Stardust

Came home from work today to find Oriana watching Stardust at my place. Mom came and picked her up, but I went ahead and finished watching it. I’ve seen it before, but there’s something about it that makes me enjoy it quite a bit. I think it’s probably something to do with slightly overly chipper girls… they get to me, I suppose. =p Although the downside to that is that I know it’s fake… there’s no such thing as overly chipper girls. =( Haha… ;) How cool would it be to have a girl that could blow up witches by supernovaing though (without blowing themselves up, of course)?

Ketchup

Why is it that ketchup packages are so small, particularly relative to, say, mayonnaise ones? How often to people actually use one package? I just don’t understand…

Now that I’ve complained about ketchup, I have realized I don’t have anything else to talk about, which makes this blog post just a bit pointless. Enjoy.

Webcam

Anyone have any experience with any wifi webcams? Thinking of setting one up in my game room. Or maybe I’ll get a regular webcam, but then I’d have to leave my (probably) Mac Mini on the whole time just for it so that seems like overkill.

We went to the new BV office to preview it on Monday. It seems quite a bit larger! I forgot to bring my camera though and the ones I took on my iPhone are at such a disappointing resolution, I don’t even want to bother with them.

The monster and fan one

I mentioned this earlier, but I went to the monster shoot at Carolee and Christopher’s. Then, I went to Home Depot and got a ceiling fan for my living room that Mark and Andrew helped install, which turned out to be quite an effort since we had to rewrite some switches. Later, we played a bit of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. That game is so crazy, but oh so awesome.

We had a discussion about comics and super-hero movies. I haven’t been into the comic world much, but apparently both Marvel and DC have severely messed up universes now. DC just loves their ridiculous “multiverses” where they have huge story-arcs that aren’t entertaining at all due to confusing “timelines” just to explain away inconsistencies. I stopped reading when they had their stupid “Infinite Crisis” and came out with characters such as Superboy-Prime. Whose bright idea was it to dilute the Superman character by creating a whole ton of other versions of him and make some of them bad? Superboy-Prime just sounds really lame, too. How in the world is a kid or comic new-comer supposed to get into these plots when you have to have a huge diagram just to know what’s going on?

Marvel, apparently, decided to throw away a bunch of plot as well by just saying “oh, these super heroes? they were actually aliens for the past few years.” Sigh. Oh yeah, and reviving “dead” characters isn’t uncommon in comics, but the recent Captain America one is just ridiculous. That bullet that apparently killed him? Oh yeah, no nevermind, that was actually a special bullet that transported him to another time and place. Oh really, Marvel? That makes a lot of sense. That’s what I see here… yeah, it’s Captain America being transported to another place and time.

captain-america_shot-dead

Let me treat you to this beauty of story-writing (from Wikipedia):

“Darkseid’s essence attempts to claim the Miracle Machine in a last ditch effort to defeat Superman. However, Superman sang a note at a frequency that countered Darkseid’s own vibrational frequency, shattering his essence.”

Yay! That’s just what everyone wanted Superman to have. Super-song. Here’s another character that had this power (well, kinda):

Sigh. Someone get these comic writers out of their bubble. They need some fresh air to get back to good story-telling rather than coming up with convoluted garbage.

On a WoW-related note, I logged in to finally do my Paladin quest to get Redemption. I checked my /played time and it’s at about 14 hours. Not bad for almost level 44. =)

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

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

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

moonfruit spam is not cool

Lame Twitter “event” of the day/week: #moonfruit spam. Not only do I not care about how long you sat on the toilet this morning, and yes, in fact, I did hear that Michael Jackson is dead, I really don’t care to hear about some website builder over and over… and over… and over again. This type of stuff keeps up and I’m just going to abandon Twitter altogether… I already question its worth. Don’t be such ad gimmick whores, people!

Speaking of selling out, I may put Google AdSense ads on Owiber.com just to play around with it. I don’t expect to make any money, but I’m curious how the whole system works. Yeah yeah, go #moonfruit yourself.

“Say how’s the weather, so I look out the window
To brighten my soul, but I can’t control the rain
That keeps falling
Smile on the outside that never comes in
A comedy, mystery, irony, tragedy
So I scream ‘let the show begin” - Jars of Clay

Should be sleeping

I was planning on sleeping 30 or so minutes ago, but my brain is still a bit too active, so I’m going to do a bit of brain dumping to the good ‘ole blog and see how that goes.

I think of myself as somewhat of a memory pack-rat as I often times will dig through old files, photos, blog entries, websites, etc. and “relive” emotions. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it’s something I like to do every so often and I’m happy I’ve had OliverWEB and the like for so many years. It’s cool to go back and look at yourself from years past and think “boy was I even nerdier then” (I know that may be hard to believe… coughAnne-Mariecough). I even have a handful of chat logs around from the AIM days which are hilarious, embarrassing, and generally entertaining.

I sometimes pause and think to myself if I’ll remember this exact moment a year or so from now and it’s interesting what that will do to you. I usually end up taking much more note of my surroundings, etc. The details of the couch I’m sitting on, music I’m listening to, lighting etc. I’ve probably had this thought at least a few dozen times or so in the past and I can’t say I really remember many of them, but it’s a cool exercise anyways. =) Will I remember writing this exact blog post? Maybe I will once I finish reading this…

Speaking of going back and looking at old stuff, give MrTechHappy (link is to the very first comic) a complete read. That’s some pretty awesome stuff there… and I like the About page as well. Remember for next year, February 21st is Dress Up Viraj Day!!

“Billie Holiday on the radio
my sluggish heart is beating seven beats too slow
another sad song and another shot of blue
cold and unconcerned are anything but new
He said “Love endures all things”
and it hurts to think He’s right
If I mark the span of failure
is his burden just as light?

I am, Spartan
close my heart so tight
Jesus
Save me
from myself tonight” - Five Iron Frenzy