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Wednesday, July 31, 2002
I am back in Houston again... the trip there was pretty cool, I got alot of work done. Now, I have to prepare a report for the bosses. Fun Fun!!!
But as promised ... here is a view of Mexico.
So... my flight back home is at 5:00 pm MST. So I got some time to burn right now. Did I ever tell you guys how I hate Southwest Airline? I dislike southwest airline because ... 1st, they have really crappy planes. 2nd, they have the cattle herding method of boarding. 3rd, they have open seating. Ok maybe a lot of it is why a lot of people love them, but to me all the stuff listed above bothers me. But you say? ?Hey, Southwest Airline is cheaper!!? But in reality, not really, Southwest is not cheaper. It usually seems cheaper because one, they are not listed in any common online travel places. The only place where you can see there fares are at southwest.com. Second, all of their fares are listed as one way, so when you multiply the amount by 2, it comes out to be about the same. So, the question you got to ask yourself, for the same amount of money, do I really want to fly Southwest so I can build up frequent flyer miles on Southwest and fly Southwest again on my next vacation???? I mean what?s up with that???
Man... El Paso is just simply bright!! Very bright, I need some new sunglasses, it is so bright. One unique thing about El Paso is that, while it seems hot, it doesn?t feel as hot as Houston or Alabama. Why? Humidity, that?s why!!!
Well, I am in El Paso, Texas. It is an interesting town. It really doesn't have many trees here at all. Everything here has a lot of Mexican influence, even the Holiday Inn next door. From my hotel, I can see Mexico? pretty cool huh?
So... during lunch I went to get my US passport made. After waiting for about 15 mins, I finally got everything filled out and made. Boy, did you know it cost 15 dollars to swear in to get a passport. I can see where the goverment makes all the money now. But it is good I finally got that done. Now can I travel outside of US... yeah!!
So... I am back from San Antonio. It was lots of fun, and I have spend lots of money, but it was well worth it. We had a great view from our hotel. About the only complain I have are the heat and all the walking. Keep an eye for the pictures on the photo section.
"It Friday baby.. and I like it!"
So it's Friday, I think I will take a half of day and spend some more quality time with my girlfriend. Oh I think I will go and get my passport done as well. That should be interesting.
Man... I am tired... I got my but whooped by the server guy in Racquet ball. It was fun... but I got to train harder and play better.
Wow ... I actually missed another day of postinig... Well... who can blame me... I been busy cleaning up my dump to get ready for the arrival of my girlfriend :-)
Great News!!!! Port 80 is open!!! What does that mean? This means you can now reach mintrix.net with without typing in :8888. I don't know what happened, but it seems that Road Runner has open the flood gate. So Mintrix is now open for business!!!
So... I went to work out of lunch today... yep... going to get ripped!!! :-) Oh and I finally, after 6 months in Houston, signed up for the Travis Gym. It's pretty cool, very very close to work. I figure, if I don't eat out for one week out of the month, it will pays for itself.
MTV got some of the most messed up tv shows. I am currently watching this show called "I bet you will". Where they will pay people to do crazy stunts. Example, they paid one guy 100 dollars to lick another guys arm pits, after giving the guy 50 dollars to run around for 5 mins. Yuk!!!
I have to say... the best vegetarian food in Houston is in the Bellaire China Town. I went there for lunch, for around 5 dollars, I got good authentic Chinese food. And I am filled up. The place is called May's Ice Parlor. Right next to Din Ho Super Market.
I believe I have just signed my death warrant. My boss has asked me to write up a day to day operation activities list. Why would he ask for that? Well, I thought I have a lot of them, but when I started to count, it seems that most of my work activities ties to a project one way or. Back in Birmingham, everyday I would get phone calls and emails asking for support. Now, I rarely get that. It is a good thing because now I can actually finish up my projects, but it is a bad thing because if they want to cut project engineers without operations supports, well, I would be the first to go. I don?t know, maybe I am making things up. Well, our stocked ended at 13.36. I guess we will see what happens.
I just got back from lunch with Pat, Greg, and Jon. They are all co-workers of mine. We went to this "hole-in-the-wall" BBQ place in the east side of town. The place is called Thelma's BBQ. The place was not much to look at. In fact, I was not sure if it was open or not, but it had some good home cooking style BBQ. Needless to say, I am totally stuffed. I don't think I will be eating much for dinner tonight. You guys can read the review from the Houston Press here.
ooooH! Start getting sleepy... must stay awake.....
I got this joke from my friend Dwayne. Well, it sort of reflects the time.
A little boy, Bernie, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old
farmer for $100.00. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.
The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad
news, the donkey died."
Bernie replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."
The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."
Bernie said, "OK then just unload the donkey." The farmer asked, "What ya
gonna do with him?"
Bernie: "I'm going to raffle him off."
Farmer: "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"
Bernie: "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead."
A month later the farmer met up with Bernie and asked, "What happened with
that dead donkey?"
Bernie: "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and
made an off the books profit of $998.00."
Farmer: "Didn't anyone complain?"
Bernie: "Just the guy who won." So I gave him his two dollars back."
Bernie grew up and eventually became the chairman of WorldCom.
I guess I should not be surprise. It seems that all the ?Lion King? tickets are gone. That really sucks. Because I was hoping to take Hsiu Hsiu to see one of their shows. I guess I will continue to search.
