1. In my Senior year at KM where we had the "school within a school" program, I was voted shyest guy. Lameness.

2. I used to dream about being an Air Force fighter pilot after seeing Top Gun. Maverick was badass. And then, years later, I learned that was actually a Navy program. Good thing dreams don’t come true. I could’ve totally blown it.

3. My means "America" and is actually pronounced "Me." And right now, you’re wondering why I don’t pronounce my own name correctly. You try pronouncing it correctly and use my name in a story to your friends. ie – "I played with Me yesterday."

4. Seriously, I have to do 25 of these? Couldn’t it have been just ten? I’m fading fast…

5. I once "Aqua Netted" myself (I’ll spare you the details) when I was 5. Let me tell you, that stuff lives up to its name. Quite painful.

6. I hate bowling. The walk of shame and the awkward high fives and clapping just doesn’t do it for me.

7. I love billiards – and up until last week, I didn’t know you couldn’t legally jump a ball by striking it in its lower half. Leave it to another Vietnamese guy to call me out on this. Over 30 years later and North & South are still at war. (Only kidding if you ever read this, T)

8. My favorite movie for the longest time was Last of the Mohicans. The soundtrack to that movie is amazing. I used to listen to that when I’d write… actually, I’m listening to it right now.

9. I once had my pants ripped off in a tragic slide accident. While no one died, you’d consider it pretty tragic too if you had to walk to the nurse’s office in your underwear during recess. Luckily they had new jeans for me to wear for the rest of the day – teal Jordache’s for girls.

10. I still have 15 more after this? I drive for fun. And when I’m angry. And when I’m sad. And actually all the time. It’s a great place to think. And a great place to sing your little heart out!

11. I still jump in puddles – and swerve to hit them. Splash!

12. I cried after losing the spelling bee in sixth grade. With Amber Cavallo moved on to Junior High, it was supposed to be MY year!!! Damn you arrogance! Damn you L-E-N-G-H-T!!!

13. My bro other once pegged me in the eye from 10 feet away during a dirt clog fight. Sadly, he failed to realize that sometimes, rocks are also covered in dirt and do not qualify. I thought I was going to be blind at 10 years old.

14. I didn’t have my first girlfriend until I was 21. Damn you #1!

15. My favorite room of the house won’t be the home theater; it’ll be the kitchen where everything is bamboo, stainless steel and accented with cobalt blue.

16. The girl in the banner on the right side of my screen is wearing a white top. A very thin, almost see through white top. Don’t kids use facebook too? I’ll capture and post to my photos.

17. I’ve never been drunk so far as I can tell. I have been tipsy though. While the Supernova vodkas at Joey’s taste like Coke Slurpee, drink it fast and brainfreeze will be the least of your worries.

18. Currently, my main image is a Microsoft Tag. Scan it with your phone and it’ll launch you into my wordpress blog.

19. I once ran into my childhood hero, Shawn Kemp at NikeTown Seattle… and then I proceeded to run away to hide. Damn you #1, again!

20. My favorite food is vegetarian Vietnamese spring rolls. (And spring rolls are not deep fried, btw.) You can get really good ones from Tamarind Tree in Seattle off Jackson.

21. Homestretch! I have ADHD.

22. #21 was a lie. While lying can be fun, car salesmen who lie, suck. I enjoy pretending to know little and then calling them out on their lies (or lack of knowledge) when they give false answers.

23. Whoever told you that "honesty is always the best policy," lied to you. ( Only kidding, hon. =| )

24. I nearly died as a fifth grader at Westport. No one told me about undertow. Luckily, as the waves started to crash over my head, bystanders formed a human chain to pull me and my cousin back into safety.

25. Finally, #25. I always give 110%

26. See #25. This means I have to do 27.5.

27. My teachers use to call me a smart alec. I didn’t know what it meant so I’d ask them, "what’s a smart alec?" Needless to say, that merely fueled their belief. I’ve grown to embrace it.

27 1/2. This took a lot longer than I

I know there are some a lot of Zune haters out there and I’m not saying the hatred isn’t justified in some cases – still people should give it a chance before passing judgment. (On a side note, see the hilarious video below.)

