Go, Warriors, Go!

Woohoo! I'm glad they drafted Ike Diogu. I think it's mostly because I have distinct memories of him dominating Stanford so I get the impression that he's good. Then again, if he can do it in college against double and triple teams, I assume he's got the game to be successful. I hope this means the end of Troy Murphy starting at the 4, but I doubt I'll get that lucky. As good as he is for fantasy, he kinda blows in giving the Warriors an inside presence.

Now that Granger and Green have both fallen this far, the Warriors should really package their 2nd round pick with one of their white boys (Dunleavy or Murphy) to pick one of them up.

If only I could be GM for a sports team!!!

One more week until Hawaii!!

Wow, the weekends definitely just come and go in the blink of an eye.

Ruth came in to visit starting on Friday, but since my parents are in town, we've been spending some time up in the city. My mom and brother came down for church this morning and then we had a nice little bbq at home afterwards, throwing on some hot dogs and steak. It's been a steady progression from just hot dogs to adding chicken to finally graduating to putting some steak on today. We ate mostly just the Yoshida teriyaki marinated pieces for lunch, so the salt and pepper ones will have to wait until dinner.

Only one more week of work to get through before an extended time away in Hawaii!! I'm definitely looking forward to the time off and some R&R. The past quarter has been full of lots of twists and turns at work and it will be a relief to get to hopefully ignore it for a nice stretch. It will be fun to head over there and hang out with Chang and Gina... too bad Andrew couldn't make it!

Chang didn't move in today... I guess that means I'm a poor supervisor.

Why me?

Another eventful COS push night...

Edit: Of course, even worse, a more eventful COS push morning-after

Rising in the rankings...

I had lost my #1 spot on Google for "hubert pan" after my Stanford webspace went down and hadn't gotten a chance to boost it back up. So a few weeks ago, I created some ghetto webpages on the CS student webspace and the RCC alumni webspace and whaddya know.. I'm back at #1 again!! It's a little strange because Google only picked up my CS one so far, but Yahoo picked up the rescomp one. Yahoo also has higher quality results for my name :( Hopefully I'll get some pagerank for my blog and it will rise up the rankings soon!! In the meantime, I can rely on the good ol' AdWords ads to keep my blog up there. You should also be able to find a plug for Roothie's Xanga.

For a good laugh, search for "andrew yeh" on Y! and read the first snippet that comes back... I never knew!

Fore!!!

As a kid watching cartoons and tv shows which had golf moments, it seemed like calling out "Fore!!!" when the ball was hit was just part and parcel of the game. Little did I realize until I actually started playing on a few courses a couple of years ago, that should definitely be the exception and generally only if you're hitting wayward shots that might strike people. How this is all relevant is that Andrew and I went to the Stanford driving range after work yesterday. As usual, it was mostly mediocre mixed a couple good shots here and there... that means I'm ready for a real golf course! We'll probably try hit some easy course, maybe next weekend. Golf is totally one of those games that I'll never be good at because it requires consistency, patience, and a lot of practice. Nonetheless, it's still fun to head out to a course on a nice day, spend some time goofing off for a couple hours, and enjoying the handful of great shots interspersed through a day of mediocrity. :)

In other news, I finally pitched a perfect game in MVP baseball 2005 last night. I've totally bought into the Moneyball philosophy in that every sports video game I buy, I trade away all my good veterans for young, up and coming players. In that sense, playing fantasy sports definitely also has benefits in the video game arena. :) So I gutted out most of the Oakland roster and yesterday used Scott Kazmir to retire every batter that came up, the Texas Rangers no less. I would've thought it would be Mark Prior or Rich Harden first, but I'm not complaining. The computer was pretty bastardly, too, pinch hitting the last two guys, I suppose in an attempt to break it up (they were down ~5 runs, so it was pretty hopeless). Now all I have to do is finish the season and win a World Series and I'll probably lose interest in the game :)

How long can I keep a clean room?

One of my big accomplishments this past weekend was cleaning up my room :). It had been a while, with lots of stuff all over the floor and the my drawers fairly disorganized. I picked up all the clothes off the ground, did my laundry, re-organized my wardrobe, and even vaccuumed the floor!! I guess saying I cleaned my room would be a stretch because the desk and tv stand are still strewn with items, but it's nice to be able to see my floor again.

Through the process of cleaning, I once again realized how much clothes I have and how much of it I don't really wear anymore. It was painstakingly difficult, but I managed to fill up a large bag full of clothes to donate. Even still, my wardrobe is pretty stuffed to the brim. I donno what it is, but I always want to keep them for sentimental value or with the thought that I might want to wear it again someday. At least maybe since Ruth isn't around, I won't go shopping very much and won't pile up new clothes as quickly. :)

Softball losers, no more!

We were actually competitive playing softball today!! The team had been on a 10 game losing streak (although I thankfully didn't play last season and experience the first 8 games of it), but today we played team that we have beaten regularly before (Taida) and another that we have been competitive with (Drifters).

This week, Chang was off enjoying Japan, but we got a couple of the younger blood out there with Eric back in town, Jeff able to make it, and Daniel playing with us, too.

