Growing old sucks >.<

Ugh... so I'm 29 now, and the last few weeks have completely sucked.

After my 1st big ride of the year, it took me most of the day before I got my core temperature back up to normal. That wasn't a big deal, but with California's stupid hot, then cold, then hot, then raining, then cold, then hot, then... erm... pollen weather, I came down with a bad case of the flu later that week.

That took forever to recover from. Medicine didn't do much good, even the stronger behind the counter stuff. I sit through one midterm sniffling and feeling miserable, only to find that my whole class sounds just as bad as I feel. I guess someone infected the whole class the previous week.

Just about when I'm feeling better, pollen season starts up. I've never had allergies when I was younger, but only in the last 3 years have they started up. Last year wasn't too bad, and I only actually felt bad enough to take Clariten on a few days, but this year, I can't even get out of bed without sneezing my head off!

And now, I'm not sure how, but I somehow managed to strain my neck muscles. Might have been from moving a new couch into the house, or it might be a bad sitting position at work last week. For all of this week, I haven't been able to move my neck much... turning from side to side causes pains in my shoulders and neck. Sleeping was a challenge as I'd wake up in the middle of the night suddenly realizing that I can't move my neck at all from the pain, and waking up in the morning involves physically lifting my head with my hands until I loosen up again. I'm starting to get better now with a regular routine of stretching after hot showers...

Wonder what's coming next week...

Flog - Wednesday April 18, 2007

8am - Tea + sugar

10am - Latte with caramel sugar-free flavoring

Lunch - BBQ Pulled pork sandwich with potato salad + potato gratin

Dinner - Weird Chinese marinated pork dish with strange tofu noodles + steamed cabbage

Stomach felt sink in the morning, probably from the weird chicken from last night :(

Flog - Monday April 16, 2007

Food Log! At Moobob42's suggestion, I'm going to log my food for the next week.

Morning

8am - 1 cup tea, includes 2 teaspoons sugar

10am - 1 cup latte (1% milk) including 2 squirts of sugar-free french vanilla flavor, 1 shot of espresso

Lunch: - Italian Style Roast Beef, Tomato & Herb Rice Pilaf, Garlicky Green Beans, Tuscan Salad. (Green beans weren't fully cooked and not fully eaten)

1pm - 1 can Diet Pepsi

Dinner: - Weird chinese food, 1/2 bowl of rice, pork & tofu skin, boiled cauliflower

Nice little applet from NYT showing you when buying a house will start to pay off better compared to renting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/2007_BU...

What I like about it is that it lets you play with the rate of return on investments and takes into account things like your income tax rate, inflation, home price appreciation, etc. It basically does what I originally wanted to do in Excel, and does a better job illustrating it :)

Personally, according to this applet, based on what I pay for rent, there is no way that buying a house would be better in any number of years :) I'm better off putting my money into a savings account and letting it appreciate.

Oh yeah, and hi to the only people reading this blog and bugging me to update it :P

(Ooo... I love this article... seems like this country loves to reward stupidity. So what if you screwed yourself over by not reading the fine print or making a budget. The government will bail you out! http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/13/real_estate/subpri...)

Cingular blows!

Yup, then again, everyone knows it, even the BetterBusinessBureau as they've been kicked out of it!

So I've been struggling with this issue with my cell phone since they "upgraded" their voicemail network two weeks ago. Besides voicemail notification issues that wouldn't go away, they totally broke the GPRS internet connection on my phone. Customer service is, of course, totally unhelpful. The first bloke claimed that it was a "nationwide outage" and that it should be fixed by the following week...

Which didn't happen, of course... the next idiot claimed that it was an outage in their WAP Proxy server... which seemed plausable except that it was hanging my phone just trying to open Internet Explorer!

