Blast from the past indeed...

On a random note, I was going through my nebhead.com email a few days back (I get Ben[at]Nebhead[dot]com forwarded to my Yahoo account, and everything else accumulates on a POP server until I can be bothered to wade through all the spam to get my daily usage reports), and I found an email from David Edwards, a friend of mine from waaaay back, when I lived in Wales. This must have been from about the age of 5 through to about 12 or 13, iirc. Anyway, it was really cool hearing what he's been up to and what a few of the other people I knew back then have been up to. He also apparantly reads this journal, so it was fantastic to hear from you Dave, and I'll get around to replying at some point.

Wooyay ^_^

That wasn't half bad for a birthday weekend :D

Having my birthday on a Monday wasn't all that productive to partying, so I cobbled together something of a whole weekend long celebration.
Did the whole party in San Jose on Friday like I said in my last entry, then spent Saturday watching Stargate and playing Civ4. Around 8ish, Agnes, Patricia and Gary came over, and a bit later we all went out for a chinese with James, Peter, Andy and Colin too. A couple of huge plates of MSG later, we all rolled back to my apt where we spent the rest of the evening drinking and chatting and listening to old/cheesy/classic music. Drunken "Guess that song" is always amusing. Eventually devolved into drunken dancing, and I have some highly amusing video of Peter dancing to "I'm too Sexy". Hit the sack around 4am in the end, after some way too serious conversations with Marija and Helena.

Woke up around midday on Sunday, and headed out with James and Colin a bit later to the crazy golf course nearby. Great fun, especially as the sun came out and it felt nice and warm in the first time for nearly a month (even California has it's winter). On the first round we all got 60 (on a par 42 course), and on the second time around James and Colin got 47 each whilst I got 57. Colin and I also had a go on the go-karts that they have there, although it was pretty pants; no real speed or ability to race at all. Got back to the hotel about 4pm, and spent the rest of the afternoon/evening relaxing in the sun by/in the pool and hot tub with Colin and Gary. Pretty excellent day, really. Grabbed some pizza later with Gary, watched Transporter 2, then jibbled a bit on my puter and that was pretty much it.

On a slightly geeky note, I tried to upgrade winamp over the weekend to 5.21, but it kept on failing on startup; Failure to initialize somethingorother. It even happened after I wiped all traces of winamp from the registry and tried to install the older version that I previously had. After much frustration, it turns out that some of the codecs that come with a particular version of ffdshow screw winamp installations up. After removing ffdshow, installing winamp, then reinstalling the latest version of ffdshow everything worked perfectly. Except then, of course, I'd lost all my skins and settings. I got my old skin back, but couldn't find the colour I'd previously had, which sucked. I found another pretty funky (and cpu intensive!) skin which I'm currently using though.

Does anyone know of some good (and FREE!) movie converters? Looking for something that'll handle anything to anything, but .MOV to .AVI/.MPG for certain.

That's it, folks. I'm 22.

Ooops?

Well, that last week went.. somewhere. Not entirely sure where, but the update I promised on Monday didn't appear, so here is the last two weeks for ya.

I did go to Helena's karaoke party in the end, and even ended up singing a few songs. Was quite fun, and Marija and Helena seemed pretty happy that I made it. I can't remember what I sang; Knocking on Heaven's Door, Bohemian Raphsody and When You Say Nothing were among them. Everyone wanted me to sing Don't Stop Me Now, but the CD wasn't there :/
Saturday was a lazy day, then went to Patricia's in the afternoon for a great evening of fantastic food and great company. Patricia is an awesome cook \o/ The theme was Brazillian, so I went in green and yellow; quite amusing to see everyone dressed in the same colours.
Sunday was another lazy day; I can't really remember what I did, but I don't think it was much. Oh, I lie. I went to the airport with Anna, Anna and Anh (yeah) to pick up Reda, a new trainee from Morocco. He was stupidly late (almost 3 hours, but not his fault) due to immigration insisting on giving him an interview, etc etc. When he did finally get through, we walked around the airport about 5 times trying to find his bags. After I had driven him to the place where he was staying (and almost running out of petrol along the way) the rest of us went to Fuddruckers and ate huge ammounts of food. We then went back to my room, and just chilled for a few hours. Good stuff.

I was still on the painkillers on Monday, so I took the day off and felt much better by the end of it, so I'm glad I did. Felt well enough on Tuesday to go into work, and was able to move around and stretch and stuff without the sharp stabbing pains. Which, obviously, is a good thing. The rest of the week went by pretty fast, and by Friday I was feeling well enough to go on my first ever ski trip to Tahoe.

