So late!

Maybe I should start coming home a little earlier at night! Didn't get home 'til 2 AM. So tired! Anyways, I think that everyone who has a wireless router needs to learn how to configure it appropriately. Last night when I was messing with my laptop. I found at least 5 different wireless networks in my neighborhood from sitting just in my room. And only one of them has encrypted security. Basically it means, I had access to the other unprotected ones. And that means free wireless Internet connection for Son!

I live on a hilly area and all of my neighbors' houses are kinda spaced far apart from mine. The house that's behind me is actually sorta down the hill from where I am. So I wonder whose networks are these belonged to! All of these wireless routers are IEEE 802.11g and that = 54Mbps Data Rates! So sweet! Cul de sac = more free wireless routers for Son to choose from! I should take my laptop and sit right in the middle of the cul de sac just to see how many wireless networks I can sniff!

The reason why I mentioned that people should really configure their routers (at least set a 64-bit encryption key, or even change the default password for goodness sake!) is that...on these open unsecured network, I can actually access their routers' configuration page, and potentially lock them out of their own routers and leave them hanging without an Internet connection! Which I won't do because that would be sooooo mean! Maybe I'll just packet sniff all of their sensitive "transitions" and data!!!!

TollRoad!

Man...I wanted to go to sleep early tonight but that didn't happen! I got caught up in some PVPing action on WoW with my brother and the guildies. And like always, my computer and video could not handle the massively intensive action that was going on. My screen was filled with just 3D models running around all over the place slaughtering each others! Fun time! Even with the additional fan that I have modded on my old video card, that thing was still overheating like it's a nuclear reactor core. Well my computer, like every other night, decided to freeze on me. So I had to reset the thing. But when I restarted it, my hard drive happily decided to go cuckoo on me again! Anyhow, to make the story short, I spent the next hour trying to figure out what went wrong again. Finally I decided to run the Operating System on my old hard drive instead, it has less capacity but more stability. Stability = less headache! = good for Son (especially with 4 classes)!

Anyhow, on to the lesser nerdy topic of the day, I received my Fastrak TollRoad transponder yesterday. And earlier this morning, I had an early morning class. I usually have to wake up around 7 AM just to make it in time for the 9 o'clock class. Well, today, I woke up a bit later than usual...not intentionally of course! So I really had to use the TollRoad for the first time just to try to skip the crappy traffic on the 91 and the 55. Moreover, I took the TollRoad 241, which transitions into the 261 and headed straight into the city of Irvine (Jamboree). Wow! I must say, this TollRoad freeway business is so sweet! It took me like maybe 20 minutes max from my house in Chino Hills almost directly to Irvine! I was driving on an average speed of 80mph most of the way there (only because there were plenty of cops on the TollRoad for whatever the reason, I'm not too sure). Anyhow, it cost me about $3.25 just to save myself a half hour of being frustrated and getting all sun tanned on the freeway. Yeah so as you can see, it can get quite expensive doing this frequently, therefore, I think I'll most likely be using it sparingly and in case of an emergency (waking up late, etc. ). And since most parts of the TollRoad are built on uncharted and rural area , the landscape is so innocently beautiful with the vast ranges of open grassy hills.

TollRoad!

Sleepy time! I opened my laptop a few hours ago just to test things out, not sure if I will keep it or not, but I sure did have some fun time messing around with my neighbors' unsecured wireless networks. It's such a sweet laptop, it's just so nicely built and designed. I'll write more about it maybe tomorrow night when I'm done with class.

Just bloggin!

It's 1 in the morning and I have to seriously head to bed in order to get enough sleep to stay focus in the morning for my Comp Law class. So here's just a quick blog for ya! I have more interesting materials to blog about but it's just been so poopee lately so they have to wait!


Thanks to some of you who are coming by and making my shoutbox a little more exciting lately! ----------------------------------------------->

Recently, I've had friends who asked me about the meaning of my name and I remember that I did blog about this some time ago! So since I've no time to write something new tonight, I'll just repost part of that blog for you!

