Too bad I don’t go to university of calgary.

I visited Stella and Eugene in the fashion district today and I ended up with two christmas presents as well as a beanie ($2) and a hat ($3.33) for myself. Having proved we were hardcore enough to shop in downtown Los Angeles, Eugene and I sent photos of ourselves in our newly aquired headwear to the bloods and the crips, to see if we were hard enough to join.

We haven’t heard back.

Lauren and I are planning on going to a nice dinner for our anniversary and so she calls the restaraunt to make reservations and gets a message that confuses her. Lauren hands me the phone and says “it’s an automated message, listen to it.” I pick up the phone, dial the same number, raise a glass that I’m drinking out of, and with no ring I hear “Hi, this is Lana, you’ve reached [the restaraunt].”

Since my mouth was full of water, I just hung up.

Today I got an odd email from a spoofed (fake) email address. It’s not spam, it’s not a chain letter, it’s just this poem telling me to lose weight. At least that’s what I got out of it.

There are a couple thing’s I’ve noticed: There’s a lot of slang and some very awkward english, for example it says “so have potential” when I think it means “you have so much potential” and “do you not see” instead of “don’t you see.” I haven’t been able to find any mention of this on the internet after some pretty heavy searching, so I’m beginning to believe this is one of a kind, whether it was meant for me or not.

I can’t think of what this person is trying to accomplish, much less who would do it. I’ve posted this entire email below, colored to indicate it’s being quoted. If you’ve seen this before, or have a clue as to who wrote it, let me know.

you are going through a tough time
lazy times
do you not see?
In order for a satisfying life we must learn to love ourselves completely
someone in your neck of the woods cares about you
someone like everyone

(there is somebody that cares for you)

I was planning on going down to an auction in Irvine because there were some computers that I wanted to bid on. They had Pentium 3 800 mhz processors, 128mb ram, and 10GB hard drives, I wanted to use one of them as a server and intended to spend no more than $50. Originally, I was going to go down with Eugene, but he was needed by Stella, so I ended up not going. At first I was annoyed, but after i saw my computers go for $125 each on the online feed of the auction, I thanked her silently. She saved me a 40 mile trip through Los Angeles traffic.

So now I thank her not so silently. Thank you Stella. You saved me $5 in gas and a whole lotta headache.

Acerbic A*cerb”ic, a.
Sour or severe.

I suggest everyone incorporate this word into their vocabulary immediately.

A british perspective

“The world trade episode was just horrible. For a good long while the world actually felt sorry for the United States. Then there was that whole 9/11 thing which I still don’t understand. What the hell happened on the ninth of November?”
-Eddie Izzard

Though I think most of the world, especially myself, had about given up on it, but they finally captured Saddam. Looking like your average street bum in San Francisco minus the Santa hat and trading a begging cup for a pistol, he was dug out of the hole he was hiding in, dragged out of his voluntary live burial to be humiliated in public.

What can I say besides our troops are studs and studdettes. The only downside to this is in my eyes Bush is now pretty much a lock for the election next year. Oh well. You can’t have it all.

The driver’s side headlight went out on my car while at work, and I had a couple thoughts about it:

Thought Number 1: It’d be really funny to cut up a car bra to make it look like an eye patch.

Thought Number 2: The brights still work, maybe I should just drive around with those on all the time.

Thought Number 3: Instead of Sparky, my car shall hereby be known as Blinky.

“I bought a David Blaine doll yesterday… But I couldn’t get it out of the box.”
-Anonymous

Recently, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon among the contacts on my buddy list. Any time some funny flash animation or strange but true fact comes to my attention, it doesn’t come from just one person.

It comes from almost every single person on my buddy list. Even people whose only connection would be that they share a coveted position on my buddy list.

I’ve also noticed that the amount of time between hearing about these internet oddities from different people is decreasing, almost like a watermark for the increasing connectivity we experience with each passing day as even more and more people create an email address or an instant messaging account for the first time.

It all started with this flash animation. I heard about it from two separate people, Eugene from SMC, and Ryan from Cal Poly, within about 10 minutes of each other. Then I noticed it on Ralph’s (of Cal Poly) profile, and a fourth person’s profile, all on the same day. None of these people are directly connected in any way that I can figure out.

Since then, I’ve started noticing that any time I discover anything interesting on the internet, at _least_ 20% of the people I tell about it have already heard about it, though a lot of times it’s 50% or higher. Some examples include:

1) Go to Google and type in “miserable failure” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky.” I didn’t post this with my earlier google trick because I’d already heard about it from several people I know. It was interesting that TWO MORE people told me about it since I had it posted last night, including Alex, who’s been in D.C. for the past quarter.

