Snapshots

Dez, Ben, and I went for our final “-lympic” event: Paralympic gold/silver/bronze medal curling game.  It was Canada vs South Korea for gold/silver, and Sweden vs USA for bronze/nada.

Of course, we were mostly watching the Canada vs South Korea game, not just because we’re Canadians, but because they put the Sweden vs USA game on the sheet closest to where we sit, so we can’t actually see much of it since too many heads were blocking our view.

There are a total of 8 ends (as opposed to 10 ends in regular curling).  The Canadians was demolishing the Koreans by the halfway point, 8-1.  7 point difference.  Pretty hard to come back on.

And then Koreans scored 2… then another 2… then another 1…  Oh man, it was nerve-wrecking.  Deja vu all over again as we compare the parallels to our women’s gold medal game.  Women led… until the last end, where they led by 2 points.  Yup.  And then overtime… then lost.  Well, the game was a nailbiter for sure.  Good thing the outcome was different.

Too bad USA lost again, so they got nada.

Anyway, on a separate topic, for those who didn’t click on any of my previous links: Those links are actually a subset of all (or nearly all) the photo highlights we have of Benny.  We have thousands of photos, and Dez selects the good ones, as well as ones that tell a story.  I post them using a free and great simple php-script gallery that I found on the web that did exactly what I wanted my gallery to do, except doing it better than if I were to code it myself.  I even donated $10 because I was so impressed.

Benny’s gallery is mostly for the grandparents who are not computer savvy, but also for people who would like to have a glimpse of what have been happening to us.  It’s categorized by months, with subcategories of special events.

Onto another unrelated topic, there has been much changes at work.  It’s still too early to tell if it will be good or bad in the long run, but changes are certainly happening.  Adapting to changes is never as easy as staying in a status quo.  I’m handed with more responsibilities, which is both welcoming and challenging.  I always like a good challenge, but sometimes I reflect on whether I really want to be committed to this line of work.  I know for certain that I enjoy software development, but I do feel that it’s a “top 3″ rather than a “top 1″.  It’s in the “I enjoy it but I don’t have a fiery passion for it” category.

Benny is now 7 months old.  Time seems to be accelerating, and the world is changing so fast.

In the blink of an eye, another month has passed.  I guess I just have to blink one more time and I’ll be a dad!

Anyway, I still suck as a golfer.  I think I am making some progress, but if I really am, then it’s really slow progress.  My fingers have been bandaged for days at a time, and continuously.  Different fingers get blisters depending on how I grip the club, which has been varying as I try out new things.  I still hit the ball poorly from time to time, and strike the mat, both help form the blisters in my hand.

The golf lessons ended a few weeks ago.  During the last lesson, I lost my 7 iron on the golf course, somehow.  I still don’t have it.  I might just have to live with(out) it.  I bought 2 wedges on craigslist at less than half the price I would get from Golf Town.  So my collection is nearly complete.  I just need to get a couple of hybrids, and overlook the fact that I don’t have my 7.  Not like it matters that much, since I still suck.  When I suck less, I will buy a new set, from craigslist, again.  After factoring the taxes, buying great-condition used clubs from craigslist is like buying clubs at 40% of the price.  It’s just too good to pass up.

Got my driver’s license renewed just yesterday.  It still says my height and weight as the same as when I was 16 years old.  The lady didn’t bother to ask me.  I guess it’s close enough.  It would be great to update it though.

I slept a lot last night.  I think I slept a total of 10 or 11 hours, and then took a 3.5 hour nap.  I guess that might be an unconscious stalling to read the book, The Birth Partner.  Yup, only 1 month to go and I still haven’t read the book(s) that I am supposed to read.  And now I’m blogging, which might be another attempt to put it off.

During my 3.5 hour nap, I had a pretty vivid dream (which is often the case for afternoon naps, I find) about being on a surprise Disney cruise.  I was again wondering what I was going to tell my parents, and wondering to myself how come I got on the ship again.  It left from Vancouver, and was heading to Victoria.  I think that was when I realized it was a dream.

Work has been fairly busy for me.  I’ve been working on this feature for 3 weeks now, and I’m still not done.  The bugs from other features have been coming in, and have been put off until I finish this feature.  It’s going to get busier and busier.  Well, at least I’m not really stuck on anything — just lots of work, that’s all.

There’s going to be lots of work at home, too.  Dissembling a table in order to fit the crib, which we have to assemble.  OMG, the book is 300 pages.  I better get cracking.

Wow, time sure flies.  Almost 3 weeks since I last blogged.  I really should do it more often.

So, what have I been doing lately?

