Interests:geek stuff. marvel vs capcom 2, warcraft 3, munchkin, settlers. Anything that would get me shunned from society, yah, i'm into it. Well, except for gerbils. i ain't into that. Expertise:brushing dirt off my shoulder Occupation:Student
Decided to make a more mature blog with less racism against my own race and more (angrier!!!! HULK SMASH!!!) insightful thoughts about the world through my nerdy Goggles of +2 Int, -2 Agi.
It's time for me to settle down and say goodbye to my mobile gaming friend, so here's your chance to not suck so much in video games with the help of the legendary [Appendage of Clayton]. I bought this badboy back in University and it's served me extremely well. So many memories with this thing... In Warcraft 3 on the North American East Coast server i got ranked top 50 in 1v1, ranked 18th in 2v2 and top 20 in 3v3 on Azeroth... countless hours of fun in WoW and counterstrike as well. Damn. this thing went with me everywhere i went for the past 4 years.
but anyways, enough reminiscing, let's get to the specs:
- 15.0" UXGA Active Matrix with Super-wide viewing angle - Native resolution of 1600x1200 - 3.2GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 (800MHz FSB) Processor - 512 on-die Cache - 1GB DDR SDRAM at 400MHz [Expandable to 2GB] - ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9700 with 128MB DDR Video Memory - 60.0 GB Hard Disk Drive @7200 RPM - 8X DVD & 24X Max. CD-RW
The only bad thing about this rig is that the right CTRL button is missing due to overuse from Warcraft. =P
Whenever i talk about my dad, it's usually about how ridiculously drunk he got me and how many times he got me to puke in one night. All of the outrageous stories about him singlehandedly getting all my friends drunk on multiple occasions are true, but there's a side of my dad that not a lot of people get to see: the smart side. I don't get many chances to see my dad and when i do see him, if i'm not double-fisting Chivas and Martel shots so i can throw it right back up, i'm trying to pick his brain for all the juicy morsels of experience regarding business, family and life lessons that i know lie within. This year on my annual trip to Beijing i got to talk to my dad on more sober terms, even if it was in the midst of a barrage of tam wing lun and jackie cheung marathon at the local upscale karaoke establishment. I guess this blog is more for me to remember what happened, but i think the advice he gave me could be applicable to others as well.
If you've ever met my dad, he's ... quite a character - to put it loosely. He drinks a lot, smokes a lot, tells lots of jokes and likes to make fun of his offspring for bad at sports and poor drinkers. However, if you peel away the jolly drunken rambunctious exterior, inside lies a man who's gone through the fires of life multiple times and each time has bounced back only to be knocked down again. Yes, he's successful now, but his success didn't come easy and in his experiences, in my opinion, lies a wealth of knowledge that i would love to tap into. I talked to him about everything from life, family, business and even the scalability of SQL Server versus Oracle. Fortunately, i was sober enough to be able to come away with a a bit of this knowledge this year. Hopefully it'll do me some good.
One thing that my dad told me that stuck out the most was this: Life isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. We come out of school, all full of life and ambition and once we land a good job, a good salary, we get cocky. We see that we're doing better than others or we see that others are doing better than us and we start forming opinions. Don't do it. Don't concern yourself with trivial things like A is making $X more than you or that you're making $Y more than B. Money as a measure of your worth at so early a stage means absolutely nothing. $5K, $10K a year, whatever. The first 5 years of your career mean nothing if all you care about is salary.
Learn. Take the hit salary wise if you can get a job that allows you to learn and not be stagnant. Always question things, always inquire about not how you are to do a task, but why. How does it fit into the big picture? Observe how you are being managed - what works and what doesn't so that when you're given the opportunity to lead, you at least have an idea of what a good approach is. And when you're finally in a position to lead, never order your team members to do something that you can't do. He's seen so many people who have been given the chance to lead fail utterly because they were too arrogant, putting too much stock into things such as job titles and salary. Just because you're called a manager or a lead architect or a team lead doesn't mean that you are able to lead, it only means you are given the opportunity.
It's getting late now and i really want to take a shower after my 17 hour flight and i can't really remember much anymore so i'll leave you guys with this final thought: The Burning Crusade is coming out in 13 days and i'm fucking stoked.
For shits and giggles, here's a pic of my dad and me at 11:59:57 on December 31, 2004. Yes, i missed the countdown. Passed out at 11:00. This year was the first time i made it all the way through the new year's countdown since 2003. Thanks for taking it easy on me this year dad.
This past weekend my family had an early X-mas gathering since my cousin is moving to HK for an indefinite amount of time. Last year we started the tradition of a "yankee exchange" (or that's what my coworker calls it. i think that name is quite racist. some croatian probably made it up... those sneaky croatian bastards...) If you've never had the privilege of participating in such a system of gift exchange, it goes something like this: You take turns picking one gift each. On your turn, you're allowed to either choose a new gift, or steal a previous gift that someone else has in their possession. Once you steal someone's gift, they get to steal or pick a new gift and so on until everyone has a gift. Gifts can only be stolen a total of 3 times at which point they're locked down.
whatever. the rules of this game aren't the point of this post. This year i decided me and jen decided we would buy 2 joke gifts packaged with an inconspicuous real gift each. The joke gifts for me and jen were 25 dollars worth of feta cheese (enough to fill a hefty tub) and a 6 pound slab of sirloin, respectively. We also snuck in some gift cards. Since these were ridiculously huge (yet similarly wrapped) gifts, one of them got chosen first. one of my uncles got the feta cheese and a $20 gift certificate from best buy.
we all had a good laugh about the feta cheese and moved on, everyone dodging the other oversized gift for fear of it being a 20 pound slab of gorgonzola. Near the end of the game, it was grandma's turn. This grandma wasn't my grandma - she was my cousins' grandma - but she did babysit me sometimes when i was a kid. Over the past few years during family get-togethers it seemed the family was getting more rowdy, more talkative, having more fun in general while the grandma sat in the corner, mostly silent. Often times i feel i should try to make some conversation but there's a pretty large language barrier since she speaks only the toi-san dialect and i only know cantonese... and although i can put together sentences fairly well, i have a pretty bad accent. She'd have enough trouble trying to understand a fluent cantonese speaker, let alone a cbc who translates eel into "slow fish."
