Ha, picked this up for $5 dollars for my travel reading.

And shall the weekend begin. I’m on my way to DCA airport and take off for Denver to attend my friend’s wedding. The groom is Mario and he was my first year roommate at Gallaudet University in 1999. Heh, he and I had the best time there (he broke his virginity during the first week there and that’s just the start). Hope he doesn’t see this post, heh. Another memory was the end-of-semester party and after barely passing all tests, we partied the hell of our heads. We bought a cheap-ass 24 beers pack and drank them all in 2 hrs, plus some liquors others shared. Needless to say, we knocked out and I better not tell what happened.

Mario, thanks for the memories and being the friend you are. We’ll always stay in touch (remmy we used to tell each other we’d want to see our kids to hang out while we grill our steaks with beers in our hands?)

Till that happens, let’s party one last time! :-)

Still full…

Snapped this on lunch break, =)

California Pizza Kitchen, yummy.

Secretly taking pics of people while they think I’m typing!

*be careful, I might snap a pic of you and expose you to the Internet within minutes.

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For those who’s never been to DC, this is what the metro looks inside….

This is what I have to suffer every morning!

All-you-can-eat crab dinner. Comes in buckets. It was good but expect a LOT of work eating those damn crabs. And they were kinda small so you’d have to eat like 50 crabs to get full, like I did. =)
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Saw this “cross” in the metro. Reminds me of the book by Dan Brown. =)
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Hello world!

Finally got this script to work. It wasn’t pretty. I actually got my new sidekick 2 abt 3 weeks ago. Found a plugin that allows you to post from any email program. Got everything set up except it refused to publish. I gave up and nearly smashed this sk.

Tonight, I was determined to make it work. Turned out to be the time zone/delay stuffs. Stupid delay (I will find you somewhere and hit delete on you). Fiddled around the code, fooling the date 7 good hours back so it won’t be delayed to publish. So you can see the time publish below. Will fix that later but for now, it’s working, that’s all it matters. =)

Now, I gotta sleep for friggin work tomorrow… it’s 1 am here, not 3 pm like the time stamp said below.

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Dammit, I think the movie, the Machinist, with Christian Bale, has influenced me. I couldn’t sleep and I keep thinking of this guy who’s never have had a sleep for a year. Watch the movie and you’ll see why he couldn’t sleep in a year. Btw, that movie has a slow pace to it and you’d have to wait patiently till the end to finally understand why the guy has such a struggle. So, I’m thinking if it’s humanly possible not to sleep in a year. The longest I’ve gone without a sleep is like 32 hours, when I went to a LAN party and shoot the heck of them (Warcraft, Quake, Unreal, Counter-strike, etc) all night long and day. Boy, that was fun and my brain was literally fried when I went to bed.

What’s the longest you’ve gone without a sleep?

Ever since I’ve been supporting myself on the income that doesn’t come from SSI, VR, or my parents, I’m learning a whole lot about the game of finance. It’s one of the first things you’ll face once you step out of college and into the real world, with no one backing you but yourself. Housing rent, car loan, groceries, buying things that you’ll never buy if you were 60 years old, etc. If you live in DC like I do, it sucks to learn that it’s nearly impossible to find a house or a condo under 150k (hey! I hail from Illinois, known for its never-ending cornfields), thus, I have to rent a place till I know for sure that I’m gonna live here for the rest of my life (I sure hope not.) That leaves the question when I’ll ever own a place someday….

I’ve always strived to be knowledgeable about things—I don’t mean in a way that I think I know everything—just being in the know. Thus, I read, study, ask questions, ponder abt things, talk with friends over certain subjects, that contributes to the learning process and like Gandi said, you never stop learning. So, lately, I’ve been reading nonfiction, mainly on finance. Why is that? Well, if you want to continue working well into your seventies, please do help yourself. I sure don’t. To do that, I have to reduce my spending and save money. After reading “the Next-Door Millionaire” book, I discovered that I’m an under-performing accumulator. It means that I’m not saving as much as I should and that I’m spending too much, or like the book said, not frugal. The author in the book said that those who are millionaires don’t even have six figures income, they do it by being frugal or PAW ( Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth). They save whatever income they have and minimize their spending. Over time, they build up a million dollar nest egg and once their mortgage has been paid off, they say good-bye to their work. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Now, I know a friend who’s a year younger than I am and she has already saved nearly a half hundred thousand dollars. That pisses me off…

So, if you want to get off to a good start, and that you’ve read this far, I have some good news to tell you. I realize I’m not the only one who seems “obsessive” about his finance and there’s tons of blogs that are almost completely devoted to accumulating wealth and to retire with a million dollar by the time s/he is 50 years old. That makes me feel somewhat better and not too nutty. Yahoo! lists the top ten money blogs here. That’ll give you a good idea of what’s their goals and what they’re writing about.

“What? is that the good news?” you might ask. No no, the good news is THIS. Need an interpretation of that? Simply said, you get 5% cashback at supermarkets (Giants, Safeway, etc), drugstores (CVS, Walgreen, etc), and gas stations and 1% at any other places. Those places make up, like, 80% of my whole expenses excluding the rent and car loan. In case you need a loan I recommend to check out billige forbrukslÃ¥n. If you were to spend $100 at those places, you get 5 dollars in return. How about $200? that’s 10 dollars. $500? 25 dollars. Now, you’re really getting something back! However, the big trick here is that you need to pay it off every month, otherwise, they’ll charge you 10% or more for it as an interest, which means you’re not getting advantage of the cashback (And they’re probably laughing at you for falling into that pitfall). That gets you down? Well, don’t forget you can ask for real cashback dollars, like at an ATM, at those places. Say bye-bye to those stupid bank fees!

You know, we keep seeing those digital cameras getting better and better, with more megapixels. Pretty good or sufficient cameras come at 3mp or higher, with 5 mp being the premium cameras but if you absolutely want the top of the line camera that professionals use, you go with 7 mp or higher. But have you ever wondered what our own eyesight would amount to how many resolution in a camera? If a manfacuturer were to duplicate our human eyesight resolution, they’d have to make a 100-million-pixel resolution. 100 mp!? That’s how sharp our eyes are and we can easily detect the fake images in anything we see such as movies or CGI.

Just found this information while reading popular science magazine and thought I’d share with you guys. We are still superior to technology!

Last week was clearly a bad case with District of Columbia, notoriously known for its license plate whining: Taxation Without Representation. Granted, we DC residents have to pay high taxes (10% on most things, which explain why we don’t have a Wal-mart or a Banana Republic here) but DC is clearly raping people off on parking tickets and those friggin stupid cameras! I had to pay $200 worth of tickets to DC, one for expired tag and one for “speeding” on the Michigan Ave that was flashed by the traffic camera. Grr, I really hate those cameras. One of those days, I’m gonna vandialize that damn camera!

$200 hard-earned money. Sigh.

On the bright side, I still retain my Illinois license plate due to insurance reasons. If I changed to DC license plate, I’d have to change my insurance coverage to DC and then the premium would go double, to about $1500 for six months.

With or without DC insurance, I suppose DC still finds a way to get my money. :-(