I’ve been golfing weekly at the local pitch and putts (QE Park and Central Park).  I’ve also been attending a weekly golf group lesson (5 in total, have done 2 so far).  I’ve also gone once or twice a week to the Richmond driving range (near work) at lunch.  Pitch and putts are par-54 courses (18 par-3 holes), and my scores were 75, 68, and 73 (today).  Next Thursday my coworkers and I will be heading to an executive length course (Country Meadows, par-58, which is mainly par-3′s with four par-4′s).

Next week I will also be attending the annual general meeting of the company I worked at back in 2001 as a co-op student.  I bought some shares back when I was there.  It’s still a private company, and surviving.  It survived the dot-com bust, and it seems like it’s surviving the current economic crisis also.  They had their first “profit” year.  I’ll get to find out how they’re doing.  At least I don’t anticipate it to be feel like a funeral.

I’ve been playing Grand Slam Tennis with the new Wii Motion Plus accessory.  EA games are great values when you know people who work there and can get you games for cheap. I also have the new Tiger Woods ’10, but haven’t gotten into that yet, since I had to level up my guy in tennis so I can kick the butt of a coworker, which should be soon now.

The new iPhone 3.0 OS had just been released, and it’s great.  Although one of the biggest features that I looked forward to (Voice Control) is not available in my old iPhone 3G, the other features are pretty cool too.  I tried tethering, and it works very well.  I was extremely excited to find out that one of the podcast sorting bugs have been fixed (since I use that daily and it has been a nuisance for 9 months).

Ever since that 24K run, my body just felt slightly weaker.  But I am still going to the gym.  I was in the maintenance mode since then, but I think it’s now time to push for some more improvements.  More and more coworkers seem to be interested in the Pose method.  If I don’t keep training, I’ll look bad next year.

My parents have gone on an Alaska cruise (Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Sea) since last Saturday, and I had the responsibility of cleaning cat poop, refilling cat food trays, buying a couple of things for my grandma, and making sure everything’s ok.

We officially got our first baby stuff.  A stroller, a high chair, and a crib.  All from her cousin.  I guess now is the time to collect the necessities.

The weather in Vancouver has been great.  Although a bit on the hot side, it really has been uncharacteristically sunny and pleasant.  Forecast says cloudy and maybe rain for the next little while, but that’s great too, since it really has been getting kind of hot.  I haven’t felt that I had good sleep for quite some time.

This past weekend was nice and relaxing for the most part.  I went to the gym a few times, watched some golf on TV, and spent quite a bit of time playing Professor Layton with Dez on the Nintendo DS.

The side story of the weekend was the computer upgrades and repairs that I did.

It has been over a year since I wanted to upgrade the storage capacity at home.  I kept waiting and waiting for the hard drive prices to keep falling, while keeping an eye on our decreasing capacity due to photos and videos and whatnot.  Finally, I decided it was time to jump in to get two WD 640 GB drives for $65 x 2 + tax.

I struggled to think of how to best use it.  In the end I decided to upgrade the 250 GB hard drive on the iMac as well as the 500 GB Time Machine backup drive.  This would free up the 500 GB for other back up purposes.

So I Googled “iMac hard drive upgrade” and found some very nice posts about how to do it.  I never would have imagined I would need to get suction cups in order to remove the glass on the monitor.  And I had to get torx screw drivers.

All went very well, actually.  Almost too well.  Despite my initial expectation that opening an iMac would be as hard as a laptop, it was actually easier.  And I was very impressed by the Time Machine feature of OSX Leopard.  I basically swapped out the drive, turned on the iMac, chose “restore backup from Time Machine”, and waited for 3 hours and voila, it’s as if the computer was never down.  Time Machine worked as well as it said it would.  It was one of the most, if not the most, important reason I decided to get us a Mac back in 2007.  I certainly can’t vouch for any Windows’ back up systems.  It had always been a struggle trying to get all my preferences back, removing programs that I no longer used, etc.  I actually wanted a cleaner, leaner Windows when I did my re-installations, whereas I wanted the Mac exactly as it was before I did the upgrade.

Anyway, Dez took a nap and woke up seeing that all was done, as if the Mac had never gone through the surgery.  Very impressive.

After the success, I decided to deal with my PC to try to set up some RAID system, or at least put the extra hard drives to some use.  As I fiddled around the innards of the PC, I found that I couldn’t readily add more hard drives to it.  So I decided to leave it be.  But guess what, the computer could no longer be powered on.

