Ha!

They even engraved on the styrofoam.

My newest toy! Courtesy of Google.

All gone!

My daily intake. Daily.

Gotta love this spam!

Ah, MNF. Monday nights were never the same without you. Welcome back!

The king of sodas. Nothing tastes better than in a can.

3 bottles of heinken and 2 burgers of mcdonalds do not mesh well.

Anyway, here’s a happy friday to you!

One way trip to Mars, would you go?

Hmm, tough question. I don’t think I will do it, although it’s a very tempting thought. Probably not, as I don’t really have the passion or desire to go to Mars and leave everybody I know behind. I’d rather have a quality of life than gaining five seconds fame for being one of the first people to go to Mars (quickly name the dog that Russians sent into the space, now you get what I mean.) But I have a prediction that at the rate we’re going at, there will be an expressway between Mars and Earth—more room for everybody or when Earth gets fked up.

Grr, I need to get myself to a beach and ride those waves!

“Be yourself.” my mom’s best advice to me.

“Everyone’s got a fear of rejection. The difference is how you handle it.” thanks, Taki.

“Just do it.” quote made famous by Nike. I know it’s simplistic and cliche but effective. As I start to think of million other excuses or procrastination, I just tell myself to shut up and just do it. Like I’ve ran 3 miles on the treadmill last Thurs night and another 3 miles this evening. Trying to get on a roll here to get in shape for 10k race on April 30.

“Courage is being scared to death–and saddling up anyway.” – John Wayne

“You wouldn’t be impressed with my skill if you knew how hard I had to work to achieve my mastery.” – Michaelangelo

“Don’t tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.” –anonymous

I hope I counted the week number right. Anyway, my parents came to visit me last weekend and had a wonderful time. My dad’s fallen in love with korean buffets but I worry about him ‘cuz his stomach is as big as it can be. Good thing my hometown doesn’t have a korean buffet. My mom’s wish got fullfilled. She got to see the pandas and the baby panda at the Washington National Zoo. My digital camera battery got dead so I rushed to get a disposable camera for my mom. My mom must have stared at the pandas for an hour, then turned around and gave me the look. “When are you gonna have a kid?” Then told my dad he shares the same roundness of a stomach with pandas. Haha. My parents.

The next highlight was the visit up the Washington Monument. Shit, it was blowing and raining hard out there and my dad had to buy a $10 dollars umbrella from a homeless black guy. The good thing about the rainy weather was that there weren’t many people lined up so we got into the monument fairly easy. It was our first time except for mom. The last time she visited, she used the stairs. Now it has an elevator. Guess what? there’s even a small store inside the top of the monument. Bet you didn’t know that. And it was an eerie feeling seeing my birthday etched all over the walls. “Feburary 22” and I stood face to face with George Washington. “Hey, you and I share the same birthday. Think I can ever become the first Deaf president? Then he said, well sorry, you’re not qualified because you weren’t born in the land of United States.” Great, I can’t become the President.

Another big event was overlapping. It was the weekend of Rockfest where Gallaudet Univ. hosts competition between RIT students and Gally students. For more info on the Rockfest, I direct you to Denazzie’s xanga.. So, several friends were staying at our place and met my parents. I’m grateful to have deaf parents that can socialize with my deaf friends.

I got a new used car. Bought the car from my roommate, Andy. It’s a 1993 BMW 324i. Pretty nice ride. Needs some fixing—no power in the windows or sunroof. A/C belt is missing, which got worn out. Muffler needs to be replaced. I hope to get them fixed asap.

The visit of my parents went fast. If I listened to the statistics, that the average life expectancy is 77 years old, that means I’ve got only 20 years left with my parents. My mom’s over sixty years old now. My dad is at high risk of having heart attacks. He’s overweight and my grandfather had had two heart bypass surgeries and he wasn’t that overweight. Yet my dad is not doing anything about it; he’s a taurus—being stubborn. So that made me rethink about things and what’s important in life.

