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8am Experiment

So I decided to perform an experiment this past week and try to wake up earlier. As many of you know, I tend to get into work rather late and that’s just me. People know not to schedule early meetings if they want me to attend. I was originally planning to complete a demo setup last weekend. What started out as a weekend where I was planning to stay home and work, turned out to be a Naruto Shippuden marathon. I had stopped watching Naruto during the filler arc where he was protecting that girl with the giant bomb inside her. It was really boring. Who knew immediately after that would become so exciting. I won’t be spoiling much here since that’s not the purpose of this post, but the last 20 or so episodes of Naruto Shippuden have just been fantastic. Did I mention I watched ~25 episodes of Naruto last weekend?

So what was supposed to be completed on Friday, became what was supposed to be completed on Sunday, became I needed to get into work early on Monday to finish the setup. I had estimated it to take between 1-4hrs to complete and was really hoping it was closer to the lower estimate. I decided to set my alarm at 8am and get into work by 9am, giving myself 2-3 extra hours than what I’d normally have.

My alarm goes off at 8am. I didn’t get out of bed till 8:30am, but I managed to get into work shortly after 9am. Good news is I completed the demo setup pretty quickly. I did hit into issues, but the dev I was working with was able to help quickly debug what was going wrong. That was Monday.

Another motivation for getting up earlier is that we have scrum meetings at 9:30am, which I haven’t been attending. My lead says it’s okay that I miss them, as long as I provide him with the latest status updates. I just feel so bad for not attending.

I set my alarm to go off at 8:30am for the remainder of the week, and the experiment failed horribly. I would wake up between 9:30am and 12pm, hitting the snooze button many times in between. Sometimes I don’t even remember hitting the snooze button. I remember specifically one time seeing 10am on my clock and wondering why the alarm hasn’t gone off yet. Of course a minute later, the alarm goes off for who knows how many times already. I guess it also didn’t help that I was still going to bed around 3-4am.

I also reaffirmed my dislike for drip coffee. Apparently work now has both Starbucks and Seattle’s Best drip coffee, but both taste really bad in my opinion. Maybe I didn’t add enough sugar. Drip coffee also tends to make my stomach queasy for the rest of the day. I do like lattes and mochas though. I wonder why.

I’ll probably resume my normal schedule from next week onwards. Maybe I’ll give this another try sometime later.

You should probably stop reading here as the rest is just the rambling of a crazy dream I had.

I had a really random dream this morning (in between my alarm clock going off). The dream started with my cousin coming into our cabin (some outdoorsy place we were staying) wearing that weird body suit with wheels on your arms and legs. I don’t really know what the sport is called, but I remember my cousin telling us that he just got back from contour body skating. I forget what happens in between, but the next thing I know it’s night time and my brother is sleep-talking, telling me to go return his snowboard gear. It doesn’t even make sense, but apparently I returned his snowboard gear in the middle of the night and he got really pissed at me the next morning, because apparently those weren’t rentals and were actually his. Of course the rental people won’t budge and won’t return his stuff. We come up with the scheme of renting the same gear again and just not return it. Somehow that worked, but the boss decided to pay us a visit. He came in a black limo and pulled up to our cabin. Not quite sure why or how I ended up in the limo, but the limo was flying and we were in it. The boss also turned out to be some evil pig in a business suit and he was hopping mad that we aren’t returning his rentals. I tried to explain that these were originally ours and we were just taking back what belonged to us. He got so angry that he grew 2 extra eyes on his forehead (4 eyes total). This got really creepy. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! My alarm clock goes off. Interesting how much dreaming goes on in just 9 minutes.

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Darker Than Black Review

Darker Than Black Several friends had recommended the Darker Than Black anime series to me, which conveniently is available on Hulu. At first the episodes were episodic and getting repetitive. The strategy was always the same. Over the course of 2 episodes, Hei would receive orders and we’d see him accomplish it. It did work out well with my exercise regiment since I usually run on the elliptical for ~50mins. There didn’t appear to be an overarching storyline to tie in everything together. But thank god I stuck with it because after the introduction of Amber, everything fell into its place and the puzzle started forming a bigger picture. The series became really fun after that point.

The story takes place sometime in the near future where some alien gates formed on Earth. Mysterious things begin to happened, such as a small population of humans becoming contractors. A contractor is sort of like a mutant from X-Men, where they’ve gained some special power, but there’s a price whenever you use it. Contractors are also completely logical beings with the human irrational bit completely removed. We’re introduced to our masked protagonist Hei and his work for the syndicate. Slowly we learn more and more about his past and when Amber shows up, things really kick up a notch.

I also really liked its 2nd OP:

The song is called θ¦šι†’γƒ’γƒ­γ‚€γ‚Ίγƒ ~THE HERO WITHOUT A β€œNAME”~ by をンティック-ηˆη²εΊ—- (An Cafe)

I should probably check out the sequel. Ratings for it are pretty good too.

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Artificial Memory

In this day and age where everyone is carrying around a cellphone/organizer, it feels like people have offloaded the responsibility of memorizing data onto devices, which may indeed be the correct evolutionary approach. Our lives are so intertwined with digital technology that many of us won’t know what to do without it.

