Chronicles of Boca: The Free Movie, The Wholesale Warehouse, and the Frisbee

We're going to take a break from my holiday trip mini series and return to our normal programming for this post. After watching Batman last night until about 2 AM, it was a bit of a struggle getting up at 8:30 this morning. Why the early wake-up call? Today was Dr. K's annual Free Ice Cream and Movie day. Dr. K is a local orthodontist here in Boca Raton. He's pretty expensive, but he's a business genius, and a pretty good orthodontist as well. In fact, I had my braces done with him, back in high school. Every year, during the holidays, he invites all of his former patients and family and friends to Muvico, where he has half of the entire movie complex booked for the event. Usually we have a choice of three or four movies - today we could pick Chicken Little, Chronicles of Narnia, and Cheaper by the Dozen 2. We ended up picking Chronicles of Narnia, and it was a good choice. Swords, Centaurs, Magic, awesome animal warriors - how can you go wrong? It was a little long, but I didn't think it dragged too badly.

After the movie, we went to Costco, the wholesale warehouse. Costco rocks, because you can get free samples of food, and you can get pretty good deals on a lot of things. I spent a lot of time ogling at their video game packages - they had PS2, PSP, and Nintendo DS packages for sale that I thought were pretty good. I ended up holding off because Cherry and I got Best Buy gift certificates which probably can come in pretty handy towards a Nintendo DS. Of the three choices, I like the DS the best, because Mario is the Bomb. But I might still hold off still for the PS3. So many consoles, so little money :'(.

Even though there are some great deals when you buy in bulk at Costco, as a family, we always end up spending like $300-plus dollars when we go. I guess we shouldn't go that often.

Shortly after the trip to Costco, Ed and I went to play Ultimate Frisbee with about 15 other people. While it's fun, this sport doesn't really particularly cater to my athletic talents. Before I played my first ultimate frisbee game, I thought it was kind of a wussy sport, because a lot of girls play it. Now I see why. My speed and strength don't seem to offer anything to the game because of my horrible receiving and my extremely limited disc throwing ability. After the game, Ed and I raced on the turf and were pretty well matched at about the 40-yard mark. Considering that I was running on a slightly pulled calf after running hard for the game, I'm still pretty confident with my speed, mwahahaha. We'll have to do it a few more times - I beat Ed several times during our trip, but this was the first time in a while that we did it on the turf.

Well, that about covers the day, stay tuned for the next episode of my Holiday Trip log!

Holiday Log - Part II: Sea World Sunday

On Sunday morning, we headed to Sea World early in the morning. In fact, we got there at 8:40 and waited for the rest of the family to arrive. The rest of the family was my parents, my brother Ed, my sister Melinda, my grandparents, and my cousin Leo, who had flown in from California to spend the Christmas holiday with us in Florida. He's originally from Michigan, so the change in weather was probably pretty pleasant, even though he works in LA now. Actually, I remember LA being pretty cold around this time of year as well, so it might be a nice change in temperature either way.

I hadn't been to Sea World in probably nearly ten years, so I was pretty stoked about going. So, when we FINALLY hooked up with the rest of the family almost an hour after I arrived, we were ready to roll. Since Ed, Cherry, and I got Silver Passports (that also included unlimited admission to Busch Gardens), we got our $9 parking refunded to us in the form of $5 Sea World vouchers, which could be applied to anything in the park. We thus ended up with $20 worth in Sea World dollars, because we grabbed my dad's parking receipt and refunded that as well! The Silver Passport also gives 10% off of purchases made in the park, which would come in very handy later on.

The first major thing we saw was the World Famous Shamu Show. The show is famous for its famous star, Shamu. It also features a couple of other killer whales - two smaller ones, and one colossal, 12000 pound whale (the next largest whale is only 6000 pounds)! The acrobatics of the show themselves were not that great - I assume that is partly due to the sheer size of the whales. However, the splashes were huge. We were able to avoid getting wet though, because we sat above the "soak zone" because the weather that day was a little too nippy to be soaked.

