Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Talent

Skill is something one earn through time and hard work; talent, on the other hand, is something that one was born with. A skill instilled by God, figuratively speaking. My talent? Computer killer.

Allow me to explain, many eons and a few blogs ago (yes, I start new and unfinished blogs like there is no tomorrow), I blogged about my series of computer mishap -- spilling water on the company laptop thus conveniently destroying it (have I mentioned that the laptop was only 1 week new?); accidentally put very malicious virus onto my personal laptop; went to use Hubby's laptop while he's trying to fix mine and brought up a blue screen of death. Three on three!

That was a while ago... and my latest streak: moved colleague's laptop from table onto podium in preparation for a conference and immediate soldering smell followed; after said conference returned to my own desk and discovered blue gooey gel on the tip of my CAT 5 cable, turned out that when I unplugged it from my laptop the night before, I accidentally dropped the tip into my cup of water and it sat there over night, at least I didn't destroy another company laptop :); day after I spilled water onto my (thank god external) keyboard and ruined a $70 keyboard.... Again, must look on the bright side, that could have been the work laptop again. :D Where will my talent stop?

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Gainfully Employed

So one day I suddenly got a hunch that I was going to get let go, so I decided to clean my cabinet of all my personal junk that's been sitting in there for the last two years. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, my hunch did not come true. Work has, actually, been quite busy lately, so when my friend said I am "gainfully employed," I assumed "gainfully" means constructively/productively. A few days after said conversation, I've decided to look up "gainfully" on Dictionary.com (you should try it some day, it's an excellent resource!). It turned out that "gainfully" means "lucrative." :O Me? Lucratively employed? So I went back to my friend and said to her, "employed... yes; gainfully though... I'm not so sure." To which she replied, "in this economy, being employed is gainfully employed." How true and how sad....

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Hope v Desperation

Once again, my goal to have a blog that I will update regularly was short lived. Here's another shot...

***

My husband believes that lottery is for the mathematically challenged (but sometimes he'll still buy them for me because he is a sweetheart :D). I, on the other hand, believe that one is buying a hope. I'm sure everyone has heard the joke by now about a guy asking God why can't he win the lottery and God said, "you've at least got to BUY the ticket for me to help you." Well... you get the idea.

So where does the desperation part comes in? Desperation is when you looked up the odds of 1/4,500,000 (yes, that's one if 4.5 million) to win the California lottery. Desperation is to calculate out that at the rate of 2 tickets per drawing, it is going to take one 400 years to buy 4,500,000 lottery tickets. Desperation is to calculate out that to buy 4,500,000 tickets within 10 years one will have to buy about 40,000 tickets each drawing... And for those of you who understands the basic concept of statistics -- just because the odds is 1/4,500,000 does NOT mean that buying 4,500,000 tickets will ensure 1 win. Just look at the number of kids a couple that wanted a kid of a specific gender need to have before they have the child of the "right" gender.

(A highschool friend of mine has 6 sisters before her parents finally have the son. The odds of having 7 girls in a row is 1/128 or 0.0078125...)

Desperation....

Monday, October 13, 2008

My Single Child Syndrome

My single child syndrome has been pointed out to me by my beloved coworkers from my previous employment. "Single child syndrome" is a very interesting term and so very true. Funny thing is I noticed that I act the same way when it comes to a video game or a real life situation.

So once upon a time I played this game called "Yohoho Puzzle Pirate." First you join a crew and be a grunt. After a few weeks, I no longer want to be a grunt so I threw money at the problem -- bought game currency with my credit card and started my own crew and flag... and be my own captain.

For the longest time I have wanted to play in coed softball in a company. I was just about to give up on that when I started working with my current company. I could not believe that this particular dream can still be fulfilled at my age. Then I had some unpleasant incidents during the season, so I started my own team. After I started my own work team, I found out that that wasn't the best idea either because now you will have to accommodate every one at work. So next year I am going to start my own team, outside of work.

