AiriZel: Thoughts

Woo Work break!

So this one actually doesn’t count as a blog post, but rather it was the first thing I saved on my plane trip.

Delta has an awesome interface where you can listen to a bunch of music stations. I opted to listen to Asia Pop and I heard two really good songs that I wrote down the lyrics to.

So I just googl’d them both and here’s what I scribbled and what the songs actually turned out to be!

Song #1: Baby come back to me one in a million, I’ll be everything you need photoshop

Song #2: I never want to fight this feeling I’m thinking of you tell me what to do I want to show you the love in my heart I want to say I love you Whenever I say you it’s anniversary

And it came out to be

One thing I remember about these two songs is that I had a chance to hear them at least 3 times. Apparently the radio on the trip had like a 2 or 3 hour loop and since I listened to music in-between the movies I watched, I got to enjoy these two songs over and over

The first installment on the way!
-Sebastian

So I’ve been putting in a lot of hours lately to get my work stuff in time…

That said, this post isn’t about me at work (it wouldn’t be all that interesting. At least not yet). Instead, it’s actually about something that started just about a year ago.

Last summer, I embarked on a trip to South Korea with NSLI-Y. While there, I was often too busy to be able to get on a blog (there isn’t wifi on a train or a subway), but I did manage to write over 7000 words (in addition to a 500ish words end statement for NSLI).

It’s definitely a bit late, but starting with my ticket from last year, I’ll be putting up all 14 or so posts on my blog. They’ll be tagged under NSLI-Y and Korea and will have the blog post title: “NSLI-Y Korea #” as part of the post.

So here’s the preamble to my approximately 14 part series… My plane ticket haha.

Saved in the text files I have is my itinerary information.

Flight – Delta Air Lines Sunday, July 5, 2009

Flight Number: DL0403 Confirmation Number: C7ZIP8

Class: COACH

Depart: Washington Ronald Reagan Natl Arpt 07:00 AM

Washington, DC USA Sunday, July 5

Terminal B

Arrive: Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Int’l Arpt 08:57 AM

Atlanta, GA USA Sunday, July 5

Terminal S

Seat: 38-B Stopovers: 0

Meal: None Mileage: 541

Aircraft: Boeing 757-200/300 Travel Time: 1:57

Flight – Delta Air Lines Sunday, July 5, 2009

Flight Number: DL0091 Confirmation Number: C7ZIP8

Class: COACH

Depart: Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Int’l Arpt 10:35 AM

Atlanta, GA USA Sunday, July 5

Terminal S

Arrive: Seoul Incheon Int’l 02:30 PM

Seoul KR Monday, July 6

Seat: 35-A Stopovers: 0

Meal: Lunch Mileage: 7135

Aircraft: Boeing 777-200/300 Travel Time: 14:55

The first actual post will come soon! (Although I said that last year…)
-Sebastian

blah. The Dow Jones closed with a 6.

So after an amazing fourth of July spent with David, Kartik, Keila, Noah, and Sunny, I’ve been pretty crazed the past week trying to get all the work done for both of my jobs.

Two jobs at once is a hard sell if you try to factor in being social. Which makes one wonder if being social is all that beneficial. It definitely wasn’t in my plans for the summer to be hanging out with these (albeit awesome) people this summer (mostly because I didn’t realize most of them were even going to be here heh). That said, I tried to spend this past weekend figuring out what I wanted to do going forward in terms of prioritizing my actions (that way I can play less basketball and just work out more), but of course the world cup threw a wrench into my plans haha.

So I suppose I’ll just document a few things that I’ve done the past few days in terms of purchases and what not.

About 12 hours ago (give or take) I purchased the 1 Pair of USB Powered Woot-Off Lights 1 Crappy Anniversary Promotion (see below) . So let’s all hope that the Dow Jones ends in a 1 today (that way I can be provided with an awesome bag of crap). That said, happy birthday to Woot and its staff. The website was recently bought and made an independent subsidiary of Amazon and honestly it’s one of the cooler ventures I look up to when I think about where I want to be in a few years.

But moreover, I’ve bought some cooler things as well. Such as the Woot random shift grab bag and a pair of Able Planet NC500SC Sound Clarity Noise Canceling Headphones.

Man those headphones were a great find. I can’t wait to get them and test them out (In fact, I’ve been checking out the post office every other day in hopes that it’ll finally come). I’m always on the lookout for headphones so it’s all good on that front. Once I get the shirt and the headphones I’ll be able to talk about that then.

Lastly, The United States Gov’t taxes 30% on WSOP winnings.

Does this post seem disjointed? It should, I’ve been writing it over a few days heh. Anyway, after the podcast tonight and the Dow Jones close, I’ll come back with another post (probably.)

-Sebastian

An interesting fact about the homepage change I made via Firefox. It actually worked. I just found myself sitting down and writing a blog post as I opened my Firefox.

Haha. So clearly this blog post doesn’t have a huge amount of planning behind it, but it’ll recap the events of this weekend.

First and foremost, congrats to Spain for winning the entire World Cup. They deserved to win despite an ugly final game that involved 12 yellow cards.

I’m currently reading Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book which is an interesting read in that although I already know a lot of the things he’s suggested to do in the book, the book is different in that he just talks about how he plays and asks the reader the consider the idea and move on. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately and realized that I’ve been pushing myself too much in one direction or another and that as a reslt I was failing inside.

