oh the Irony

So THursday is usually our group lunch day. Today, one of the guys there sent out an email that he really wanted to go to this famous fast food burger joint. The reason is because he is starting this incredible diet and exercise routine next week for 24 weeks where he will meet with trainer 3 times a day so he won't be able to eat anything he likes. So he is going to satisfy his burger cravings today. We all said "your trainer will hate you to learn you are going to gain 5 pounds before going to see him".haha. Anyway, so we all drove to this burger joint and went in. We went in two cars so our car arrived first, the other car is still on their way. I was in the diet guy's car. We went in the line and the first thing the cashier said was "the beef truck didn't arrive today! We have no meat, only vegeburger and frozen chicken" Then he grumbled "I don't know why I opened". Diet guy practically fainted HAHAHA. It was hilarious, Since we were already there we ended up getting chicken sandwich and fries. Man this is the first time I went to a burger joint and they had no burgers, they did have these excellent garlic fries.

10 minutes after we ordered, the second car arrived. They came in and we all yelled out "they have no beef today!!". They made a sad face of course, but as they got in line and waited, one guy suddenly smirked and yelled to us "He says the beef truck just arrived!!" -_-!!!!! It was totally hilarious as the diet guy's plans were completely ruined. We were like, your trainer is so good he anticipated your cravings and stopped you hahah. Oh the Irony!

vacation plans! ^_^

I am going to Alaska next week for about 10 days for vacation (feel bad cause work is really busy haha). I am pretty excited. I am going with my favorite fellow traveler Paddy and this crazy couple we recruited off the company mailing list. ( I say they are crazy because the guy just got married, he has never gone camping and his wife has never been in a road trip but they are totally gung ho about it.) Paddy always had this dream to drive the Seattle -> Alaska route. It is apparently one of the best roadtrips you can do. We did some investigations and found out that the one way trip takes about 6 days of driving which basically means we have to drive there and come back immediately. Also the rental fees were outrageous in the thousands range. so after weeks of planning (the crazy couple backed out once due to cost but came back) we decided to fly one way and rent a car to drive back. Avis actually had a summer deal for one way drive to Seattle so I guess we are not the only ones doing this. The cost turned out to be acceptable so here is our final plan: I thought I would post this here incase we all got eaten by bears at least you guys would know where I went -_-!

June 30th: Fly Seattle to Anchorage

July 1st: Anchorage - Seward, Anchorage - Denali National Park- Camp for the night

July 2nd: Shuttle bus tour to Wonder Lake, in front of Mount McKinley (10 hour round trip, this is gonna be so painful) camp for the night

July 3rd: Fairbanks - Deadhorse - Prudhoe Bay driving on the infamous Dalton Highway (12 hour one way gravel road to the Northern tip of Alaska inside the Arctic Circle) stop at the last camping site on Dalton highway - camp for the night

July 4th: Prudhoe Bay - Fairbanks - (Another 12 hour gravel road if we are still alive lol)

July 5th: Fairbanks -- Haines Junction and camp. This drive is 8hrs.

July 6th: Drive from Pine Lake - White Horse - Watson Lake (6hrs to get here) - Muncho Lake, BC (10hrs to get here, if we can)

July 7th: drive to Fort St John 7hrs

July 8th: Prince George - Williams Lake - stay for the night

July 9th: KamLoops - Seattle (should be back by midnight).

Route Map:

embarrassment -_-!

So today, in a routine presentation in a routine meeting, I was showing the team our newest test tools and how it can help them simplify testing. I opened boss's brand new laptop, opened internet explorer and typed in the address... connecting..connecting... Nothing. My hand is starting to sweat a little and I have no idea why it wouldn't work since it just worked before i walked in the meeting (classic example of Murphy's Law). So I pulled up remote desktop and connected to my machine because everyone is staring it at me and it is scary. Finally it connected and my desktop showed up, immediately the entire room burst out in a collective "OMG" as they gazed with amazement at my awesomely cluttered desktop. You will see what i mean in a moment. Then they started all to read out the icons I have, so here I was standing in the middle of the room mentally kicking myself for doing this and mentally trying to think if I have anything bad on my desktop (well I don't really but you get paranoid anyway). Then suddenly one guy said "what is that Paris Hilton file", then everybody went 'oooo'. I yelled out "it is her new CD, it is her new CD!!!!!!", and everyone was like "that is even worse!!!' -_-!!!!!! (incidentally, Snoopy this is all your fault! hahha). So after everyone thoroughly inspected everything on my desktop I was able to move on to my presentation with my face completely red hahaha.

