Dance Music

As promised, here is the medley piece that we were performing to a few weeks ago. The piece is a combination of the Samba at the beginning transitioning to Rumba and then to Salsa for the spicy ending. You can tell which is which. Samba is very upbeat and has a repeating beat, Rumba is slower and supposedly a "dance of love," and Salsa, we all should know what that sounds like. Enjoy!

Oh and btw, if you can understand Spanish, the Salsa part is kinda funny, the lyric I mean. Aww man, this piece of music brings back so many memories, good and bad, everytime I listen to it. It's funny that I can't even bear to listen to this piece right now just because I do not want to recall certain things from the past at this moment...

Choose "dance" below! As always wait until it finishes downloading and then click on the PLAY button!

Worst Day Ever!!!

Yes! It was a very poopee day! It got better later and into the night though. Anyways, I had to face my one and only formidable and atrocious final for my one and only Computer Architecture class! It was incredibly hard and a bit short of impossible to complete! But I have noone but myself to blame for not studying at the beginning of the quarter and my lovely procrastinating nature of waiting until the last minute! But then again, after seeing how impossible the test was today. I really doubt any more studying would help that much at all!

Moreover, for the record, for the past 5 days or so straight, I've been studying, reading, highlighting my thick book from the moment I woke up 'til the time I lie down to sleep (which usually is 6 in the morning!). I think if I were to study this much every day, I'd be well on my way on completing my PhD by now! Maybe I should start working this hard more often, it's a bit refreshing and different than the usual! It was a bit lonely and disparaging after isolating myself from the outer world for 5 days straight. I didn't really speak to anyone nor see anyone in this period of time nor did I even take a slight peak at the Sun once. I almost lapse into a depression! No kidding!

The final was spectacularly horrible that I think most of the people in the class walked out asking themselves what the hell was that all about? Some people were asking questions like, "did you guys leave half of the test blank?" My reply was, "Nooo! but I did manage to scribble some nonsense down though!" Seriously, I think I have failed this final miserably! Even Judy, who sat right next to me, she's a Berkeley graduate and a current PhD student at UCI, and she was tripping out over the test too. I noticed her panicky flipping of pages of the final every few minutes. Man oh man, that was the hardest final I have taken, given the fact that it has very little to do with what he taught in class nor on the homework. It's like on a different level that we haven't gotten to or even expected from what we've learned! Worst enough as the final was, it IS the ONLY thing that is graded for the entire quarter! We had optional homeworks and no midterm. So it was a do-or-die situation! Terrible situation!

Anyhow, I hope to get at least a B because a B- would mean a fail! Damn graduate school! I hope that I am not the worst failure of all the failures! Oh well, what's over is finally over. Time to move on...

Oh and maybe in the next few days, I will post up the music piece that was put together for the dance performance I did with my Latin class a couple of weeks ago...check back later!

Artsy Fartsy! =)

I woke up a little late earlier today, figured that I need to get out of the house for a little while. Pete called me around noon and told me that he will be down in Irvine, at UCI to be exact, to check out his friend's art exhibit. Since dance rehearsal for the dance team was canceled...again, without notifying Son of course! Second time in a roll now! Unacceptable! j/k...I didn't care though because I was down there for other reasons too... Well I'm not the only one being left out of the loop as though it seems...so it's okay...Kate and Laura apparently showed up at the rehearsal room and had to call me to find out.

Anyhow, since there wasn't a rehearsal, I met up with Pete at Lee's Sandwiches right across the campus for some quick dinner. From there, we stopped by the UCI's Art/Dance area to explore the Panopticon Art Gallery. It was pretty interesting in many ways! Art and dance majors have such good time! Beautiful people with plenty of time on their hands to do crazy and abnormal stuff! How great is that?! Makes me want to switch major if only I were an undergrad!