I’m not going to hate on iPods… in fact, I’ve bought my mom a few of them over the years. Their simplicity and ease of use is second to none in most cases but, for me, the lure of subscription music was too powerful to deny. Most of the music I listen to, I’ll grow tired of fairly quickly. That makes buying music too expensive (save for a few great albums I HAVE to add to my collection – those I’ll listen to over and over again for years) and outright illogical. I’ve also stopped buying DVDs and I’m going to abstain from buying BluRay movies. I’ll just rent from Netflix (an extra $1 per month to upgrade your account to BD enabled). I digress; back to Zune…

Anyway, after getting Vattana that Zune as I mentioned in the previous post, I was jonesing for one of my own. Then came the 3G iPhone. For a couple months there, I got caught up in the hype. This was the phone I had to have… then again, it was the phone EVERYONE had to have. This was so much the case that when I wasn’t able to get it within the first couple of days after launch, my yearning for the jeezus phone had subsided. Lucky me. I thought I was going to be able to fill all my needs – phone/music/video/etc, with a single device. In the end though, I would’ve probably gone back to wanting a Zune (subscription music/good looking player/customization!).

That Zune I got Vattana last Valentine’s day was customized with an lasered on image and inscription on the back. Previous to actually ordering the customized Zune, we sat down and checked out the Zune site for customization options. They’ve got lots of artwork to choose from. I teased her with a few selections including the one pictured below. “Robots are cool,” I argued. She was adamant about not having robot art on her Zune.

Again, I wasn’t serious about it. I was merely teasing her – the robots were kind of weird. Honestly, I wanted to Japanese Tsunami.

Fast forward to Valentine’s day 09, exactly one year from last when Vattana received her Zune. She told me she had a surprise upstairs for me. Now to be fair, she set me up pretty nicely for this. The previous two weeks, she had been asking me about shoe size and design for a custom pair of Nike Superbad II’s (football cleats) so I was totally expecting footwear. To my dismay, she handed me a plain brown, one and a half inch thick shipping box – definitely not shoes.

All I could think was, “what in the hell is in this box?!” As my fingers ripped through the tape and peeled off that top lid, the tips danced and probed inside the box – a book! A book? A book!? So basically, I had gone from euphoria (getting new cleats) to major disappointment (a book?!) And then back again… kinda like this except backwards. I screamed like a little kid getting a Wii at Christmas. I used to wonder how any one could react like that – it had to be faked right? Nope. It’s unadulterated, 100% pure joy. It’s something we forget as we grow older. So while the present was awesome (the customized Zune), something I had wanted for a long time, the real gift in this all was the reaction – it was pretty awesome to experience that joy like I was 10 years old all over again. If only we had gotten video…

Anyway… what’d she customize it with? The always wonderful, ever thoughtful girlfriend of mine got me robots. Yup. Those same ones I jokingly teased her about. She really thought I loved them back when I was picking out her design so she got it permanently lasered onto my Zune. Funny thing is, in the end, the robots mean more to me than any other design she could’ve picked – it’s now got meaning behind it. The tsunami in all its awesome glory couldn’t have even come close…

• Unlike the iPod, not everyone and their mother’s, mothers owned one.

• Good performance to price ratio along with a beautiful screen.

• Customization – I was able to laser on art! (and an inscription)

• Subscription music service – For $14.99 a month, I’m able to download and cram onto the 80GBs, all of my music plus any music I liked on their service.

It was a no brainer. Here we are a year later and though she owns an iPhone, Vattana still uses her Zune exclusively for music. For those of you who are on the fence about making the switch, ask me about it. I admittedly love the design of the iPod Touches and its ease of use is hard to beat – but the Zune just manages to do so with this second gen player.

