I haven't touched the flute in over 6 years. It was time to shake the dust off and play something. After playing some basic scales and warm up exercises to get the instrument into normal operating temperature, I had discovered that over the years there was a lot of skills lost. Gone were my phrasing abilities, air capacity, and in the end, I was more out of tune than Kenny G (inside joke). Slowly I remembered what it was like to fill the musical instrument up with air and began to make the sounds coming out of it feel somewhat full.

I found a great place for Final Fantasy sheet music and decided to play an excerpt of "Eyes On Me" from Final Fantasy VIII. I can't wait to join a local concert band once I get out of my current job and into a normal 8am-5pm job. It'll be refreshing to perform with others once again.

queen logo idea

This is just a logo idea for Queen when she becomes an optometrist!

om nom nom nom

main meat ingredients: pork(marinate with salt+sesame oil) , chicken(marinate with salt+sesame oil), shrimps, halibut/cod fish, and shellfish... (dunno eng name o.O)








Ready made cream (made from scratch top left corner) diced onions, shallot, shiritaki mushrooms








Nappa (Veggies) + mozzarella cheese








Tada :D







yay ! ready to serve <3 goes well with spaghetti/rice or i guess u can try mash potatas XD

the long and winding road

I feel so lucky having found the roommates that I did. Hard to believe everyone got along great (although there was the dark age of Hans that we shall forget). It's been great times, even while we lived in La Jolla Del Sol, cramped in a 2 bed 1 bath with Caleb in the living room. Thinking back, wtf kind of life style was that?? I'll remember the times we played Rainbow 6 3 and Jason would drop grenades on us by accident, all the ttimes playing Battlefield 2 with Pablo and Caleb, and of course, the epic DOTA games. I will cherish the beginnings of having our kitty, Yuki, around and finally having Queen (AKA Yoko breaking up the band) move down. JK!

Moving into the Vela house was quite an experience too. Finally we had space to breathe and everyone had their own room. It was the perfect party house as exemplified by our numerous hostings of UCSD Pepband parties. Alas, that was not meant to last as foreclosure was drawing near. Luckily we all stayed together and found ourselves at Menkar. This house is even bigger, but came with a dog smell that we will never get rid of. I felt we truly maximized our BBQing abilities this passed summer, grilling it up almost every night and rocking the house with our Rock Band 2 and Street Fighter 4 sessions. Working out great too, too bad we didn't stick with that lulz.



It's been a great 6 years or so living with these guys, but it's time to move out. Queen and I are moving back to La Jolla Del Sol, closer to both our workplaces. Now instead of a 10 mile commute, it'll be a 3 mile commute, probably on our bikes or utilizing the UCSD shuttle system. The future is definitely still uncertain. Queen's applying to go to optometry school and when she gets in, I'll be left by myself. Maybe we'll get the band back together again someday in the future.


Good luck to Chris who is taking over our spot in the house. I had the time of my life living with these people. Hope you will too.

Open Heart Surgery On A Dell Laptop

One of my coworkers has a Dell Inspiron E1705 Laptop. It started getting a lot of blue screens at random times and the blue screen kept saying something to the matter of "IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL_TO"...Yes, I love how the designers of Windows decided to include very cryptic error messages. It reminds me of the days when I was writing my own OS and it was late in the evening when all I could think about was going to watch Star Wars Episode 1 as it was opening day. So as a lazy shortcut, I just coded a generic catch all error message such that if anything went wrong it would display "Blah". It was sort of a way to poke fun of these useless blue screens.

Anyways, IRQ usually refers to some bad RAM so after running my favorite x86 RAM tester, Memtest86 and finding no errors, I eliminated the idea that the system RAM was faulty. My next thing was just reinstall windows since the OS itself or one of the many drivers it was using, could have been bad. No luck there. I was frustrated. After more troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to a faulty video card.

Reading on the internet, it seems that the GeForce Go 7900 that came with these laptops had a very high failure rate due to overheating issues and bad memory chips. The less superior ATI X1400 that also was available for this model had a better probability of survival so I looked really hard for this card on the interwebs. The challenge of the X1400 is that it is an old card since the E1705 laptop came out sometime in 2006. Fortunately, I found the card on some obscure website.

The next step was to painfully dismantle the laptop since unfortunately unlike desktops, there is more to it than opening your ATX case and unplugging the faulty video card.

First you have to pop open this rectangular piece of plastic that sits between the bottom of the LCD screen and the top of the keyboard. This was rather scary because I had to use a flat head screwdriver and pry the thing off. I can hear the tabs that held it down go snap crackle and pop. Apparently this was the way to do it since there was no screws holding it down. Next the keyboard came off as it was only held down by two screws hidden underneath the rectangular piece of plastic that I popped off.

