Month: October 2007

Posted on

Pony Express Awesomeness

So this weekend, I sold 3 Canon PC 170 Personal Copiers for about $50 a piece. Pretty good deal considering I only paid tax for them which came out to be ~$6-7 a piece. Anyway, I typically use USPS to ship most things, usually Media Mail or Parcel Post depending on what I’m shipping using the USPS PayPal Trick. Other times, I ship USPS Priority Mail when customers pay for expedited shipping.

However, for shipping things over 4lbs, I typically go with UPS, FedEx, or DHL, depending on whichever one is convenient. UPS usually wins since I can just drop them off at Office Depot, however they also usually end up being the most expensive, but for $1-2 more, the convenience matters more to me.

However, that changed when I needed to ship a 26lb photocopier… UPS was going to charge $33 or something ridiculous like that while DHL was charging $24. However, I didn’t know where I could exactly ship via DHL and if I recall correctly, DHL is backed by OfficeMax and there’s really no OfficeMax close to me. Is the ~$10 difference actually enough to convince me to drive further?

Then I remember that as a Microsoft employee, I actually have a discount with DHL. Punching in my info, the shipping fee dropped from $24 to $17, making it even more tempting. I decided to check out DHL’s drop off locator tool and found out that there was a Pony Express next to work. I recall seeing a Pony Express before, but could not remember from where. However, Google Maps and Live Maps both pointed to the intersection of 24th and 148th and given there were malls on each corner there, I had no idea which one they were in.

I gave them a call Monday morning asking which complex they were located in and they said they were across from Safeway in the Arby’s complex. I personally don’t think that the map marker should’ve been at the intersection of 24th and 148th and now I remember seeing that store in that complex.

Anyway, I drop by afterwards and was not sure how what it’ll be like. Office Depot doesn’t like me that much when I just drop in to drop off packages as they’re not really getting a cut on the delivery fee. I had 3 26lb packages so I had to take them in 1 by 1. When I first walked in, the clerk at the desk asked me if it was a drop off. I said yes and mentioned I had 2 more. He instructs me to just put it on the table and he’ll open the door for me. I thought that was really nice.

What really surprised me next was that he actually came out to my car and helped me carry one of the 26lb packages. That was so nice!!!

Looks like DHL will be getting more of my business now. 🙂

Posted on

Yaris – Free XBLA Game

I apologize for not posting much recently. My blog topics have been accumulating. Here’s just a few of my draft titles: 5 Free iTunes Songs Followup, Fighting Dance Moves, Credit Card Update, Elliptical User Warnings, Dwarfs Count, Cute Cat Comic, Lucky Star, and File Server (yes, it’s still in queue to blog about). Here’s one that’s in my email box that I found.

I’m shocked that one of my most popular posts is 4 Free Xbox Live Arcade Games, generating about 200 unique views this past month.

A few weeks ago, while I was looking at the MSFT stock headlines (speaking of which, did you see the recent surge?!?!? We not only broke $30, but now we’re at $35!), I saw this: Want a Free Xbox Game?

If you’re still smarting after shelling out $60 for a copy of Halo 3 last month, relief is on the way. Xbox owners connected to the Xbox Live Marketplace are getting a free treat this week with a game called Yaris.

OK, maybe it’s more product placement than video game. The New York Times reports that Toyota bankrolled the game to promote its Yaris car line. There’s little for Toyota to lose here. Racing car games are popular. Electronic Arts has a killer franchise in Need for Speed. Activision recently bought the developer behind the Project Gotham Racing series, which has sold 4.5 million copies.

The Xbox marketplace provides developers with inventory-free distribution, so it’s not as if Toyota is going to have to eat a ton of returns. As long as players don’t walk into a Toyota showroom and wonder why the real Yaris can’t shoot missiles or claw away at other drivers with electronic tentacles, Toyota will accomplish its goal of reaching out to young drivers.

For more information on the Yaris game, check out Yaris (Xbox 360) and Toyota Yaris: Xbox LIVE Arcade Game.

I downloaded this game last week, but haven’t really had a chance to play it yet. Still trying to get through Halo 3. Given that I play about an hour or 2 a week, I’m not progressing that fast. Stanman and them were over this weekend to play multiplayer Halo 3 and they made fun of me for not having unlocked any of the costumes.

