License Plate

Guess who doesn’t like Google? The car owner below.

Yahoo Google License Plate

When I saw the plate this morning, I couldn’t believe CA DMV let him have the plate to begin with. Isn’t there someone who reads the personalized plate request before granting the request? Not that I can actually picture skinny computer software engineers getting into a street brawl but still. [Because I barely know how to use photoshop elements, this is the best I could do to enhance the picture from a cell phone camera pic. The plate frame reads Do You (top) Yahoo? (bottom).]

Testing

To see if post by e-mail works. I have nothing new to post, except that I just ate a PB&J sandwich for lunch.

Novel Trivia

Another one for the ‘SC folks.

Blimp Ride

After two cancellations, I got to ride the blimp this Thursday.  Since it was kind of windy, I was counting on another cancellation but the blimp was in the air so my father and I headed down to Carson, CA.

Ground crew - wind socket to aid pilot during descent

Blimp + Ground Crew - Landing

Ground Crew in action

Holding down the blimp

Ballast taken off the blimp

The pilot happened to notice that a guy who was also in our time slot was wearing flip-flops and closed toe shoes are a must to get inside the blimp.  The man and his wife hustled out of the area to buy him a new pair of shoes.

Last Minute Shoes

We headed down to Long Beach and my father was shocked to see all the empty slots at both Long Beach and LA ports.

Long Beach Port - No Ships

We hovered over the area for quite a bit since the wind made it seem like we weren’t moving.  The pilot said we were moving at ground speed of about 12 miles per hour.

Unsold Toyotas

Oil Refinery

Sulfur - byproduct of oil refinery

Everyone in the Blimp

The pilot was intensely focused during the landing.  She was turning the wheel (which looks a lot like the wheel you see in an old-fashioned ship) and pulling the valves to release air and/or helium like nobody’s business for about 2-3 minutes.  Then, the ground crew grabbed the blimp and we stepped out.

Final shot of the blimp

The End!  (Goodyear claims that the rides are not open to the public but I think if one works in the immediate area and becomes friends with the ground crew, you can try to ride the blimp if people don’t show up.  We were scheduled for 5:00PM and I noticed in the release form that in the 4:ooPM slot, only 2 people rode.)

Don’t Buy This

I bought this pseudo potato chip @ Costco because I thought it was similar to Baked Lay’s.  It wasn’t.  The freeze-dried stuff is really disgusting and it tasted just like raw potatoes, nothing like a potato chip. The individual bags don’t have that many chips but after eating 1 crisp/chip, I threw the rest away.  Luckily, I got the full refund.

Spending $$$

After I did my taxes and saw the refund number pop up instead of payment number this year, I went on a mini on-line spending spree.   I bought purses (3 to get free s/h) and bought a ticket to see the World Figure Skating  Championship.  Men’s figure skating is apparently not that popular as the final was scheduled on a weeknight and the tickets were heavily discounted to the point that the whole trip (event ticket + metro day pass) cost less than $20. (And it was nice that there were plenty of empty seats as I did not have to deal with arm rest hogs.)

Cameras with telephoto lens were not allowed so the camera function on my phone was perfect for the event. (I don’t have a camera so it’s a moot point but I saw plenty of folks in the audience with their big-ass SLR cameras/lenses and people using the video function on their cameras so maybe the whole camera policy can be ignored.)

ice rink before the free skate

Yup, I was in the nose-bleed section but since it was my first time inside the Staples Center, I didn’t really care.  Incidentally, I sat next to a figure skating fanatic on the bus ride home and she could not stop complaining about the fact that she spent $1000 on her tickets and the person next to her got her ticket for free.  So if you’re working in the downtown LA area, there are free skating event tickets to be had @ Starbucks near the Staples Center/convention center.

And as an early birthday gift (to beat the sales tax hike), I received a mountain bike last weekend.  I haven’t been on a bike in over 10 years and I am not altogether that confident that I won’t be hit by a car but it’s been fun riding my bike around during the daytime.  I have no stamina when it comes to cycling so the rides have been relatively short & I’m learning to shift gears, which is a first for me.  I commented to my dad that I tried shifting gears to slow down the bike when going downhill and that the speed never changed.   He laughed and said do I see a transmission on the bike?  I never said I was a mechanical engineer.

Go Shopping

If you’re in CA, sales tax goes up in less than 2 weeks so buy your taxable goods before April.   I’ve been doing my part by buying a ton of paper goods (paper plates, cups, towels, TP) and think the economists are misinterpreting the uptick in retail sales data since I won’t be buying taxable items for a while.

African Trivia

Another one for the ‘SC folks.  And if you couldn’t tell, I wasn’t too sure about #6.

Good Boyfriend

Here’s a picture of a good boyfriend.

Purses can get heavy so help out your significant other and carry their purses.

Dental Hygiene

Just want to give a quick reminder to everyone that is is very important to floss daily.  Not to toot my own horn but since I floss daily, I thought all adults over the age of 21 floss daily.  So imagine my surprise when my sister declared that it’s been a long time since she flossed and my father’s dental emergencies emerged recently.  I’ve been going to the dentist with my father the last couple of weeks because he had an abcessed tooth along with cavities under an old filling.  His abcess was under an old root canal and he had to have the tooth extracted*.  He didn’t realize the tooth had cracked and the abcess was there long enough to cause the jaw bone to degrade to the point that dental implant would probably not be an option for him.  So take a lesson from my father’s travails: go to a (good) dentist regularly and maintain good dental hygiene so that even if you need dental implants, you can at least have enough jaw bone to get implants.

* My father was adamant that he did not want to have his abcessed tooth extracted and claimed that after the initial diagnosis, his gums no longer bled, pain was gone and that the dentist wasn’t 100% sure it was an abcess to begin with.   I was insistent that he get his tooth extracted, which might have been influenced by my recent viewing of Ghost Town. Obviously, it was all psychosomatic since after getting a second opinion and the extraction, the true damage done by the abcess was greater than initially thought.