Sayang Central

More on sundogs

I'm such a dork, but I've never heard of them, and they look really neat.

Found a website that talks about this effect (and others): Atmospheric Optics

posted by Paul @ 1/28/2004 04:42:56 PM

Much cooler than a rainbow

From SFGate's day in pictures.

It's called a "sundog"

posted by Paul @ 1/28/2004 04:38:13 PM

A little diversion

So my presentation at work went very well...

But I still have a lot more work to do.

In the meantime, a little diversion.

How fun!

Update: Old link didn't work, found it elsewhere

posted by Paul @ 1/21/2004 05:30:19 PM

It comes from love...

So I sent Minli a present. A t-shirt with this picture on the front:



Hee hee...

You can see more on their website: David and Goliath Tees.

posted by Paul @ 1/15/2004 06:54:30 PM

Doggie Dancing

Minli! Something for you to do with Skewball!

Doggie Dancing!

The video starts off fairly lame, but gets cuter and a more impressive as it goes on.
Make use your sound is turned on!

posted by Paul @ 1/13/2004 12:36:42 PM

Whee... stress at work

Those of you who know what sort of stuff I do at work, you know that its usually pretty stress-free. My projects tend to be very open-ended, where I move on to the next project when I feel the current one is "done." If not something like that, it's something that has far more time allocated to it than needed.

Anyway, for the past couple weeks I've been writing a test harness for a senior engineer to write and run performance tests on a critical subsection of our current chip. I've had everything ready for the engineer for a while now, but he's too busy to switch tasks and write and run the tests. Since the group is starving for data, and the chip is about to be locked down and sent to the fab (the factory), I wrote some basic tests and published the data to the group. If I had wanted to keep a low profile, this was the wrong thing to do -- questions, comments, concerns all came pouring in. I had to perform a basic analysis of the data and generate some pretty graphs to show the data effectively -- basically the job that the senior engineer was supposed to be doing.

My old manager, now my manager's manager, apparently liked what he saw, and told me to give a full-fledged presentation of the performance of this subsection of the chip to a group of senior engineers, managers, directors, and two VPs. The troubling thing is not only do I not have a full understanding of this subsection of the chip, I don't have any data to analyze with such knowledge, nor do I have tests to create aforementioned data, or even a test plan to figure out what tests to write! At least I have a week to get it done, right?

I know enough to recognize this as a chance to get noticed, so I'll have to put in the extra effort and hours to get it all done well... but I swear the damned Monkey year curse has already kicked in:

... the first thing I did was send out a meeting invite to this oh-so-illustrious audience containing the wrong date.

sigh

posted by Paul @ 1/12/2004 11:14:29 PM

My weekend...

On Friday Adam and I headed over to Evan & Lori's for our semi-monthly Poker Night. We enjoyed some tasty chicken (prepared in a fashion other than Lori's choosing), Greek salad, and a whole lot of alcohol. Somehow we found ourselves in a competition as to who could hold their liquor best. After a total of 14-16 drinks each, we decided that we were tired of consuming expensive vodka, and should find our way home. We got our friend Ming to drop us off at home, but this of course left the problem of getting our cars back.

The next morning we awoke, both slightly drunk and rather hung-over. Emily arrived to drag Adam out of bed, and was a dear to make us some tasty waffles with Adam's new waffle maker. The day passed without incident, with Adam and Emily catching up on sleep, and me catching up on several episodes of Charmed on my TiVo. Dinner time rolled around, and we found ourselves stuck in the apartment entirely lacking ingredients for anything worth making. We didn't even have enough rice for 3 people -- or garlic -- or fresh vegetables. And we didn't have our cars, so we couldn't go out for anything. I ended up making a decent pasta with beef & onions. Quite tasty given the lack of anything to work with -- and the fact that I'm not that good a cook. Lori came by that night to pick us up so we could get our cars back.

I fell asleep pretty early, but woke up at 2am with a really bad neckache. I eventually dragged myself out of bed and watched several more episodes of Charmed . I love that show, as you can tell. At about 4:30 I went back to bed, neck hurting significantly less. I then proceeded to dream non-stop for the next 8 hours:

My first dream was set underwater in the ruins of my current apartment. The justification at the time was that the world flooded, but for some reason we had no difficulty breathing. However, we were under attack by these strange sea-cucumber-like aliens with big teeth that would tear holes in the walls or doors/windows and suck people out of the apartment and eat them. Strangely enough the stupid aliens looked like they were from a very bad sci-fi flick and were very obviously made out of rubber, with rubber teeth and all, mouths not unlike the sand creature in the Return of the Jedi. Thankfully, Leo (the angel from Charmed) was on hand to orb us out of any danger, that is until the aliens ate him. I'm not sure what happened next, but I probably decided that the dream was stupid enough and ended it.