But here’s another free xbox live arcade game for you! Enjoy!

Posted on

Spanakopita

When transferring the elliptical images over to my computer, I noticed a few images that I hadn’t talked about yet:

spanakopitaspanakopita

I also got these from Costco and they’re super yummy. They’re called spanakopita and the description states: spinach and feta phyllo triangles. According to Wikipedia:

Spanakopita is a Greek spinach pie with a filling of spinach, feta cheese (usually), green onions, egg, and seasoning (often including dill). The filling is wrapped in layers of phyllo pastry with butter and/or olive oil, either in a large pan from which individual servings are cut, or rolled into individual triangular servings (see burek). Once baked, it is golden in color.

In Greece, it is mostly eaten as a snack, an alternative to tyropita.

In restaurants it can be served with tzatziki sauce and a Greek salad. It has become a popular item in Greek restaurants worldwide, and is served as either a light meal or an appetizer.

After it leaves the oven, the outside is crispy and the insides are soft. The only unfortunate thing is that each dish comes with 12 triangles and I can’t possibly finish all of them in 1 sitting, and after you leave it out for some time, the crispiness disappears. It’s also on sale this month (from the coupon booklet).

Posted on

Elliptical

So I’ve been meaning to get an elliptical for awhile and when I saw that Costco had one on sale this month, I jumped. It was only available online and I had recalled receiving a letter stating that my Executive Membership which gives me an extra 2% back doesn’t apply to online orders. I decided to email Costco customer service to find out if that was the case. It turns out I was wrong:

Thank you for your e-mail to Costco Wholesale.

Yes online purchases do count toward the 2% the same way they do in the store. If there is anything further please let us know.

Thank you,

Joel
Costco Wholesale Corporation

Awesome. After reading that email, I pretty much jumped and made my purchase. The one I got is: NordicTrack CX 938 Elliptical, which is still on sale for $400.

Fast forward till last Friday when I decided to work from home. I get a phone call asking me if I’ll be available on Monday between the hours of 11am and 2pm for delivery from UPS freight. I said that should be fine.

The UPS gave me a call around 1pm today asking me for more specific directions to my place, since I live in a complex. Turns out he went into the wrong complex. But he got here in the next 10 minutes or so. Turns out UPS freight won’t take things up the stairs and he insisted that he dump the package in my garage which is on the 1st floor. I didn’t blame him. The package was huge and heavy and he was by himself. I thought to myself, I could probably bring it up part by part later. I had to get into work now.

When I get home tonight, I start unpacking the thing, and part by part, I started to bring it up to my living room. However, I was left with a very “big” problem. There was 1 gigantic part, which I would say weighed about 80lbs or so. That’s what sucks about living alone. I don’t have someone that could lift the other end of heavy things. Otherwise, I’m perfectly fine.

So I tried dragging it, and for the most part it worked. The stairs were a bit tricky, but I guess the recent exercises did strengthen me up. When I went back downstairs to the garage to check to see if I had anything left, that’s when I noticed some broken plastic. I was like *!@*!*!@#*@!#*!@$*!@#*@!#!@. It looked like it was part of some electrical connector. I went back up stairs to check it out and found the broken piece. Thankfully none of the wires were damaged, just the plastic encasing for the connector head.

So step by step, I started building the elliptical. When instructions asked to have one person lift up X, that person turned out to be a cardboard box. Things were fine until it got to the point of attaching the handles. First I needed to apply grease and being inexperienced with grease, I of course overdid it and ended with big chunks coming out afterwards. Then there was the stupid thing they called the push nut which came with a push nut tool, which was basically keep hammering at it till it held the handles in snuggly. That took a lot of work as it wasn’t easy hammering something with a hole smaller than what it’s trying to get into.

Don’t you hate it when you forget to put a washer between your screw and what you’re screwing into? Yah, that happened to me a few times and I had to unscrew it and screw it back again.

It turns out this elliptical doesn’t use AC power, but instead is powered by 4 “D” batteries. Thankfully I have all sets of common batteries which I’ve purchased from Costco (AAA, AA, C, and D). After plugging in the console unit, I did a test to see if the wiring was fine, since I did damaged its “spine” earlier. It turned out okay as I was able to control the resistance (located in the back) without any problems. What I found hilarious is the the fact it even has a little fan in the center of the console with multiple speeds. I wonder how long that’ll last with “D” batteries.

