I’ve got a few photos stuck in the camera that I haven’t processed yet from these past few weekends. I’ll get to them eventually.

Tomorrow night, Chad, Sam, Beika and I are going to see BATTLESHIP at midnight because it’s AWESOME. Honestly, I’m pretty sure it’s quite terrible, but I’m hoping in an awesome way. If someone yells “YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP!” I’ll call the whole adventure a success. I’ll give you all an update on how this goes. Stay tuned.

Then, I went to the park near my house and got some shaved ice. When I was parking, I saw a guy in something that looked like a robe, which I thought was a bit weird cause it was fairly warm outside. I should have known something was up at this point, but I continued to get my shaved ice when I noticed that the dude in question and his group of friends had started LARPing. =(

I left, then, but decided that the day was too nice to waste inside, so I gathered up Ally, Sydney, and their respective owners and headed to a dog park in Pflugerville, which sounds farther away than it was I think. Anyways, here are some pics:

Aww, dog buddies:

Jonney got Mozilla a huge rawhide bone a while back, here’s a pic of that:

BYE!

Two nights ago, Mozilla must have eaten something bad cause he kept on throwing up. I had thought he was over it, so I let him on my bed but shortly after, he threw up on my pillow/bed, so I had to remove the sheets and switch to my backup:

I think I may be in the market for another house near the end of the year. Started to browse available ones just to get a feel for things again. A little excited about it (but not looking forward to the moving or the paperwork =/).

I’ve known many of my friends for a very long time (some for over half my life), and I love all of them… some in different ways than others. Sam will probably be the first to tell you we have a special relationship. I met Sam back in high school when he was the tall, goofy, asian ROTC guy in the halls. I think he actually knew Olivia before me, but I do remember him showing up to computer club once (maybe he voted for me for president? haha). Back then, he looked something like this:

Sam’s of the class of 2002, so when I graduated in 2001, I went off to UT with a bunch of the gang and never really expected to see this guy again. Well, a year of shenanigans happens, then I stumble upon Sam again on the church’s internet forums and I borrow My Sassy Girl from him cause it’s supposedly a good movie. Somewhere during this time, it’s also discovered that we’re both looking for roommates for the coming semester, so the adventures of JW152 begin.

It’s here where Sam meets Mark who triggers what we dub “the downfall of Sam” which all started with a game of mario kart (or was it super monkey ball?) and a big green button. You can ask one of them about this, but suffice it to say that Sam then realized we’re a bunch of asses, especially Mark, and he didn’t quite know how to handle that. The remainder of our Jester days entailed, but were not limited to:

• Getting in the Daily Texan for having an infamously dirty dorm room:
  
• A $1 blow-up doll from eBay with some… accessories
• Getting noise complaints from below, above, and around our dorm room and having the RA kick people out of our room
• Sam looking at me while I slept and wondering what it would be like if I were a girl and we were watching the sun rise (don’t ask me, man, I found out cause he wrote about it on his xanga!)
• Webcam hijinks
• Drunken Pauls
• Food “accidents” on Sam’s bedding
• Hot sauce filled donuts
• Spilt milk
• Sam founded TiSA and didn’t even tell me until a semester or so later
• Sam changed his legal name and became an American citizen

Well, after that, a bunch of us moved into some really ghetto apartments just north of the Target near campus on I35. It was here that the Tower of Che-Kang was built:

Throughout the years, my Xanga has gone through two iterations dedicated to Sam (I wish I had kept the first one… sorry. I do remember it being very pink). I even joined Facebook originally back in the day to get my Sam loving Xanga more exposure!

Speaking of which, here are some old FB posts. Sam hadn’t quite perfected his come-back to “suck it” at this point…

More recently, I built Samitic.us and the Samboard.

We’ve been to Key West:

Taiwan/Singapore:

New York City:

Vegas:

… and even Arkansas:

I’ve known Sam for over ten years now and he’s been the butt of many jokes (I swear he asks for most of them), and though I don’t admit this often, one of my bestest friends. Happy birthday, Sam!

On Thursday night, Andrew and Viraj came in to town for their three-day weekend. We went to Papa Tino’s, which was pretty good but the lighting was really dark. I wouldn’t really have gotten much with my Mark II, but the Mark III at 12800 ISO let me get these:

Certainly noisy, but not bad! I’m pretty pleased. These pics have more detail than I could make out with my eyes in that lighting.

And… here are some more Mozilla pics for your viewing pleasure. First, some Facebook timline fun. =)

I’ve got some shots of Mozilla and Ally playing in the grass, but I forgot to upload them to Flickr. Another time. =)

On Saturday, we played some frisbee game that involved two rectangular areas:

Viraj, at one point, called a disc out of bounds and reasoned “based on the line from that one cone, it’s out.” Apparently Viraj has redefined what makes a line and one can now be defined based on one point. The disc was in, it turns out.

