So I decided to change my website's hosting plan a few days ago. As a result you've probably been seeing some strange error messages in the last couple of days. While nothing has change from the design point of view, the backend performance will be better what with Dreamhosts' many features. (Thanks away for the recommendation. If anyone is thinking about making the switch to them let me know and I can show you how.)

Part of the delay was just figuring out the different configuration files, database changes, shell commands, etc. I'm sure away had an easier time migrating to them but I had a frustrating time getting it to work. And now it's finally up and running again. Yay!

Check it out and let me know if there is anything strange on the site. Is it faster or slower? Bleh...

After some email exchanges and reading of various hosting sites, I finally figured out a place to call "home". My new place will be hosted by the "generous" folks at Dreamhost.

After emailing away and getting his "i like" comment as well as a referral link, I went ahead and signed up earlier today. The whole process took about 30 mins or so (since I have some time on my hand at work.) Of course the most time consuming part of it is leaving verio, my old hosting place.

What a funny coincidence that I get a new host and away get this (referral) as a present. =)

Happy Birthday away! (Of course you guys all knew that!)

So if you are experiencing problem accessing this site in the next 2-3 days please be patient while I configure the new server and tying up lose ends at my old host. Thanks for your patient.

While I would like to say that the video night/open discussion on gender communication last Sat. night went relatively smoothly, the ending of it didn't. What happened was that at around midnight, after walking some friends to their cars, a caravan of police cars rushed into the corner street where I live in Sunnyvale. Something was happening. What turned out to be a night of watching that 70's show-style video flashback were now becoming an episode in "Cops", or a scene from Crash. All happening in front of my house.

So the cops rushed out of their police cars, about seven of them. One guy pulled his standard issued maglite™, proceeded to locate the suspect's house. He then led the charge with the rest of the officers following behind him, in a single file line. Somewhere in the middle was another officer with his canine dog in tow. Something was definitely happening.

Sandy and myself went over to downtown Palo Alto last night for my company's Insight 2006 dinner at Il Fornaio. I had the sea bass while she had the chicken. According to their outdated 2001 menu both of us would have to hunker down $52.95 per person for our meals. Luckily my company footed the bill. The chicken was tasty but the fish were, according to Sands, "fishy". I like their hors d'oeuvre as well as their ambience. I'd like to think a certain someone would benefit by taking his future date there. =P

During dinner I sat next to a CEO from Manhanttan whose former careers as a chemical engineer, a director of an investment bank, and now running his own venture capital firm has earned him his rights to tell me these advice:

Don't be afraid to change career. Kids in your generation can have five careers. What matters is not how smart you are, that helps. It's how you work with people and if you get along with them. (—David J. P. Meachin)

Woohoo!! I got a Nano from Sands as a result of her company giving them out. I'm now the proud owner of a new 2 GB iPod Nano.

Running with this sleek black baby will be soooooo cool. Hooray for biotech companies Holiday giveaway, which my sweetie so deserved as a result of much last minute travelling and total lunacy dealing with her manager.

Thanks hun! =)

For the Big Sur folks let's go running already.

Sometimes rather than thinking of something to write I like to just rummage around the various blog sites to see what everyone else is writing. Sometimes I like to leave comments on these sites. An idea occurred to me—and folks bare in mind I haven't really thought through these things—someone could write a way to aggregate the "most recent comments" that we leave after reading wuboy, drewboy, kat15812, jeeyoungi, clieu, jimmyjam206, laurenine , mdw, and someone I really really like site.

Think of bread crumbs trail in Hansel and Gretel. A comment here, a comment there, some more at blahblahblah...there ought to be a way to sweep up all those crumbs into a "container"—most recent comments by so-and-so. A blogs comment thread if you will.

I don't know if there is a flu going around but I'm feeling a little under the weather today. I'm taking the rest of the day off and just chill at home. At least the weekend is coming up.

Have a good weekend guys.

My second time volunteering for Kids Club. This time the kids were much less rowdy, specifically two boys Gregor and Mikey (from my groups are ages 9-10 or classes 4/5). You know things go pretty smoothly where we calm the kids down with sweet snack, patiently ask them to be seated, follow the teachers in body worship. Then we have them repeat Genesis 1-22 on the slides. At this point a few of them are just in complete distractions. They are all volunteered by their parents to be here for two hours but to some of them, "it's like prison!"

Mikey and Gregor are best friends. How do I know? Gregor told me after I asked them what were their favorite Christmas gifts were.

Gregor: I got a new Nintendo game from Mikey. It's my favorite cuz his my best friend.

More new blogging softwares promise to keep your publishing needs healthy. And anyway I got this idea from away after his successful crossposting from his WP blog to Xanga and it made me think about those possibilities. I suppose I could duplicate my typing but a quick search led me to GRX's very own ryu52's Xanga blog mirror script.

My only concern is that the freakin' RSS feeds. I usually post in the past in Moveabletype in order NOT update the feeds to get the proper "content/design" look-and-feel.

Of course someone else suggested "why folks just don't join xanga." I actually like Xanga's GRX community. It's nice too to get those nice eProps. But in defending MT I guess at the moment I have some time on my hand to play around with the design, come up with categories as well as multiple sites (community and journal) AND snoop around for gee-whiz plugins. (Those darn tagclouds on these flickr, technorati, del.icio.us sites are well delicious looking albeit it may not make my blogging site any better or simpler to use.)

Having say that lets see if this works. Otherwise grrr...

So at the end of our GRX's vision week during the dinner part some of us got to have a bit of fun, made some stuff out of our leftover, mostly these butter balls that came with the appetizers.

Guys and girls from Immersion, Race, Knot2Us, Stand, Glue, and Crosstraining got to participate. Here are the group breakdowns: Table 1 (ours: Shelly, Alin, Jimmy, Lauren, Sandy, myself) vs. Table 2. (Christine, Alex, Grace, Victoria)

Round	Table 1	Table 2	Winner
1	Chomp Chomp	Mr. Caterpillar	Chomp Chomp
2	Asian Butterfly	None	Asian Butterfly
3	Kissing Snowfolks	Snowman	Kissing Snowfolks

Butter Art Images (compliments of L-Dawg)

         
(Clicking on each thumbnails will open up a larger image in a new window.)

In the end it was just a little bit of fun after a long and sometimes "over the head" theological discussions—oh and I am not endorsing that you play with your food.

I'm desperate for content. I remembered back in days where they touted "content is king".

Looking at my stats recently my reader-ship has been flagging. Well it comes and goes in cycles but the general trend (yes I did minored in Economics) looks downward. What to do?

Behind every man stands his woman. So I approached Sands and we traded some ideas. These are really rather randomn of sort...

So we were leaving Pho Hoa after lunch last Sunday Lauren driving, Jimmy in the passenger seat, Sands, Ray, and myself in the back. I forgot who made the first comment (Ray?) but here's how it went down...

My life is brilliant.

Its 2006 and well my life so far has been quite good. Got to stretch my legs a little bit. A year ago I came to GRX and I was broken, a fool actually living for the accolades of this world.

In any case this entry won't be long and sad but is...dood I'm excited. I'm looking forward to this year. Looking forward to sharing and learning more about my sweet Sandy. Oh well of course before that there will always be a place in my heart for God.

So yeah up and down life goes round and round but all in all I can't say its been a bad 2005 year. Thank you Lord. Now lets keep stretching those legs.

Happy New Year folks.