Yummy dinner...again

I just had the pasta and steak Carol made, I have to admit the steaks are quite nice, tasty and at the same time very tender and juicy - even though the steak is well-done, and even though I prefer my steak medium rare. She got some skill! The broccoli is a lil disappointing though, it's just straight boiled/steamed. And again, there're whole cloves of garlics in the pasta. I wonder how many jars of garlic she goes through each week... On another note, the steaks are so tasty, I ate 1.5 pieces of them... I'm going to get fat. I guess I'll have to dump her soon... ;-)

Yummy dinner

Carol brought me some food she cooked last night, since we got take out last night, so I had them for dinner tonight. I tell you, they're yummy... I had some sort of stir fried shrimps - it tastes slightly sweet not too salty, just how I like it. Also, the stir fried string beans with garlic, yummy also, and cooked just right, still a bit of crunchy - very nice. I hate over cooked veggies that taste mushy. Guess she's a good cook :) and she likes to use whole clove garlic :( ... I'm no vampire but I don't like whole clove garlic in cooking ...

There's also the broccoli, steak and pasta I got to try tomorrow.

Blah... Gummy Bear

Carol came over for dinner last night, we bought some take out from the Chavez Mercado, she got torda sandwich and I got my usual super burrito con carne a sada, and a slice of flan cake. She really liked it. She brought with her "Her Majesty's Secret Service", 007 actually got married in this movie!

My wrist has pretty much healed, all the bruises are gone, but I still don't get the full range of motions, and it still hurt when I bend my wrist. Hopefully, it won't be another bone bruise. To get stronger bones, I went to Costco bought a bottle of Calcium supplement, I had it before, but it tasted nasty - just like chalk, and I ended up throwing it away! This time I bought the kid's Calcium Gummy Bears, and it's yummy :-) I'm supposed to eat 2 of those everyday, but I can see myself eat more just like candy...

Entertained...

Finally, my Onkyo receiver arrived last weekend - mmmmm... I mean a week ago.... Hooking up all the components, now I have the basic home entertainment system. The remote works with the Philips DVD player, but not the Westinghouse TV. I tried Westinghouse site, and googled it, still unable to find the remote code... bummer.

The sound effect now is so much better than the TV speakers. I had a lil panic though after hooking up all the components... The Polk speakers were working beautifully one day, then next day I'm not getting any sound out of them at all. I checked and rechecked all the cables and connectors, they all plugged in correctly, but there's just no sound coming out of the speakers! Then something hit me, I turned off the speakers! Silly bugger... I was playing with all the buttons on the receiver and forgot to turn the speakers back on. Anyways, I'm still looking for a sub woofer and a center channel speaker.

Lightsaber

For $80, you can get a Master Replica Force FX light saber @ Fry's. It's the ones that will light up, make humming sound, and clashing sounds when you hit something. It's totally awesome, the best present for a Star Wars fan. I bought one already beginning of the year, it was about $100 then. It's available both online and local store.

The Fountain...

I was browsing through the movie listings @ amctheatres.com to see what new movies coming out this week, and saw The Fountain - I thought I'd give a brief review since I watched it on the day it came out with Carol. Well, the story sees interesting - at least on the paper... I was thinking of a timeless romantic love story... well, it's not quite what I thought it was... It has some romantic scenes, and is a love story - of some kind... But, not a very good one. The review gave it a 2.5 out of 4, so, I guess it's not too bad a rating. But, personally, I'd give it a 1 out of 4 - quite generous already... It's one of the worst movies I've seen the whole year! "The Hill Have Eyes", "Silent Hills " etc. are more entertaining than this! The story line is a chaotic mess, some scenes are repeated over and over, make you wonder if the main character is hallucinate. Through out the movie, I rarely had a clear idea what's going on in the story, it's like a bad dream watching the movie... Some of the review says it's remarkable like 2001 or Blade Runner, I say NOT! Carol says the movie bears the closest resemblance of "The Fountain" is "Solaris", which she isn't very fond of either. The whole experience was just WEIRD.

Carol was telling me that the guy next to her was groaning and moaning in his seat the whole movie - I guess he didn't enjoy it very much either. Carol also said I'd give her a hard time for picking this stupid movie ... you betcha I will... for a long time to come.

BF etc...

Not much happening... went to a Thanksgiving dinner at San Juan Bautista, very nice place, on top of a hill, it must be pretty high - I felt my ears pop as I drove up the hill.

