Well... it's time to move on. Blogspot has been great, but I'm still looking for something to replace The Lyceum, my dearly departed BBS. Thus, I've moved to www.livejournal.com/~sahn in hopes to develop a more interactive relationship with my (few) readers. As future updates will be placed on that site, please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Yep, I went to the LA Auto Show on Saturday. I sat in the Z4. It was nice. I sat in the 350Z. It was nice. I sat in the WRX. It was nice. I sat in the RX-8. It fit like a glove. It was absolutely friggin gorgeous from the driver's seat, as if some Mazda engineer dove into my deepest, darkest automotive fantasy and created the car I've always dreamed about. Granted, that says nothing about what it feels like to drive the car, but standing still, the car just felt right.

Definition:
Jukebox (JUK*boks) noun - A box that spins, dives, jumps, and runs in attempt to avoid capture when a person tries to grab it. A box that cannot be grabbed.

It looks like my DirecTV, my DSL ISP is going to stop providing DSL. So what do I do? Do I look into getting cable internet (I still don't know if it's available in my area), or do I go with Verizon DSL? It also looks like the DirecTV DSL Gateway is mine to keep. I wonder if it's good for anything more than a paperweight after DirecTV stops providing DSL. I don't suppose it's configurable to be used with any other ISP. But I guess it doesn't really matter because most broadband providers provide the necessary hardware anyway.

The Bar-Monkey

(stolen from slashdot) "The Bar-Monkey is a bar built around a 486 running linux that can dispense an 8 ounce mixed drink in under 10 seconds. It uses a Matrix Orbital Serial LCD panel with a keypad built into the bar surface for user input. Three Harvey Mudd College students built the bar in their spare time last semester. The bar holds 16 ingredients with which it can currently mix 188 drinks stored in its drink database. Total project cost: $235."

Oh those crazy Mudders. If only I were an engineering student, then maybe I could be cool, too.

Speaking of building funky stuff... anyone want to work on that Live Journal clone with me?

Well... it's been almost three weeks since I ordered that MP3 player I mentioned and it's still out of stock. So I cancelled that order and ordered a nice one from a different online store that's in stock. I got the Archos Jukebox FM Recorder 20 from www.shopharmony.com for $239 with no tax and free ground shipping. Why did I get this particular mp3 player? 20 GB. USB 2.0. Works as an external hard drive. Record MP3s in real time from any audio source. And here's the kicker, an FM tuner. Yup, I can store more music on this thing than I can listen to in a lifetime, AND listen to the radio. (You can also record MP3s directly from the radio 30 seconds after the song starts!) The USB 2.0 and FM tuner make this thing unique compared to other hard drive based MP3 players on the market. And it's comparatively cheap. I changed my mind on the MP3 player because the one I previously ordered (Rio S50) had 128 MB of memory which would hold about 2 hours or so of music. That wouldn't even get me through half a day of work. The ground shipping should take 7-10 days, so I should be rocking in about a week or so.

Now all I need is a USB 2.0 PCI card and cable.

This year will be better than the last. I declare it!

CYear ThisYear(++LastYear);

I bet you can't believe I just wrote that. I bet you have no clue what I just wrote.

Anyhow, I plan on going to the LA Auto Show this Saturday morning. Anyone want to come with me? Just let me know.

If Bruce Lee were a computer programmer, he'd probably say something like, "To be a good programmer, you must be the program."

Speaking of scary dreams ....

About a month or two ago, I had the same dream like 2 or 3 times. You'd never guess what it was. I dreamt that I was a computer program. Now I know what you're thinking. "How the heck do you dream that you're a computer program?" Trust me, it's not easy. My body didn't exist in my dream. All that was there were lines of code. Lots and lots of lines of code. But being the computer program, I only saw the few lines that were right in front of me, the lines that I was currently executing. I'd see the code. Grab some value from some memory location, dereference some pointers, do some operations, allocate and deallocate memory, store values in variables, throw exceptions, and move on to the next line of code. And then I'd wake up still seeing the code in front of me, but I'd be entirely confused by the fact that I had a physical body instead of registers and memory. I'd look at my arm and wonder why it wasn't numbers in hexidecimal. Yes, it was very freakish indeed. It was the worst nightmare I've had in a long while. At least I don't have dreams about bashing the heads of people I knew in college.

Yes, it was VERY freakish indeed.

Today's a very gorgeous day for the middle of winter. It just seems wrong to have this kind of weather in January, but it's one of the reasons I love Southern California.

Wise words from a friend of mine. "Guys are very picky about who they like, but they'll date anybody.... Girls will place their hearts anywhere."

I have a very good relationship with my parents. A very good landlord/tenant relationship. As soon as they start trying to be parents, though, it starts to get wierd.

1500, check. Next week, I go for 2000. But from now on, I'm going to try to avoid going to the YMCA around this time. It seems like AARP was having a field trip there, and that has got to be one of the most demotivating things to work out to.

Like I mentioned before, my company provides lunch. Once a week we get chinese food, and we had it today. Oh, how I'm getting sick of that chinese food. I hardly ate any of it today. It has to be the worst chinese I've ever had... probably even worse than the fast food chinese you can get in food courts. The best thing about getting this chinese food for lunch are the fortune cookies. For some reason, I tend to place more weight on fortune cookie fortune than horoscopes. Why? I dunno, maybe it's because fortune cookies fortunes come inside a tasty cookie. Maybe it's because fortune cookies usually have better fortunes. Maybe it's because fortune cookies don't pretend to have any sort of astrological significance behind them. Maybe it's because you had some hand in picking your fortune, by the mere act of grabbing a particular cookie. Yes, it must be fate that causes me to grab one cookie and not another.

Anyhow... the last two fortunes I've gotten read, "You are never selfish with your advice or your help," and, "Your life becomes more and more of an adventure!"

There's this chinese restaurant a few minutes from my house called Peking (or Bookyung as we Koreans call it). I will no longer take that restaurant for granted.

Happy New Year! It's 2003!

It sucks that I have to go to work tomorrow. Today felt so much like a Saturday.