I managed to take 4400 photos / videos that total 12.5GB in 2009. My backup for the year spanned 3 DVD-Rs. As I have done in years past, I made one set for an on-site backup, and a second set for an off-site backup. (no, this is NOT overkill. You should have seen what i did with my film camera negatives — those are stored in Acid free books, and descant packs were used to keep the moisture constant ) Anyway, I did a file checksum compare between the original source file on the HDD, the first DVD-R backup set and the second DVD-R backup set to ensure there were no bit errors and the data integrity was solid. I also made sure that the DVD-R was readable on a second computer without issue. That part alone took 5 hours.

At 9pm my computer has a HDD auto-clone operation that kicks in every two days that copies everything from C drive to my D drive. I use the Casper software to do this. That took a few minutes to update. At 10pm I was finally able to copy the 2009 photos into my E drive which is powered on every once and a while when I need to do a quick digital backup without needing to burn stuff to media.

Oh yeah, I spent way too much time on Facebook while the backups were occurring. Too bad I didn’t go riding.

I registered for the following cycling rides today:

• Worst Day of the Year ride 2010 (Feb 14th) – 40 mile option
• LiveSTRONG Seattle 2010 – 100 mile option. Join my team at: http://seattle2010.livestrong.org/TIO
• Tour de Cure (Hillsboro) 2010 – 100 mile option. Join my team at: http://main.diabetes.org/site/TR?pg=personal&fr_id=7041&px=5551585

Monday Jan 4th – 1am: Tweeted to #FB: “1am. Still wide awake. I really should have tried to maintain a normal sleep schedule over the last few days… Need to be awake by 6!”

Well, 6am came by and waking up was an insane challenge. I had a 7am appointment at Kaiser (Mother Joseph Plaza campus), but I got the run around and the doc wasn’t in the office. That is not what I’m expecting when you have an appointment setup. So I had things rescheduled for 1pm that afternoon, but all the way over at the Kaiser Sunnybrook office in Clackamas. I took the afternoon off from work and drove all the way out there. A little inconvenient to drive out there, but I got medically cleared to resume cycling… thank goodness everything should be OK.

I went to Fred Meyer to pick up groceries and saw a car with plates that read “DR HRBL.” I took it as “Dr. Horrible” which made my day. Jill pointed out that it could be “Dr Herbal” … which kinda ruined the fun! Anyway, got food for the next few days. I made a tuna noodle casserole [recipe] for dinner. It was a quick and easy meal to make, and it was good. I would argue that the recipe only serves 2 people, not 4.

I went through Facebook in the evening hours and noticed I got tagged in Jessica’s vacation note. For the record, 10am is WAY too early to text while one is really wanting to sleep . Cycling plans for this Saturday with Jess is in progress.

Tuesday Jan 5th – 1:40am: Tweeted to #FB: “1:40am. Awake for the last hr & can’t sleep. Isn’t there a ’sleep mode’ for this mind?:(”

I really need to get the sleep schedule back on track. This is gonna hurt much more as the week progresses.

I looked at my Google Analytics report this morning and noted that the number search result that leads to my website is “Frootee stargate” and links to my blog entry in October 2009.

I’m pleased to announce that showing Dr. Horrible a few times over the summer months has taken hold in some of my friends… even when one is on vacation, and said person may have been watching it in the car as they were a passenger heading to their destination… ahem… Jessica.

I started watching Firefly again. Yeah, I think enough time has passed that I can enjoy watching the series again. The last binge was in August as noted in the entry titled “The last 3 Months” and subsequent drawings and collection of Firefly maquettes.

Cycling plans set for Saturday morning – 9am, 30+ mile ride around Hillsboro.
Plans set for Sunday too… this will be my second visit to Corvallis since graduation. Should be fun!

Wednesday Jan 6th – 1:00am: Tweeted to #FB: “Really? 1am. Why can’t I sleep?!? Three days straight of sitting in bed for 1+hr without falling a sleep. Crazy.”

I’m starting to think about getting a smart phone and a data plan. Maybe a Blackberry won’t be too bad after all. I’m gonna stay clear of the iPhone unless they can seriously increase the battery time. We’ll see what happens. It’s just a thought for now. It would be nice to be connected to the world and have access to information at your fingertips.