Friday morning went to Bestbuy try to pick up a camera, the parking was all full... finally found a place to park my car, and wen inside the store, it was packed full of people... the camera prices weren't that good though. So, I left to for Fry's, we, it was worse, I can't find a spot for parking, so I just left. Well, I got all my home A/V stuff anyway.

Carol came around noon, I took her to Dadar Seafood restaurant in McCarty Ranch plaza. I ordered: sesame pancake with green onion, sir fry lamb with green onion and combination knife cut noodles - all my favor ates. Carol usually don't like the smell of lamb, but she loved the dishes I ordered.

Then we headed out to SF China Town, it was a nice drive on 280. SF was kinda quite, China Town still have quite a bit of people - according to her, believe it or not, it's my first time there. It's like most China Towns I've been to, but with a lot more souvenir stores... We also paid a short visit to the Chinese Culture Center in China Town, but it's not what we thought it would be - only some com temporary stuff(I won't even call them art....) on display... It will fit nicely if you change the name to something else...

Afterwards we went to Twin Peak to see the sunset, it was a lil cloudy on the ocean, but was beautiful nonetheless. Better yet, after the sunset, turn around, we got to watch the night scape of the city. It was chilling on the hill, should have brought a blanket or something...

Dinner at the Baba Neo in Mountain View, it's one of the better Malaysia restaurant around. Next day, we had lunch at the Gaesung Tofu House - my special retreat, a place I only take my family and close friends to. Carol was surprised at how tasty the tofu soup was without MSG... this is real Korean tofu house. In comparison, the one on Castro in Mountain View is couple of notches below...

B'day

...yesterday, taught class whole morning. Carol and I went out for some Sushi O Sushi with friends, afterwards we meet up at my apt had cake and some port, Brian said he's already doen with the batch of alcohol we bout a year ago, man, he's fast... After they left, Carol and I had a long talk, we both felt that we're too different even thought we're so attracted to each other. I'm just not sure if it will work out. So we decided it's the best we break up now instead later, it will just hurt more. She said I looked a lil scared the night before, hmm, I never thought I'm a commitment-phobic... I don't know. We talked and talked until the morning, as the time passes by, she's still so cheerful, kept talking, laughing and hugging me... It made me really sad, and made the break up really hard, I started to wonder if I made the right decision.... What if I'm wrong, then I'd forever kick m yself, cause I'd never know. It was hearrt breaking, and she's not helping the situation by ebing so cheerful. I broke down, and asked her if she'd willing to give it a try again. Well, this is the 2nd time we break up and make up in a week! She's driving crazy. We talked even more, she said maybe I'm juts scared to get hurt. I don't know, I just know I really like her. Night, Carol. xoxo

Horrible Dumplings

Carol and I went to Cupertino village for dinner. The last time we were here, we were going to try the dumpling place, but it was so full, we had to wait for 30min, so we went with Korean food instead. Against my better judgement, we tried a few dishes. A tray of steamed buns with juice inside(supposedly a famous Shanghainess signature food), but it was very greasy, and tasteless;
also a streamed tray of Chinese chive with shrimp, it tasted just like steamed buns...

Another dish we ordered was the steamed rice with mixed veggies and meat, another Shanghainess signature dish, and yet another disappointment. My mom's is waaaaay better, hell, even mine is way better than this, am not jocking! It's supposed to be cooked just regular rice, add water to rice and cook in any rice cooker, except, mix in with slightly stir fried veggies and meat(Chinese sausage and pork/chicken etc). But, this came out way too greasy, and look stir fried to me, and very salty as well as tasted MSG...

I was going to order the Tong-Po pork, I asked the waiter, he said it's half pork and half fat, slow braised.... mmmmm, no thank you. The rest of dished look pretty common, sweet and sour pork - well, this should not be a Chinese food, instead it should be an American dish - 'cause it's not how it's should be cooked, actually is there such a thing? Hmmm.... Left without much options, so I ordered stir fried fish fillet with some sort of green veggie. This is by far the worst dish here, and to date I've tried. It should change it's name to stir fried fish in MSG... When we left, it's basically untouched. Poor Carol, she had to constantly pour me tea...

No way I'm going back there again. That's the reason I normally don't eat Chinese food given any choice, I'd rather eat sandwich or burger, or burrito, or just a salad.

