The Devil's Millhopper

By far, Friday was the biggest and best day of our trip. How can you compete with Reggie Freakin' Nelson? First Team All-American with 6 Ints (one returned 70 yards for a Touchdown!), a hard-hitter in the open field that terrorized receivers in the middle, not to mention he comes out of Palm Bay High School right here in Melbourne! But alas, our trip did have other days.

Saturday was one of those days. It started out kind of slow, since I stayed up a little on Friday night to play some Devil May Cry 3, but the day would get interesting soon enough. I had decided that this past Saturday would be the day that, after spending six years in Gainesville, I finally went to the famous geological site, the only State Geological Site in Florida, the Devil's Millhopper. The fact that I played Devil May Cry 3 just a night before going to the Devil's Millhopper is completely coincidental.

What is the Devil's Millhopper? It's a natural sinkhole that is 500 feet across and about 117 feet deep, shaped like a funnel, or a "hopper", something used in the 1800's to grind grain. It was formed from by the dissolution of the softer limestone in the area by the acid content of rainwater that soaked through. Because fossilized bones and teeth were found at the bottom of the sinkhole, it was said that this location was the hopper that fed bodies to the devil, and so, it's name was born. There's actually a cheesy legend that tells the story of the Devil kidnapping an Indian (native American) princess and then trapping the braves who went to go rescue her by creating the huge sinkhole for them to fall into.

The Devil's Millhopper is about 7 miles from where Ed and Shawn live, but due to some very dubious directions from their website, we ended up driving for two hours for about 40 miles on what we have coined as the "JAJAJA" route, a reference to the AIM/L33Tspeak for "HAHAHA" used by many Spanish speaking chatters and MMORPG players. To clarify, the "JAJAJA" route refers the the back and forth driving as well as the laughable embarrassment of taking such a loopy route to get to somewhere 15 minutes away.

Eventually, as evidenced by the photos, we were able to make it to the Millhopper, where we found a surprisingly beautiful State Park (and added another stamp to our National Park Passports!) that featured slopes (albeit inverted), creeks, and waterfalls I'd never seen anywhere in the state of Florida. The whole park is about an hour walk, but I highly recommend the walk to anyone that lives in Gainesville and has never seen it before or simply wants to go for a walk or a brisk set of stadiums (we saw a guy running up and down the 232 steps over and over again.)

Make sure you check out the photos in the Photo Album!

Reggie Freakin' Nelson!!!

This past weekend, Cherrie and I took an extended trip to Gainesville. It would be our first time back to Gainesville, which is often referred to as "Title Town" these days, since we went to the FSU game in 2005, AKA the "Stomp in the Swamp". While our main purpose was to get information about Cherrie transferring to UF's top ten ranked Accounting Program after she finishes her AA at BCC, we spent four nights in Gainesville this time around.

We arrived in Gainesville on Thursday night, somewhat to Ed's surprise, since I hadn't told him that we were coming in on Thursday. As a result, we had to stay in the living room for the duration of our visit, since Ed wasn't able to clean his room and apartment before we got there. We settled in and got ready for our big day on Friday.

Friday morning, Cherrie and I attended a campus tour. For all those smirking (and I know you're out there), yes, I know the irony of someone like me who's spent 6 years at UF taking a campus tour. And yes, while the tour itself wasn't particularly enlightening, it was definitely worth it, if for nothing other than this reason: The last stop of the tour was at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, obviously somewhere I'd also been on many occasions. However, this time, there was no game or kung fu practice going on. Instead, Chris Leak, Jemalle Cornelius, Reggie Nelson, and two other presumably former players were running around the stadium, preparing for the NFL draft coming up! On seeing them, Cherrie completely ignored the stories the tour guides were telling and hopped down to the sidelines and managed to get a photo with Reggie Freakin' Nelson!!

