Some Pictures

Me and Grandma Chen on Mother's Day. She's not looking at the camera because she's pretty much blind.


My new 2-monitor setup in my room. Starcraft on one screen, baseball scoreboard on the other. Doesn't get much better than that.


Apprentice Bill Rancic at the Sox game. I was a fan of him before I saw him run out to the mound and throw out the first pitch. The guy runs and throws like a girl.


White Sox 15, Orioles 0. Thanks to Dennis, free tickets, free parking, awesome weather, 3 brats and 2 beers... life is good.


*****

Also, happy birthday to Vira.

Lawn Care

My current passion is taking care of my lawn at the Darien house. It's pretty much eaten up the past couple weekends for me (or at least Saturday/Sunday afternoons) as well as some weekday evenings, but actually I don't seem to mind spending so much time working on it.

More than one person has asked me - "why don't you guys just pay someone to do it?" Well, first of all, why pay someone to do something you can do yourself? But more importantly, I'm thinking that if you put your own time and energy into working on your own lawn, it will be more rewarding in the end to see results. At least that's the hope.

See, I used to just be responsible for mowing the lawn. There's not much to mowing the lawn, except pushing a loud vibrating machine around and trying not to cut crooked patterns where it looks too ugly. Even though I never hated doing it, it was still basically a chore. Now that I take responsibility for the whole process, I'm finding that yard work can actually be kind of fun.

I know that makes me sound like a loser, but seriously, I'm finding myself actually looking forward to spending more time on yard work. It's like a sort of escape from the rest of my week. For a few hours, I don't have to deal with anyone else, I don't have to think about anything other than the grass in front of me. I don't have to worry about whether or not I have the skills or knowledge to do what I'm doing, because I know that lawn care is something you probably don't even need to finish high school to do. And maybe the best thing is, I'm not spending all my time sitting in front of a computer, or watching TV, I'm outside enjoying the sunny weather like human beings were meant to.

The main challenge so far has been trying to patch up some bald spots in the front yard where the grass died last year. The guy at Home Depot recommended this bag of stuff which has a mix of fertilizer, compost, and seeds which you use to cover up the spot and water it until it grows. According to the bag, there should be some signs of growth within 7-14 days. So far, it's been 9 days, but I don't see anything yet, so if nothing's shown up by this weekend, I will be one unhappy mofo.

The next task ahead will be to kill the weeds and spread some fertilizer. Fertilizing is cool. Maybe I shall trim the edges too.

*****

- Speaking of Home Depot, about a year ago I added them to my blacklist after they didn't put Wet Paint signs on their ground posts and I permanently stained my favorite pants by leaning on one of the posts. Well, I think now I need to back off a little from my original rage, because lately I have found that the people working there are so very helpful and friendly. At least the one in Darien is good. Maybe I'll still hang on to my bitterness against the Palatine Home Depot for now and see where that takes me.

- The other day, I filled up my car with my normal gas and the total came to more than $40. I don't know if this is a record for me, but I don't remember ever paying $40 for a tank of gas. I guess even when the news was all reporting about high gas prices, I still never gave it much thought. But $40 caught my attention, it seems like a lot to pay for one fillup especially since I'm not driving a huge SUV or anything. Although the 17-18 gallons my car holds is probably bigger than your normal 4-door sedan's tank. Still.... $40? I thought we were gonna rob those Iraqis blind of their oil, what happened to that master plan?

- Latest voice in my head: "This bores me... Would any of you like to play a game of basketball?" - Prince (played by Dave Chappelle)

Some Pics

Me and the boys at Transit (early evening)


Me and Dennis at US Cellular


P and Dennis at US Cellular - What a cute couple!

The Joys of Email

Until today, I had only heard stories of other people's work inboxes being bombarded by mass email reply-to-all disasters. Now, I can finally say that I have experienced this monument of human stupidity for myself.

I don't know how it originally started, but around 9 am this morning I got an email from some random person in the company network saying "please remove my address from this list". Since then, I have gotten about 200 more messages of people who inexplicably keep choosing to reply-to-all with various responses. A sample of the messages I've been receiving:

"I don't know who you are?"
"What is going on here?"
"I have no idea what any of you are talking about"
"Nor do I know what this is about"
"I also don't know what this is about"
"Please take me off your list. These emails are clogging up my inbox"
"Ditto"
"Dito"
"delete my name"
"Dito"
"Ditto"
"Me too!"
"and me too!"
"Remove me also"
"Ditto for me."
"I think you sent this to me in error."
"I agree with Tom. Does anyone know what's going on?"
"I agree with Tom and Maria, this must be a mistake."
"PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO ALL!"
"I probably should not be responding for fear of further email assault, but this is a virus of some sort"
"WHY ARE YOU SENDING THIS TO ME"
"If you mental giants would stop replying to all, this problem would not be continuing"
"I have no choice but to reply all because I don't know who sent me the message"
"I am talking to Help Desk. They say to not reply to the messages and just delete them."
"Do you people realize that this is probably some sort of virus??"
"Hi Belinda, I noticed your name on the list and just wanted to say hi. How are you, other than getting erroneous emails in your inbox?"

