#282 - ah, so this is what it's like to have a life

who knew? not me apparently...

well, first here's a picture from karaoke... keane and jon are power ballad seranading each other right now, jill apparently thinks it's hilarious and i think it's a bit disgusting, but hey, different strokes...

so we start off with karaoke, actually this story starts off a couple of weeks before karaoke, but let's be fuzzy on the details here because i actually need to practice a bit of censorship. not that whoever the three of you who read this blog don't know who all about me anyway, but certain times call for a little more discretion than others.

so, to start off this blog let me just say that i've been paying my dues for a long time (some might say i've done nothing BUT pay dues), so it's so vindicating to finally realize some of the good things that come from being patient and stalwart. i've finally started dating again and it's just been wonderful. i'm not going to divulge too much about it obviously, but i just wanted to mention it because it's made such a huge difference to my outlook on life. i have more patience with my clients, i don't swear at dumbass drivers (as much), i even play the piano better, it's just a great feeling being me right now. i totally lucked out, that's for sure, i mean, who knows how these things ever get started, for me it was random blind date that turned out just about a billion times better than i could have imagined.

anyway, like i said, discretion will be used here because i'm a gentleman (or at least i will be dwhen it comes to writing about this the blog), but i need to mention it because now i have a life! haha, not that i didn't have one before, i mean, i do lots of things, just not the sort of things that probably constitutes most people's idea of "having a life." i mean look i haven't been able to update this blog in such a long time. so let's update:

1. karaoke - obviously super great... i'm kinda running out of songs though, need to update the variety of my music library

2. wet n wild - don't have any pictures unfortunately, but i went to family fun day with my co-workers and had a great time (again, surprisingly, just like last year). it's cool because they have kids and so we got to be "kids" going to a themepark again, it just makes things so much different than just going there as an adult y'know?

3. tennis - ekolu league starting up again this saturday, i'm very excited, haven't been able to play very frequently at all, even this summer, so i can't wait to start up again!

4. work - is boring! which is much better than being exciting in the wrong way, y'know? so i'll take boring for now...

5. phones - CELL PHONE SHOPPING IS HARD!! the iphone is on my mind (and EVERYWHERE else i look), but i really want to stick with tmobile and i've been wavering back and forth between blackberry and maybe that new mytouch... but that iphone is calling me...

6. damn bastard parrot - like an insane stalker i took video of that damn parrot to show everyone what horrid noise it makes all day... but i don't know what happened to my youtube account so i'm gonna have to find another way to post the video for you (beware!)

**UPDATE - okay, couldn't get my youtube account working (i wonder if i closed it?), so head on over to my facebook page to see the video of that damn parrot

7. halloween - gotta find a halloween costume, only two months left...

8. can't remember what else i was gonna write about... see? i can't even get my thoughts organized into blog-form, which is kind of a good thing because i'm more pre-occupied by REAL LIFE and not blog so that's a step forward huh? haha.

#281 - IT'S FRICKIN' BIRDS!!

it's almost like this... except the one i hear comes in two parts, with a frickingly annoying lady laugh in between:

dude, i figured it out... it's birds. those maddeningly annoying shreiks and moronic laughs i've been hearing on a frustratingly daily basis are coming from parrots! i knew it couldn't have been humans, at least, i was reasonably sure it wasn't humans because 1) it was so consistently horrid and 2) if it were humans then i'd have to be even MORE pissed at the rudeness of whoever was screaming constantly for hours so loud that even my neighbors five buildings over could hear it.

but i got a clue about it this summer, i began noticing that the screams were occurring pretty regularly between 7:30-8:30 in the morning, right around noontime, and between 5:00-6:30 at night, but never once it got dark. then, as i was spying around in my yard one day i saw a bird cage in the garage of a neighbor and i thought for sure it had to be coming from there. but i got no confirmation, each time i'd hear the hideousness i'd go out to see if i could see some brat kid or some other rude-o out there, but i saw nothing.

finally, tonight, at 8:00 pm i heard it, i went outside and saw that same house with the garage light on, i saw not one, but TWO big bird cages and at least one parrot... the culprit... the damn bastard. they kept the garage light on tonight so the parrot didn't go to sleep (y'know how all you need to do is cover their cage with a towel to make it dark and they go right to sleep) and it was yelling and "laughing" well into the night. lemme tell you it's a damn good thing i don't live in makaha or wherever that condo was because i'd be calling up that peacock lady right about now...

so on one hand, it's a good thing that it's a parrot because then i'm not so mad as if someone was actually yelling (because that's so RUDE! and now i know i'm not the only one that hears it so that's even more inconsiderate!), i mean if it's an animal at least it's somewhat non-controllable... on the OTHER hand, it IS inconsiderate of the parrot's owners to keep those damn things in their garage throwing out their damn banshee calls out across the whole townhouse complex. they could close the garage or keep them in the house or in the backyard (their yard faces the freeway so at least the screams wouldn't bother all their neighbors), but no, they keep them in the garage and let them shreik all damn day. bastards!

so, first spotted-nape doves at my parents' house... then franklin birds at my friends' house... and now parrots. birds, you have just put yourselves on my permanent shit list. bastards.

