Weekend Recap - Part 3

It was now Sunday. We had so much food left over from this past Friday that I decided to make some Vietnamese beef noodle soup called "Pho" to help cook off the rest of the sliced beef. I figured that since I was making it, I should just go all out and have everyone over again to enjoy it with me. We ended up having a BYOB Party...Bring Your Own Bowl. I didn't have enough large bowls to serve everyone so I just texted my friends to bring their own. Hehe, what a great idea!

I went to the Asian grocery store and picked up some ingredients. When I got back home, I got started on the broth. It takes a long time to prepare the broth and we were on a limited time schedule. In a large pot of water, I threw in some beef bones, some chunks of beef shank steak, some star anise seeds, cloves, an onion, a cinnamon stick, and some salt and fish sauce and then let everything just simmer.

Tary and I then briefly left the house to drive into Boston for our 3D/4D ultrasound appointment. It was a bit of a hike to get there and parking wasn't that easy to find through the downpour. We were both very excited though to take a sneak peek at our little guy! The whole experience was definitely worth it.

When we got there, we had to wait about a half hour for the previous couple to finish up. When it was our turn, we went into a large room with a bed, the ultrasound machine on the far side of the bed, a sofa on the other side, a projector over the bed which was displaying an image on a screen toward the foot of the bed, and a computer monitor on the wall next to the sofa.

Tary hopped on the bed and the nurse (attendant?) started with some normal ultrasound imagery and we got to hear Baby's heartbeat again. The sound is distinct, a little weird, but it never gets old. We also got the nurse to confirm that Baby is a boy. Finally, some actual confirmation!

The next part was unforgettable. The nurse switched on this 3D/4D mode and I was pretty much speechless. I can't fully describe how we felt as we saw various images of Baby but I guess the closest thing is an overwhelming feeling of love for him. I can't wait until he's finally born! Tary kept commenting on how much he looked like me. Hehe, hopefully he only has the good parts.

When the session was over (which flew on by), they gave us a DVD with a recording of the entire session. They also gave us some still photos of Baby that they took throughout the session. It'll be exciting to show Baby one day when he's older what he looked like before he was born. It's kind of crazy for the mind to take it all at once. Haha, my friend says it's like Total Recall.

So back home we went and when we got there, I quickly started simmering the Pho broth again. Normally you would let it simmer for many hours. We only did it for about 3 or 4 hours due to our time constraints. I was a little worried that the broth wouldn't have a chance to extract all of the flavors out of the bones and meat.

Well, my friends started showing up. Actually, I think 12 people showed up in total, each with their own bowls in hand. They all waited patiently for me to finish cooking everything. I was being a little bit of a Pho snob when my friend A.D. kept trying to suggest things to cook in the broth and I kept refusing. Cambodian people call this dish K'tieu and I often find that when Khmer people eat it, they often add things to the broth to make it much sweeter than how it's typically made. Pho is all about the savory broth and the thinly sliced meat that goes along with the noodles. When you are given a bowl of Pho, you are supposed to taste the broth first and then you add fish sauce, fresh lime juice, hoisin sauce, and hot sauce to taste. When you add all of this extra stuff to the broth before even tasting it, I think it is slightly insulting to the person who worked so hard to make the broth.

Anyways, my friend A.D. was really helpful in other areas (when he wasn't trying to K'tieu-ize my Pho). He helped me cook the rest of the noodles while I precooked the sliced beef. When that was all done, everyone came and ladled the broth into their respective bowls. Then everyone found a place to eat, whether it was around the kitchen table or standing by the counters. I was pretty nervous how the Pho would be received. It was only my second time making it...ever. And this was a lot different than the last time I made it. But from the sounds of everyone slurping the noodles and broth, I think it went over pretty well. Hehe, hopefully they weren't trying to spare my feelings. I know where I can make improvements next time. Just remember to BYOB!

Weekend Recap - Part 2

On Saturday, I woke up at around 7:45 AM and took a quick shower. I had a dentist appointment at 8:30 AM and I was still feeling like a zombie from the lack of sleep the night before. It was just a checkup to see how my gums healed from the surgery last month. I was pleased that things were looking good.

