Must Vegie, no Belly

During the sun rise, my camera's battery decide to deplete at the right moment (and I decided to not bring the charger with me!!) so no pics ever since, and frankly, Wilfred's camera's battery also run out (with an almost-full CF card)...

 

After the sun rise (about 6:30am), good guess for those who think I would go back to sleep (which is exactly what I did)...

 

My friends woke me up around 10, then we kindda rushed to Buffalo again (to another outlet).  With the help of GPS and the nearly-no-line-up-customs, we got there around 11....  (wow 1 hour, how nice)

 

For lunch, we went to an italian-style restaurant (again!).  The price was lower, and the food was so-so, nothing special ;-)

 

The outlet consists of both outdoor and indoor stores, and what we bought from there?  SHOES!  Man, I can say no-more, it's mad-expensive to buy shoes in Canada, period.  After exceeding $100USD for each of us, we panick'ed and remove all the boxes for shoes (since they costed the most) and wear them (and hide the old shoes somewhere in my car).

 

When we go to the customs, I made a boo-boo decision upon seeing a traffic and thinking I could get around that.......  ended up having to get on the same highway after 10 mins (yes, we lost 10 mins and the line up grew a little)...

 

The customs asked us for passport, and we started chatting ever since...  normal stuffs like "how long have you guys been in US for", "what did you guys do in US", "are you all residents of Canada", "how much of the goodies you guys bought in this trip"...  while the custom guy were holding our passports.  After all the chats, he gave back our passports and we're free to go ----  wait a min, when did he scan our passports?  No he didn't actually~

 

After passing the customs my friends finally used the DVD in my car, and passed out after the movie until arriving home~

I know I spelled it wrong (or did I spell it right?), but I do mean to spell it this way...

 

The trip was "buffy", and it has "fall", and it does pronounce as "buff fallo".

 

The trip consists of 2 days of shopping and 1 nite of staying at hotel at Niagra Falls.  I never thought staying at Niagra at night would be so much fun, so much that me and my friends didn't get to play the UNOs we brought, so much that we used up our limited battery for our cameras, so much that I never had a funner night seeing others sleeping.

 

I've never driven to Buffalo before, actually I don't remember going to Buffalo for my entire life.  So GPS is needed for me (well for us), which Vincent (my friend) bought it a few days before the trip.  The thing just works, even everytime it tells me to turn Right, I turn Left!  All it does is to adapt my way and sense of direction, and do its "Recalculating".  In turns, I get to know its way of thinking too -> No U-Turn!

 

So on Sunday (July 1), just about 2km from the border into NY state, as the last exit passed us, the traffic jam hits us.  By then I notice there's another section of the road (separated by concrete barrier) for trucks specifically, and we saw few cars stopped and try to turn back (as they realize they're in the wrong section).  We were so laughing (while we're stucked in traffic).  As we slowly approach the border (which is just 2km away), we finally saw the custom stations (an indication of we're almost there).  By the time we get to the custom station, we realize that the cars are diverted and the station WAS NOT IN USE!  We felt dumb, and at the same time, we found that the truck section of the road, which was previously separated by concrete barrier, is MERGING into our section!  GRR!  (we know we should've just taken that section!)

 

So by the time we arrive at the mall it's already 3pm, 3 hours to shop - fine!  One thing I do have to mention is that, unlike Canadians, ppl there are really working hard, and even at 6:30pm - 30 mins passed their closing hours.  They showed no sign of packing up and leave, they showed passion in helping us to find what we really need...  I was astonished.

 

We then head to our home-of-stay-for-the-night -> Hilton Hotel.  Betty (my friend) told us it doesn't have Falls-view, thus no fireworks and no sun rise.  Here's the surprises start - we get the falls view, and better yet, we get BOTH of he falls covered in the same view, and the Fallsview Hotel is just right in the middle between the Falls, not blocking any scenaries, it's just AMAZING!

 

We went for the swimming pool, and frankly I was the only one that couldn't swim!  LAWL >:O

 

After that we went back to our hotel, dress up, and the fireworks begin.  Here's another surprise, the fireworks take place near the American falls, which is right in front of us (since we could see both of the falls).  I was taking the video (though crappy) while Wilfred (my friend) was doing the camera-man, taking fast continuous pictures.  And this drained the batteries of our cameras.