See, totally the same MO -- (1) start my own and (2) throw $ at the problem. Hurray to single child syndrome, capitalism, and $ to throw at problems. :D

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Marriage

I love being married. Let me precede this post by stating that I do not believe that marriage is for everyone. I believe that to some individuals, the idea of spending the rest of their lives with the same man/woman is a mortifying idea. That said, certain other individuals, like me, are perfectly happy being married. There are many benefits to being married (paying more taxes is, obviously, not one of them). To list a few of those advantages:-

(1) always a date to go to couple events;

(2) always someone to go home to;

(3) always someone there to take care of you when you are sick... (did I also precede that marriage is only a good thing if you are happy in it?)

The biggest advantage of all? Have you ever heard of the quote "Behind every success man is a woman"? I think it's safe to extend to say that "Behind every successful person is a spouse." (Support gay marriage!!) But I digress, this blog entry is not dedicated to supporting gay marriage. There's a good reason to that statement. It's not so much the support from the partner as to the energy saved from no longer needed to look and able to be channeled to other more constructive cause, like WORK!!

Just think, when a man or a woman walk into the room, in a social or work context, you no longer have to think whether he/she is a potential partner. And I don't have to channel as much energy into avoiding potential behavior that will send the wrong message. People don't tend to over interpret as much when they know that you are married. You can make friends with both gender without romantic context. It is just awesome!!

Hurray to being married.

***

Found this funny quote while looking for the actual quote, so I thought I'd mention it:

"Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife." - Groucho Marx

From Quote DB

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Why I Stopped Using Ebay

Just made a purchase on ebay and totally regretting it. If there's a way to cancel that transaction, I would. So how did I go from this person that used to buy all sorts of stuff (I literally would "window shop" -- as in have nothing specific in mind) on ebay to someone who avoids it like a plague? Answer: one bad experience.

Allow me to go into further details. I buy, and occasionally sell, video games on ebay. Just like many parking lots that like to post disclaimers that "we are not responsible for any lost of damages to your vehicles," many sellers on ebay likes to disclaim that they are "no responsible for shipping lost or damages." As it turns out, peeps can disclaim anything they damn well feel it, but posting it, low and behold, does not automatically make it legal. Although one could argue that you are entering a legally binding contract on ebay... regardless....

So I never received my item from this one seller. In fact, the tracking # on the post office specifically say that "we have been contacted about this shipment," but not confirmed that they have, indeed, received the item. As a decent human being, I even tried multiple times to sort out whether it's FOB (freight on board) origin or destination with ebay to no avail.

Ebay's response: Oh, you didn't receive the item? Go deal with PayPal.

PayPal: We don't deal with shipping insurance. Just file your claim.

So was it my fault that I took advantage of PayPal's $2000 guarantee and got my money back? The seller literally cursed me to hell. I guess to some retards, all living creatures naturally believe in God, their God. Besides the fact that he's a Bible thumber, he also called me a blonde. I'm so evil that I must be blonde. Need an IQ test to determine this guy's intelligence?

Money back or not, I dislike confrontations and nasty emails. And all that for what? A $4-$10 saving? Ugh. Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather buy from Amazon from now on.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Witnessing History

So I've got this new habit of turning the TV on in the morning when I get ready for work. It's some noise in the background and it's also nice to be able to talk to my coworkers about current events in addition to video games and gossips about other peeps in the office. Of course nowadays morning news are invariably about the crashing of the stock market and the pathetic presidential campaign (is there one that is not pathetic)? And one morning, regarding the plummeting stockmarket, the news reporter said, "you are witnessing history here." Sure, can't argue with that, but is that really a good thing? To be witnessing history? With the exception of men landing on moon, I think the rest are quite overrated. Holocaust, tsunami, earthquakes that kill hundreds and thousands of people? No, I'm good. I think I'll be happy just reading them from a history book.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The Division of Labor

Schools of studies are devoted to the division of labor between men and women. Heck, when I was studying anthropology in college, evolutionary differences between men and women were based on the different in division of labor (mainly hunting v gathering). Last week as I was bragging to my female coworker about how great my husband is, a question popped into my head: my husband cooks, cleans, AND brings home more dough... what do I bring into this relationship. If it wasn't bad enough that I have to ask myself that question, it took me a week to come up with an answer -- he brings all the serious and important things into the relationship, I bring the entertainment.

