When I finally become a homeowner, I am so gonna buy these!

See if you can guess what this is. :-)

Logitech should really consider manufacturing more home equipment accessories.

I didn’t realize how hard it is to find a decent card to be given to someone leaving our section for a new job position (nope, it’s not me, although I’m leaving the job next week). Earlier this summer, I was asked to be a rep. for our Sunshine Club whose sole purpose is to give recognition or consoldence to someone in our section such as baby shower, retirement, or death. So, my first (and last) assignment was to find a farewell card for a black lady who’s worked 15 years for NASS, our department under the USDA agency. First, I went to a little gift shop that’s deep in the basement of our headquarters building and tried to find its respective category. Retirement? no, she’s not retiring, just moving to a new job under a different agency. Ok, “we’ll miss you!”? nope, too sappy. I looked up and down across the whole aisle and finally found the category, which was “good-bye”. Only to find out that the entire column was out of cards. Looks like I’m not the only one leaving the agency. Great, I’ll have to go to a CVS store or a similar store to get a card since the party is tomorrow or I’d look very bad at being a rep. on my first assignment.

After work, I went to play golf with Luke. Thought I’m gonna be a little rusty as I didn’t play for 2 weeks. To my own surprise, my first drive wasn’t badly off the right side into the rough under some trees. For some reason, I felt at ease playing golf, like my swing and me was one machine working in sync. In the past, I’d try to be like Tiger Woods and swing as hard as I could. Ofc, you cannot do that in golf unless you’re Tiger Woods; it’d be the opposite. The harder you try to swing, the more likely you’ll fuck up. Just ask Luke when he nearly lost his balance while trying to hit a drive. So, the key concentration here is that you’re not trying to hit the ball 100%. Try to hit it at 80% and if you’re that good, maybe 90% for a bit extra juice on the ball… (more…)

That’s the date I will start working at Google. It’s a good thing that my boss and I have a positive relationship. I was a little worried at how she would react but she was really supportive and gave me some advice. I originally wanted to end my employment with USDA early this Friday ‘cuz one of our co-workers is also leaving, so it would be killing two birds with one stone if we shared the farewell party together. However, my boss insisted that I serve the standard two weeks notice but I told her I wanted to take some time to visit my parents as I haven’t seen them all summer and it doesn’t help much that I’m the only child too. Then she told me how I can use my absence leave and extend my employment for an extra pay period (one more paycheck, :-) ). so I will be taking a whole week off before I start work at Google.

Time for me to find a fare from DCA to SPI.

Only in DC, Posted via Sidekick II by natech.

24 hrs subway with bulletproof glass, no seats.

Xbox party, Posted via Sidekick II by natech.

Blake, Clint, Ernie, and Mark.

Xbox party, Posted via Sidekick II by natech.

Halo 2 group

Woot! They called me and told me I got the offer. I can’t reveal details but want to let everyone know that I got the job!

Bye bye Windows

New hand air blower/dryer, Posted via Sidekick II by natech.

Cool, this new blower dried off my hands in a few seconds, instead of

like 1, 2 mins. (Proof I do wash my hands, ;-)

I knew it! Sooner or later, Google was gonna do something about the so-called blogosphere. They just unveiled the new search engine for blogs. Here it is: http://blogsearch.google.com/

Know a bit about Greek Mythology? Like how Apollo is the God of Sun, Aphrodite for love and beauty, or Hades for Hell. So, if there is going to be one for the www, it has to be AWstats. It tracks every hit, visitor, and spider (search engines) that come to this website. Knowledge is truly powerful.

*fixed the photo gallery. Rewrite rules were broken. Happy looking.

I’ve never been a fan of Jeep except for the Wrangler but every next model seems to get worse and worse…till I saw this pic.

This is looking really nice; I’m seeing more SUVs coming out with more car-like platform. Guess people do spend more time on the concrete than off-road.

*update* more pics of this near-production concept suv

I get a feeling that this suv is gonna be a big hit, it has 2.4 liters, which should put the mpg at around 25 highway.

Almost like what Monster.com’s tagline, “today’s the day.” (I didn’t apply for the job thru them, I got referred.), I have an interview with Google tmw. It’s gonna be for a datacenter technician. You can find more info about this position here.

I’m getting really nervous about this opportunity and it’s almost a once-in-a-lifetime chance as I doubt I will get another shot if I didn’t make it. Looks like the requirements aren’t too high but one problem is that I don’t have much real-world experience with Linux. I never worked in a computer lab where entire servers are run on Linux; only windows. The U.S. government has a love affair with Microsoft Windows, so to speak, so I never had the chance to work directly with Linux except at home. I have played around with Linux on my computer but I doubt it’s enough to be able to perform tasks Google would expect me to do. I know some basic commands but not extensively that I’m able to make a delicious meal from basic ingredients. I’d be still looking into a cookbook. That’s what I will probably tell them in the interview. I will tell them that the best way to learn is thru work environment experience and see if I can handle it. I imagine myself crawling on my knees and begging them to just give me the chance. If I still cannot do the job at the end of 3 months stint, they are more than welcome to cut me off and say I wasn’t geeky enough. I will accept that. A chance is all I need and I will practically live at their one of the datacenters and become a workaholic, if hired. If I do get it, I will come home and wipe out the windows partition on this hard drive and eat, breathe, live through Linux only.

The best advice anybody’s given me is my mom. She always tell me, “Be yourself.” So, I’m gonna be myself and answer their questions to the best I can. Good luck to myself.

Oh yeah, I’ve been interviewed by IBM, Microsoft, and now Google. As they say, “third time’s a charm.”, this damn better be true.

Knowing that today is my last chance to finalize the transfer from dot5hosting.com over to dreamhost.com (although I haven’t gotten the last notice to let me know that my account is gonna be expired, I still better not take the risk and end up losing everything.), the first thing I did was try to figure how to retract the database from the mysql server. We the geeks call it mysql dump and with the friendly interface of myPHPadmin, this dump was as easy as you would save a file from the www. Then I gotta set up the database on the new server but dreamhost.com is more technical if not geeky as it doesn’t support localhost (default hostname for most database setups) and you gotta have to set up the hostname for the database. With the aid of docs thru dreamhost, I found a way to set up the database using my own hostname, which has a nice geeky feeling to it. Once the database has been set up, I used the import command to, well, import my blog into the new database, and then I simply copied everything thru ftp over to the new server. And here I am. Transfer complete. :-)

I just realized I only have two days left before I either renew my contract with my current web hosting server or change to a new server. Or this whole thing will be shut down and I lose everything on the server. I’ve broken the biggest rule in computing: always back up your data. Which I haven’t done so. Good thing I use Flickr as my image management. Since my current web server doesn’t allow shell access due to security reasons, I found this web hosting service that allows unix access at a good deal, $7.95 a month for two years.

I’m gonna go ahead and migrate over to the new server. I hope it’ll go smoothly without any hiccups. That’s if someone will notice. ;-)

*update*

I found this absolutely sweet deal, thanks to mymoneyblog.com, he used the coupon, ’77OFF1YEAR’ to save $77 from $111.95 for one year ($9.95 a month) to only $3.95 a month. That sealed the deal for me. Hello Dreamhost.

Hurricance Katrina timeline

Think 2004 election was crazy? Just wait till 2008…