My elliptical was finally complete and it’s huge! Not exactly what I was expecting. Now I needed to squeeze it into somewhere where I would actually use it, which meant it had to be in front of the TV. Unlike my exercise bike, this thing was probably going to be stationary. Being 6ft long also meant it would barely fit between the couch and the TV.

So I moved my couches around and stuck both the elliptical and exercise bike in between and ended up with:

living room setupliving room setupliving room setupliving room setupliving room setup

Don’t worry about the wire going across the floor. Since I had moved my speakers, that was just part of the process to recalibrate them.

Afterwards, I noticed that my left toe had a painful feeling, like thousands of little pins poking at it. Not exactly sure what happened and it doesn’t look injured. Hopefully I didn’t hurt any other part of my body either.

I’ll probably give it a try either tomorrow or the day afterward. Building this thing used up quite an amount of energy.

Posted on

New Title Image

So if you haven’t noticed, I’ve updated my title image. It originally featured Detective Conan and Shinichi in the background with the saying “Krunk4Ever! It’s the only truth.” You can still see the previous title image here. However, while updating to WordPress 2.3 and having to fix up all the stylesheets and theme changes, I got bored and decided to make a new title image.

I started searching for more Detective Conan images, but didn’t really find one that I liked or could work with. Then I searched for Rurouni Kenshin, Bleach, and Naruto. I found a Naruto one that I liked and even created a title image that was on my site for a few hours. If you didn’t get to see it, you can check it out here. It was going to say “Krunk4Ever! Some anger just can’t be quelled.” It looked pretty decent, but I decided to see what other options there was.

I also got to a point where I wanted to have a black and white title image, basically a silhouette type image (think iPod commercials). I was playing with at few images and after I converted them to silhouettes, they looked nothing like the original, so I gave up on that idea.

While browsing for more images, I ended up on this page: Ginko, the snow, the tree, and the Mushi and immediately overtaken with a very peaceful and calm feeling. The image is from an anime called Mushi-Shi (蟲師) which literally translates to bug master, but according to BasuGasuBakuhatsu:

The literal translation for “Mushi-shi” sounds sorta like “Bug Tamer,” but I think the actual meaning is a bit more interesting. At least, if you’re not into entomology…

Mushishi are not bugs. They’re actually pseudo life-forms that were around before life even existed. They usually can’t be seen, but their effects on people can be pretty strong. Ginko, a “Mushi-shi,” travels the world ridding people of their Mushi afflictions and learning more about them. Aaaand that’s about it.

I haven’t checked out this anime yet, but it has a pretty high rating on AniDB. Looks like something to add to my watch list. House, M.D. is once again postponed until further noticed.

Anyway, back to the topic. I first created this one, which following the previous title images, had a white border. However Hjo3 noted that the white borders were a bit weird given the fact that the new image also had a white border, so I decided to give moving the trees to the edge a try and came up with what I have now. It turned out pretty nice. I’m not sure which one is better, but I’ll leave this one for now. Since there was this little man walking, I decided to make up some saying dealing with “journey”, and ended up with “Krunk4Ever! A journey of amazing experiences.”

Posted on

The Ten Commandments…?

The Yahoo! New Movie Trailers RSS feed brought to my attention a new movie called The Ten Commandments. I don’t typically watch Yahoo! movie trailers which aren’t in HD, since the quality is usually pretty bad. Basically similar to YouTube quality. Anyway, reading the movie description, it sounded like another movie about Moses, and since I was a big fan of Prince of Egypt (it’s still probably one of my all time favorite animations), I decided to check it out.

However, I was very disappointed. They decided to make it a 3D animation and it was so bad, that I can easily say the Prince of Egypt animation was 10x better. The characters felt really fake and the expressions were horrible.

You can watched The Ten Commandments trailer and then compare it to the 1999’s Prince of Egypt trailer.

Posted on

VoiceStick Replacement – IPKall with GrandCentral

So VoiceStick, one of my free VoIP service providers decided they were going to start charging money. I was on the Next2Nothing plan where all incoming calls were free, but they would charge 2¢/min for all outgoing calls. I was fine with that since I didn’t plan to make any outgoing calls.

