My neighbor's beautiful flowers.

Such a beautiful flower. Taken in Cusco, Peru.

Downtown Lima, Peru. 

Cusco, Peru

Dead Woman's Pass - Inca Trail (14,000+ ft)

Side of house in Cusco, Peru. I love the grungy texture.

One of the cooler box cars (it's of the San Francisco earthquake).

This is how many people showed up. You can sorta see the track in the background there.

Little kid watching the race.

Shot taken from Red Bull Soap Box Race in SF's Mission Dolores Park. Some more pics here.

Guess what I found in the States!

Awesome clouds, taken on the Inca Trail.

Fleet Week: Blue Angels

So I went to Fleet Week this weekend up in SF and the air show was awesome. Although I wish I had a bigger zoom on my camera, it was very entertaining watching jet fly by at super-fast (not super-sonic) speeds, bi-planes stall out and do barrel rolls, and big ass cargo planes be slow. Enjoy some choice shots and there's some more on my Picasa. You should also listen to "Highway to the Danger Zone" right about now too.

Side of a building on the Inca Trail. Can you guess what kind of building this is?!?!

Peruvian Beetle. I like the colors and the chrome.

Sunset of some mountains by the "Rainbow City" that we went to in Peru. I love the layering effect there, and if you look on the bottom, you can see the traditional 2 bulls on the roof top of the houses, which are there for good luck.

Some cool mountains on our way to the Inca Trail.

California Academy of Sciences

So I went to the California Academy of Sciences yesterday. It was really cool and I got a membership to the place too (I get to bring a free guest everytime I go + 10% off at the gift shop) so I can go back and take some better pictures of everything and check out the rain forest and planetarium. Everything was really nice though, but it was super crowded, and I wish I had time to read everything and take 20 billion photos of everything too. Enjoy the pics, I'll post more on Picasa and update this with a link.

Entrance to the Academy.

Albino alligator in the swamp section. Luckily, we caught this guy yawning cause otherwise it would just be of him (or her) lying there like a lazy gator.

Cool fish in the aquarium (forgot the name), which was pretty cool. Similar to the Monterey one, but smaller.

Living roof of the California Academy of Sciences. Doesn't this look like something from Nausicaa Valley of the Wind? I feel like some gigantic flying insect is going to pop out.

This was the first picture of the trip that I got yelled at for because I wasn't supposed to take pictures of this. Right after we landed in Lima, there was this duty free shop, and since I was very eager to take photos with my new lense (24-105mm Canon L f/4.0), I thought this was hilarious, so I decided to take a picture of it. You can even see the guy's blurry hand in the picture trying to stop me from taking it. If you can't read, it says "Smoking seriously harms you and others around you" and the other box says "Smoking kills". Isn't that hilarious?

Inside Cruz del Sur's bus station in Lima. It was really nice and very clean. Pretty fancy place. We came here to change our bus tickets to Arequipa.

Cruz del Sur logo. This proved to be the best travel buses in Peru. It is pricer than the other buses, but it is totally worth it. Trust me.

One of the chairs in our hostel in Lima. Pretty cool design I'd say.

For those of you wondering where my daily photos went, I've been real busy at work lately and haven't really found the time to post anything. I'll try and post something later in the week though.

Local souvenior shop in Miraflores. We bought lots of finger puppets here.

Lighthouse in Miraflores, Lima.

This was taken at a hot springs place after our hike in Colca Canyon.

Picture of a 1 Sol coin, front and back. They also have 2 and 5 Sol coins, which proved to be very helpful because everything cost under 10 Sols and no one ever had change. 

Taken in a garden near the place where I took the picture of the mountains.

Some mountains in Arequipa.

A woman setting up shop at a rest stop around 4800 m above sea level. 

So I could have sworn that I took pictures of a gas station and the prices, but I can't seem to find it. Until then, he's a picture of some good ol' American Lays at the Lima gas station by our hostel. At this point, I've been told to not take pictures of things twice now (including this one). Now I may be acting like a dumb American at this point, but what's wrong with taking pictures of some chips in a gas station? Will I get yelled at in America if I try and do the same thing? Or is it because I'm Chinese and I might be a spy pretending to be a tourist so the Peruvians are suspicious of me? Anyways, the prices above are in Peruvians Sols, where 2.85 sols are worth $1 US, so these bags are definitely not cheap, but I can say that they do seem to taste less oily.