So, avoid this place. Some cheap Chinese BBQ restaurant make better no frill food. A note on the seasoning in Chinese food in general, what's up with "brown sauce" anyway, most of the dishes came in an unappetizing brownish sauce. Carol says she put Oyster Sauce in every dish she cook, hello! It's just MSG in brown sauce.... Carol says I'm not very Chinese, since I don't eat chicken feet, fish head... , well, lucky me... you can have mine...

Sony inside...

....NOT!!! Today I met up with my friend Josh for lunch in a tiny Mexican restaurant on Fairoaks. We talked about Blue Ray and HD,he said he saw some Blue Ray units on display in Circuit City, and the pictures are great, he might get one, but the image quality is only little better than the DVD, the price of the unit doesn't justify that. And he's looking forward to the Wii launch - not that he's going to get a Wii out right, but if there's a Star Wars title for Wii, he'd definitely get it - mmm... Wii control and the light saber... need I say any more.... Yeah, me too!

But, I would never, ever get Blue Ray... no matter what! 'Cause I HATE Sony! Sony didn't really do anything bad to me, but one of its corporate entity - Sony Online Entertainment(SOE), has certainly pissed off a lot of people, me included. If you've heard what happened to the Star Wars Galaxies, you will understand where I come from. SOE, is a liar and scum, they treat their customers like sh!t. We both are Star Wars fans, and played in Galaxies. I mentioned to him that alot of people said would return to Galaxies if SOE roll back the NGE or install the old one on a separate server. He said he would too, however, I would not! This is how much I hate SOE, they will never get my money - after what they did to millions of people. There's no excuse for what they did, none what so ever! Sony being a big corporate, if one of their company can do such a nasty thing to they long time customers, you can pretty much guess their corporate culture...

So, no thank you. No Blue Ray for me, no Sony camera for me, no Memory Stick for me, no Sony TV for me, no Sony DVD player for me, no Sony receiver for me, no Sony speaker for me... it's just no more Sony for me, end of story. I'm building my home entertainment system, and there's not a single component is a Sony.

HDMIed

Yesterday, the HDMI cable arrived, plug into the TV and DVD, easy enough. Turn on the USB drive and tried to play the Battlestar Galactica episode, but I see no visible difference - yeah, I did set up the TV to use HDMI(with both auto resolution and 1080i)... Oh well...

My receiver(Onkyo TXSR504) should arrive this Saturday.

BSOD!!!

Means "Blue Screen Of Death", it's what you get when your MS Windows PC having a fatal error, and kicks you to the blue screen...of death...

Funny thing is that people hated it when it happens. Now, MS released a screen saver that simulates BSOD - well, not exactly "simulate", but a screen saver that made to look EXACTLY like you're having a BSOD... without all the real repercussions...isn't that ironic? After displaying the BSOD a few seconds, it will reboot... well, not for real of course... But you'll never know... it may actually cause a real BSOD after you installed the BSOD... Don't say I didn't warn you...

Rock on!

You like play air guitar? /airguitar But there's no sound when you play? Bummer... Well, now you can play air guitar and have sound that matches your movement!

On an unrelated news. I had a dental appointmemt around noon, it so happend that it's in Carol's neighbourhood, so I called her up to have lunch. And she says she's pleasantly surprised. We kissed and hugged in the parking lot. She told me that she'd never approve this before, but now she doesn't care. Hmmmm, sounds like daddy's good girl is busting out her shell.

Good weekend

Carol was over for a visit yesterday, we watched Kill Bill movies, she relly enjoyed it. I liked the first one better, but she liked the 2nd one better. She commented that how clean was my place - of course, I just cleaned it! We had Korean dinner at the Cupertino Village, the short ribs are very good - but I'm yet to try the tofu(then I can tell how good is the place :) ). We had lot of deep talks, I like her alot, but she's from a VERY traditional Chinese family... there're certain expectations from her parents that she has to keep(well, she's still living with parents, and brother/sister's family... I should have guessed from that...), she said that I looked very surprised... However, I'm very non-conforming to the least... Like Han Solo always says "I have a bad feeling about this...".

She hates me.... with a big smile.

Honey, I swapped your wedding ring for a PS3....

Burbank (CA) - People are willing to go through hell to get the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3 console and there are already lines forming for November 17th launch. We went to the Best Buy store in Burbank where people started lining up on Monday November 6th, 11 days. Watch our video as one guy explains how he quit his job to stand in line, while another won't be buying his girlfriend an engagement ring anytime soon.