Next was a weird acrobatics show which was sub-par, at least for my tastes. I think I've been spoiled by Chinese acrobatics and Cirque du Soleil caliber material. I've never seen Cirque du Soleil, but I would REALLY like to someday if I get the chance. There was a weird Slinky man, which was pretty cool - something I'd never seen before - and the bouncing trampoline acrobats, which are becoming overdone these days. The other acts were only so-so. The next show, the Dolphin show, was much better. Bottleneck dolphins are smaller than killer whales, and so they are quite a bit more athletic. There were anywhere up to six dolphins at one time, and they performed many synchronized jumps and barrel rolls, along with their human diver co-stars dressed in the new, trendy, artsy costumes that are so popular today, as seen in the photo. There was also a comedic Sea Lion and Otter show, and a really neat show with adopted dogs and cats running very well practiced routes.

A highlight of the park is definitely the collection of fish and animals. The aquarium is fantastic - complete with sharks, barracuda, eel, and bizarre fish like this seaweed like Sea Dragon. We also got to see the polar bear exhibit, the Penguin exhibit, walruses, narwhals, and Beluga whales, among others.

There have never been many rides at Sea World, so we got a chance to try all of the rides, unlike at a certain other theme park trip that will be written about soon. They had a simulator helicopter ride which led into the polar bear exhibit. I used to love simulator rides, especially when Star Tours at Disney MGM first came out. I thought they were the coolest thing ever. They're still pretty thrilling, but they seem to make me a lot dizzier than they used to. There was also a flume-type ride which sported a very respectable drop as well as a pretty scary path through Atlantis and an unexpected roller coaster segment that followed the main drop. The biggest ride of them was the Kraken, Sea Worlds first roller coaster, and it's a quality coaster at that. Big, fast, and very steady - no rattling around like those old, smaller roller coasters used to do.

We ended the trip to Sea World by putting the $20 Sea World dollars and the 10% Passport discount to use. After the discounts, we were able to get this huge plush Shamu for only four dollars! All in all, the trip to Sea World was a very pleasant one, and we topped the trip off when we got to the hotel by taking a swim in the indoor pool and spa.

Up next, Outlet Shopping and Busch Gardens!

Holiday Log - Part I

I've been away for most of the week, so I didn't get a chance to update much. However, I did a lot of stuff - so much that I think it's going to take a couple of posts to get all the details and photos. Tonight, I'll write just a little bit because it's late and I've had a long day.

The picture on the left is from our Busch Gardens trip, in the aviary, where I got to feed this cool bird. I've got a lot more Busch Gardens stories for later, so stay tuned and watch for them when they come!

So, let's start on Saturday. We found out that we didn't have to show up in Orlando until Sunday, so I was able to watch the Bucs game on Saturday. It was a really stressful game too, with more than a couple heart-attack-caliber points. After the fumble during the first overtime on the kickoff return, I thought the game was over. But then, we blocked their 20-some yard field goal attempt, and marched the ball down to inside the ten with the help of a pass interference call, but we opted for a field goal to try to end the game early and ended up kicking wide left! Thankfully, we stopped them near midfield, then finally, with 3 minutes left in overtime, ended the game on a 42-yard attempt. Talk about heart attacks. I was confident though, because Mike Vick can't beat Monte Kiffin, mwahaha! Not really, I was pretty nervous.

Well, that's enough for today. Up next - Sea World Sunday! With photos!

There are Bikini Babes Washing Cars Here

Well, I'm now a full two days into my winter holiday break. We haven't done much yet. I broke down and opened the gift that my brother sent me. Turns out it's not an iPod or a PSP, as I had rather hoped it would be. It's a Coca-Cola brand Clock. Pretty nice thinking - I am an avid Coca-Cola fan. In fact, I'm in the "Coke Drinkers Upset About the UF-Pepsi Contract" group on the Facebook. Plus, I like novelty items like this - I own a Coca-Cola bottle opener, which actually is a little bottle itself with a shot of Coke in it. So, I appreciate the thought.

