Squats and Neighbors and Dolphins, Oh My!

Not a whole lot going on, other than work, hence the lack of posts. But I'll see what I can whip up!

My apartment complex is undergoing a number of changes lately. In actuality, it's just one change, I guess, but it is a rather major change. Basically, they have sold the property, and the new owner is in the process of selling the units off as condominiums. In this effort, they have offered us "special" rates of some 150 grand for an "upgraded" unit, which means there's new carpet and cabinets and other kithcen stuff, or some 130 grand for the unit as I live in it now. Keep in mind that these are twenty-year-old two bedroom/two bathroom (they say "master bath" but it's really the exact same thing for both bathrooms) apartments that have undergone who knows how many tenants, and they are selling them for more than what our first house (when I was a kid) was! I mean, these are pretty nice for apartments, but it's just a little much for 900 square feet of 20-year-old housing.

Even though I have no plans of buying the place, the changes still have had some effect on me. Most notably, the rental office is being inexplicably renovated for the new owner, and, subsequently, the gym has been moved. Okay, I can deal with walking to a different place to work out, but apparently, the night manager or whoever locks the door to the gym and the laundry room at night can't make the adjustment, and as a result, the hours to the gym are now 9 to 5! I'm not sure who works out during these hours, especially when you take into consideration the fact that the complex restricts use of the gym to people over 18. So, some frustration indeed.

In light of my lack of access to the gym, I've been working out at home quite often, doing Thiago's Home Workout, of Grant's Pad March Archive fame, and curls and crunches and so-forth. I tried a new one last week: body-weight squats. That's squats with zero, and I repeat, zero pounds of additional weight resistance. Granted, I ended up doing about 100 of these in sets of 20, but it was quite a bit more difficult than I expected. The worst part, however, was the soreness in my legs for the remainder of the week! Who would have thought? Zero pounds, fellas. Try it!

Moving along, while we are living out the rest of our lease, our next door neighbors have apparently found new quarters. Not to be mean or anything, but it's about time. My neighbors were nice, most of the time, but they were pretty weird. They had, more likely than not, a unit identical to mine - 900 square feet of air-conditioned 2-bedroom/2-bathroom. However, that unit was home to a young couple and their daughter, an older couple (parents, presumably), and another young couple that appeared to be the younger brother and his girlfriend! That's seven people, in the same size home that two small asian people live in right next door! They also had four vehicles among them, so they took up four parking spaces compared to my one! So, as I said, they've moved on, hopefully to a three bedroom place. Good for them!

Lastly, Cherry and I went to Sea World again on Saturday, to once again take advantage of our fabulous Silver Passports. This time, I finally remembered to use the passes to get my 10% discount on our lunch, and I also found that we could use the pass to get on their famous Sky Tower attraction for free! Nothing beats the rush of saving a few bucks that you didn't expect to! This trip was much slower paced than our previous trips. First, it was not nearly as crowded as it had been the last few times, and secondly, since we'd been to Sea World so many times this year, we had no desire to rush to finish everything. As a result, we were able to see everything we wanted to see, for the most part. We did not see the fireworks show, since we left right before a massive storm struck at around 6PM, but we did see an exhibit that, for some reason, we have missed every single other time we have come this year! There is a dolphin tank fairly close to the entrance of the park where you can play with the dolphins and their basketballs and buoys, and if you get lucky, you can actually touch them! I'm not sure if I've touched dolphins before or not (in my childhood), but I almost got bitten by one this time! And it was so cool! I have to say, dolphins are really hard... and not quite as smooth as I imagined them to be. But still, very cool. We will have to try that swimming with the dolphins experience thing sometime!

ABC News: Pluto loses planet status

ABC News: Pluto loses planet status

Haven't done news link cop-outs in a while, but this one is pretty interesting. Poor Pluto. Think of all the grade-school textbooks that will have to be updated! The horror!

It's a bird, it's a plane, no... it's a POST!

Haven't written much this past week, so I'll try and make up for it now...