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Tomiyama (Japanese-a typical Japanese last name) - Fu Shan (Chinese) - Phu Son (Vietnamese) - or Wealthy(Rich) Mountain.

Now everyone knows how to write my name in Japanese, and Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, Chieu Chow, Taiwanese, etc.)
I have always been writing the first character from bottom up...I guess I have always been doing it the "wrong" way.

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Oh and I also uploaded a few new pictures to my Flickr account. So you can check that out too. I went to my first graduate ICS "Talk" earlier today before one of my classes in the McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium. It's basically a seminar on "A Comprehensive Approach to Intrusion Detection Alert Correlation" led by Dr. Richard Kemmerer from UCSB. In short, the "talk" was about utilizing sensor net to detect and reduce security breaches and attacks on a particular network for administrators. I took a few pictures of the nice auditorium that I was in just because I like the design of it and ALSO it's my goal to beat Pete's Flickr account of 1500+ pictures.

DON'T CLICK ME!!!

Hihis Life

(nt)

Sleepy Time

Just got home a little while ago, time to catch up on some sleep for the lost hours of sleep this past week. I'm going to try to catch up some readings and homework this weekend too. That means no going out!

Happy Birthday to Darren, his birthday is in a few days. We all went out to dinner earlier tonight at Wahoo's Fish Taco down in Irvine. Derek, Dexter, Jennifer, Darren and I got there first. We were later joined by Jesse, Latecia, Lily, Jamie, and the New Zealand girl ( Sharon). The festivity went on throughout the night. Even though we didn't do much else besides dinner and a mini cake birthday party later at Derek's apartment. It was fun just to chill and catch up on old times!

Earlier today, I stopped by my old work office at the University of La Verne just to check out what has been happening lately with the department. It is quite a long story but basically, this is the last deathly blow to the "Original ITC Crew". The ITC department no longer exists in my eyes in approximately two weeks or so. The group of us, you know who you are, IS the last and best crew that ITC ever has! That's why this summer, I've got to get started on the business venture development for all of us! I've got to make some time for it even if I have summer school.

Anyhow, I uploaded some brand new pictures I've taken earlier today of my alma mater, University of La Verne, and a few pictures of the office where I used to work for for the past 4 years. Recently, there has been a lot of "changes" within the department. So as you can see from the pictures, it looks like a warzone, everything is being "moved" and reorganized, including people!!! :(

Click on the following link to be sent directly to my new Flikr photo/picture account.
CLICK ME!!!

Can't wait until summer, hopefully, I will have more time to start playing my piano intensively again! Time to go play a few notes before I pass out or bedtime, whichever comes first! Have a good weekend!

Résumé and Portfolio Updated

I found some free time tonight to finally update my résumé just a tad bit to include some more updated and current information. I've included three different versions of it on here. Click on the following text links to see the appropriate version for each format:

I also updated my porfolio section and corrected a few missing links and dead links. Some of my old work are currently offline, so I have to resort to linking them to screenshots of the sites instead until I find some more free time to re-upload those sites. I also have a few websites, that I've completed recently, that are yet to be included in my online Portfolio. I will get those up by this weekend.

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Today has been another exhausting day. Well actually, Tuesday and Thursday are usually my longest days of the week. I leave my house around 9 in the morning and usually don't get home until 9 at night. On Tuesday, I have a 3 hours night class and on Thursday, dance rehearsal typically goes on for a couple of hours at night. It's okay though, one advantage for staying at school so late into the evening is that I don't have to face the horrendous traffic driving home at 8 PM.

All of my classes' workloads are slowly creeping up on me. Maybe taking 4 classes, having dance rehearsal and trying to have a life all at the same time isn’t that great of an idea . I have a lot of deadlines to meet and plenty of readings that will keep me occupied easily into the summer.

