Right On, Brennan.

A little rant from Brennan which I most completely agree with.

http://www.badmofo.org/hl/?article=324

Good bye Los Angeles, Hola Uruguay!

It's 2:00AM and I can't sleep. I'm laying here in bed, counting the minutes until tomorrow morning's flight out of Burbank and back to SF.

At 2:40PM, Alin and I connect from SFO to Houston, and then to Buenos Aires, followed by a prompt landing in Montevideo. I'm so excited I'm going to burst.

This was our gift to ourselves, and a little pricey at that, a much needed break.

Speaking of gifts, considering it is now officially the day after Christmas, what did everyone out there get? Anything cool, like perhaps, an iPod with video? :) How about a brand new iMac?

Sure, these are just shameless plugs of my company's wares, but hey, somethings gotta keep that stock moving up up up.

Which also reminds me, how completely ridiculous taxes are for profits made from sale of stock. I was looking at selling some stock and noticed that once I exercise it, I lose 43% of it to taxes. What the hell is that?

They should put some sort of sliding scale to that. If you make, i.e. 0-$100K on the sale of a stock, you should be taxed at like 15%, if you make 100K-500K you lose 20%, and make 500K-1M could be as bad as 30%, but people, 43%? That's just robbery.

I've been looking towards using my stock as a way to make owning a house some day a little more attainable, unfortunately, it just seems like that's years away from becoming a reality. *sigh*

Oh well, for now, no fretting or dreading. For now, I shall drink mojitos and maitais while laying on the beach and soaking up the sun with my love. Now, only 9 hours and 40 minutes remaining till I see her yet again. Counting the seconds.

Hope you're all doing well. Enjoy the remainder of your "holidays."

-s

Getting closer.

T-minus 1 day and 6 hours. That's right kids. Come Monday morning at 8:00AM, I will be on an airplane to SFO, from which I will meet Alin and fly to Houston, then Buenos Aires, and finally Montevideo. That'll be roughly 15 hours later.

I'm dreading the flight but looking forward to the welcomed break from life.

Merry Christmas everyone.

I suppose I should go home. *sigh*

-s

Before I forget...

Don't drink and pass out in public kids.

Kong is King

I just got home after watching King Kong. I must say, I'm very impressed. It was visually appealing, the story was touching, the actors were great, all around a great movie.

It's not quite as epic as Lord of the Rings, but it will definitely leave a mark in my mind. I walked away from this feeling how I did after Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Stormship Troopers. It's really surreal but the story is so good that you get sucked into it and believe it's real.

Peter Jackson did an excellent job. Definitely worth the $10 to see it.

-s

Back in LA

So here I am, back in Los Angeles. Oh joy.

I'm here for the next 5 days, before I head out to Uruguay for the remainder of my year. I'm excited about that part of my "holiday" break.

I miss Alin already, it's only been 5 hours. *sigh*.

-s

Oh, and....

Thanks Tom and Justin for fixing the server. I'm happy my blog works again.

what the hell is the matter with blogger

Ugh. What a not so fun week this will turn out to be. I fly to LA on Wednesday to spend xmas with my family. Alin's not going to come with me because she's going to be working at the hospital, covering for a coworker. What a sad day.

My trip to LA will be short and sweet. I'll be flying back from LA on Monday morning to connect to a flight to Uruguay with Alin and Rupen. Rupen's already down there at the moment, he'll be meeting us at the airport in Montevideo. I'm really looking forward to this mini vacation. It should prove to be most excellent.

In the mean time, I have a fuckload of things to do. I'm not sure how it's all going to get done before I leave, but I'm hoping to find the time, somewhere.

Okay, time for some nap time. I can't wait. later.

Good Web Based Photo Gallery

What the hell is it about Photo Gallery's that is so hard to get right? I have to say, I've never used on that I just outright love.

The current gallery I'm using is called Coppermine, which I've been using for some time now. My major gripe with it is that's it's a fucking pain to get photos from iPhoto onto the web. A developer kindly made an iPhoto plug-in that works, barely.

I've heard Gallery is good but I don't want to setup something that's database dependent, although I'm pretty certain that Coppermine itself is.

I like BlorpSciprt, but updating the "look and feel" is a pain with that, so it makes it really difficult for me to make it look the way I want it to. Plus, again, there's no integration with iPhoto.

*sigh*, if there were only an easy way to build and maintain a photo gallery that integrated with iPhoto and did not suck. ;(

-s

Can't Sleep. Let's Ramble.

I spent the evening at Alin's house tonight. That was pleasant. Her dad and I put up their Christmas lights early in the evening which I enjoyed. I love decorating for holidays.

I've noticed that whenever my parents ask me to do anything, I get frustrated and huff and puff the whole way through. But when Alin's parents ask me to do the exact same thing, it's not big deal. I know why that is, but it's just funny that it's the case. There shouldn't be any reason why I do that with my parents, and yet I do. I wonder if that'll ever get old.

Today, I decided to try and fix my La-Z-Boy recliner. It has a built in massager, which wasn't working properly. There's a set of 5 different pads, 2 of which stopped working about 2 years ago. I was inspired by the massage chair that Alin's folks bought. After a few hours of tinkering, I figured out what the problem was.

Inside the back of the chair, there's a little circuit board that feeds each of the massage pads their power. Apparently, the two pads in question somehow had their wires torn out from the circuit board.

The wires themselves were still inside of the bundle that was soldered into other parts of the circuit board, but they had been pulled inside of the bundle by some tension. Using some needle-nose plyers, I extracted the wires. Now, I need to figure out, of the four wires, which one goes well and re-solder them to the board.

I'm really excited at the prespect of fixing this. I was already able to get the built in fridge working. Outside of the broken massage pads and the integrated telephone, that chair will be 'good as new."

I'll have to work on that next weekend, or maybe sometime this week. Anyway, I'm going to try and get some sleep. It's now 2:30 and I have to drive to Cupertino at the crack of dawn.

Good night.

-s

Sitting... Waiting... Wishing...

I love a clean apartment. Today, Alin helped me clean-up my place since I hadn't done any cleaning a little while. I love walking around barefoot on clean carpet.

We went out to dinner with her family tonight at a place called Fresh Choice. I enjoyed it, but mostly for the company. The macaroni and cheese was a bit of a disappointment, but everything else was passable.

We're about to head back to the city right now. I think the plan is to get a bottle of wine and watch a movie. We'll see how well that goes :)

Be back later. Hope you all enjoyed the photo.

-s