Soul Searchings

Nothing overly significant to write home about in the last week, but I thought I’d write a post regardless.

As it turned out, we actually did go for KFC again the third straight day after I wrote my last entry… and this time it was actually Elaine who made the call. I quickly wolfed down some fries and a drumstick before rushing off to play tennis with Gary and Kent at Gladstone. With just the three of us, we played some 3-game mini-matches, with a tiebreak on the 3rd game. Last week, I was like 6-1, losing once to Kent. Today, we only managed to play maybe 4-5 mini-matches total before it got too dark to play, at about 9:15pm. I love the last couple weeks of June, where it’s bright enough to play until 10pm. As dusk comes earlier and earlier, the playtime gets shorter and shorter, since sometimes I can’t get to the court before 7:30pm. Fortunately, there’s the option to play at Burnaby Lake.

The three of us still felt like playing, so we packed up and went down to Burnaby Lake to continue. Even arriving at 10pm, there was just one court available out of the twelve under the lights. After playing a few more mini-matches, I think I finished at 5-1, losing once to Gary.

Elaine and I finally took a KFC break on Thursday… but made it four out of five on Friday. By the end of next week, I bet the workers will know us on a first name basis. At the very least, I’m trying to counter all this fried chicken goodness by eating healthy for lunch… so I’ve been getting takeout Japanese food from Fujiya the last four work days. I like their Unagi Don for $3.95. It tastes just about as good as it would from actual Japanese restaurants, but is like half the price. Sometimes I would get the Negitoro hand rolls for $3.50, the Spicy Tuna roll for $3.25 or the California roll for $2.95.

Saturday night, played a $10 buy-in poker game with the Gladstone guys at Jason’s place. The game went ridiculously fast… mostly due to the fact that during the first and second level of blinds, at least one person was holding a monster every single hand… most of the time that included Ken. He doubled up in the first few hands when he raised preflop with AQ and got called by Zach holding KT. When he went all in on a low ragged flop, Zach called with the two overcards plus a flush draw. I just ran it through the calculator, and Zach was actually the favorite to win, at about 55%. A few hands later, after some fairly large preflop raises, three saw the flop, which came Q-rag-rag. Ken pushed all in… and amazingly, both Ash and Ed’s GF called. Ken had QQ, Ash had KK, and Ed’s GF had AQ. Ken got lucky again and outflopped Ash. He likely would have been in huge trouble had he missed the flop. Whatever the case, he now had a HUGE chip lead. Ed had picked up a few sizeable pots as well, so I think the chip count was maybe something like T900 for Ken, T350 for Ed and me with T150 or something. I hadn’t even had a chance to win a pot yet. Not too long into the three way, I had AK and made a raise preflop, and Ed moved all in. Obviously I wasn’t going to fold, and went up against 55 for the coinflip. I didn’t improve - big surprise - and I was done. Heads up, Ed managed to outduel Ken to win $50, adding to his 50/50 draw win earlier in the night from Amy’s fundraiser of close to $200. Last year, Thi managed to do the same thing, coincidentally.

Since this first game finished so fast, we quickly played a second game for $5. Strangely, this game was much tighter than the previous one, and nobody got knocked out till at least the third level. There were a lot fewer monster hands, and I managed to get some decent cards this time. Had 44 one hand and managed to hit my set on the flop, and won the pot after a raise. The dealer showed the upcoming cards and it turns out I would have hit my quad on the river. I hung around in this game, and in the end, I won the heads up session against Zach. I won a couple coinflips to get me there, and the final hand where we went all in, he had A9 and I had him in bad shape with 99, which held up.

Sunday afternoon, played a tennis match against Ken, and I won in straight sets, something like 6-2, 6-4, 6-2. I think I have a better idea of what allows me to win most of the time. Skill-wise, I’m definitely not any better, but my main advantages are that my serve return is pretty good, and I can get to a lot of difficult shots and at least get them back over the net, yielding a chance for my opponent to screw up the next shot. I found out what my playing style is called now, and the description matches very well indeed - I’m a scrambler. Originally I thought I maybe had some elements of being a pusher… but the scrambler moniker definitely seems more fitting.