I have been rushing to finish a statistical analysis for work. In this effort, I took a few classes and had to learn about something called APA (Advanced Process Analysis, I think it stands for). Along with Six Sigma, it's basically using statistics to analyze certain outputs like product yield, or in my case, the effectiveness of our measurement systems. I think APA was developed in Japan, and, like many industry trends, you can get varying levels of APA certification. What I found amusing is that the certifications for APA, and I kid you not, are belt colors. Like in Karate. Or kung fu I guess, even though traditionally, we weren't supposed to have belts or rankings in kung fu. Anyway, I had to study the material given to Green Belts, and I learned from the local APA Black Belt here at my company in Melbourne. Hiyah!

Speaking of Martial Arts, it has been entirely too hot to practice kung fu lately. I'm really starting to look forward to the cool (I hesitate to say "cold", since I'm in Florida) winter weather. Saturday was a testament to the heat we have to endure in the summer. Nick, his girlfriend Josette, Shawn, Cherry, and I played a pick up game of football this past Saturday, on a day that actually wasn't so hot for a Florida summer day. We only ran about 10 offensive plays each before submitting to the sun. Still, it was fun - I scored 5 touchdowns on those 10 offensive plays and a fumble recovery for a TD, exploiting the Turtles' weaknesses in speed by gaining about 50 YAC (on five yard receptions) every successful play. Nick, who played QB for both teams since he pulled his hamstring, did throw some beautiful passes to Shawn, clowning me when I was playing defense. They also clowned Cherry and me when Shawn pretended to have heatstroke, and Nick ran it in for a TD... I called the bluff, but Cherry didn't buy it! Damn that humanitarianism! Still, the Junks won 5-2!

We haven't played much Brain Age for a while. We played almost every day for about a month, but at the end of my vacation last week, I went to Target and downloaded a demo of Meteos, a cool little puzzle game for Nintendo DS. It's kind of like Bejeweled, but thanks to the stylus, it's much much faster than Bejeweled, or any other puzzle game I've played before, for that matter. The premise is familiar - line up 3 or more like tiles to get them to disappear. Only they don't disappear, instead, those three tiles become little rockets and attempt to push all the tiles above them off the screen into space. If the load is too heavy, those rockets won't be enough - but you can try to line up another three before it falls to send it firing off into space again! At first, Cherry just scribbled on the touch screen, making me very nervous about scratches, but soon, she figured out how to play with skill and became quite good at it. Since she enjoyed the game so much, we decided to leave the demo on the DS for the whole week, and so we couldn't restart the DS to play Brain Age (demos disappear if you turn off the DS).

But yesterday, that would all change. I recently made my very first purchase on eBay - to buy Trace Memory, a graphic adventure type game for the DS. I was really nervous about the purchase - it was not so long ago that my brother Ed got scammed for $1500 on eBay, and so I've never trusted it. But I was really interested in Trace Memory, and I saw it on eBay from a Power Seller for just 14 bucks, including shipping! I figured, for 14 bucks, I could give 99.8% positive ratings a chance. After all, if everyone got scammed on eBay, they probably wouldn't be in business anymore, right? Right! I got Trace Memory in the mail yesterday, and with that, the DS turned off, so we could try the new game! We've only played it for about 20 minutes, just getting past the intro, so I can't really say much about it yet, but it looks like it will be pretty fun!

Until next time!

The Tri-Fectorate Meets Again!

So, as you might have noticed, I've been away for a little while. My sister, Melinda, came to visit us for most of last week, which kept Cherry, who is on her two week summer break, pretty busy. On the weekend, we all went back to Boca to spend time with the family and whatnot.

This time, however, I had a mission of my own. My friend, Kaveh whose-three-surnames-will-not-be-repeated-in-this-post-for-reasons-which-will-be-discussed had invited, among others, Chris and I, to a party honoring his engagement with Christina, whose family lives on five acres at the northern edge of Boca (and they need all five acres - Christina has ten siblings, about the same number of dogs, and three horses to boot!). So, after (at least what seems like) more than two years, the tri-fectorate (which was incorrectly transcribed in a former post as the "triumverate") was finally united again, with all three members in one place!

Other guests included most of Christina's immediate family, many of Kaveh's family (including his father, who had flown in from Iran just before the terrorists were captured in England, fortunately), one of Kaveh's classmates from grad school, and one of our other friends, Kolaleh, a girl who had taken a number of classes with us and apparently has also recently become engaged! The party was pretty good - there was a ton of food, and Christina's house has several very cool amenities, like a soft serve ice-cream machine, a chocolate fountain, and a slushie machine! Cherry and I spent most of our time hanging out with Chris and his girlfriend, Nicole, as we talked about nerdy things like building emulation arcade machines.