Anyhow, earlier tonight, I bought some flight tickets for my little trip up north some time toward the end of May. I'm going to be flying up to the Bay area in the morning and back by nighttime! It's going to be one heck of a day! I'll write about it more later...

Oh yah, I was chatting with Kim on the phone earlier tonight and she told me about myspace.com and how much fun she's having on it pimping(!)...I mean...chatting with random people! I've signed up for myspace.com for a while now but I rarely ever check it or really ever use it. Kim insisted that I have to sign back in to add her as my friend, and so I did. Surprisingly, I saw a few of my old friends from high school that I've lost contact with or really haven't kept in touch with on Kim's friend list! I thought that was really neat! Moreover, I was browsing through some of my old friends' profiles and it's incredible to see how much they have changed or not changed since high school. Anyways, if you are on myspace.com, you can do a search for "Phu Son" and see what ya'll get!

BTW, thank you Pete for the cool Pro account at Flickr.com. Now I can upload all my WoW screenshots to it! j/k j/k Actually, I've uploaded some "real" pictures earlier today!!! I had a class in one of the new buildings on the UCI campus today, the CalIT2 building. It's a very nicely constructed building. Very sophisticated and technologically advanced. I was amazed and impressed by the stylish architectural design of the building, so after my class, I took a few pictures of the building inside and out. You can visit my new Flickr Pro account to view these pictures! And as I will be uploading more pictures to this account from now on, you can bookmark it too!

CLICK ME!! http://www.flickr.com/photos/phuson/

CalIT2 Building

Heya!

Quick post again, 'cuz I have an early class in the morning. It's my Computer Law class. It starts at 9 AM but that usually means I have to wake up around 7 AM to get ready and take off. Traffic is always a b**** that early in the morning! I'm so not looking forward to that at all. Would somebody please remind me to order the Fastpast/Fastrak transponder thingie some time this week, please!!! So I can finally use it to drive on the speedy Toll Road 241 straight to Irvine instead of the dreaded and awful 91 freeway! It will cost me around 4 bucks or so one way to Irvine, but think about the cost of gas nowadays and the 20 minutes of traffic I might not have to be stuck on(!) and you will see what I mean!!!

In other news, check out my cool lottery quickpick ticket. Every time I stop by to put gas in my car, I usually just buy a dollar of the Super Lotto Quickpick ticket just for fun. You know! Just to see what kind of crap numbers the machine will randomize for me (as a computer scientist, it's kinda cool to see the kind of "randomized" numbers being "fixed" just to jack my one measly dollar – yes I'm skeptical)! Check out what I got recently a day ago at a gas station in La Verne.

Almost a straight draw! What?! We're not playing Poker?!! :)

Hehe…I don’t even need to check the drawing tomorrow night and I know I won’t win anything!!!! I remember checking out my ticket right after I bought it, and chuckling so hard at it. I almost wanted to return it to the cashier and ask for my dollar back!!! :lol:

Have a good day! :)

EJ's Birthday Party at D&B

I got class all day tomorrow so I'm going to make this quick. For EJ's birthday, we took her to D&B. We got there around 7 PM and ate dinner there. After dinner, we spent the rest of the night playing all sort of random games within the D&B gameroom!

About 5 hours and about 1400 D&B tickets later, we were exhausted!!! For 1400 something tickets, instead of trading in for something big or valuable, we each came home with the most random little toy prizes ever! The most fun I had all year long. Very unproductive and mindless! But so fun! Fun = that's all it matters right! Anyhow, I've got to get going to bed now, I have a very long day ahead! I have much more fun stuff to blog about but that has to wait for another day or something, unless you really want to know! You can message me on AIM: Drakeez or you can hit me up on my cell!

Here is a couple of pictures of that night! For the rest of the pictures click on the link below!

PICTURE GALLERY LINK

Let's not poke Son's eyes out on your birthday!

WTF is Brian's PSP doing taking all my spotlight!