Eventually, it was her turn to participate in the exchange and since she was last, she ended up getting my joke gift of a ridiculously large, bloody piece of meat and a best buy gift card. As she opened it up, i cringed. This joke would probably be best on one of the uncles or aunts because they could probably actually for one, lift the damn bucket filled with meat and then cut it up and cook it. Grandma wouldn't appreciate this. However, cynical and doubting clayton was in for a surprise.
As she lifted up the tissue paper jen so strategically positioned in the basket to conceal the unholy bovine mass that was lurking beneath, her eyes lit up and she threw her head back and laughed what i think was the heartiest laugh i've ever heard her laugh. To tell you the truth, i don't remember that last time she's laughed out loud like that in a while. The rest of the evening was filled with lots of eating, wii playing, crazy boardgames and what not, but that moment just made my night.
To think that all it took to cross the language barrier and make someone laugh was a big fucking piece of cow meat. A toast...to cows!
I really, really was trying to make my next post a happy one and in general, post less angry rants... but i had to have a run-in with a fucking mainlander today and now i must vent.
Since it was a pretty nice day, i decided to get some gas and a car wash while i'm at it. I head down to the local touchless car wash and of course, there's a big line up for the car wash. no problem, i'll wait. not like i have anything better to do on a saturday afternoon.
The line-up for the car wash was deceptively short. Although there were only a few cars, each car took FOREVER to get through, so i had to wait a good 30 mins before the car in front of me got into the wash. Finally it was my turn. The gates go up and i pull in... except the guy in front of me was still in there getting dried off. No problem. i understand. Those dryers don't do a good job and you gotta go through them slowly to get even any water off your car.
After a good half a minute of waiting, i notice that the car in front of me isn't even moving. actually i lie. He's moving backwards. The idiot had popped it into reverse and was heading my way. This guy seemed adamant to get his whole car back into the wash so he could go through the dryers again. That wouldn't usually make me worried except the sensor to start MY wash was only a foot away from him... not to mention my front bumper as well. So i give him a little honk to tell him to get the fuck out of there.
All of a sudden the guy goes into a fob frenzy. If you've ever hung around fobs long/often enough, you'll know what i'm talking about. The smallest infraction of their perceived social rights causes a torrent of adrenaline to flood their brains, ending in a complete mental breakdown and unleashing violent and belligerent tendencies not often found in typical 5'5" 130lbs men. At least, typical 5'5" 130lbs men who don't want to get their ass kicked by a burly Canadian white boy hockey player.
I can see the man's head swinging back and forth in his seat, trying to see who in the world would have the gall to honk their horn at him. Once he affixed his Mainlander eyes on me, he flipped me the bird. It didn't stop there, however. He had to make sure i saw his gesture of extreme displeasure. He frantically flailed his head around so he could flip me the bird with his other hand. Apparently his g/f grew a set of balls too cuz she rolled down her window and flipped me off as well.
After that, he decided he had every right to be a total prick, so he started rolling back and forth in the car wash and taking his sweet time. At this point i'm getting pretty pissed so i lay into the horn. All of a sudden, the man completely flips out. His arms start flailing, you can see him screaming at his g/f and he's in all out Super Sayan Level 6 Fob Frenzy mode. I could almost make out what he was saying: "Who the fuck has the balls to honk at me? I have every right to roll around in this car wash! i paid $5.99 for this basic wash minus the 2 dollars discount and i'll stay as long as i want! Who wants some of this deadly China Chinook of the Northern Provinces? These 10 inch mother fucking pythons? Who i ask? WHO???"
So carrying on in stereotypical fob frenzy fashion, he proceeds to get out of the car. I don't know about China, but when you have an altercation with someone traffic and you get out of the car, it's for 2 reasons: 1) you want to exchange insurance information or 2) you want to exchange blows to the face. Swapping digits didn't seem to be on this guy's mind, so i roll down the window and yell at him "Get the fuck back in your car and drive, motherfucker." He keeps on coming at me screaming. Now I'm not a guy that'll start a fight. I'm the guy that'll run his mouth and then have 6 of my friends cheap shot you in the back of the head. Besides, even if i did fight and managed to take him out, what then? There's never a point in fighting. But i digress.
The mainlander gets up to my window and starts shouting profanities at me in a mix of mandarin and english. I yell through my window telling him to get the fuck out of my face. This continued for half a minute before i got fed up. I pulled my car up to the sensor and started the wash. As the water came raining down, he finally smartened up and got out of there in a hurry, circled around the parking lot a few times in his wet panties and then departed before i got out of the wash.
I hope he dies in a fire. I hate mainlanders. My annual trip to Beijing is gonna be great this year.
And if you've never seen Fob Frenzy in action, here's the infamous Bus Uncle.
