OMNINOGGIN

Back in my younger poor-college-student years, I’ve always been pissed that my cell phone bill was always substantially more than what my monthly plan costs due to cell phone taxes. Arnold taxes the average Californian 13.18% of their cell phone bill. If you tack on federal tax (5.48%), an average Californian will pay an extra $7.46 per month in taxes for a $40 per month plan. That’s about $90 per year. I was looking for ways to reduce this number and this is what I did:

1. Researched which state had the cheapest cell phone tax (found out that it was Nevada with 1.14% tax rate).
2. Opt for e-statement, so Sprint emails me statements instead of sending me a paper statements to my home address.
3. Change my address online to Caesar’s Palace Casino:
   3570 LAS VEGAS BLVD S
   LAS VEGAS, NV 89109
4. Start supporting the Nevada State government and watch my bill go down.

Here is the result of changing my billing address. Read on…

Paweena had to go work in Lakeport, CA (city by Clearlake) so I tagged along with her this weekend. Throughout this post, I will be assigning points to my experiences at Clearlake. To start it off, Paweena has been away for a few weeks in Los Angeles, it was nice to finally spend time with her (+3). Things are starting off great so far! Read on…

I changed jobs about 2 months ago to a Test Engineer at Coral8. We develop and sell Complex Events Processing software and one of the things we brag about is high availability and guaranteed message delivery. One of the questions we got from one of our customers today was, “Can we run over UDP for greater reliability?” I can tell you that UDP does NOT stand for “Undropped Data Protocol”, see Wikipedia (first sentence of second paragraph).

Believe it or not, this is a proper English sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

In fact any occurrences greater than zero is a proper sentence. If you are into geek notation this is what it means:

Buffalo [buffalo...].

To find out what the sentence really means you can check out the Wikipedia page, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, where they can explain it a lot better than I can.

Also because the English language is so random, people think they can do whatever they want with it to make it proper, see this blog that documents unnecessary quotation marks.

At the MTV Video Music Awards, Britney Spears half-assed a performance on the opening act. Naturally this generated lots of bad publicity for her which trigger her fan club uprise (see video below). Britney probably dealt with all the gossip a lot better than her fans. The morning after the VMAs, I saw this video posted on Digg. I watched it and laughed like any other video I find on Digg then disregard it. When I get back from work, I saw the same damn video on the television news (something I rarely watch)! I can’t believe that this stuff is newsworthy. So now if you search Google for “Leave Britney Alone” there are so many articles about it (including this one). I can’t believe how someone can become famous over night just for crying and complaining.

After months of dreaming and being lazy,
weeks of acquiring working hardware,
days of setting up the OS, Apache, and MySQL,
hours of migrating wordpress data and configurations,
minutes of settings up network IP routing,
and seconds of testing,
I have finally migrated this blog from WindowsXP to FreeBSD 6.2

It’s time for me to grow some horns. I’m looking forward to seeing how much more reliable, faster, and secure the blog will become. I’ll soon be posting tutorials on the troubles I’ve encountered throughout this process, but for now, this is FIRST POST on the new system!