#280 - i caved...

so it's finally happened... i've given in and opened a facebook account. man, what happened to all my resolve to stay away? i thought i could wait it all out, like how myspace came and went, i thought i wouldn't have to get into the facebook world before it sputtered out. on the other hand though, why be so anti? who am i to refuse society's pressures? damn those afterschool PSA's brainwashing me to fight peer pressure... no, embrace peer pressure! that's how you become cool! and i want to be cool!

haha, for real though, it's not such a bad thing being on facebook, the only bad part about it is that now i have so many more people to offend by not checking the page and not writing back to people, so many more channels for rudeness, i already have a hard time not being rude to random people out in the community and now i have a whole internet community of people to try to not be rude to. well, practice makes perfect i guess, still, time is a factor. i've only been on this thing since like tuesday or something and already i've got loads of messages backed up to read, too much.

one more thing that's kinda still got me shaky on the whole facebook thing is the fear of worlds colliding. i mean, i don't mind having co-workers and friends viewing my page... but i found out that my MOM has a page! and she had a page before me! granted, i'm pretty sure she still doesn't know how to do much on it, but dude, i don't want my mom reading the same posts that my friends read, weird right? so here's to keeping my facebook page pretty boring.. anyway, i've still got this blog (hope she's not reading this one...) for my more creative posts, haha.

#279 - the search continues

i just finished reading the search for superstrings, symmetry, and the theory of everything by john gribbin... it took me four years to read this book, but only because i only started reading it this summer. not for lack of interest, though, because i've always been kind of intrigued by theoretical physics (not experimental physics... because high school physics and physics labs in college taught me that NO experiment ever comes out right, and yet they expect us to believe that it might if the world were "perfect," pssh). but the reading bug comes and goes for me, i need to be in the right mood, and when i am, dude i jam through those books. but this book i bought at the mckinley book fair maybe four years ago for $4 and it was a great thing that i waited so long to read it because this year or next they will finally turn on the large hadron collider in geneva, switzerland and actually begin testing a lot of the theories presented in this book.

see, the problem with science is that it takes so darn long. people have been tackling the "theory of everything" since einstein couldn't figure it out and even string theory has actually been around since the 1960's. as technology advanced and physicists could actually contruct experiments to test out and find evidence for some of their theories momentum grew and now supersymmetry and membrane-theory (kind of an updated version of string theory) are the leading contenders for the "theory of everything" with a chance to actually be proven correct once they turn on that huge (and by huge, i mean, humungolous! big enough to straddle country borders) large hadron collider and start creating matter. yes, that's right, creating matter. it's a weird concept. creating matter from energy? how can matter just pop up? it's hard to imagine, but that's exactly what happens. matter and energy are just different forms of the same thing (so says einstein... remember e=mc squared? [i can't put the superscript in there]). so once they turn that bugger on and smash those heavy hadrons together at gargantuan speeds (the energy source) they expect to create new matter (matter that quickly vanishes through other processes) as evidence to describe everything that the universe is made of and how they all interact with each other.

man, i learned a lot from this book... most of which is completely useless for everything except for understanding jokes on "the big bang theory." the problem now is that this book was published in 1998, and although it was a great way to catch me up on all the pre-requisite info from before einstein until now so that i can understand those science channel shows about CERN and the search for neutrinos and antineutrinos and stuff, a lot has happened in the past eleven years that i also need to catch up on. looks like i'm gonna have to find myself another book...