Allow me to elaborate:- I introduced him to food outside of burgers and spaghetti (my poor mid-west boys); I made him watch My Fair Lady and Sound of Music; I dragged him to Les Miserable (almost ditched him and went alone when he was complaining about $55 ticket to see Les Miserable. $55! For Les Miserable! It was a steal!) and Jersey Boys; not only do I manage the queue to our online movie rental, I've taken the liberty to pick the movies for him also (he never remembers to put movies that he likes into the queue). Hubby kindly pointed out that I've also contributed two lovely cats into the relationship... again, still falls under the entertainment umbrella!

So, I would like to think that I bring fun and joy into his life when he brings organization into mine. ;)

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

When It Rains, It Pours

Alternate title for this entry: My Inability to Finish Projects That I Start

I have about oh some 10-15 different blogs. Why? You may ask. The longest one I had was when I was in San Diego. I think the blog lasted my entire duration there -- about 10 months. Then we moved to the bay area, and I was depressed during my job hunt. Then got even MORE depressed when I got the third worst job in my life and I had to stop blogging because I did not want to fill it with all negative criticisms of my imbecile coworkers. Ever since then I've tried plenty of times but was never able to make consistent entries. Every time after a few months gap, I'd have new found determination that "this time I'll have one entry a day," so I'd start another blog. So this is my nth blog... and I'm sure there will be n+1th blog, n+2th blog, so on and so forth.

Why the title? I digressed. Two days after I started this blog, with only ONE entry and NO links at all, I received an email from blogger. Evidently my pathetic one-entry blog somehow flagged their software that identifies spam blogs. Spam blogs? I know what SPAM is... make fried rice with it all the time. I get SPAM emails a lot... but gmail has a pretty good filter, a lot better than Yahoo mail if I may add, but what is a spam blog? I followed the link. Evidently a spam blog is a blog with many links, usually all link to the same place. Ugh. I guess I'd lump this into the category of: this one I'll never figure out in this life time. Perhaps it's because of my gazillion blogs under the account.... ergo the backup title: My Inability to Finish Projects that I Start.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

The Dumb

I hate dumb people. My ex used to say that (as if it's a bad thing) I have low tolerance to dumb people. Of course it was hurtful at the time, but to date he was not able to tell me WHY I need to tolerate them? Maybe he's is one of them, that would certainly explain his odd affinity towards them.

I used to think that when the end of the world came, it'd be some sort of high-tech terrorism that brought all the computers (or just the few main ones) down since we have grown to be SO dependent of computer. Just imagine -- lost of power, water, traffic signals, bank accounts "wiped cleaned," nothing that haven't already been depicted in some Hollywood video. Heck, just imaging not having your TV/Tivo for one night... or your cell phone... or internet... Scary huh? But lately I am thinking that when the end of the world came, it's brought down by the Dumb.

If nothing else, the Dumb sure likes to breed. They believe literally in the Bible about going out there and multiply. Ugh, the Bible, much like the constitution, sometimes needs to be adjusted to the, that's right, PRESENT. Resources are limited, let it be clean water, food, or habitable land. No organisms on earth are meant to breed uncontrollably. Or it could be the global warming, because the Dumb doesn't care, or believe that it's a real deal, or that "someone will fix it, I can just go on with my way of life."

The Republicans are made up of two groups of people -- the Dumb and the Rich. It is very scary the Dumb likes to breed more so than the Educated (the Educated understands the concept of OPTIMAL number of offspring, sometimes the more is not necessarily the better). And in a democratic country, that just means we are screwed. Yes, you heard me, SCREWED. The most ironic part? The Dumb doesn't even realized that they are being manipulated to vote in a way so that the Rich get richer and they never did figure out why they are struggling in the bottom rung of the society.