January 2007 – Page 3

January 11, 2007January 11, 2007

More Snow!

Yay?

The weather’s been crazy this winter here in Seattle (or so I’ve been told). It’s snowing here again, a day later than what the original forecast was. Tekman and Xyon left like way early to avoid it. Derek and I stuck around and had dinner and left around 10 to avoid the horrendous traffic that the maps were showing.

Although, not all is bad.

I first took West Lake Sammamish and that road although a bit windy, was very nice to drive all. Due to the traffic I guess, there was basically no snow on the road, only a few cars all going about 30MPH (vs 5MPH on 148th which I initially took and then pulled a U-turn and drove towards West Lake Sammamish). It was like driving on a rainy day, where people were just a bit more careful than normal. Oh yah, I had also filled up my tank with gas as I had less than an 1/8th left and I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway, when I got out of West Lake Sammamish and passed the 90, the hill was blockaded. There were little red cones and a police car parked there stopping people from continuing onto Lakemont. I had my GPS system so I turned left and continued hoping for it to find another route. It did and it seems to connect right back onto Lakemont on top of the hill. I decided to try it. However, this route was less taken, so there was more snow and ice on the road. I got to a point where my card would just not go up anymore. Do note, there have been cars parked on the side of the road all around this area. I guess they just wanted to go home and didn’t want to go through the crazy traffic. However, looking at my GPS system, it was going to be about a 2mi walk which I decided to give the west entrance a try. The Lakemont entrance I was trying was from the north.

I got on to the freeway 90W which was pretty clear and merged onto 405S and took the Coral Creek exit. Once off the freeway, there was a long line continuing onto Coral Creek. I decided to try to take a detour, however it turned out to be 30 minute mistake. Though I’m not sure if that was a good thing or not. I’m still not sure what caused all that traffic on Coral Creek. I’m guessing people were having problems getting into that part of Issaquah? At first I thought it was because everyone was trying to get onto Forest/Lakemont because all the other exits were closed, but the turn lane into Forest/Lakemont only had a few cars.

The drive up Forest was okay. When it was going uphill, cars went up one at a time. So this is why I said maybe my little 30 minute detour was a good thing. A car got stuck in the middle of the steep hill. Cars one by one went by it. It was my turn and I got stuck around the same area. The guy came up and gave me a push and I managed all the way to the top of the hill. I parked my car and came back down to assist him, but we only managed to go up a couple yards. He decided he was going to just park his car there for the night and I bid farewell. Little did I know, I was stuck again. I just needed a little push to get some inertia and that great guy came to help me again.

The rest of the trip was pretty easy. Going up Cougar Mountain was a bit scary. At times, my wheels would be spinning at 60MPH when I’m really going about 15.

But it appears the HOA of my condo lot paid some snow plow car to plow the snow in our lot. However, there was still snow on my driveway and it took me 3 times ramming up my driveway while trying to avoid crashing into my house before I made it into my garage. I was actually contemplating just parking my car in front of my garage, but looks like my car won’t have to freeze outside tonight.

Looks like I’ll be working from home tomorrow.

Abandoned cars on frozen roads Slide Show (from MS newsgroup) – You can read the original article here: Abandoned vehicles litter Washington roads

January 8, 2007January 8, 2007

Viva Piñata

So I purchased Viva Pinata from the company store before I left for Christmas, but didn’t really have a chance to play it till now. All I’ve got to say is MY PIÑATAS ARE SO CUTE!!! It’s basically the first kids game for the Xbox 360 and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. It reminds me of Sim Farm, but 10,000x cuter. You plant fruits and trees and grass and nuts and flowers, and these attract piñatas to your garden. After your garden completes a certain set of requirements (i.e. having green grass), they become your piñata (or more like a pet). After they become yours, you get to command them around. If you have 2 or more, you get to make them have baby piñatas.

The only sad thing about this game, is that some piñatas are carnivores and they have to eat other piñatas. Like in order to get my bird piñatas to have a baby bird piñata, one of the requirements was that they eat a worm piñata. Sometimes these piñatas get into a fight and you can whack them or sprinkle them with water, or else you end up with a sick limping piñata which you have to call a doctor to come and it’ll feed it medicine.