My refrigerator is on the fritz again. Its a 2003 General Electric GSS22WGPC side by side. The condenser coil in the back of the freezer is completely frozen over and the fridge section is getting close to 50 degrees. I spent the better part of the evening taking the food out and storing it in a ice chest so things won’t spoil. I removed the shelving from the freezer side and removed the back panel to the freezer. Spent a good 30 minutes aiming a hair dryer at the coil and got everything melted away. I didn’t have a chance to completely dismantle the freezer components and diagnose what is wrong, but at least this will get the fresh food section back in working order for a few weeks. Perhaps I’ll look at the components tomorrow night. Just need to do some research first. I did find a good forum and replacement parts website for some helpful advice from other consumers and repair guys:

Appliance Blog: http://www.applianceblog.com/mainforums/
Replacement parts: http://www.appliancepartspros.com/
Replacement parts (Sears): http://www.searspartsdirect.com/partsdirect/index.action
Exploded block diagram for my fridge: http://www.appliancepartspros.com/partsearch/model.aspx?model_id=5242135&diagram_id=22287624#d22287624

Thursday Jan 7th – I left work early today. There wasn’t much to do (and I’m thankful for that!)… though I still need to complete my performance review.

I took apart the freezer section once again. This time, I was on a mission to check what was wrong. It could have been one of three things: 1) the defrost heater , 2) the thermostat, or 3) the logic board. The logic board is the most expensive part… around $160. Visual inspection of the board didn’t show any signs of burns, or bulging caps. So that’s good. I’m hoping it’s item 1) or 2) since those cost MUCH less.

Anyway, I packed away all of the freezer food in a tote again and stored it outside with some ice. I proceeded to remove the shelving, then the back panel. Next came the ice maker motor, and the evaporator cover. The evaporator cooling fan was next to be removed. It covers and houses the access points for the defrost heater and thermostat that I was interested in. It took a bit of effort to disassemble as i had to squeeze myself into the freezer cavity. That was a bit awkward.

The thermostat tested OK and the wiring continuity was just fine. I tested the defrost heater last and found it open. It’s a resistive heating element, so it should have registered something on the ohm-meter, but didn’t. (In hind sight, I guess I could have checked the defrost heater FIRST without having to completely remove the freezer compartment components. Oh well). I found a replacement defrost heater from the Sears Part Direct website for $36 + $10 shipping. Not too bad I’d think — the closest part store that carried stock was deep in PDX, so $10 isn’t too much to pay for convenience. This is still cheaper than having a GE tech come out and shelling out $80 for just the diagnosis fee + parts + labor. I should get the part by next Thursday. Lets hope that fixes it.

I snapped a few pictures of the take apart and posted them onto facebook. If you don’t have an account, you can view them through this public link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2238986&id=19700626&l=3d5e1d27ba

To wind down the evening, I talked to mom for an hour and caught up on the week. She’s really worried that I’ll get cold in China… I keep telling her my jacket is warm enough; yes, I’ll be warm; and no, -4degC isn’t that cold with the gear that I’m bringing.

Rest in peace Mr. O’Halloran. You will be missed by all of your past and present students at Mt. Tabor M.S.

-T

I copied most of my phone pics to Facebook. It’s about time I did that. Thank goodness for the microSD card. I noticed is that the EXIF data is missing on half of the photos- this was rather problematic as I wanted to assign a date comment each photo, so there was some manual labor going through old e-mails and chat logs to find out when some of the photos were taken! There was also something about the phone JPG files that the FB uploader didn’t like. I had to re-save each one in Photoshop to get the JPG headers correct again before it uploaded. That took a better part of 3 hours. I also started to play around with the Facebook Mobile feature the night before. I guess it’s pretty convenient to take photos with the camera phone and upload them directly, but that’s a one photo at a time type of operation. I’d much rather use my small point and shoot or DSLR if i have it on me. We’ll see how much I use this.

My friends finished tagging my Mania Monday party pictures from Dec 21st. I woke up and found 80 new photo tags. There are a lot of pics, and I thank you (John, Clara) for tagging the remaining ones! Jessica blames me for sending a bunch of FB spam. Ha.

I finally made the chocolate chip cookies — almost 30 hours after I said I would make them. The recipe [allrecipes.com] says this would yield 60 cookies. One thing that I realized is that it would yield 60 small cookies. I made 18 small cookies and 20 large ones instead. I figure why make a bite sized one?

