• Zhang Jing Chu, an actress from China. Starred in Rush Hour 3 and Protege.
• Lin Zhi Ling, one of Taiwan's top models.

Sorry, no pics. Still can't post any so you'll have to do a google search. Time for class!

Slept for 3 hours last night and got up this morning for class. When I got to class I was fine, but around 20 minutes into lecture I started to drift in and out of sleep. A couple of times, I actually felt as if I were knocked out for hours. I guess those are the couple "good" minutes of rest? When I got home around 1ish, I was gone. I woke up at 7:37pm; just in time for the Laker game. Wasn't a pretty game, but who can argue against the results. Sasha showing once again why he's called the Machine.

This is my first experience with an iPod of any kind. Overall, I'd say it is more user-friendly than the other mp3 players "once" you have a good grasp of how iTunes works. For others this probably isn't hard at all, but for me, I'm still quite unfamiliar with all the iTunes functions making the program foreign. I'm used to clicking on a file and having it play that 1 file in winamp. Whereas iTunes plays that file and loads the rest of the songs in the same folder into the music list. So here's what I set out to do today.

• Put an album that I have on CD onto my iPod. (Sounds easy, but I was really confused on how to do it at first).

Believe it or not, I had to go look up how to do it on google because of how confusing everything was. There's no instructions with the iPod except for iTunes' so-called step by step process. I didn't want to load all my songs onto the iPod, but as soon as I registered the player, it started syncing. I stopped the transfer but the iPod already got a couple of songs put onto it. At that point, I didn't know how to get the songs deleted (Thinking it can be done on the player or through some sort of folder). But after deleting them off my iTunes library, the songs went away. So starting fresh again, this time I enabled the manual transfer without self-syncing. Now I was getting somewhere. With the CD in the drive, iTunes recognized there were songs on the CD, I tried to move them straight from CD to iPod, but that apparently is not the way things are done. I then imported the CD as mp3s into my music library and from the library, I drag and dropped the files into the iPod. Success! But now there were no album arts. Selecting the album as a whole, and going to view its properties, there was a blank box for album art. On Amazon.com, I searched the CD and took the art from the website dragging it and dropping it into the space in iTunes. Worked beautifully. Didn't show up on the Touch though, so I synced it again and there it was on the screen. The process takes a lot longer than I thought, but after configuring it to manual transfers, iTunes is much easier to use. I thought I had to keep all the songs and albums I want on my iPod on the computer's hard drive, but with manual transfers I could delete the songs on the computer and they'd still be available on the iPod.

1/27, once again...for the 24th time. I have some awesome pics to post, which I still can't for now. My utility function right now is in positive preferences of U(x,y)=max[x²y²] (that'll be a circle right?)

Hmm..There must be a conspiracy as to not let me fully enjoy the weekend. I got a quiz/test tomorrow morning, a couple more paragraphs to my case study, and econ hw (derivatives, damn hard).

Rain is relaxing. So relaxing that I didn't do my case study today. lol, I'll force myself to finish it tomorrow. What didn't rain today was the Lakers in the 3rd quarter against the Spurs. Disappointing loss after a pretty good first half.

Didn't feel like I accomplished a lot today in terms of work due early next week, but I shall try again tomorrow after getting back from class. Hope I won't fall asleep due to the gloomy weather. I want to post photos! Bah, no can do until February though. Patiently waiting for my chance.

Yesterday I went to Disneyland. It's no longer the "happiest place on earth" but "where dreams come true."

I came back to Riverside yesterday night, only to find out that today was the last day of the Asian American Expo. I haven't missed it for the past 6 or 7 years (not that it's particularly good or anything) so as unreasonable as it felt to go back, I drove to Pomona to check it out for a few hours. I got ramen and miso soup out of the trip and got to taste a couple dishes from attending vendors. Also, I got those banned-from-sale baby red eared turtles that they have each year. 2 of them for 7 dollars; hopefully I can keep them alive. Currently they're basking under a UV lamp.
On top of everything, I got the air purifier today and finally hooked up the HD player (the DVD player replacement). Watched Lust, Caution with English subs (found it at the Expo, so far nowhere else has it) and The Banquet downstairs with air that I can actually inhale. Both were decent or perhaps my expectations weren't too high.
MLK holiday tomorrow, which means I'll be spending it reading up and writing my 2 case studies.