What I mean by that is that in order to truly improve at something one needs to be both cerebral about it and actually apply the concepts to practice. I feel that with Poker and Magic I’ve applied different aspects of the game that have caused me to stagnate in my development.

I mean case in point is that I used to digest about 30 articles a week in Magic, but didn’t play nearly enough. Then when I did both I was a lot better. So obviously playing and reading is the highest point to truly get better. Additionally, I used to read a lot, then I started to play more poker, then stopped reading as much and I feel like I’m stagnating in that as well. If I really want to be the best, I need to read constantly and keep absorbing different things while  applying those ideas into practice. If I do that I feel like I can be better and reach the peak.

Which is actually true for programming today. I feel in my programming of Ruby on Rails I haven’t had enough of the literature absorbed (my favorite word for this blog post obviously) to be truly proficient at the language to code for anything really. I’m currently trying to change that, but it’s definitely a hard task when I’m trying to also do my job to the optimum. And that’s really all I want to do.

Well that last statement is false (I want to do much more than that.)

With that note,
-Sebastian

So this is a mighty tangent, but a few years ago when my Playstation 2 broke, I’ve been wanting to play Final Fantasy 10 and 12 through. Unfortunately, my desktop at the time, with its single core action and X800 Graphics card could not support such a feat at the speeds I wanted (I built it in 2006 for christ sake )

Enter my new desktop (as cited before). Whereas my Lenovo T400 failed at really rendering these things well, my new desktop has had no problems (in that it only uses about 40% of all 4 cores and isn’t overly taxing the graphics card either).

Yay! In related news, I have Final Fantasy 7 working as well and my PC also has stepmania at full speed.

Dream of 2007 here I come

I’ve always wanted to wake up from a long night and remember what dreams I’ve had.

However, in this case, I remember a few. One involved me running away from teh cops for something or another and man did I do a fine job with help from some awesome other people. (It involved waiting for a cop to pull us over and get out of the car, speeding into a turn at the intersection and then cutting across a grass intersection to go the other direction haha… It also involved rogues, help from an unlikely source, and pretty much the plot of any getaway scene).

And wow, I already forgot the second dream haha.

In other news, Woot was bought by Amazon Oh and Naruto hit 500.

So finally I found the right moment to upload my computer specs!

Desktop:

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3 LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
• CPU: Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core
• Heatsink: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
• Graphics Card: Gigabyte Radeon HD 5850 (Cypress Pro) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card w/ ATI Eyefinity
• RAM: 8GB of  G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory
• SSD: Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB SATA II SSD
• HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
• PSU: Consair CMPSU-750TX  750W  ATX12V/EPS12V Power Supply Unit
• DVD: LG 22X DVD+R Burner
• Case: Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower

Peripherals:

• Keyboard/Mouse: Logitech MK700 Black 2.4Ghz
• Speakers: Logitech Z-320 Speakers
• Monitors: 2x Dell S2309W 23″ Widescreen Monitors (each with a 3 year warranty)

^_^

-Sebastian

So I guess I’ll start out by saying I’m a huge fan of RSS feeds. I’ve used them for god knows how long and I find them to be the 3rd thing I check every morning (right behind my e-mail, which I check on my cellphone as I wake up and the whole gmail/facebook combination which includes the calendar).

Anyway, I really like having no items left in my list, but after slacking off during the school year and allowing it to balloon to 1000s of items, I’ve definitely tried to keep it under wraps this time around.

However, it’s harder than I thought it would be.

Currently I RSS feed the following:

• Me (So basically, I have my comments on this blog and the blog posts I write under subscription so I have a better sense of what’s seen in the RSS feed)
• Lifehacker – I love all of Lifehacker. It’s actually the reason I got an RSS feed in the first place (so I can all sorts of random things to improve my life).
• Daily MTG (The mothership)
• ChannelFireball/PureMTGO.com – I’ll group these two as the strategy websites I read
• Deckcheck.net – I’m seriously considering getting rid of this one, but that said I like to know when decks are added and are new so I can see what other people are seeing (although lately they’ve been updating too slowly for it to do me any good).
• MTG Salvation Spoilers – continuing the theme
• OneManga Recent Updates/MangaStream Updates – This is how I keep up with dozens of mangas concurrently. I have these websites tell me when they come out and readable online! (I also check Franky-House and Baka-updates on occasion, but I digress).
• CNN Business – Meh. May need to change this to WallStreet Business. I’ve grown really tired of non-tech mainstream news.
• TorrentFreak – Because I need my douse of anarchy everyday! (And I’m very interested in the opinions of the far copy left, a side I occasionally see myself agreeing with (for things such as fair use)
• Engadget, CNET Tech, Wired Top Stories – The big 3 when it comes to how I get my technology news.

And I stay up to date with all of these, however, CNET Tech and Engadget just inundate me with news story after news story and it’s hard to keep up with both.

I probably need to ditch one or both. Wonder if anyone has any suggestions.. Let me know!

-Sebastian

Just a brief forward in regards to Landon Donovan for making my fellow Americans care about Football Soccer for a second. His 91st minute goal is pretty much the equivalent of a Kobe Game winner in soccer terms, and I suppose the fact it was the last game of the group is about as equivalent to a game 7 in the 1st round of the NBA playoffs. And with that, the two teams I’m rooting for, South Korea and the United States, both made the round of 16.

Also once again, Twitter is down. I said this a long time ago, but I don’t believe Twitter is built to handle loads. And apparently throwing venture capital money at it isn’t going to fix it.

-Sebastian