I know chinese are cheap, but...

This is just ridiculous.




I mean, seriously. This guy's whole house is made up of fedex boxes. Literally everything. His bed, his couch, this dining table. I know we've all heard the phrase starving students, but this is just plain ridiculous.

But you gotta tip your hat to his creativity and dedication. Eat your heart out ikea.

Full House

My sister came home for summer break. As a quick primer, she's attending upenn dental and just finished her 2nd year there. She got the brains between the 2 of us. I just dumb. Hence i'm an engineer. But that aside, she's home for break. For a whole month. actually... not even a month. like 26? days. Something like that. That's all the break she gets now. No more spring break. No more winter break (just days off for the holidays, like a week). One month. That's all she has to look forward to. At least it's better than being in med school where you have 100hr weeks and 30hr shifts, not including being on-call. You don't really hear about dental emergencies and dentists being called at 3am to fix a cavity or chipped tooth. I think if this was the case, the number of dentist suicidies would jump up exponentially.

I think my parents are happy. Both the kids are home, doing the same stupid sibling things. We fight over the bathroom. She needs a car to go visit friends. I need the car to go to work. But she doesn't wake up in time to go take me to work, so she's stuck without a car. But that's okay since she doesn't wake up past noon either way.

But as soon as she got back home from school, i knew she was home. I didn't need to actually 'see' her. I just knew. There was a trail of destruction in the house that could have only been created by her. For example, i open the fridge, there's a huge thing of diet soda. Open the cupboard, there's all this junk food where once there was space. Go to take a shower, our nice silver drain cover is nowhere to be seen. Just a big black something instead. And a brand new toothbrush sitting on my bed. And not just any toothbrush. She managed to score me one of thos new-fangled sonicare do-hickeys that dispense toothpaste as well as brush your teeth. As if you couldn't get lazier, the fine folks at philips managed to neatly package an entire brushing solution into a fancy $200+ contraption. Thankfully, i haven't gotten the 'you have to floss' lecture yet. But it's only a matter of time.

Since she's been at home doing nothing but playing with the dog and eating all that junk food, I dragged her out with the stanford group this past weekend to bike across the



It was a lot of fun, and didn't take that long. Granted, we stopped for quite a while to eat lunch. We had these hamburgers on the recommendation of Irving



but i think this joint was the only place in the area that actually had decent food at a reasonable price. Granted, we were eating in sausalito, a particularly expensive area of the bay area. Although the line outside of this place was kind of insane, it was funny to see group/mob mentality at work. When we showed up, there wasn't that much of a line, maybe a few people deep. As soon as we (10 of us) all got into line, people must have assumed "wow, this place must be good, look at line" and started getting in line as well. So long in fact that it stretched 2 storefronts.



If you look carefully, you can see people waiting in line at the place so eloquently named "hamburgers". Classy.

So after about 17.6 miles of biking around, we triumphantly came to the ferry stop at tiburon.



We were in pretty good spirits since we all made it. But definitely not as lively as when we left. We ended up taking the ferry home instead of biking back. That definitely would have been an adventure. Some of us were up for this idea, but others were holding their ground with the ferry idea. I think if we had tried to make them bike back, given the chance, they would have probably locked us up in


(alcatraz)

My sister didn't really feel like biking anymore, and was glad we took the ferry. Lazy bum. So i did what brothers do best.




who knew i had such a fob for a sister? Heh.. at least we had fun

New and Shiny

In order to keep things from getting stale, i decided to change the look of my blog. Nothing super fancy or out of the ordinary, but the pictures i post up kept getting swallowed by the archive links on the right side, so did a switch to the left side. More picture goodness for everyone. And i added links on the left-hand side. Venturing into html-land. Not exactly what i'm good at. But i guess it's always good to try and learn new things. Coding was never something i did particularly well. I could do enough to pass my classes (albiet, very poorly, but still passing). If you hate it, like it, are ambivalent, too bad. But feel free to post your hate-mail in the comments section.

But in all seriousness, "new and shiny" really does define this point in my life. There is so much that's going on that's breaking new ground and gives me reason to look foward to brighter days. There's a steady income that's not ending because summer is ending (thank the never-ending summer internships for that), no more homework or tests to ruin the flow of my week, and besides, fall is knocking on the door. No more hot summer days. Just cool, mild weather again. And winter is not too far behind, which means more snowboarding is on the horizon. And although i'm doing my best to live up to the engineer stereotype, i'm beginning to learn peoples names at church and avoiding the anti-social streak. Hey, that's what we engineers do best.