After the tour, I made a miserably failed attempt to meet up with my friend Ahmad, who will be leaving the country soon. I'll have to catch up with him sometime before then. However, we did meet with Ed for lunch, and then we went to the Admissions Office and the Business School Office to get some information for Cherrie. After getting the information we wanted, we headed over to the newly renovated Library West. Back when I first started at UF, Library West was a typical library - a low, aging building. Now, it towered four or five stories (much like the Marston Science Library) and was fully equipped with a very nice Starbucks, computer stations, and best of all, moveable stacks! You push a button to get the stacks to move right or left so you can access the books you want! I can't think of any other way to describe it except Super, Super Cool.

Next, we headed to the practice field, where the 2007 Gator Football Team was having their second day of Spring Practice! I have to say I wasn't overly impressed. We didn't look all that crisp. On the other hand, the players had been out there for around two hours and it wasn't exactly cool weather out, so some of them, especially the younger guys, were probably getting pretty tired. The veterans looked pretty good, though! Make sure you check out the photos in the Photo Album to share my first Gator Spring Practice!

At the end of the day, Ray called Ed to tell him that our basketball game against Butler was going to be shown in the Reitz Union theater during Gator Nights, so we rushed over there to watch the Gators advance to the Elite Eight in a low scoring victory and make some Spin Art as well. As Gator fans should know by now, the basketball team would later defeat Oregon on Sunday to advance to the Final Four! I don't want to jinx us, but a repeat of last year's National Championship is still very much alive!

Come back soon for the rest of my Gainesville Trip Recap!

Gators at the White House

I've never been much of a George W. Bush fan, but when the Gators visited the white house, ol' W welcomed them as warmly as can be, speaking with surprising eloquence and humor. Check out him receiving the handoff from Chris Leak! Enjoy!

Full-Time Working = Half-Assed Blogging

I was going to try something totally different today. I'm going to actually post without photos or pictures of any kind! I know, you're all very, very disappointed. Honestly though, I am actually pretty disappointed. Although you readers might not notice it, photos and pictures really do light up a boring blog. The problem is, finding the perfect picture, uploading it, then fixing the damage that Blogger's crude photo adding tool does to the html code takes time. And time, these days, is pretty hard to come by. Especially for someone like me, who does most of his blogging at work. But after looking at the bare blog entry, I couldn't accept such shoddy craft, so I tossed in a couple pictures anyway. Such are the lengths I go to to guarantee quality blogging at Grant's Pad!

I've said it a few times this year already - my responsibilities have increased quite a bit this year, which is definitely a good thing (longtime astute readers will notice the shameless self-plug in that phrase to the good ol' early days of Grant's Pad!). I've since been tasked with yet another daunting task - to hold a training course during our annual service center technician training on the Transponder product! Granted, that doesn't mean much to our non-aviation electronics industry readers, but basically, it means that I'm charged with making sure our technicians from all around the world know how to fix Transponders. A far cry from my usual duties, which is to fix them myself in new and sometimes innovative ways.

Anyhow, a few updates from this past weekend. We decided to visit my parents over the weekend. Ed was on his spring break, so it was a convenient weekend to bring the whole family together. It was also sort of my birthday, so that was another good excuse to go to Boca. As usual, we didn't do a whole lot. We watched the Gators advance to the second round of the NCAA tournament by completely dismantling some poor 16-seed (Jackson State, I think?). Apparently, they played the very next day without me knowing and downed Purdue to advance to the Sweet Sixteen round. We play again this Friday, where hopefully we can advance again, and again, and again! My bracket demands it!

I made it a point to wash my car for the first time in probably a year this weekend. I don't have a hose or other car washing stuff in Melbourne, so I wash my car at home. I also do it in Boca in the hopes that Ed will help out, but he barely ever focuses long enough to not be anything more than a distraction. Still, the car did get cleaned, so that was one mission accomplished.

After washing the car, Ed, Melinda, Cherrie, my dad, and I went to play some touch football. Yes, I know, not the usual hardcore tackle football that you've become accustomed to reading about, but we couldn't find anyone that wanted to get hit by Ed and myself. Speaking of football, Ed wanted to try out to be a walk-on at Florida this past month, but due to a nagging injury and severe lack of diligence, the sports doctors didn't clear him to try out, shattering his football dreams. In retrospect, they did the right thing, as Ed wasn't able to keep up with me on his sprained heel.

