BZ, Rolo, and the new iPhone 3GS

I finally found a few spare minutes to drop a post into this pitiful blog. I’m literally writing this post for my own benefit as I’ve probably alienated everyone else that bothered to spend 30 seconds on my site. I think I’ve gotten the site to where I want it visually, so now all it needs is some content…..and yes I know the twitter feed on the right is messed up but I already contacted the developer and he’s putting together a fix…

iPhone
I never thought I would ever get into the iPhone craze but on June 19th, I ended up trekking over to Bellevue Square to stay in line for about an hour and a half. Funny thing is that I “reserved” a spot online a day before launch day on Apple’s site but apparently there were two types of “reserved” - one with a phone on hold and the other without. I ended up in the line with an iPhone on hold – which I didn’t. 1.5 hrs later and the nice Apple lady asks me for my name, “Brian….Zam..”, oh looks like you’re not on the list. Ugh. Ended up not being a big deal, she just told me to tell the “Orange Shirt Apple Guys” that I started online.

20 minutes later I have an iPhone in my hand…3 minutes later I fell in love…

Livestrong 5K
It’s been a mere 14 years since I was made to run in a race. Yup that’s right high school is the last time I ran in anything that resembled a track. So I can’t remember the exact reason why I chose to run a 5K this year but I figured I should do SOMETHING new this year. After a few hours of searching about 5K’s and looking online for any upcoming runs, I ended up chosing the Seattle Livestrong Challenge sponsored by Lance Armstrong as my first 5K. That was back in April, I had about 2 months to train for the run. I ended up doing 1 or 2 short runs before the 5K, I was definitely not prepared for this race.

BZ and his Bib

Race Day
The night before Race Day (June 21st) I did not get enough sleep, I’m pretty sure I got about 3-4 hrs of sleep. I was running on adrenaline and a 5 hr energy shot. We got to Seattle Center pretty early because we had to pick up our bibs and t-shirts. The event was pretty well organized, the cyclers went first. We actually bumped into Charlon right before he was off to tackle the 100 mile course.

Ready…Set…Go
It’s was 8am and all the runners for the 5K run/walk were in the chute…5…4…3…2…1 and we’re off. After only 3 minutes I’m was already started to feel tired, fcuk. My lack of sleep was starting to hit me, but I queued up my “sprint” beats on the ipod and I got a short boost of energy. I was able to go non-stop for another 5-10 minutes but had to slow down again. My lungs were definitely not used to that.

The only time I looked back was to make sure Myra was close by, I swear she stayed back just to make me feel better for being so slow – hahah thx Nukka. My biggest fear during the race was that I would need to be picked up by the “service” van for being too slow during the 5K. So I made it a point to keep looking straight ahead and push myself. Another major energy booster were the notes some of the runners pinned to their backs. “I miss you Mom”, “I hate you Cancer, you took my loved ones away!” those quotes along with pictures of their lost loved ones made me want to run harder.

One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind after crossing that finish line was that this would not be my last run for the year….

More posts to follow…

Lots n’ lots of stuff has happened in the past month and needs to be put into the blog (plus various threats from some readers that the site just plain sucks).

Most of my recent updates have been dropped into Facebook or Twitter, which explains the lack of updates on the site.

It’s about 2:48am PT right now and I just finished cleaning up the Categories (it was a such a mess, after I found the “proper” way to setup tags and categories I just had to fix them); tomorrow will be dedicated to fixing up the Tags.

Some of the upcoming posts include:

- Our recent run in the Livestrong Challenge in Seattle
- Training for the 1/2 marathon in Chicago
- iPhone and maybe my own personal review?

Stay tuned…no really stay tuned

This post is coming courtesy of my new toy…the new iPhone 3GS. If this doesn’t get me to update the blog more often nothing will…..

This blog is dying quick…..maybe the WordPress upgrade to 2.8 might help….stay tuned for another update hopefully soon…

Just a quickie post to show ya’ll I made it to chuch on Ash Wednesday!
Uploaded from Flickr

Wishing all of you safe and Merry New Year! We’ll be staying in on NYE to save some $$$, then off to the slopes tomorrow to spend it.

Look for a new me in 2009 ( dang if it was 2003 that would totally rhyme – oh well).

b-side

UPDATE
So we TRIED to make it up to the Snoqualmie on New Year’s Day but WSDOT did avalanche control for ALL the major highways to the mountains. We (Me, Myra, DP, and Quang) packed our ish in the MDX – trekked onto the North Bend McDonalds to get our quickie breakfast. Five minutes later we pass a sign that said “PASS CLOSED”. We’re like oh shit, did anyone check the websites?