Which brings me to the crux of the post. KCPC is about to move into our "new and shiny" building. A structure of concrete and steel, 4 walls and a roof. But it's so much more. It's a place that for 7 years, 7 looooooooong years, we've all prayed about and hoped to see one day. We as a church have endured (at least me personally) a catholic church and a mortuary. It was always interesting to go to church while we were at the catholic church because we always had company while we were worshiping. Not in the sense that random people would come in, or that I felt like God was present (which he always is), but there's statues of various saints and other religious figures around. It's like a built-in audience. It was always an experience and adventure to go to church, wondering which 'statuette' i would sit next to.

If you ever wonder if God has a sense of humor, i firmly believe he does. Otherwise, why would he have so graciously provided us the mortuary where we currently call 'home'? Not that it's a bad home, but the irony of it so thick that you can almost taste it. We are a body of worshipers who glorify the one true God, the giver of all life, and here we are worshiping in a building that deals with nothing but death. If you have ever had the opportunity to venture downstairs into the basement, you would find the body-preperation room where all the walls are tiled for easy cleaning, the coffin elevator, and the giant scale meant to weigh the coffin+deceased. It's not exactly the friendliest place to be at night. At times, I swear that the building is alive with all the random and weird noises going on. While i play drums in the em hall, there's this small vent in the wall that blows air directly at me. It's pretty freaky since I don't ever recall having that vent "work", and the air it spews is kind of musty and stale. But all ghoulish nonsense aside, the mortuary has served us faithfully for the past 2+ years. I'll definitely miss that building when we leave, but i doubt i'll ever have this huge surge of nostalgia to go back and visit.

We're so close to moving in to 50 Northridge. We've been so close for so long it's almost frustrating. This week, it was announced that we have received a verbal permit. There's only one more thing to test with the water system before we're allowed in. That test should happen this week. It could be this weekend or next before we get in. It's really exciting, but i feel that it's been hyped up so long, i'm starting to get cynical about the whole thing. But why? I should really be ecstatic and hoping and praying everyday to see that we get in the building. I'm going to get a soundwall around me so i can bang the drums as loud as i want without making the first 3-4 rows deaf from the volume. Everything is going to be new. The sound system. The pews. The carpet. The walls. The windows. Everything. But yet, i'm filled with doubt and skepticism. But the building exists. I saw it with my own 2 eyes. I touched the walls with my hands. I got dirt from the windows on my hands. It's tangible proof that we're almost there. But yet, i'm holding that attitude "i'll believe it when it happens". Why do i doubt? What is it about human nature that makes it so hard to believe? The building is there!! It's real!!




Yet i can't bring myself to believe that it's gonna happen anytime soon. The move in date has been pushed back so many times, it's hard to get excited. It's become almost anti-climactic.

Right now, my lack of faith is appalling. My attitude needs to go from old and busted to new and shiny.

The Athletic Men of Oakland

GO A's!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't pet the sweaty things

This is for all the music lovers out there:



(if you don't get it... clikc on it so you can read all the 'notes')

In other news, proof that it's not our fault for not being able to hear girls voices.

"The Daily Mail, quoting findings published in the specialist magazine

NeuroImage, said researchers at Sheffield university in northern England discovered startling differences in the way the brain responds to male and female sounds.

Men deciphered female voices using the auditory part of the brain that processes music, while male voices engaged a simpler mechanism, it said."

Kind of makes you wonder why you never hear people saying "my dad's soothing voice"

Ants in the pants

As promised, here's an update of this past weekend.

Went to Kings Canyon with my friend's church from down south on a camping trip. I think i spent nearly 24 hrs in the car this weekend. Granted, i wasn't driving the whole time, but that's a really long time to be stuck in a cramped space. But I digress. Kings Canyon Nation park is somewhat east of fresno, and it's just an amazing place and in my opinion, better than yosemite. Blasphemy you might claim, but hang on a sec. Don't you get your drawers all up in a twist just yet. It's not necessarily better in terms of scenery. It doesn't have the great majestic sites like Half Dome or Yosemite falls, but it does have one major advantage over the better known park. Lack of people. There's basically no one there. Granted, it's not exactly the easiest place to drive to (a good hr half of that drive is all windy roads) and it's stuck out in the middle of nowhere, but the views and the peaceful serenity of the place is unmatched.

But in any case, this was the first time in a long time that I actually went camping in tents and roughed it out. I think the last time I did tent camping was back in high school. Dang, it's been a long time. There's something about roughing it with a bunch of people that makes it that much more fun, and builds stronger bonds. Friendships through misery is probably a more apt name for this phenomenon. So about 35 people went on this camping trip. I don't know how me managed to shove that many people into about 6 tents, but we didn't have anybody sleeping out in the open, although we did have one or two primadonna's sleeping in the cars.