That night, we went to Ichiban, a nearby Japanese restaurant, for some teppanyaki, or hibachi style cooking. We hadn't had teppanyaki for some time due to the extravagant prices ($3 charge to upgrade from a bowl of white rice to a bowl of fried rice that the chef makes in a big pile with everyone else's fried rice!), but it has always been among my favorite cuisines. Steak, shrimp, fried rice, soup, and a good show with knives and fire, all made with hefty doses of butter - doesn't get much better than that! We finished off that day by watching Tsui Hark's Seven Swords, a movie based on a novel about some swordsmen during the Qing Dynasty that featured a lot of bladework - the perfect, albeit highly far-fetched, complement to a dinner that featured some fancy bladework itself!

The last day of our trip, we took our usual pilgrimage to a Chinese Super Buffet. This time, we went to a buffet in nearby Coral Springs. The food was awesome and plentiful, as usual, but as far as Grant's Pad noteworthiness is concerned, the coolest thing was the little Pooh-bear cellphone straps that we picked up for a dollar apiece in the vending machines at the restaurant. Each Pooh is dressed in a removable rubber suit that reflects a certain astrological sign, but only Ed was lucky enough to get one that had his sign. I opted for Capricorn, since Pooh in a goat suit looks pretty funny.

And... that's all we did over the weekend! Back to work I go!

Office Space YouTube Cop-Out

I'm not even going to try to hide it today, this is a total YouTube Cop-out day. I actually do have some things to write about, but I'm pretty swamped. Still, I don't want to leave you faithful readers with nothing, so enjoy this hilarious spoof trailer of the movie Office Space, re-cut as a slasher/thriller!



Hopefully I'll have some time to actually write later on this week!

Return of Wednesday Movie Night

Depending on either (a) how long you've actually known me, (b) how regularly you read Grant's Pad, or (c) you don't read Grant's Pad that often but for some reason happened to read the Sophomore Fall Semester post (which has a bunch of broken photos that you can no longer see in the post but are still accessible through the photo album), you'd know what Wednesday Movie Night is. Of course, it is a pretty descriptive name all by itself, so I guess even if you are (d) none of the above, you probably still know that Wednesday Movie Night, not surprisingly, is where we watch movies on Wednesday Night.

At the time, it started mostly because I didn't have class until the afternoon on Thursdays, so we would throw a small party every Wednesday which featured one or two movies, courtesy of my Blockbuster Rewards account. As the semesters went on and we got busier, however, Wednesday Movie Nights became a thing of the past. That is, it was a thing of the past until yesterday!

To celebrate my birthday, Cherrie and I went to see 300 yesterday using the movie tickets I bought from Debbie last Friday. 300 has been proclaimed as the first major blockbuster of the year, and it's not hard to see why. We saw it at a theater that featured DLP and Dolby Digital, so the picture and sound were awesome. I might have been trying to convince myself that it was actually noticeable, but I really do think the picture was almost flawless. As for the movie itself, it featured blood in the liters, a little bit of nudity, and stylized combat - all essentials of a great action movie. The story was straightforward but seemed to emphasize corruption more than I remember reading about in historical accounts of the Battle at Thermopylae - the story itself was not really the movie's strong point, in my opinion. In fact, I think the most incredible thing about 300 is how they were able to find that many men in their 40s with perfect physiques. Amazing.

After the movie, we decided to do something that we'd joked about doing a few times - and that was jump into another theater to watch a second movie! It so happened that Music and Lyrics, with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore and her lisp, was just about to start in the very next theater! Interestingly, I found this movie to be surprisingly entertaining, albeit a little sappy at the end. But 80's style music videos are the bomb, and the music in the movie was actually quite catchy! "I didn't think I could ever fall in love again, but then 'POP', goes my heart!" Awesome.