Today, I thought it would be a good idea to try and run the dishwashing machine. Having been used to washing my dishes by hand and using the dishwashing machine as a drying rack for my dishes, this could be considered a novelty for me as well. In fact, I didn't even have a dishwasher for much of my college career, so having one at all was pretty foreign to me, much less using it. In any case, I loaded it up - which was harder than it might seem because I actually had to take special care not to wash all the dishes by hand in order to fill the machine - filled the little dishwashing liquid compartment with some Palmolive Oxy, and set it off. Some fifteen minutes later, I walked back into the kitchen to find that the Machine had unleashed a flood of soap suds all over the floor, creating a sudsy mess that was about to attack my living room carpet. Unfortunately, this sudsy mess looked absolutely nothing like this:

With that, Cherry and I spent the next hour and a half undoing the damage caused by the exploding dishwashing machine. We swept the water out of the apartment through the front door and towards the edge of the balcony walkway, causing some of the slush to drip downstairs. I pushed most of the suds to the edge of the walkway which hung over some bushes down below, to avoid our downstairs neighbors from getting some unforecasted showers, and subsequently created what could have quite possibly been a fully intentional Winter Snow scene at the edge of the stairs. Too bad I didn't get a picture of it - it was pretty convincing from a distance.

After sweeping all of the water and suds out of the apartment, we still had to fish all of the still scaldingly hot dishes from the dishwasher itself to get the water and suds out of there.

In the end, it worked out pretty nicely because we now had very clean dishes and also a very clean kitchen floor.

Happy Holiday Break!

Hooray! Today our group just had a half day at work, and it wasn't really a busy half at that. It felt a lot like the last day at school, which is somewhat ironic. While I was in school, I always dreaded the day that I would start working in a real job. One major reason was because I thought that I would never have a free extended holiday again. But here I am, starting an 11 day holiday stretch!

The week wound down pretty good. I found out that it was in fact the very floppy disk that for some reason wouldn't read on the computers in the cube farm. I replaced the disk, and then started to take measurements. Of course, it couldn't be that easy - I looked at the code that Shawn wrote to compile the data, and it turns out that the order I took the data in was wrong. Fortunately, I discovered this error early, and was able to correct it before I got too far along. I missed out on the holiday cookies, but after shutting down the lab and my computer, I was OUTTA THERE!

So, I've got a few things to look forward to during the holiday. This weekend, the family will be making a small circle in South Florida, starting in Orlando, then cutting to Tampa, and going through Alligator Alley, which, I have been told, is no longer the seemingly endless length of unlit highway and now has some small historic attractions. I dig that kind of stuff. Of course, this will probably mean that I will miss out on the Bucs game on Saturday, but I will have the Outback Bowl on January 2nd to look forward to - Go Gators! My brother Ed also gave me a present that looks very intriguing - I can't remember the last time I got a mystery gift from a member of my family, so I'll let you know what it is as soon as I find out!

Floppy Disks and Obscure Software Suck

Well, today was my first day back to work after my first longer-than-three-days off, and it showed. As soon as I left my apartment complex, I made a wrong turn which put me right into traffic! Good thing I live really close to work.

As soon as I got in, Nick asked me how the Ball was. Don't worry, my reaction was exactly the same as yours is now - "What Ball?" In the excitement of the weekend (coming back from Orlando, my brother staying for a few days, the Bucs getting throttled beyond recognition, that kind of thing), I had become completely oblivious to the fact that Cherry and I were supposed to go to company's Winter Ball. It's a damn shame too. Free food is always a reason to drive twenty minutes. Or even two hours (for Farrah anyway, as Bob mentioned today).

Fortunately, I had a very clear idea of what work I was to do today. In fact, I pretty much know exactly what I will be doing for at least the rest of this week - more than likely for the early part of next year as well. I got to my cube and found a package on my desk, which contained parts from a vendor. I don't know if you've ever gotten parts from a vendor before, but it always feels pretty cool, like you're really important! However, those parts were going to be put on the back burner for a while.

