So one of my good friends had his wedding. It was a great ceremony and
reception. In fact, it's a good example of what I'm looking for in my
wedding.  Simple yet effective.  The party guest wasn't as
huge as other weddings I've been to, which is just the way I like
it.  The ceremony is short yet sweet, which is just the way I like
it.  The reception wasn't filled with overabundant unecessary
events, which is just the way I like it. A lot of ideas for my wedding
will probably reflect my friend's, so it's good that I was able to get
a chance to visualize what I've had in mind.

Random Futures

catch phrase (video)

Schwarzenegger signs law criminalizing sale / rental of violent / sexual games to minors (link)

Kanye West and Mike Myers Reunite on SNL October 1, 2005 (video)

China to develop it's own DVD format (link)

fluffers make movies (video)

babycal throw (flash game)

kung fu style (video)

Al Qaeda puts job ads on Internet (link)

yahooligans TV (video)

cellphone networks at risk? (link)

The best of SNL's Ambiguously Gay Duo (video)

the package (flash game)

I just came back from the GreenDay concert at the Home Depot Center, in Carson, California. It was my very first GreenDay concert too, and I'm glad to say that I really enjoyed seeing them live.

Before the show started though, things were looking really grim in
getting to the Home Depot Center in the first place. After picking up
my friend from his house, it took us about 25 minutes to get to the
exit off-ramp that will take us to the venue.  It was about 6:35PM
at that time, and the opening act; Jimmy Eat World,
should be starting at about 7:00PM. By 7:41PM, we were STILL on that
exit off-ramp. Yeah, traffic was absolutely horrible. We were stuck in
traffic for so long, that my friend went ahead and stepped out of the
car, walked over to the Carl's Jr fast food restaurant to pick up
something to eat.  That must have been the murphy's law we needed,
because within that 20 minutes that my friend was gone, I was able to
park at the venue. Looking for parking I accidentally entered a road
that I wasn't suppose to be on, luckily security allowed me to park at
another parking area nearby there (along with the other cars behind
me).  It turns out that parking area was close to the entrance and
exit, which should make leaving the concert easy later. 

So I met up with my friend thanks to the wonderful device that is the
cellphone, and we were proceeding to get inside.  There are four
main entrances to get inside, and two of them at the east side of the
arena had very very very long lines to get in. The west side of the
arena however practically had no lines whatsover, so we obviously chose
those entrances, and were inside in less than a minute.  The
question comes as to why a lot of people actually walked by those west
entrances and went for the east side of the building.  Well, the
west entrances had signs that said "VIP only" or "annual passes only"
etc... People didn't realize it, but those only applied to the sporting
events and were signs to be ignored. Oh well, their loss.

Upon entering the Home Depot Center, I have to say that it's a very
nice stadium.  In fact, it's the best stadium I've ever been
in for a concert.  The seating was spaced out well, there are no lines for the
rest rooms because there were so many of them, also the food / drink
vendors were abundant which prevented long lines.  Good work in
making this stadium people.

So we missed Jimmy Eat World, which is unfortunate since I wanted to
see them live, but at least we didn't have to wait long for GreenDay at
that point of the night.  Before I go on, I've got to mention that
the majority of the audience were teenagers.  In fact, a lot of them
were teens that had their parents / guardians accompanying them. 
Me, being somebody who normally goes to metal concerts, I have to say
that I've never felt safer in a concert ever! There was absolutely no
aggressiveness in the air at all.

So on to GreenDay.  Before they got on stage, there was a guy in a
pink bunny suit that was entertaining the crowd. Funny.  Well,
when GreenDay got on stage, it was fun fun fun times.  They played
a good mix of songs from their large catalog of songs, and played the
majority of all the songs I wanted to hear.  There were maybe
three or four songs that I was hoping they would play, but didn't.
Fireworks, flames, confetti, and some cool light work.  They know
how to make a visually pleasing show.