I was on the mound for the first game and breezed through the first four innings, giving up a single run and getting lots of weak popups, even making three or four grabs on my own. We steadily built up a lead by pushing six or seven runs. Then things started unravelling in the fifth inning... I totally lost my mechanics and balls started dropping short of the plate. I think I ended up walking three people over the course of the inning and they narrowed the gap to a handful. After they had started building their rally, Daniel made a great dig in the hole and, with no chance of getting the runner out at 1st, fired home to get the runner by a step. That was a clutch 2nd out that got us ever closer to the end of the inning. During the bottom half, Eric and I led off with our customary flares and singles and both came around to score to help pad the lead back up.

When the sixth inning rolled around, I was slightly less erratic, but got to the point where there were runners on 2nd and 3rd with 2 out and their lone girl on deck. Mike came out and asked if I felt comfortable walking the guy at the plate and throwing strikes to the girl. Of course, I agreed, proceeded to give the guy some lousy pitches, and then faced the girl, who I got to weakly popout before but also walked afterwards. The first pitch was fairly short, so the count ran 2-1. The next one caught the back line of the box and it looked surely good, but as Mike threw the ball back, the ump called it a ball. That threw me for a loop and I took my eyes off the return throw, barely snowconing it and preventing it from pegging me in the face. The next pitch was a solid strike, but with the count full, I threw one that just caught the edge of the plate as it landed to walk in a run. Thankfully, we ended up escaping that inning with the next batter.

When the top of the 7th rolled around we started up 11-6. I had been shaky the previous two, but with a sizeable margin, I think Mike felt comfortable leaving me in there still :). After giving up a couple runs and getting a couple outs, there were runners on 2nd and 3rd, but I lost a guy and walked the bases loaded, putting the tying run on base. The next guy hit a shot out to center, but Jeff snagged it and put an end to an increasingly nervewracking game.

For the 2nd game of our doubleheader, I was playing first, which was a nice break from pitching. Our friends dominated the infield, with Eric, Daniel, Andrew, and I from third around through first. I don't quite remember this game to the same level of detail as I was tired and not really involved in every pitch :) We did give up 6 runs to start the game in the 1st as the ump had a pretty tight strike zone, calling it depending on whether it came down below the batter's back shoulder rather than the simpler way of just calling depending on where it lands. We managed to claw our way back and I actually contributed with a few singles, but fell short, losing 9-7.

All in all, it was much better to not only win, but also play decently and be competitive. It was a whole lot more fun than getting drubbed by over 20 runs! :)

Time flies when you're... working hard?

I can't believe how quickly the time goes by at work. Things definitely seem to go by quicker as one gets older, but it used to be with a longer time horizon (e.g. the last month or year went by pretty quickly, in retrospect). Now it seems like every day and week is like "poof, and then it's gone".

After chatting with one of the engineers last night, I kind of wonder how things would be if I continued down the software engineer path. The summer internships were definitely boring, but probably due to the combination of having fairly lame projects and working at somewhat slow-paced places. I definitely enjoy PM, but just sometimes miss the challenge of hammering through a coding problem, although I guess I still get to help propose some designs and let other people take care of the implementation =)

It is a little freaky how quickly the days go, though.

The dawn of a new era!

On the fateful April 15, 2004, I started both a Blogger and a Xanga blog, but ended up doing most of my posting on Xanga. The main reason was that most of the people I knew were on Xanga and I couldn't leave comments unless I had a login/blog with them, so I just ended up continuing to use it. Although there are some conveniences associated with it, I'm not a big fan of the closed community, where I couldn't leave comments unless I had a login, I couldn't figure out how to change my links to show subscriptions to other non-Xanga blogs, and there just wasn't much control in general to do whatever I wanted. Finally, to top it all off, I re-registered my own domain name, eventually picked a hosting provider, and got off my lazy butt to set up a subdomain and have Blogger publish to it. That was the final straw and now the switchover is in the works. When I get another jolt of inspiration, I might even try transfer my posts out of Xanga and over here.

Yet another softball beating

So today we played two softball games in this Chinese American league's summer tournament. It's been a while since I had played, but the team has been pretty mediocre over the last couple seasons. Was planning to head out with Chang, Andrew, and Daniel, but Daniel had to go into work this morning, so it was just the three of us that went.

In pretty predictable fashion:
- We lost both games, getting dominated in each
- I pitched and gave up over FIFTY total runs, although a good chunk of them unearned . Was fairly consistent and didn't give up too many walks.
- I sucked at the plate. A combination of my limited hand-eye coordination and still not feeling comfortable in the box.
- Chang was solid and steady, gobbling up balls behind me in the infield and knocking some crisp singles
- Andrew couldn't manage escaping the day without getting hurt

All in all, it was still pretty fun. I progressed from being frustrated to being disinterested to being able to laugh about it. I usually end up somewhere in the first two stages before the carnage is over, so it was good that today we got so bad that I could reflect on it while getting hammered.

Oh yeah, and I gave up another over the fence homerun. But since it's already happened before, it wasn't a big deal. Been there, done that.