NewSc2

No, but after years of cooking, this may be the first time I’ve seen twins. On second thought, I might’ve seen it a couple times before… I ate the pictured, mutated egg with a Chinese onion pancake, but left the yolk kinda runny. (Probably wasn’t paying attention as I ran around with my camera.) It wasn’t that good. The natural order of yolk:white was off.

Bulletin time! What happened today?

- Saw a woman run out of gas at a stoplight in Newport Beach. She panicked, ran across the street to the Shell, and an attendant walked over and filled her car with a gallon of gas. The car was a Bentley Continental GT. Damn woman, yes your husband let you drive his nice car — it guzzles gas like a mofo, keep it filled.

- I was driving alongside an ambulance a couple miles on Brookhurst. A fire truck came blaring over the overpass, slowed down, motioned to the ambulance (as traffic was stopped), and the ambulance followed suit. Thought that was kinda cool.

- Randomly saw several hot chicks at Barnes and Noble and Kean Coffee. Dunno why, but seeing a hot chick almost brightens my day. I’d talk more about it, but it’d probably come off as chauvinistic, or desperate, or.. something…

- Ran 4 miles today, in 40 minutes (total). Paused a couple minutes to take pictures of the Fire Department hosing down portions of Back Bay. (Different fire truck)

- Weighed in at 165.6 lbs. today, after a 20-hour fast. Down from 175 after a huge meal last week.

- Read up on Fantasy Baseball. Draft is tomorrow.

- 4 days and counting of no alcohol! Coffee, however, is a different story…

- Fleshed out 2 new tracks for the music course I’ve been taking. Assignments are due tomorrow. Need to start from scratch for my assignment because the beta software I’ve been testing is not backwards compatible with the course.

I’ve been pretty busy these past couple weeks. Tax time is around the corner, and I’ve been trying to save up as much as possible, which has kept the staying in to a maximum.

I’m also taking an online techno course, and this past week/the next week are the busiest two weeks of the 4-week course. The course is taught by a music school in London called Point Blank, and so far I’m very pleased with the results.

The basics of minimal techno music production get crammed into 4 sets of lessons, and this past lesson covered sound sythesis and rhythmic sampling. Needless to say, sound synthesis (programming basses, leads, sound effects) is a topic that can’t be fully touched upon in 1 week, but the exercises we’ve had to do are pretty deep and rewarding. Of course, this means I’ve been holed up in front of my laptop and computer for 4-5 hours a day, practicing, and it’s left little time for anything else (which is a good thing).

I just spent at least an hour browsing ArtofManliness.com. Mesmerizing. Not that I needed any tips on being manly, of course.

Where’s the balance between caring and being pushy?

Sheepathon: did you have a lovely day?

Hm, let’s see. How did my day go…

12:01am saw me at Silky’s, drinking with Andre, Stan, and Andrew Chang. The economy must be hitting really hard, because the whole bar was dead. There were only a couple others besides us and Ernesto. Chatted with Ernie for a good half hour, and boosted his ego a little bit, calling his drinks “some of the most balanced drinks I’ve ever had (between alcohol strength and taste).” Blame the alcohol =)

2:15am — went home

4:45am — fell asleep (damn you Daylight Savings)

9:45am — woke up (another day, another 5 hrs. of sleep. 3rd day in a row?)

10:20am — let Teddy out to pee, brought him back inside (he’s so cute), drove to work

10:45am-2pm — met with our consultant. Elaine (my cousin) showed up around 1:30pm. I planned out mailers to potential customers, revised POs and invoices, and summarized February’s financial data.

3:30pm — stopped by Kean’s during a quick stop to our storage facility. I ran into Gary Matthews, Jr., and:

1. He was wearing all blue. That confused me for a good couple minutes. I knew he was a baseball player, and I thought he was Gary Matthews, Jr. but the blue made me think of the Dodgers. He had this weird aura about him — I can’t really put my finger on it… Maybe it was just odd seeing a black guy in his late 20’s/early 30’s dressed expensive-casual at a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon.
2. I didn’t want to ask — Hey, are you Gary Matthews Jr.?! and mistake him for someone else. He got his coffee to go, so I waited until he left, and asked another guy for confirmation.
3. Gary puts at least 1/4 cup of sugar into his coffee. Wth?
4. He doesn’t look that athletic for a professional baseball player. Kind of has a small belly, maybe only a couple inches taller than me, and not that buff. *cough* steroids *cough.
5. He drives a black Bentley with a Texas license plate.
6. Seemed like a nice guy from what I overheard.
7. Kean’s Double Espresso Macchiato = delicious.

