Just found a new friend’s website: Tako Studio. An anime buddy of mine on IRC. Be sure to check out his Art Gallery. His drawings are pretty neat! A lot better than my doodles. Speaking of which, I should bring my doodles back online. Maybe later.

Heang and Chheang cook steak:

(Click on image to view/download video)

Sam trying to pop a Champagne in Chheang’s butt:

(Click on image to view/download video)

After Darren tried crushing soda can on forehead:

(Click on image to view/download video)

Sam pops a champagne up Heang’s butt:

(Click on image to view/download video)

2006 New Year Countdown:

(Click on image to view/download video)

I also uploaded a few extra videos I found on this computer. I posted them before, but thought it was worth resharing:

• Lego Star Wars Orchestra
• Playing Piano with Balls
• Sleeping Puppies

You can also check out the other videos I have at my PutFile page.

I can’t believe I have to go back to work on Tuesday. This vacation was nice, but too short!

Check out the the photos I took during the party in my photo album. Videos will be uploaded shortly (or whenver putfile.com is done with maintenance).

A bunch of us celebrated entering the New Year of 2006 at Chheang’s and Antegra’s apartment in Irvine. Technically, it’s no longer Antegra’s apartment since his rent only covered him till the end of December 2005. A bunch of us went beforehand and made dinner. JoeHK, Chheang, PhatFreeza, LilSneezy, DNG, MMouse, and I stopped by at Albertsons to pick up some food. We got new york steak, chips, sour cream, potatoes, chilli, shredded cheese, onions, soda, orange juice, and tons of alcohol. MMouse and LilSneezy got their own thing because MMouse wasn’t too fond of steak and LilSneezy was sick. We ended up getting a bottle of Hpnotiq (I thought the spelling was Hypnotiq) and Tanqueray No. Ten. LilSneezy really wanted to try Hpnotiq because it was recommended by others, but I think it was mainly because it came in a cool bottle and the color matched her green shirt. DNG wanted the group to try gin since apparently not too many have tried gin before. I recommended either Tanqueray No. Ten or Bombay Sapphire since those are what I’ve seen CDMCC drink the most and recommend.

We headed back to the apartment and JoeHK and Chheang were the dedicated cooks. They made some good tasting steak and were also making baked potatoes. I’m not steak fanatic so I can’t really tell the difference between good steak and bad steak. We actually flipped a coin to decide to get $8/lb steak or $4/lb steak. We ended up with $4/lb steak, but everyone was happy.

An interesting aspect of the apartment is that one of the roommates literally lives in a cardboard box:

DNG was our dedicated bar tender making everyone drinks with what was available. We had so much trouble opening the Tanqueray No. Ten bottle. DNG, Chheang, Kyle, and I first all tried brute strength, but no one could get a good grip on the cap. LilSneezy suggested banging the cap on the corner of the counter. That didn’t seem to help either. MMouse busted out his leatherman and PhatFreeze was trying to opening it was the clamp and screwdriver. Finally, DNG somehow managed to open it with little effort. I think it was the combined effort of everyone that the cap finally gave way.

Other alcohol that was already in the fridge included Southern Comfort, Jack Daniel’s, and Miller Light (?).

Kyle joined us shortly after we arrived and we started a poker game after dinner. $1 buy in and I lost an all-in after hitting trip 8s on the turn, but MMouse hit a straight on the river. Kyle ended up as the winner of the tournament (again) with PhatFreeza coming in 2nd.

Ohfuee and MeSofa joined later in the night, followed by Glendia and Steve. Actually, I’m no longer sure which party arrived first. Ohfuee brought us a bottle of Absolut and a big pack of Tecate.

We were playing Taboo while waiting for the count down to start and when it did, no one was ready for the toast cause everyone’s cup was empty. We did modify the rules for Taboo a bit. If you skip, your team loses a point. If you taboo, you have to take a sip of Ohfuee’s horrid drink: Toilet Water. In other words, you could either take one for the team by tabooing or if you so afraid of the drink (which you should be), you’d rather force your team to lose a point. If you don’t believe how horrid the drink is, check out their expressions:

My camera ran out of battery shortly afterwards, but it was good time to stop taking photos because people were starting to barf and fall asleep. We woke up early the next morning: 10am because PhatFreeza had to return his car back to his parents. After I got home, I uploaded the photos and went straight to bed for another long nap.