Seriously, all of those were actually among the messages I received throughout today. I just don't understand how so many people can be so dumb and ignorant when it comes to email. The people who are stupid enough to reply-all when they want to be removed from a list are annoying enough. But even more frustrating is all the people who feel the need to teach everyone else about how they shouldn't reply-all, when in so doing they only add more to the congestion and don't help any of us at all. Then there's the retards who actually look at the other names on the thread and try to talk to an individual by replying to everyone. There's probably tens of thousands of people across the country on this company-wide network, and because you feel like saying what's up to one other person, you muck up all these other people's mailboxes?

The sad thing is, there actually was an official company email sent out at 11 that specifically told people NOT to reply to these messages and to just to delete them. 4 hours later, I'm still getting more replies. Utterly ridiculous, I say.

Too Bad I Don't Have A Nice Rack

Got pulled over on Dundee yesterday by a cop who claimed I wasn't wearing a seat belt. Fine, except I was wearing a seat belt all along. He comes to my window and sees the seatbelt on, and goes "is there any chance you put that on after seeing me? Just be honest." Well, to be completely honest, I didn't even see him until he turned on his lights, and anyways, I almost always wear my seat belt to begin with (this being one of those times). And this is what I told him.

Now, you'd think that he would just let it go, but then he noted that I was wearing the belt under my arm. I know it's not the "proper" way to wear a seat belt, but I usually tuck the shoulder strap under my arm because it gets uncomfortable and rubs against my neck and stuff. So the cop is like "maybe I didn't see it on because you were wearing it like that" and takes my license back to his car. 15 minutes later, he comes back and gives me the following speech:

"Ok, I'm still pretty sure I saw you without your seatbelt on, but I don't think you're lying, so I'll meet you halfway: this is a 'citation' for a 'seat belt violation' - it doesn't necessarily say that you weren't wearing your seatbelt, but I'll call it a violation because you weren't wearing it the proper way. So unlike a ticket, it won't go on your driving record, you just have to send in $25 to pay the fine. We're just doing this to save lives, you know, to encourage people to wear seat belts."

Let me get this straight: A cop pulls me over for no other reason than him thinking I wasn't wearing a seat belt. In fact, I was wearing my seat belt, he just didn't see it. In the end, he admits that he's not completely sure about seeing me without a seat belt on, and I still get stuck with a $25 'citation' for a 'seat belt violation'. All this, when I'm one of the people in this country who's been wearing a seat belt for years and was also wearing one the time he pulled me over.

It's not like I have a really shoddy history either, I haven't been pulled over at all in about 3-4 years, and that was when a cop wrote me a speeding ticket for going 9 over the speed limit (9 over!! Don't cops have anything better to do??). And I was polite to the guy all along, even when I was tempted to say something sarcastic like "I'm glad I have police officers like you to serve and protect me like this."

Ok, so I wasn't wearing it in the exact proper way. But I know I'm not the only person out there who wears the strap underneath their arm. Big deal, at least I have it on, which is more than you can say for a lot of other people. Just give me a warning and I'll change, is it really necessary to write me a citation and give me a $25 fine?? All I know is, there may have been all sorts of robberies, murders, rapes, quote-unquote "real crimes" that he could have been fighting instead of burning his 20 minutes and mine to nail me on wearing my seat belt wrong. Even one of those horrible people out there who actually don't wear their seat belts would have been a better use of time than me.

So now I'm trying to decide whether or not to fight this thing and get a court date. It's only $25, so I don't know if it's worth the trouble, but there's principle here. First of all, I should not be getting fined for a seat belt violation when I was wearing my seat belt (and always have). If it's their intention to "save lives by encouraging people to wear their seat belt", it's not necessary to go after people like me who already do it. Second of all, cops need to be discouraged somehow from pulling people over for seat belt violations when they're not even sure about what they see. If they have nothing better to do with their time, then I'd have to say that means we have more cops on the street than we really need. Anyways, I'm thinking that maybe if I actually stand up and make this cop defend himself in court, he'll at least feel more accountable for doing the same thing again, and it could save other people like me from having to go through the story I just described.

Now, I've wasted another 20 minutes writing about the dumb thing.