In anticipation of our 3000th guest, I've gone ahead and assessed the value of Grant's Pad, as calculated by a link-to-dollar formula apparently used by AOL. When you're done reading this post and any other posts that draw your attention today, scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar and you'll find that, today, Grant's Pad is worth $1,129.08!
Any takers?
What deal, you ask? What deal is so good that even notoriously parsimonious Grantis Mantis cannot resist? An 802.11b/g wireless router for $1.99, that's what! It turns out that CompUSA is selling these eHome Wireless G Broadband Routers for $1.99 after a quarter dozen mail-in rebates. Who is eHome, you ask? Well, I have to be honest with you - I've never heard of them before. But they seem to be some kind of brand under the much better known D-Link company. Even so, it's well documented that their eHome products have crappy documentation, and I can verify the claims of plaintants who have suffered from the crappy documentation. But I still got the router to work for both of my laptops as well as my Nintendo DS Lite, so, for $1.99, I definitely can't complain! Of course, I've only really used it for a grand total of about two hours or so, so I won't go on record as saying that I fully endorse the eHome brand yet, but so far, it looks like I'm going to hang on to it and cash in on the rebates!
Now, having a wireless router has obvious benefits, like being able to surf the net on the couch, or eliminating the need to run ethernet cable all over the house. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that one of the biggest benefits of having a wireless network at home is the ability to finally play Mario Kart DS on the Nintendo Wi-Fi network! Heck, one of the biggest reasons I waited so long to get Mario Kart DS was because I couldn't take advantage of the Wi-Fi play! But no more! I'm now one of the legion of DS owners around the world that can race other Karters from the comfort of my own home!
After the light turned green, however, lady-in-the-Hyundai power-boosted out of the starting gate and weaved around me, then back in front of me to avoid the car in the right lane, then back again to the right lane to avoid the SUV and make it into the parking lot of CVS. That's right, CVS, the drug/convenience store, formerly known as Eckerd's in the South. She stopped at the wheelchair ramp, where her male passenger, who was definitely capable of walking, rushed inside. Now, I can't say I'm 100% certain of this, but something tells me that CVS sells the same things at 8:08 as they do at 8:06 (and I'm being generous when I assume that the Hyundai would have gained two minutes by passing me). I'll have to find out from my buddy and Tri-Fectorate member Kaveh if his CVS has vastly different items available every 90 seconds!
The astute Grant's Pad reader will notice that there are a few more items on my Wishlist that have been checked off. That's because Cherrie got her first paycheck on Friday, and we subsequently went on a mini shopping spree. Mostly we got groceries (we hadn't had a good home cooked meal in a while since we've been house shopping), but we also picked up some clothes, and most importantly for me, the critically acclaimed Nintendo DS game, Elite Beat Agents! This most bizarre of DS games caters perfectly to happy-go-lucky types such as myself, featuring a group of Secret Agents who solve problems of the world using the powers of their smooth Saturday Night Fever moves and Skillz that killz. Big, important problems such as helping a cab driver on the verge of getting his license revoked get a pregnant woman to the delivery room as soon as possible or helping a has-been baseball star save kid admirers from a fire-breathing Golem. Very, very cool. Elite, even.
So, why haven't I written in so long? As mentioned before, I've been really productive at work lately. And by productive, I mean swamped. Not a bad thing, though, not at all. Like I've said many times in the past, it's way, way better to have a lot of work to do than to have none at all and feel like you're a waste of cubicle space and company network resources. Work is not a bad thing, and working hard and using your skills is definitely a good thing. I'm going to go out on a limb here and try to make a very forced connection here by saying that it's kind of like in the movie Cherrie and I saw last Friday, Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. Not gonna say a whole lot about the movie though, in case you haven't seen it. But it was a good one, definitely a feel good story about one Chris Gardner who worked really hard through ups and downs (but mostly downs) to achieve his dreams and eventually became the president of his own multi-million dollar stock brokerage... If you haven't seen it, I do recommend this film over the Curse of the Golden Flower, which we saw last weekend.