I finished Catching Fire, and Mockingjay, the second and third books of the Hunger Games trilogy. I enjoyed Catching Fire quite a bit and it was certainly the best of the three (Hunger Games, I thought was mediocre). Mockingjay was probably somewhere in the middle, but I didn’t find the ending all that appealing. It felt awkward to me. Maybe the whole series was overhyped for me, but I felt a bit let-down by the ending. I’ve found that I’ve been enjoying books with complexity in not only plot but how the story’s told. I know Hunger Games is a “young adult” series, so that’s probably why it didn’t live up to my impression of the hype, but I thought the first and third books were a bit too.. simple I guess.

In related news, Harry Potter is now available in e-book formats (legit), so I’ve purchased the series and will start to read them. I kind of lost interest in the Dark Tower series (I’m somewhere in the middle of the third book I think), but maybe I’ll come back and finish that one day too. Guess all these books should come in handle tomorrow while I’m sitting at home recuperating…

Night!

1. Danger
2. Tyrone/Tirone

I don’t think I could actually commit to going with Tyrone, but Danger is sounding fairly appealing to me at the moment. I’m looking for something clever/fun so if you have ideas, share!

Oh! I should mention… this is NOT and April 1st joke. =P

In other news, I found a wonderful program to make fake Magic cards and had a blast of a time creating Sam and Viraj cards. I’m sure Gene, Liang, Mark, and Sam can attest to the many giggles that came from my desk as I tinkered with this. I was so pleased with myself. Here are draft versions of two Virajs. You’ll have to wait for the Sam one. I think I’m going to redo what I’ve got.

=D

I got my 5D Mark III and it’s been a very pleasant experience so far. I’ve really only taken photos of Mozilla, though. Here are a few for your viewing pleasure:

Olivia brought to my attention that Mozilla now has a unibrow. =( However, I will say that he has an “M” for Mozilla on his head.

Here’s a set of tweets that makes me smile (it’s from newest to oldest, so you probably want to read it in reverse).

My 5D Mark III comes in tomorrow! YEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

I asked the social networks whether or not it was weird that I sometimes like going to the movies by myself. I got a number of responses that seemed to indicate that that is not one of the reasons that makes me weird. I haven’t gone in a while by myself, but it does feel appealing occasionally. I never really got why movie-going was viewed as such a social event, since you don’t really interact while watching the movie. There are certainly some exceptions (like watching Expendables next to OMan – that makes the movie uber awesome), but it seems most people viewed going alone sometimes positively.

I posted a few pics from Andrew and Jen’s engagement party thing to flickr. I wasn’t really out to document the entire event (there were plenty of other photographers there), so I just have a few random ones. I wish I had actually taken at least one picture of Jen though (sorry!). Here’re a few and some of the after-party:

Chad, Nancy, Mark and I went to Uchiko today for the start of restaurant week and it was pretty good. I didn’t think about bringing my camera and taking any pics, so you get none. =) We went there at 5PM cause they were full on reservations and I didn’t want to end up waiting a million hours during “prime dinner time.” We ended up not having to wait long at all and they didn’t seem too packed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were busier later though, just something to note for those of you who want to go there and may not have reservations (get there early instead!).

Mozilla has started to shed a bunch and I think we’ve entered into the “blowing the coat” phase that happens twice a year. I’ve been taking him outside and combing him almost every day and I get a good bit of fur every time. He cooperates pretty well though, so that’s good. I’ve seen photos of shibas blowing their coat that look all funky, but Mozilla still looks to have a pretty good coat (not patchy), so we’ll see if that sticks.

MY 5D MARK III IS SUPPOSED TO SHIP SOON. WE SO EXCITED.

Speaking of sleep, here’s one of Mozilla sleeping next to my modem:

A few days ago, Mozilla ran out the front door for the first time (I blame Mark). Greg and I chased after him and despite the worry in me that he’d get run over by a car, I was fairly amused by how elated he looked. He ran across the street a few times and went as far as two houses down, but he came back and started sniffing a bush for long enough for me to sneak up on him and grab his leg. After learning how fun it was to run free, he snuck out again later as Greg was leaving, but Greg managed to corral him back into the house. Shiba inus are infamous for not having good recall and while he’s not bad when he’s in the backyard (I’ve been positively reinforcing him by giving him treats after calling him back), that doesn’t work at all when he’s out front, so I’m going to have to take more care with making sure he doesn’t sneak out.

Take this broken heart,
if it brings You praise,
Take this beaten soul,
shivering hands I will raise.

Hope Unstoppable,
Sing the morning sun,
Wake up oh sleeper,
the Daylight has come.
- Brave Saint Saturn