The most interesting bit came at the end of the party, however, as we were about to leave. Kaveh insisted that we stay for this story. Having recently changed his job, Kaveh signed a lease about a month ago. Shortly after (like within the hour), as he was having a meal, the landlord tracked him down and said to him, "Say Hi to Grant and Chris for me!"

Obviously, this was a very unexpected statement, so Kaveh naturally said, "What did you say?"

The landlord said, "You know, the Triumverate. I know you guys used to hang out by the library looking at the girls passing by!"

Flabbergasted, Kaveh thought to himself, "Oh my god, who is this guy? Is he with the CIA? How does he know all of this?"

Sensing his confusion, the landlord handed Kaveh a transcript of this. Apparently, after the lease had been signed, the landlord did a simple background check on Kaveh by searching his full name (which was not repeated in this post, as mentioned earlier) and the posts about the Tri-Fectorate on Grant's Pad popped up! Actually I had noticed, using the Sitemeter, that someone had come across Grant's Pad a few times by googling Kaveh's name. Anyhow, the whole ordeal gave Kaveh and Christina quite a scare, so I guess I should be more careful when posting full, foreign sounding names on the Internet from now on!

Who would have thought grass could let you get so full?

So yesterday, Cherry and I went to the supermarket, and we noticed that those salads-in-bags were on sale with a buy-one-get-one-free promotion. One of the shopping rules of our household is, if it's BOGOF, get it!

So we picked up two bags of salad, some caesar dressing, and some croutons, got the rest of our groceries, and headed home. By the time dinner came around, I popped some chicken nuggets in the oven so I could add some meat to my salad, crispy chicken style. I washed one salad-in-a-bag, and 15 minutes later we had two big bowls of Crispy Chicken Caesar Salad in front of us. We added a little fruit to the salad as well, and to be honest, the meal was quite good. Plus, I got really full off of it! I never thought eating just salad could satisfy me, as I have traditionally had a strict "No Meat, No Eat!" diet... Granted, I cheated a little bit with the chicken nuggets, but still, I was fairly impressed. No wonder cows get so big!

In other news, I downloaded the demo for Metroid Prime: Hunters on the weekend. I've never been particularly good at first person shooters - as I've mentioned before, I was dominated in Goldeneye time and again by my friend Jose in my early years of college, and those all-night Counterstrike melees in China? Don't even want to talk about it. FPS's have evolved since Goldeneye, which was by far the FPS that I was best at. You couldn't jump, and turning was quite slow. The control scheme of Metroid Prime: Hunters is actually more like the mouse-and-keyboard combo controls of Counterstrike. You use the D-pad to strafe left to right and move forward and backwards. Use the stylus as you would a mouse to aim and turn. This lets you turn on a dime. Furthermore, use the stylus to point at and select your weapon of choice, eliminating the need to remember which key is assigned to which weapon. The stylus also lets you switch back and forth between your alternate form (in Samus' case, the Morph Ball), and lastly (I didn't realize this until my friend Karn told me) by tapping the stylus, you can jump.

So yeah, the controls are pretty slick, and there are these launch pads that send you flying in the air, where you can then twist and turn, shooting all around every axis, which is pretty cool, but I still suck. I managed to figure out one map and could fairly regularly win that map against the bots, but the other, cooler map in space that you can (and I often did) fall off of was much harder, and I only ever managed to get second place by virtue of hiding, hording energy orbs, and not getting killed as much. So, it's pretty fun, and the graphics are also kick ass for a DS game, but it would take some time to get used to, much less good at.

Speaking of Karn, I've mentioned him before in my college flashback posts before, I think. Karn was the first actual classmate of mine that I spoke to at the University of Florida, where we took Calculus 2 together (I ended up dropping that class...). He's from Thailand, and has lived here without his parents since 1997, when his parents moved back to Thailand and he decided to stay here. He's a devout Christian, and loves video games (he also just got a DS Lite!), and recently got married. Since then, he contacted me, and with my newfound interest in video games, we have been chatting quite a bit, and playing an online version of the board game Risk, at ConquerClub.com. I remember playing this game waaaaay back, in like 1992 or so, at my cousin's house and absolutely sucking at it. I think I never really got good at strategy games in general - I was never really good at the Sid Meier's Civilization series either. Anyhow, at one point in my first game, Karn was about to get massacred, and he decided to sacrifice himself to help me win. On conquering him, I was able to trade in the cards I got from him to develop a massive army that I used to take out North and South America, which earned me another army that I used to conquer Africa, which earned me a final army that I used to finally dominate Asia, where I was based out of, ironically. It's quite a rush, being on a roll like that!