For the next 3 days, we did the normal camping activities. We swam in the river, hiked a few trails, built campfires and made smores, the usual things. But I don't ever remember eating so well on a camping trip before. The food itself wasn't exactly gourmet or anything fantastic, but I think camping just makes food taste better. Probably has something to do with having your mouth coated in dirt all day.

But all in all, i had a great time and i'm really glad i went. Just being away from civilization for a few days is really freshing. No cell phones. No e-mail. No computers. No tv. No microwaves. No nothing. It's funny how much we rely on these things every day. You ever notice that if you don't have access to these things during your normal daily routine, you feel something's lacking? It's like you need to have these things constantly at your fingertips, even if all you're going to do it hit refresh in your inbox and wait for the non-existent e-mails to show up. Or open up cnn or some news site and wait for the next major global catastrophe so you can quickly im your friends who are sitting in their apts doing the exact same thing. It's amazing how quickly we get attached to these "technological wonders". It's like an addiction. But when you're out in the woods, sitting amongst nature and God's creation/s, it's truely amazing how quickly you forget your dependence on these things. All of sudden, you're more concerned if a bear is going to show up and ravage your campsite, how mosquitos can find that one little spot of skin that you forgot to put bug repellent on, how many stars you can see in the night sky, and the sound of silence at night. No cars. No sirens. No drone of highway noise or tootin' of train horns. Nothing. Nada. Just peaceful serenity. Yup. Silence while you look up into the stars. And the sound of snoring of your friend sleeping next to you keeping you up, while ants manage to find a way into your tent and eat you alive.

Camping's great. I need to do this more often.

Far far away

Heading down to LA this weekend for a camping trip. Should be a lot of fun. Will post pictures upon my return.

4 day weekend coming up!!

Enemy Territory

Due to the recent spew of complaints, I have decided to proof and edit my entries. (end edited entry)

So now onto more important matters of business.

This weekend was a flurry of activity. I participated in the annual Korea Times softball tourney on saturday. Besides church, this was probably one of the biggest gathering of Koreans i have seen in the bay area. It was interesting partly due to the fact that I ran into a few familiar faces, and they were probably as surprised as I was since i was playing with a church they probably didn't expect to see me with.
But back to softball. We ended up playing 1 and half games. Before i get into elaborating upon the half bit, let me state first and foremost how important it is to have a decent pitcher in slow pitch softball. We won our first game cuz the other team went through 3 pitchers just in the first inning. Talk about demoralizing. They basically walked our entire lineup and helped us score about half our runs. By the end of the second inning, someone stated that because of the first inning, we basically won the game. Which we did. I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd say we were pretty confident at that point since we had an uber-veteran pitching for us.

But alas, woe is us. We got a taste of our own medicine for our second game. We had our own pitching problems and ended up playing half a game. Yup. that's right. Half a game. We had the mercy rule invoked on us. The other team put up something like 15 runs the first inning. By the end of the game, the ump simply said if we didn't score about 5 runs, he would end the game. Pretty sad. But all in all, it was a fun time to play some softball with the guys and enjoy the nice weather. The fact that the fields were in great shape and that the KM provided us with fantastic food didn't hurt either.

But the highlight of the weekend was spending some quality time doing an activity I have about zero competence in. Nil. Nada. Nien. After softball, I headed out to emerybay to hang out and just chill with some peepz. After a botched attempt at some cheap food (damn you spengers for getting rid of the happy hr burgers!!!!), we ended up grabbing some decent japanese food and just chillin at someone's place afterwards. But what happened next is something I'd like not to have repeated anytime soon. Apparently, the group i was hanging out with was fairly talented or at least mildly interested in art or some form or artistic expression. They were just putting down splotches of color, drawing landscapes or something freeform, and the host was painting a cherry from a cover of a magazine. I on the other hand, had difficulty comprending the nature of this 'task'. Paint? Brush? Paper? You want me to put paint on the brush, and put the brush with paint on the paper and move it around? Whoaaa.... this is too complicated. If I ever had a fish out of water experience, this was about as dry as it would ever be. I think i sat around for a good 5 minutes with absolutely NO idea of what I was doing. It goes without saying, it was pretty easy to tell who out of the four of us had the underdeveloped creative side of the brain. After about 45 minutes, the other participants had produced:


and





Obviously there is some definite talent in the room. But this expression just about sums up the collective thoughts of everyone involved (including yours truly) when looking at what i came up with




After about 45 minutes of sitting that piece of paper, this was all i could come up with




I think I need to have my head examined. That's public education for you. 2 squares. 2 triangles. A bunch of x's and a botched attempt at..... I'm not even sure what i was trying to do. Next time, i'm just going to put a black dot in the middle of the page and call it art. After all, isn't that what people pay mega bucks for these days? I'm a freaking genius!!

Big ups to nancy for letting us destroy her apartment. Hey B&T, were you not entertained?