I spent the rest of the day taking measurements for a new board implementation that we plan on hopefully using as a replacement, and it turned out that, despite my extensive experience with network analyzers, all that skillz that killz wasn't going to do me any good if I didn't know how to use the test software that operated the circuit itself. Turns out that the learning curve was a bit tougher than I expected. After fiddling with the software and recalibrating some six or seven times, I finally had a semblance of a data set ready to go, on my floppy disk. I take the floppy over to my cube, and wouldn't you know it, it doesn't @#%$@^ing work! At first, I blamed it on the floppy, because, you know, it's always the floppy's fault. But it turned out it wasn't the floppy's fault - in fact it was because the network analyzer software creates an obscure .s1 file that my PC doesn't recognize, and subsequently shuts down my floppy disk drive every time it sees it!





<--- Behold, mysterious bluish light Hopefully, I'll get it figured out soon. I'll let you know, if I don't forget.

Another Orlando Outing, sans Evil Fat World of Denim Man

So, as promised, we went to Orlando again on Wednesday night to try and get a few more days out of the time share. This time, however, we didn't really get to play as much as before in the actual resort itself. We found a great little Chinese restaurant, China 126, nearby, and grabbed some dinner before my dad, grandparents, and my brother, Ed, arrived. When they got there, Ed, Cherry and I went to the main visitor's center to play a little ping pong, but more importantly, play some more of the Boxing Game! My brother kicked my ass in it, getting 12th place! If you recall, I got 82nd last time, and this time I got 68th. I'm gonna need to practice more, for my honor's sake.

The next day, we headed over to Cypress Gardens. I hadn't been to Cypress Gardens in a really long time, since it never really had any rides. Although there wasn't an Evil Fat World of Denim manager this time around, there was a Wicked Old Cypress Gardens Baggage Check Man who didn't let us bring fruit in the park, and made us walk all the way back to the parking lot. This gave Ed and I a chance to do a little footrace - something we haven't done in about a year, when I tripped on the turf and was never able to recover. This time, I won - thus justifying my self proclaimed 4-star Speed rating =D.

The park still seemed to be kind of small compared to other, higher profile parks, such as Sea World and Busch Gardens, but it was actually more fun than I expected.

Once we actually got into the park, we saw a lot of those bushes trimmed to look like animals. One was this rabbit, whose hands looked suspiciously like breasts... but Anyway! There was also this live statue, which was really cool because at one point she would spray water from her fingertips!

For those of you who have never been to Cypress Gardens before, it is Florida's oldest theme park. It features a small zoo and a vast botanical garden, which is famous for nice scenery and interesting trees. This aspect of the park remains the same.

However, what surprised me the most this time around was the plethora of thrill rides that I don't seem to remember being there before. They had bumper cars, the free falling machine, some small roller coasters, some water slide type rides, an inverter, a crazy swinging and turning thing, and this awesome bouncing machine! Plus, with so few visitors to the park on a Thursday in early December, we had virtually zero wait time on any given ride. However, I have to admit that my body doesn't seem to let me take the kind of punishment from repeated iterations of spins and drops that used to be routine when going to theme parks - I felt pretty sick towards the end of the day.

There were also a few shows - a Christmas themed ice-skating show, song and dance show, and a water skiing show. And, for model train enthusiasts, there was a really big exhibit that had models of several locales in the USA, such as the Midwest, Upstate New York, Philadelphia, and California. They also sold Brio sets, which I got a great kick out of, not having played with Brio wooden trains since I was a young lad in Clearwater.

At the end of the day, when it got dark, the grand finale, was to ride in this Sky View thing (I don't remember what it was REALLY called) which gives a great view of the park, especially because of the Christmas season and all the purty lights (albeit in the midst of a lot of mosquitos from the lake it's set over)!

So, that was the end of my second outing to Orlando in one week. I'm looking forward to the Christmas holiday though - my company gives us a full TEN straight days of vacation during the holiday!

First Mobile Post

Hi everyone! This is the first time I am posting from my cellphone. It's a pretty handy tool!

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This message was sent from a T-Mobile wireless phone.