After Pete left for his class, I phoned up Darren and forced him to get his lazy ass out of bed and head down to UCI because he really shouldn’t miss out on some really “interesting art pieces.” So there I was, attending the art gallery for the second time! Yes Pete, second time!!! This time I brought my little camera with me to take some pictures! Pete’s friends weren’t there anymore the second time around. Moreover, on any particular occasion or event, no matter what it is, if you put me and Darren together, you know it will be a madhouse after we are through. We are like the two biggest clowns when we are placed together in the same place. So as you can guess, we had a bit too much fun at the art gallery. I think…trying not to make a scene laughing so hard was quite an accomplishment!

Here are some pictures at the art gallery:

Pam's b/w photographs on the bottom.

Let's not start hanging up VC's straw hats. Please, it reminds Son of the tunnel digging's days! :)

Pete, here's your favorite art work.

Oh this is the art piece that I accidently said out loud, "What the *** is this?!" right in front of a group of people! :lol:

Oh yeah, while walking toward the parking complex where I’ve parked my car, I immediately noticed this distinct petite Korean girl trotting along in a rather face pace right by us. I quickly tapped Darren and whispered carefully, not make a scene if I were mistaken, “Hey dude, isn't that what's her name, dorm, freshmen year, with all the other Korean girls?” (hahaha, I forgot her name!) And Darren was like, “Yeah, that’s Diana!” Anyhow, we met up and chat a little bit. She gave us the biggest hug after realizing who we were! She was shocked and surprised to see both of us at UCI. Apparently her friend has an art gallery that was nearby and she was kinda late to the show.

We spoke for brief few minutes trying to catch up on things. I asked her for the whereabouts of the other Korean girls (her roommates - Jean, Alice, and Lonnie). Found out that they are all doing pretty well and unbelievably Lonnie is getting married or something. That was interesting to say the least, because Lonnie was such a shy girl. Anyways, Diana got pretty mad at me again for keeping on referring them to "the Koreans" as I used to do it 5-6 years ago! Anyhow, talking to her made me feel incredibly nostalgic about the good old time when I was a freshman living in Middle Earth. (Yeah Pete, I do have good memories at UCI too! Not many but at least some!) I so wish I can do it over again! She was a good friend and so were the other Korean girls. They lived a couple of doors away from ours in the dorm, so we practically saw and hung out with each others almost everyday. The good old days!

After the second round of dinner at the KFC nearby, Darren and I decided to hit up the ARC for some badminton action since we both agreed that bar hopping is so...ummm...not us. Darren almost dislocated his shoulder and I almost tore my right arm off swinging at the birdies as hard as we can. Actually, at one point, I was seriously aiming at the 50 feet ceiling as my target! The most hilarious part of all this was that after we were done, the badminton court looked like a battlefield with all these pieces of white feather scattered around that were torn from the birdies we were thrashing. :lol:

Once we both realized that any more birdies smashing will result in one of us in the hospital nearby with a torn arm or dislocated shoulder, we proceeded to leave the ARC for Lee’s Sandwiches. It's actually my second time of the day at this place. Lychee smoothie! That was deliciously sweet and worth my 3 bucks!!!

By the way, I think I've discovered a serious realization earlier tonight discussing a particular phone conversation I've had with this one girl to Darren. The realization is that I'm really such a jerk to girls even the nice ones, recently. Sometime I can say the meanest things! It's all fun and game to me though but I think I might need to calm down just a little bit! Hey, if I don’t like you, I wouldn’t be teasing you...right? Hahaha, who'd have thought that I can be so darn good at being a jerk to a point that girls might really think I am one! I need to revert back to being the nice Son that I am at least for the time being! What’cha think?

Anyhow, if you are still wondering what the hell else happened tonight in other perspectives, please check out Pete's blog or Darren's xanga! They wrote some funny things about it!

Hiccup!

Yes, Son made a little hiccup today during a dance performance in front of a few hundred people! Just kidding! Maybe about 30 people! Yes that's right! Son got nervous under the hot spot light and the tension of people's eyes and stepped on his own foot while doing the Samba walk! Son was embarassed for a brief second but continued on doing the Rumba and Salsa routine perfectly! The little Salsa medley that Son has to do with the Latin class was pretty neat! Anyhow, Son still thinks that the Salsa is the most fun to do.