I tell people who are ready to get a new phone to consider the iPhone all the time (actually, I tell them there’s no other phone they should even consider if they can afford the monthly service fees). It’s a great phone and though I want one, I received a HTC Touch Pro for xmas and can’t complain; I truly love the Touch Pro when it comes to business. But if I weren’t so focused on business capabilities, I’d go iPhone all the way. Seriously, have you see all the apps available for download? Plus, the interface can’t be beat as far as phones go. Still, if I were to own an iPhone one of these days, I’d be carrying around my Zune, solely for its music capabilities. After months (11 to be exact) of glowing envy on my part, Vattana finally realized …

Acting – You know damn well you weren’t actually this excited to receive a pack of peanut butter cups for your bday. Regardless, well played with the in-laws.

If only it were truly this easy.

Make-up – now available for retards…

… and for retards who hunt – now available in CAMO!

My new hobby… screaming JENGA in Vattana’s face.

My favorite food on Earth – vegetarian spring rolls!

Hmm, far too many pics. More to come…

Then again, maybe I’m not as clever as I had thought (still continue to do so), and maybe all those people already knew what the tag was an how it was meant to be read. Still, it was a smart way to lead into my new blog right? A smart way to get people interested… so I thought – most who inquired about the code, simply gave up after a few seconds worth of racking their brains.

So we’ll see.  Maybe someone will figure it out, yet….

For about four years, I worked at Best Buy.  I enjoyed my time there. Met some great people including Vattana, who I had a part in bringing on board (that’s another story). During my time there, Circuit City was a competitor and like any competitor in any sport, I viewed them as my enemy. That’s not to say I didn’t respect them; I did. Still, I was at Best Buy and Circuit City which happened to be right down the road (further feeding the fire of this rivalry) was a competitor and therefore, an enemy.

But after I left Best Buy and the effects of the brain washing I had endured subsided, I grew to love Circuit City. They often had better prices and while their customer service wasn’t always the greatest, neither was Best Buy’s. All things being equal, aside from pricing, I wasn’t going to discriminate. It’s a free market and it’s the better pricing that would win the battles for my business.

When Vattana was in search for a new laptop a couple days ago, we shopped around. We first hit up Costco, then made our way to Best Buy. In this economy, there are good deals to be had everywhere (so long as you can afford them). Our stop on Thursday night, brought us to Circuit City. As we walked through the doors, something felt entirely different in this experience. All the rumors we had heard about Circuit City on its last legs had to be the reason, but not for the reasons you might think. This didn’t feel like the old Circuit… it felt like they had changed their culture (if only at this particular store in Tukwila). The people were more upbeat, the store traffic seemed fairly high for this time of night and, we were greeted at the door by a genuinely friendly young man. Gone were the seemingly poor attitudes of the old regime. There weren’t slackers packed in a deep pocket corner of the store merely rambling on about how badass they are at WoW or COD4. Did Circuit finally decide they were going to right this sinking ship by winning the war with the tactics of better customer service? (Some people are actually willing to pay the higher costs if it means notably better customer service – ask Vattana about her car.)

While we didn’t purchase the laptop, we did find a great deal which we may be back for, moreover, they were undercutting Best Buy on this particular product by hundreds.  So as we left the store and said bye to that friendly guy at the door, I thought, “great to see that Circuit’s going to survive.”

Friday, January 16th, 2009, Circuit City announced they were closing all 567 locations in the US. This is truly a sad day. And like any grieving period, I must’ve been in denial after hearing the news. In the back of my mind, I thought maybe someone would save them much like CompUSA was saved (if only partially) by Tiger Direct. Maybe they’d stick around, if only in this area. Yesterday evening when I jumped online to check out the price and availability of that laptop Vattana and I had liked from the previous night before, I was stopped at the digital door that was this greeting above when visiting their website. http://www.circuitcity.com/closed.html

Check it out for yourself. I think I’m at the depression stage right now. Hopefully, for all of us, this is as bad as it gets. This economic time is truly unnerving…

On another note, didn’t CompUSA close their doors in the middle of last year? Can anyone tell me why their lights are still on full blast? I wonder who’s paying that bill…

Congrats are in order here. If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously cracked the code. I’m sure most people who have seen my facebook, myspace, Live Messenger, and other online presences are wondering what in the heck I changed my picture for. Beyond that, what the eff is up with the colored triangles?!

