Roz in US

Roz is visiting me next week. That is SO COOL! I've been inviting her to visit me for close to ten years, and she's finally getting her butt to Cali. Pretty damn awesome!!!!!

Places to bring her, things to do...

Santa Cruz, Monterey, Carmel

Napa

SF - Ghirardelli Sq, Union Sq, Golden Gate, probably will do SF over a couple of days?

Karaoke

Santana Row

Clubbing

Gilroy

Music in the park

Chinese food at Brokaw (ha ha ha, I bet she's deprived!!)

Dimsum

Penang Village

what else...?

Girls about guys

This occurred while I was chatting with two friends online today. Totally separate conversations. Two contrasting viewpoints...

In one corner, we have the eternal optimist
SK: Met a new boy.
SK: Out with the old and in with the new.

And in the other corner, the proverbial glass-half-empty
MT: I'm boring. and I lost faith in men
MT: don't know. just don't trust men, no interest
MT: sometime I think it's better off w/o one

And Derek says...
DL: I swear girls are weird

Texas cycling machine - Lance

The man is a freakin' machine... 7 Tour de France victories after surviving testicular cancer. Congrats dude! You're absolutely amazing!

Loss of a friend of a friend

SK's friend died last Wed. She was 24. I never knew her.

She was riding when she lost control, hit the guard rail at 67 mph, and broke her neck and spine. The details of the accident are not important. What's important? I don't even know.

SK was saying, this is not how your friends are supposed to go. We're supposed to grow old and grey and die of natural causes when you have wrinkles and liver spots and arthritis.

It's so senseless. 24 years old. Life snuffed out in the split second it takes to lose control of your bike, in the split second it takes to shatter your bones. Everything changes in that one blink of an eye.

Life is so short, so fragile. Blink and it's over.

SK, I'd give you a hug if you were here...

My big fat dumbass loan agent

My dumbass loan agent keeps insisting that money in a stocks account does not qualify as liquid cash. I hate the hoops she makes me jump through. I hate her inefficiency. I hate her dawdling around. She sucks.

If you want to know who she is, drop me an email.

[Update 7/19] So I liquidated my stocks last night so that I could have some liquid cash in my account just to satisfy her. And guess what, the stocks I was holding JUMP up 3.5% today. If I hadn't sold, I would've made an additional 1k or so. I hate her.

Matcha green tea

Quick Jamba Juice lunch recipe:
1 x Power Matcha Green Tea Blast
1 x Honey Berry Bran

It's the current fad. It's MY current fad. Damn yummy!!

New toy of the day

I'm in love with Trillian. I use all of the IMs around - Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, you name it, I got it. So I'm a geek. We already know that. Well, the coolest thing is that Trillian lets me play on all my IMs and let's me do that without installing a gazillion IM programs... One for AIM, one for Yahoo, one for... None of that crap! One program, every IM. Yeah, that's sweet!

Peachy!

I've been on a peach binge lately. 5 white peaches in 3 days. So what's the deal? Well, I bought them for a BBQ, for dessert, but we never got around to cutting and eating them, so well, I ended up eating them myself. And once I ate the first one, I just couldn't stop... :)

Reconnecting with old times

I haven't seen Lester in years. I think the last time I saw him was in... oh... 1992? 93? Well, after relentlessly searching google for quite a long time (as in since 2000 or so), I finally found an ICQ number that might belong to him. I added that ICQ number to my buddy list, and started hoping he would turn up online.

I waited.
And waited.
He never showed up online.

Tonight, I was going to bed when I decided to check my email one last time before hitting the sack. And there, on my ICQ list, was his name. Immediately, I messaged him:

[0249] DL: hello, anyone home?
[0253] LC: who is this?
[0253] DL: Derek. Are you from Catholic High?
[0253] DL: Or rather, were you...?
[0254] LC: omg u managed to find me!!!!
[0254] DL: OMFG
[0254] LC: so mr lau
[0254] DL: You don't know how long I have tried to find you!
[0254] LC: omfg indeed

Amazing... Simply fucking amazing. I haven't talked to him for a decade. I... I can hardly believe it.

Hunting for a new cellphone

What do I want?
Mucho free minutes
Free (or cheap) cellphone
Camera phone
Bluetooth and/or IR would be nice
Ability to sync with Outlook address book
Mucho free SMS