Colin rented a 4x4 with winter tires, and we left at about 7pm to pick up Lina from work before heading all the way up to Tahoe in one push. Went pretty well, and despite leaving after most people we got there well before 3 of the other 4 cars. Apparantly Filip's car had broken down in Sacramento (one of the sparkplugs had gone, or something) which delayed them considerably. Drank for a while, before hitting the sack around 4am.
Woke up (courtesy of Lina) nice and early 3 hours later, ate a great breakfast of Hot Pockets, drank a bunch of OJ, and was ready to go snowboarding for the first time evar! I'd never been skiing or snowboarding or anything before, so t'was something of an adventure. Was an excellent day overall; despite falling over hundreds of times on the first few runs down the easy easy slope, I was nonetheless able to get down it without falling over by the end of the day, and was even able to go down some steeper greens only falling over once or twice. I was really, really happy. Snowboarding is a lot tougher than it looks though, really hard on the thighs and calves.

Finished off around 4pm on Saturday, then went back to the cabin we rented for some well deserved beernd hottubbage. Went to Denny's for dinner, then came back to the cabin for more hot tub, and more beer. Ended up watching the last 30 mins of Gladiator and all of The Patriot before getting to sleep around 2am.

Woke up nice and early again on Sunday (again, thanks to Lina), and spent the day trying to improve my snowboarding skills. Wasn't quite as productive as the previous day, but I was able to improve a little bit. Very very happy to be able to come away from the weekend and say that I'm able to snowboard now \o/

Woke up on Monday morning with killer aches in virtually every muscle in my body, and spent the day hobbling from place to place. It eased up quite a lot by the end of the day though, and the rest of the week has flown by completely. Haven't really done anything (had a meal with Chris White on Monday, and had some excellent discussions about AIESEC, with some interesting tangents too) for the rest of the week though. Except for Wednesday, which was Reda's welcome party in San Jose. Sonoma Chicken Coop = great food. Was supposed to be at an Alumni Social event on Thursday (followed by a trip to the Almaden Britannia Arms, as usual) but felt kinda ill and lethargic, so I just spent the evening catching up on Stargate. Now on Season 8 \o/

Yesterday (Friday 24th) I went into San Jose again to an Irish pub to jointly celebrate mine and Anna's birthday (even though mine's on Monday, and hers is on Sunday). Ended up somewhere else, but it was a good night overall; lots of beer = good. I had driven to Lina and Patricia's place so I wouldn't have to worry about driving home; Lina drove me back to hers at about 1am, where I crashed on the sofa. Was up at 5.30 to take Lina to the airport though, which I managed admirably, after which I ended up driving back to the hotel and crashing for another 5 hours or so.

Which brings me to right now; There shall be food and a party later tonight, and at some point I'll get some photos online.

Wheeeeeeeee!

:D

This weekend I mostly learnt to snowboard.



Uber-update for the past 10 days coming later today.

Fuzzy World

Like I said, I had a great time last weekend. After my laptop's power adapter died, I was gonna have a nice quiet night in, but decided to go out to Palo Alto instead. Met up with Gary, James, Peter, Colin, Patricia, Helena, Marija and Lina at the Rose and Crown, and had an *excellent* night there. Played this darts game called Cricket with some total strangers with Helena; we lost the first game, and won the second by miiiles. Excellent fun.

Then headed back to the hotel for some more drinks, and ended up getting to bed by about 4am. At some point that night, Gary and Lina had been discussing getting up for an early morning run, so I bet that Gary wouldn't be up at 6am. This prompted a phonecall from him at 6am, waking me up, so I guess I lost that one.

Saturday involved me mainly mooching about after grabbing breakfast at 9 with Lina (who nearly broke down my door trying to wake me up); we watched a movie, then she and Patricia had to go back to Santa Clara to pick up some furniture for Lina, so I napped for a little bit.

Around 4pm I went and bought a bunch of food for Lina's welcome BBQ that evening. In a typical display of AIESEC punctuality, even though it was supposed to start at 5, no one showed up until 6.30-7.00. This was actually pretty good, seeing as I had *major* problems getting the BBQ started. The hotel's gas fired BBQ was broken (although in the end it turned out not to be.... grrrrr) so I had to make do with a stupid little charcoal one that *refused* to start. Eventually it did though, and the food was pretty tasty, and I think everyone who came in the end liked it. It turned out to be pretty much all the Bay Area trainees there, and not that many others. But it was pretty cool seeing Igor, Philip and Maghda again.