Son hopes that the video clip of the the performance won't include that hiccup part! Or else Son will edit the crap out of that video clip! Well, that's that for another chapter of Son's life. The people Son's met now have departed and ventured on their own ways. Son's made some good friends and some dangerous "enemies" but all in all, it was another insightful experience.

Maybe Son will post the music of the medley piece a little later when Son's recovered from this eternal sadness. That piece of music has too many good and bad memories attached to it. Time to let things go, Son said.

Son likes posting in the third person! Or maybe...this is not Son at all! Who knows! You won't!

The calm before the storm!

After sitting in my room remembering the past and pondering about my future for the past 5 hours without much distraction from anything else particularly, I think I've gone crazy! Naw...not yet, I think tonight was more or less one of those peaceful nights that I'm going to last see before the coming hectic weeks wind up. I've actually sit down and turned on some opera music and opened up the windows to let the cool breeze fills up my somber room for the first time in a long time. The smell of the outside fog and coldness plus the music are making me feel so nostalgic about old times. I was chatting with Darren earlier tonight and I was telling him how times like this remind me so much of our careless, fun freshmen year in college living in the dormitory. It was a better period of my life that I did not see nor appreciate until now.

Anyways, part of the reason why tonight was a slower night than usual is because of the server on WoW abrubtedly crashed and forced Blizzard's having to migrate it to a new server rack for better stability and less lagginess in the future. Oh well, time to get back to reading my dry thick book for my class. I'm so lost in this class. The more I read, the more I realize that this is not for me and that I can't help but let my mind wander elsewhere every other 10 seconds. The more I read, the more I feel lost and hopeless. Man! The final is going to be pretty crazy and difficult for me...

The title for tonight's entry says it all, the calm before the storm, so I'll be back after the storm. I will have some cool stuff to post up here. You will see. In the meantime, have a good week my friend.

Also, one last note, thanks Pete for helping me with some spammer problems. I'm glad I can be your Guinea pig for your P.I. escapade.

It's almost over?

It's already the 9th week of class! Time flies by so quickly! Another week coming up and then finally the final week. Man oh man, I'm going to do pretty crappy on my final. I'm worry about it! Maybe it's the most uninteresting thing ever to study! Good luck studying Son! Oh well, it's probably going to be the last couple of weeks at UCI as a grad student, I think. But we'll see!

[sarcasm] It's going to be an interesting two weeks coming up. [/sacasm]

It's going to be crappy! I can already foresee it...I have too many scheduled events that are just happened to be colliding with each others in term of interest and time. I'm going to miss a few people that I've got to know better over the past few months. I'd like to enjoy these two weeks more but I just know that things are just going to be so hectic that before I know it, it'll all be over!

Anyhow, time to go practice the piano until I fall asleep...Oh and happy birthday to my mom, her b-day was 2 days ago! Hehe...she'll never read this but it doesn't matter, maybe someday she will run into this website! That will be like never! I still can't believe that my dad is 13 years older than my mom!

Spammer!

Maybe lately I've been getting so much spamming, it's nasty! I'm not blaming on anyone though. It's automated and IP spoofed! So I can't really use the IP blocking method. Maybe it's time for me to use one of Pete's or David's many method for eliminating these spammers! Anyways, I've been too lazy lately to do any of these. For now, I will just have to go through and manually delete these random spammings by hand.

Just a nice picture of the sky after the rain on Friday

Anyhow, updates on the past few days as always. On friday night, I got a little bored after visiting my old job office, so I decided to stop by the local Borders in Chino Hills to do some "readings" ;). Nonetheless, I really did do some hardcore reading when I got there. I actually sat on one of those comfy little couches and read for next 3 hours. Guess what I was reading! No no not the Playboy magazine! :lol:

Actually it was a book about Music Theory. It was quite a good book with well illustrated music notations. I learned a good bit about music reading that I didn't know before or was a bit iffy about. The reason I was reading up on this topic is because of the night before, I was up playing my piano for a good 2 hours straight or so. I played it 'til I was dizzy! So crazy!