After the dentist appointment, I went home to pick up Tary. We drove north to LensCrafters where I had an appointment with the eye doctor. I have been having problems with my left eye lately where it's been twitching a lot during the day. It always felt like I had something in my eye. I thought the vision in my left eye was getting worse. After seeing the doctor though, I found out that my eye was twitching because it had actually gotten better. What?!

I normally wear glasses when I work on the computer. My prescription was -1.0 in my left eye and +0.25 in my right eye. The doctor told me that my left eye had gotten better to only -0.5 and that my right eye stayed the same. The reason why my left eye was twitching so much was that my glasses were at the wrong strength for me. Whew, what a relief. I had to pay for a new set of lenses but I was glad it was cheaper than having to buy a new set of frames.

After the eye doctor's appointment, we picked up Tary's cousin K.M. and I dropped them both off at their other cousin's house. They were going off to have a little girls' afternoon thing together.

I went home to change and put on some athletic-wear. I drove to the park near my house to play Ultimate Frisbee. I was the first one there so I was a little bored. I played some Bejeweled Blitz (which I think I need an intervention for) while I waited for the others to arrive. After about 15 minutes, the others started to show up.

It was a pretty low turnout. We had only 10 people come and play. The emails this week were late so I don't know if everyone knew that we were playing today. It was cold, windy, and freezing rain kept falling on us. It wasn't a great day to play but we still made the best of it. We only played two games but they were both very competitive and close games. I think I ended up on the winning side of both of them so that's always fun.

Weekend Recap - Part 1

Another weekend has passed and I've finally gotten some time to kind of jot some notes about it. It's kind of nice to recap what happened because one day, I'm gonna look back on these posts and wonder what I was up to. Hopefully this will be some good reading. Too bad it was so long so I broke up this post into three parts. Let's start with Friday.

After work, Tary and I were on our way to get some soft-serve chocolate ice cream (for the 3rd time this week) when one of my best buds A.D. aka "Deabo" called and let us know that our other good friends P.N. and L.N. were having hot pot, dry style (i.e., food cooked over a skillet served family style) at their place. I had never been to their place before so I was excited for a change of scenery. A.D. then mentioned though that they (P.N. and L.N.) were a little hesitant of having too many people there because of a lack of space. He briefly talked about the possibility of having it at our house but he didn't want to impose. Tary and I didn't mind having everyone over so we agreed to host the hot pot. How can we say no to good food in the company of great friends?

So the usual cast of friends came over. We had an assortment of thinly sliced rib-eye, various greens and vegetables, and even some shrimp that was cooked with butter over an electric skillet. The kitchen table was full of food, people, and of course laughter. It was tough cooking everything so a second skillet was added to the mix. I was excited because that meant the meat would get cooked faster and more importantly, closer to my plate.

After dinner, most of our friends went back home. Some had stayed to continue just chatting. Most of the conversation was about helping our friend A.D. let his inner "Deabo" out at PAX (the upcoming nerd convention). We had so much fun chatting that we lost all track of time. I think the guys stayed over until about 4:30 AM! Oh, I would pay for that the next day...

You Are Not a Sniper

I've been playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 now for about a week and I have one huge pet peeve about the game that I had to blog about it. Everyone and their little brother loves using the Recon class to be a sniper. In almost every game, most of my squad will be working together to complete objectives like capturing a flag, blowing up a M-COM station, leveling a building, or taking out enemy vehicles. Each of these tasks helps the team win. However, there is always at least one guy in the squad who's off hiding in the woods trying to be that sniper in Enemy At The Gate. Hey, guy! You are not a sniper!

There are four classes in the game, each with their individual strengths and weaknesses. The Assault class is useful for taking out enemy infantry and basically owning other people. He can support his teammates with ammo packs. A skilled Assault soldier can kill enemy infantry from both close and long distances. He can keep providing extra ammo for the other classes to continue blowing things up.

The Engineer class is great for repairing vehicles and for blowing up enemy ones. Engineers have problems in long range combat but are great at close range. Engineers can keep ally vehicles around longer by repairing them with his drill thingy.

The Medic class is great for providing suppressing fire, resurrecting fallen teammates, and for dropping health packs. The light machine gun is also great a taking out infantry when fired in short bursts. He can use his defibrillator paddles and bring back teammates that have died. Each "res" also restores tickets that are normally lost with each death.