#278 - high of 75

some days are just sunnier, y'know? not a cloud in the sky, everything is bright and clear and clean and stress-free. those kinds of days don't come often (so you gotta savor them), but when they do come they jump-start your persective on the world. dumbass drivers aren't so much a worry anymore, things move a little slower, and that's okay. those days when you just smile and don't even realize you're doing it y'know? today was definately one of those days.
it's a funny thing about when things are feeling sunny, not only do you feel pretty good, but things work a lot better too. your memory gets sharper, you react a little bit faster (or smarter, or both), you just do things better. today i was having one of those days and i played a bit of piano and even THAT i did better, no messed notes, a bit smoother, like i could actually play or something.
and when you're feeling that way and the weather outside reflects that? man, that's sweet. take a little trip to the beach to surf the waves (or even non-waves, flat as it was today) and it's perfection. so... lesson learned, don't let the world get you down too often, there are sunny days if you just wait for them...

high of 75 - relient k

#277 - shark week - what have we learned

woo hoo shark week! shark week is always pretty awesome, but this year i've been a little distracted. partly that has to do with work starting so early in the summer now so i've been dvr-ing all the shark week programs and watching them later. but when you look at the whole list of shark shows on your dvr list it starts to look a bit much y'know? and so i started off the week by listing down all the shows and writing my "what have we learned" notes under each one (and i had a LOT to write, kinda of embarrassingly), but at the end of the week i was just getting kind of bored with it all, fast-forwarded a bunch of the shows and in general had other things on my mind, so i'm re-editing this post and just dropping the most interesting things learned during shark week!

- discovery channel seems to be too willing to show re-enactments and re-creations for my opinion. i guess it's nice to have the visual cue, but if it didn't happen, it didn't happen. no need to make stuff up. i especially didn't like "blood in the water," the first shark week program, it was like a fake documentary about shark attacks in the early 1900's that inspired "jaws" with of-the-time-period interviews and everything... lame.
- also, another disturbing trend of perhaps a loss of perspective and un-biased-ness (for lack of a better word), i've noticed that a lot of the programs on discovery, the history channel and all those wonderful stations have been assuming that people who lived long ago (and not so long ago, like in the early 1900's) were retards. in "blood" they speculate that a string of shark attacks reported in the news were instigated by a new jersey heat wave that, for the first time (they supposed), drew people from just wading in the shallows of the seashore to swimming in the deeper ocean. are you kidding me? you mean to tell me that even though people have been alive for thousands of years they only started swimming in the deep ocean in the early 1900's? please. like the ancient mayas could not POSSIBLY have built any of their own pyramids and buildings because they were all too "primative?" lame. which is why i was so happy when "secrets of the bog people" (a show about 7000 year old remains preserved in a bog swamp in florida and how they were able to extract preserved brain matter from excavated skulls, showing that people 7000 years ago had the same brain structures as modern day man... meaning while they may not have had the collective knowledge accumulated and transmitted over the years as we do now, they were no less able to think about, perceive, and reason with the world around them as we are able to do today) showed that just because people lived a long time ago, doesn't mean they were automatically idiots. in fact, i might argue that people living back then were, on average, even smarter than people now, because back then, survival of the fittest was a principle very much still in effect. today, however, medical advances and social conventions are helping people who might not have passed on their genes 7000 years ago do so today. and if you've ever seen the movie "idiocracy," you'd understand that there is what i believe to be a very real possibility that the "smarter" people of this world may be weeding themselves out, or are at least being overrun with those with less-than-ideal-geneology. makes sense right? well, i work in a school, haha.

- not too much new info to learn about sharks i think. seems like they're having trouble coming up with new scientific discoveries and so that's why there's this glut of sensationalistic shows... too bad. perhaps people aren't so high up on shark research as they were in the 90's, or maybe i'm just really smart (of course), but these shows seem to be more bark than bite (heh heh).
- still, cool video at least. "deadly waters" showed some crazy guy jumping in the water with a bunch of sharks in different places around the world. he highlighted some of the places in the world with the most shark attacks (the carribbean, south pacific, south africa, australia, florida, duh) and fed them a bunch of (creepy) human analogs (including a "chum-sicle" and prosthetic arms and legs).

- remember the summer of 2001? apparently it was "the summer of the shark." y'know how once one story gets out to the media they start LOOKING for more stories like it right? that's how people remember things, through the news. so "sharkbite summer" detailed a bunch of shark attack stories, including ones where people fight back. i like it when people fight back after a shark attack, because, damn, i would right? i'd be so mad, like, "wtf shark? why you gotta be such a little bitch for?" haha, well, more likely i'd say "owowowowowowow" but still. so in this one story, a shark attacked a boy in about 3 ft of water, his father was nearby and grabbed the shark by the tail and dragged both the boy AND the shark onto the shore. they took the boy to the hospital, but back on shore one guy killed the shark, stuck his arm down the shark's mouth and pulled out the boy's arm! then they rushed it to the hospital and re-attached it. whoa right? geez.

- "shark tribe" was a cool show, it was about two tribes in papua new guinea who go out in skinny little canoes and catch sharks by hand, with no bait. they just use a coconut rattle, a rope, and a stick. scientifically reasonable, yes, but mix in all the culture and tradition that they associate with "shark calling" and that makes it a pretty cool story of people living in the "modern" world whose lives are just totally different from ours (or mine, at least). still, they weren't able to catch a shark on the show...