Other times, I attracted a mouse piñata and the snake piñata comes and eats it. Thank god you only really attract 2 of each kind (so they can mate), so I ended up losing 2 mouse piñatas and getting 2 more.

Part of the game requires you to sell the piñatas to make money, but they’re just so cute that I can’t bear to sell any yet. It was EXTREMELY hard for me to tell one of my piñatas to eat another my piñata, but it’s just part of the the game.

Did I mention HOW CUTE these piñatas are? They’re SO CUTE!!! They’re even cuter than the 5 minutes I watched the cartoon for.

Anyway, it was either posting random crap or playing Viva Piñata, and you know which one I opted for.

Last but not least, I wanted to stick this in somewhere. A few days ago, the 1st 4 episodes of 24 – Season 6 was leaked. Please visit your nearest bittorrent site to satisfy that hunger. I’m guessing they were planning to air 4 episodes over one weekend like for Season 5, but ooops…

January 6, 2007March 5, 2008

Happy Birthday Xyon

Just wanted to say Happy Birthday to Xyon. Coincidentally, I just received my free birthday meal postcard at The Keg. Yummmm….

Random Crap:

Not going to be a traditional random crap post as I have way to much queued up for tonight. I finally got around to uploading my Monterey Bay Aquarium pictures. This is my 2nd visit and I quote what Cari told me another kid said, “I see the white shark, but where’s the great white shark?” I guess I was a little disappointed at the size of the shark, but it was still rather neat. I didn’t get to see the giant sea turtle though. You can see all the pictures in the Monterey Bay Aquarium – Visit 2 gallery album. Here’s a select few I thought were cool:

I also took a picture and video of the waterfall thingy:

About 20 seconds into the video, Cari seems to very afraid of the little kid that comes close to here.

Also, I promised you pictures of the cool present my sister got me. I forget what it was called exactly. 3D Art? 3D Jigsaw? 3D Puzzle? Anyway, it’s like a 3D jigsaw puzzle where you piece together well pieces to make a cool model. Mine was a dragon, but she had a fish and a plane also. The fish she was making was neat. Too bad I had to build it myself, though it was time well spent. I was somewhat bored at home anyway. Some pieces were loose and required glue to hold together. Most were pretty tight fitting:

I guess if I ever find time, I’ll paint it. Find time… haha. Anyway, it looks like I’ll be getting a new digicam soon. The one I have (Canon PowerShot S400) is giving me “memory card error” and sometimes showing the E50 error code. According to Smart Computing: This message will appear on the LCD (liquid-crystal display) of a Canon digital camera when there is an error formatting the memory card. The E50 error may appear as a result of camera failure, card failure, environmental problems, or misuse. It’s not my memory card as it works fine in any USB adapter. The original card is already dead, which I think the digicam is the culprit. Both are 1GB Compact Flash cards. I finally ended up pounding on the digicam with my fist and suddenly it starts reading my card again. I don’t know which one I’m going to get, but most likely back in the Canon family as they’ve treated me well. Probably and PowerShot SD600 or SD700. Depends what deals pop up I guess.

I’ll end this post with a comic strip that Cari showed me: (from s2kshift9k)
orange cheating with banana

January 5, 2007January 2, 2008

AIM 6.0

I’ve generally disliked the AIM client that AOL has been creating. I mean when it came out, it was decent, but sort of like IE, they just sort of let it sit there because they were everyone was using it. I’ve been using version 5.5 in conjunction with DeadAIM for who knows how long. It’s not because there hasn’t been new versions. AIM Triton came out awhile back and so did AIM Pro. AIM Pro was actually decent, but it was lacking features that I wanted. The feature I needed was logging, but AOL decided that feature wasn’t necessary version after version. Even AIM Pro just kept logs for 30 days or so before flushing them. Version 5.5’s UI was also pretty ugly. Honestly, the little ad doesn’t really bother me that much, especially when I’m running my screen resolution at 1920×1280. I also disable adblock on websites that I like and don’t have intrusive ads that take up half the screen. Adblock Plus has this feature you can disable the blocking on particular sites.