You see, I'm starting to really pick up the pace here at work as my responsibilities are increasing. For example, I will be doing my first Project Plan for the company soon, and it's widely expected that my mentor figure Mark will be leaving our group, if not the company, for at least some period of time, which would leave me, in the words of the Transponder Technician Bob, as "the only person who knows what the inside of a Transponder looks like!"
As alluded to in the previous Winter Holiday Update earlier this week, included on our 7-Day Cruise on the Carnival Victory were three land cruises. The first of these was a night stop in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Of course, we only had about five hours in total to spend on the island, and it was already around 7PM ET (8PM in Puerto Rico - we had to keep our watches on Ship Time, which happened to be Eastern Time since we set off from Miami), so there really wasn't much to do or even see. We just walked around the city, which was still lit by its Christmas lights, took some photos of statues and various buildings and forts which had some historical value.
However, aside from drab buildings and bright lights, I did get to see this awesome spray painter. Ed has this painting of the New York City skyline, with the World Trade Center still standing, commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attack, in his room back at my parents house in Boca. I always thought it was a pretty cool painting, but I never wondered as to how the painting was painted. Turns out, it was completely spray painted! As this spray paint artist showed me, which a bunch of different colors of spray paint, some crumpled newspaper, a knife, and a few cylinders of various sizes, you can create beautiful, almost photorealistic paintings that have incredible shading and shimmering effects!
Our excursion to Puerto Rico was short lived, but the next land cruise was a bit more eventful. We made our way to St. Maarten, an island co-colonized by France and the Netherlands. Once again, we didn't have much time to spend here - only six hours, but at least this time it was daylight! We decided to try to take advantage by taking a cab tour of the island, stopping in the mountains, shopping districts, and the all important "European Style" (read: clothing optional) beach on the French side. I only have one photo from the beach in my photo album, but it's not really worth posting. Turns out most of the patrons who opted to not wear clothes were fat old men! But you can go check it out anyway.
That's not to say the Caribbean is not without boobies! In fact, the Islands pride themselves in boobies, with beach towels featuring frontal nudity and boob coffee mugs like the one Ed picked up for his roommate Shawn. And of course, you should never go to a nude beach without being prepared with extensive knowledge of the variety of fruit that you might encounter. The T-Shirt below can help you out with that!
But boobies aren't also the only thing the Caribbean is known for. It's also known for great diving, and so Cherrie, Ed, my sister Melinda, and I decided to take a snorkel tour on the Castaway Girl, a small catamaran that sails the bays of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The crew consisted of the Captain and three young, laid back "free spirits" who didn't want real jobs back in the States. Fortunately, they had some hot friends on their sister ship who mooned us while we were setting out to the snorkel site (the chick crew member on our boat mooned back, I'm told by Ed, but I missed out on that)!
Unfortunately, Cherrie, who just learned to swim about a year ago when she arrived in the states, couldn't get over her fear of the deep water, so after about fifteen minutes in the water, she had to get back on the boat and didn't get to enjoy much of the trip. Actually, neither did Ed, Melinda, or myself. I have SCUBA dived a few times in the Palm Beach area, as well as in the Keys and the Bahamas, and it definitely seemed to me that those locales had much more beautiful reefs. However, the other snorkelists on our trip said that they saw a shark and a sea turtle! I miss all the good stuff!
After the snorkel trip, we went back to the ship, changed really quickly, and then headed back into town to pick up free charms from Diamonds International, the premier jewelry dealer that is associated with the cruise line. And that concluded our last land cruise. We would spend the next two days heading back to Miami, where we stopped at an awesome Chinese novelties store before going home to catch some sleep and prepare for the New Years party the next day.
The movie itself, which stars Chow Yun-Fat, Jay Chou, and Gong Li, wasn't all that good. Beautiful cinematography? Check. Cool ninja battles and liters of blood? Check. Twisted incest and betrayal plot? Check. Boobies ready to bust out of corsets? Check. Maybe it was the obnoxious people sitting behind us that giggled every time nothing significant happened, but I just didn't find myself enjoying the movie that much. I would check it out if you like the checklist of positives that I listed above though!