Yes, I admit it. There’s no denying it. I’m a bona fide junk food junkie. I get fast food - burgers, pizza, fried chicken - probably at least four times a week, sometimes for both lunch and dinner. While I’m fortunate to have the metabolism to not be fat, I’m sure it can’t be doing my arteries any good. I guess I’ve accepted the trade-off of living a few less years in return for eating the delicious but unquestionably unhealthy fare. At least fast food is my only real health vice, since I don’t smoke, drink, or do drugs.

These two weeks are not going to be especially bad for my arteries. From July 24th until August 8th, KFC has these buy-one-get-one-free combo coupons… and they’re just too good for me to resist. There is the option for two Twister combos for $6, two popcorn chicken combos for $6, or two four-piece meals for $8.50. Considering Elaine loves all of that stuff too, we just can’t pass it up! We’ve already had KFC the last two days… I think we need to take a break from it… at least for today anyway!

If you haven’t been to KFC in awhile, you might not know that they don’t have the extra crispy chicken anymore. The two options available now are original recipe (of course) and spicy recipe. Seems like spicy is the new trend nowadays, with Church’s having introduced it at least a year ago. Flavour wise, I still think KFC’s original recipe is the tastiest chicken I’ve ever eaten, and it remains my favourite.

It’s finger lickin’ good!

This past Saturday, I played in the Whistler Open Coed 6’s volleyball tournament.  I drove up with Elaine on Friday night in my Yaris. Man, it’s tough maintaining speed going up any hill! I have a new peeve… and that is people going really slow around curves and such, but right when the passing lane comes, they suddenly find their gas pedal and start going fast enough that I have a hard time passing them. It doesn’t help that most of the passing lanes are on the uphills. It was so annoying!

Anyways, got there around 10pm and just settled into our room at the Tantalus Lodge. Elaine and I shared a suite with Richard and Anna, while everyone else shared the upstairs suite. We went up with our four Nintendo DS’ and played some multi-player Metroid Pinball and hung out for a little while.

Woke up bright and early at 7:45am, quickly got ready and scarfed down an apple strudel before heading out to the field. Boy, did that ever prove to be a mistake! That strudel definitely did not go down well, and I was left with an upset stomach for the entire morning of play. Our team consisted of Roy as setter, myself and Blessie as the powers, Thi and Richard as the middles and Jacqueline as the offside. This lineup actually proved to work out pretty well, and we stayed with this configuration through the entire tournament. I think we played six round robin games, and we only lost one. We actually even beat our other team, with Chanh, Clara, Faye, Bryan, Tony and Ron. However, we got gypped and lost our first playoff game, even though we shouldn’t have. We were totally dominating the other team in the first set, and the score was 19-9 at one point. But then we started taking it too easy, and let the other team catch up to finish the set 21-16. We still played lackadaisically in the second set and somehow lost 21-13. We only managed to play to 1-1 in the third set when the whistle blew. Apparently, we were actually supposed to play out the third set to 11 to determine a winner, but somehow the other team convinced us that it was over and that the result will be based on the total current points. So since they beat us in the second set by more than we beat them in the first set, they advanced, while we were left playing for pride. It’s a shame, since we definitely should have made it to at the least the semifinals, where we would have either played Chanh’s team again, or faced off against the really stacked two-time defending champions. But alas, it was not to be.

We did finish off strong and win our final three games though, to end up with an overall record of about 8-2. After that, we watched the championship match between Chanh’s team and the stacked team. It was not pretty to watch, as Chanh’s team got demolished pretty badly. They may not even have made double digits in at least one set. But for finishing second, they still won a volleyball and t-shirts.

That night, we all went out for dinner at the Keg in the village. The walk there and back was a bit of a struggle. I was hurting pretty good. My calves had started to cramp up soon after lunch already, but strangely felt better later in the afternoon. I got a pretty bad sunburn as well, with my whole face very red except for the outline of my Oakley Minutes. Everything felt even worse the next morning. My face was painful to the touch, and my body was sore all over.

We checked out Sunday after 12:30pm and drove to have lunch at the KFC/Taco Bell in Squamish. It’s like a tradition to go there everytime we go to Whistler. I wish there was a Taco Bell closer to home! The closest one would be Metrotown, but I don’t think that location has the full menu available. I see that there are several locations in Surrey and Langley though. I would have to say I prefer them over Taco Time for both value and taste.