Orange Lake Resort Weekend

So, last week my dad calls me and tells me that we get to use his friend Subrata's time share this year at Orange Lake Resort in Orlando. We checked it out over the weekend, and it proved to be a pretty fun couple of days.
Our unit was a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom condo, kind of like the apartment we live in now, except cooler. Older, but really nicely furnished and moderately well laid-out. I especially liked the "bay" style dinner table. It also featured a full kitchen with a coffee maker, a washer/dryer (which we made use of, being the washer/dryer fiends that we are), and TVs in both bedrooms and the living room!

The resort is huge. It's supposed to be the largest single site resort in the world, with 20 gazillion acres with 10 jillian units and billions of owners all around the world. Well, not really, but it was really big - check their website for the actual statistics if you like at www.orangelake.com.

There was a pretty nice little beach area which made for really cool looking sunset kung fu/tai chi Kodak moments. The activities are pretty abundant, though we didn't even get close to using all of them. There are like eight different pools, most of which were a very comfortable, bathwater-like temperature, which was great against the low 70's temperature on Saturday (Sunday was too rainy and cold to even consider swimming as an option).

They had a few decent arcades, but we didn't make extensive use of them. I did try this one boxing game where the machine would track your body movements, though, which was awesome! I knocked out the first opponent, but I was TKO'd in the second bout. I ended up ranking 82nd overall, and it was actually a pretty good workout for like 5 minutes of gametime. The activity we probably enjoyed the most was the ping-pong tournament. While ping-pong isn't exactly an elusive activity for us, since my parents have a ping-pong table at home in Boca, it's not every day we can win 2nd place in a tournament, like Cherry did!

We would have tried mini-golf, which is supposed to be famous at this resort, but at like $7.50 per person, we opted to go to the "un-birthday party", which sucked because it turned out that the cake was only for kids! Silly me. So, we re-opted to go to Downtown Disney to see if we could get any cool gifts and sights. We met some big-shot friends and managed to pick up a few gifts along the way.
On Sunday, we went to an informational tour to get us to try and buy a timeshare with the resort. We didn't buy. But we did get a complimentary breakfast, and they also gave us a free gift for attending the tour in the form of twenty dollars in Cold, Hard Cash and also a coupon book which may or may not prove to be useful (currently, we plan on returning to stay a few more days out of the week on Wednesday night, so we can make the most out of the time share.)

The vacation would have been really great, except for a few things. We didn't really get to eat any good food, opting for McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Denny's, even though we had access to a full kitchen and also despite the abundance of buffets in the Orlando area. Hopefully we'll get to hit those buffets on the return trip! The biggest stinker, by far, was a debacle where we bought a pair of jeans for Cherry at the World of Denim and had them do an alteration. The alteration came out REALLY crappy - the hem was completely ruined - and we asked them to either fix it or give us another satisfying solution. Instead, after fifteen brain-frying minutes of explanation of how the alteration was done to the "standards of suckiness" of the company for the past ten thousand years and so on and so forth, the evil manager decided that we were obviously being a disruption to his business, and called the police to have us escorted off the premises! That REALLY pissed us off and made for a crappy end to the mini-vacation.

Hopefully, our return trip will make up for our encounter with the Fat And Evil World of Denim manager.

Beanie Day!!!

I went to my first Company Holiday luncheon today! It consisted primarily of massive amounts of lasagna, "hockey puck" awards for people who had... unique contributions to the company's overall social atmostphere, and beanies for all the new employees (which apparently included people who were reassigned to Engineering this year and also contracters who became full-time employees). See below for a close look at the fine craftsmanship of the beanies:

Tomorrow, I get to wear this stylish accessory for a full eight hours at work! Not only is it stylish, but it's incredibly well designed, for a snug, yet unobstructing, fit that seems to just stick to your head. It's a must have for every employee - in fact, every employee has one anyway!

The hockey puck awards ranged from sick employees spitting up coffee over coworkers, to pilots locking their car keys in the airplane hangar, to people spraying WD-40 on their bench press set and subsequently letting the 45-lb plates fall on their feet, crushing the bones in their toes. As for the food, it was decent. Filling, in any case.

Treasure Life!

I know it sounds kind of cliche, but we really should treasure life. Be happy whenever you can, and try your best not to let yourself be down.

