Been going out past midnight to capture these little fuckers that have been constantly eating my plants (and flowers). I got five of them the first night, three more the next night. I think I’ve got them all but there may be unhatched eggs around that will eventually turn into adults. I will perhaps check again next week to make sure none of them left…even though I’m sure they will be back. =(

On another note, went to the Halo Reach launch event in downtown last Sat. Major disappointment. 2.5 hrs of lining up despite having a “VIP” line bypass access. Didn’t get a UNSC t-shirt since they only had 300 of them and they were all given away to people who were in front of us. Well we got to play a laser tag game where we shot Convenent/alien forces, kind of fun I guess. I still can’t get over the fact that random people got the t-shirt but Andrew and I and our group didn’t get shit. Sigh.

Just sold all the shares on my first ever stock trade! - it was a little scary. I bought NVDA(nVidia) at 8.92 and sold at 10.10, a 13% increase, not too bad for a first-timer I guess. I’ve been reading a book called “The Neatest Little Guide To Stock Market Investing”, it seems to be quite good and helpful so far, with very straight forward examples to follow and also a detailed collection of thoughts from a few of the world’s best investors. It’s easy to read but I have a feeling that in order to put the concepts into use it’ll probably take me a long time - consider that my budget is so limited. The technical terms are kind of confusing, even though I think I may get a better understanding in the coming days. The internet also seem to have unlimited amount of resources about trading. One I found useful today was www.investopedia.com, I have yet to spare time to read it though. Don’t think I’ll be buying another stock anytime soon without attempting to do some actual analysis on them while referencing the book. This is going to be fun, I think.

Today I had my first dance lesson in life, with Wendy. It was a small class with 9 people I think, and we had a chance to learn “cha cha”. I think the underlying routine isn’t that difficult when you see someone doing it but when you actually do it yourself you know how hard it really is. But I think it’s something that once you get the hang of it it’ll become automatic…pretty much just like any other thing, I guess. I’m actually glad that most of the students weren’t much better than I was so I didn’t have to be the worst in the class, lol.

Have been a long while since I wanted to sell my photographers on stock image sites but I never had a chance to do it. Today I got a chance to clear up one item on my to-do list that is to sign up for these sites. Most of them requires an annoying registration process which includes uploading copy of your ID, answering bunch of questions as a form of a “quiz” to make sure you “fully understand” the terms…etc. What surprised me was that these sites usually don’t want landscape/nature/scenery type of images, and the fact is that the bulk of my best images fall within those categories…. I don’t care, if they want images of sports I’ll go shoot sport, if they want still life I’ll do so, nothing is too challenging for me in terms of taking photographs!

And then I had a cup of “V8″ veggie juice for the first time in my life - it actually tastes okay. I’ve always avoided it as I generally dislike tomatoes and veggies. I had always wonder how people can actually drink up tomatoes, and the puree looks gross. I don’t know, I guess I really need to eat more veggie/green stuff so drinking veggie juice would be a good start. It may magically cure my bad/dry skin condition..who knows.

Bought the game last week (used, Craigslist), and couldn’t stop playing since then. Made by Rockstar games, same company that did Grand Theft Auto. I really like the detail the designers put into the game - the realistic weather changes and sound effects (love the thunderstorms), the extremely detailed and realistic formations like the canyons, valleys, rivers…all that good stuff. Riding the horse in the game I really feel like I have gone back in time when I visited Utah - in fact I think a lot of the sceneries are made based on the earth formations found in Utah and Arizona. The canyons remind me of Canyonlands National Park, and the arches of course, remind me of the Arches National Park. I can spend an entire night just to ride the horse and wander around the vast plains and the narrow canyons! The missions are fun, interactions are pretty cool, in-game physics work well, I don’t really have too much of a complaint. Maybe it’s a little over-realistic but I guess most modern games tend to do it that way.

It fried today. My screen was showing these crazy “colorful” random patterns and I knew something was wrong. It was scary as you never know whether it’s the display card, the motherboard, software drivers, or something else. I rushed to Futureshop to get a GeForce 210 ($59, cheapest shit), plugged it in, and my PC revived. Now it’s the hard decision whether I should keep the display card and keep using my PC, or completely get rid of the PC since I have this really cool laptop now that is a few times faster than my PC. It’s a tough call since I have 5 internal harddrive right now and huge amount of data, if I get rid of the PC I’ll somehow have to be able to access data from these harddrives via some sort of adapter. I came across the “Vantec Nexstar Universal Storage Adapter” which claims to be able to connect to all kinds of storage devices externally via USB - HDD, DVDRom, memory cards, everything. It only costs $23 I think I’ll pick up two of them and see how cool it really is..