There is another tournament in August, the weekend after my birthday. I’m not sure whether I’m going up for that one yet or not, but every one of these volleyball trips are definitely a blast!

I had some trouble finding an online stream for the World Cup final. I couldn’t seem to get ESPN 360 to work. I think maybe it was because ESPN wasn’t broadcasting it. In the end, I found this program called TVUPlayer that has a bunch of preset channels, including ABC and ESPN. Fortunately, the World Cup final was available on ABC, so I was able to tune in just as Zidane scored the first goal on the penalty shot. The beginning proved to be pretty exciting, with Italy replying with their own score just minutes later. It looked like it was going to be a high scoring affair, but the game tightened up after that.

I had trouble staying awake for the entire duration. I was so sleepy from being up around 18 hours after only maybe 2 hours of sleep. I wasn’t too thrilled when the game went into extra time. Of course, everyone is talking about Zidane’s headbutt on Materazzi, which seemed to be fairly unprovoked. It looked like Materazzi fondled Zidane or pinched his nipple moments before. Don’t know what else there was to it that caused Zidane’s extreme reaction, but apparently Materazzi is a very dirty player, so it’s very possible that there was more to it than what the cameras picked up. After being red carded for that, the shot showing Zidane leaving the field with the World Cup trophy in the foreground seemed to be extremely fitting for the situation. Props to the cameraman who managed to capture that moment.

As everyone knows, the match went down to being decided on penalty shots. I think it’s a pretty terrible way to determine a winner on such an important event. Regardless, congratulations to Italy for winning the shootout to capture the cup.

I managed to get a few good hours of sleep after that, and now my schedule should be back to normal for this working week.

It didn’t take long for another mouse to show up in Elaine’s room. Guess there are more hiding than I thought. Going to have to get a bunch more glue traps today.

This weekend, it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much except for watching some sports and playing some online poker. Yesterday, Elaine went to have a… voluntary operation done. If you don’t know about it yet, you’ll probably know what it is she did the next time you see her. I’d like to put it on record that I was actually against her doing it, but in the end, it was her decision.

Her procedure was scheduled for about four hours starting from about noon. I needed to drive her there to the operating facility, but after that I had ample time to watch almost all of the World Cup consolation match where Germany defeated Portugal 3-1. Later on, after picking Elaine up, I basically had to take care of her the rest of the day as she was still partially disoriented and hurting a lot, to the point where she wasn’t able to do much of anything for herself. It’ll probably be like this for at least another few days.

My sleep schedule is all screwed up now. I had originally been thinking that I would sleep really early Saturday night and then wake up at 6am to watch the Wimbledon Gentlemen’s Singles finals, and then watch the World Cup finals at 11am. Things didn’t quite go as scheduled, as I only got a very short nap in the late afternoon, and then ended up staying up all night.

There is no cable here in Elaine’s room. I really should try to figure out how to get it hooked up, but I keep putting it off. I haven’t set up BeyondTV on my home PC again since fixing the system, so that wasn’t an option for me today.

I found out that Wimbledon actually has this pay service for live streaming of matches, and for a single day, it costs $2.95. I ended up ordering it just so that I could watch the match between Federer and Nadal. Going into this match, Federer was 55-0 this year against all other opponents, but 0-4 against Nadal. One might be led to think that Nadal is a better player than Federer because of this, but this is not really the case. Nadal has thus far mostly been a clay court specialist, and he is near unbeatable on that type of surface. On other surfaces though, he has been very beatable, and numerous random players have taken him out in those tournaments. The difference is Federer is very good on ALL surfaces and can beat any player on any surface - with the one exception being the combination of Nadal on a clay court.

Even though Nadal was seeded second at Wimbledon, most people did not believe he would make it very far into the tournament, but he proved everyone wrong just by making the finals. Federer has won the previous three Wimbledon tournaments, and was looking to make it four today. As expected on the grass court, Federer finally beat Nadal this year.

Federer utilized the slice backhand quite a bit today, and I realize now that I shouldn’t feel bad about doing the same. I always used to think my backhand slice was a lame shot, but now I see it can be a very effective and consistent shot, and there is nothing wrong with using it.