Some highlights of the show was when Billy Joe stopped a song for a
minute to lecture someone in the crowd for being a jerk. Whoever that
was must have felt like an idiot.  Another highlight was when the
band got three volunteers to play drums, bass guitar, and rhythm
guitar.  Those audience members must have had the time of their
lives playing a song with GreenDay. Actually there was a fourth
volunteer who was unfortunately too young and small to use a regular
sized guitar. Ofcourse, their cover songs were definitely a highlight
(especially the shout / stand by me combo). They also have a knack of
making a three minute strong stretch out to ten minutes.
Billy Joe was also an effective frontman, getting the crowd involved a
lot (especially the hey-ho, hey-ho stuff that he did a lot). They also
couldn't resist at poking fun at George W. Bush once in awhile.

They played for almost two hours, and when the show was over. We got to
our car and was already on the freeway five minutes later.  It was
basically the total opposite of getting in.  All in all, it was
a great concert.

Since my friend is getting married Oct 9, 2005, we decided to throw him a bachelor party. We decided on going to Hooters and the Spearmint Rhino!
We even got him a fake "ball and chain" for him to wear on his wrist,
to give the ladies of those establishments the heads-up on who is the
bachelor of the night.

So it was off to Hooters!!! So I'll get right to it, what did they make
my friend do? First off, they put one of those toilet seat cover
thingees around his neck, with the words "Sucker!!!" "Boo!!" "Boo!!"
written on it.  Then they had him stand on a chair, put two
inflated baloons underneath the front of his shirt, to imitate breastessesess.
The Hooter's girls got the attention of the whole crowd to loudly spell
out S-U-C-K-E-R!!! Then they did their cheer about how the bachelor
can't have any one of them anymore. Ofcourse, our designated camera guy
was taking lots and lots of pictures of the girls at that moment, and
probably didn't even take a picture of the bachelor. Ofcourse.

When we were ordering some hot wings to eat, we were debating about
just getting 20 wings, since we weren't really that hungry in the first
place.  One of our friend's said that we should order more,
because him by himself could eat twenty.  Needless to say, by the
end he only ate 10 wings. You owe us 10 more wings buddy!
Just because it has to be mentioned, our personal Hooter's waitress is
named Emili (not Emily).  She was cool. Thanks for being our own
personal Hooter's girl.

Then it was off to the Spearmint Rhino, where we planned to treat my
friend to a bunch of lap dances.  I personally haven't gone to the
Rhino for about seven years now, so needless to say, I was looking
forward to returning there.  Ofcourse, I mentally told myself that
I wasn't going to spend too much, but walking into the club though, I
realized that was going to be impossible.  Damn, where there a lot
of hot and pretty girls there! I know I've always told people "you
can't go wrong with the Rhino," and it looks like that even after all
these years, it still lives up to that notion. So who was I going
to get a dance with first? Heck, I already wouldn't mind getting a
dance with the girl who was on stage at that exact moment we walked in.
Yeah, I was in a predicament. 

Then I saw this one Asian brunette and immediately I knew I NEEDED a
dance with her.  She said her name is Amanda, and is incredibly
sweet, cute, pretty, has a sense of humor, great smile, and an awesome
figure.  Yup, she was definitely my type (think Kristin Kreuk). I was with her for a
good amount of time too, and I'll just say that I had more than one
dance with her (I obviously won't go into detail here). I even got a
hat that came along with the special dance I had with her. 
Afterwards when my dances were done with her, I returned to my friends
who then asked me "hey, where did you go to for 30 minutes?" hahaha,
did I really take that long? A little later on, while I was sitting at
the front of the stage, after a bunch of dancers performed, Amanda
herself got on stage.  She noticed me at that moment, and since we
were familiar with each other by that point, she gave me some extra
attention in her performance. yyeeaahhhh, made me feel special.

What can I say, I love the ladies.  There was even this cocktail
waitress who was also a pretty cute Asian brunette that I chatted up a
bit too (yup, my type as well). She told me her name is Mandy (eh,
that's also a nickname for Amanda, hehe), and I couldn't help but buy
her a drink which she was very appreciative of. Yup, me spending the
big bucks here. 

oh yeah, my bachelor friend, totally forgot about him there.....
anyways, a bit more later I noticed that one of my friends was asked for a dance than
who other? That's right, Amanda. By that point of the night; almost two
hours since we first entered, it was decided that after my friend's
dance with Amanda was over, we should leave before we all bankrupt
ourselves.  Since my friend actually
borrowed just enough money for one dance, it shouldn't take long,
right? About five or six songs later, I get a tap on my shoulder and
it's my friend asking to borrow some more money. hahaha, knowing who he was with, I told him
that I totally understood. As soon as my friend paid Amanda, I
approached her to say good bye, and to my surprise, she actually
remembered my name! In fact, my friend told me that she even asked him to
specifically say bye-bye to me for her. Talk about resisting temptation
to fall in love. .... now just in case my girlfriend reads this and
kills me in my sleep, she has nothing to worry about, nothing.
Seriously. No, really, seriously.  She knows she owns me for
the rest of my life.