Have you ever forgotten your own cell phone number even if momentarily when inquired by a person or an application? I’m always surprised at how easily I forget my own cell phone number. How does that even happen? Yet for some reason I can still remember my old home phone number which I have not used for over 5 or 6 years. In fact that number is no longer in service. When I was in elementary school, we didn’t have cell phones, so I jotted down friends’ phone numbers in a little notepad. But after awhile, you basically remember all your friends’ phone numbers where you don’t even have to look at your notepad anymore. Nowadays, I can’t even remember my own parents’ cell phone number. Honestly if I lost my cell phone or if it’s out of battery, I wouldn’t really know a number I could call. 911? The fact is we no longer see the number. We call people by looking up their names. When a call comes in, you don’t see a number, you see their name. In fact if I see #s (meaning my phone doesn’t recognize it), I automatically send it to voicemail. The only time I actually use my cell phone # is when I’m giving it to someone, and when you don’t do that often enough, you end up forgetting it.

Then there’s the problem with sense of direction and just a general idea of where things are located. Maybe this is just my problem. I’ve been in the Seattle area for over 5 years and for the 1st 4, I had no idea where anything was in Seattle, thanks to my GPS. Did you know until I stopped using my GPS, I never knew how to get to Andrew’s place w/o it, even though I’ve gone to his place probably 5 or 6x before then. About a year ago, I decided I really wanted to know where things were. Fremont, Capitol Hill, Belltown, Ballard – these were all things that existed in Seattle, but I had no idea how they connected to each other or how to get from 1 to the other. I don’t recall the last time I took out my GPS, but it’s only around in case I get lost. Nowadays I draw little maps on post-it notes and it’s been working wonders. I now know street names, landmarks to remember, and I hardly ever have to look up how to get to the same place twice.

And of course there’s birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. I doubt I can remember people’s birthdays these days without Outlook and Facebook. Heck, I sometimes forget even my own.

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Bite of Seattle + Inception

The password for the following post is: inception

Felt a bit weird to just have a post telling you the password of the following post, so I’ll talk a bit about Bite of Seattle.

Bite of Seattle was fun as usual, though also very crowded as usual. The worst part was getting off the freeway on Mercer. Finding parking wasn’t too bad once you got past the Seattle Center.

All of us got the sampling plate from The Alley which consists of a samples from 7 different restaurants in Seattle for $10:
The Alley Plate
This samples were surprisingly delicious, though I wasn’t too fond of the chilled soup.

When I first saw the Dungeness crab and Berkshire pork sausage, I thought they were cinnamon buns. The sausage was really good!
Dungeness crab and Berkshire pork sausage

We walked around a bit more and checked out some more stands. We then went to the Pacific Science Center IMAX where our movie was going to start at 8. Surprisingly the line wasn’t as long as when they were airing The Dark Knight, though it was sold out several days ago. Guess word of Inception hasn’t gotten around yet, but this movie was definitely amazingly awesome!!! It was not only really fun, but very thought provoking. Don’t want to spoil anything here, but you can check out the trailers. I’ll be making a follow-up post for discussion, and the password for the following post is: inception

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Angel Beats!

Angel Beats! Poster Wow, it’s been a long time since I blogged about an anime series.

I recently finished watching Angel Beats! The series started off very random, yet very fun. The main female character reminded me of Haruhi Suzumiya. In fact the randomness and wackiness reminded me a lot of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The story begins with a boy Otonashi waking up with amnesia and this girl Yuri holding a sniper rifle tells him he’s dead. She tells him to join her Battlefront Brigade who’s main enemy is the Angel. Of course Otonashi doesn’t believe her and confronts the “so called” Angel. The Angel then sticks a sword through his heart and the crazy series begins. The story pretty much continues with the Battlefront Brigade fighting against the Angel and how the Battlefront Brigade tries to outsmart the Angel.

For the first 8 episodes, the series was pretty random, wacky, and fun. Story was light and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However starting with episode 9 (do note this is only a 13 episode series), it got really serious. At first I was wary of the change, but really quickly I liked how it turned out and made me love the series even more. My only regret is that the series was so short that they didn’t really get to develop much of the characters beyond the 4 or 5 main characters. I really want to know the back story of TK!

Angel Beats! Characters

This is one of the better animes I’ve seen in recent years. The OP and ED music are pretty catchy too! They even had a band inside the anime called Girls Dead Monster and I really like one their songs: My Song. They even made a rock version of the OP.

One of my favorite scenes is below (won’t really spoil much):

My sister says it reminds her of The Matrix, and I agree. I believe this to be a homage.

Did I mention they have an awesome soundtrack?

Now with Angel Beats! done and a new season of anime series airing, I’ve taken a liking to Highschool of the Dead. It feels like a typical zombie series at the moment, with 5 students and a nurse trying to battle their way out of this mess. The graphics and animation are superb and I’ve heard great things about the source material (manga). There also appears to be a lot of fan service. Check out the OP if you’re interested. If you search for Highschool of the Dead on YouTube, you can also stream the 1st episode before it gets taken down.

I’ve also started watching Darker Than Black now that I realized it was available on Hulu. Many people have recommended the series to me and I even have it in my Netflix queue. So far, the first 2 episodes look interesting. Let’s hope it’s as good as everyone claims it to be. Maybe I shouldn’t set my expectations that high. That’s just setting myself up to be disappointed. ;p

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