- when you google "shark week" for images, you come up with retarded things man, these are all just random pictures from one search.

anyway, all in all shark week is shark week. cool videos. freaky stories. makes you want to go out into the water and also makes you not want to go into the water. but right now the sun is shining, it's a saturday afternoon, and i'm going snorkeling! wish me sharks...

no wait... don't.

#276 - sharks! sharks! sharks!

yes, there is no other way to announce the beginning of shark week! you must say it quickly and with gusto.

plus, just today there was a reported tiger shark attack on a turtle on the north shore (click here). the witnesses said that the shark was chasing the turtle and then both the turtle AND the shark came up onto shore, beaching themselves, then the shark took a chunk outta the turtle. WHOA! man, that would've been something to see. yikes. and to top it all off, it happened at papa'iloa, dude, i'm there like all the time! well, not ALL the time, but i go surfing up there at lani's and chun's all the time.

still, i've never actually seen a shark up there. i'm sure they're there. underneath me somewhere. but i've never SEEN one (while surfing at least, i've seen some while snorkeling at waimea bay, and my dad has caught a few there as well). the only time i've ever seen a shark while surfing was at white plains, and they were way far out. i could see them because they were thrashing around out there feeding on something (it was too far away to see what it was, but there was at least of few of them, with birds circling overhead too). needless to say my heart skipped about a billion beats and when it started again i motored as fast as i could in-shore and got my bite-able little ass outta there!

probably weren't tiger sharks though... probably some kind of pack shark like galapagos or something (those are the kind that i saw on that shark cage tour that i went on a year ago remember this? and this?). still, freaky, especially knowing that some sharks do this:

MAN! well i've got most of my shark week still on dvr (today i finished up those quantum physics shows... super interesting, but ultimately disappointing because we really haven't figured out all those physic problems yet, so all those shows are left hanging), but i did watch air jaws II: even higher (yes, that's really what it was called). when i was a kid watching shark week, i never really got frightened by these shows, mostly because i knew i wasn't a seal so had no fear of being eaten, but man, that's some awesome footage.

more shark week updates to come, you and me are gonna learn a LOT this week, heh heh...

#275 - i have a life?

well, i must because i haven't gotten to post anything in the past week. work started, weekend was pretty busy, and any extra time i found was promptly filled with the science channel (in HD!). so here's the rundown of my thoughts this week:

- back to work, not so bad. i'm slightly motivated to start this year, after having the summer completely off for the first time i have some new ideas for therapy and such... i am a big nerd so i've been waiting for new rehab science bits to munch on.

- office at work is still hot as a mutha (i apologize for using the word "mutha," but it fits). by the time 12:30 rolls around it's game over already. it gets so stinkin' sticky in there i gotta take a shower right when i get home just to head out again to go to the gym.

- parents are mean... or dumb, it's hard to tease out which ones are which, but man, the list of awful kids' names grows bigger and bigger every year... of course i can't share, but please parents, think before you name.

- heart walk. participated in the heart walk this year, it was a lot bigger than the juvenile diabetes walk (and also fricken' 3.5 miles longer) and pretty good. this is the closest i get to volunteering for things, but i like medical charities. especially when it has to deal with things like stroke (re: big nerd). i even saw one of my old clients who had a stroke (and resulting aphasia) at the walk, good for her/him!

- mexican night/baby shower. well, you all were there, i don't gotta write about it huh? nah, it was fun, i'd write more about it but i don't have any pictures from it...

- i don't take pictures anymore. the past few picture-worthy things i've done have been picture-less. i mean, i still take my camera along with me, but i end up not taking any pictures. i think partly that's because i think my camera has been out-done by technology already, i need an upgrade i think. but also because i think i've exhausted my photographic creativity... sometimes i bore myself with the pictures i take myself. i need new inspiration...

- SHARK WEEK! man, this deserves it's own post (and so it shall get one... later)

- along with shark week on the discovery channel, the science channel has been doing a great job every sunday with the physics themes. today i dvr-ed three programs on the big bang, the LHC (the large haldron collider), and the physics of gravity. plus "the secrets of the bog people," heh.

- one more thing, well, i'm hoping to get more of a life, i've got a little spark of opportunity, but not sure if it's gonna translate to anything much. actually i'm pretty nervous about it right now, that's me being a nerd again, but don't wanna jinx anything so i'll keep quiet about it now, haha. but don't let that eat you up or anything, it's nothing too special, just maybe a chance that i have to convince myself to take!