Major drinkage ensued after the party, but everyone was pretty wiped out, and almost everyone was asleep by 1am. This was good, as Lina woke me up early the next morning, and we went into San Francisco. We were supposed to go sightseeing, but the weather was awful so we went to Ripley's Believe it or Not museum on Fishermans Wharf which was kinda cool, then down to the Mission area to meet Anton. We went to Good Vibrations, then to Haight Ashbury (where the 60's flower power revolution started. Kinda funky place) where Lina found lots of cool shops she liked. It started *really* raining then though, and we all ended up drenched.

After swinging by the Uni of San Francisco for their AIESEC gpm, I dropped Lina off back in Santa Clara around 8pm, and I went back home, had a nice warm shower, and collapsed into bed.

Monday and Tuesday were fairly uneventful, especially as I didn't have a new power adaptor for my laptop until Tuesday morning.

Then, Wednesday, I had my surgery. Got given general anaesthetic after being pumped full of drugs, and then woke up an hour later in lots of pain. Got given two shots of morphine, but it didn't really help the pain at all. Bummer. Was eventually able to walk around though, and got discharged at 2pm. Got given a prescription for Perocet (the active ingredient of which is in the same chemical family as opium. Wheeee \o/) which I picked up, then I got home, popped a pill, and watched the world go fuzzy.

Anna came over at about 6pm, and brought pizza with her, as I hadn't eaten anything all day. For this, I shall love her forever. We ate some food and watched The Producers. Then I went to sleep.

Thursday mainly involved me staying in bed for most of the day, seeing as it was too painful to move, even with the meds. I ended up reading a lot of my current book (The Cryptonomicron) and watching a lot of Stargate. Plus, HBO showed Shrek 2 and Oceans 12, so I watched both of those.

Today, I am feeling much better (ie. I can wlk around without too much pain) which means that at some points I shall be making an expedition to Raleys for orange juice, water, and food. 'Cos I really didn't eat too much yesterday.

And I'm *supposed* to be going to Helena's birthday party down in Almaden tonight. But I doubt I'll be able to make it :(

Mix'n'Match

have a new power adapter, it was delivered this morning. Ordered on Friday evening for a total of $80, including priority postage. Wooyay.

If you like computer games, you *have* to watch the following video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198
It is, quite simply, the best computer game I think I have *ever* seen. It's gonna be awesome. Brilliant. Amazing. Fantastic. Incredible. The video is 35 minutes long, but it's *so* cool.


In other news, I had a fantastic weekend, and I have surgery tomorrow morning. I guess I should get some sleep.

RoKS!

Well, that was a weekend, wasn't it? Awesome stuff. Everyone had a good time, which is good. The past two months of hard work paid off. Although, now I'm feeling kinda... empty, I guess. RoKS was the big thing on the horizon for so long, and I put so much effort into making it work that now it's past, I feel sad. Poor me.

I've got bunches of other stuff to do though, so I can't really complain. As Events Co-ordinator for the whole Bay Area, I've gotta start getting to work straight away on putting together my team, and start doing stuff! I also have a lot of work to do for Sun, so at the moment I don't have much free time. And I seem to be coming down with a cold or something. Woe.


Monday was fairly uneventful. Managed to haul myself out of bed and into work. After work, I pretty much spent the entire evening finishing off a bunch off odds and ends from RoKS. And watching 24, of course. Erin++! Tuesday was much the same, except I had to head down to San Jose for 8pm for an EB meeting, which was nice and short, before going to Patricia's place for some food and charades with the other trainees (via the International House, where I chatted for about 20 mins with some of the folks there whilst picking up a tent). Good night, although I didn't get back home until rather late.

Woke up on Wednesday morning to find that my car had been broken into during the night; The rear passenger side window had been smashed in, although nothing had been taken. Random, pointless vandalism. Grrrr. Spent a good hour cleaning all the glass out of the car, and then went to a glass place to get new glass fitted. Complete hole-in-the-wall kind of place; A little hut in the middle of an overgrown lot on the side of a hill, complete with chickens and a cow. However, there were able to fir new glass within an hour for $160; not too bad at all.

Headed straight to work from there (via Jamba Juice.... <3 Jamba Juice) and spent the rest of the afternoon completing a piece of work. Got home and started sorting out some photos that people had sent me from the weekend, making a powerpoint for GPM tomorrow, and watched Lost.



Now. Let's see if I can start to keep this updated fairly regularly, shall we?