So I had fun, oh wait, so my bachelor friend had fun, and damn did we
spend a lot of money at the Rhino. I would say that I wasted a lot of
money, but I enjoyed myself too much that I'll have to rephrase that
and just say that it was simply really expensive (the prices were about
twice
the price from seven years ago too). You know it got bad when my
friends' asked me how much I spent, and my response was "I don't know."
You know it really really got bad when I went to the ATM at the end of
the night and it told me that "I was over my account's withdrawal limit
for the day." When I went home though, I found a happy surprise. 
Years ago, when me and my friends were trying to make going to these
kinds of a clubs a once a year event, I decided to stash some money
aside for such a thing.  Well, as you probably guessed by now, I
remembered that and dug the money out.  It's not as much as I
actually spent, but it helps makes up for some of those losses.

oh well, I'll end this off with saying, Amanda you were AWESOME. 
I'm sure the next time I visit that particular Spearmint Rhino; which is probably YEARS from
now, she won't be there to give me an encore performance. But at least
I had that one night with her. haha, funny how this blog post started off about my friend's bachelor
party get together, and ends up with me talking about a girl. Figures.

Random High Water Mark

Holy Squid! Photos Offer First Glimpse of Live Deep-Sea Giant (link)

Every single cover of Mad Magazine in a single place (link)

guitar thief (video)

Jet Blue landing gear (pics)

THAT'S Saturn's moon? (link)

scary Titanic trailer (video)

the most extravagant xbox360 bundle package deal (link)

toothpick gallery (pics)

red hot riding hood (video)

the many made up words in the Simpsons (link)

van morrison's 31 contractual obligation songs (audio)

Hooter girls from around the country (pics)

"There's too many good things to watch on TV!"
I've heard that phrase several times the past few weeks since the Fall
TV season started. Usually the next phrase that is said after that
would be...
"...and I don't have time to watch them all."
How ironic I think that for years and years, people have complained that
there's nothing good on TV, and now it's just the complete opposite.

I myself have faced this problem of having too many things on TV that I
want to see, and the fact that I hardly ever watch anything "live"
anymore means that I have to set up timers on my two VCRs (plus my
girlfriend's two VCRs) to record everything we want to see. That's
right, between me and my girlfriend, the combined total amount of shows
we need to watch requires FOUR VCRs to record them all (one of these
days I'll get a DVR / TiVo type device). The
problem just isn't that there's a lot of shows to watch, but that a lot
of them are on at the same exact time as another one you want to see.
But then there's the other important problem. There isn't that much time
to watch through all those shows.  In fact, I'm still in the
process of finishing off the ones I haven't seen last week. The fact
that I'm not always home doesn't help the situation.  But there is
a solution now that has been growing since last year...
bittorrent! 

Bittorrent is simply the fastest growing P2P file sharing method, and
it's the best way to download TV shows. There are eager net & media
savvy people out there that can get the latest episode of a TV show as
early as the next morning. So how does that help? Well, if you got
either a laptop, a pocket PC, a portable media player, or even a
modified PSP, then you can watch a downloaded show somewhere else
besides your home TV.  You could be doing that as a passenger in a
rideshare, while you are waiting in line somewhere, or at your work's
lunch break (I would suggest using earphones for all these). I haven't been active
in doing this since I heard about bittorrent last year, but I tried
this recently with the season premiere of "the office" that my VCR did
not record, watched it on my pocket PC on my lunch break at work, and
realized how convenient that whole experience once.

This blog post has more or less become an infomercial for bittorrent, so here are the necessary things you need.

1) download bittorrent ofcourse (official site). Step one is all you really need, but just in case....