Back to the "fun" part though. Since four of our seven days on the cruise were completely at sea, we had to find ways to occupy ourselves. We couldn't just eat and sleep the whole time, however tempting it was. To offset all of the eating we did (and we did eat a lot), we worked out every morning in the state of the art gym at the top of the ship, which overlooked the forward bow of the ship. The exercise machines were all hydraulic resistance, using compressed air to simulate weight, so that the rocking of the boat wouldn't cause the weight to change or cause bad accidents. Most of the people who used the gym were actually in pretty good shape, but all paled in comparison to "Ms. NFL", a lady who had the build of a SAM linebacker in the league. Seriously, this woman had traps that could break me in half! After most of the workouts, we sweated it out in the steam room and the sauna. Even with all of this health consciousness, I gained about five pounds on the cruise. Interestingly, I didn't notice much of an increase in my waistline - I did notice, however, that my wrists, of all things, seemed to have gotten fatter, as my wristwatch became quite tight towards the end of the cruise! I mean, I've always said I wish I had bigger, sturdier wrists, but I was referring more to the bone part, not the fat part!
Moving along, each night, there were shows put on by the Victory Dancers (mentioned in my previous holiday post), jugglers, and comedians. Aside from showtime, every day on the top deck there was a Caribbean style band jammin' it out, and every night there was an awesome band that played 60's and 70's dance music called the Bestsellers. I'm not stereotyping when I say this, but I have to be honest that it looked really funny to see four old Filipino guys (it seemed that two out of every three servicepeople on the boat was Filipino, and you would be hard pressed to find an crew member that was 100% American. Even El Capitan was Italian!) rockin' it out to the Bee Gees. But rock, they did!
Then there was Formal Night, the night where everyone dressed up for dinner. In fact, on this particular cruise, there were two Formal Nights. These were somewhat of a hassle to me, but my mom liked them a lot, and we did take a lot of pictures. In fact, I ended up buying about $100 worth of those pictures! What sucked is you can only get one copy of each picture, since you bought the developed versions, not the negatives. Furthermore, they're printed with some kind of security ink so you can't even scan them, so I can only show you my own crappy unprofessional photos.
Of course there was also the many pools, one of which has an awesome water slide guarded by a hot eastern European crew member, and hot tubs, some of which were open well into the night. Near one of the pools was Club O2, where all the cool teenagers hung out and didn't let us play much Ping Pong. Outside of Club O2 was the miniature golf course, which we used quite a bit. Finally, every day after a long day of playing on the boat, we would return to our staterooms to find a cool new Towel Animal creation by our cabin steward!
Anyway, on to the holiday blogging! After spending around a day in Boca's posh pedestrian outdoor shopping plaza at Mizner Park, we set off for our 7-day cruise to the Eastern Caribbean. It would be Cherrie's first cruise on the ocean and my first 7-day cruise - I went on a short 3-day cruise with a group of families right around winter of 2001. Ed and the rest of my family had gone on a 7-day cruise to the Western Caribbean some years ago with my cousin Leo and his family, but I had missed out on that trip since I was in China visiting Cherrie.
The boat took off from the Port of Miami, which is pretty close to where the Miami Heat play. We got there kind of late despite planning to leave the house at 11 AM to get to the boat early. In reality, by the time my mom finished getting all of her things ready, we had left at around 1:30 and arrived at around 2:30 in Miami. My parents brought a lot of stuff - two mid-sized suitcases, my mom's laptop, and a backpack. In comparison, Cherrie and I brought one small suitcase and two backpacks in case we wanted to buy anything. Of course, even we didn't get around to using/wearing all the things we brought, and I'm pretty sure my parents didn't get around to wearing even half of their things. Regardless, we soon boarded the Carnival Victory, which would be our home for the next seven days!