Boy, was I hungry or something!!!

BTW, thank you, EJ for resizing the pictures and for sending them to Laureen! And thanks for forwarding the email to me, Laureen! And if you check out the gallery of pictures, you will notice that Francis hit a jackpot '777' on the slot machine there and scored us 150 tickets in one shot!

My days...

The past couple of days was so unproductive but fun nonetheless! I didn't get home until 3 AM the night before. Was hanging out with the Darren, Derek, Hong and Dexter for the better part of the night down in Irvine. It's all good though because driving home at 2 in the morning is the best! No traffic!

Woke up a bit late today, I didn't get a chance to stop by UCI's Wayzgoose Faire to visit some friends who were manning one of the booths there. I did end up arriving at the Grad ICS BBQ at the Mason’s park nearby on time though! Never have I seen so much brain-power trying to BBQ before. It was fun to see my fellow graduate nerds doing something different rather than theorizing or programming some insanely obfuscated algorithms! :)

Anyhow, Warren had this great idea that he found online to use Krispy Kreme buns to make the ultimate burger for the BBQ! We have been entertaining and toying with the idea of a Krispy Kreme burger for the entire past week. Warren actually went online and googled it up too! Today, we finally had the chance to try out the idea out! Below, you can witness our masterpiece! Krispy Kreme donut buns sandwiching a juicy cheesy patty with a variety of condiments! Amazingly and surprisingly, it tasted pretty good. Only Warren and I were the only ones brave enough to try it at first! However later on, we successfully persuaded Ryan and Judy to try a bite of it. Seriously, I thought it was pretty good, a bit sweet on the outside and salty in the inside! Yummy! With the pickles inside, it almost tasted like a Hawaiian Burger that you can get at Islands. Please, the way I see it is that if you are willing to spend 4-6 years of your life just to get a PhD after your name, let’s not be scared of a little sweet burger! :lol: (I’m so going to get flamed for this comment).

Krispy Kreme Burger!!! Tasty!
...
Why do I look like I'm on one of the Fear Factor's Episodes! On the right picture is Warren's enjoying his KK burger!

I abruptly had to leave the BBQ early to start driving to the Poker Party over my coworker’s house. But I managed to stop by Derek’s place on the way back. Darren was over there too chilling and shooting some SS mofos in the Call of Duty game. I joined in the action but sorry Derek, I grenaded a few of our teammates…by “accident” of course. :) That game is too captivating!

I left Derek's place and headed up north to the city of Rancho Cucamonga! Took me about an hour of driving from Irvine. Finally I got there and realized that I was like 4 hours late! Sorry Pete, yeah yeah…bros before hoes...I know I know! If it's any other days I would have to agree with you...but today, no hoes involved! I just had too many scheduled events going on! ;) Hehe...I missed the Poker tourney and almost missed Jessie because she has to be in bed 10 minutes after I've arrived. I got to play with her for a few minutes though, she showed me her new little doll. Oh ya, thanks Brian for putting little Jessie on the phone and trying to make her say "Uncle Son" while I was on my way there! That was cool. I did miss Sydney though, I forgot how early babies have to go to bed by! It's been so busy lately, I think I'm going to make an effort to visit your daughters some time this week Pete.

Anyhow, I left Pete's house around midnight and joined up with Kim and Stephanie at a local Starbucks nearby my house before it closed down for the night. Kim, you should've not listen to me last night and everything would've been okay!! ... You are such a playa :lol: Maybe one of these days you will admit that Son’s always right when it comes to relationship...hehe.

It was a long couple of days. I finally will get some much needed rest before the start of a new week. I have so much reading to be done! Especially my Computer Law class! If any of you are completely and utterly bored! Feel free to email me, I'll send you some cool copyright, patent, trademark papers to read! Maybe you can read and decipher them for me and just tell me the gist of it! I'll treat you to dinner or something! ;) The class is pretty cool so far, makes me want to get a law degree after this! But with the amount of reading we have to do...maybe I'll think about it instead...