So RayAlome tells me about this new AIM 6.0 that was released a month or 2 back, and initially I just dismissed it as another AIM failure, probably worse than Triton (then again, nothing could really be worse than Triton). When I went back home this break, I removed Triton from my system and was going to install AIM Pro, but decided to give 6.0 a try. Honestly, I’ve found this newer version nothing short from amazing.

Remember back in the days of ICQ, where you can send offline messages and the person would get it immediately when they signed on. Well, that’s back! No longer needing to set alerts to see when people come on now (though the alert function is still good for stalking).

They also have their internal logging system. The file structure’s somewhat weird. DeadAIM broke the saved logs into directories by screennames. AIM 6.0 just puts all logs into one directory. But with indexers like Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, or even Lookout, you can have all these indexed and no real need to perform a long search.

Other features this new version provides include IM Grouping (which is really tabs, but on the side), ability to have 1,000 buddies (instead of the previous cap of 200), and some other neat stuff. They’ve also integrated it pretty well with their website (email, AIM Today, AIM profile, etc). AIM Today actually tells you how many IMs you’ve sent/received (actually somewhat scary) and other information you might be interested. I personally have that disabled from launching when I start AIM. You can also check out all your buddies’ info in one location without having to open a buddy info window for each one. Then there’s the AIM profile where you provide info about yourself and even add your Flickr, Digg, Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, YouTube, and even personal RSS feeds (which you can add at Buddy Network Settings).

So after I got back to Seattle, I did hit a really weird problem installing AIM 6.0 on my main box:

The problem appears that it’s unable to load the images for the buttons and skin, leaving a very ugly window. Interestingly enough, some icons do get loaded, but who knows what is going on. At first I thought it may have been a bad installation, but the UI (user interface) loaded fine on my other Windows accounts (not to confuse with AIM accounts). I thought maybe there was a setting, theme, or expression that wasn’t being correctly loaded, so I deleted my AIM user data and registry keys, but that didn’t fix it either. I had tried making myself an Administrator (thinking this program may be picky), but that didn’t fix it. I even tried uninstalling/reinstalling as an Administrator, but that didn’t do anything either. My computer back in LA is basically the same set up where I’m running as a user and not an admin and it worked fine. RayAlome suggested that it might be because of some UI tweak. I changed everything back into Fisher Price mode, but the AIM window didn’t change at all. I do tweak my settings a lot, but I have no idea what could be the problem here.

I ended up logging off and logging into my Admin account, renamed my “Documents and Settings” directory and logged back in to create a new profile as my default account, and guess what, AIM know has the correct skin. So it appears to be something in my registry since I’ve already uninstalled DeadAIM, the previous AIM client, deleted all AIM settings in my user profile and delete all the AIM registry keys in HKCU that I could fine. At first I thought I could deal with an ugly looking AIM, but today when I got home, I decided to just create a new profile and import the my data over. It actually wasn’t that bad. The most difficult part of creating this new profile was Outlook. Apparently there isn’t an easy way to export account settings. The data inside Application Data and Local Settings\Application Data are just your emails and calendar. Searching online resulted in this thread: Outlook 2003 Accounts File. Apparently Outlook account information since Outlook 2003 are stored in your registry. Therefore, I just exported: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook (thread tells you to use HK_USERS\{USER_SID}\, but if CURRENT_USER is just a shortcut to the current user’s SID. I then copied a bunch of other Application Data crap from my old profile to my new profile. Desktop and My Documents were a pretty easy move. Quick Start icons were somewhat hidden, but didn’t take me too long to figure out where they were stored.

So the things I did immediately was disabled Fisher Price mode and set it back to classic mode. Rearrange my icons and folder views. One thing that it did disable was my input languages (language bar), so I had to re-enabled all the ones that I used.

All this work to get AIM to look like this:

For those that want to disable the ads, Aim Ad Hack for AIM 6.0 is available.

January 3, 2007

Christmas Vacation

Don’t think I got a chance to say it earlier, but HAPPY NEW YEAR!