I organized my FB Home Cooking album. I also added recipes to some of the captions and updated my recipe folder.

To end the night, I watched Stargate Universe, Episode 10 ‘Justice,’ and Stargate SG-1 Season 4, Episode 10 ‘Beneath the Surface.’ Not a bad way to wind down the day.

Tuesday Dec 29th –
I read my Google Analytics report this morning and it showed someone searching for “Facebook Thomas Ng” – I guess I’m the #2 hit on Google for this term. I’m currently ranked #4 if you just search for my name. The third ranked hit used to be my domain name as well, but it has been bought by some artist. I stopped paying for the .org domain since everything is re-directed to the .net domain anyway. Oh well. One more interesting tidbit: someone visited my website from South Africa!

Random thought: sometimes I feel like Doogie Howser sitting in front of my computer, reflecting back on the events for the day — except I don’t have an old CRT monitor or the 8-bit Doogie Howser theme song playing in the background. OH! Speaking of which, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this if you are a Neil Patrick Harris fan or just a dork (like me).

Hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/watch/53001/saturday-night-live-digital-short-doogie-howser-theme

While searching for that clip, I noticed that Hulu.com has four seasons worth of DH MD online as well [Hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/doogie-howser-md]. I remember watching the pilot episode back in 2004 when I was bored out of my mind studying at the library one day. I think I watched an episode of Duck Tales as well that day. Good times!

I’m gonna get my H1N1 vaccination today. That ought to be fun. I don’t mind needles, but I really don’t think I’ll need the vaccination either. I usually just let my body naturally take care of infection/cold and not take any actual medicine for it. Just getting it to satisfy the parents before I head on over to Shanghai for work for the last two weeks of January. Oh wow, it just hit me: I’m leaving the country in 3 weeks! Ack! I should stat looking for a decent sized suite case to fit 2 weeks of stuff and a winter jacket.

I’m aiming for a mid afternoon cycling ride at 2pm today as well. They are currently predicting a 15% chance of rain, and a high around 38deg. Should be alright for a quick ride around town. Today’s cycling plans currently on standby. Likelihood of precipitation is increasing. We’ll play this one by ear.

Alright, time to start the day.

-T

Updates for Tuesday: It started to snow around 1pm today. 3″ accumulated during the evening. The weather forecasts never said anything about it. I’m sure glad that I canceled my cycling ride. Oh well. I got my H1N1 vaccination. The nurse at Kaiser was quite cute and we struck up a conversation. Too bad she’s taken. :-\ Went to Fred Meyers for some groceries. Slowly drove home in the snow.

I made a snowman in my driveway, a snow angel in the front yard and captured some night shots around the neighborhood with my camera. Apparently I cloned myself in a multiplicity shot as well. Pictures are on Facebook (or on my Fotobook page). All in all, a good day.

Wednesday Dec 30th – I changed out the SIM card in my phone today. After installing the replacement one, it decided to delete all of my sent text messages from the phone, but it kept all of the ones in the inbox. There were some messages that I wanted to keep and didn’t have the chance to send them over to my computer yet. That’s a bummer — oh well, we’ll start fresh for 2010.

Party at my place 6pm. Made fried rice for dinner; had chips/salsa and cookies for snacks. Played Blokus, and Carcassone with a small skeleton crew.

Thursday Dec 31st – It’s been a really slow start for the day. I’m not exactly feeling 100% and I’m hoping I can thwart off a cold for another few hours. I woke up with my nasal sinuses plugged up and hurting. I woke up around 11am, checked e-mail and went back to sleep for a few more hours. I finally had breakfast at 2pm. The rest of the afternoon was met with vomiting and not feeling good at all. I did head out to urgent care to get checked out. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good night. Since I wasn’t in any immediate health danger, I didn’t leave with the answers that I wanted… I was just instructed to take some ibuprofen and wait until Monday when the surgeons would be back in the office. Ugh. Maybe I should reconsider my health benefit selections for 2011.

I went to the new years eve party at Chantelle’s place tonight. I was the only sober one there and it was freakin’ hillarious. I am glad that I got to hang out with my friends for the new year. I look forward to 2010. It should be exciting and challenging. I resolve to cycle at least 3K miles.