I just figured it was a fun way to confuse people all while bringing them back to my new blog. Considering I had originally resolved to write more this year (anyone remember the 1,000,000 word goal for the year?) I’m off to a terrible start. Besides, having no readers (except for the 2 that came today – and those were me after I had forgotten to log in)doesn’t provide much incentive, does it? With this, I’m killing three birds with one stone. I found a way to use this Microsoft Tagging creatively, I’ve updated my blog, and I’ve drawn some readers to this blog. Score! (Hopefully your phone can handle the data… sadly, I didn’t make my page exactly a mobile page.

Want to know how you can get your own tag? Check out http://tag.microsoft.com

As neat and ingenious as this little tagging tool is, it’s no where near what I thought when I first watched a demonstration video of PhotoSynth and SeaDragon. My jaw nearly hit the floor as I watched the video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED. Those two technologies renewed my faith in the company’s ability to innovate. Microsoft’s creating some really neat new stuff these days. While this video is a couple years old now, it’s still pretty darn impressive. Check it out!

Just think – we’re only two weeks into winter and already, we’ve had a ton of snow (here in “rainy Seattle”). While my RWD (rear wheel drive) car isn’t all that great in the snow (let’s face it – my car sucks in the snow), I’ve rediscovered my love for riding the bus. There’s simply more time to enjoy all that’s going on around you (all while fearing for your life, at times) and it’s probably a lot healthier. Especially when your bus doesn’t run on schedule due to the snow forcing you to walk miles and miles to and from bus stops which really defeats the purpose of busses.

After those first few days of snow, my car was left parked stranded in my garage for two weeks. Believe me, this gave me plenty of time to reflect. On everything. EVERYTHING. Sitting at home, locked away in your room will do that to you. Sitting at a bus stop for hours waiting for a bus that’s supposed to come once every 15 minutes will do that to you. Finally making it onto and riding a bus full of strangers who are packed in like sardines (yes, a man made a joke about this on the bus, and no, it didn’t work then either) angrily shoving each other to claim their “comfort” space as they are new riders unfamiliar with this technology, will do that to you. Walking over 30 miles in the snow (which makes things eerily quiet at night) in the course of a week, all by your lonesome self, will do that to you. Especially when your phone’s battery sucks and can’t hold a charge for the full length of the waking day, will do that to you. Oh how I’ve missed the bus. And writing. 

In that time, I tried to figure out what I’d resolve to do in this new year (now three days old). Drop some weight (too cliche), eat more healthy (also too cliche), make up with lost friends (what lost friends?), etc. For days, I had nothing except for sore, soaked, cold feet (which I refused to purchase new boots for because I was too cheap to justify a purchase that would benefit me more the far too few days it snows here in Seattle – did I mention we’re just a couple weeks into winter?).  And then, two days in (which was yesterday), I realized I’d resolve to write more. Write what? Blog! I did so for month last year during a mental explosion/renaissance. During that time, I made a goal to reach 1,000 page views for my blog on myspace within the month. As soon as I hit it, I quit it (a priceless motto for life). I had burned myself out on writing and while great subjects had presented themselves to me over the course of the past eight months (being saved by a female stranger at 2am after I chanced it on my gas level, being pulled over twice for expired tabs/speeding and not being ticketed, my second meeting with Ari Hest), I simply couldn’t bring myself to write anything of  substance. So here’s what I’m resolving to do this year (though I’m sure I’ll change this goal after realizing how ridiculous it is upon doing the math): write 1,000,000 words in one year through a blog (this one?), twitter and facebook updates. You might thing it’s easy considering how verbose I can be but it still equates to 2,809 words a day. Sometimes I don’t even think I speak that many words in a day!

Did I mention we’re already three days into this new year? Hmm… so classic me – procrastinate to the end. At 2,809 words a day and three days in, I should be at 8,427 words. Subtract what I’ve done here and I’ve got just ~7,780 or so left for today to keep pace. 

It’s going to be a long year…