My Christmas vacation comes to an end tomorrow when I head back to Seattle. It’s been a fun 2 weeks. Spent most of my time sleeping and eating and relaxing. Didn’t really get anything that interesting for Christmas, but I did get myself a TomTom GO 700 Portable GPS Navigation during the American Express My Wishlist promotion for $300 (with a potential $100 rebate). It’s pretty neat, though I find myself using that screen to drive instead of looking out the windshield when I was playing with it. It has that 3D mode and it feels like I’m driving in a video game. Other stuff I got included some gift cards, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, some new clothing, and this really cool dragon puzzle thingy (picture to come later).

I also hung out with a bunch of friends during this vacation. SueOn and I went Christmas shopping the day after Christmas at the Citadel and the place wasn’t as crazy as I would’ve imagined. Then again, we went around 11am, so maybe all the good deals that were supposed to happened at 7am was already over.

Speaking of shopping, I went to Fry’s for the 3rd time to purchase a wireless bridge. My uncle’s setup needed a bridge to connect his Slingbox with wireless router. Searching on Fry’s.com for “bridge” resulted quite a few available wireless bridges, however I was shocked that they didn’t have any bridges available in the retail store. The closest thing they carried were wireless print servers. By default, most wireless routers don’t come with client/bridge mode. I didn’t really have time for something to be shipped, so I was contemplating if it was better to go with Ethernet through power outlets or a wireless print server. Both were $100. I ended up getting the wireless print server (Netgear WGPS606) as it had a whole bunch of extra features. I’m still shocked they didn’t carry a simple wireless bridge in the largest electronic store.

Anyway, back to meeting with friends. I met up with Ungsunghero and chilled at his new place and had dinner. It’s been a year since I’ve seen him and it was really fun catching up.

Then Decathanerd, Cari and I took a 3 day trip up to north California. Our initial intention was to visit Mechy, but he apparently had a “vague” memory of trying to booking tickets to fly home on Sunday, but ended up getting tickets for Monday because Sunday was full. It was a shame since I haven’t seen Mechy in quite a long time and was hoping to see him again this trip. We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and saw tons of cool fishes and stuff. Decathanerd was testing out his new Nikon 10MP digicam which took some really nice pictures. My pictures will be uploaded shortly (probably when I get back, since my upload speed here sucks). We also met up with some friends and played on Cari’s new Nintendo Wii. It was really fun. Now if I can just find a deal… We visited Berkeley on our last day to check out the new buildings. Unfortunately we visited Berkeley on New Year’s Eve and due to our unfortunate luck, every place we wanted to go to was close (i.e. Student store, Sweet Hearts, gellato place, Quickly, Yogurt Park).

We got back around 10ish and I met up with some Mark Keppel friends to break into the new year. JoeHK, DNG, Kyle, Glendia, LilSneezy, MMouse, Vvorivi, Ohfuee, Norybic and I all counted down and cheered with apple cider, though some had theirs spiked. We went to Garden Cafe afterwards and just chilled and chatted. We went back to Glendia’s place afterwards and basically gossiped about everything. Glendia even busted out the year book and we went through it telling stories of things I never knew.

The day after, SueOn came back from Minnesota and he tried to get a group of people to have dinner with me, but it being last minute and all, not too many people made it. Though the food at Tofu House (Korean BBQ) was really good.

Afterwards, I met up with Ohfuee, CDPlayer, and Decathanerd and we went bowling. I was rather pathetic (probably since I haven’t bowled in such a long time), I got 68 followed by 58 or something like that. It was rather disappointing. We went over to ABC Cafe and chilled till they told us that we needed to move our car and that’s when we realized it was 3am already.

I did have to apologize to GwaGwasan and LilPebbly because they had called me the previous day asking if they could come over and give me some snowballs they had made, and I ‘promised’ I called back when I got home. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do so since I came back at 3am and had totally forgotten about this the next morning. They decided to call me again and I felt really bad for having not called back. They dropped by around 10 today and gave me these cookies (called snowballs apparently) which were really good. It was like cookies with pecan nuts covered with powered sugar. Yummmm. We chatted for quite a bit and it was nice to see them again.

All in all, my break’s been great. Too bad I have to go back. 🙂