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Today Liam, Jordan, and myself decided that Travis is very Gollum-like. They're both pale (Travis is Pale 1, after all) and chemo-like. This morning I visited my dad at his office and he showed me what he's been working on the past two years. It was pretty nifty. He also treated me to lunch at Brothers Pizzeria, which is off of Highway 6 near Park Row. I think it used to be at West Oaks. Yesterday (Monday) morning he met me at Randalls and opened a checking account for me at Bank of America, which is pretty cool. After that we started to consume our delicious supply of Sapporo Ichiban noodles. We now only have 59 of 63 packages left. My cousin Jim also came to visit and we attempted to beat Mario 3 after some Mario Kart 64 with my sister. We got to World 8, but we just didn't have enough time to complete it. The rest of Jim's family, except for my uncle, Steve, met us and my dad treated them to Chili's. The Chicken Crispers are always my favorite there. Otherwise, there's not too much to say, but I'm preparing for an awesome fruit-exploding New Years eve tomorrow.

Ugh, I woke up at 11 this morning to go to Dim Sum with my mom's side of the family at Ocean Palace after a late night game of Scrabble last night.

GoldenChocobos: Dim Sum?
GoldenChocobos: poorly lit addition?

For those of you non-Asians, Dim Sum is basically a type of Chinese lunch where everything is a la carte. People push carts with tiny dishes of food around the restaurant and you flag them down if they have something you want. Afterward we went to Hong Kong Market (a Chinese grocery store) to restock our supply of Chinese goods. We ran out of good instant noodles recently, and the only good kind is Sapporo Ichiban.



Any other brand of instant noodles, such of Nissin Top Ramen and Maruchan Ramen, totally suck compared to Ichiban. However, they don't sell Ichiban at local non-Chinese stores. We buy them in giant 21-packs for 8 dollars a box, which is roughly 38 cents a package. It's a little more expensive than the other brands, but it tastes so much better than anything else out there.

We met my grandparents and aunt and uncle on my dad's side of the family for dinner at Steak and Ale and then I came back home and Tyler and Travis visited. We played a round robin of FIFA '04, which is pretty sweet. Tyler won, I was 2nd, and Travis was last. It's hard to score in it, but then again, it was also hard to score in FIFA '03 the first time we played.

Man... I just finished an intense one on one game of Scrabble with my sister. She had some crazy urge to play Scrabble at like 2 AM, right when I was about to go to sleep. None of her friends want to play with her anymore because she's too good. Usually she would beat the stuffing out of me, but I got lucky and beat her (321 - 267). Alyssa had the highest scoring word, SQUARED, on a triple word score for 54 points. I received 39 points for LEAK, also on a triple word score, with the 'K' on a double word score. My sister had two of the best words that didn't receive as many points as they should have (since she couldn't get the word or the high scoring letters on the good spots), including STANZA and IVY which only scored 17 and 9 points, respectively. I also lost out on NEXT, which was only worth 19 points with my placement. My first word of the game was THRALL, which scored 18 points on a double word score, and on my third turn I added EN- to the front of it to create ENTHRALL, worth 22 points thanks to another double word score. I'd also like to gloat note that I didn't place a single word worth less than 10 points. Yeah... It was some intense late night Scrabble action with fatigued players. We took a picture of the final board, which I'll post later. Anyway, It's like 5 AM now... and I think I have to be in China Town for Dim Sum with my mom's side of our family in another 5 hours or so... Sleep is good...

Travis keeps telling me to get this Horizons game, which is supposed to be an Everquest-like MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). However, I still can't stand the idea of monthly fees other than the essentials. You know... electricity, water... DSL... And then of course, I don't pay for any of those myself, courtesy of my dad. You see, Travis actually think it's reasonable to pay $13 a month for that game, but I think it's a rip off. Servers can be expensive, but there's no way that they need a whole 13 bucks for each player. They should already be getting enough profit from game sales alone that they could only charge a few dollars a month, minimal, to maintain their servers. Anyway, Travis got me all hyped up to do something tonight, but then he bailed on me since it's his grandparents' last night in town, and he's going to play games with them. I guess that's a good enough excuse.

Earlier today I played tennis with James, Tommy, Terry, Zhi, and Will, which was pretty fun. I played one on one with James and got my butt handed to me. Then I played two on two with Tommy against Zhi and Will, and we won in a tie-breaker match. Zhi had some evil (yes, evil) Mickey Mouse ball he found and was actually pretty good with, so Tommy "accidently" hit it over the fence toward the other courts at Taylor. Zhi screamed "Ball help?" and some little kid threw it back. However, the ball thrown back wasn't the Mickey Mouse ball. We only played first to three games wins for each match. The games didn't take too long, but we spent a good amount of time just hitting the balls back and forth and everywhere else.