Happy Birfday ED

Today is Ed's birthday! The big 2-0! I can't believe it, that makes me feel really old!

To celebrate, I'm going the way of the YouTube cop-out and posting his old Sup Sam Cheurng (13 Spears) video!



Now I guess it's back to work...

Paper Mario, DS Download Station, Dumb Armadillos, and Lawyers

A new month, a new running off at the keyboard post!

I started playing Paper Mario late last week. It was one of the first games that I really wanted to play since I got the Project 64 Nintendo 64 emulator (right up there with Super Mario 64 and Super Smash Bros. - Mario Kart 64 doesn't really count since I played that fairly extensively in college). I'm fairly impressed at the depth of the game, and, as Ed mentioned some time ago in his blog, the art, music, and dialog is saccharine level cute. I'm not sure the game really qualifies as an RPG though - basically you're still collecting Stars, and there's not a whole lot of character or story development. At least, not on the scale of most Final Fantasy games, anyway. There's no overworld to speak of either, which is an interesting variation. And there is about zero percent variability in the amount of damage you do - it's predictable just about every time, which goes quite against the premise of the more chance-oriented paper-and-pen RPGs that gave birth to the genre. Still, it's entertaining, and has a good number of easy but fun puzzles that you have to go through, making it more of a Zelda type game in my book!

Moving along, as my more faithful readers know, I recently got a shiny new DS Lite, with the free game Brain Age. Yesterday, I was able to get my Brain Age down to 21 (the ideal age is 20)! Of course, it's probably a one day deal or something, but any way I look at it, I'm doing pretty good, consistently getting right around 24 (you know, my real age) day by day. Inevitably, that means in a few weeks, after I've unlocked all of the training activities, all Brain Age will really have to offer me besides the gratification of consistently logging a Brain Age of 20 is the large number of Sudoku puzzles, which means I'll probably be pining for some more DS variety right around September or so (Paper Mario is giving me a good amount of variety at the moment).

So, what's a game-lacking game player to do? I found out about the "DS Download Station program that Nintendo has worked out with a number of retailers throughout the country. Basically, you can go to one of these retailers and download free demos and/or movies of games to your DS (or in my case, my DS Lite)! The catch is, once you turn off the DS, the demo goes bye-bye. Fortunately, the DS Lite can live for at least several days in sleep mode, so I was able to keep the demo I got - Mario Kart DS, until yesterday when I wanted to play Brain Age again. It's a lot of fun though, and I can only imagine trying the classic Mario Kart (for Super Nintendo) tracks in online multiplayer mode!

Veering completely off course (at least as far as the post is concerned), while driving to work today, I saw an armadillo poke out onto Hibiscus as I was approaching. I made it a point not to hit it, but I kept an eye on it in my rearview mirror, curious to see if it would survive it's trek to the greener grasses on the other side of the road. A truck had just turned onto the road, but the animal had almost reached the divider lines, so I was sure he would make it. Suddenly, he inexplicably changed his mind about crossing the road, and attempted to turn back. The truck driver, who I assume had expected the armadillo to continue on its present course as I did, was unable to react to the armadillo's sudden change of heart, and the next thing I saw was an armadillo careening off of the tires of the truck. Fortunately, I was spared from seeing too much gore, since I was still driving towards work (and subsequently, away from that disaster) but still, what a crappy way to start the day...

Now, warp to complete non-sequitur mode, as I offer a Joke of the Month. It actually seemed a lot funnier yesterday when I first read it - now it doesn't seem that funny any more but I decided to post it anyway, for the sake of finishing this post up with something other than roadkill...

A new client comes in to a lawyer's office.

"How much do you charge?"

The lawyer replies "I charge $500 to answer three questions!"

"That's a bit steep, isn't it?"

"Yes it is, now what's your third question?"