Today as Cherry and I were coming back from the gym right here in our neighborhood, we walked past a sheet with all kinds of gifts on it. Since it is the season for gift-giving, we thought it was pretty cute, and walked towards it to get a closer look. As we were standing there looking at the little things on the sheet, a lady walked by with her dog and said "That's what I was looking for!" On noticing our confusion, the lady asked us if we knew what this was all about. We didn't.

Apparently, on Sunday night at about 8:00 PM, a 14-year-old boy was riding on his RAZOR brand scooter when he was hit by an SUV. He died shortly afterwards.

I had no idea that any of this happened. Last night, I was playing Final Fantasy VIII when this boy was hit by a truck little more than a football field away from my window. I saw signs of it today - the news vans at the entrance of my apartment complex, the gathering of kids setting up the memorial - but I would have never guessed that this was about a happy boy, who had saved money he made cutting the neighbor's grass to buy his motor scooter, leaving us early on that very scooter that he was so happy to get by himself.

The newspaper mentioned that he was a very popular boy, who danced at the apartment complex's annual pool party every year, and was irresistible to girls his age. Over the summer, we went to the pool almost every day - I'm sure I met this boy a few times.

Today's post will be dedicated to Patrick Stains, whom I never knew but am sure I talked to once, not because he was my friend, but because he made the effort to make himself happy, and reminded me to treasure life.

Thank Goodness it's... Saturday??

I actually meant to write yesterday - it would have worked a lot better for the title. This one doesn't make that much sense. Regardless, today's theme will be Good Things.

It was a Pretty Good day, but so is today. And most days. That's a Good Thing. I try not to remember bad things and bad days though, so I'm not sure how accurate my assessments necessarily are. But overall, it was a Pretty Good week. A lot of it has to do with the end of the year bonus that we got yesterday (that would be Friday, the intended date of this post). Suddenly, I feel like I can, like, buy stuff! So we went to Roadhouse Grill for all-you-can-eat baby back ribs and a steak that was way raw, and then came back out way overdone once it came back the second time. That sucked, but I was able to get a 3$ discount, so that worked out Pretty Good.


Other Goodies for the week - see left:

This was one of the coolest games I have ever been to, and I've been to quite a few of them. The last time I went to a game that had anywhere near this big of a rival was LSU in 2004, and well, we lost. So 34-7 against FSU was Really, Really Good. Go Gators!

Some good games this Saturday too - Texas is up on Colorado a ridiculous 70-3 right as I type, and it's not even the 4th quarter yet, and of course USC-UCLA are coming up in the afternoon, as well as the SEC championship, which we should have been in had not been for SOS...

Word in the grapevine is that I'm going to keep working on TPR (that's transponder, for the uninitiated - more on that if you really want to know), which is also Really Good. I'd basically be working with the same people I am now, and that is a Good Thing.

Well, I think that about covers it! Until next time, have a Good Day! =)

First Blog!

Where should I start? I've kept journals before - but they were of the pencil and paper variety - needless to say I didn't get an awful lot of comments about them. I haven't made a journal entry of any sort pretty much since the end of last year, and I can say that a LOT has happened since then, between Cherry arriving in the US, my graduating with my Master's degree, a decent vacation in the southwest USA, and our moving to Melbourne for my new job.

In any case, my life has taken a turn to the "real world", so to speak, and I'm enjoying it, even though I've found out that the real world eats money. I never would have imagined that I would spend this much money for just about nothing since I made it through most of college on some 500 dollars a month! I have to admit I'm living more comfortably, and with Cherry cooking 3-4 course meals almost every day, I can't be eating much better. I still spend most weekends watching football and still work out at least 4 times a week (down from my usual 6, but I guess once things settle down a little more I'll bring it back up).

The job is pretty cool, although I'm in the middle of some reassigning mess, and to be honest they don't seem to even know where I'm slated to go - so it's kind of stressed to say the least. Add that to I am looking to buy a house, and will also get another car in the very near future, and, well, I've got my hands full!

Well, I'd say that's enough for now, I'll see how long I can keep this blog up! Again, this time I'll take the approach of writing entries when something happens rather than on a scheduled basis. Hopefully good things happen often!