However a month or 2 back, they secretly started charging money without notifying the users. I only found out after Ungsunghero mentioned it to me and realized I had a negative balance. Since I was on the “free” plan, there was no need to provide a credit card and I might have started out with some free credit. When I saw my balance, it was at -$1.32 or something like that.

I’ve mentioned VoiceStick previously, stating how they were better than IPKall both in quality and the fact they can provide local numbers from anywhere in the USA. IPKall restricted your number to be in the Seattle area which was either 425, 206, 360, or 253. My IPKall still works fine and I haven’t had any problems with it, but now I lost a local number for my parents in LA to call me. Worse case scenario, they can still call my cell phone.

Anyway, I was just telling Derek and Tekman a few weeks back about GrandCentral, because Tekman needed a number which wasn’t long distance for his son’s school to call him. I told him about GrandCentral and how it’s basically choose a number and get free call forwarding. GrandCentral has a whole slew of neat features. Call forwarding is just one of the many.

I believe GrandCentral (being in beta) is still an invite-only service, so if you’re interested, feel free to leave your name and email in the comment area.

This got me thinking… Can I get a local number in LA (626 area code) and have it forward to my IPKall phone number. I decided to give it a shot and it turned out quite successful. Initially, I was having some quality trouble, where I had a hard time hearing the other side and vice versa. It turned out it was because I was “uploading”, which caused more deterioration of the VoIP connection than previously with my other VoIP services. Of course the quality isn’t as good as what VoiceStick was before and probably worser now since it’s going through 2 VoIP connections (first through GrandCentral, then through IPKall/FWD), but I asked my parents to give it a try and with my “uploading” software closed, the quality was actually rather good.

Setting up GrandCentral is pretty easy. You provide some information, give it an area code/address and it’ll return you a set of phone numbers to choose from. I wanted one that was easy to remember (basically one with repetitions of digits and found a pretty good one after going through about 30).

Setting up IPKall is a bit more difficult. At this point, I’m going to assume you already have a VoIP Phone Adapter (such as the “unlocked” Linksys PAP2) or you’ll be using a PC-Phone software (somewhat like Skype) provided to you by FWD.

IPKall isn’t exactly a VoIP service. They’re sort of a door that can connect a phone number to an existing VoIP service that allows incoming connections. They recommend FWD (Free World Dialup) as the VoIP service provider. FWD doesn’t provide actual phone numbers, but they allow incoming connections and what IPKall does is to connect an incoming call into that VoIP service. I’d suggest setting up the FWD account before you setup the IPKall account.

Creating an account on FWD is pretty straight forward. What you’ll want to keep note of is what your FWD Number is and the password you set. You’ll need this information to setup your VoIP Phone Adapter. Here are the settings I have on my Linksys PAP2:

SIP Port: 5060
Proxy: fwd.pulver.com
Use Outbound Proxy: No
Register: Yes
User ID: Your FWD Number
Password: Your FWD Password
Use Auth ID: Yes
Auth ID: Your FWD Number

Anything I didn’t mention, I’m assuming it’s the default. After saving, check the registration state and see if it changes to Online. It usually takes less than 5 minutes if the information you enter is correct.

Creating an IPKall account is pretty much like GrandCentral. You give them some information, select the area code you want, then select your phone number. After your account is created, update the following settings:

SIP Phone Number: Your FWD Number
SIP Proxy: fwd.pulver.com

Although it says it may take up to 60 minutes for the changes to take effect, I’ve noticed that creating a new account can take a day before the phone number starts working.

Now go back into GrandCentral and tell it to forward all calls to the IPKall phone number you just setup and everything should work just fine!

If you need help, feel free to leave a comment.

Posted on

Donate Free Rice While You Learn Vocabulary!

Got this site from Digg: FreeRice

Every vocabulary you get right, they donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Interesting concept, but what I found amazing is the vocab training it appears to be. In the style of GRE where you start off easy and as you get words correct, it gets harder, but when you get them wrong, the difficulty decreases. I’ve been stuck around level 28-34 for some time and finally gave up after about 1200 grains of rice.

Definitely helpful for someone who’s planning to take the SAT or GRE any time soon.