So yeah, in total I received a ton of cash for my birthday and Christmas presents. I'll probably have to save a lot of it, not that I can even think of enough (practical) things to buy to use all of it up. There's this cool looking PS2 game called Lifeline that's coming out some time next year, check it out. It uses a USB headset for the player to give the main character instructions on what to do but sounds so much better than "Hey, You, Pikachu!" did. Also, here's a few photos from my birthday party with my friends:

Last night my grandparents came to visit as they always do. My aunt and uncle came from Florida to come visit as well, which they rarely do. My mom cooked some great roasted potatoes and we had some honey baked ham for dinner. We also opened all of our presents last night. I got a new set of headphones which was supposed to be my stocking stuffer, but they didn't fit inside the stocking. I also received a large duffel bag, which complements a smaller one I got for my birthday. My sister gave me Final Fantasy X-2 and my dad gave me The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. My parents also gave me a Sonicare toothbrush. I guess they're trying to tell me I need to take better care of my teeth.

Today my mom's side of the family came over for lunch like they always do on Christmas day, which consisted of more honey ham and cajun-fried turkey, which was too spicy for my liking. My mom's side of the family includes: Aunts Annie and Fong, Uncles Steve and Tony, and cousins Stephen, Jim, Timothy, Michael, and Jamie. The cousins played some Catchphrase with my sister, but I wasn't feeling too well so I skipped out on that. Later we played three rounds of Croquet, in which I placed 1st, 2nd, and 3rd respectively. Overall, I tied with Michael for first (he also placed 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, but not in that order). We're about to go visit my dad's side of the family for dinner at a Chinese restaurant called Jade Village. Good food, but definitely not the most clean place ever. For some reason the Chinese just don't seem to value cleanliness in their restaurants.

If you have time, check out Ctrl-Alt-Delete (CAD), my favorite webcomic, at www.CtrlAltDel-online.com, which follows the hilarious tales of a hardcore gamer named Ethan.

Today my godparents and family visited to celebrate my birthday, which was the third party I've had for it this year. We went to Cafe East to eat with them, though I can't say that it's my favorite restaurant ever. Chinese buffet just isn't Chinese, especially when they have french fries and chicken nuggets (which I ate yesterday at McDonald's). They gave me $100 in cash and a $50 gift card to Best Buy. I assume that it was a combined birthday / Christmas gift since they both said happy birthday. Mmm... money... now I gotta decide what to spend it on, you know, since saving isn't smart at all. I still need to get some more RAM, assuming that I don't get any for Christmas. For those of you who are curious, these are my current computer specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running @ 1.67 GHz
Windows XP Professional
Radeon 9600 w/ Catalyst 3.10 drivers
256 MB DDR RAM

Yeah, so I'd like to upgrade the RAM to at least 512 MB. It looks like Christmas Eve is coming very very soon, so I hope everyone has a merry Christmas!

Yesterday my network upstairs refused to work all day. I received a 52x speed CD burner for my birthday from my sister along with many writable CD's and Trivial Pursuit 6th Edition. After I installed the burner, I couldn't access the network or the internet on my computer, which was pretty sucky because the CD burner should not have any effect on our LAN. It turns out our wireless router was having problems, which we discovered after trying out our old router. So for now, we're using an older router. Let's just say you know that you use the internet and computers too much when you find it scary that you're unable to access the internet on your computer for a whole day.

Well, today is my 18th birthday, and I don't really feel any different than I did yesterday. I decided to start up a new blog, separate from IMCM Online and my Computer Science weblog. Though this is my third blog, I think I'll be updating it the most. On Friday a few friends celebrated my birthday with me and gave me some pretty cool gifts. However, they were all pretty much joint birthday and Christmas gifts, but I guess that's all right, since I combined Tyler and Travis' gift (a mini-foosball table) since they're from the same family. They gave me The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Special Extended Edition, which is pretty sweet, along with Spaceballs, an old parody of Star Wars and the sci-fi genre in general. Liam gave me a Lord of the Rings Chess Set with crazy pieces such as Gollum as a black bishop and Legalos as a white rook. Tyler thought that Legalos would be a bishop because arrows are more diagonal than straight. Scott gave me twenty bucks, and money is always good since I can buy whatever I want with it.

The other day I installed my new Radeon 9600, replacing my Radeon 9000 Pro, and everything is so much better. Halo doesn't crash anymore, and everything is rendered smoother. The active camouflage looks even better (read "more invisible"), which is cool, but makes it so much harder for me to see enemies using it. I don't think any of my games have crashed since I installed the Radeon 9600. There's a little story behind how I got the card, which I may explain later.

I renewed my driver's license on Thursday. I didn't have to wait long, but unfortunately I didn't pass the reading test, so I have to wear glasses while driving now. My sister and I went to Katy Mills afterward to do some Christmas shopping, which was somewhat successful. Anyway, tonight my grandparents are visiting, and we're going out to eat for my birthday, and that's about it for what I'm doing. Tuesday night we're celebrating with my godparents. It'll be fun.

I'll edit the template and site later so it doesn't look so... template-like.