We thought maybe the sign wasn’t updated so we kept going. Four minutes later we see the SUV cop car and the road is coned off. Shit. We waited there for maybe 5 minutes checking online and the ski phones to see if we can hit up Stevens or Crystal. Find out for Stevens HWY 2 was closed, and Crystal’s ski phone was out of order.

Dammit. Not a good way to start off the year.

The title is a little misleading in that I’m actually only measuring from August to December; I lost a few stats when moving my blog from my personal computer to a dedicated hosting solution. So here they are:

Tunes: Mer
I was pretty surprised peeps were actually interested in this post. ME:R has a nice mellow pop sound to it, something I’d listen to while I”m doing something else. If you haven’t listened to the song in the post, try it out. If you like it, go to his myspace page to listen to more tunes.

Awesome: Dear Wallstreet…
I knew I’d get a few hits on this post. It’s so eloquently put and pretty much sums all of 2008′s financial break-downs.

Toys: Out with the Old, In with the New
I was hella excited when I saw my board arrive. After ripping it out of the box, I could tell it was itching to get up to the mountains. To this day, the board is still a snow virgin – but I’m hoping to pop it’s cherry on New Year’s Day.

Departure: We be leaving on a Jet Plane…
This post was about our first day on our San Jose trip. When we arrived at the hotel we were more than plesantly surprised, the room surpassed our expectations the minute we got there. Flat screen tv, free network access, and a sleep comfort bed….perfect. Too bad Myra was sick – she couldn’t enjoy it as much as she would have.

Sick: Update
I’m not sure why this post had so many hits. Folks may have been curious to see if I was getting better, or just waiting for me to get worse ( dp most likely ).

That’s it for now. One of my goals for 2009 is to get more posts in, and more often….

So some guy took a bunch of 8 bit NES games and remixed them to X-mas tunes. I downloaded the free zip file and there were a few songs that were pretty recognizable.

Download the tunes and see for yourself. Poor guy has a sick dog so if you like the tunes donate a few bucks.

8 Bit Jesus

Mother Nature showered us with another round of snowfall on X-mas day. So much so that the drive to church was pretty sketch. We ended up helping a Subaru make it into St. Louise’s parking lot after it got stuck in the snow.

After church, we picked up some food at our new favorite Chinese restaurant, Kings. While we were waiting for the food to be done, we saw a few cars getting stuck trying to enter/exit the restaurant parking lot. I swear, no one in Washington state knows how to drive in the snow. Never gun your car when you’re stuck, that almost always exacerbates the problem.

We ended up watching movies and trying to fight our food comas…..I lost.

The month of December was definitely a blur. We were all worried that this snowboarding season was going to be a shitty one, given that we didn’t start getting snow in the mountains until last week. And we all got dumped on, the mountains and the low lands. Roads were horrendous for days because cities refused to use salt because it harms the environment.

Seattle drivers suck in the snow so the campus was closed for a few days last week, MS Fargo campus even made fun of us. So we got a few days of working from home last week which pretty much killed productivity for most of our guys. Most peeps were OOF so getting anything done was close to impossible.

Myra’s “uncle Allan” from Hawaii came and stayed with us for week. Poor guy was here for the worst Seattle snow storm in years, and actually ended up stayin in Kent for a few days because driving conditions wouldn’t allow us to make it down there to pick him up. Allan and I ended up driving Myra crazy with our never-ending quest to unlock new characters in Xbox 360′s Castle Crashers. (Cool – while searching for the link to Castle Crashers – I found out that they’re releasing a badly needed update to the game! – Myra’s gonna be pissed! ) We tried to make it out to the malls a few times but didn’t want to chance it. Because the snow kept most people in, when we could make it to the mall – I was able to shop peacefully….sorta.

My bro and his girl came last week as well. Rawry took off early (loser), and my brother is chillin’ here till the 30th. We broke our time honored tradition of opening presents at midnight on X-mas eve just so Rawry can see us open her and my brother’s gifts. All I can say is damn we made out like bandits.

We ended up having dinner at our parent’s house, Turkey meatballs, Red Lobster Cheesy biscuits, family size Mac ‘n Cheese, steak and ham. We also ended up buying all the junk food we can think of to tide us over during X-mas day.

More updates to come post X-mas day….