Friday Jan 1st – HAPPY NEW YEAR! I was going to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended edition = 11.5 hours) at Lee’s place, but I’m currently feeling a little bit under the weather. I guess I’ll stay home and spend the first day of 2010 sick. I spent way more time sleeping than awake in 2010 thus far. Currently waiting for clear skies, and green light to return to cycling. Ugg.

Saturday Jan 2nd – I woke up with a nice 101degree fever. I guess it was a good choice to stay at home yesterday. I thought about going shopping so I can make something nice for dinner, but was quickly reminded that I should be in bed and definitely not driving. I ended up making noodles for “lunch” at 4pm, and a tomato with egg dish (didn’t have beef though!) for dinner at 9pm. Ah, 2010… this has been a rough start.

It was wonderfully awesome to speak to someone famous! In Hollywood! Well, I guess Vancouver British Columbia is more correct. But you get my drift.

In Stargate: Continuum, I noticed that Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) reach for a box of Frootees cereal in the store. If you are an astute fan of the Stargate franchise and a fan of David Hewlett’s work, you may have also noticed that the Frootees box first appeared in the opening scene of a Hewlett’s A Dog’s Breakfast. Hewlett also played as Dr. Rodney McKay in the Stargate: Atlantis series and had debuted in a few episodes of Stargate: SG-1 opposite Tapping as the world renowned stargate expert. Carter and McKay have a love hate relationship.

Pretty cool tip of the hat to both the shows, and the respective characters .

If they want to do a strange plot twist, I guess the ‘alternate timeline’ that Stargate Continuum takes place in could be the same timeline as A Dog’s Breakfast. That would have been awesome if they just met in passing without McKay, err.. Patrick, knowing who Carter was. Ha!

Additionally, if you look close enough, the Frootees box in A Dog’s Breakfast appears to be original. The one in Stargate: Continuum looks like it was stuck on to a Kellogg’s Rice Krispies box (notice the side panel) . The cereal was made for ADB, and is not a real marketed cereal.

Work has been stressful, as I’m sure many of you can relate. I spent the better part of May, June, July and August cooped up in the hardware engineering lab or the EMC chamber until the wee hours of the morning. There were a few off-site adventures to NW EMC to checkout FCC compatibility of my project, and at times find out that we’re not so compliant which led to a lot of debugging. As it were, it was a constant rinse and repeat cycle of working from 8-5 verifying my project, and debugging issues. I’d go cycling for an hour or two to get my head on straight, then return to the office from 8-midnight or later. I’m sure that can’t be good for anyone. Some days I would be so tired that my mind was completely numb, and I’d just walk around in a daze.

Cycling, for the most part, kept me sane. I’d ride 20-30 miles after work just to get my mind off of things. It was really nice to just sit and propel yourself on a country road for miles at a time. I started the season back on March 12, 2009, and officially ended it just last week on Sept 23rd, 2009 with a total of 2321 miles over the last 6 months. My bike, a 2006 Specialized Tarmac Comp has seen well over 4000 miles since i bought it in the spring of 2007. I wore out the original set of brakes and the original set of wheels after 3000 miles. The chain was changed back around 2000 miles and it’s only been through one “accident” during the 2007 STP. Not too bad.

Other stuff
Somehow I found some opportunities to fall in love with a new movie — well, new to me anyway. In early August, I was over at a friend’s place and and watched “Serenity“. Yes, it was originally filmed in 2005. The acting was great and the concept of a colonized universe because the “Earth was used up” seemed appealing to me. Apparently my brother, David, tried to show me this movie back in 2006 after it came out on DVD, but I had no reason to watch it. Boy, was I mistaken. I come to find out that the movie was based on the 2002 TV show “Firefly.” I looked it up on Hulu the same weekend and gave the first and second episode a shot. Boy, it was good and I wondered why I never heard of it before — perhaps it was because it was stuck in the library studying my ass off at the time.

I watched almost the entire season in the first weekend and thought I’d better see how many seasons this show ran. I was saddened to find out that the series only ran for one season before being canceled by Fox. D’oh! I bought the Blu-Ray versions of both titles and watched them both at least twice over now. I think it just gets better each time really. As a side note, I found the character of Kaylee Fry (played by Jewel Staite) really sweet and loving. She’s the ships mechanic, who is sweet and “bubbly” and yet be very stern and straight with someone when she is upset. I think Jewel is hot, so that may have something to do with it as well The whole Firefly / Serenity series consumed about 2 weeks of the late night hours which is great – something to watch before I doze off to sleep for the night.