2) you might want to also use one of the client programs such as... "arctic torrent," "BitComet," or "Azureus." There's more client programs out there as well.

3) You can get stuff to download from... "mininova," "the pirate bay," "animesuki," "torrentspy," "supernova," also check this list of torrent site status, and ofcourse you can always just "google" your search
(ex: "TV" + "name" + "torrent").

The thing about bittorrent is that not unlike other P2P programs,
sometimes you'll be able to download a file really quick, and other
times it takes forever. So it's not perfect, but I find it a better alternative to the traditional P2P programs.

what I am listening to this week...

1) Death Cab For Cutie - Plans
2) Louis XIV - The Best Little Secrets Are Kept
3) Demons & Wizards - Touched By The Crimson King
4) Dane cook - Harmful If Swallowed
5) Metallica - Reload

You Failed the US Citizenship Test

Oops, you only got 4 out of 10 right!

If you want to go get fast food to go, do you primarily prefer to go
through the drive-thru or do you rather go in the restaurant to make
the order?  I'm guessing using the drive-thru is the preferred
choice, and while that would be my choice as well, I honestly would
rather go in the restaurant to pick up the food. The reason is because
there have been sooo many times the drive-thru would get my order
wrong, as opposed to going in the restaurant where I seldom get the
wrong order.  

I don't know why it makes such a difference to me either. 
Everything from talking to the speaker box, looking at my order
itemized and displayed on the digital screen, to paying and getting my
change, those all work fine with no hitch.  But once they give you
your bag that contains your food, all bets are off.  The bag could
be missing an item, or they gave you somebody else's order.  You
just don't know. Ofcourse, the easiest solution is to check inside the
bag when you receive it, you look in, see the proper number of boxes
and wrappers, satisfied with what you see and take off. But once you
get home, inside the box or the wrapper is the wrong food! What do you
do, drive back to the fast food joint and tell them they got it wrong?
By that time, you don't want to leave the house anymore.

As for ordering and picking up your food inside the restaurant itself,
it's not always full proof either, but you seem to have better chances
getting home with what you ordered.  Maybe they take extra care in
making sure you get your food with that method, because you can easily
and immediately complain straight to their face if there's a problem.
Heck, they might even worry about being physically threatened by a
disgruntled customer.  As for the drive-thru, there's a better
chance that they won't hear from the person about a wrong order once
they drive off. So they don't have to work extra hard in making sure
they give you the correct order. Brilliant ey?

This just proves that sometimes the convenient option isn't always the best one.

Hold At All Random Costs

granny gets road rage (video)

the drive-thru prank (video)

Women Have To Stop Starving Themselves Past The Point Of Hotness (link)

matrix mouse (video)

Mexican Companies Pushing Spicy Beer Mixer (link)

Steve-O trashed beyond belief (video)

New-Car Smell Emerges As Auto Safety Issue (link)

the video of Kate Moss on Cocaine (video)

NYC LIVE traffic cams + google maps (link)

Dr.Tran (video)

thing thing 2 (flash game)

this is playing Halo 2 on xbox LIVE (video)

here's some quick reviews from some returning TV favorites of mine...

Arrested Development - still funny if not funnier than ever. Definitely
one of the best comedies on TV still. Unpredictable as ever.

Law & Order SVU - maintains that great quality as the best of the
Law & Order franchise.  Looks like they might push their
characters even farther than normal. awesome.

Veronica Mars - underrated show here, people go watch it! It's actually
pretty damn good. A lot of new and great possibilities seems to be
happening this season.

Lost - still no real answers, just more questions.  I'm still
hooked though, so I hope they can top the great first season with their
second one.

Alias - what the hell is this show's direction now?  it's like
they are grasping at straws to keep a story going, especially since the
primary story (Rambaldi) is done with. 

Smallville - still needs to make up for the horrendous Season 4. 
I'm hoping this is the last season actually, so they better improve on
their quality control.

Joey - It's hard to believe that a lot of people think this show isn't
funny.  I feel that it's as entertaining and funny as Friends
is.  Looks like they are trying some things new this season, hope
it works out for the better.

Malcolm in the Middle - Still chugging along, except it's now in a
crappy timeslot (Friday night). Funny and wacky as it's ever been.