Cambridge I woke up today at 6:30, went back to sleep, woke at 12:23 - then decided that I couldn't lounge around my bed all day. So I decided to go visit Cambridge and meet up with Andrew.

Driving up I promptly got lost. Having my Treo helped, I was able to get directions via Mapquest. However as most of you know, sometimes the online directions are total BS. Boston/Cambridge is quite the college town. I drove past five that day, including Boston University, MIT, Cambridge College, Harvard, Tufts University.

I do have to say that the Harvard girls are smoking hot. Wowww....

Anyways I wandered around Harvard Square until about 7 where I caught up with Andrew. He and Wendy have a nice place right next to the Law and EE buildings. We ate at a sushi joint (first place I've seen to have Inari!) and caught up. It was good seeing him again. Then he showed me around the Law Library and his cube in the EE building. After that I left and promptly got EXTREMELY LOST. I have no idea how that happened (oh wait, i know ... I'm a DUMBASS!), anyways mapquest helped me out a little but I got lucky and found 90E somehow. Then fell asleep watching the oscars.  ¶ 12:06 AM 0 comments

  Reporting from Connecticut Not much... fixing up my aunt's computer. I figured I'd stop by one last time to finish what I started. Went pretty smooth so far. My aunt and uncle are pretty clueless when it comes to computers and the internet so I'm trying to slowly educate them. My uncle was pretty happy when I created a yahoo email account for him :0 Later on I will teach my aunt how to burn CDs and DVDs.

EDIT: my aunt later gave me another $100 as a 'goodbye gift'. WTH too nice. I grudgingly came to the conclusion that it would make her happy if -- I took the $$$ rather than throwing it back into the house and running out the door then driving off before she could chase me down and throw the money into the car ...

Anyways I managed my time so that I'll be heading back in the afternoon just in time to go clubbing tonight. I only have one week left so I have to fit a ton of stuff into my schedule. Meeting up with Andrew at Harvard, meeting up w/ my cousin's friend for sushi. Plus doing a bunch of stuff w/ my coworkers since we are all leaving next week.

Training was a breeze this week. I didn't even open my book, didn't do most of the HW labs, and still did pretty well. Helps that the instructor told us there was no course test which means that my brain shut down on Tuesday. Although I should get a pretty good evaluation since I participated a lot. We studied EMC Control Center which is a pretty nifty piece of software - WHEN IT IS WORKING.

Obligatory liquor remark - yes I got buzzed last night, playing drinking games that I've never heard of and drinking some nasty liquor that really sucked. Good stuff. Thanks the treo I got some pics, wooo.  ¶ 9:18 AM 0 comments

  phone blog Blogging from my new phone right now. Yes it is the new hotness. :)

Treo!  ¶ 8:28 PM 0 comments

  All star weekend I'm pretty pissed at myself for falling asleep during both the Dunk Contest and the All-Star game. I missed out.

Josh Smith. I knew he had mad hops from watching his High School reel pre-draft but this guy looks like he has a future. At least he is exciting to watch. Oh yeah and who did the Warriors draft? Andris Bie-who?

On the other hand, pretty happy that AI got the MVP. Especially after I had a heated discussion with a couple co-workers about AI on the way back from Boston. They just had ridiculous logic as to why AI sucks (haters) and I ripped them to shreds. I usually don't get that argumentative but when I hear stupid BS I have to call people out.

We were supposed to go to New York this week but things didn't pan out. Everyone was just dead tired after drinking on Friday and it carried over to the next couple days.  ¶ 6:41 AM 0 comments

  Lots of stuff that happened that I forgot to blog about Past week - training really sucked because our instructor was horrible and no one learned anything. However we all passed the course exam so that was good. None of the labs were up-to-date, instructor didn't speak English and got pissed if I forgot the AIX command from slide 62 in the book, etc.

Some good bad news. I got my Treo 650 for $260 and after rebates and stuff it'll be $110 hopefully. This phone is freakin' amazing with the stuff that you can do with it. Contract w/ Verizon isn't over tho so I had to get a new number and switch to Cingular since Verizon is mad lagging on the Treo.

The bad news is that someone messed up and my SIM card is useless. This pisses me off to no end. Grrrrr. Worst case scenario is that I'll have to wait until I get back to Cali to fix the problem. Everyone else thinks the phone is dope and wants to get it too. It is a bit on the wide side but I could get a beater phone and put the SIM card in that one for things like ski trips... maybe something like a Razor :).

Poker losings: Went to Foxwoods last week and waiting a lot of time to get to sit down at a table. Played limit 2/4 which kinda sucked cuz it was limit. Oh wells. I only won a couple hands, was down $40, then my relatives showed up to pick me up WAY TOO EARLY I MIGHT ADD. This is how that happened.