Somewhere in here, I bought a new home theater system. I thought, man, it might be time to get sound that is better than just the two speakers from my TV. I’m glad I made that choice since the “movie experience” in the house went from “OK” to “DAMN! I didn’t know that bullet went from the front left corner of the room to the rear right!” (Of course, you may have guessed the first thing that popped into the DVD player was The Matrix and the all mighty lobby shoot out scene

ANYWAY… After finding out that Firefly only aired for a season, i started looking at the Filmography of the principle characters and found a couple of other good shows as a result. Nathan Fillion (who played Captain Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds) was in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog (starring Neil Patrick Harris — yes, Doogie Howser); Adam Baldwin (who played Jayne) is in Chuck as John Casey (knew this one already since I already watch Chuck!); Summer Glau (the Terminator on the Sarah Connor Chronicles, duh!) and Jewel Staite who was casted as a recurring guest star in Season 4 of Stargate: Atlantis and promoted to a regular status in Season 5 as Dr. Jennifer Keller.

I watched Stargate: SG1 on and off for the last few years on SCI-FI and was familiar with the whole “Stargate” concept so I thought I’d give Stargate Atlantis a try — started with Season 5. I watched it and definitely loved the characters in the show as well as a continuation of what the SG:1 series had already established. But again, I was saddened to find out that the show did not get renewed for a sixth season. (Man, i thought, that’s two shows that I’ve watched and that’s two shows that I find out that has been canceled?!?). So if you know me, then you’ll also know that I really like Science Fiction — yes, even Star Trek; I’m sure there is a Trekkie side in you as well — so I went a head and bought seasons 4 and 5 of Stargate: Atlantis on DVD (there is no Blu-Ray version, unfortunately ). While I waited for those to arrive, I started watching the Pilot episode of Stargate Atlantis and for the next month I watched Seasons 1, 2, and 3 from, uh, shall we say, an “online, and out of country, source.” The video quality suffered a bit, but the story line was rather engaging. I then followed suite with Season 4, and re-watched Season 5 for continuity and clarification and got all of the inside-jokes in the screen play. Watching SG:A revived my love for Sci-Fi, I went a head and bought Seasons 1-3 as well.

Stargate: Atlantis (SG:A) is the second part of the Stargate series (preceded by Stargate:SG1). With the cancellation of the show, the SyFy network premiered Stargate: Universe (SG:U) to explore the 9th chevron of the Stargate (9th symbol address to “dial” between two stargate devices and establish a connecting wormhole). Some back history can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(device). It should be noted that much of the “Stargate” travel is heavily based on theoretical astrophysics, particularly that of black holes and wormholes — so not entirely “far fetched” considering that there are real people, today, that spend their lives doing theoretical astrophysics. But of course, “far fetched” is used broadly in this context Naturally i watched the pilot episodes and find it intriguing at this time. The only actor/actress that i know from that series is Ming-Na (who played Dr. Jing-Mei Chen on ER).

Oh yeah, so after watching the last season and episode of SG:A (for the second time!) i started to search for other shows that the main characters are a part of. First, there’s the obvious (because I told you above, unless you just skipped a few paragraphs) — Jewel Staite from Firefly who played as Dr. Jennifer Keller, Chief Medical Officer of the Atlantis base. David Hewlett (who plays as a self-described genius and astrophysicist Dr. Rodney McKay) wrote a British comedy themed movie called A Dog’s Breakfast — which starred himself, Kate Hewlett (real life and movie sister), Paul McGillion, and Rachel Luttrell – which i found quite odd and hilarious since some of those are the primary cast members and recurring guest stars on SG:A. I bought A Dog’s Breakfast just yesterday along with SG:A Seasons 1-3, so lets watch it at a movie night sometime in the near future.

There’s currently rumored to be a direct to DVD Stargate Atlantis movie, but the release date hasn’t been announced. I hope that one makes it through.

In closing:
If you’ve have made it this far, I applaud you.

When i started to write this several hours ago, I re-watched the Firefly episode “Out of Gas.” – If you don’t get into the whole Firefly series or the Serenity movie, do yourself a favor and at least give this episode a try. It shows a lot of the character development and the back history of the main characters that were on the ship. In my estimation, which may or may not be worth anything to you, it is definitely a “MUST SEE”

Thanks for sticking with it.
-T