Oh, one last thing! Thanks to all the folks who either called me, left a comment on my Facebook, or best of all, left a comment right here on Grant's Pad! I don't want to name any names, but I was pleasantly surprised by the birthday comment from my classmate of several classes in high school, Lia. Lia is apparently also an avid blogger. She runs Adventures in Lia-Land, and apparently her job and life allows her to run into big celebrities all the time, which in turn means that she probably has some pretty interesting things to say. I've added her blog to my new list of blogs (separated from non-blog links), and it appears that she updates it like clockwork, so check it out sometime!

25th Birthday! Closer to 30 or 20?

Man. I know I say this a lot, but I can't stop emphasizing how fast time flies these days. Like this blog, for example. I've been running Grant's Pad for more than a year now. In fact, last year, I covered the fact that my birthday, which is today, is also Pi Day.

The fact is, since I already went over the whole Pi Day thing, I don't have that much to say this year, except that, now that I'm 25, I'm officially closer to 30 than I am to 20. At least I am according to a discussion that I had about this a few years ago when my good friend Pablo turned 25. It made sense at the time. After all, conventional math theorems round 2.5 to 3 and 2.4 to 2, or 250 to 300 and 240 to 200. However, today, after talking to a bunch of friends and co-workers, they seemed to think that 26 was actually the turning point, and 25 is more "gray area" or "right in the middle". My coworker Shawn went as far as to say that age is a mathematical exception that is always rounded using a floor function, such that even 29 is closer to 20 than it is to 30! So, which is it? It's a question that begs to be answered.

So, I don't really have anything in particular planned for my 25th birthday. I still have to work today so it's not like I have a lot of time to do anything. I guess I might try to go see that movie 300 that I was planning to see last week. My brother Ed said he might give me a boost on filling out my wishlist, so I have that to look forward to! As for you, dear reader(s), you can help get me a few more visit hits, and maybe even leave a few warm comments!

Raisin' a Roof

We stayed at home for most of the weekend, or at least within five miles of our apartment, but it was a big weekend for us nonetheless.

For those of you who've paid attention for the past year or so, you might know that our anniversary is on March 11. Yep, we've been married for two years already! Never ceases to amaze me how fast time flies. Anyhow, we went out to eat a couple of times and I bought movie tickets from Debbie, the senior admin in our building, who was nice enough to write an IOU for me since I didn't bring any cash with me, but we never did get around to going to the movies this weekend, instead watching Selena and The Sixth Sense on TV.

Most of the SEC Basketball Tournament occurred this weekend. Traditionally, this tournament hasn't meant much for me, but with all the success the Gators have had in all kinds of things (basketball last year, football this past season, dancing with the stars, etc.), I've taken a little interest in it lately. I only watched one game of it - the Final - and sure enough, we were in it. We ended up beating Arkansas by twenty-something points, and according to the newspapers, we'd only trailed in the SEC tournament one time - 0-2 in the beginning of the game against Ole' Miss. The victory over Arkansas gave the Gators their third straight SEC championship. Now it's on to the NCAA tournament!

The biggest thing that happened this weekend, by far, is our starting the process to build a brand new house right here in West Melbourne! Twice in the past two years we've tried to find a house we liked for the right price, but both times to no avail. In addition, the craziness of the housing market over the past few years (like the prices in Florida doubling since 2002 and crashing nearly twenty percent in the last year) made every price look not-so-right. Interestingly, it seemed that building a new house was actually less expensive in most cases than buying a resale home, when considering the same features and price per square foot of the house. In addition, we could choose many of the features we wanted, such as tile and colors, that weren't necessarily available. So, after a couple months of researching the builders available to us and learning about the home building process, I finally pulled the trigger and voila! We are on our way to building our very first home!

So, from now on, Grant's Pad will have a new label, appropriately called Home Building, that will be tagged on any posts that have to do with building our new house! Hopefully, it will be a good learning experience for us and a good home as well!