So the Lakers win streak is now over. What a pathetic loss to the Suns. Neither team played particularly well with 20+ turnovers each, but Lakers just left guys like Diaw wide open on too many different possessions. The game was rather hard to watch. Kwame right now seems like a lost cause. And Lamar, usually he taps it to himself pretty effectively but sometimes it'd be nice if he just went up and secured the rebound. Without Bynum, the team plays a completely different game of basketball. Hopefully for the Lakers, finding a way to win will come sooner rather than later.

Lol, whew! I finally finished going through all the photos. I tried uploading them and Spaces finally gave me the back hand slap. There's a 500 photo limit for the month and apparently I reached it within a day of uploading. I have a whole bunch more, but at this rate with only 500 a month, it'll take me until March to post them all. And to think I tried to finish the photos quicker. That means I can't even post any other new stuff until I finish uploading these. Who would've thought that 500 photos in a month is not enough. Bah, oh well. I'm tired now. Met with my group today to discuss a case due on Friday. Finished my portion without trying to force the issue to maximize pages since writing anything extra on the question may just be redundant. Got class early tomorrow. Banzai! No, just kidding.

  

I just noticed that yesterday's quote is actually quite good:
"Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well."-Josh Billings

I slaved away like a dog and finally got through all the photos. Hah! Now the question is, when will I post them. It'll take a long time in my estimation..At this point, I've used up all my virtual memory after going through all the photos. Because of it, I lost Vista Aero and am stuck in Basic mode until I restart.

I haven't gone through the photos from before or after the vacation, but as for the Taiwan trip photos, I've gone through about 2/3 of them and watermarked the ones to be uploaded and sorted them from photos that won't be uploaded. In the end it's still over 300+ photos and I'm not done. I was hoping it'd be less because uploading is another dreadful task that may take hours.
Well, not much I can do now. Time to shift my efforts to econ and business. I'll get back to this later.

Hmm.. I should be happy that Lakers came out with a victory today, but I'm not. Without Bynum, they're really out of sync. Kobe had to do a lot to keep them in the game, and honestly I don't think the team has found an answer to temporarily replace Bynum's absence. The next few games will be tough, and I was hoping to see how the Lakers would do against teams over .500, but without Bynum, it might not be pretty nor will it be representative of how Lakers will play against these teams down the stretch.

Here's an FFXIII Versus trailer: I thought this game was supposed to be out this Christmas but I guess it's delayed another year?
  

I tried moving the photos yesterday from the card reader to my PC, and finally just gave up after another 45 min. from posting yesterday's entry. I managed to move a whopping 13 files! So instead, I plugged my card reader into the computer with XP and it works like a charm. But even with the XP computer, it took a good 15 minutes to transfer all the files. And because I'm on a wireless network connected via a USB port, when I plugged in the card reader it must've disabled my internet. Without the wireless LAN, I lost my network connection to the computer with Vista. When the files all transferred over, I had to restart the XP comp for it to repair the network connection. (I tried repairing the connection with restart and it didn't work). Once it restarted, I was able to detect it in my network. I tried moving all the files at once..ugh...but the computer stopped responding. I tried to move half of the files, still no good.  1/4? Nope. Each time, I had to restart Windows Explorer in order to start the process again. Finally, down to 30-50 files at a time, I'm getting some action. But it takes 3 minutes or so to move 50 files and I had over 1200 to move. That meant I couldn't go anywhere o_O! But yes, I sat here and did what I had to do. I think I finally finished just a little before 5PM. After the Laker game, (which we won, but best of luck to Bynum's injury..hope he's ok, as he's a crucial role player for the team now) I sorted the files from pre-Taiwan, Taiwan, and post-Taiwan, while also deleting some of the over-blurred photos from poor lighting. That took about an hour and a half. Today I'm attempting to get through watermarking some of them. There's a loooot to go through though, so photos by the end of today is probably a no go. Plus, Laker game at 7PM tonight. No Andrew Bynum, but hopefully we can pull out 7 straight wins. Sonics have been losing quite a few games lately if I remember correctly.

