Life and Times of Chau

I’m more tired than Barry Bonds, if that’s immaginable. I’ve just been at work for much longer than I need to be the last two days while running 4 lot the last 3 days. Its too much, but hey this is my job so I will have to deal with it. Hopefully I don’t have to work this weekend. This will give me some time to recover and feel better. I will be heading down to Monterey this weekend so if anyone down there want to get together then send me a message and let me know. Or better yet leave me a comment. Is anyone actually reading this thing. I’ve been busy playing with this laptop and loading all my software into it. So far I have to say its worth every penny and does more than I can imagine. The screen is awesome for watching dvds. Its not the lightest thing but not heavy either so I can live with it. The speakers are not as loud as I want it to be but sound great with headphones. Battery life is ok, at around ~2hours, and charges pretty quickly.

I have most of my electronic needs so now my next wants are a projector, and a new cell phone. I have an upgrade coming up on April 7th from Cingular so I will search for a phone when that goes into effect. My friend Harpreet just bought a new Palm Treo 650 from Cingular for $450 with a 1 year plan upgrade. I was looking at the nokia 3120 (cheap, $30) or samsung p777 (expensive, $300) but not sure which one to go for yet. I think the smart move is the nokia, but the likely move is the samsung. Its a slider and has so many awesome features. Just a hard phone to say no too. Its one that turns heads and looks great. The other expensive thing I was looking at is a new 2005 Subaru Impreza WRX sportswagon. I got a quote for $21,500 + tax and licensing from the dealership. Humm

I just got home and the UPS lady delivered my brand new Acer Aspire 1414 laptop. It is the best $800 I ever spent. The screen is so bright and nice that it puts others to shame. The processor is fast enough for me a Celeron M 1.33 GHz, 512 mb of ram, 40 GB hard drive, wireless G built in, dvd/cd-rw drive and all of the other bells and whistles that comes with a new laptop for an unbeatable price. I ordered it on Sunday night and it arrives today, so that was really fast shipping. I highly recommend ebuyer.com for computer parts. They are a great merchant for your computing needs. On Saturday I went up to Oakand to see my sister and went out to dinner with her and her boyfriend Tom. It was really good italian food and then I was invited to a Hold-Em poker game that night. It was fun and although I lost $20 in 4 hands it playing from 10 til almost 2am. Definitely fun and I had my chances, so its all good. I’m sure that I will get a chance to win my money back from Trong.

We have an office pool for the NCAA basketball tournament and so far I’m in 4th place but only 3 points away from first. It might be good enough since I have more live teams than most of the other players. I really need Louiville and Utah to win their next games. That would really help my cause. I still have Illinois beating UNC for the championship. They are the two best team all year, so hopefully there are no upsets.

On a last note, this laptop rocks. Hopefully my tax return check comes soon.

I"m not in college anymore but its seems that I have a case of insomnia again. I hard got any sleep this weekend and now I can’t get to sleep at 2:30am and have to be functioning at work in about 5 hours. Don’t know what to do about it but no matter how hard i try to convince myself to try to get some sleep its just not coming. I didn’t sleep at all Sunday night and worked 8 hours, so I don’t think fatigue will be a problem, but this is not healthy. Anyone has any suggestions, other than sleeping pills?

Been looking for a laptop, and the best ones I found online is Acer for around $800 with most of the features that I need. Hopefully my tax rebate check would come soon so that I can go out and buy this laptop. I’m expecting 1,500 bucks from Uncle Sam, so that should easily cover the purchase.

I got up late, around 11:30am, since i didn’t acutally get to bed til almost 6am, I actually didn’t get much sleep. But for some reason my body felt rejuvinated and much more restful than most of last week, when I think I got too much sleep. I did a load of laundry and clean up the apartment a bit. Didn’t get around to vacuuming the place, but did clean counters and such and gather the trash. Went to get the oil changed on my car yesterday after work and the guy said i need to replace my timing belt and since its a VW jetta, on VW dealerships have those specific belts, so I’m stuck paying the dealers. That’s the only thing I hate about my car, the jacked up service and parts that it needs and are only available at the VW dealerships. Well that and it doesn’t have very good cupholders. But hey, I love everything else about it so I’m sure I will still have that car for a long time. Its only at 55,000 miles and its a 1998 model, so there’s several good years left in it and I plan to keep it until at least 100,000 miles. By then I might have some money saved up for a new car. The new 2005 Ford Mustangs look very nice so my favs right now are that, subaru sportswagon, audi A4 or another VW Jetta. One of these four will be my next car.

Had some fish and chips for lunch while watching college basketball and filling out my brackets. Its going to be a good march madness as not team looks like they’re a lock for the national championship. I playing in a pool at work so that will be interesting. Everyone is putting in 5 bucks and the winner takes 70%, second 20%, third 10% of the pot. I think about 15-20 people are going to play so it should be interesting. Then I went out to Lake Elizabeth and started my new workout routine. I plan to jog/walk around the perimeter of the lake every weekend. This is the first weekend and it took me about 30 minutes to cover a little over 3 miles. Hopefully by next month I can cut that down to 25 minutes. In high school I ran a sub 7 minute mile. So to be in that kind of shape I would need to cut the time down to about 22-23 minutes. Its a nice place to jog and always seem to be pretty crowded, there are also distance markers for every 1/2 mile marked along the trail, which is nice since I don’t have a pedometer. I should look into buying one of those. After the jog I went to get my car washed, stopped by Fry’s to look around and got dinner.

Just finish watching Ned Kelly, which was a really good film, decent actors and action, pretty simple storyline and message. Too bad I can’t seem to get it to burn since I wouldn’t mind having a copy of it. Also got a couple movies from Blockbuster online, Spirited Away and Tadpole.

Well I should get really for bed and hopefully with all this exercise, I will tire myself to sleep instead of stay up all night like yesterday. Work calls in the morning at 8am.

I use to have a diaryland blog/journal that I keep mostly while I was in college. Its been a while since I regularly updated there, probably over a year. Life is definitely different from when I was still in school and now feels as good as any to start up a new blog on friendster. Most of the diaries that I followed are no longer up on diaryland and it kind of sucks with massive server problems. I did the livejournal thing for a bit, but that didn’t feel right as well. Hopefully this will stick and I will be back updating regularly again.

Since most of the people that will be reading this are my friends, I’m sure most of you remember me and how I was in high school. Well I’m still pretty much the same guy. Quite, shy, introverted, dry sense of humor, fairly athletic, although not is as good of a physical shape as I was back then. Probably still viewed as the smart asian, but since my company, Impax Laboratories is about 90% asian, I’m actually a part of the majority, as far as the QC lab is concern. For a relative smart guy, I sure took a long time in college. Went to MPC for a year to waste time and then headed for Sonoma State University. I came in as a computer science major, big mistake, didn’t like it at all so I changed my major to Chemistry towards the end of my second year there. Didn’t grauduate until May 2004. But in the end I guess it was all worth the 20 grand in student loans. I have a decent job two months out of school pulling in close to $40,000 a year because of that degree. I also enjoy my job, which is a good thing and my supervisor is really cool. I have been at Impax since July 2004 and so far its a great experience. I now live in Fremont, CA in the east bay and work in Hayward, about 10 minutes away. Other than working on some Saturdays, its been fun, knowledgeable and a good working enviroment. Made some new friends out of the coworkers. Although being as introverted as I am, haven’t spent much time out of work with them. We did manage to go see a Warriors/Suns game last month and that was fun.

Nothing else for now. Hopefully more people will use this blog function as it would be nice to see what all my friends are up to in their daily lives.