Now I’m waiting for the World Cup final between Italy and France to begin. I’ve got money riding on this game, and I actually don’t REALLY care who wins, because I’m going to come out on top either way! You see, I joined this Ladbrokes poker site because they have a very good and easy promotion for new players, and a couple of the perks was that I received one $18 free bet on sports for playing more than 50 hands in the first day, and then I got another $20 to wager with by placing 51st in a special freeroll. Actually, I didn’t really have to do much to earn that bet. That freeroll was for new players, and the 1st place winner gets a weeklong trip to Vegas plus $500 to wager on the World Cup. 2nd place through 76th receives $20 to wager. Only thing is, there were only a total of SIXTY entrants in that freeroll! That yielded a pretty damn good chance of winning the trip! Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to play for real, so I basically just gave away my chips. For the sports bets, I decided to play it safe, and used the $18 free bet to pick Italy to win, which would give a return of $30.96. With the other $20, I was able to be more creative with it, and $15 went towards France winning, which would give a return of $31.50. With the remaining $5, I made a bunch of small bets for stuff such as picking the correct score, who will get the first throw-in, etc. If France wins 3-0, my $0.50 bet would return a large $20.50.

It was pretty fun picking my bets… and doing it with free money made it all that much more enjoyable. Either way, I’m guaranteed some free money with zero risk.

Anyways, kickoff is about thirty minutes away. I hope I’ll be able to stream it online again via ESPN 360 as I did last week. You usually need to be in the US to watch the World Cup games on ESPN 360, but if you configure a US based proxy, you can bypass that restriction.

Oh yeah, somehow a family of mice found it’s way into Elaine’s home. There has been one running around Elaine’s room for the past few days now. I’ve seen it several times, but have never yet been able to capture it, even with glue traps placed in strategic locations. Just earlier, while I was typing this blog, the mouse finally got itself stuck on the glue trap underneath the computer desk and started making a high pitched squealing noise. We got rid of it now, and hopefully none of its siblings finds its way into the room, but I wouldn’t be suprised to hear another mouse rustling in the room in the near future. Apparently Elaine’s downstairs tenants have already caught ten of them.

So I replaced the motherboard for Elaine’s computer last night… and I couldn’t believe it. The new motherboard exhibited almost the exact same behaviour as the previous one did! I’ve built well over a dozen computers over the years and have repaired many more, and I’ve never seen a system where it would partially power on automatically and refuse to fully turn off. Even all the other troubleshooters over on Experts Exchange can’t seem to pinpoint what could be wrong. Maybe it’s just a major coincidence that I got another board that has the same problem? That’s just too strange.

Anyways, last night, played a doubles tennis match with Gary against Wing and Kent. We won three straight sets, 6-0, 7-5, 6-2. We were down 5-2 in the second set but fought back to win 5 straight games. I played some decent tennis, and although I rarely got any big first serves in, I was very consistent on my second serves. In my six serving games, I very literally only got maybe 5-6 double faults. My single backhand hasn’t been improving lately - in fact, I’ve gone back to using my slice for most of my backhands. My forehand is fine, and my volleying is pretty decent. There were some fun rallies last night, and it was quite an enjoyable evening of tennis.

Just watched the World Cup semi-final game between France and Portugal. The final minute of play was pretty exciting. That was the first time I had seen the opposing goalie come all the way up to the attacking box to try and help the team score. I’m sure it’s happened, but I hadn’t seen it before. =P

I correctly predicted Brazil would get knocked out in the quarterfinals, whereas everyone else except one other person in the office had them advancing to at least the semi-finals.

Here are a couple free kick goals that I found very remarkable…

Roberto Rivelino (find it in the list)
Just an amazing play. I love how he got his teammates to make another wall in front of the defense and have them dive out of the way just as he strikes the ball, perfectly passing through the just vacated hole created. Brilliant.

Roberto Carlos
Incredible reverse banana shot. It is damn hard to do a shot like that… and it was executed perfectly, and from so far out too. Awesome.

A couple weeks ago, our company had a picnic and we played a bit of soccer there at the park. Man, is soccer ever demanding on the body! You have to be in such great shape to be able to play it for any sustained length of time. After just a few minutes, I felt like I was dying. It was still great fun to play it for the first time since high school though.