Check out the octane in Peru! So high! I took a picture of the prices too. Maybe I'll make that my next post...

Awesome door across our hostel in Cusco. I love this blue door. This one has no post-processing whatsoever.

Our hostel in Lima was the awarded 2006's safest hostel on Hostelworld.com. This is why...

Stairwell at our first hostel in Lima. It was super cramped and we had a hard time walking up with our big backpacks on.

Good Luck Chuck

So I just finished watching Good Luck Chuck and I'm in that feel good mood that I usually get in from watching a romantic comedy. I also miss my girlfriend an extra lot too. One thing that suprprised me from the movie was all the nudity though. I mean, it was great and all, so I'm not trying to diss that or anything, but it was just unexpected. I guess I can had the pretense that it would be a regular romantic comedy and not end up having more nudity and "sex scenes" than Wedding Crashers. Also, I thought that the movie wasn't laugh out loud funny at all. I'm not sure if it was trying to be that way, but I only found myself smiling or smirking at the cute parts and just being slightly amused at the parts where it was trying to be funny. But maybe that's why it was a romantic comedy and not just a comedy, since I don't remember laughing that hard while watching Serendipity either. Overall, I liked the movie. I think it was cute, and I also think that Jessica Alba is super cute in it. Anyways, it's late, till next time...

Cute little Peruvian girl in Cusco. This shot cost me 2.5 sols (almost a $1). Basically, in Peru, they have they cute girls with cute lambs sitting around the streets with there mom in traditional garb and if they catch you taking a picture, they follow you until you pay. However, this girl was just too cute to pass up.

Shot of a church window in Lima. I really like how the bricks are arranged around the window. Again, this has been post-processed to draw out the bricks a bit more.

Photo Blog

So I've decided to make this a photo blog. Here's my first contribution, taken in Peru, by the place we reserved the trip to Colca Canyon. Note: This picture was post-processed using Lightroom 2, using the 300 color preset. I really like how this effect draws out the texture of the wall. So far, this is one of my favorite photos. 

Spain, you better kick Germany's butt!

So Spain beat Russia 3-0 on Thursday. It wasn't as exciting as Wednesday's Turkey - Germany game, but Spain did play beautifully. It was like watching a ballet: their flow was amazing, their motions were fluid, and they played a really clean game. Good job Spain! Russia, on the other hand, played like typical Russians from a Hollywood movie: super physical and aggressive (and there was one guy that looked sooo scary, you know, the one with the beard...). Their hands could always be found pulling, holding, or pushing the nearest Spaniard and it seemed like they didn't have a care in world if they were touching the ball or other ppl's bodies when they challenged a play. Anyways, after an uneventful 1st half, Spain scored the 1st first goal of the match 5 min into the 2nd half and the match started to get more exciting. Some of Russia's tries were close but Spain kept them out of the box leaving Russia to shoot from 25 m out. It'd be good to see how Spain's defense holds up against the German's offense. Hopefully, it'll be good enough to stop the German's headers from inside the box. Anyways, as the title of this post says, Spain, you better beat Germany tomorrow! Go Spain!!!!

Farewell Turkey...

Turkey, you deserved to win. What can I say? Life can be so unfair. Playing without 9 of your starters, you rocked Germany and showed the world that you guys are an awesome team and a force to be reckoned with. You stole the ball off of every German player, capitalized on the Germans' smugness, and made it one of the greatest games I've ever watched. If only your second string goal keeper didn't suck so much... ARG! So frustrating! For those of you that didn't watch the game, you should, it had comedy, suspense, action, and everything else you could ever want from a soccer game. My voice is still recovering from the game. Anyways, there's more I want to write, but I'm at work right now, so until next time!

Let's go SPAIN! Make sure you kick Germany's butt in the finals!

Beowulf and Sweeney Todd...

So I watched Sweeney Todd and Beowulf last night (and by last night I meant about a week ago since I take so damn long to write these blogs posts) and I wasn't too happy with any of them. If you haven't seen any of them and you still really want to, you should probably stop reading since there may be some spoilers. Spoiler alert!