My next dream was about me going to a job interview at Intel. I, of course, neglected to bring instructions on how to find the interview location, but wandering around their many buildings seemed like a good idea. The first building I entered contained a weird hawker-center (food court) type establishment and long, very-run down hallways filled with low priced merchants. I stopped to have a snack and but then decided I needed to keep looking for my interviewers. I found my way several buildings down to a large lecture hall, emptying of young people, all (obviously?) there to interview for jobs. Among these folk, I found the people who were waiting for me, I was late, and they were already grumpy at me. We then walked a long, long distance, through buildings with long empty hallways, others with more hawker-centers, even between the buildings was a 5-foot wide maze-like canal filled with water, which we walked through for some length. Finally we ended up entering the third floor of a log-cabin-looking building. Inside was the backstage area of a theater or something, filled with weird costumes and various types of skimpy clothing. For some reason it seemed like a good idea to try on (without taking off the rest of my clothing) a bright-orange thong (what the hell?). My interviewer clearly didn't approve, so I promptly took it off... The interview, which was more of an interrogation with the really bright lights and all, went very poorly. Shortly thereafter I woke up... after all that, I decided I was not going back to sleep and dragged myself out of bed.

Care to intepret these dreams?

Anyway, afterwards Adam and I watched a bunch of football, did a little bit of work on the computer, and went shopping for food at Safeway, restocking our house with non-perishable, or at least freezable items. They didn't have any good rice though, so we're still without rice. Sigh... I think we're both guys who need to live with women to keep our lives in order.

posted by Paul @ 1/12/2004 12:58:08 AM

The couple that plays together stays together

Okay, So I remember playing video games with Minli as well. At least I'm slightly more reasonable than this, from Penny-Arcade

posted by Paul @ 1/09/2004 05:00:46 PM

Bad Monkey Year!?!

Hmph, shall refrain from making snide comments about Paul's super-late blog. Anyway, just read this Chinese horoscope thingy that said that the next lunar year (starts on the 22nd of January this year) is not going to work for us monkeys.

Great. Not that I believe in all these prediction things, but it would be nice to have a happy and positive prediction, wouldn't it? Instead of the doom and gloom... I quote from the email forwarded:

"Luck will not be so smooth this year and you will need to be more careful in the things that you do. You must stay alert at all times to be able to react to sudden changes and problems solved much easier. Those at work should keep low profile. Do not be too proud and arrogant, as it will cause a lot of problems that will affect your career. This is not a good year to be involved in gambling and investments because the wealth star is not performing at its best. Be careful of your personal safety when going outdoors for you may end up seriously injured. For problems in love, do not expect too much. It really isn't your year!"

Obviously not going to play mahjong this year!

posted by ML @ 1/07/2004 12:48:26 AM

Happy New Year!

Okay, so I'm a little late. Okay, nearly a week late. But New Year's was just now, anyway, right?

What do I remember from 2003? Not much, but I'll try anyway:
- An apartment on campus with Minli
- Minli's cooking, including the failed experiments :)
- Game Nights
- Las Vegas and San Diego
- Living in Redwood City with Adam
- Skye
- Buying my first car
- Poker Nights
- Pool Nights
- Going to Singapore for Thanksgiving
- Going back to Hawaii and never visiting the Beach (except for a failed effort to visit when it was raining...)

posted by Paul @ 1/05/2004 01:38:54 PM

A True-Blue-Me Fan

Have realized that Albus Peedle Skewball is a True-Blue-Me fan. Besides having a strange penchant for stealing my underwear, he shows his utmost devotion by gulping up my snot-filled tissues.

Gross.

We had obedience class today, and Skew has improved: he no longer whines and cries, and he only hyperventilated once. Just that he's still not doing so hot on the obedience part, but I guess I can't wish for everything to be perfect. On a random note, did I ever mention that anyone who opens the fridge gets Skew's undivided attention for the next 5 minutes? He's a foody little fella. The goal at the end of this week is to keep him in a Sit-Stay position for 2 minutes while major distractions are going on. For Skew, a major distraction would be someone eating. Not like big fat dogs trying to kill him or anything, just someone eating in front of him. I'm doomed, will have to train him till one of us breaks down. Probably me.

Oh yeah, he's got a new favourite toy, a stuffed cat. He carries it around and sleeps with it next to him, only too cute. See picture:

posted by ML @ 1/04/2004 06:21:31 AM

Deja Vu
As a follow-up to my previous post, guess what I did this year? Found myself kicking off 2004 with a *small* bang in a nice hotel room in Singapore with Alice, Celia and Julie. Flipped channels, found the New Year Countdown show, watched it, yelled "Happy New Year" at the appropriate time, and then slumped back into a sleepy and slightly drunken stupor.

Vaguely remember watching some strange documentary about... aborigines? Very very faint. Whoopee, new year.

In other news, had a weird-ass dream about a computer generated mega-heron (those birds with long beaks, just a really huge one) attacking a ship. The bird got so near I even saw the pixels!

Again, I say, great way to start the new year.

posted by ML @ 1/02/2004 01:55:54 AM