2) “The Star Wars kid,” a poor husky kid who didn’t know the video camera was on while he was doing his best impression of Darth Maul fighting with nobody. Why this one got passed around so much, I have no idea. Maybe a little too close to home for me to find it funny, but a lot of people think it’s hilarious.

3) Kollaboration 2001. This one, unlike the last one, I highly recommend. It has to be seen to believe. There’s a couple of very decent kids dancing at the beginning, whatever, but then this geeky looking kid comes on stage and his bones just disappear. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I found out about this one from Eugene and when I told Lauren about it she’d already seen it.

There’s more examples, and this will be continued and edited later, but alas, work beckons.

“You scored a 66% on the final exam. Your final grade is an A. Congratulations!”
-Professor Bresloff

Talk about something you never EVER thought you’d read. I only needed a 5% to get a B in the class, but I THOUGHT I needed a 75% to get an A.

1) Go to Google
2) Type “french military victories”
3) Hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”

(23:10:22) Eugene: i learned so much today during my c++ final

This last Sunday Lauren and I went to the USC band banquet, which was an interesting experience as always. I got a new suit that I like and actually fits me, $99 at Hollywood Suit outlet. I went for the dark brown because it looks good with my hair. The band banquet is an interesting mix of people, most of them drunk, all of them loud and having a good time. I was surprised to see my favorite sports radio host, Petros Pappadakis, was the guest of honor at the banquet and I got to take a picture with him.

Lauren was sporting a most excellent polka dot dress and we both had some rather cool shoes, mine were my new brown adidas and she had some brown Sauconys that simultaneously matched my suit and shirt. Good stuff. Obligatory picture taken at the banquet:

Ok, so my blog’s basically up to date now, no more until after tomorrow’s final. blech.

My Dad and his three brothers all came down to visit me this past weekend to come watch USC THWOMP the Oregon State Beavers. The football game was excellent and it was a good Saturday in general. It started at Canter’s for breakfast, moved on to the Coliseum for the game, then to Baja Fresh For dinner and then to see the world famous Groundlings at 10pm. If you don’t know, the groundlings is basically a great comedy theatre and is one of the main breeding grounds for SNL peeps. The theatre is on Melrose (Yes, THAT Melrose) and it has some interesting stores across the street:

Good times.

I saw the movie “Love Actually” in the theatres with Lauren and liked it enough to mention to you right here, right now. This film ruled, there’s not a second I would have cut from the whole movie. It’s hilarious, though admittedly a chick flick, but it’s going down as one of those guilty pleasures in the same vein as “When Harry Met Sally”. Right now I’d say it’s one of my top 10 movies of all time and I plan on seeing it again in the theatre before the end of the year.

A friend of mine gave this movie an A-, which after seeing this movie, I consider an insult. Especially since he gave another movie an “A,” a movie in which, I’ve been told (via Eugene), Tom Cruise once again gets good acting mixed up with staring at something really hard.

P.S. The cookies I made are slammin.

Cookies are in the oven. I almost mixed the eggs with the flour instead of the oven, but thanks to Lauren, that disaster was averted.

I know I said I would wait until after finals to update my blog, but I’ve got all day tomorrow to study for my last serious final and I need a break after today, so I’ve decided to update now, studying be damned. I was originally going to have this all be one huge post, but I’ve come to realize it’s better to break it down. So first off, Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving was EXCELLENT, I got to see a lot of family and even more fantastic food. The first night in San Jose my grandma arranged a dinner especially for me and it included a Honey Baked Ham, home made rolls, home made raspberry jam, and mashed potatoes with gravy. And thanksgiving was yet to come. Thanksgiving was another meal of epic proportions with tons more family and just as much food. You can see here that they managed to somehow get me with my tongue out by not telling me there was a picture being taken:

Also I got this awesome snapshot of my sister and grandmother both looking cute and very obviously related:

The only weird thing that happened is that I discovered my parents have censored our home television so that my sister doesn’t accidentally stumble across naked people on TV. This wouldn’t bother me if she was SEVEN, but as she’s seventeen and can freely go out and view movies such as American Beauty, American Pie, or any other American film with people completely in the buff without parental permission, it seems kinda silly to have “True Lies” censored because Jamie Lee Curtis shows a little leg. Also movies such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” are censored because they’re so old they’re not rated by the MPAA. I LOVE IT!

I’m gonna make some cookies, then post some more.

Wow, I just took my physics final and, well, wow. I went in with a pretty strong A. Now I don’t know. wow.