Our next trip: go on a cruise from Alaska to Hawaii in 2007. That’s gonna be fun. :-)

My roommate and I just signed up to run in this 10k! Now I have no excuse not to bum around and to get myself ready for this.

I was recently in a car accident and it was bad enough that my car was declared a total loss by my insurance. It’s a miracle that I walked out of the accident unscathed with some bruises, although I think the corner of my right rib may have been cracked. That I looked back, I feel like a NASCAR driver who got out of the car ok and wave hands to the fans. Intersections are dangerous, my fellows, especially when it’s on a blind hill. My car was flipped upside-down. o_O

So, that’s why you see a pic of the convertible rental car down in the photo sidebar. :-) They were all out of compact cars so they gave me the car. One friend will sell his 1993 BMW in a nice condition in abt two weeks. It needs a new muffler and some minor electronics like windows not rolling up/down and automatic locking in the driver’s door (someone tried to break in but failed.) so I will attempt to fix them, then it should be all good to go.

I’ll post up pics of my car accident shortly. Good-bye, 2004 Civic Si hatchback, you were a martyr as you saved my life. *kisses*

Saw this on the Digg website. I like the article so much that I have to post here.

In what language do deaf people think?

Dear Cecil:

In what language do deaf people think? I think in English, because that’s what I speak. But since deaf people cannot hear, they can’t learn how to speak a language. Nevertheless, they must think in some language. Would they think in English if they use sign language and read English? How would they do that if they’ve never heard the words they are signing or reading pronounced? Or maybe they just see words in their head, instead of hearing themselves? –Cathy, Malvern, Pennsylvania

I’m not going to post the entire article but to highlight some paragraphs.

The profoundly, prelingually deaf can and do acquire language; it’s just gestural rather than verbal. The sign language most commonly used in the U.S. is American Sign Language, sometimes called Ameslan or just Sign. Those not conversant in Sign may suppose that it’s an invented form of communication like Esperanto or Morse code. It’s not. It’s an independent natural language, evolved by ordinary people and transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. It bears no relationship to English and in some ways is more similar to Chinese–a single highly inflected gesture can convey an entire word or phrase.

Wow, who would have thought that our ASL is more similar to Chinese than English!

Sign equips native users with the ability to manipulate symbols, grasp abstractions, and actively acquire and process knowledge–in short, to think, in the full human sense of the term. Nonetheless, “oralists” have long insisted that the best way to educate the deaf is to teach them spoken language, sometimes going so far as to suppress signing. Sacks and many deaf folk think this has been a disaster for deaf people.

It’s our turn to suppress the oralists!

The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like–the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian.

Yet hearing students keep thinking it’s easier to learn ASL than Russian in their high school foreign language requirement. Just because ASL doesn’t have a written form doesn’t mean it’s easy to learn ASL!

I remember one time when I was working for the Nestle Beverage Company in Jacksonville, IL after my senior year in high school. I had two managers and they wanted to learn ASL. One manager was the head of the factory and with his job, he would travel to many countries to do business and meetings, so he knew quite some languages, so he thought it should be easy to learn ASL, being that it’s right on the tip of our fingers instead of our tongue. The other manager was a short friendly guy from Texas with a great sense of humor. He was responsible for internal operations and didn’t travel elsewhere as much as the other manager did. So, suffice to say that he didn’t know another language but English.

Everyday during lunch or office breaks, I’d say hi to both managers and try to strike up a conversation to help teach them some ASL. Ofc, first with ASL fingerspelling, then gradually moving on to learn different signs and build up a vocabulary base. Toward the end of my internship, which manager ends up learning the most? It was the Texan. And the other manager? he was still struggling with sign alphabets. The Texan learned so much that we were able to converse smoothly with a minimal stoppage for interpretations (which sign is that? that kind of question). His sense of humor probably helped as much, for we would always make jokes and laugh.

I learned from this experience as much as they learned ASL and it leads me to believe that people who rely on audio so much—I think that’s called an audiophile?—-that they’re unable to grasp the concept of the language being visual instead of audible. Like the article above, the gulf between ASL and English is greater than English and Russian.