IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY

This morning, I registered the domain tracytang.com. As some of you may already know, that just happens to be the name of my sister.

I’ve had my eye on that domain for almost three years now. As luck would have it, someone also in Vancouver had it. The annoying thing was the owner didn’t do anything with the site. At first, it just re-directed to another weird site. Then for the last year or so, it didn’t go anywhere. I actually thought I had a chance about a year ago, when the renewal date came up, but the owner renewed at the last minute.

This year though, I kept watching the domain status and I knew something was up when it lapsed beyond the renewal date. The catch is, just because it goes past the renewal date, a domain can still get rescued by the owner at the very last second.

This time, however, that didn’t happen. On Sunday morning, tracytang.com returned to the pool of publicly available domains such as extremelylargehooters.com. After receiving the final confirmation from my sister, I registered the domain on her behalf.

She still isn’t sure what she’s going to do with the domain, but for starters we’ve setup an e-mail account. Her e-mail address follows the same pattern as mine, so you can probably guess what it is.

We talked briefly about the other Tracy Tangs in the world who might have been interested in the domain. We know there’s a health care administrator in Florida with the same name. Strangely enough she’s not of Asian descent. Donna Changstein anyone? There’s also a Tracy Tang who is a successful publisher. She’s worked at many large companies like Penguin Books.

I wonder if they’ll come looking at the site?

WEEKEND UPDATE

I’m not sure, but I think I just finished my project proposal for my computer animation class. I didn’t expect to get that far, but here I am. I guess that’s what you get for not doing anything else all night.

On Saturday night, I went to Sushi Aoki for dinner. It’s located on W. Broadway, between Cypress and Burrard. I’d been there once before but I only had the yakisoba, so I knew nothing of their sushi. This time, I sampled some of their sushi and boy was it awesome. Their menus are quite helpful, chock full of photographs so you can see what you’re getting. I ordered a simple salmon and tuna sushi combo, and looking at the picture, I was expecting a satisfying yet not a bloated dinner. I was wrong.

When you get salmon and tuna sushi most of the time, you usually see a tiny piece of fish on top of some rolled rice. What I got was several large slabs of fresh fish on top rice. The pieces of fish were so large, I had to lift them off the rice to make sure there was something underneath. There was enough fish there that at some restaurants this would have easily constituted an order of sashimi.

My dining partners, Adam and Tyson, were also not expecting the large portions. Adam had a California roll combo and some tempura, while Tyson had a feast consisting of nearly every variety of raw seafood. We all got our asses kicked but it was so good.

There was one “interesting” moment though. As Tyson was sampling the various items from the sea, he came upon one selection that he said wasn’t that great but we should try and get our opinions. Keep in mind he had a rather mild response to this piece of seafood. I decided to try the mysterious item. It looked like a slice of raw squid to me. It was white and had the same texture all the pieces of raw squid I’ve seen in my entire life. I should have known better at that point, but hey, I’m a dumb guy. As soon as I put it in my mouth, I knew I had made a grievous error on my part. I’ve been eating sushi for almost twenty years. I’ve tried a lot of things but never have I had a piece of sushi that was so disagreeable. Raw squid tastes awful. There is a good reason why Greek people batter it up and fry it. To make things worse, the texture is slimy and chewy. I tried chewing as fast as I could to get it down, but it fought me every step of the way. My trouble must have been very evident because Adam and Tyson kept saying, “Are you alright?”

I finally managed to swallow the cursed piece of squid. After sipping some tea and regaining my composure, I managed to say, “Adam, that was really good… your turn”. The bastard guy wouldn’t have any of it.

So, other than the nasty squid experience, I must say that Sushi Aoki is an excellent place for sushi.

SOMETHING STRANGE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Since around early evening, my web server has been receiving a lot of hits from Korea. It’s about one hit a minute, for several hours now. They seem to be grabbing a photo of actress Vanessa Marcil. She’s got her arm across what seems to be a bare chest, but you can’t see anything, so it’s tame compared to what you could find on the Internet.

The hits are originating from the Korean version of Yahoo image search. Beyond that, I have no clue why she is so popular all of a sudden among Korean web surfers. Wow, I just checked the logs, it’s more than one hit a minute now, closer to one hit every 20 seconds or so. I’m not worried about the bandwidth yet, but I may need to do something in the morning if this continues.

STEAK

I just ate an entire 370g (uncooked weight) t-bone steak for lunch. I’m feeling pretty good right now. Part of me wants to nap. I have hockey in 45 minutes. I wonder if eating all that meat was a good idea. Stay tuned.

ONE MAN'S APOLOGY

Some of you have already read this, but good old CK sent out a message on the SJC news-list. I would like to share it with this audience:

“Hi, everyone.

On behalf of the people of my country, the United States, I would like to apologize to the people of Canada and the other nations represented here at St. Johns for the outcome of the presidential election. Sorry about that.

For what its worth, my home state of Minnesota showed some clarity of thought.

Peace,

Chris K.”

TO COME SO CLOSE…

I stopped going to any web sites for about an hour as I worked on an assignment. I came back to see that the race got even tighter. A two vote difference now lies between the candidates. I can’t believe this. This was the most common thing I heard tonight:

“Fuck, that’s a lot of red.”

Ohio is this election’s Florida. I can’t believe it’s going to go down to one last state again. I was joking this thing was going to “overtime”. That turned out to an apt analogy. I’m still extremely pessimistic. This is going to be like losing in overtime two game sevens in a row and each time, you tied it up with seconds left, goalie pulled.

Screw the Red Sox and their decades of crushing disappointment, this is going to be orders of magnitude worse.

TOO CLOSE TO CALL

I can’t believe the election is so close now. All I know is that Kerry needs Ohio for him to have any chance of winning. There’s talk that the absentee ballots in Ohio might take up to ten days to count.

The fact that the votes are so close now only means that the disappointment will be that much greater when Dubya somehow sneaks by.

GRIM

Though the election is not officially over, I am feeling a sense of sadness. I feel for all the Americans that I had the pleasure of meeting in the two years I was at SJC. Of those who have returned to their homeland, none of them were in states that went Democratic.

I thought the election would be a lot closer than it was. This only makes me more disappointed and confused as to what the average American voter was thinking today. There’s really nothing more I have to say right now. I think the best course of action will be to take this hour by hour and day by day.