Last and certainly least, we have the Recon class. The class is meant to sneak around in the front lines to spot enemy troops and to blow up objectives. They have a motion detector ball that they can toss nearby which reveals enemy locations. The Recon class can also blow up objectives and vehicles with their remote detonated C4. Lastly, the Recon class can use a variety of weapons ranging from sub-machine guns to shotguns to sniper rifles. However, everyone seems to forget that last fact and always try to snipe. Why? Sniping is so cool. It looks cool in movies. It looks cool in video games. It feels awesome when you are a one-man army who can strike fear in your enemies and make them paranoid to venture out in the open. Unfortunately, most people stink at it and can't shoot fish in a barrel.

Bad Company 2 is a team-based game. It's hard to win without working as a team. You can be the best person on the server and you will still lose consistently if the rest of your teammates aren't working together. All of the other classes fill some sort of rule that helps the entire team. But on every team, there are at least a half-dozen people trying to snipe. They only care about having a good K/D (kill/death) ratio. They think that as long as they kill more people than the number of times they die, they are helping their team win. They just run off on their own, hide somewhere, and wait for unsuspecting victims to run in front of their cross-hairs. A 2:1 K/D looks good on paper. But if you only kill 4 people in a round and your team still loses by 50 tickets, it doesn't mean anything! If you hid in the woods and let the enemy tank roll by and mow down 10 of your teammates, what good does that do?

Argh, snipers are so useless in this game! The main problem is that you just can't kill enemies fast enough. The sniper rifle usually takes two shots to kill someone. By the time you fire the first round, the enemies will have an idea where you're hiding. If there are multiple enemies together (which usually happens because the other team will be working together), you will get run over. Sure, you can hide and pick your spots and get the stragglers. But you can't cover your teammates' backs if you're always trying to preserve your own life.

The team is better off if you switched to a real class and did something useful. Anything! If you are an assault class, you can at least kill more enemies and at a much faster rate. If you are an engineer, you can blow up their tanks which keeps them from killing more of your teammates. Medics can bring your teammates back to life.

It is called the RECON class for a reason! It is not the Sniper class! Just because you have a slick ghillie suit, a pair of binoculars, and a buff rifle, that does not mean that you are a sniper! Stop wasting tickets and help your team. For the last time, you n00b; You are a not a sniper!

Ultimate Frisbee 2010 Season

On this past Saturday, the Ultimate Frisbee 2010 season got underway. I was excited to be playing Ultimate Frisbee again. At the same time, I felt a little hesitant because of my wrist. Would it hold up? It still hurts sometimes. This was the first action since the injury back in late October. It's also the first time I would be doing anything physical since last season so I know everything would hurt. Sometimes I hate it when I'm right...

There were about 21 people so we split ourselves up into 3 even teams. I was fortunate enough to play in the first game. The 3rd team would play the winner of our game. Being as stupid greedy gung ho as I am, I shouted "First to 5!". My buddy didn't hear me and requested that we play to just 3. I overruled and 5 it was...for now.

The first point of the season was brutal. It always is. Everyone was still trying to get their conditioning back. I know it's only been about 5 months since our last action but my lungs were on fire. I think we scored first. I don't remember because I felt like keeling over. I was wheezing, hunched over, gasping for air. I had the lungs of a smoker after a box of Marlboro's...except I don't smoke. I quickly shouted, "Let's play to 3!" I was relieved when the other team agreed.

We ended up winning the first game. That was so much fun but wow, my whole body hurts.We played the next game and we won that one as well. At this point, I was kind of hoping we'd actually lose a game just so I can sit down for a few minutes. My teammates luckily felt the same way and we let the other two teams play a few games while we rested on the sidelines.

After everyone had a chance to play a few games, we decided to split everyone up again into two large teams for one final showdown. It was a great game. We were down early but we caught up and took a small lead. The other team fought hard to tie it up at 9 points a piece. We ended up scoring the last point to win it all. Woo hoo!

It is now 3 days later and I am still soooooo sore from this past Saturday. My calves are sore. My quads are sore. My hamstrings are sore. My back is sore. Even my left arm is sore and I don't even use it to throw with. I feel so old. I know it's now the 2010 season and it has only been 5 months since the last season ended, but I feel more than a year older than I did the previous season. I don't know how professional athletes can keep going when they are sometimes more than 10 years older than I am.