Since we had gotten to the boat so late, we missed the first available meal, which, though seemingly trivial, is a BIG DEAL, which you would know if you've ever been on a cruise. Cruises are all about the free food, so missing a meal (or 14, as Ed did on his last cruise - he overslept through breakfast and lunch EVERY DAY!) is HUGE. Every meal on the ship is included, and you can order as many starters, salads, entrees, and desserts as you like, from souffles to escargot to filet and lobster and beyond! I've taken photos of basically everything I tasted on the boat, so make sure you check out the Cruise Food Photo Album!
I was pretty impressed with our state room as well. It was fully furnished with a king-sized bed, a television set complete with about 20 channels including Grant and Cherrie favorites TNT and TBS, a little bathroom and shower, a dresser, a closet, and the all important safebox where my prized Nintendo DS Lite stayed whenever it wasn't in my hands.
After the excruciatingly long emergency safety exercise, which basically required all 3500 passengers and 1100 crew on board to don their life preservers for some forty minutes on the mid plank deck of the ship, we had our first dinner, which for Ed, Cherrie, and I, consisted of about two each of starters, entrees, and desserts. After dinner, we explored the upper deck of the ship, which actually looks really cool at night because of the lights they hang up on the pool slide and across to the stacks. We must have been going pretty fast that night, as the wind could reasonably keep our jacketed bodies at about a 60 degree angle without letting us crash to the deck!
"If I was a Ohio State fan right now, I would try to shit and vomit on myself to try to simulate something worse than what just happened to them."I emphasized that last one because I think that's the one that really shows the level of dominance the Gators had in this game. Florida had something like 75 plays of 20 yards or more all season long, and the 41 points seems to scream Big Plays for Fast Points. But Ohio State was apparently worried about those big plays, and tried to limit them by playing zone all night, instead of blitzing to try to pressure the Offensive Player of the Game, quarterback Chris Leak, who hit nearly 70 percent of his passes for over 200 passing yards, mostly on short screen passes to the Percy Harvin on the perimeter and quick slants to emerging tight end/receiver Cornelius Ingram. By comparison, the Heisman Trophy winning quarterback on the other side of the game, Troy Smith, finished the game with a grand total of six yards of offense, having taken five sacks from superfast defensive ends Jarvis Moss and Derrick Harvey.
The Gators were truly firing on all cylinders in this game. Defensively, besides the five sacks, Jarvis Moss also forced a fumble, which was returned by his partner in crime, Harvey, inside the 10-yard line, and Reggie Lewis grabbed an interception in the first half. The Buckeyes were shocked and awed by our speed on defense. For all the Big Ten homers, who said that our SEC schedule wasn't so tough, take note of this: the only team to gain fewer yards on offense than Ohio State on the Gators was division I-AA Western Carolina! Perennial bottom feeders Kentucky, and Vanderbilt racked up three times more yardage than Ohio State's vaunted offense! Ohio State's overrated defense, on the other hand, was also abused by our offense, who marched up and down the field, converting on 10-of-19 third downs and 2-of-3 fourth downs (including the knee to end the game), compared to 1-of-10 conversions by the Buckeyes. Even much-maligned kicker Chris Hetlund was on fire, hitting season-long field goals of 43 and 40 yards after being 4-14 for the season, with none longer than 33 yards!
Yes, this year was a special one for the Gators. We won the NCAA Basketball Championship last March, making Florida the first school to be the reigning Football and Basketball champions in the same year. Florida was celebrating it's 100th year of college football. The Gators last championship was exactly ten seasons ago. I had talked to my DS pal, Karn, before the game, and I told him, "It would be awesome if we could do what LSU did to Notre Dame last week!" He replied, "Hey, it's possible!" Take a look at that score again. 41-14. Just like our SEC rivals from the Bayou! Ours was much, much sweeter however. Nobody gave the Gators a fighting chance, and if someone were to tell you that the final score would be 41-14, you would believe that someone got the teams mixed up and that Ohio State would have been on the upper side of that score. But Steve Spurrier said it - it's the Year of the Gator. We survived the toughest schedule in the nation, as rated by the NCAA. We won our first SEC East crown in six years. We then won our first SEC Championship in the same number of years. A stroke of luck (and an upset of USC by UCLA) vaulted us into the National Championship Game. And Chris Leak put the perfect ending on his roller coaster ride of a record breaking career, leading Florida to its second National Championship in Football. A co-worker of mine said that the Gator's might have burned up the rest of their sports karma for the next decade or two, but I wouldn't be so sure about that! We'll be back for more championships, and hopefully I'll be there one of those years!