By the way, I ordered two laptops a few days ago! Helped Kim out with ordering one of the 700m's for her. You owe me one for this! I woke so damn early to make that order! I also put in an order for a Dell 6000d for myself. I'm not sure if I’m going to keep it or not though. I don’t really need an extra computer that desperately at the moment. So I might have to end up canceling it soon before it gets shipped. :sad: Maybe you can help me decide what to do! How 'bout you leave a comment below and let me know if I should keep it or not! Remember that I can and should use that $1k for paying off some grad school loans! But then I did give up going to USC just so I can save some money by going to UCI...decision decision!

BTW: Laureen! See the lack of pictures on my blog?!! That's because you haven't stolen EJ’s camera and send me all of the pictures at her b-day party!! :)

I need to update my Resume and Portfolio one of these days, they are getting a bit outdated now that I haven’t touched them in almost a year! Most of the links aren't working properly anymore! :sad:

Hello!

Hi there, it's been quite a long while since I lasted posted! How's everyone doing? Good...I hope.

It's been kinda busy lately with all the schoolwork I have and...ummm...yeah, schoolwork, that's about it! I actually have a lot to blog about but it's just been so sporadic lately with everything that's been going on. Oh by the way, just as an update, I actually received a B in my only grad class last quarter. It was the hardest class that I have taken thus far! Amazingly, I passed the class, well...I studied so hard for the final!!

Today was a long and exhausting day, I missed dance rehearsal again! It was rescheduled and nobody told me about it until after the fact! Anyhow, this weekend is going to be pretty packed. BBQ, Poker Party (I'll get to visit Jessie and Sydney again!), and rehearsal on Sunday! I better head to bed now, I'm starting to not make any sense as I keep on typing...I'll blog some more later this weekend! Adios!

Here are some pictures that were taken with Pete's super duper camera when I was visiting his family and daughters about a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

Son's so Counter Terrorist defusing bombs!

Jessie is teaching me how to play her little toy!

My experimenting with Pete's professional camera. It's a sweet camera for sure!

Oh yeah! If you have not yet noticed, the last post on my blog was by a secret guest blogger! Notice the name of whom it is posted by?! Hehe

Cheap Eats That Chicks Will Dig

Today’s recipe is for buttermilk pancakes from scratch - the light fluffy buttermilk kind that your fork melts through! You can make a big batch of dry mix that will keep for 3 months. All the ingredients are dirt cheap that you can probably thief from mom’s pantry, and the only specialty ingredient you need is buttermilk! These taste so good you don't even need syrup!

Basic Mix

1 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp kosher salt (don't use table salt which has iodine - kosher salt has a much cleaner taste - look for it in the Kosher food section next to the matzo!)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda (check the expiration date or they won't rise!)

You can make as much of this as you want and can store it for up to 3 months! When you're ready to make some, for every TWO(2) cups of mix-

2 eggs
4 tbsp of butter (1/2 a stick) - real butter, not margarine or butter substitute
2 cups of buttermilk – regular, don't use reduced fat!

-Put the dry mix in a large mixing bowl.
-Melt the butter (in a big microwave safe bowl)
-Add the eggs. Mix like crazy.
-Add the buttermilk – Mix like crazy some more.
-Add the WET into the bowl of DRY and whisk for only about 10-12 SECONDS, and gently fold in any remaining dry spots. It's gonna be lumpy like Shordshin’s face, but they'll cook out. If you mix too much too much gluten will form and the pancakes will be tough and rubbery, not light and fluffy!

Fire up the electric griddle or frying pan (350 degrees) and ladle the batter on as big as you like. It's a good idea to "shake" the pan so the batter spreads/cooks evenly. When you see bubbles forming on top, flip em over - watch your heat or they’ll burn and taste like crap! Otherwise enjoy your light and fluffy pancakes that the chicks will dig too!