PHIDONG.COM . 5.0

Could this really be the best fifty dollars I've ever spent? I think so.

I ordered the Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 keyboard last week and it arrived while I was in the midst of midterms. This is truly a different experinece. They say keyboards are like mattresses. You never know yours sucks until you've tried one that is better. This is better, a lot better.

Review, well.. my more in depth thoughts, coming soon. I want to try it for a couple more days before I reserve a final judgement. So far though, it's fantastic. Very comfortable and quiet.

And just to make things clear, I was moving from a wireless Logitech to my wired Ergo4000.. not some cheapo Dell Quietkey.

out with the old in with the new

Continue for a picture of my new keyboard w/ the rest of my desk.

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After three and a half years of Sprint, you'd imagine my joy when it was finally time to move on. I dropped by my cousin's aunt's store today before class and she hooked me up. Straight up switch, free phone. If you want to check out her store, it's called PCS WIRELESS, 14152 Brookhurst.

Those who know me understand how difficult it is to get a hold of me. I actually get reception in my room now. and on campus. And when I'm outside.. and.. and..

The options were between the RAZR and this phone. There were a couple others too, but I decided to go with this one since it has more features than the RAZR, although the RAZR would've been pretty sweet, I admit. She had a white one of this and it was cool but when she told me this one was black and showed it to me I was sold (the razr was the original one).

Anyway, I'm going to do some homework, so here are pictures of my new phone.

Call me! My number is (714)809-4954! I'll be waiting!

p.s. It says Cingular, but I'm actually on the T-Mobile network.

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For the first four days of the week, I have a class that begins past 5. This is good news for me because I can park in AR. Theres a small lot next to the lecture halls where my classes are. The lot is small but big enough to accomodate everyone that uses it. It's just two rows of parking of which one side is monitored 24 hours. The other side though is my gold mine, a row where I can park after 4. Seventy five percent of the time I come, theres a spot and today after waiting just a couple minutes a spot opened up. The guy backed out of the spot and began to drive away just as two ladies walked to their Mereces C230 next to my newly opened spot.

I let them cross the parking lot out of consideration to the fatter lady which was carrying a large crate and barrel box. My windows were down and I could hear them chatting away. It didn't matter to me, I just wanted to park and get to Gateway so I could do some homework. The fat lady put the box on the car and stood a foot and a half away from it. Right in my parking space. I looked on, hoping they would notice me. No, they had noticed me. We made eye contact as they crossed the lot. They saw my signal, they saw me waiting, they knew I wanted to get into the spot.

She swung the rear door of the sedan open. At this point, I had inched forward a little to see if I could fit into the spot even with her standing there. It couldn't be done. The humble lot consists of no more than 80 parking spaces, all made compact to efficiently use the land. I slouched back and rolled my eyes as she realized the box wouldn't fit into the back door. She said, "We're going to have to put this into the trunk" to the driver and the driver, a lady who I didn't pay much attention to, acknowledged.

As she moved the box to the trunk, she left the door wide open. The length of the door was enough to take about 1/2 of the parking space up and there was definitely no way I'd be getting in. This whole ordeal took about two minutes. For two minutes, I sat there, no more than 3 feet away from them waiting. Finally, the fatter lady closed the trunk and made way to her car. On the way, she closed the door that had been preventing me from pulling into the parking space. She stepped over and put her hand on the passenger door.

I began to pull in a little when I heard a voice through my open windows. It was the driver. "Can you please wait until she gets into the car?" she said to me with an attitude laced in between every word. I rolled my eyes and said, "I'm waiting. What do you want me to do? " I pulled in and turned my head, staring into their car after the fat one got in and situated herself. They didn't look back.

Inconsiderate people make me sick.

To help with the understanding of this post, I made a little MS Paint diagram of the situation. Now, time to do my hw.

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I got my camera back today. So I guess nobody gets to babysit my lenses! After less than a week, Canon, Irvine had it all ready to go. They didn't call, as usual, but I already developed the habit of checking their Online Repair Tracking everyday to see if my camera and battery grip were done being repaired. To my delight, when I checked it this morning both service tags returned a completed status.

It was 3:30 when I discovered this. Unfortunately for me, I have class at 3:30, but regardless of this, I made my way to the repair center before they closed (4:30) and ended up being late for class. It seems I've been doing a lot of that lately, missing class. A couple weeks ago I said that this would be a long quarter, but it seems like it's going by pretty fast. Or so it seems!