Photo Album from UF's Pro Day

Found this awesome collection of about 250 photos someone took at Pro Day this past Wednesday. The guy had a great camera, and the photos are super clear. Gator fans, knock yourselves out: Pro Day Photos

The Life of a Mentee

Wow, it's been quite a while since I last posted! My sister, Melinda, posted a comment on my last post, which was nice, except that the comment had basically nothing to do with the actual post itself. Oh, and Melinda, you don't have to send me a separate e-mail telling me you posted a comment - all comments go straight to my inbox automatically! For the rest of you, leave a comment from time to time, even if it is non-sequitur like Melinda's. It let's the staff at Grant's Pad (all one of me) know that the blog is being actually read and not just getting stopped by when a random blog surfer hits the "Next Blog" button in the navigation bar!

Anyway, it's been pretty busy over the past week. As I mentioned before, my responsibilities at work are ever increasing - at some point soon I might actually be considered to be "fully loaded" according to our load distribution tables! Actually, I feel pretty fully loaded now as it is. I've been working on a new transmitter design, a production process modification, and I'll be working again on a number of ceramic filters soon. On top of that, I've been asked to characterize a product's power distribution that I don't know very much about at all. With all these new things going on, I signed up to participate in this pilot mentoring program as a mentee under another Mark who's a new mid-level manager at the company. He's been here for only six months, so I figured we would have some things to relate to since we're both fairly new hires, and his background is also RF and microwave designs, which is right down my alley. And, as I said before, he's a manager now, which is also something that I aspire to someday be, and finally, he also got his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida! So, he fit the bill pretty well, and we had our first talk this past Monday.

On to the fun stuff now! Last week, I participated in another Conquer Club game with Karn and his friends. I was doing pretty well, but bit off more than I could chew and became the first to be wiped out. For consolation, Karn introduced me to yet another ongoing web-based game that's similar to Age of Empires. It's called Travian, and player's in the US can access it at http://www.travian.us/. Apparently, games take nearly a year to complete because the resources take so long to harvest and the buildings take so long to complete. However, since it is so slow, it's not that likely that your empire will be destroyed when you are away game, doing less fun things like working or sleeping. Basically, its' designed for working folks like me. So far, I've been playing for three days and I only have one building and no units!

Another activity that's kept me sane for the past few weeks now is downloading soundtracks from various video games. I had started this quite some time ago with the soundtrack to The Twilight Princess and Chrono Trigger, two games with fantastic soundtracks. In fact, I'm listening to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack right now. After a while, those got boring, so I downloaded the entire licensed soundtrack to Elite Beat Agents, the awesome rhythm game for Nintendo DS that I got last month. It's pretty remarkable that I now like some songs, such as Ashlee Simpson's La La, after playing that game. In fact, I find myself wanting to listen a number of the songs that I never liked before in Elite Beat Agents. Other soundtrack's I downloaded recently are the soundtrack to Sega's Skies of Arcadia, which I've never played before but has incredible music, and the soundtrack to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, a game that I have started playing recently. I have to comment that the music in Aria of Sorrow sounds pretty awesome when you're playing the game, but is not so impressive when you're just listening to the music by itself. Not so with the other soundtracks, which sound great all by themselves!

Speaking of Aria of Sorrow, I've begun to focus on this game as the next game with a story and a legitimate start and finish that I want to complete. The long description above is just to differentiate it from games that I just pick up and play whenever, like Mario Kart DS and Elite Beat Agents (both of which I play with exorbitant frequency). However, I like to have a game that I'm "working on", such as Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Ocarina of Time, which I finally completed late last year. This past weekend, I finally finished the Super Nintendo classic, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The last dungeon is quite a tough one - and Ganon turned out to be tougher than I expected he would be, depleting all 18 of my heart containers a number of times. With The Link to the Past conquered, I am now diverting my game focus on Aria of Sorrow. It's my first Castlevania experience, and it's proving to be an awesome one. I never played Castlevania games before, quite frankly because I'm scared of zombies and the like, but with the interesting "future" setting of Aria of Sorrow, I'm able to face my fears and take on my first Castlevania game now! I have to say, having played it for some seven hours now (I actually started playing it a while before I finished Link to the Past, similar to how I started playing Link to the Past before I finished Ocarina of Time - I didn't play all seven hours just over the past few days), I have been missing out on some great action gaming by avoiding Castlevania for the past fifteen years!