Make sure you catch the game tonight on Fox, coverage starting at 7:30PM, and tune back here tomorrow for my post-championship game post!
ORANGE!!! BLUUUUE!!! OHIO STATE = GATOR BAIT!!!
The day after our last Busch Gardens trip for a long time, we went shopping for most of the day at the Premier Outlets in the Orlando vicinity. Nothing to talk about there, so fast forward to Friday, when my parents left my sister Melinda and Ed under my care once again. We decided to go to the new water park that Orange Lake had built since our visit to Orange Lake last year. It wasn't much of a park, though - there were two slides, a lazy river, and a few pools with a water volleyball net. There was also a gym which was much nicer than the gym on our side of the resort. The gym didn't have many freeweights, but it did have some nice machines. The chest press machine, however, was of the "euphoric" variety - it led Ed and I to believe that we could fairly easily bench 285 pounds for several reps... frequent readers of Grant's Pad know that it's well documented that my top one-rep max for flat bench press was 265 pounds, and that was several years ago when I lifted weights on a much more consistent basis. Still, we could pretend that we magically were 50% stronger for a little while (until we got on the cruise in the later part of our holiday).
After the awesome lunch, we decided to go try out the mini golf, only to find out that it was something like $15 a head! We decided instead to hang out on the Hammocks. Not much to say, but it was pretty fun. The hammocks were surprisingly comfortable, despite being a little tricky to get on - I managed to flip myself into the sand on one attempt to get into the middle of the hammock in one great bound.
The best game for me so far, however, was last night's Sugar Bowl, where No. 4 LSU and their giant quarterback, JaMarcus Russell, annihilated No. 11 Notre Dame 41-14, continuing the Irish's streak of consecutive bowl losses with 9. Russell's throwing power was astonishing, as he flicked 50+ yard passes on the move, on his back foot, heck even on no feet, with ease, while ND's Brady Quinn completed less than half of his passes for less than 150 yards. Of course, media darling Notre Dame will probably only drop to, say, No. 13 when the final polls come out...
The next day, we were supposed to meet up with Jason, from the Meihua Student Association of Martial Arts to go to pick up Eric to go to Busch Gardens. However, Jason got up a little late, so Cherrie and I went ahead to go pick up Eric in St. Petersburg while Ed waited for Jason at the time share, in hopes that we could coordinate our times and meet up at Busch Gardens at the same time. Little did I know that Eric lives as far from Busch Gardens as you can get in the city of St. Petersburg - across the bay and all the way to the northern most part of Pinellas County! However, Ed and Jason got caught up in some traffic, and despite us taking nearly two and a half hours to get to Busch Gardens from Orlando (typically a one and half hour drive) and stopping at Long John Silvers for some Shrimp Bites, we got there at around 1PM right about when Ed and Jason got there. Fortunately, the drive wasn't too boring, especially for Eric, who played New Super Mario Brothers for most of the ride...
After waiting a few minutes for Melinda (another member of the Kung Fu Club - not my sister), who had gotten to the park a few minutes earlier, we started making our way around the park. We hit up Gwazi, the wooden roller coaster that we usually skip because it's so rickety, and I was able to convince Cherrie to go on it with us! At the end of the day, we were able to hit up most of the rides we wanted to go on - SheiKra, Kumba, the bumper cars, the flume ride, the River Rapids ride, and the Rhino Rally Jeep Ride, which finally had its water segment open!
