Google Juice

I will occasionally Google myself to see how much Google juice I’ve got. Particularly since moving domain names from OliverWEB.com to Owiber.com, I’ve been curious how that impacts my rank. Looking at my analytics data, it seems like a frequent path from Google to my site is querying for “bazaarvoice oliver wong“ which isn’t too surprising to me. An even better search to find e-Oliver is for “owiber.”

However, I saw that a few of the top results were to pages I didn’t particularly own or care about, so I decided to make an About Oliver Wong page with an SEO friendly URL and all that jazz. I don’t mean to seem self-indulgent, but I figured I should probably have such a page to compete with the other pages out there on the internet “about me.” It was fun just brain dumping a bunch about myself. =p

Weekend’s about over with now, which included:


  • Contractors redoing house, knocking out a wall, adding a door, tiling floor, etc.

  • Diablo II LAN party with Bazaarvoice crew

  • Helped Chancy move into their new house

  • Biked over to Chancy’s (took shortcut under the railroad tracks - ~9min at an easy pace)

  • Dinner with family for belated bday/father’s day

I will now sheepishly declare that I have some Taylor Swift stuck in my head after hearing her at least a few times over the weekend due to reasons I could not control… :-) So now I feel like an adolescent girl trying to rid my crush on the team’s football star. :-(

“Drew looks at me
I fake a smile so he won’t see
What I want and I need
And everything that we should be

I’ll bet she’s beautiful
That girl he talks about
And she’s got everything
That I have to live without” - Taylor Swift

Almost Done!

My house work is almost done. Mostly all that remains is adding the trim between the tile and wood and just general cleaning. It’s looking pretty nice. =) I was worried about what tile/grout to get but I think it worked out well… it’s very hard to look at one piece of tile and than extrapolate it across a large portion of your house. Here are some shots, starting with the bathroom door I got added to the master room.

AlmostDone-001 (by owiber)

AlmostDone-002 (by owiber)

AlmostDone-003 (by owiber)

AlmostDone-004 (by owiber)

Now I’m debating a bit about what to do with the former “breakfast nook” area. I’m thinking about turning it into a clean “table games” area and going with a predominantly white+wood look with clean white lighting. We’ll see…

“Sometimes I wanna give up
I wanna give in,
I wanna quit the fight
And then I see you, baby
And everything’s alright,
everything’s alright

When I see you smile
I can face the world, oh oh,
you know I can do anything
When I see you smile
I see a ray of light, oh oh,
I see it shining right through the rain
When I see you smile
Oh yeah, baby when I see you smile at me” - Bad English

Tile Down!

Contractors put down most of the tile today, then I went to help Chancy move into their new house for a while. Tomorrow, it’s the Bazaarvoice Technical Services Diablo II LAN party at my place! Woo!

TileDown-001 (by owiber)

They also did a pretty good job installing a door for my master bathroom, but I was too lazy to take a pic of that. Maybe tomorrow after everything’s done. Have a good weekend!

Wall Down!

I had contractors over at my place today to take down a wall and replace some wood flooring with tile. Here’re some mid-progress photos:

WallDown-001

WallDown-002

WallDown-003

Tomorrow, the tiling starts! Yaaaay!

“If you leave, don’t leave now
Please don’t take my heart away
Promise me, just one more night
Then we’ll go our separate ways
We’ve always had time on our sides
Now it’s fading fast
Every second, every moment
We’ve got to, We’ve got to make it last

I touched you once, I touched you twice
I won’t let go at any price
I need you now like I needed you then
You always said we’d still be friends someday” - OMD

My Teacher Is An Alien

When I was young (like elementary school), I used to love Bruce Coville books. I was thinking about something to blog about tonight, I remembered there was a series that I started but never finished because the final book hadn’t been written yet. By the time it was, I had moved on from reading (I blame the education system for that one ;-)).

So… I’m thinking about picking up the entire “Aliens Ate My Homework” series and going through it on my staycation later this week… we’ll see if that actually happens. I don’t really remember the plot, and I was a pretty big dork as a young Oliver so I’m a bit curious to go through it again and see what I think now that I’m young Oliver +15… extreme, turbo.

Speaking of young tweenage Oliver, I was looking at my Friends 2000 page and apparently had not accepted at that point in time the awesomeness that is the years 10-13. You’ll notice that the pictures on the side pretty much skip all of my middle school years, haha - straight from elementary to high school. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to get to high school without getting beaten up (nah, I’m just kidding, I was the bully :P… no, I’m kidding about that too). I will find some pictures of the dreaded tweenage years and post them sometime. It’ll be fun!