screeny of my desktop ,see in 1600x1200 it really ins't that bad!! i still have 3/4 of the space!

fatal error

One of our guys got this error when trying to compile a file on Visual Studios

Fatal Error C1121
Error Message
call to CryptoAPI failed
The compiler made a call to the CryptoAPI and the call failed. Reinstall Visual Studio and possibly reinstall the operating system.

Nothing like reinstalling the operating system to comfort the user lol.

Quake Wars

I saw a video of the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars beta at Youtube today. It looks like a crossbreed of BF2 and Halo. It is strategic FPS with two sides, alien and human. You can be different solder roles (medics, engineer) and drive vehicles, but I don't think there is squad and commander features. the Aliens and Humans have completely different classes etc. Wonder if it is worth looking into. It is online multiplayer only with bot support I think. Can't imagine it being better than BF though. The release date should be sometime in 4th Quarter this year. I looked up the requirement and it is at least playable lol.

System requirements close to Quake 4
"In talking to Kevin Cloud and Paul Wedgewood of id Software and Splash Damage, it was expected that the game would have the same requirements as Quake 4. -- 2007 Santa Monica California Hands on preview session

Minimum System Requirements
Operating System: Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Processor: Pentium PIII 800 MHz Processor or AMD Athlon
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 2™ or ATI Radeon™ 7000 or higher
CD-ROM: 4X or Faster
RAM: 256 MB RAM

Recommended System Requirements
Operating System: Windows XP
Processor: CPU Pentium 4 2.4GHz or Athlon64 3000
Video Card: Geforce FX 5700 or Radeon 9600 or higher
CD-ROM: CDRom 52x or DVD Rom 16x
RAM: 512 MB RAM

The Best Game Ever??!!

Saw some new info about the game Rock Band on our mailing list, it does seem to be turning out to be the best game ever (if it is true)! These are taken from a forum post at Game Informer

- One disk with 4 separate campaigns. Guitar, Drum, Bass and Vocal. Each can be played on its own from start to finish, in addition, a full band game is designed to allow for one huge co-op playthrough.

- Will feature full support for four player online play on both 360 and PS3. Any combination of on/offline play will work and each player can pick their own difficulty setting.

- Flexible community system will allow you to find bandmates anywhere in the world

- There will be a way for you to share your band's triumphs with the world, but the details are still under wraps.

- Musical fret-boards are now transparent so you can see more of the background visuals. Guitar is on the left side of the screen, Bass on the right and drums down the middle. Vocals scroll from right to left along the top of the screen.

- Guitars and Bass now have 10 frets. 5 for the regular sections of the game and 5 for the newly designated solo sections.

- Whammy bar is back as is the tilt to activate rock band's version of star power

- there is a five way switch on the guitar that allows for 5 different self-applied effects to the sound.

- Singing is now more in depth. There is a phoneme detector that will pick up individual vowels and consonants you say. Build up enough highly judged phrases and you'll be able to sing free-form. If you do well enough in free-form, then you'll trigger the vocalist's version of star power.

- Microphone doubles as a tambourine on many songs to combat super long guitar solos where the singer doesn't have much to do.

- Drums are apparently insane. You use actual sticks and hit one of four colored pads in front of you, in addition to a kick pedal attached to the drumming unit. Drummers will also have the ability to do fills etc. in their own little free-form section, do well and you'll trigger the drummers version of star power.

- If one person fails, the whole band does not fail, their section simply turns gray and they have to sit out the rest of the song unless one your band mates initiates star power, which will bring you back into the fold.

- If all bandmates can reach the end of a song, you'll be greeted with one huge free-form jam session.

- There will be a character creation system, and you can create multiple avatars that play different instruments.

- Four themed clothing stores in addition to licensed guitars and pedals and other rock paraphernalia.