Moreover, on Saturday, I went out to dinner with Kim and Omar at this Persian restaurant in Claremont. It was actually quite delicious. Well, the meal was a bit expensive for what it's worth though. Thanks Kim for treating us out! Kudos on the good selection of restaurant. :)

Sunday was a bit slow again, well actually I had to wake up pretty early than usual. Visited Pete and his family...then onto dance rehearsal in Irvine, then stopped by Darren's place. We went out for some Del Taco cuz we are cheap...and broke! Hehe. Oh and Derek, don't worry about it dude. Just take care whatever you have to take care of. No worries! There's always next week.

Got home a bit late, went to Molten Core with my guildies and some other guilds. We got wiped out so many times, it's not even funny! I've never seen so many people in a raid group before. There were like 40 people on the screen. It was lagging my computer quite bad. I was getting 4 FPS (Frame per second) at times! Fun nonetheless, but a bit of a waste of time! Hopefully next run will be better than this.

MC! right before we got wiped by the fire elementals!

Sup Brian! Like my gloves? I look like a shaman now!

Oh and if you are still bored and want to read more stuff! Check out my Darren's xanga! He wrote a pretty cool poem about life and stuff. Worth the read.

Click here to be transported to Darren's Xanga.

Broke!

I'm so broke that it's not even funny! Happy March month! Time flies by so quickly, it's just amazing! March madness!!! Umm...wait that's college basketball...

Anyhow, I'm broke as heck, I've been eating out for the past 5 or so days straight! Let's see...Thursday, Denny's (previous post)! Friday, went out with some old coworkers to celebrate my buddy, Jeremy's Birthday at Shogun around noon. Later that day, I joined up with Omar, Angelic, and Kim at Hero's in Claremont for dinner. The next day, Saturday, I went...wait a minute, I forgot already, maybe I didn't go out at all on Saturday. Oh! I remember, Saturday, I went out with Angelic and Kim to the nearby Island's for some delicious burgers! I was going to go dancing later that night but the food coma got to me before dinner was over, so we ended up hitting the local Starbuck's in La Verne. And on Sunday, after a brief dance rehearsal for the dance team, I met up with Darren, Derek, and Dexter at Red Robin in Irvine. :lol: So funny, we were so flirting with the waitress while talking smack about girls and their mysterious ways!

Francis and Jeremy. Brian and me (I look high!)

Actually, from my brilliant recollection of the past days, I did stay home on Monday and did "try" catching up on some readings for my class (I shall not disclose the result of this but I think you all can sorta figure out how it went! :lol: ). Tuesday, got out of my last class and felt that I should stay in Irvine for a while before heading back in the crappy traffic on the 91. So I decided to head toward the Santa Ana, Costa Mesa where Darren's at. We were going to try this new restaurant down there but that place shut down sometimes ago. So...disappointed we were, we settled for some good old Vietnamese broken rice down in Little Saigon. It has been quite a while since I've been to this place. I was with a special someone last time I was there...that place holds some good'ole memories...

Holy crap, now I wonder why I'm so broke! I don't even have a job at the moment!

Oh and by the way, I had to replace my car's engine recently as of this past weekend. The old one was spilling out coolant way too much, and driving it would risk my ass being stranded in the middle of nowhere overheating. :sad: Hopefully the new engine will last me for a while, before I can really afford to get myself a new car one day.

Here is the picture of my old engine, it lasted me for approximately 7 long years! We've been through thick and thin, I tell you! I swear, I feel like everything that's been with me for a long while is slowly departing from my being one after another. (Sig. Other, Job, School, now...car's engine) I'm so crazy!

VTEC baby! My new engine is actually a 2.3 Liter! I so not feel any differences though!

Also, I'd like to say thanks to my cousin, Baga (nickname!), in Vietnam for sending me this over New Year. Thanks man! If you ever read this. Hope you have fun with the Compact Flash card I smuggled...ummm...I mean sent to you!