I need to start exercising more so I won't feel so sore each week. It's hard to find time to do that though when I sit in front of a computer for most of the day. I suppose I can't complain. I'll easily take what I have now over some of the physically intensive jobs that I had to do in my younger days.

What's kind of funny is that my good friend, C.D. asked me why don't I just lift some weights in my basement? I replied, "Because they are so heavy!" Maybe when Baby is born, we can take him for little walks or something.

Well, the first game of the Ultimate Frisbee season is finally behind us. Hopefully one of many more to come this year. I'm looking forward to it! Bring it on! Just let me catch my breath first...

Wilfork and the Patriots

The free agency period has started for the NFL and we finally received some good news from the Patriots camp. I am so happy to hear that the Patriots and their NT Vince Wilfork have come to an agreement. Wilfork's contract is for 5 years, $40 million, with a $18 million signing bonus and a total of $25 million guaranteed. I like this deal for several reasons.

1. The Patriots retain their best defensive player who is still in his prime. The defense is clearly not as good when big Vince isn't anchoring the middle of the defensive line. They simply cannot hold up in the run game without him.
2. The deal seems pretty fair from both sides. The total value is much lower than I expected. I had no idea what kind of money Vince was seeking but I'm glad he wasn't seeking a ridiculous deal like the one that Albert Haynesworth signed last year. Deals like that can completely cripple a franchise if the player is a bust. Also, ridiculous deals prevent a team from signing other high profile free agents or retaining a team's own free agents.
3. Now that the deal is done, Vince has plenty of financial security for his family and can now stop worrying about his contract situation and just focus on what he does best, which is plug up the middle, wreak havoc on offensive linemen, and knock around QBs and RBs.
4. This deal also shows that the Patriots are willing to extend the contracts of their own players who have played out their rookie contracts. It shows that players can get rewarded while playing for New England. And it shows that the Patriots will pay for players they feel are a good fit into their system and philosophy.

In other signings, the Patriots have re-signed OLB Tully Banta-Cain for a 3-year, $13.5 million, and incentives which could raise the total value close to $19 million. I also like this signing because the Patriots are retaining their best pass rusher. Banta-Cain finished with a team-high 10 sacks and he was the only player who could consistently get some semblance of a pass rush. I feel that the Patriots may have overpaid him just a little bit but he already knows the system, can get some pressure on the QB, and is continuing to improve in other aspects of his game.

As for the remaining free agents on the Patriots, I really hope the Patriots can work something out with Leigh Bodden. He was clearly their best corner last year. He held up quite well even though the front 7 could not generate a consistent pass rush. I am concerned though because Atlanta just signed another CB, Dunta Robinson for 6 years, $57 million, with $25.5 million guaranteed. A quality corner will be costly this year and Bodden is the best one still available.

I also hope the Patriots can re-sign DE, Jarvis Green. He's clearly not the same caliber player when Seymour was still here but he's still a pretty good player that could easily start on most NFL teams. I think this will be his 3rd deal so hopefully he'll settle for a bit of a hometown discount.

Lastly, I hope RB Kevin Faulk will also return. He's the most consistent RB they have and he's a reliable 3rd-down back. He's good at pass protection and catching those short passes over the middle as Tom Brady's safety valve. He's also pretty good running from shotgun draw plays when the defense is playing the pass.

I love this time of the year. Winter is almost over and Spring is around the corner. Even though NFL action won't start for another 6 months, there is still plenty of things going on such as free agency, the NFL Combines, and the upcoming draft. What drives me crazy though is reading through forums and listening to people talk on the radio. People are saying all kinds of crazy stuff like the Patriots will be a sub-.500 team this year because they haven't been [over]paying high profile free agents. They also say stuff like the Patriots will be last in the division (AFC East). What have these people been smoking? These people can't be serious! Last I heard, we still have Tom Brady, Randy Moss (even though I can't stand him), a relatively good offensive line, a pretty good defensive line, rising stars in Mayo and Meriweather, and are still coached by one of the greatest coaches in NFL history.

Well, I can't wait for the 2010 NFL season to start. Time to get back on ESPN.com and Extra Points and see what else is new.

