mahalo.

First win of the season for my Tuesday hockey team. 3-0. We were short with only 6 skaters too. I scored the first one and I think got a second assist on the second. That’s a game winner baby! I have this interesting looking shiner on the back of my right shoulder though… I wonder where it’s from.

Finally finished the first season of 24. Lost sleep, but it was worth it.

Three nights, three games of poker this weekend… now gotta start reviewing my blackjack before going to vegas this weekend =)

been doing a lot of shopping last couple of days. first i did the online order at banana. then thursday, i bought some more stuff at banana. this morning, i went back to banana to exchange some stuff and bought some more stuff, although in the end, i just ended up spending about $1 more. and i think i’m going to return the entire online order. it’s been a nice sale though… very nice =)

then after banana this morning, sri, mimi, allen and i headed out to the gilroy outlets where i spent more money. i’ve been looking for a pair of dark-colored running shoes for a while to replace my decrepid nikes. i ended up settling on a pair of adidas trail running shoes for about $37. along the way, i picked up a $12 pair of shorts and $12 of socks. all pretty good deals in my mind. only other purchase i made was at the nike factory store, where i picked up a $7 size 1 soccer ball =). it’s just sort of fun to play with in your hands, and it’s neon green and a way for me to work on my footwork. that was pretty fun.

now i’m eyeing a set of poker chips online… buy it now for $67 although it’s $20 for shipping. so $80 for 500 chips, an aluminum case, two decks of cards, 5 dice and a dealer button… so tempting, so tempting… i think i’m going to wait and see how the auctions go though. i won’t use buy it now unless i think it’s really necesary.

i’ve also been losing sleep watching episodes of 24. that show is so addicting.

man, over the last 2 days, i’ve spent over $300 at BR. and i’m going back today! although it will be to return stuff and maybe do a price adjustment.

Another sort of strange thing happened. Recently I placed an order with Snapfish, and where the photos usually take 3-5 days to get to my house, this time it was delayed. So I asked their customer service what happened and if I could get a refund. What they told me is that in these occasions, it’s usually just a delay on the part of the postal service, and that I should get my order within 20 business days. I totally interpreted that as pure BS, but lo and behold, 19 days after my order shipped, my photos turned up in my mailbox yesterday. who would’ve thought? ye of little faith.

Hotmail recently announced that they would follow in yahoo!’s steps to increase their default mailbox size. users will get 250MB default, up from their previously measely 2.5MB. yahoo! made a similar increase a week or so ago, bumping up to 100MB from 4MB. I still wouldn’t use hotmail just because of all the spam those mailboxes attract. And they also have a really stupid shutdown policy. basically if someone reports that they received spam from your address, your address gets shutdown after a single investigation that is brief, to be generous.

someone in the slashdot forums reported that they tried an experiment. they signed up for a new hotmail account. sent no emails from it. and then from another email address, they reported to hotmail that they received spam from the newly created account. hotmail ended up shutting down that account. they must have not even bothered to check how many emails were sent from the spammed account. in a day when email spamming worms can spoof senders addresses, i think that’s just a pretty crappy policy. what good is having 250MB of storage space when all that means is that you can lose that 250MB suddenly, without cause.

additionally, i don’t know about other yahoo! and hotmail users, but while I was using yahoo mail, i was almost always near 100% storage. Companies must have realized that their users often quite near capacity. This might have been okay if there were some way to export emails from your inbox to your local machine, but to my knowledge, that was never an option. instead, they basically played on the fact that no one else out there was offering any better. my guess is that users that got a good email address on gmail will favor their gmail account over their previous yahoo and hotmail accounts if those were secondary accounts. if they were primary accounts i can see why it might be hard to switch addresses. although the prospect of receiving spam in a newly minted gmail account could detract some people from advertising it.

going to start small, unlike the kick-start i gave myself two summers ago. it’s just going to start with:

Every morning…
1. do as many push-ups as i can do
2. do as many sit-ups as i can do

3. do as many pull-ups as i can do

Eat less bad food during the day.

On days when I can go to the gym, run for at least 20 minutes, work it up to 25 over the course of 2 weeks. Then depending on how I feel, run between 25-45 minutes every day I go to the gym. If I don’t run, bike/precor for at least 30-35 minutes, or do stairclimber/super stair climber(thing with actual stairs) for 20-25 minutes (that super stair climber is rough).

See if I can’t get back down to about 180-185 in a month.

On an unrelated topic… for a while, I was pretty anti-labor unions. But my stance on that has mellowed out a bit more recently.

Now I think, labor unions are bad… unless they are a means of getting the attention of an incompetent management that is clearly being wasteful of resources. Or expressing to management that there is a need (not a want) among the employees. For example, the porn industry recently found HIV infected actors/actresses. Porn stars wanted more medical precautions. That sure sounds like a reasonable need to me when directors prefer that they not use condoms.

A labor union is effectively a negotiating tactic based on the fact that the effect of an entire group of workers to refusing to co-operate is much more devastating than a single worker saying that if they don’t get a raise, they’re going to call in sick for a week or two or month.

If you look at it from a purely logical standpoint (meaning, no emotional/human interest), look at the situation. The company doesn’t have the resources, or simply refuses to, pay you more money or provide you with more benefits. Usually (or at least from what I’ve read from news reports… which may or may not be accurate) union heads try to compare their worker’s salaries to the salaries of someone comparably employed at another location. You would think that hey, if they believe they can get something better somewhere else, then they should go do it. Quit and get your better job. Market economy right?