Aunt: Hi we are coming to pick you up at the casino.
me: uhh I might be staying late here so maybe I should call you guys when I'm done.
Aunt: That's ok we are going to the casino now.
me: ......

Anyways they got there and my aunt called me three times within a span of two minutes. So I finally left the table grudgingly. It was a good experience for me, especially since the blackjack limits were $25 which is ridiculous. I can't afford that kind of action. Poker was much cheaper and lasted longer. One of my friends Matt rocked the stud table to the tune of $160. Another won $500 at blackjack. My cohorts Vinh and Karthik both were down $100. Good fun.

Then I hung out w/ my relatives from CT sat night and sunday. Met my cousin's bf. He's cool, he has a Treo 600. Fixed their computer a bit but I'll have to go back one day to upgrade their OS to XP. My Uncle had some interesting stories about my dad that he prolly would never have told me. I hope they move out to Cali after they retire because life in CT seems rather boring. Not a whole lot of stuff to do besides hit the casinos. Plus my uncle and my dad are good buds, they can hang out together. :] My aunt and uncle also gave me a red envelope for Chinese New Year. Suffice to say that it was WAY MORE money than I have ever gotten in my life. So nice of them.

Going to Chinatown in Boston at noon...  ¶ 7:35 AM 0 comments

  I passed ... I was in the first group of people to take the ETF certification test today. Basically forced to wake up at 6am. It's good because I aced that test and now don't have to worry about studying ever again during my time here. Weeeeeee! Not going to get fired.

About halfway through the test I was thinking 'omg this is f--king easy.' They try to scare you with all this BS (oooh you should study everyday) but in reality there's nothing to it. The sad thing is that once I get out in the field, most of the stuff in the ETF books won't be relevant. They just want to make sure you aren't an idiot and can learn the material or something. Whatever.

Sleep, work out, withdraw $$$ for casino ...  ¶ 6:16 AM 0 comments

  fascination Lately, nothing fascinates me as much as my bank account and credit card online statements. $$$money! It's even more interesting nowadays since I get reimbursed for the vast majority of things. The cool thing is looking at my CC statement and remembered exactly when and where I swiped the card.

For instance during my sushi-craze week, my CC bill looked like this:

01/17 01/17 OGA`S JAPANESE CUISINE NATICK MA 40.02
01/19 01/19 OGA`S JAPANESE CUISINE NATICK MA 34.38
01/20 01/20 GINZA BROOKLINE BROOKLINE MA 34.43
01/21 01/21 OGA`S JAPANESE CUISINE NATICK MA 31.25
01/24 01/24 HISA WESTBORO MA 30.00
01/25 01/25 OGA`S JAPANESE CUISINE NATICK MA 46.00
01/25 01/25 TEPPAN YAKI ASIAN CUIS FRANKLIN MA 27.96

Yeah it's quite ridiculous. But nothing is more ridiculous than getting $30 bucks of groceries everyday. I've been doing that this week I've been studying for the certification exam. Basically it's a $30 spending spree where I toss things into my cart at random if the mood strikes me. The first day I actually got real grocery stuff like bread, meat, juice, etc. The 2nd day I was like "sheesh I will not be able to finish these groceries... what the hay, buy tons of junk." So I filled up my freezer with tons of ice cream, popsicles, frozen food. The plan is to fatten up my friends :) Tomorrow will be more of the same, since I won't be free until after Saturday morning. After that it's off to Foxwoods (casino) for some good times (I plan on sitting at a hold 'em game!).

Oh yeah for Chinese New Year I celebrated by getting $30 of so-so chinese food (too many leftovers!). At least my friend came and helped me eat some of it ...  ¶ 11:02 PM 0 comments

  I quit drinking... ... for this week at least.

For some reason unbenownst to anyone, my co-worker Linda decided that we should all drink... on a Monday. Now this made no sense to me but seeing as how my other two friends would rag on me, I decided to go. Poison of the day was sprite + belvadere.

Everything was fine and dandy until Linda decided that she wanted to play drinking games. Unfortunately someone was able to produce a deck of cards, and the game was "@sshole".

... everyone got wrecked badly. Especially Linda, although she was a trooper most of the way until that one last drink which flipped the switch into total insobriety.

The extent of the damage was not known to me until the next day, when I had to wake up at SEVEN O'CLOCK. This new phenomenon that I experience was the "hangover." One of my coworkers kept prodding me to drink tons of water. Thanks to her advice, I reverted back to normal after lunch. Suffice to say, it was not one of my best mornings. I am glad that I didn't throw up (can't say the same for one of my co-workers). I was actually a bit more attentive in class come to think of it. Weird ...