I bet you’re thinking that’s an expletive, but actually it isn’t. I was referring to motherboards, which is one computer part I’m starting to get really annoyed with. In the past, I used to think that hard drives were the components that died most frequently in a computer, but now I’m starting to think otherwise. Three months ago, I wrote about how I needed to replace the motherboard on my own system. The symptoms that it exhibited for several months leading up to its death were that it would have trouble firing up on a cold start. It was as if you were trying to start a car that just wouldn’t quite turn over. Inititally, I thought it was a problem with the power supply. Switching to a brand new power supply didn’t help, but oddly enough, I tried another old power supply and it fired the system up just fine. I left it as is until finally, it wouldn’t turn on at all.

A month ago or so, my cousin’s computer had trouble turning on. When you push the power button, you can see the fans spin for a split second before stopping dead. Replacing the motherboard fixed everything.

Two days ago, I had to help a former client replace their motherboard. While I don’t do outside IT consulting anymore, since I bought that computer for them originally and because they didn’t have anyone else to turn to right now, I decided to help them out. In their case, the system would appear to power on, with all the fans spinning and the hard drive fired up, but nothing would show up on the screen. The computer wouldn’t post, nor give any error beeps. Replacing the motherboard fixed that right up too.

Coincidentally, also two days ago, Elaine’s motherboard bit the dust too. When I built her new computer four months ago, the motherboard already did have a problem. I had never seen this before, but right when the power supply has power, all the fans and hard drives would turn on. The system itself will still be off until you press the power button though. But since the computer actually did run perfectly fine, I didn’t bother diagnosing the problem at the time. But this weekend, I decided to clean out the dust in her computer… and upon plugging everything back in, it still did the partial power up automatically… but now I wasn’t able to turn the system on anymore with the power button. Even using a flathead screwdriver to bridge the two power pins didn’t work… which meant that the motherboard was clearly toast. I just bought a new motherboard and will be replacing this one tonight.

Some defective motherboards can be a result of bad capacitors, but this is just one of many possible causes. Visually, none of the four defective motherboards I now have sitting in my room have shown clear signs of having bad capacitors… but the fact remains, in each and every one of these four computers, the motherboard has been the problem part, even though each system exhibited completely different behaviours.

I tried being quite thorough when diagnosing the problem, trying different power supplies and even CPU’s just to make sure those weren’t the cause of the problems.

I guess it could be worse though. It isn’t TOO difficult to install a replacement motherboard. If it’s the same model, then you don’t have to do anything at all… WinXP should fire up as if nothing had changed, since it already has all the right drivers installed. If you’re installing a different model motherboard, then there is some post-installation labour necessary. Usually, you will need to do a repair installation of WinXP. Fortunately, doing a repair installation means that you won’t lose any of your programs and settings. All you have to do after the repair installation is to download all the Windows patches again, and pretty much everything should be back to the pre-swap state. If you have a legit copy of WinXP, you will probably have to re-activate it, which means you will probably have to call up their support number and tell them how you needed to replace your motherboard. They will then give you a long key to manually activate it. If you have a "borrowed" copy of WinXP, Microsoft has made it a hell of a lot harder to download all the Windows updates… but with a few hacks, it’s still possible.

That’s my rant about motherboards.

Today, we had a really stupid problem here at the office. Our main wireless connection would keep dying. It would be fine for a minute, but then it would suddenly disconnect all the users. After another minute, it will be fine, and people will connect again… only to have it die again a minute later. I had the hardest time trying to figure out what the hell was causing this. Of course, I thought that maybe it was the router… so I switched to another router. Nope, same problem. In the end, I switched the wireless SSID to something else, and it has been working perfectly fine with the five users currently connected to it. So it appears that there is SOME laptop here at the office that is killing the wireless router everytime it tries to connect to it. I’ve never seen this before, and I don’t know how it’s doing it. Problem is there isn’t any good way of figuring out which system is the culprit. Over time, more people will request to get access to the new wireless SSID, so if the machine is still causing a problem, I should be able to determine which one it is. Man, was this ever annoying to diagnose!