But then it’s almost always the situation that that simply isn’t a convenient solution. Maybe there are no other jobs in the vicinity that offer those kinds of opportunities. Maybe the job being compared to is similar in subject, but different in terms of the actual skills needed (i.e. between pro sports leagues). But in that case, if you have no reasonable recourse, what exactly are you negotiating with? What is your next best alternative? If it looks like the only other option apart from working in the conditions that you’re in now is to work at an even-lower paying job with less benefits, then this is already the best thing you can get given your situation. Your next best alternative is not a viable option. Going on strike then is not a negotiation - it is a form of coercion. The employer has no real reason to provide you with means beyond what they have already given. And given that they do want you to be happy employees (because happy employees are productive employees) then you are simply pressing them beyond what they have and creating an unnecessary burden on the finances of the company. Also, you have to consider what happens if your company is eventually forced to shut down because of inefficient operations. Then, you are left with your next best alternative, which was worse off than your state before you decided to go on strike.

Now what would happen if there were no unions. Remember, this is a unique situation where you basically have an isolated economy of a single employer and a large number of employees. My guess is, considering that again, this is a market economy, the workers would suffer for a while under the tyrannous rule of the evil corporation. But in the long run, another company will see this supply of cheap labor, and come in, creating a new labor market. At this point, you will see the situation begin to improve. Wages and benefits will rise naturally from competition (unless the two companies collude… i.e. a la price fixing) everyone benefits. The companies will still have relatively cheap labor (they will not raise salaries beyond their MR=MC point (i think this was the principle… can’t exactly remember how to derive it), the employees will have the best benefits possible given the financial strenght of the companies.

The union would have effectively artifically raised the cost of labor, making it difficult for other companies to come and enter the market. The labor unions would have effectively shot themselves in the foot for a short-term fix.

Again, to my point in the beginning, if you really have a need that must be addressed, or it is clear that the company is wasting resources that could have been allocated to you, then, okay. I can see why you would be upset and feel some sort of obligation out of principle to unionize. And I can see why a singular voice could be ineffective against a bureaucracy. But to push a strapped company because you aren’t being paid as well as your counterparts in a wealthier part of the country… man… suck it up dude.

On that note, I’m afraid I do have to support the potential NHL labor stoppage if the OWNERS don’t get what they want. This is one of those cases where another company will not be able to step in and provide better benefits for the employees (unless you count the WHA, but they won’t be anywhere close to the NHL in terms of benefits and salary); but it really doesn’t matter because here’s a situation where the players want more, but the owners simply don’t have the money to pay them (this is a want, not a need). I mean, these owners are funding the franchise out of their own pockets and are losing money and the players want to be paid more? Seems sort of ridiculous. What the owners have proposed (I believe this is right…) is a luxury tax to be placed on the wealthiest franchises, that will be re-distributed among the other teams in the league.

I guess I can see this from two sides. On one hand, why the heck would a team that has worked hard to make a lot of money have to give any of that away to other teams in the league? On the other hand, if having more teams in the league means increased exposure, leading to increased profitability for all teams in the league, then this might be a good solution until the weaker franchises are more financially stable. My personal opinion is that player’s salaries jumped too quickly. I’m not sure about overexpansion, as it is some of the older franchises (i.e. Pittsburgh, Chicago, Ottawa, Buffalo) that haven’t done well, not the newer ones. If anything, the newer ones are doing better because their fans are still excited about the young franchise. But older teams have fewer excuses to lose. And if you look at the newer franchises (Nashville, Columbus, Minnesota) they didn’t steal the big stars from the struggling teams. Amonte and Roenick went to Philadelphia. Jagr went to Washington and now New York. Lang went to Washington and now Detroit. Anyhow, I don’t think a salary cap is the answer, but I sure hope some kind of revenue sharing plan gets worked out. Although, I personally wouldn’t mind if the league contracted to 26 teams. If the fans don’t want to support their teams, then the loss isn’t that monumental anyways. And if the fans really do want their team back, they will eventually get their team back and help them succeed (i.e. Minnesota).

I’m done rambling, hitting “Submit” now.

sunday, i expected to take the family out to dinner for father’s day, but it turned out that a meeting at our church arranged for a new couple ran a little late, so that never happened. so, i ended up taking advantage of a present that christina got me… the first two seasons of 24!

After watching the first three hours of the first season, I do agree that the first season was better than the third. But it may just be that there’s a lot more character development in the beginning of the season… I missed out on that during the third season. I also kind of wish that I hadn’t known what happened in the third season before watching the first. Because now I know that Tony isn’t the mole even though they’re trying to portray him that way, and that Nina is the mole. Man, Tony was so different in the first season… and Mia Kirshner… she’s pretty nice… Elisha Cuthbert on the other hand, was definitely not as cute in the first season, and much stupider… no wonder everyone hated her. I wonder how she ended up the way she was in the third season.

i just started using firefox, the new browser being developed by the mozilla foundation. man, it is sweet, compact and fast!

you can get it from:
www.mozilla.org

i was motivated to look into mozilla after reading about firefox and having to have to deal with the recent adware attacks. as it stands for now, firefox looks to be my new default browser.

it also has a built in pop-up blocker (the google toolbar was nice, but built-in is better), and uses google as the default search engine. also very extendable. right now i’m using some cool looking skin called “noia”? it is good stuff. did i mention that it’s fast?

back to my original decision. the potential reward is too good. and even the worst case scenario is better than what i can earn almost anywhere in 6 months. i really enjoy working with the people there and the office location is nothing to complain about. and i will get to do a lot, lot, lot of coding.

have been skimping out on some of the more recent releases, but i must see:

i, robot
king arthur
spiderman 2

and this movie that kelly linked me to… it looks so funny.
Harold and Kumar