This Past Week

This past week has been brutal. I feel like I've been so busy that it's hard to balance everything that I enjoy in my spare time. It definitely affects how often I get to write on this blog. It's 3:36 AM right now and I can't fall asleep. I know I should be sleeping because I have to wake up early for church later this morning but I have too many things I want to write about and there aren't enough hours in the day to write them all. I know I’m going to pay for this later but here goes…

I normally won't write about work but I guess the events of this week are sort of blog-worthy. We're in “crank” mode and we're trying to get everything done in time for our upcoming release. I probably signed up for more things than I normally should and I should delegate more. I am a bit of a control freak so I would rather work hard on something just to get it to work the way I want it to than to leave it to someone else to do it. All of those extra hours were pretty stressful on both my physical and mental health. I had several milestones that I set for myself I put a lot of pressure on myself to meet them.

On top of all of the busyness at work, the video game (Battlefield: Bad Company 2) that I built my new computer for was released this week. After those long days at work, I just wanted to unwind and blow up some baddies. But unfortunately, the release has been far from smooth. On Tuesday night (March 2, 2010), after I got home from work, I quickly installed the game and set up my controls. I logged on for the first time and was eager to get into the action. What on earth were they thinking when they designed the GUI for this game? The whole interface is garbage. It is so confusing trying to manage my friends list, or browse through the list of servers. There are arrows in places where regular buttons would have made much more sense.

Everything just feels slow. The server list takes forever to refresh. When I finally got into a server, my screen immediately started spinning. Argh! They still haven’t fixed the stupid joystick binding? I went back into the settings to unbind the joystick keys and found that the developers removed the ability to unbind keys. What?! This used to work in the Beta. Okay, now I’m getting angry. How did this game get even buggier in the released version?

I got tired of trying to work around my problems so I just unplugged my joystick from the USB port. I went back into the game and played for what felt like only 15 minutes. The game just felt off. I’m really sensitive to lag so any kind of unresponsiveness feels apparent to me. It just seemed like every server had a 100+ ms ping. I guess that could be expected with the sheer number of people playing at the same time but I’m still not happy.

Some of the weapons in the game just don’t feel “right”. Grenades from the grenade launchers (i.e., n00b tubes) sometimes blow up. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they blow up but don’t do any damage. I don’t care what kind of damage they set for it but all I ask is that the gun’s behavior is consistent. Is that too much to ask?

The game wasn’t all bad. It was really awesome with the new “Destruction 2.0” feature where you blow up just about any obstacle or terrain in the game. A few times I got into firefights with someone and they would run through a doorway and hide behind a wall. I would then just blow up the wall and get a kill. That never gets old. It’s also awesome when you blow up the last support on a building and watch the entire structure collapse on itself and take out everyone still inside of it.

Anyways, I wanted to keep going but then all of the servers went down. Oh great. Now I can’t even play anything. Whenever you tried to join a game, it either made it look like you were logging in but then kick you out or it would just not work at all. That was about 10 PM at night. What am I supposed to do for the rest of the night? Play single player mode? That’s so boring…

What drives me crazy is that I work in Software QA. I know what’s it like to test a product and to make sure it’s as polished as it can be. I understand that there will always be unexpected things that will come up at customer sites and how it feels to issue a patch to fix the issues. But how does a company as large as DICE/EA not have found these obvious issues in their testing and addressed them? How can they still get things wrong when they can learn from what worked and didn’t work in their previous Battlefield games? I tried to find answers online to see if other users have posted workarounds but all of their online websites were also hammered and were either down or very sluggish. I’m sick of paying all of this money to companies just to get a sub-quality product and then wait months for the game to actually mature.

So I’ve been killing myself at work to get things done and thoroughly tested and all I want to do is to just relieve some stress with a nice video game. But I’ve been so disappointed thus far with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I was so excited early on but the game causes me more stress than I need right now. I’ve only played it a few days this past week and only for an hour or two at most each time. There are a bunch of things to like about the game but the there are so many fundamental flaws that It’s just too frustrating to play right now. I haven’t even played it this weekend yet. I guess I really don’t care that much about that game until they get their act together.

On a brighter note, work actually ended on a high note. I was able to finish everything that I wanted to do this week. Nothing feels better than to work hard and feel that you put in a solid week’s worth of work. I feel accomplished. At least I have Bejeweled Blitz to help unwind.