Anyways, I don't even really like alcohol all that much. Except for the good stuff like Sangria's. No one will believe me tho, when I say I don't really drink. I CAN drink socially, but it's nothing I really look forward too. I haven't really bought any alcohol except for some Barcardi O, most of the time it's my friend shelling out dough for the stuff (although I did buy a round of shots / beers a few times).

Anyways I quit alcohol until Saturday when the class goes to the casinos. No more drinking games for me (w/o good reason).  ¶ 11:08 PM 0 comments

  Super Bowl Sunday Still thinking of what to do tonight. Hopefully we'll go out to a bar in Boston but I wouldn't mind just chilling in someone's hotel room. I participated in the pool but drew crappy numbers. It would be nice to win some money tho.

It's going to be crazy if the Pat win.

just waiting for laundry to finish so that I can workout...  ¶ 9:46 AM 0 comments

  Contention ... So today I finally talked to this one friend who wanted to start his own internet business. He had gotten back to the bay area and wanted to know what was up with the project. I hadn't done anything in a month so I let him know that.

He got really pissed at me and threatened to kick me off the 'team', which was such an idle threat anyways because no one else had done anything. At least I had a decent reason not to do anything, I was doing job-training. He kept ranting about how I had cost him tons of money (lie) and how he hoped I got laid off so I could work for him (old joke). It may sound bad but we are friends and I played it off as best I could (i.e. saying I would do stuff later).

I guess he had a bad experience or something but working for someone else IMO is not all that bad. Especially for someone like me who needs a little bit of direction in my life. Sure it's nice to be your own boss but at this point in time it's not practical or feasible for myself. As for my friend, it seems like he really hates the 9-5 job so he'll consider pursuing alternative means of income. Which is fine, in a group of friends we always need an enterprenuer. At most it'll be a side-project for me. Currently I realize that I really do need to occupy my time working the real job, else I'd be goofing off or doing whatever that's not contributing to my own personal growth.

I don't have delusions of grandeur for the project, my own goal would be to produce something workable that people would use and appreciate.

- In other news, I need to stop eating microwaved foods! I'm so lazy to cook tho. So lazy that I'm asking one of my friends to cook tomorrow. She's pretty good at cooking and there's always bunch of us to get rid of her leftovers.

- Also nice to see Steve Young get voted into the Hall of Fame and Michael Irvin denied! I will rub that in Linda's face on Monday (one of my lab partners who is from Dallas). All joking aside, Irvin was a class act on NFL PRIMETIME, too bad they couldn't both get in.  ¶ 4:13 PM 0 comments

  TGIF! Omg such a crazy week. I had three tests in three days, it was insane. I aced today's test and everyone was hella giddy and screwing around in lab. Then one of the team leads informed us that everyone else had left and we were free to go.

This week was better than last week. My class participation was up and my instructer will probably give me a favorable review. That should get them off my back for a little while. I had my weekly call with my manager yesterday and he was very chill as usual.

We were really happy to get out of there and that meant drinks. Linda had the ingrediants to make white Russians so she hooked that up. Paul had the Guinness cans, Vinh brought over Hennessy and Red Bull. It only took me one guinness and a few white russians to get nice and buzzed and here i am blogging. Other ppl are getting plastered as we speak. So funny to observe. We are going to go to some Italian restaurant tonight for dinner, hopefully it will be good stuff. I'm sure ppl will drink afterwards.

Currently listening to: Eminem Encore album.

EDIT: had one sam adams at the dinner, then 3 shots of patron afterwards (crazy strong tequilla). Still fine tho :) I did make one stupid comment that someone took me to task for. But whatever, we don't hang together regularly and I could care less what he thought about me. As long as I am good with my core group of people (Team West / TME / New England) that's all the counts.

EDIT2: I'm going to stop keeping tabs of drinks :P So pointless. Also going to make a point to exercise daily. Went a couple times this week so far.   ¶ 3:53 PM 0 comments

  sleepy ... Today I spent roughly 11 hours at the training facility. Some of it was mine own fault, I had failed a proficiency prelim exam by 1% last Friday and was forced to retake it. I dunno whether it was the threat of termination (doubtful) but I studied like crazy and aced it the 2nd time around. Unfortunately this entailed waking up at 5am to read things over, taking the test at 730, then spending a loooong time in the labs feeling extremely sleepy.

We got out at 630, went to Legal Seafood, and I promptly blew $65 on crab cakes, clam chowdar (the best!), one legal sangria, and an order of tuna sashimi. Pricy but totally worth it. Why not live it up.

Going to order the Treo 650 tomorrow. Retail cost is $550. With 2 year plan, EMC discounts, EMC $100 reimbursement, rebates - cost to me --> $100.

Sweeeeeeeeeet.  ¶ 6:36 PM 0 comments