............

Waiting in line for more than a week is bad enough, but some in the group called off sick and one guy even quit his job to stand in line. To make it even worse, the one who called in sick has postponed his engagement with his girlfriend because the money that would have gone into buying a ring will be used to buy a PlayStation 3.

The last guy in line didn't want to go on camera, but he told us that he wasn't sure if there were enough PlayStation 3 consoles. Apparently Best Buy employees are very tight lipped on exactly how many consoles the store will be receiving

............

Come on peole, it's just another piece of hardware... I thought I'm a big fan of Star Wars, but then I never waited in line for the movie ticket...

The full article here.

Weird sport...

There's weird science, then there's weird sports... A guy at work was just telling me that he plays for the San Jose Underwater Hocky team, yeah right...what a BS... so I made up something called Underwater Frisbee. After googling it, it actually exists. Holy cow! And a search for Underwater Frisbee also turned up something as well...

Bruised, but not broken

The X-ray confirmed that... so according to my doctor, it should start to get better in a week when it's only muscle bruise, ligament injury can take months to heal.

Big bad bruise

Yep, it's quite bruised now, I can see a big patch of blue, and this morning I'm having probem rotate my wrist, so it's a big challenge just turning on water in the shower, or put on cloth, on turn on the car engine. Basically, I need to use the entire arm instead of just my hand... feel like a robot...

Hurt my hand

At the end of Taekwon Do class today, we did a bit of breaking practice. And we did a bit of real breaking - concrete block of 2" thick. We all did palm heel strike - no way I'm going to use my knuckles... I broke one piece of of the block, didn't break any of my bones this time - good, but still my hand is a bit swollen, and it hurts try rotate my right wrist, I think I will see some bruse tomorrow. About 2 years ago around this time, I broke my right knuckle, it seems this time of the year is my unlucky time - practice for competitions, and black belt test...

Polk Audio Speakers

Picked up a pair of PolkAudio P150 speakers during lunch @ the Fry's, only $49, though not top of the line, but good enough for me. I have a set of 5.1 PolkAudio speakers for my PC for the past 2 years or so, it's quite good. Now, all I need is a receiver, and maybe a subwoofer and center channel speaker.

Fusion v2...

In a stunning move, nVidia yesterday announced a new graphic chip GeForce 8800 GTX...(ok, not quite a stunning move, I'm just being dramatic...)

Nvidia usually focuses on giving customers crystal-clear images on their computer screens. But Wednesday, the chip maker launched a new chip that does more: It not only runs the computer's display but also does some of the work of the microprocessor ``brain'' inside a personal computer.

Previously, AMD announced that it will put GPU inside CPU,; now, nVidia will put CPU inside GPU(in a manner of speak). As I said before, CPU and GPU will merge - regardless whether GPU in CPU or CPU in GPU. And while we have dual core. quad core CPUs, why not dual/quad core GPUs - there will be no need for SLI anymore. Or buy you mixed CPU/GPU core combo. "Would you like to super size you MPU combo to go sir? It's only $400 more to get dual CPU, dual GPU, a real value deal."

More on DVD player ...

Played around with the DVD a lil more, it seems it does have MP3 auto play capability of some sort - I was wrong ealier when I said it doesn't do auto play. There's a "Repeat" button on the remote, press it repeatedly to cycle through the options: Single, Once, Directory, All, Shuffle. But when I choose the shuffle it seems it just playes files in the same directory.

BTW, I do seem to wahtch TV a bit more now, now I watch TV after work. Used to just go right to my computer - since my old TV sucks...

DVD + USB

So I hooked up my new 2.5" USB enclosure to the DVD player, vola! Everything shows up on the TV, even the Recycle Bin... Played DivX, and MP3, all working fine. However, one thing I didn't like, it lacks the ability to create play list or play all files. It's OK for DivX files, since each file is around 45 minutes long - Battlestar, and people don't tend just sit there watch all day long. However, for MP3, it's only a few minutes long each song, so you'll have to sit there pressing the button whenever one song finishes - not very usable... Another thing, you can't set screensaver(or something like that), when you play MP3, the folder/file list just stays on the TV screen. Then again, you won't need it, the TV has screen saver at a minumum of 15 minutes, you would have pressed the play button at least 3-4 times before it will kick in.... *sigh* I'll have to get the Squeezebox after all.