 

Hmm...  wait, we're missing something - dinner.  Oh yes, so let's count the time -> 6:30pm left mall, 8:00pm check into hotel, 9:00pm swim, 10:00pm watch fireworks, so when did we take our dinner?  Nope, we haven't.  We then walked to Fallsview hotel (actually the mini-mall at Fallsview casino) and had our italian-style dinner there.

 

Stuffed belly, stiffed body weren't good for us, and we just headed back to hotel and...  sleep!

 

I actually slept quite bad that night, almost awaken for the whole night, and I managed to get to see the sun rise.  On a side note, even though I managed to take the picture when I first see the line of the red-sun, Wilfred told me the sun had risen long ago, just that we didn't get to see the sun itself (cuz there were buildings blocking and all the other craps!)

 

After that I went back to sleep and waiting for the second day (it was the second day already but anyways!) to come...

(Find info about ImagineCup at http://www.imaginecup.ca, it's a programming contest)

 

Aww, I didn't get into top-6 (actually, top-7) so no seattle and korea for me~  But this was fun already and alot of free stuffs (yeah free $$ for us to spend too).  I was only ranked at 14 out of 145 contestants there (regional qualifier so not a lot of ppl to face).  Oh well, it's good to meet alot of ppl (students) and get to meet Charles too (haven't seen him for 5 years).

 

Now I'm all tired out of all the walking and standing, and the work at my work place too!

I just found that I haven't been writing anything for months...  so here is something I wanna share:

 

DreamScene - a free component for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, allows you to use video files as your wallpaper and play it.  Of course it wont play the sound, and it may not be very productive.  But at the technical-side of it, it's very cool!

 

This free thinggy isn't final version...  it's just a preview version so I guess there are few issues to work out.  But it looks so damn good already (see screenie below).

 

One down-side is that, if you use dual-screen you may be out of luck, as your video card may not have big enough texture size to support both of your screens.

A while ago I was surfing net for things about Zune (an upcoming new portable player manufactured by Toshiba), I came across with the following story:

 

quote from "Ryan" at Gizmodo.com

I actually saw some kid on the subway yesterday using his gigantic 15" laptop as an MP3 player.  Picture a guy walking into the train, holding his laptop in its case with the screen cracked open a few inches to prevefnt the laptop from going to sleep.  He was careful to hold the laptp with both hands an parallel to the ground.  He then proceeded to open it up fully, maximize iTunes, fiddle around wit the track and volume, then slightly close the screen again.  On the very next stop, he got off, still holding his screen open.  It looked completely ridiculous and cumbersome, and this is exactly why portable media players have a market today.

 

 

Garfield loves sleeping, so do I.  Too bad I have to wake up early every weekday now and flee to work.  Nothing really has to do with Monday.  It's not like me to eat breakfast, but I did this morning, and bited myself twice...~

 

The traffic went easy on me, or should I say it's expected.  Last thursday I went out at 7:20am, arrived at 8am sharp.  Last friday I went out at 7:10am, arrived at 7:30am; so guess what time I arrived if I went out at 7:15am this morning, and you should get it right (or else go back to grade 3 math).

 

So there are 2 things sitting on my desks with notes from my higher-ups saying they're wrong and need to be fixed, fine I'll do it.  So I found this and get it right, and save.  When the program saves it to the database it reloads it to reflect the saves, but this time, the saves aint there and it simply reverted my changes!!!

 

Stucked for an hour attempting the same thing and nothing works, and the worst of all these is that, my manager's changes are saved when I asked her to try it out!!!  So WTF!

 

edit: 10:06am the program started doing something else now - it keeps disconnecting on me!

edit: 10:09am the program somehow reverted my document about 4 versions older...  omg!  it keeps versioning and revert them back without asking me?!?!?!?!?

edit: 10:22am after fixing the versioning problem, it now added 3 new items for me randomly!!!!

edit: 10:26am just to give an idea of how long this piece of sh*t takes to save the file and reloads it (4 mins).

edit: 10:29am it freaken added another 2 random items!!!  I deleted one and saved (and see if anything else is going to happen).

edit: 10:33am loading.......  sigh!

edit: 11:00am things finally work normally...  I have no clue what happened earlier time this morning!!!  But as long as it works fine I'm cool with it.