6pm — ate mom’s Chinese sticky rice, some steamed broccoli and carrots, and sliced lamb.

7pm — gym. 7 sets of Clean & Press (75lbs. to 95 lbs.), elliptical for 15 minutes.

8pm — home: laundry, food, garbage, and music. I’m currently taking an online techno production course. All the sounds used in this loop were built from the ground up by yours truly: 2009-03-10-PBLesson1b.mp3

12am — snack, Sportscenter

1am — this blog update.

2am — read investing books, sleep early, hopefully get 8 hours. The mock portfolio I created last October is just about back to even. Amazon and Morgan Stanley have been coming through~

Figured I’d document this so I can look back years later and laugh.

Current computer configuration:

The last picture above is my current bookmarks toolbar.

Comics: Penny Arcade, XKCD, and Giant in the Playground.
Music: KVR Audio, Ableton forums, mnml.nl, Elektron forums, and Gearslutz
Gaming: Zero Punctuation, Kotaku, CheapAssGamer, and GameFAQs.

BB = Bodybuilding.com (which I’ve just removed)

The Kepler Telescope launched today. I’d been following up on it (like the nerd I am) for the past several days. Many giant gas planets have recently been discovered around relatively nearby stars, and the Kepler Telescope is equipped with specific instruments built to detect minute wobbles in star movement (due to the gravity pull of small rocky planets circling the star).

As this XKCD strip cleverly illustrates:

I ended up spending the past few hours researching the Rare Earth hypothesis, the Fermi Paradox, Fermi Problems, ion thrusters, the Cambrian Explosion, the Khardashev scale, and many other little sidetracks. (I’d already spent some time on the technological singularity, so most of these concepts were pretty familiar).

It’s times like these that I really appreciate the science education (physical and biological) I received (because I’m not using it much nowadays).

Anyway, the articles were very interesting, especially the arguments surrounding the Cambrian explosion and the Fermi Paradox. In a nutshell — the Cambrian explosion saw the first bloom of true animal organisms, evolving from multi-cellular microorganisms. Why this suddenly happened is unknown, and Darwin cited it as one of the main fallacies underlying his theory of natural selection. Proposed answers include the relative heating of Earth, and the emergence of a larger supply of oxygen, from large photosynthesizing plants. Oxygen is crucial to the existence of present-day large animals.

The Cambrian explosion is something our planet needed to undergo for complex life to exist today, and may be a very unique event, which would support the Rare Earth hypothesis.

Although the universe is vast, many unique events are needed for complex life to form. This is what the “Rare Earth” hypothesis is all about. Planets need to be a certain size and distance away from stars that are of the right age and temperature (white stars die too quickly, red dwarves require planets to be located much closer to the sun, and would lock the planet into a tidal orbit), the existence of a large moon (to create tides) may be necessary, a certain chemical makeup of a planet, a far distance away from the center of galaxies, etc.

The Fermi Paradox, coined by the Nobel laureate (and developer of the nuclear reactor) Ernico Fermi, relates to the Rare Earth hypothesis. Fermi, during a lunch, did some brief calculations and theorized that there should be thousands of intelligent civilizations, and we should have been contacted by aliens a long time ago, and many times over. Why this hasn’t happened is known as the Fermi Paradox.

The reasons behind the Fermi Paradox are complicated and purely philosophical. Theories like “It’s the nature of intelligent civilizations to destroy others” (they could see warring humans as a virus to their enlightened selves), or “Civilizations only broadcast detectable radio signals (a la SETI) for a brief period of time” (before they continue onto neutrino signals or develop stable wormholes) require a leap of thought to achieve.

I really liked the “They’ve reached a technological singularity” theory, where aliens have attained a posthuman character, and do not attempt to communicate with us, just as we wouldn’t attempt to talk to ants.

Regardless, cheers to the Kepler  Mission. Even though it won’t find life, its focus is to find habitable rocky planets. The developers have already related any potential findings to a statistical amount (i.e. if the telescope finds 2 after studying 1,000 sun-like stars, then 430 of those 1,000 stars contain rocky planets. Or something like that. My statistics is bad). Read up on the wiki to find out more.

Came across this letter in my casual Wikipedia researching (see post above).

It’s the letter Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt as World War II began, urging FDR to speed up research on the atomic bomb. This led to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

Does time slow down when memories are created?

If so, I wish I could bottle up more days like yesterday.

