For Mother's Day, the bro and I came up with the idea to get her a personalized photo frame with a photo of her favorite children inside. This evolved eventually into a plate engraved with Chinese characters stuck onto a digital photo frame. In searching for pictures to load into it, I ran into some real gems. I found some pics of me actually looking cute as a young 'un:

Then, in light of all the misunderstandings I've been having with the bro lately, this photo struck me as bitterly and bitingly funny:

When the time comes for the bro to be married, I'll know where to find plenty of great material for his wedding slideshow. :)

I would rather eat rocks than buy anything at Best Buy.

I've developed a cough. No cold symptoms, just a cough.

I forget that most mothers don't work on Mother's Day, which is why I can still run around and get her real present ready today (she has no idea).

Just got back from a one-day trip to Dallas for a funeral. It's hard not to cry when your friends (children of the deceased) are crying while recounting the happy memories.

Reformatting my computer solved a bunch of little problems I'd tolerated for the last 3 years, including:
- external volume mute button: if I unmuted the laptop, then hit the increase volume button (also external), it'd mute again. So I'd have to hit "unmute" AGAIN, before I could use the increase volume button.
- I tried out this notebook utility that came with my computer called "battery calibration". Now, it actually gives me at least a few minutes after warning me before shutting down when the power is low. Before, it would go, "Better plug in now" and then shut down immediately.
- scrolling with the touchpad is much more consistent, whereas before it would just stop working sometimes. Strangely I'd read that you have to install a generic Synaptics driver to get hardware scrolling working in Firefox.
- the built-in wireless had been starting to crap out, so I'd bought an external wireless adapter. After reformatting, the built-in works fine.

Will add to the list as I find them. Good grief, should've done this sooner.

Off to finish off our gift to my mom!

Got to finally meet Charmian! :) Messing around at the waterwall:

Nothing like coming home and everyone pitching in for a nice home-cooked dinner (including my infamous hot 'n sour soup):

This sucks. As does this.

The bro (who sent me the first story about baseball player Choo) and I were discussing how in smaller cities, the backlash against Asians would be worse than in bigger, more diverse cities. Let's take a look here, using Los Angeles and Houston for comparison since they are relatively chock-full of Asians.

Population numbers as of 2000 census:
Blacksburg, Virginia: 39,573
Cary, Illinois: 15,531
Los Angeles, California: 3,694,820
Houston, Texas: 1,953,631

Oh, and for those who read my site anywhere other than the mothersite, I was out of town for a few days and only posted to ihatepink.com while I was away. So to get your mini-pic-fix, visit the mothersite! :)

It's good to see extended family (we didn't get to see all of them, but I am grateful for the ones we could see). Four generations present here:

Proud grandparents:

Wii sillyness!

*yawn* Off to the bride's house to get my makeup and hair done:

Video of me giving the groom a hard time (a Chinese custom):

My fave catch of the day:

Wedding paparazzi. The ringbearer (above) and the flower girl were excessively cute:

The newlyweds and me (like the color of my dress? hehe):

Beware the fake eyelashes that almost touch my eyebrows:

This is after John and Jenna's little Dereck drooled all over my jeans trying to ... uh, fit my leg in his mouth, I guess? HAhaha.

Spontaneous detour to check out Manhattan Beach right off the plane:

Video of me being silly at the beach:

Seeing my former landlords, who are like a second set of parents to me:

Meeting my nephew (son of my cousin, what do you call them?), who is affixing himself to dad's arm here:

Exhausted, but in a good way. Lights out for me!

My webhost, EnVaDoR, has once again made the limelight for his l337 "modding" skillz. I say "modding" because well, it's more like carpentry and/or engineering and/or design. He has truly succeeded in not only thinking outside the box, but also outside your humdrum regular computer case. :)

The initial photo of a computer that comes up is also EnVaDoR's, the Dashboard PC. Scroll down to "Mods from Envador" and watch the cool little slideshow of his "work" plus his telephone interview with Intel, which provides insight into Dean's personality. At 4:30 into the slideshow, he says some things that truly inspire me. Thanks, Dean!

So without further ado: [ Intel® Core™ Processor Challenge PC Design >> Share Your PC Story ]