BlaringSmelly

Sean handed me a small plastic ball, wished me happy birthday, then told me he got it for 2 euros at the airport vending machine while he was in Europe. I had a hard time getting it open. The mystery ball of thing seated on my desk for couple days until Narisa helped me cracked it open. Out came a cute bear.

When you squeeze it, the bear’s eye balls popped out of its eye sockets just like that. Now how cute is that? This squeeze me bear is easily one of the best birthday presents I’ve received.

Once a while, some random encounters give me new perspectives on how far alone technology has advanced. I stumbled into MyHeritage.com and had some fun playing with its face recognition tool.

First, upload your photos for scanning. In less than 30 seconds, detected human faces are highlighted from uploaded photos. They are cropped and ready for further analysis.

There are couple things you can do with your photos on My Heritage:

Look-alike Meter

Ever wonder if you are a mama’s boy or daddy’s little girl? Look-alike Meter tells it all. I’ve got both mom and dad’s facial features, but a little something more from mama.

Celebrity Look-alike

It generates a list of celebrities you might or might not agree that look like you. At best it’s cheap entertainment and ego boost. I uploaded 2 photos and one came out I’m 80% Jada Smith look-alike. The other one I was more Caucasian than Asian. I like how the process of matching for resemblance goes beyond ethnic boundaries.

Unlike my other bike, this one I need to pedal to get it going.

I haven’t owned a bicycle for at least a decade. Cycling or outdoor activities of any sort were never on my top to-do list. Fortunately I’m getting into the habits of exercising just in time as I’m getting into my 30s. I tried everything from aerobic classes, yoga, swimming, weight lifting, jogging, rock climbing, martial arts… Some I enjoyed more than others. But I never considered giving cycling a chance. Until early this year during my visit home, I had great memories and bonding experience with my mom over riding bicycles around the neighborhood and to the morning market. Plus Seattle has some great biking trails, it would be a waste not to give it a shot.

Paul recommended Gregg’s Cycles. We discovered their Bellevue location on Friday as we were on our way to watch Transformer (hot dang that movie was awesome!) Parking is always a challenge at their Green Lake store. So we went to the Bellevue one.

I want a bike I can ride comfortably on the streets or park paths. But I don’t want the kind with flowery basket and cushiony seat for my butt. Because of my size, there weren’t many bike choices. Actually there was only 1 Gary Fisher 15.5” Utopia that seemed to be a good fit. I took the bike out for a quick ride and that settled it.

The bike, plus helmet, lock, and couple accessories, I came out of the store $950 poorer. That went well over my budget by 2 folds. These day bicycles have so many belts and whistles you actually need a manual to learn to ride it. This is one expensive hobby to get into. I better enjoy cycling.

Working for a company with the word “fish” in its name, I have the reason and motive to get my own office pet fish. Recently exploring at a local Petco store, I was completely sold when I spotted this futuristic aquarium. Next thing you know, I picked up a female Betta to go with it.

The little Betta was quite an adventurer, swimming constantly between planets, space rocks, and UFO. I gotta say this is one of my best impulsive buys in recent years.

Geoff forwarded me this awesome footage from MotoCzysz’s ’07 C1 990 track tests in Las Vegas. Totally brighten my day.

http://www.motoczysz.com/videos/vegas_circuit2.html

To learn more about MotoCzysz and its C1 990 07, check out http://www.motoczysz.com/main.php?area=07C1

For years, Rio Cali MP3 player has been my faithful work out companion. It was top of the line mp3 device when I bought it. Regardless of smaller memory storage, Rio was overall a better choice over iPod or any other mp3 players. The device was compact, slick, and more importantly, sturdy looking. It also came with armband and sport clip earphones.

Really, Rio was perfect for me. It is proven to build for tough plays. I used it several times a week, indoor or outdoor. It hardly gave me any problem. The armband still got a tight grip after all these years. Rio’s music managing software was a little tricky. After a while I gave up fooling around with its playlist and just dumped 128 MB worth of music in the player. That summed up nearly 2 hours of music play, plenty to keep me distracted during 1 work out session.

Over years of tough love, Rio was finally showing its age. The metal clip connecting the armband and player started to rust. Couple times the player quit playing for no reason. That’s when I started looking for a placement.

Just happen that I received an iPod Shuffle for my birthday. The little guy packed in a whopping 1GB of music, it comes as a clip, and look, no metal! After trying out for over a month, shuffle has really growing on me. So today I finally took Rio out of my gym bag for good.

Bye bye Rio, hello shuffle.

Yeah there’s a part 2 in the adventure of “make Janet’s bike run again”. This time I dragged Mike into this because…I need a ride to Geoff’s hideout in Maple Valley.

