The snow is here to stay!

<=== You see these? These are my new winter tires that I have on my car! Well they aren't too new as I had them put on my car a week ago (what good timing!). At first when I had these on I was so scared it wasn't going to snow (no snow in Calgary, what was I thinking?) and it seemed like the chinook winds would never stop. I was scared that I was going to wear the tread down to nothing before it even got a chance to touch snow. But all that ended just a few days ago when the cold wind started coming in, and since last night, the beautiful white stuff has been falling down ever since! I know its not the first snow, but it is the first snow fall that is not melting away. Now usually I'm not a morning person and have no urge to wake up and take that long boring drive to school every morning. However, when I saw the snow as I exited the garage this morning, all I wanted to do was drive! I was so excited, I could not hide it.... :D They gripped the snow/ice like nothing I have experienced before. I stopped with ease while others slid by me. I took corners with confidence. It was like driving in summer, but with snow everywhere, so I guess it's not like driving in summer. Ahh it was awesome! After class I did a few laps around the neighborhood. Attacking corners at safe speeds (no more than 60km/h), slamming on the breaks and experienced the awesome gripping power of the Kumho kw19's. Ahhh :D

Anyways as I write this blog, I look out the window and see that it is still snowing. I definitely can't wait to drive tomorrow morning!!!!!

I love snow! But more so the significant other snow :D

Black or White?

R.I.P Noriyuki "Pat" Morita

For those of you that are relatively as old as me (and that's old!) you will most likely remember Noriyuki "Pat" Morita from the Karate Kid movies, if you're even older than me (my parents age) you will remember him from Happy Days. He past away yesterday in his Las Vegas home of natural causes. He has 3 movies in production now so I wonder will happen with those. Anwyays the story is Here.

Rest In Peace Noriyuki Morita.

Harajuka girls weekend.

So this past weekend I went up to Edmonton to see Gwen Stefani's Love.Angel.Music.Baby. Concert with Christian, Michal and Kevin. It wasn't bad at all. I didn't go in expecting much and so I came out not disappointed.

M.I.A. was the opener for Gwen and she was fantastic. She pretty much did all her songs from her CD Arular. It was her dance moves (running man) and her dj throwing in a bunch of old school flavour (eurythmics, reel 2 reel) that made it awesome. Oh and I think the fact that we had about 3-4 beers by the end of her act had a lot to do with it as well. I swear that the beer they serve up at the stadiums are laced with heroine. It is the only plausible/possible explanation for the feeling that one experiences when drinking the first beer.

After a 30 minutes or so break Gwen came on to the cheers of high school and junior high girls all around the stadium. The screams were piercing and I think at one point my ears might have been bleeding. I could barely see her, even through the zoom on my camera she came up to be no more than 1 1/2 inches tall from my perspective. But you can definitely tell she was wearing short shorts and showing off her legs. She pretty much played every song from L.A.M.B. and then she had about 2 extra songs that weren't on there, and after you heard them you would know why they were excluded. Her sound set up was very good and her performance was okay (she didn't work the stage that much, which really sucked if you had tickets to the direct right/left of her). Her Harajuka girls weren't very visible but were there and she introduced them. They were pretty good dancers though.

So after the concert we went back to the Marriott Courtyard and grabbed some donairs on the way back. Then we headed off to The Urban Lounge to meet up with some friends of Kevin. When we arrived we lucked out that his friends were 1 back in the line up and so we joined them (not without complaints from others in line) and after about 20 minutes we got in. The place had a live cover band so I wasn't to thrilled so I just sat there the whole night till closing drinking a few red bull and vodka's and a jagger bomb (drop shot that is red bull + jaggermeister); what a mistake this will turn out to be when I went to sleep. Now we stayed till close and then we left and tried to catch a cab. Who knew it would be so hard to do so? The bar was off of Whyte Ave. So we went onto Whyte Ave. to try and hail one down. After what seemed like an hour we were finally able to catch one. This was not without some drama after a few of them [taxi cabs] would tease us by pulling over and slowing down and then driving off as we grabbed for the handle. I suppose they did this to prevent people from fighting for cabs. However I found this truly annoying. Why can't they line up like they do in front of Cowboys or any other bar here in Calgary.

Anyways we got back and most of us were asleep by 4am, except for me. Those Red Bulls came back to haunt me. I would fall in and out of sleep throughout the hours and I could feel myself shaking from what I can only guess can be caused by too much Red Bull. To top it off our room felt like it was 30 degrees, Kevin snored, and the room walls were paper thin so you heard everything (no this was not a case of heightened senses caused by Red Bull). It was so noisy that by 8:30AM everyone was up and very tired. We finally managed to get to Denny's by noon and left the city by 1pm. I had Michal drive as I was coming down off the Red Bull buzz and wanted to catch a few winks before I got home to Calgary where I would have to attend a Christmas party for Tuyet's company. I managed to sleep until Red Deer and that was it. Our trip home was without incident and it ended up to be quite the experience. I have learned a great thing from it as well. Do not drink Red Bull close to the end of a night if you cherish sleep, and to not exceed the recommended maximum of 2 Red Bull's/day (I had 3).

That was my Harajuka girls experience. I will post the videos I took of the concert later when the server I normally put stuff on is up.

ph33r teh 1337 h4x0r

1337
-Alex 2005

I ran across this picture today while searching up "elite speak" on google while talking to Andrew. It made me chuckle.

Addicted to Lost.