HDMI

So I took a side trip to the Fry's after lunch. The HDMI cables cost anywhere from $49 to upward of $120+, and we're not talking about 100ft long cables... only 3-6 ft long! Checked amazon.com, cheap ones come at around $18, check ebay - a sweet $4 deal! The bluetooth dongle also cost a ridicules $29, and they're pulling them off the shelves... cost around $40-50 at Bestbuy, and on ebay a $4 steal again. So, I only bought a 2.5" HDD enclosure, hope it will work with the Philips DVD player... no HDMI up converted movie tonight.... :-(

Have you taken a look at the back panel of your TV lately...? It's a wild wild world of connectors, connectors of all shapes and sizes... sooner or later we're going to run out of connectors shapes... USB alone, has at least 3 differnt connector sizes/shapes that I know of...

Firmware upgrade

Update the firmware on the DVD player- through a CD disk, it doesn't like the DVD disk for some reason, but once I burned it to a CD, it worked. This is silly, the drive can read CD and DVD, why not read DVD for firmware upgrade? I have a DVD +RW for this sort of things, it's silly to use a 700MB CD for just a 1.5MB firmware file....

Also updated the region code :-), with help found on Amazon.com

1. Turn on the unit
2. Open the loading tray
3. Press the "Setup" button on the remote
4. Navigate to the "Preferences" page using the right arrow key
6. Press the down arrow once to enter the Preference page
5. Enter 138931 on the remote
6. You will now see the current region code displayed
7. Use the Up/Down arrow keys to select the region required or "0" for all regions
8. Press the "Play" button on the remote

I don't have any DVDs other than region 1s, but good to know that when I need it, the player can handle it :-)

Bachelor pad upgrade

Why stop at the LCD HD TV when you can get up conversion DVD player?! Got myself a Philips DVP9560 DVD player tonight, it has up conversion, supports all sorts of CD/DVD +/- R/W disk combos. Better yet, it plays DivX and MP3, and WMV. Don't really care about WMV, but I love the fact that it plays MP3 and DivX. I was going to get the Squeezebox, but this DVD player is so much cheaper, $69 @ Bestbuy. Where as the Squeezebox currently costs $299 even after it's been out for at leat a year... And this plays DivX, but Squeezebox dosn't. Did I mention, it has a USB port? So you can plug in an USB harddrive and play off the harddrive.

It was simple enough to hook up the DVD player, everything just worked automagically :-) So, I plugged in my Thecus YES Nano USB enclosure with a 20GB 2.5" Toshiba drive, but it didn't recognize the drive, bummer, I read that people have been having trouble with the USB drives, most people formatted it to FAT32 and it worked, but some say not to use a laptop drive. Well, guess I'll have to pick up a differnt enclosure to try first - cheaper, otherwise, I'll try a desktop harddrive. My drive is formatted to FAT32 BTW. I thought, it may not like my directory structure, so I copied all the file to the drive's root directory, but it still didn't work...


So, next I tried my memory card reader, it has multiple slots for different memory cards. Plug in, and they showed up on the TV. I have a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo as well as a 4GB SD card plugged in at the same time. They shown up as USB 1 & 4 on t he TV, so I guess it will work if I plug in a USB hub :-) so, I can connect multiple USB drives to it.



I have directories as well files in the root directory on both memory cards. The all files and directories showed up OK for both cards. But, it failed to play DivX file off the SD card - it would play for a few seconds and then just stop. On the other hand, DivX files as well as JPG files all played OK off the MS, in directories and from the root directory. Since 4GB SD card is not standard, I wonder if it has anything to do with it. But it's really cool to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica off my MS :-) And when displaying still pictures, pressing the arrow keys on remote will rotate the pictures.

It also played DivX off DVD +R disk flawlessly, fast forwarding worked great.

I'm quite impressed over all, despite a few minor issues - maybe I'm just too picky. The USB is only 1.1, could have been USB 2.0 - so much faster and will be really helpful when playing HD DivX. A lil slow when detecting disks or USB drive - a few people noted as well. The most annoying part is the file name support - it only displays like 8 characters or so, hardly any useful, it would be a pain in the butt to rename all of my MP3 files to shorten the name - even if I removed the artist name from the file name, it would still be too long. *sigh* Anyways, I'm getting a HDMI cable tomorrow from Fry's to try out the video up conversion. Sweet, my bachelor pad is taking shape :-) Next, a good receiver and a pair of good speaker - the audio sounds rather flat from the TV speakers.

