Bride from China

I wake up to NPR every morning. This morning, there was a segment about Marriage in Washington and there was an interview with a guy named Dave "who's Chinese and scored a cushy job working at a bustling dot-com in the mid-90's in Seattle". I thought "huh--I wonder if it's Amazon. And if it is, I wonder if I know who". As I listened more and thought more, I was like "wait! That's Dave Wong!". Sure enough, the guy who helped set up my web developer desktop on my first day at Amazon 6 years ago who is supposedly currently learning calligraphy in China was talking on the air about his failed marriage (which I knew bits and pieces about through the grapevine). Listen to the story!

Mason not supported

Whew! Well, the domain transfer finally happened---and in doing so, my mail server and DNS also flipped over. For the most part, this was totally seamless (although it was odd--over the weekend, some of my mail went to my old server, some mail went to the new server..as I discovered this morning). The main issue is that Dreamhost doesn't support Mason---so you'll see that on many of my pages, the header and footer look pretty messed up. Ack, I'll have to deal later and convert them into Server-Side Includes or something like that.

This domain transfer is taking longer than I had anticipated---Dreamhost first sent a request to Register.com. That processed for 2 days before Register.com sent me an email warning me of the transfer and basically giving me 5 days to cancel before they continued with the transfer. Technically, the transfer should have been approved to go yesterday...but nothing's happened yet. Meanwhile, since I'm in mid-transfer, the DNS is frozen and I can't modify it on either end. So I thought I might as well blog.

The trip to NYC was awesome as expected. Matt's friend, Teresa, was kind enough to let us crash at her place in Brooklyn while we were there. Sadly, it was really the first time I'd ever been to Brooklyn...and I love it! It is such an awesome burrough, so cute and full of interesting neighborhoods. On our first night, Paul and Teresa took us out to dinner at Grimaldi's Pizzeria which was oh so good. After dinner, we got ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory and just hung out at the pier under the Brooklyn Bridge for a bit...such an amazing view of Manhattan. Did I mention the ice cream was soo creamy and delicious?

Most of Saturday was dedicated to going to Katie & Kit's wedding out in Long Island, the first Chinese wedding I've really been to in my adulthood. It was full of funny games, karaoke, the bride wearing 5 dresses, and lots and lots of food. Overall, a great wedding full of entertainment. Congrats Katie! Sunday, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge (something I highly recommend doing if you haven't before) and met up with Debbie & Saevar on the Manhattan side for dim sum at Dim Sum GoGo----yum! The afternoon that followed was full of culture and fun as we hit up the Autumn Moon Festival in Chinatown and the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy. Before we knew it, it was time to head back home.

Speaking of, we flew Song Airlines for the first time---it was actually a bit cheaper than JetBlue at the time I bought the tickets and had better flight times. Similar to JetBlue, there's TV onboard although there aren't as many channels and it wasn't very reliable; however, there was music to choose from and many pay-per-view movies that one could watch. A particular favorite of mine was the Games section. Passengers can spend $5 and play all the games they want in a game pack (including Bejeweled!)...OR they can play in-flight trivia where you duke it out with the rest of the passengers through 20-question rounds of trivia. By mid-flight, I was determined to beat Herm in 11B and JoJo in 25C. Would I fly Song again? Definitely.

The highlight of the week since returning was going to The Arcade Fire concert at the Paramount on Wednesday. They opened powerfully with "Wake Up" and continued to impress the audience the whole evening with their passionate and catchy sounds. I only know the music from their album, Funeral, but that was enough to have me humming along to 90% of the concert. They were great in concert and carried their tunes perfectly. After the show, they further impressed me by going out to the Paramount's grand staircase and doing an impromptu acoustic piece. Next concert--Franz Ferdinand next weekend.

Just found out that my hairstylist at Gene Juarez, the one I've been seeing for more than 5 years, Reed, scored a major gig performing the TV theme for the new show Kitchen Confidential, which I'd already added to my DVR. His band has a really catchy beat and I predict I'll have to be finding myself a new hairstylist soon because his band's really going to be successful. Good job Reed!

changing hosts

New York was awesome--I'll have to blog about it later.

Meanwhile, I need to switch webhosts. After looking around a bit, I decided to go with DreamHost--they had a pretty rockin' deal. Apologies if my site goes down or looks funky as I migrate this whole site over. This'll be a first for me.