Even with all of the work I'm doing in school, I manged to finally getting around to finishing up my business card. This time, it's serious. I'm going to get them printed. I really will! This is probably the 4th or 5th time I've finished a business card. I've only actually printed them once and they came out bad (it was a vistaprint thing, w/ no logo on the back for 12 shipped). I call them my throwaway cards because, well.. when I give my throwaway cards to someone, I'm throwing them away. I don't expect to receive a return or anything.

You'll get a throw-away, but potential customers will get this:

The front is spot-uv with the logo and border being glossy. The blue portions are matte and the back is matte, with the contact information on the right side and the logo faded so the open space can be used to jot down notes to potential customers.

Why? why now? Why not? I think it's about time to start actively persuing more events to cover. Plus I want to build my new computer.

Speaking of computers, my printer and cd's came in today. I ordered an Epson R200 from Newegg and some printable DVDs and CD-Rs from Rima (the R200 prints on cds!) Unfortunately for me, I ended up buying the wrong kind of DVDs. Not only that, but I opened one of the packages so now I can't return it. I got thermal instead of inkjet, so now I'm stuck with 100 DVD-Rs that I can't even print on! If anybody wants to remedy this problem by taking these off my hands for $34, I'd be happy to sell them.

My new baby.

A test run. I didn't realize the white went all the way over the ring!

I have to admit, printing on CDs is pretty cool. It doesn't look like a pressed cd, but the quality is fairly good and it looks a lot better than the sticky kind that you print on and stamp onto your CD. It'll definitely last longer too since it isn't going to peel off while spinning in your CD-ROM drive.

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Ugh. Theres so much to do and I keep putting it off. I guess I need to get busy tomorrow.

Get new glasses/contacts . I need a new prescription to say the least. The world is out of focus to me right now and it kind of gives me a headache.

Get a new cellphone . Man. My cellphone sucks. Sprint sucks. I keep cutting out. I would've signed another contract a couple months ago, but Sprint decided that they wouldn't offer me a rebate on a new phone even though I've been signed up with them for over 2 and a half years now. Time to switch.

Do my homework / Study . This one is a killer. I've been putting this crap off, kind of. I have been doing work for one class, E8. I've been reading A Civil Action and to my surprise, I'm almost done even though I didn't think it'd be possible. So that's good news. The bad news is I still have a HW assignment from last week to do, a lot of reading, my Mechanics of Materials homework, Fluid, and a Lab that is due on Wednesday.

Wash my car . It is really filthy, but this is low on my priority list for several reasons. Schoolwork is a lot more important and vision is as well.

That's all I think. I guess it doesn't seem like so much anymore, until I pull out my books for the first time tomorrow and realize I'm in a mini hole. I can't wait to get my camera back so I can take some pictures

My babies have no home anymore. Does anyone want to babysit them?

Hopefully it'll get done by the end of this week.

p.s. And yes, all the SHITma lenses are to the Canon lenses.

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After an entire year, I'm back pretty much where I started. The only reassuring thing I can tell myself is, "Only two more years of this and we're done. Two more years." This quarter is going to be hard and I'm not helping myself much by making it harder. I hate my schedule.

UCI decided it was best to cancel another one of my classes. This is the second time it has happened. The first time they canceled my Friday lab, which was annoying because I had my schedule set-up so that I only had to wake up early once. Then they decided it'd be hilarious to cancel my discussion on Friday morning too, so now my schedule is drastically different. I go to school at 10AM twice a week, but luckily for me one of the 10AM classes is a lab that only meets 4 times this quarter. I've already knocked one down, although I showed up 15 minutes late because I couldn't find the classroom inside the lab. But it's over and the only thing left for that is to do the report, which should be fun since it all has to be done on the computer.

The other class I have to wake up for is my Discussion on Monday mornings. I quite possibly picked the WORSE time to schedule a class, early Monday morning. 10AM isn't that early though, I guess I can thank my year of 8AM Physics for thinking 10AM isn't that bad (although with my sleep schedule the way it is now, I can't see it could be good...)