Geoff managed to get the bike started earlier. But the engine spud like an old lady. Geoff decided to take the engine apart to give a good clean up.

Mike and I can’t help much, so we did our best to ‘blend in’. We circled Geoff with 2 white plastic picnic chairs; a can of beer / soda in our hand; cranked up that 80’s Rocks radio station; and just chilled in Geoff’s garage. Our redneck impersonation reached its climax when 2 monster trucks drove by; both equiped with huge Confederate flags flying on the sides. Ha!

Geoff suspected the carburetor is causing the engine to spud. Surely he was right about that. The bike sounded much better after he cleaned and reassembled the parts back. Geoff was eager to test the bike, and also I think he was a little crazy. He jumped on the seatless bike ( basically he was seating on battery) and took off in top speed. Before any of us can make a clever remark, he was back from the end of the road and made a sharp stop in front of us.

Looked like we are good to go! Geoff’s wife joined us in the garage as Mike and I were getting ready to leave. I want to give the bike a good warm up so I casually started the engine. Big mistake, I forgot to check if the bike was in neutral. And just so Geoff happened to leave the gear in first after he did that amazing stun. The bike shot out and landed sideway on me. It happened so fast all of us were frozen for few seconds. Then Mike leaped out and quickly pick up the bike on me.

Amazingly there was no visible damage on the bike. And all I got was a bruised up middle finger. However we made a pretty good dent on the shell of Geoff’s $400 server just happened to be next to us.

Before we headed out to the open road, Geoff gave some advices just like a good doctor after a major surgery. Apparently Geoff added couple gallons of high performance gasoline in my tank that I should run the fuel out as fast as I can. This fuel costs $12/gallon and is meant for race bike in a race. Mike was scratching head and couldn’t understand why Geoff would put so much of that good stuff in my bike. Frankly my bike ran just the same…it’s pretty much a waste of fancy fuel.

The picture was taken 3 days after the accident. You can still see my injured middle finger in a darker shade than my other fingers. Pretty neat eh?

I knew I was long overdue with bike oil change and some maintenance checkups, but I kept slacking on it. Finally my poor bike had enough of abuses and negligent from me. Last time I wanted to play with it, it wouldn’t start.

Geoff came to the rescue. He is my bike-go-to guy! His garage has a nice setup of tools and equipments for general bike maintenance. It is somewhat of a necessity for Geoff since he owns about half dozen of motorcycles.

The motorcycle was loaded to his truck. We stop by a Harley store to pick up a new oil filter for the bike and a Harley shirt for myself :D. Oil filter was surprisingly cheap. It gets me all excited. Once I learn to do my own oil change, it’s going to be so easy and inexpensive to keep my bike happy.

I wish I had taken pictures of me being a grease monkey. It’s such a sense of accomplishment getting my hands dirty and doing it myself as Geoff talk me through step by step.

Turned out the oil level was quite low to start with, the battery was rather weak, and the spark plug needed a replacement… We stop at local auto shop to pick up a new spark plug. The store didn’t carry the one we need. The closest Harley store takes more than 30 minutes to get to. We wouldn’t be able to make it there before closing time.

At this point we had to stop. Geoff was generous enough to keep my bike in his garage and gave me a ride home. I was disappointed not being able to get it done today. Still I am excited I get to learn basic mechanical aspects of motorcycle. That is part of the motorcycle ownership experience.

Beautiful morning, I had to squeeze in a quick ride out before the day begins.

What a great ride to Golden Garden Beach. It was sunny and breezy, not too many cars on the road. I briefly stop at the beach, took some pictures. Then head back to meet friends for our Dim Sum lunch.

The redneck in Paul had him all worked up on finding a shooting range in or around Seattle. He managed to find one in Bellevue so we went on to check it out last Saturday.

At the shooting range, I noticed an interesting mixture of gun nuts and tourist type Asians. I shouldn’t be too surprised as in several Asian countries, civilians are banned from possessing firearms.

Paul picked a Glock 17 to start with. He did fine on his first try, then it was my turn.

Wholly shit, the recoil had me look like a fool! I am no body builder but I ain’t the “oh protect me I am so weak” type of girl either. But the 9mm appeared to be a bit more than I can handle. After we finished shooting all the ammo, we switched to a .22. Guess what? I can finally shoot things. During one round I hit the bull’s eye not once, but 4 times.

There was a group of Chinese occupying one lane. Judging from their accents, I believe they are from China. They were pretty loud the whole time, and the one girl in the group was significantly louder than the others. During the shooting practice, we wore ear plugs to protect our ears from the loud gun fires. But I can still hear her as if she were inches from me. And because she wasn’t doing any shooting herself, her laughs were nonstop and really obnoxious the whole time.

Play the video above, you can hear her and her fellow friends in the background.