The LCD screen came off next. All that was holding the LCD screen down were 4 screws and for some reason the wires from the motherboard to the wireless card went through the LCD screen. Therefore, I had to flip the laptop over and disconnect the wires that connected to the wireless card before completely removing the LCD screen.

With the LCD screen off, I could take off the top panel by unscrewing a bunch of screws on the top and also on the bottom of the laptop.

I took the old Nvidia card out and replaced it with the ATI card. I put everything back to normal and booted the computer up. Now everything works fine. I was lucky that Dell does not solder on their video cards like in most laptops. If this was the case, my friend would have had to buy a whole new computer.

terribad guitar stuff

Man, I don't even know why I posted this.

Steamed pearl meatball [珍珠丸 Zen Zu Wan]

Hainanese Chicken Rice [海南雞飯 Hai Nan Gi Fan] + Twnese okra and clams [蛤利絲瓜 Ge Li Si Gua]

Falken Azenis RT-615

I got my new Falken Azenis RT-615 and they are awesome! These tires are the closest I can get to race-spec tires and still meet the street legality rules of Autocross. The tires were $90 each, which is funny because my crappy stock tires cost $80 each. I tested them out at Sanderson Airfield in Shelton, WA during one of the autocross weekends and they were unbelievable!

If you have facebook, you can watch the video of the run. If you do not have facebook, check it out on youtube!

1 2 3 4

Me and Scott playing 1 2 3 4 by the Plain White T's on ukulele and guitar. Wooooo!

乾扁四季豆[Gan Bien Si Gi Do]

will upload the process soon! :D

Banana cupcakes

mashed bananas




(missing pics.... oops :P)




mix in the container! yay :D








doesn't it look good !? <3 getting all excited and then...







took it out too early Q_Q now they're flat heads






and see... if u dun let the cupcakes stay in the dry sauna... they get unhappy (i swear i didn't punch it! >3<)
but hey! it tastes really good :D

Cheesecake (no crust)! :D nom nom nom

Nom! :3








Get a plate and flip! :D tada! Put it in fridge for 1-2 hrs.









A bit cracked on the top but no worries! that's not what we'll be seeing. :D Let it cool for 1-2 hrs at room temp.







Viola! Unbaked cheesecake. Preheat oven at 325 F with a pan of water.






Add whipped cream + cream cheese mix









1/4 cup butter + 3 phili cream cheese + 4 egg yokes + 1 tblespn vanilla extract.







4 egg whites + 130 grams sugar + whip= home made whip cream!

台灣紅燒牛肉[Tai Wan Hong Sao Niu Rou] Twnese Beef Stew

Nom nom nom

Queen pic #3

So this one I just used the diffuse glow filter, I had to play around with the blur, but I wanted to get it really bright, almost dream-like. Nothing fancy, used layers this time. Oooo, getting pro...

edit: I decided to take out the curtain, it was bugging me...


edit 2: I can't decide what I like better, but here's the color version.

For TOM.

Armor Value



Techie Suicide. The math for it is basically x(.75)(n). Where x = suicide damage level and n = armor value reduction.

Since tom doesn't like to suicide like pro-status techie..... this might motivate him.

extraterrestrial highway

Queen pic #2

I think since I suck at photoshop, I'm just going to use the default rendering thing they have for noobs like me and hope something good comes out of it. For this one, I used "cutout". I can see why they chose to call it that.

Queen pic #1

Thought I'd post this pic of Queen that I was messing around with. Nothing fancy, just thought it looked cool. Queen says it looks pop-arty.

Nerf N-Strike EX-3

While Lance was at Toys R Us purchasing accessories for his Playstation3, I felt compelled to purchase a Nerf Gun. I had never owned one and thought it would be a great toy to break up the monotony of the workplace. I purchased the N-Strike EX-3. After taking it out of the box, the dart didn't go very far. Little did I know that there was an air suppressor built-in to prevent the dart from doing outrageous things. Well, I grew tired of this limitation rather quickly so I decided to remove it.

Take the gun apart by unscrewing all the tiny screws.

Remove the air chamber. In front of the air chamber is a spring with a cap on it. Just throw those two pieces away!

In the muzzle barrel, there is an air restriction plate.

Break off the long plastic piece and clear the hole in the muzzle barrel mouth.

Reassemble back together to get some ridiculously awesome dart action without the air suppressor!