One of the most funniest moments of last night was when DNG tried to crush a can on his forehead, but failed and instead hurted himself. To redeem himself, he rip the can apart with his teeth. Another moment to remember was when we started busting out MMouse’s champagne poppers and got the room really messy and started trying to pop it into each other’s butt and nuts.

One of the topics that came up during yesterday’s New Year Party was if people were for or against the reunification of Taiwan and China. My stance as many of you know is I’m against the reunification unless the government changes. DNG was bringing up that the reunification would bring heaps of economic benefits to both countries, but I argued asking if economic strength was the best measure of how great a society or civilization is? Would you give up certain freedoms to obtain a better economy? This led to an argument of how China has no freedom of religion (i.e. Falun Gong) and Taiwan has limited freedom of speech and USA doesn’t really have that much freedom considering that the media is really controlled by the shareholders, although it appears to be “free”. I agreed that that may be the case, but the level of freedom is clearly differentiable. For example, my website will no longer be able to view within China because the word Falun Gong has appeared on my website. Even if a website has the word Freedom or Liberty, they are automatically blocked by the Great Firewall of China and if you’ve seen the recent allegations against Microsoft, Yahoo, and even Google for compromising ethics to make money in China, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And with bloggers nowadays, large news companies aren’t the only source of news anymore.

I gave my example of how China is like the Matrix and the people inside have no real sense of what the “real world” outside is like since every aspect of their lives is controlled by the government. If you were living in the Matrix, would you take the blue pill or the red pill? I agree the situation may be not as simple as that and once you know that an outside world exists, your decision can change. But let’s say the option exists and knowing that once you take the blue pill, there’s no turning back and if you take the red pill, you won’t remember anything about the outside world, which pill would you take. Now that you have an idea of what I’m getting at, people in China are ignorant of this because of the Firewall, but people in Taiwan are not. They already know what the REAL WORLD outside is and by reunification, they’re forcing them to enter this China bubble and force them to believe this new version of reality.

Hong Kong also came into discussion since it reunited with China back in 1997. I shared my knowledge with the group saying how once China took over Hong Kong, all newspapers basically caved and became supporters of communism. All but one: Apple Daily (蘋果日報). You can read the Wikipedia entry about it. My dad tells me it’s because that all the editors of Apple Daily are US citizens or something like that and that the Communist government can’t touch them. Another interesting fact you might want to know is that currently the Hong Kong’s chief executive is chosen by a 400 member committee which all are chosen by the government. Hong Kong people have been rallying to reform this and move toward democracy. There was a bill to increase that number from 400 to 800, but it was shot down because you have to understand, 800 people out of 7 million is like nothing.

My stance has and will remain the same no matter how much economical benefits there may be, there are certain freedoms that should never be given up. China can take its time to improve. Even if it takes 200 years before China’s reformed where they don’t need a Firewall to cover the real truth, Taiwan can wait that long before reunification.

Yay! I finished The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Amazon). It was a bit shorter than I expected and Princess Zelda didn’t kiss me in the end! BOOOOOO! Can’t really complain since it was probably one of the funner games I’ve played all year.

I did have to use a walkthrough in times when I was stuck: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap Walkthrough. I know I cheated, but time was against me. I had to finish the game before I leave (1/3) because the GameBoy Advance belongs to my brother. The walkthrough was pretty vague and it took some time to figure out what many of the things it was referring to, but it got me through.

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Random Crap:

Teen’s New Name: KentuckyFriedCruelty.com – A 19-year-old PETA staffer has legally changed his name to KentuckyFriedCruelty.com. Sigh… Hi, who’s this? Hi, I’m Kentucky FriedCruelty.com. I wonder what his kids would be named.