I woke up around 11am and found out my car was missing (my dad took it out). So I hit up Andre to ask for a ride to the bank and Subway. (5 dollar footloooong — goddamnit no, shut up, shut up)

Went for a solo, 3-mile run afterward at the usual stomping ground (Back Bay).

Realized my hair was getting too wild, so I got it cut around the corner. Picked up a Turkish Latte at Kean’s after that (my stylist, Back Bay, and Kean’s are all within a few blocks of each other), and read a few chapters of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

I got to Klosterman’s “23 questions I’d ask a girl to figure out if she’s my type” (or something like that), and came across this one:

You’re walking around downtown Chicago. A wizard stops you, and tells you he can make you more attractive — relative to a dollar amount that you’ll pay him. Of course, you don’t believe him. So he points at a man walking across the street, and says “I’ll make him one dollar more attractive,” and waves his wand. The man’s appearance doesn’t change, but somewhere deep inside you, you realize he’s a tiny bit more attractive. He’s undeniably a little sexier. Now there’s one catch — you can only pay the wizard once — you can’t go back to him after the deal’s done, and he will never bless your looks again. How much do you pay?

This was just one question among between twenty two others, but it stuck with me a little longer than most.

Just how much would I pay? I ended up settling on $400 — an amount I wouldn’t feel too bad losing if the wizard was BSing around. But a few hours later I realized that question had many other caveats. It never details how much money would raise your looks by, say, 1 point on the ubiquitous “Scale of 1-10″, so it breaks down your answer to: 1) how much disposable income you have, 2) how much you value physical appearances, 3) your trustworthiness of strangers, and 4) plastic/cosmetic surgery.

Anyway, I dwelled on this, and several other questions, for a good half hour or so, stopped by Hi-Time Wine Cellars (also only a couple blocks away), didn’t see anything interesting, and went back home.

There wasn’t much on TV, so I channel surfed and came across the beginning of a replay of Muhammed Ali vs. George Foreman (the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in 1974). I’d never seen Ali box an entire match before, so I made some noodles and settled down. It was amazing, easily one of the best boxing matches I’d ever seen.

Ali vs. Frazier III, the “Thrilla in Manila” was next, so I hit up Will and Andre and asked them to come over for some drinks and TV. Will left around 11 (he had work the next day), Andrew Chang came on by, and Andre left for a couple hours, only to return to Silky’s later (that’s a whole ‘nother story, which I won’t get into here).

So Andrew and I walk to Silky’s, get a couple drinks, hang out there for about an hour, and Andre shows up at 1:26am. Seriously, exactly 4 minutes before closing time. So… omg… we need to get more alcohol –

Three Matadors, Ernesto!

Okay, now take our picture Ernesto:

Why is everybody dressed up in caballeros y vaqueros outfits? Oh, there’s a chili cookoff tomorrow. Hm, whose hat is this? Oh well, Andre — take a picture!

The two of us (Andrew and me) stumble back home, and Andre parks and joins us halfway. We end up sitting outside my house, indian-style, and talk… about… I forget. Andre has the video. Stan comes over (his car’s backing up in the picture), and by now the delicious matadors are settling down. We are all jibbering about something, and Andrew keeps making me laugh:

Now that Stan’s here, we go inside to play some Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.

SSF2THDR.

Andrew continues to be hilarious. We’d devolved into speaking Mandarin (wait, actually, just Andrew), so Andrew kept saying (in Chinese) — “I’m gonna kick-kick-kick-kick your head! Wait, how do you say “fierce” in Chinese? Oh, I remember. I’m going to kick you! I’m going to use my forceful kick! My leg is made of stone! See?! Kick-kick-kick! Aha I’m so strong!”

Okay, so that picture probably didn’t capture the emotion, but the exchange should be on video too.

3am rolls around, and tacos beckon. We stumble outside, and Andrew runs up to my lemon tree, grabs a lemon, and… just… bites it. “My mouth is so sour!!! Your oranges don’t taste good Tony… =(”

I think he ate the lemon peel:

And so we get to the last picture. March 1st, 2009, 3:16am, in Santa Ana, CA, on the corner of Harbor and Hazard, at the Taqueria de Anda. 3 lengua tacos (mine), various carnitas and carne asada tacos (Stan, Andre), and a Carne Asada burrito (half me, half Andre):

Total bill for the entire day? Not including the haircut or game, or the bottle of wine I dug out from the cellar: 1 Five… Five dollar… Five dollar footloooonnnggg…, 1 $3 cup of coffee, 1 round of drinks ($11 + $4 tip), and $6 at Taqueria. Not bad.

*PS — Thanks Andre, for sending over the pics~