Then, today, after my 3rd call, the nice friendly and extremely apologetic customer service rep says that it's a problem with my phone... and... oh look! How convenient. Your phone is two weeks our of warrenty! Would you like me to bill your account for $200 and send you a new refurbished phone? Erm... excuse me? If you knew about this two weeks ago, why not do it then?

bah, idiots... In the end, a simple search and firmware reinstallation fixed the issue. The timing all seems too convenient. I mean, that's an excellent business model! Wait for your customer's warrenty to expire, send a signal over the waves to conveniently break functionality, then offer your customer the opportunity to spend more money!

Seriously!

Here's the plane and our captain on the right!

And... that's it for photos! 

Wide angel shot of the Golden Gate Bridge... See all those little white dots on the water? They are all little sailboats! 

Golden Gate Park and the surrounding area... That's our right wing right there in the photo! 

Another shot of Half Moon Bay airport taken with my camera... You can really see the whole airport and the clouds all around it. 

Oh yeah! Found a few more photos on my camera! All the other photos below were taken with Jeremy's Canon Digital Rebel. This is a wide angel shot of Stanford taken with my puny little SD500 

Just before landing. That's Palo Alto airport right infront of us. You can see all the tiny little planes on the ground by the runway.

Unfortunately, the airport is right by the dump. Right about now we can smell the stink from the dump whafting up into our little plane. >.<

Still, you can see that we're lined up perfectly for an awesome landing. We barely needed 1/4 of the runway to land and taxi off it! Small planes rock! 

Moffet Field & Shoreline Amphitheatre. That hanger doesn't look as big when you're looking at it from the air... even if it is just 2000ft up! 

Oracle from the air! 

SFO! It's huge from the air. The runways are quite long and extend far into the bay.

This is a shot of the main terminal with quite a few planes there. 

At this point, we're starting to leave SF...

Took a shot on the way out of the Bay Bridge & Treasure Island. I kinda like how it turned out. You don't get that perspective of the bay bridge very often! 

This is an interesting shot... There's an aircraft carrier sitting in the bay, right off of San Francisco.

Looks like a pretty small carrier... Maybe a retired one? I'm not too sure... Anyone with any ideas? 

This is kind of a crazy photo taken as we were flying over San Francisco. The little black outline in the foreground is the pilot's window.

I was taking the photo right across the pilot's front to get a shot of the pyramid ^^; 

Another shot of the Golden Gate Bridge right as we're flying back towards San Francisco.

You can see lots of sailboats out there in the ocean! This was taken at about... maybe 2:45pm @1500ft still; 

Nice shot of the Bay Bridge with San Francisco in the background. Interesting reflection from the sun.

This was taken when we were flying over... I guess the Oakland area at about 1500ft 

Spent some time buzzing UC Berkeley as well, since Stanford had some time :) 

San Francisco downtown area... You can see lots of boats in the background, container ships, tankers, even an aircraft carrier.

Lots of sailboats in the foreground too... Great day! 

Treasure Island and the Oakland Bay Bridge.
You can see the new second bridge being built just infront of the existing bridge. 

Alcatraz from the air! 

Fisherman's Wharf and the SF downtown area right as we're flying into the bay... 

Flying right over the Golden Gate Bridge...
All those cars look like little ants! I think we're about 1500 ft up right now. 

Golden Gate Bridge from the Pacific Ocean side. 

San Francisco! Well, kinda... that strip of green right in the middle of the photograph is Golden Gate Park. You can see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, and the rows and rows of Lego houses right there south of the park.

Looks like Sim City! 

Nice shot of Half Moon Bay (I think) through the clouds. We're at about 2000ft at this point. 

Between the last photograph and this one, I was given control of the plane and had a bit of fun flying it over the ridge towards the Pacific ocean... Talk about force feedback and high resolution graphics! Much better then any flight simulator out there!

This is a shot of the Half Moon Bay airport... You can see a bit of the propellor in the shot 

A shot of SLAC and 280. We did a really tight 360 turn just to hang around over Stanford and 280 to get nice shots of the area