- A full set of mo-cap stage movements have been added for each instrument. You can decide whether your vocalist moves like Axel Rose, or stands his ground like Clapton.

- 40 performance venues planned

- All peripherals will be unique to each platform. This isn't the developer's decision. Apparently MS peripherals require special circuit boards.

- You'll be able to craft your own band logo

- The HUD in the screens isn't final but is a good indication of what you can expect

- 4 songs announced in the article, not sure if this is new or old but whatever.
Weezer - Say It Ain't So - Original Master Track
Black Sabbath - Paranoid - Original Master Track
The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again - Original Master Track
Nirvana - In Bloom - Original Master Track

inspirations

In keeping with Kungfucius' theme, here is something I saw about Mr. Woo who builds robot in china. Wait til the end to see the most amazing one, It almost looks too good to be true. My cynical mind wonders if there is a guy in there pretending hahaha.

This is a segment from British show by Paul Merton, called Paul Merton in China


ETA:, after posting this video, I started looking at other segment of his show and I saw this..!!!

OMG, what restaurant they went to?? I have NEVER seen this eww....
Paul Merton in China - Chinese Meal

OMG, what a total waste of space!! that girl is right about Chinese rich people LOL
Paul Merton in China- weird French hotel

OMG, that is so funny!! lol I wonder what happened when the hotel manager founds out
Paul Mertonin China- mistaken identity

Trivia report

SNoopy and I made a come back last night with our newest team members CCP. They are Snoopy's friends who we roped in into joining us. I think they had fun and may come back. It also helps one of the guys on another team actually knew them so there is that competition factor as well haha. The questions were actually really mainstream this time, which made for a more fun experience even if we didn't do very well.
There was a category on gentleman sports that included Sailing, Polo, Snookers and Fencing (thank god for taking Fencing classes in college haha). THen there was Manly sports category which CCP totally rocked. We did ok on real estate, completely bombed the Cowboys and Indians category. The funny thing was that the first question was "what was the name of the Indian chief whose real name means "in the wilderness". We of course were clueless, so I randomly said "crazy horse??" (I had no idea and was making it up)> we all laughed and moved on, and then later, when they came to that question, they were like the answer is ...."Crazy Horse!!". Snoopy said "OMG< we got that one right!! did you put it down??" I said "err, I was just joking so I left that one blank". then I got beaten up for not putting that answer down LOL.

The bonus round was name that Classical COmposition. Finally!! a music category that was not modern rock! We did ok in that, It is sad that I can't remember any music that is later than 1800s lol. In the end, we came in 3rd to last with 29 points. Although now that we don't get free beer, I am not sure it is such a good result after all HAHAHA.

quiz of the day

Saw this in an email thread. The funny thing is I never programmed in PHP hahah.


Which Programming Language are You?

videos

I uploaded some videos I took on the trip. This is the first time I seriously tried out the video function. So looking back, I definitely moved too fast and talked too quietly. Oh well, will do better next time.

Also here is my Big Island hazard signs collage :) ( you might have to zoom in to see some of them) I think the reason they have so much signs is that basically the attitude on the Island is we warned you about stuff but feel free to do whatever you want.

celebrating Edward Norton

I always liked Edward Norton ever since I saw Primal Fear. He is such a wonderful actor and very lowkey, always doing interesting characters. I was reminded of him today when I was telling someone about The Painted Veil which I saw on the airplane. He was remarkably good in it. Then Snoopy watched The 25th Hour today. She was telling me about this amazing monologue that Edward Norton did in this movie. It was truly awesome. So here is it in celebration of Edward Norton.

warning: strong language

trip to Big Island

The task of recapping this trip is rather daunting as so much stuff has happened in 4 days and I am not really that good at remembering the details. so I guess I will do my best. I thought I would post the photos first. We had together about 1000 pictures. I have eliminated them down to 170. I had to get rid of alot of good pictures but I think uploading a thousand pics is a bit much. The pictures are based on chronological order and I made a map of our itinerary. As you can see we pretty much ran all the way around the Island except the most Eastern section. It is ALOT of driving as the island is about as big as Connecticut and Rhode Island put together except more mountainous.





Moonfleck's Hawaii Album