I had this “computer-can’t-be-powered-on” issue last year.  I bought the Antec Sonata II quiet case back in the December of 2006, and it was a terrific case.  But only until a while later I read on the forums that there was a known power supply issue.  More info can be found by Googling “Antec Sonata SmartPower PSU problem”.  Basically, you can’t turn on the computer anymore, even though it seems like it’s still working.  i.e. the light on the motherboard is still on.  I even called Antec last year, and left a message.  But in the end I did not pursue the problem, because it miraculously worked again.  And it continued to work until this weekend.

I don’t know what triggered it.  But anyway, it just wouldn’t turn on anymore, and I had enough of it.  I did not have the patience to wait for it to be resurrected like last year.  My QuickTax installation was on the PC, and I still needed it to file our taxes.  So it was time to get rid of the power supply once and for all.  I went out and bit the bullet and bought a $80+tax Seasonic power supply.  I always knew of Seasonic’s reputation, and it was always slightly more than I was willing to pay.  But it was known to be quiet, and reliable.  So after putting up with this power issue for the 2nd time, I decided not to cheap out on the power supply.  Yup, after taking a bunch of stuff out and putting a bunch of stuff back in, the PC is now working fine.

The total electronics upgrade and repair bill for this weekend was $340.  :-\

I am attending a conference this coming Friday to Sunday in San Francisco.  I delayed any booking of hotel and flight because I was not sure if Dez would feel well enough to come with me.  She decided to not come with me to San Fran, so this would cut down the amount of time I spend there.

About a year ago, the conference organizer had told us they booked a “block” of rooms at the Holiday Inn – Golden Gateway hotel for the attendees for a special price of $135 / night.  I thought it was too expensive, so I always planned to stay Jeff, who lived about an hour’s drive away.  I didn’t think the price was “special”, since when I checked the price about half a year ago, a normal room booked through their website was about $135.

As the conference drew nearer, I decided that staying with Jeff wasn’t a terrific idea after I found out the conference starts at 8:45am and possibly ends at around 9pm.  I would lose a lot of time in the commute, and/or Jeff would lose a lot of time driving me.  It would’ve been better if I stayed in downtown San Fran for 2 nights.  So I decided to use Priceline to hopefully minimize my hotel costs.  I’ve heard of it, but never used it until today.

For those of you who don’t know Priceline, the basic idea is this:  You name your own price, and if the vendor accepts your price, you are immediately “committed”.  So, for hotels, you pick your travel dates, your city, your quality (1-star to 5 stars), the “region(s)” where you are willing to stay, and your offer price.  After you picked everything, you then enter your credit card info, and submit.  If all the criteria are met, then the money is charged on your credit card and Priceline tells you which hotel you won your bid for.  If you don’t win the bid, you would have to wait 24 hours to bid with the same criteria again.  You can’t just change the price and bid again, but you can change/add a region, or change the dates, or change the quality of the hotel that you want, and then try again.

The PRO of using Priceline is the potential savings.  Historical trends show that people save up to 50% off the retail advertised prices of the hotels.  The trade off is that you don’t get to pick which exact hotel you stay at.

So, my plan was to pay around $60 / night to stay at a decent hotel in downtown San Fran.  The hotel where the conference is held is on the north edge of region 1.  But, because region 1 is so big, I could end up on the south end of region 1, which would be much farther than if I stayed at region 10 or 9.

As a test, I decided to try region 10 first.  I first picked 3.5 stars.  It said the average price was $169/night.  Offering $60 is kinda pushing it.  Well, I didn’t plan to win right off the bat anyway, so it’s a good test to see how the process works.

So I didn’t win.  I then added region 9, and adjusted the quality to 3 stars.  I was tempted to change my offering price of $60 to $65… but then I figured I have a few more days left, so I should stand my ground.

Again, I didn’t get it.  So $60 / night for any 3-star or higher hotels in regions 9 and 10 is simply too low.  I thought about changing the quality to 2.5 stars…  But then I figured to just try region 1 instead.

I chose region 1, 3-stars (it says average price is $118/night), and again offering $60.  As the server went to work querying the database, I hoped I either didn’t get it, or got it closer to where the conference is held.  I mean, I was willing to walk a few (up to 15) short blocks, but even that is pushing it.

I was like, wow, you got to be kidding me.  My offer was accepted by the hotel where the conference is held?  How cool is that?!  I have zero blocks to walk!  And to think the “special” price for conference attendees was $135?!  I would think the hotel is busier that weekend due to the conference… but maybe lots of people booked elsewhere (for cheaper) due to the $135 / night price tag?

I checked their website now, and a standard room for that weekend is now $160 / night if I were to book it through their website.  Wow.  This was the best-case scenario for me – cheap, 2-night stay at the hotel where it’s held.  I just scored a few extra hours of sleep.