Some people are telling me that this is one of the hardest quarters as a Civil Engineer. The good news is that I'm not a Civil Engineering major. The bad news is that I'm taking many of the same courses, although they have it a little worse. They have to take Fluid Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials, and some Traffic class. I only have to take the first two, but only is an understatement because these aren't easy cheesy and our professors are not very strong lecturers.

Fluid Mechanics . As if the topic were not hard enough, our professor is asian with a pretty strong accent. It's understandble though, when he speaks loud enough for you to hear it and process it. The other 99% of the time he is just mumbling words to himself as he rewrites the textbook onto the white board. His overuse of phrases such as, "so simple", "very easy", etc. aren't too encouraging either, considering I have no idea how to even do the first problem on his homework set. Today I narrowly missed a quiz that I didn't prepare for when one of the girls in the class nervously said, "tails". The professor flipped a coin and caught it in his other hand, looked down and said "tails". The entire class begain cheering and applauding and by entire I mean everybody but me and some people around me. So we didn't have a quiz, but we're going to have one next week. You can count on that.

Mechanics of Materials . The fact that this class draws heavily on two courses which I barely passed doesn't really favor me. Not only does this mean that once the course began that I was already behind the rest of the students, but it means that this material, which is gauranteed to be more complex, complicated, and more involved than the courses which I "passed" (I got a D), is just going to be harder than before. To make matters worse, the professor of the course hasn't gone over a single problem yet. I sat through 20 minutes of his lecture on Monday thinking to myself, "When is he going to start lecturing??" At that point he was just talking about stress and tension and how they are related or something like that. After another 30 minutes of him talking informally to the class, I realized that this was his lecture. This was how he taught. After this epiphany, I also came to the conclusion that I'm going to need a LOT of help in this class. If I want to pass, that is.

E8 and ESS51 aren't going bad though, which is good news. ESS51 seems a bit more difficult than E8, but I haven't gone to enough class to give a fair evaluation of the course. I did get my book in on Tuesday, so I have two chapters to catch up on for E8 as well as 2-3 chapers for CEE150 and CEE170. E8 is really the only class I've read for. The book is somewhat intriguing, although I will admit that on the 250th page I lost patience and read the ending of the book. To be fair to me, the professor had already told us how the case ended, but I decided that I needed to see it for myself. Our mock trials are next month, which gives me plenty of time to prepare my bullshit brief. The bad news is that my group is and I have to do opening/closing even though I wanted to do geology. Oh well. They were like, "Who wants to do it " nobody was saying anything and someone had to man up, so I did. This will probably turn out to be one of the worst decisions I have made in my entire life.

A year ago, around this time, I was standing outside of Starbucks on the phone. Photovillage. Richard? picked up the phone and I gave him my credit card number and two days later (yes, I ordered 2nd day shipping) a 20D was sitting on my doorstep. This means two things:

1) I've notched another year on my photography experience and trust me, this year has taught me many things.

and 2) My warranty is about to expire.

So I'm going to bring my battery grip, which hasn't been fully fixed and my camera into the Service Center tomorrow and see if they can calibrate, adjust, etc. everything and make it all good again. I was hoping the shutter would go before my warranty is up, but I guess not.

In other news, the 50mm f/1.4 that I bought from FM came in again. Yeah, I got another one. I'm slowly buying all my lenses back because I miss them so much. Just kidding. So my lens line-up is now: Sigma 15mm f/2.8, Sigma 20mm f/1.8, Canon 50mm f/1.4, Canon 85mm f/1.8, Canon 135mm f/2L, Sigma 100-300mm f/4. A bunch of Canons sammiched together by Sigmas. I kind of miss my Tamron though and my only zoom feels lonely. Maybe I'll buy it back.

And yeah, I am becoming a Canon whore.

I'm going to get my 135L box from Loc soon!

Oh yeah and I guess I'm going to start shooting for the Yearbook when I get my camera back. I guess I'm retiring from camera collecting and actually picking up shooting. It should be interesting to see if I can improve at all. I guess this is a step forward.

I wonder what the 3 steps back are going to be...

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It's about that time again. I'm beginning to lose my mind. I feel so behind alread and it's only the 2nd week of school. I'm probably going to start studying soon and.. uh, doing homework. The last thing I want to do is fall back onto AP right after getting off of it. Gotta keep everything together or I'll fall apart!

Hopefully this will help:

I ordered some gaffer's tape from filmtools.

Orange tape leads to Bengal Tiger 20D #3.

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