Microsoft’s ‘orange badge’ culture gets forum (from /.) – The rest of the world calls them contractors, temps or contingent workers. But among the rank and file at Microsoft Corp., they’re known by the color of their badges. “You tell people, ‘I’m an orange badge at Microsoft,’ and pretty much everybody in the tech industry knows exactly what that means,” says Howard Wu, a software project manager who worked at Microsoft through a temporary staffing firm. “It’s practically a subculture in Seattle.” … Wu is trying to do something about it. He has launched an online forum, OrangeBadges.com, that is one of two new efforts to bring together Microsoft contractors, people who work temporary stints at the company. But unlike other initiatives among Microsoft contractors, organizers of both groups say they aren’t trying to create unions.

Pricey coffee good to the last dropping – Would you pay $175 (101 pounds) for a pound of coffee beans which had passed through the backside of a furry mammal in Indonesia? … Kopi Luwak beans from Indonesia are rare and expensive, thanks to a unique taste and aroma enhanced by the digestive system of palm civets, nocturnal tree-climbing creatures about the size of a large house cat. … Despite being carnivorous, civets eat ripe coffee cherries for treats. The coffee beans, which are found inside of the cherries, remain intact after passing through the animal.

10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year (from /.) – But some of the year’s greatest joys weren’t new products, but aspects of new products. Here and there, you could find tiny touches of brilliance: clever steps forward and new spins on old features that somehow made it through committee, past the bean counters and under the radar of marketing departments. Sometimes it’s the little things we forget to appreciate. I wonder why they forgot about tabs in web browsers.

New York Times Link Generator – a great tool to post New York Times articles on your blog or website to allow readers to bypass their registration by generating the link.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

I was told the different styles of tea (i.e. Green Tea, Black Tea, and Oolong Tea) were just different ways of preparing the tea leaves by Tekman which I could accept. But a few days ago Cari told me that all tea leaves originate from the same species, which I couldn’t even force myself to believe. Even in each category of Green Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Tea, etc, there are way too many different kinds of tea and different tastes. Even within Chinese black teas, they all taste quite different. Even my dad wouldn’t believe all tea leaves are of the same species when I asked him about it today.

So I decided to do some research online. According to Wikipedia: Tea is produced from leaves and leaf buds of Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. All tea varieties, such as green, oolong, and black tea, are harvested from this species, but differ by processing. It just blows my mind to think that all teas are from the same species. Do note, there are still variations inside species, just like skin color, hair color, and eye color differentiation within the human species. If you want to see how green tea and black tea differ during the processing, you can read more about it at Wikipedia.

I still wasn’t too certain with this info, so I did so more searching and found these:

• Tea Information and Types of Tea – Tea is basically the dried and processed leaves of only one species of plant called camellia sinensis. Interestingly enough, herbal teas or herbal infusions are not really teas, but simply dried flowers and/or herbs.
• Generation Tea : Pu-erh Tea, Chinese Tea, Oolong Tea, Black Tea – The tea species Camellia sinensis produces all the varieties of tea. The processing ultimately determines the class of tea created. This is part of the mystique of tea.

This is just mind boggling! Some time later, we also began to question if coffee were all from the same species, which I personally thought had a higher probability of being from the same species than tea, but it turns out there are 2 species of beans that can be used to make coffee. According to Wikipedia: There are two main species of the coffee plant. Coffea arabica is the older of them. It is thought to be indigenous to Ethiopia, but as the name implies it was first cultivated on the Arabian Peninsula. It is more susceptible to disease, and considered by professional cuppers to be greatly superior in flavor to Coffea canephora (robusta), which contains about twice as much caffeine—a natural insecticide (paralyzes and kills some of the insects that attempt to feed on the plant) and stimulant— and can be cultivated in environments where arabica will not thrive. This has led to its use as an inexpensive substitute for arabica in many commercial coffee blends such as Folgers, Maxwell House and almost all instant coffee products. Compared to arabica, robusta tends to be more bitter, with a telltale “burnt rubber” aroma and flavor. Good quality robustas are used as ingredients in some espresso blends to provide a better “crema” (foamy head), and to lower the ingredient cost. In Italy many espresso blends are based on dark-roasted robusta.