More immediate, I need to get my laundry out of the laundry mat tomorrow morning first thing - forgot about it due to the DVD player excitment... :-)

I HATE...

...logins!!! Today is the first day of employment benefit enrollment for year 2007. Being a ealy starter I thought I should do it now instead of wait fof later... I was quite a procrastinator when I was a kid...

Login to new benefit site, create new account (I thought I had one last year...anyways, no problem...) So, I tried to create new account, need password, etc etc, but it won't accept my universal password I use everywhere at work. It just keeps saying it's in wrong format, what the frack! My universal passwd has mixed cases, charaters and numbers and even a special character - just like any good engineer would use. But, it didn't wortk here. So, I removed special character, it still didn't work! Now I'm more frustrated, since it didn't give me any hint of what's accepted... So, I tried some all number password, and it worked. Great... or maybe NOT... Now I have one more password to remember... frack...What the heck?! What's the reason that they won't allow user to use characters? Not allow special characters, I can somewhat accept, but why reject characters?! Numbers or letters, it's all stored in the database, the computer don't give a frack... And it's all encrypted... should be... so it should be stored as characters anyway... Unless, they store the password as numeric numbers - then it would be clear text ... holy cow... some shitty security measure...

Another grip, why the hack do I create account every year?! Say if they changed supplier, I must create new account. Why the frack everyone has different rules on what's accpeted, what not! User name I can understand that need some restriction, but what the frack wrong with what password I use, they're not going to create an user account for me on some Linux/Windows OS - so it must be able to be typed in on termnal, so why does it even matter?!

Now I'm in, it asked me to create challenge question/answer. The default is "What color is your first car?" Mmmm, Mitubishi Sigma, red... type in "red", click next, it says "Value must be between 4 and 20 characters." Hello! Why don't you just say "Enter any color besides red.". My friend J suggested "burgundy", but it's not the right color; so, he suggest "candy apple red", I guess the validation would say "No space allowed..."; so J suggested "strawberry", then I guess it would complain "Not a color." ROFL! At least there're more questions, so I don't have to use "rojo"...*sigh* OK, see If I can pick a ddifferent question.

Great, timeout... starting over...

Borat

I asked my good friend J today what think of Da Vinci Code - he's your typical white American Christian, happily married with kids. And he said "some people are just silly..." lol, very true. Below quoted from AOL games Daily:

Looking to its second weekend, the question will be how much the "Borat" phenomenon can grow. With humor both low-brow and bracingly satirical, the movie could polarize some audiences, though that is not what the producers found during preview screenings.

"People have taken offense to certain aspects of the movie, but the wide majority of audiences are smart enough to know he's depicting a backwards view in a very smart way," producer Jay Roach said. "He's also able to hold up a satirical mirror to us to expose our prejudices, and people get that."

For example, the speech Borat gave in Texas in this Rodeo competition, he was saying "war of terror" intsead "war on terror", might be just bad English, might be just how the author felt.

Another Jewish friend of mine, also said that some religious people are just self rightious, they think they're better than others. She told me a story that once her grandfather said proudly that there's no poor people in his church, right, maybe those poor people can't afford to give 5% of their income to be close to God... Since when belive in God has to do with donations? When I was in high school I learned that in the Dark Ages, people pay to have their sins lifted... hmmm, interesting... What's up with the Catholic prists and choir boys, Rev. Haggard? And dude, I'm not ignorant of Christianity and faith, I used to go to church when I was in junior college. Lucky me, it wasn't a Catholic church.. kewl...