I don't know what spurred me to "find" all of Season 1 of Lost on the internet but there I was two months ago "finding" it like mad. Then I proceeded to watch the episodes to see what the guffaw was all about. And you know what? I wasn't disappointed one bit because there is a lot of guffaw! Sure these shows are quite a "cock tease", always ending off on some sort of cliff hanger, which will never be resolved until 3 episodes down the road. But damn does it keep you on the edge of your seat wanting more! I guess it is the whole point of a cliff hanger. I ended up watching the first season in the span of a few days! What I liked about having all the episodes from one season available to me was that I didn't have to wait a week for the next episode to air to cure my curiousity! Having them on hand was terrific in quenching my Lost thirst, all I had to do was double click :D

Since then I have had to do the unthinkable. Wait. That's right I wait till the next week like every Dick, Joe and Jane for the next episode to air. And you know what? It sucks!!!! I should have just ignored the complete second season and "found" it during the summer. That way I wouldn't have to wait and my life on Wednesdays at 10pm MT/8 ET wouldn't be so booked up. But now that I'm suckered into it already its hard to get out. It's an addiction! So bad this addiction that I quench my thrist for Lost by visiting sites that deal with Lost debates on Theories of what is really going on to visiting sites made specifically for the show such as Oceanic Airlines and The Hanso corporation! What scares me is what is going to happen when the season ends? Will I go into shock from Lost withdrawal? Will I have the shakes? Oh I hope not!!!!!!! Maybe reruns will satisfy me and I can be really nerdy/geeky and nit pick each episode.....oh wait I might just being do that already!

The last time I was like this was for ST:TNG. For those of you who don't know what that is. It stands for Star Trek The Next Generation! I know, I know, I'm a nerd! Some will call me a trekkie but damn did I ever love the world of Star Trek. So much so I have a nitpiker's guide to the Next Generation world and I have Tech manuals and even an Encyclopedia of all things Star Trek. I even have Star Trek playing cards (similar to Magic/Yugi Oh cards). But never did I cross the line and get myself spock ears or the Star Trek uniform. I knew when to draw the line, hehe.

Anyways, all I have to say is that Lost is damn good. It's a tease at times filled with useless flashbacks and brings up questions that never seemed to be answered but I guess that's what makes it so good! Alright I think that's enough about my addiction to Lost and all things geeky from the past and I'll leave you some interesting links if you are also a Lost fan. Definitely check out the "Ultimate Theory" and "What is the Island" link. They are very interesting.

The Hanso Foundation

Oceanic Airlines

Lost Links

The Ultimate Theory

What is the Island?

4 8 15 16 23 42 - Lost Forums

Enjoy!


P.S. Another reason to watch this show is to support another native Albertan!

iPod pains

So I basically found out what happened with my iPod and how it was completely wiped clean. iTunes apparently just updated my iPod with nothing, clearing all my songs, when I connected my iPod to the computer. Since the default setting on iTunes (right upon installation of iTunes) is to automatically update your iPod with songs from your library. But if you didn't save your library, or have nothing in your library, "nothing" will be uploaded to your iPod and the end result is your iPod music library being obliterated into nothing. The stupid thing about it all is that you cannot change this setting of an automatic iPod update to doing it manually until you connect your iPod. So basically you're screwed if you don't have your old library saved in some manner. Boo. Oh well, at least I have the PC and its a lot faster at importing CD's than my laptop was. Now I have a dilemma about importing though. Which format should I import the songs? MP3 or iTunes standard AAC. I've read many reviews on the net and its pretty much a mixed review. Some say AAC is better, some say MP3 is better. Some say MP3 is the standard and others say AAC will be the standard. All I want is the format that will sound the best but be reasonable in size when stored on my computer and iPod.

Enough geeking for now, tell me what you think about AAC and MP3.

Electronic woes.....

Long story short. My brother and our step-cousins infected my main PC with a worm. I tried removing it but went a little gung ho and accidentally removed a critical file. The computer wouldn't start up after that. After installing windows on a different partition I was able to save all the data from my account and my brothers. After a few successful reformats to install windows on the proper partition I was informed I could not install SP2 for XP because I did not have a legit code for the copy of windows I had. So I finally gave in and went and bought a legit copy of XP Home. After hours of installations of drivers/programs and restoring everything to almost near normal conditions before the virus I noticed there were quite a few bugs in it. First bug was that before the start up screen it would ask me what copy of windows xp I would like to use (even though there was just 1 OS on my comp). I fixed that by editing the boot.ini file in the C:/ and reformatted all my other partitions to make sure that there was no "second" windows on there. After that I installed my external soundcard and then finally iTunes to listen to some tunes. It was all going okay until I plugged in my iPod. I had 20gigs of music on that thing. But when I plugged it in, something happened. I don't know what, but when I clicked on "Alex's iPod" I noticed I had nothing on it. Absolutely nothing. It registered nearly 40gigs of free/unused space. Now that's a feeling of devastation. Why? Well about 15gigs of my 20 gigs on there was from music I imported from my CD collection. I wasn't able to salvage my entire iTunes music collection from my computer before I reformatted so that basically means I have to re-import all my music back on............MOTHER F&!@#$#^%%^*^*(&$!!!!!!

That's it I've had it with electronics for quite some time now. That PC can rot in whatever level of hell, along with all the loser programmers who code viruses. I really hope that there is a special place in hell for these programmers. Heck if there isn't maybe I'll draw up a petition for there to be one. Ugh.

That's it for now, I'm mad and tired and I don't think I can refrain from writing more profanity if I continue.

Alex.