Alright, you've be properly warned. Sweeney Todd I "watched" with Kai and we both seemed to think that it was too slow. It might have been because Sweeney Todd was done like a musical (which I didn't expect until I heard like 2 songs in the first 10 min or something) but then Moulin Rouge was also done in the same way and I loved that movie. So maybe it was the music? Out of all the songs I only really liked the "Pretty Women" song and the one about the kid that wanted to steal Joanna (or is it Johanna with a silent "H"?) and the other ones I just couldn't understand since they were all singing together. So maybe it was because of all the songs that I didn't like, that seemed to have gone on for hours, that made it too slow and not very interesting.

Anyways, the movie wasn't all bad, it had some funny parts, like when the word "gandered" was said twenty times in a row which made me rethink how I look at girls and if I deserved a beating, or when Sweeney and the big cleavage girl were looking outside the window at people they could make into meat pies. And oh, you can't forget the parts when the dead bodies just slam on the ground, I wonder how they did that... Speaking of which, the movie also had some pretty disgusting parts too, with all the blood spraying out of Sweeney's victim's throats, I wonder if that really happens. I've certainly seen that in a lot of movies, but does blood really spray out like that in real life? Also, the movie ends with a sad ending and I really dislike sad endings, so maybe that's another reason why I didn't like it. I think the only exception to this is Gladiator, which was awesome, even though it had the saddest ending ever...which takes us to...Beowulf! (That was a totally unintended transition, but you liked that didn't you?)

So whoever it was that stopped us from watching Beowulf in theaters (I think that was Seth), thanks for saving me the $10. Beowulf was horrible. Now I understand that it takes lots of skill to make trailers. The trailer to Beowulf was deceiving, Sweeny Todd too, and don't get me started on Lars and the Real Girl (oh god, I thought it would be a laugh out loud comedy, boy was I wrong). But then, is making a trailer for a movie that is way off from the real movie actually skillful or is it just because the guy didn't know what he/she was doing? Or maybe the skill is in deceiving the audience to spend the money to see the movie or even just to see it?

Anyways, back to Beowulf. Beowulf sucked. I don't remember the original story too well, but from what Diego told me, it was totally off. And that stirred my memory a bit for me to come to the same conclusion. Also, while the CG was good, it wasn't awesome enough to make me think that the movie was good. I mean, the first Final Fantasy movie (Spirits Within, not Advent Children) had awesome CG too and I personally think it made up for the sucky plot. But Beowulf had good CG and a great plot that was already written for centuries! But they decided to mess around with it. On the plus side, Angelina Jolie was semi-nude, but again, not enough to make a good movie.

First blog post in years! (not counting the ones in INFO 204 of course)

So yea, this is my first blog post in years so please excuse me cause I'm a little out of practice. So why did I decide to start a blog again after all these years you ask? What could I possibly write about my life that I couldn't summarize in a couple words? Well... let me tell you by making a bulleted list (in joke)!

• Honestly, one reason is that I don't wanna pay for web hosting, not because I'm super cheap or anything, but because it'd be a waste of money, since it'd take me forever to design a site that I'd be okay with showing to others. So that's why I'm currently using a basic template. This might change in the future, but for now, I'll keep it.
• Another reason is because I wanted to check out the user interface for Google Analytics. The other day, I was trying to design some mocks and I was curious how Google Analytics displayed charts, since I remember it being pretty cool, but I just couldn't find any good screen shots online, so I tried to register a site to see the UI. However, since I didn't have any sites of my own and I didn't wanna pay for web hosting, I decided to start a blog. I have to tell you though, the screen shots online were better, since right now my traffic graph is just a horizontal line at 0.
  
• My girlfriend just started one: inkyeagle.wordpress.com
  
• I like to take photos and it'd be good to post the best ones here.
• I wanna keep a journal of the things I do everyday so I don't forget. I kept one before and it was really fun to read through it and see how I've changed.

Alright, so there are probably a bunch of other reasons, but those are the ones I can think of, and since it's already taken me like over a week to write just one post, I'll just publish this one.