Oh yeah, and another thing that happened today was that my mom sent us (her children) an email and addressed everyone as “Daughters.” The email thread:

“Running just as fast as we can
Holding on to one another’s hand
Trying to get away into the night

And then you put your arms around me
And we tumble to the ground
And then you say

I think we’re alone now
There doesn’t seem to be anyone around
I think we’re alone now
The beating of our hearts is the only sound” - Tiffany

The independent one

Let’s see here, what did I do on the July 4th weekend?…

Friday:


  • Finally watered my lawn after purchasing a water hose that was actually long enough for my needs

  • Hobo Jon photo shoot!

  • Went to Plucker’s with Al

  • Refactored a bunch of backend code on Owiber.com

Saturday:


  • Chilled with Chad for a bit, including fetching some stuff to repair a really small scratch on his car
    IndependenceWeekend-001 (by owiber)

  • People trickled on over to my house as we watched Return of the Jedi on TV. Sam loves him some Jedi:
    IndependenceWeekend-003 (by owiber)

  • Mark brings us steak! We eat then watch Independence Day (woo!).
    IndependenceWeekend-002 (by owiber)

  • We go check out Chancy’s new house (Mark, Sam and I venture across the railroad tracks to discover the short-cut)
    IndependenceWeekend-004 (by owiber)

  • We chill and everyone but me plays poker as we listen to music and mess with iTunes DJ
    IndependenceWeekend-005 (by owiber)

    IndependenceWeekend-006 (by owiber)

    IndependenceWeekend-007 (by owiber)

Sunday:


  • A lot of bumming around, and watching more Weeds (Season 2) with Ochs and Chancy.

Thaaat’s it! (I think)

Old Photos

I grabbed a few old photos and uploaded them to Flickr, mostly for back-up’s sake. I’m not entirely sure where the full size ones are, but I’m sure they’re somewhere. Here’re a few notable ones:

The Barbie Hummer!
IMG_5590 (by owiber)

Viraj, beautiful as always: :P
IMG_5639 (by owiber)

Mark attacking Olivia:
IMG_6446 (by owiber)

Crazy Andrew:
IMG_6577 (by owiber)

A classic:
IMG_6551 (by owiber)

I love this guy! (he’s in San Francisco):
IMG_8162 (by owiber)

Fobby Chancy:
IMG_2363 (by owiber)

3D-Loser!
IMG_2452 (by owiber)

She let out a fart ghost:
IMG_8282 (by owiber)

Unhappy Mommy:
IMG_8121 (by owiber)

Pig vampire:
IMG_8076 (by owiber)

So… I had to do a ridiculous amount of work to get these images to work with my Flickr stuff on the site because apparently if your original image is the size of the Flickr “Large” image (1024px width or height), Flickr doesn’t generate a Large image so I can’t count on that URL existing. Also, the original image URL is obfuscated (I assume so you can’t easily download someone’s full-size image if they don’t want you to). I eventually had to get my own Flickr API key and write a server side service to find out the Large (or equivalent) image URL to use. whew It works though! Let me know if you have any issues.

Wanna Post

I want to post some lyrics, so I gotta come up with a blog post to go along with it…

I just had dinner at Plucker’s with Al:

BV-TS-PlayDay-048

Good times as usual. Thanks, Al!

In other news, I need to replace my roof after the hail storm a while or whatever ago. Thankfully, that’s what insurance is for! It actually works out pretty well, since I’d probably need to replace it in a few years anyways. Should I look into getting a metal roof? :mrgreen: I likely would have figured this out a while ago had a solicitor not assumed I was an adolescent child, which made me not listen to her at all. Anyways, inspector said it was pretty scratched up but I didn’t have any immediate risk of leaks or anything, so I’ll get around to getting that done soon.

I’m prepping to get some other contract work done on my house, like removing a wall or two and tiling some floor. I’ll post pics when that happens (maybe even this coming week)!

“I’m lying alone with my head on the phone
Thinking of you till it hurts
I know you hurt too but what else can we do
Tormented and torn apart
I wish I could carry your smile and my heart
For times when my life feels so low
It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring
When today doesn’t really know, doesn’t really know” -Air Supply