Dating Pressure

Went out with Yu on Saturday, we had dinner at Yoyo Sushi - not that a good place, she got a Spider roll, the deep fried softshell crab was soggy... my Rainbow roll is not that great either, I think the fish's kinda old, and I don't mean they have mustache or beard... the differnt types of fish all tasted the same :-<

We went to watch Borat, it was funny, all seems going pretty well, but then when it came to the scene when Borat fighting his producer buck naked and biting... Yu stand up and run out... Guess she must've grosssed out. Well, it's just movie... not prono. I can see she's a nice person, but we're just so differnt, not only in terms of hobbies, but view towards the world in general. She's Christian, and goes to church every week. Guess she's just not used to the rude humors. And she hates the Da Vinci Code, even though she never watched it. Because "it lowered God to the level of human and portraits God as just a good person...", and "made some people think the movie is the actual truth..." What?! Give me a break! It's JUST A MOVIE! And most of the movies are made up stories, do they have to say "this is a fictional story" before every movie?! Or should people only making movies that look so over the top that it can not be true, Anime, cartoon? The movie told a story that seems true, it's a darn good movie, and darn good story telling! And I seriously doubted anyone actually belived it's a true story!! She got brained watched by the organized religion... I have lotsa Christian/Catholic friends, but none are this stuckup. It's just not going to work out between us I can feel it, but my sister keeps saying I should give her more time, and I can not tell a person only after a short time! Wrong, even a short time can tell a lot, and I'm pretty good at reading people. It's just not going to work, and waste both of our times! What the frack. One more date and that's it! And no more chics from her church.

Weekend!

Well, yesterday's weekend too, but not much happened, spent most of the day at the Taekwon Do school helping with colour belt testing...

Today's a more proper R&R weekend. Carol and I went hiking at the Castle Rock State Park. It's a short drive, but the view is very nice at the top with its endless forest. The trees nearer to us are green, and as the forest gets farther away, it changes to differnt shades of green, and at the distance, it gradually changes to blue. On the horizon, it became white, I'm not sure it's cloud or the ocean.

Later, she took me to what she calls an authentic Vietnamese resturant, it's not big, but she says they have 2 dishes are very good, and only that 2 are worth trying. She's been going to that place to eat sicne she's in the 6th grade. It's in downtown San Jose, very close to SanJose State University, on E. Willian St(near 8th or 9th st), called something like DaLok(or DaLat or DaLot... err, something like that).

One of them is a noodle dish, dry noodles - no soup. It's came with bean sprout and lemon wedges. The noodle has slices of ham like thingie, a crab claw and big shrimp. At the bottom at the bowl, it has some soy sauce, so you need to mix them up before eating - don't forget squeeze the some lemon juice and add bean sprout. It's not bad.

The second one is rice with prawns. Carol said it she tried to make it at home, but didn't have much success - it's actually hard to make. Of course! The rice is not regualr rice, it's "broken rice", I can imagine it will take someitme and patience to break the rice ;-) Anyway, this is not the main interetsing thing about this dish. I said earlier, "rice with prawn", I didn't say shrimp. 'Cause, they're HUGE! They're not your average big prawns... think big! How big? Think smaller lobsters or crayfish... They're yummy! It's cooked in some sort of redish source, might be just soy sause with sugar. 'Cause it tastes just like how my sister cooks shrimps - stir fry shrimp, add a bit soy sause and sugar. Man, these are good, 'cause you really can taste the flavour, and the bite is mouthful :) I love it! Another thing to note is, that these prawns are fresh water prawns, Carol says they taste different from sea prawns.

For desert, get either Vietnamese coffee or one of those sweet drink. The Vietnamese coffee look and taste like Thai iced coffee, but lot stronger - very strong. This is traditional Vietnamese as well. Traditionally, you'd have to use strainer to let the coffee drip slowly into cup. The other is condensed milk(?) with ice and various jelly bits in it - not so special, I've had similar drinks at other places.

New TV!!!

I've been bad today ... I bought a 32" LCD Westinghouse HD TV at Bestbuy, been looking for it for a while, but the price now is so low and I couldn't help it.... It's on sale now for$699 in store or online. If you want to get one... it's too late, ends today. You'll just have to wait for the next sale, but it shoudln't be that long... Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I was going to wait, but the price is too good to pass - and besides, they do price match if later I find better price elsewhere or in Bestbuy.

Let me tell you... the picture is very sharp. On par with Sony, Samsung etc. I don't have HD TV or digital cabel - just the regular cable. But, is there differece between 480i and 720i and 1080i channel ro what! WOW! To christian the new TV, I played the Animatrix DVD, wow it looked wicked! My Toshiba 5 DVD changer still plays very well, but it's at least 3 years old... and a lil slow when loading DVDs to my taste. I want the new one to be able to play DivX files too. And need a receiver too, and a network MP3 player - really want to get the Squeezebox.

Well, so I also need a NAS server that can stream my MP3 files... so the list goes on and on and on....