy your FREE pizza!

*Not sure when it will expire; today could be the last day.
**it seems that the coupon no longers works, so if it continues to be that way, guess we missed the boat, :-(

I have been meaning to order the new T-Mobile Sidekick, not because it has a built-in camera or that it’s a bit smaller and lighter than its predecessor but a better vibration. With my current sidekick, I often would have to check my pager to make sure I didn’t miss any alerts. Ah, one of the many pitfalls of being a Deaf person.

So, I scorched the Net for the absolutely best deal on the sidekick 2. For the reference of price comparison, I used the T-Mobile’s upgrade offer, which is outrageous at $370 dollars or $300 dollars with the purchase of voice/data plan, $39.99 or higher, for 12 months contract. Of course, I don’t use the voice plan at all. Then, I saw this page that you could get it for free but only to add an additional line to your current account, phffth. So, the best deal comes to deafpager.com and fusewireless.com. They offer similar pricing, with one $50 dollars rebate from T-Mobile. You may be inclined to ask how come their deals are lower than most online retailers. The secret is that they have an agreement with Sprint and MCI relay. They pay them to install Sprint or MCI relay programs onto sidekicks. (I believe deafpager.com works with MCI IP-Relay while Fuse Wireless uses Sprint relay). Sprint and MCI are fierce competitors, vying for more customers to use their relay so that they could garner more minutes, which will be reimbursed by the FCC. Somehow, fusewireless.com adds $20 dollars fee to the initial price of $149, bumping the price to $169 while deafpager.com doesn’t. Moreover, deafpager does offer a free color bumper to customize your sidekick plus a free car charger. I entrusted my order to deafpager.

Deafpager.com said it’ll be within 48 hours that the order will be processed. If they don’t, I’m gonna report to the Better Business Bureau!

Had my first soju drink. It tasted just like vodka but lighter. You could call it a “Vodka Lite”. It has about 40% proof as opposed to 80% in vodka. Cheers!

Just a short message to let everybody know—if they do check my page—that I’m still alive and kicking. The only excuse I have is that time’s going by too fast. Had a three days long conference at DHHIG recently. Learned a quite about communication and networking in the federal government. Prior to the conference, I played golf on Saturday and Sunday. Also last Friday, I went to a DPHH event and I made some interesting observations, in which I’ll post about it soon enough. Now, I just flew in today to visit my parents here in Illinois. I’ve been under this roof ever since I was brought to the United States when I was three years old. Ofc, the layout has changed since then but it still brings a lot of memories. Dad bought an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier, so I’m gonna scan a lot of pics and feed into a photo gallery. More to come!

Oh yeah, it does feel nice to come home and have a refigerator full of foods that didn’t come out of your pocket. :-)

I try not to blog too much about other sites (that’s why I created a linklog above) whereas the subject should be…well…about me. But I saw this picture that I have to post it here. This is every beer guy’s dream. :-)

The Link

Ahh, I came home to fix the blue screen of death right after I left work. Indeed, I did look around for solutions in the www, (thank god for message boards) and found one solution exactly like mine. Here. So, the problem turned out to be that when I made Linux partitions on my hard drive, the Partition Magic 8 software “hide” XP boot record so that the attention be turned to Linux. All I had to do is to boot into Linux CD and run fdisk /dev/hda. Press “T” to change the system id on /dev/hda1 which contains the boot record of XP. ID number was 17, stands for hidden, so I changed it to 07, unhide. Then reboot. Bingo, XP is back. Then one of my two logical drives went missing—probably because I messed around with MBR, trying to fix anything without doing the research first—I didn’t have a laptop to help me out, so I didn’t have a much choice. But thank god for Partition Magic 8, it has an ability to “undelete” a partition and rescue that second logical drive. Whew. So, everything’s back to normal. I looked at the partition table and realized that I had not resized the extended NTFS partition and was basically partitioning Linux ONTO NTFS extended partition! So I changed the partition table again. Then, I decided to use fdisk to do the partitions instead of PM8 since it hides the XP without ever letting me know, phfft.

Before I could make my system wet with Gentoo Linux, I had to go meet a friend at 8 pm to discuss rent situation as he was thinking abt moving into the basement room for his summer internship. Time passed away quickly and it’s my bedtime, ugh. Had to put this on hold for next day.