Well, I have added tons of old pictures tonight. All of them are from 2000 and 2001. I think I will put the Y2k pictures next. Please let me know if you guys like the new photo album interface. The reason for the change is because editing photos are just too time consuming. By using a script, it saves me tons of time. As you can see here, I was able to update 3 pages in one night and design the interface. Pretty good huh?
The following message was sent to my by my friend Phil. It's pretty funny, so the next time you have a bad day in the office think of this guy.
"Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to The X, 103.2 on your FM dial in Ft Wayne, IN, she won. Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: we have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the airhose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with 5 other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make 3 agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling 35 minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for 2 days because my butthole was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt."
I just got in to work and finish checking everything thing. Well, it is wet and soggy outside or you can say just plain nasty... eek. But the good thing is inside my little cube, it is the same all year round.
I just got back from Chinatown. There are some benefits about living in Houston, there is a China town here. Yep I went to Sangtong Noodle shop in Bellaire's Chinatown. It was good. I got back just before the rain. Now it's raining again.
I like raining days... I love when it rains really heavy and I am inside nice and dry. Well, right now Houston is plenty wet.
So... how do I feel today? Well... I was feeling pretty good... and now all the sudden I feel a little bit lost. Well, I guess all will be better tomorrow.
Time to head to bed. There is one thing, I believe I will do tomorrow. I am going to install a Blogger replacement on my server.
Humm... 802.11 Wireless Ethernet build in to your cable box? Is it possible? What about security? I find it very interesting to see what they would do about security, if this was ever deployed. Imagine, a wireless neighborhood network in your community, wouldn?t that be very cool!
Don't you just hate it when finally Saturday comes around and you get the change to sleep in late, but your body's internal clock still wakes you up 8 am in the morning.
Dude, this sucks!
Ah... the score is 6 to 3 Astros. Well, I am back from the game. It was a lot of fun. Astros beat the Reds once again. The game ended on the top of the 9th with a winning strike out by Wagner. The below is actually the actual winning strike out pitch.
One more thing, only in Houston would they put in A/Cs in a baseball field.
Ok... it is getting close to 5:00pm and no one is calling me about the last 2 tickets.... they are pretty good seats. Between Third base and Foul poll. It's the Astro's vs. the Reds!!
Well, I have converted 4 floors over to the new IP address scheme at work today. It is about 6:30, I am going home and working out. Got to get fit for my lady :-)
So tired today... I guess it could be from working out yesterday and staying up late. Yeah.... I am sure it is not good for me to stay up soo late every night.
So... I am just looking through my music collections and I realized that I have not added any new music for a while. So what's up with that? Does it mean that I am getting older and not keeping up? So what's hot and happening now days? Since Napster is now gone, where would one go to get some more free music???
It seems that the blogger server are going down more and more often. Maybe I should look for something else and move my blogs off of blogger. I might look at doing that this weekend.
I just got back from working out and look what I found in the mailbox. I got a post card from Berlin. That is way cool. It is a post card from OLA , my Swedish friend!!! Awesome!!
So... Dwayne and I just got back from Miyakos for lunch. I don't really like the place, but it is close and kinda cheap. After lunch, we went to Folley's to try to find a gift for his wife. I have never been to Folley's dowtown before and I have to say, it's HUGE!!! So my question to everyone is where should I go for a weekend get away trip with Hsiu Hsiu when she returns???
I am watching All Star Baseball right now... it's pretty cool. I wonder why the even want to think about going on strike. I think that is just plain stupid that baseball players would do such a stupid thing.
Ah... what a wonderful lunch. I had the pleasure of going out to lunch with Bob, Clayton, Ben, and Dwayne. We had some Chinese food. It was pretty good. It is good to have an opportunity to talk to the big network guys and to find out more about what they are working on.
Damn! I am sooo pissed off. I don't know if it is just the poor code I am using or is it PHP or is it Microsoft or is it even me, but I am having the hardest time trying to get a PHP script to work under IIS. I don't think it should have any problem, but for some reason the interpreter is very, very picky and nothing will run properly. So here is the issue... should I move all my crap over to a linux box or not? I would ask you guys for comment, but since I could not get my comment PHP script to work ... I can't do it.
oh well... it sucks and now I give up.
I guess you can't hide forever. I am now offically on Google. For the longest time, I thought if I am using port 8888 I should not be picked up by most search engines. Well... I am wrong. I guess we will see what happens from here.
So... it seems that my discussion section is getting bigger, especially the reviews section. I have now reached the two page mark on the review section. I guess that it is good and bad. It?s good that I have so many reviews. It?s bad that people may not look in the 2nd page at the old reviews. Oh well?
July 3rd has been a really really busy day... I was in Atlanta all day. BTW Braves 6 Expos 5.... Go Braves!!!!! I guess I will talk more about it tomorrow.
Too tired now.....
I just got back from a 3 hours long "Minority Report" movie. No, no, the movie was not that long. It was around 2 hours long, but we got caught in something. Well, about an hour in to the movie, the power went out in the theater. So my sis and I had to sit there with the backup generator light on for about 30 min. So how was the movie?? It was very, very cool. You guys can read more about it tonight when I write my review in the discussion forum.
"Baby, When I think about you... I think about LLLLLLLLLove..."
Man... do you know that you can make a lot of money changing tires?? Well... my sister got her car tires changed out... All four of them.. and they cost about 90 dollars EACH!!! Wow wee.. That is pretty high!!! I wonder why there is not a similar service that we network engineers can provide to make some quick bucks?