I'm trying to move about 1,200 photos from my memory card to the computer and it's taking a long long time. It's been over half an hour just selecting the photos I want to move over. Microsoft doesn't seem to have an answer to this Vista issue yet o_O. The PC just lags and responds really slowly as photos are being selected. And once they're selected it takes another decade to transfer them from one folder to another. At this point in time, I'm getting a "(Not Responding)" message with a grayed out window. I don't want to restart or end program though because it'll take another lifetime to select all the photos again.

After waxing the car yesterday, my body was so sore. Legs were tired, arms were tired, and feet were tired. To make things worse, I had to bring my sister to the mall to buy "a" present for her friend. That "one" present ended up taking 3 hours of my time as I lingered around and waited.

Another one of those late waking days. Still need to do a couple things...but first it's time to eat some food. The car is really dirty too and is in desperate need of a good wash, although the rain from the past week has been strong enough to get off a lot of crap. Still really tired though, not sure why. The only reason I woke up was for the sake of getting up because it's already past noon.

Didn't know what to eat for dinner today, so I went into a "new" place that my sister brought up. Life Plaza apparently failed to pass inspection standards, so they shut down and were replaced by Butterfly Cafe. The customer service was sub-par for one thing. The food looked ok, tasted a bit salty, and smelled like Chinese food. But, there is no doubt that it is loaded with MSG. I am so thirsty right now that I've been drinking bottles of water minutes at a time. I feel so bloated but my mouth wants more.

Falling asleep. Another tiring day. Not sure what time I'll wake up tomorrow.

After the apartment's incident with the ground level getting soaked, the past few days I've literally been living out of my room. Haven't cooked anything since downstairs smells damp and furnitures are piled in the kitchen. Everything is moved aside or upstairs, so I've been in my room before going out and as soon as I return home and fairly cramped. Good thing I'm used to living in smaller spaces so it doesn't feel as bad. Another thing I've lost out on is watching the Laker games in HD. Standard def. upstairs just doesn't feel the same. The team has been playing well beyond what I had expected of them. Especially Bynum. Sooner or later I'll have to buy tickets to a game, haha. Good win last night against Grizzlies (talk about D. Fish being on fire) and again tonight against the Hornets. Looking forward to see how they do against other teams over .500. Anyways, Ghost Hunters International on now.

Still working on photos to update from the trip.

Holy crap! Ever since getting back from Taiwan, things have been getting hectic with things to do left and right at the apartment and at home. The other day, for example, I patched up the unevenness in the driveway with instant-dry concrete mix. I've also been getting up at 5AM everyday and sleeping around 10PM. Good habit if I could keep it up, but it's pretty abnormal for me. Right now it's 10:45PM, and I just woke up!! Hah, yeah I know; WTF? I didn't even wake up any time in between. Reiterating, that's 10:45 P. M. I wasted a whole entire day in bed, and honestly, I'm still a bit tired. I had no idea it was this late. The sun never came out today, and the rain just sounds so darn peaceful. I've mentioned before how entrancing the rain is right? This is my testament to how well rain works.

Anyways, back to waking up at 5AM. It feels great to be up early. Too bad places don't open until 7AM, haha. Because of Taiwan's Shao bing yio tiao and dan bing, I've been addicted to tou-chiang places. Haven't been to Yong-ho in a long long time, but lately it's been a place on my map I don't mind visiting. Hehe, unfortunately the dan bing is not so tasty.

Kicking off the new year with some water damage! Not cool. The carpet in the living room is completely drenched wet. The place smells really moldy downstairs. Supposedly a pipe from under the apartment burst, so now the floor is covered in water. Never a boring day eh? Now I've had experienced water damages from the walls coming from my neighbors, from upstairs leaking down the ceiling, and a new addition, from under the apartment through the concrete.