Sudoku

I discovered Sudoku Puzzles today. Pretty fun and captivating for the mathematical mind. It's basically a grid of Nine 3x3 boxes where you have to fill in numbers such that each column, row and 3x3 box has the numbers 1 to 9 inclusively.

Lion cut

Misha's lion cut
Originally uploaded by moohaha.

Misha got his lion cut today! AND the groomer was able to get all the mats off his bum. He's got this nice fuzz about him now---it's an interesting feeling picking him up, not having a mass of fur. So far, so good--he doesn't seem to really notice it.


Oops.

Need a Host

My friend, Alex, who has graciously hosted my website for free for the last 6 years, since its birth, has decided to shut down his servers in a week. As a result, I need a new web host! I don't even know where to look since Alex has hosted my site ever since I've even had a website. For all you out there that have your own domain, do you recommend your webhost? Advice? I'd love to hear it---either put something in the comments or email me: audrey-at-this-website.

Everything Sounds Like Coldplay
-- pretty funny and sad at the same time

"Do They Know It's Hallowe'en"
-- cool benefit song featuring The Arcade Fire, Postal Service, Feist, Beck, Sonic Youth and more

Chill weekend--went to party at Kabir's on Friday. Spent all of Saturday with Eric and John (who was visiting from San Francisco). We rented and saw Kung Fu Hustle---totally hilarious. Loved it. I highly recommend this for some good 'ol kung fu humor. We later got a scrumptious veggie dinner at Carmelita's (I had truffled potato empanadas), followed by an evening of bowling and karaoke at Leilani Lanes. Wahoo. Sunday, caught up with former coworker, Phillip, and his wife, Susan, who came over for a bit...and then met up with the girls for a spa evening at Habitude, followed by dinner at Madame K's.

The new iPod nano is hot. It's somewhere between a Shuffle and a Mini, as thin as a pencil, 4GB for $199, color screen, supports photos and charges/sycncs via USB. I've still got my old school 2nd generation 20GB iPod. It works fine--this one makes me think twice about having a backup.

This is a great compilation of some of the best and worst of Katrina reporting. Some of it just gets me so riled up and angry. Grr. I love that Microsoft does 100% matching for charity giving PLUS they made it convenient for me to just deduct straight from my payroll to give to the American Red Cross. Sweet.

Took Misha in this morning to get his lion cut but the groomer had to take off suddenly due to a family death and left me a "Misha's mom" note on the door. I'll just have to reschedule to another time...

Chaining myself to work from home...

Hallelujah---after postponing it for weeks and weeks and weeks, I finally decided to work on "RAS-ing" (Remote Access) from home to the Microsoft network so that I can take the time some days to leave early and continue spec writing from the Bauhaus. I had initial problems because my main connection program was out of date and wouldn't run and I couldn't get the new .exe to install. Thank goodness MS has a 24 hour helpline dedicated just for employees to fix ANYTHING that has to do with Microsoft software or whatever. A quick call to a dude in India and I'm all patched up--yay! Okay, this isn't something to totally celebrate about since I'm wahoo-ing about being able to work away from work now. [sigh] The things we get excited about...

More blog links

By the way, I decided to expose all the blogs I keep up with on my blog aggregator, Bloglines, on the right side for y'all's curious minds. Unfortunately, this means that I'm not linking to those blogs that don't have a feed (that I know of), like Betina or Jenny...

I love holiday weekends

It's Labor Day and I wish there was yet another day of rest. Matt and I have spent most of the holiday weekend hitting up Bumbershoot---it's been a few years since I've gone to this annual music festival in Seattle...and it's certainly grown a lot since I last attended. There are so many more venues and much more space being used. So far, we've caught The Pharcyde, Omar Torrez, Common, M.Ward, Maktub and more. Today, we'll be catching Ted Leo, the Decemberists, Los Amigos Invisibles and whatever in between. Wahoo!

On Saturday, we took the ferry up to Port Gamble, WA to attend Katie & Jarrod's wedding--Katie's a former coworker from Amazon. It was gorgeous with the water in the background and the weather just perfect. I saw many former and current Amazonians and it was great to catch up with a lot of them. Congrats! One more wedding remaining for the year...and then wedding season will be over with finally.

I'm taking Misha in to the groomer on Wednesday for a Lion Cut for 2 reasons mainly: he gets hairballs all the time because of his long hair and he's been gettings little mats on this body recently, mostly around the bum area. Every cat owner I've talked to who has done this for their cat say that their cat LOVED it. It seems like the right thing to do...but am I evil? Misha just has so much hair that I'm afraid of what it'll look like.