Crumpled Nothings!

I don't have a clue what's wrong with my sleep cycle...I am just not getting any sleep at all. I am trying to shut my mind off, but that's not working. I am not worried or stressed about anything...my mind just seems to wander around. I have been tossing myself around for the past couple of hours and have given up.

I don't want to take Nyquil coz I feel like I won't wake up to get to work the next morning.

Alas, another sleepless night.

My car being egged was still fresh on my mind. But I soon forgot about that coz I got it all washed up and clean. We had lunch at P.F. Chang's to celebrate a couple of my co-workers' birthdays. If you go there and you like spicy foods, then try the Chang's Spicy Chicken - wickedly delicious.

Right after, we went back to work and I had my yearly performance evaluation. I don't mean to brag, although I am still going to...it was good. In fact, it was great. I thought it would be a little different, but it was definitely much better than I expected.

So I'm happy.

I have had my share of troubles when I drove a Taurus. I hated that car, and it did a good job hating me back. You can read all about that spread through out my posts in this entire blog.

So when I got my Accord, which I like, and I have done a good job driving it and maintaining it, why does this happen to me:

I wake up this morning, get dressed and ready to take on the day. I walk out the door and see some gooey yellow stuff on the pavement right in front of my car. "What is that?" I think to myself, but forget about it the next second. As I approach the door to open it, I see streaks of that same gooey stuff on my car's window, and then the windshield, and the trail follows all the way to the rear window of the car, where I also see white flakes mixed in with this gooey stuff. F*&K..My car got egged!

Why on earth would somebody do that? I had to call in at work to let them know I will be going for a car wash first before I get to work...can you imagine what that call would have sounded like? Karla got the call...and I could picture her laughing at my misery before I even made the call...I tried my best to let her know without laughing myself, and being annoyed at the same time.

If this happens again, I need to setup a spy cam from my bedroom window.

after the holiday weekend...such a drag!

The four day weekend has ended. Had a hearty Thanksgiving dinner with friends. The food was delicious and I got more than my fair share of cranberry sauce, which I could die for.

Later, when the clock struck at midnight, it was time to shop. Allen Outlet Stores opened at 12AM on the dot and the place was packed as hell. In every store, there were people crammed up elbow to elbow, pushing and shoving others. It was insane. I walked into Puma, Kenneth Cole, Gap, CK, J.Crew, but the only place there that I really found (and bought) something was from Banana Republic. Remember the Puffer Vest I talked about a few days ago - It retails for $88.00 and I was able to bag it for just $35.00 bucks. Also, I picked up Khakis which was already in the clearance section, and an additional 30% off, so picked that up for around 10 bucks. Sweet, innit?

We were shopping around at Allen Outlets till about 3AM, and then went to Denny's for some fast grub before Kohl's opened up at 4AM. But I had to make a quick stop-over, by which I mean stand in line for the doors to open, at Staples. I had to pick up an HP laptop for my cousin. After about 45 minutes of small talk with an elderly couple standing right next to me in line, the doors opened. When I went in, I saw the laptop I had to pick up on display and signaled the guy working there to get it for me from the back office. 10 minutes later he comes back saying "Sorry Sir, we don't have those in stock and the only one we have is the one on display, and the battery plate from that one has been stolen." I was like wait...you don't have it?? Why advertise it? "Could I get a rain check?" He raises an eyebrow and says to me "First of all, there are no rain checks on holiday specials, and second..I am not going to argue with you about that!"

"Excuse me? You advertised you would have the laptop. I am the first person here to ask for it. You don't even have it?" After some bickering, he agreed to check online, and have it shipped. He looked it up online and found the product, but as we were checking out, Staples website came back with a message saying that the transaction cannot be completed since they could not validate that the laptop I was trying to purchase was actually available. UGH!

I walked out of there, a little upset, and then headed to Kohl's where my friends were. Kohl's was just a mad rush of people. I haven't seen so many people in a store other than in the Big Apple. This is not the Dallas I know from the other 364 days in the year. Anyways, I didn't feel like purchasing anything else since I thought I already got what I wanted from Banana earlier. But, since my friends were waiting in line to check out at Kohl's..the line that circled around the entire store TWICE, I decided to look around. I saw this brown corduroy sports jacket that I just couldn't look away from. Originally retails for 150, and I got it for 40. 100 bucks off. Also picked up a brown/blue pull over sweater for 14 bucks. I was done. I went back to stand in line with my friends who probably moved about 15 feet from where they were standing when I left them. After an hour and 40 minutes later we finally go to the register and walked out. Wow! It was bright outside. Almost 8AM. We'd been shopping for 8 hours straight.

I dropped them off and went to see my nephew and niece who I hadn't seen for about 2 weeks. I dozed off at my cousin's place and woke up at 5:30PM. My circadian cycle was whacked out at this point.

But good shopping I'd say. Who says Black Friday is only a marketing gimmick? I found good deals and I got what I was looking for. So there!

P.S: I talked myself out of buying the Garmin Nuvi 660. I couldn't see myself blowing 400 bucks on something, no matter how cool it is. That's just not me...yet!

Android is an open source SDK can allow developers to create feature-rich applications for mobile phones. Here is an intro to Android. Paresh, you will like something that's shown in this demo, and probably can't wait to get it :)

Check it out to see another reason why you should wait if you're thinking of getting the iPhone, in which the developments of apps and their functionality is pretty much controlled by Apple. Whereas if you (or when you) get a mobile phone that runs on Android, you customize your phone to your needs, and wants, with apps created by developers that could be free to download and use all over the web.

City FM keeps surprising me every time...They played an almost forgotten Arabic song that all of us cousins and friends back in high school would have a blast with...We never understood the words, but just enjoyed the music...sweet memories.

I guess I am starting my own yearly funny bits of Diwali videos to wish everyone. Just like I posted a hilarious video last year for Diwali wishes, I now do the same, yet again.

As you all know, I absolutely love the NBC comedy series "The Office" and Steve Carell is one of my favorite comedians out there. During the last year, a Diwali special episode aired and it was hysterical.

The following video is the end of the show where Steve Carell's character "Michael Scott", sings Diwali wishes to everyone at a party to the tune of Adam Sandler's Hanukkah song. Enjoy!



For those who are interested in knowing exactly what Diwali is about, click here for a full Wiki article.

Happy Diwali Everyone!

Yes. It is that time of the year I always look forward to. The time of the year that I puts me in the holiday mood and start planning for Christmas and New Years'. My favorite month of the year is coming up - December.

I stopped at a Starbucks today and noticed that their red cups are back again. It was at that moment I realized, that seeing these red cups at Starbucks is the perfect indicator and a mood setter for the holidays. I got a LOT of brainstorming to do in that respect.

We had our company's annual unified conference today. So started off in the morning waking up at 5:30AM (That's right!), out the door by 6:40AM, a 35 minute drive to the hotel, had some breakfast and freshly brewed Starbucks coffee.

I must say, the presentations have gotten MUCH better than the last unified conference, and the one the year before. So much so, that I wouldn't really call them presentations, but they could truly be called performances - at least one of them.

I won't go into details, but every department presents on what they do at the company, and what every person within that department does respectively. Every time, each department always wants to top the other on their presentation techniques, because after a few days, the presentations get rated. So there is always this constant friendly battle between the departments to kick the other's butt. I think that's really good - keeps it interesting. You never know what to expect. And this time around...we REALLY didn't know what we were going to find out.

Just as last year, my department came up with a Game Show theme, inspired by the "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?" show. This went extremely well and we had a lot of audience participation, and it was a blast. We were able to educate everyone on all the systems we have in place out there to make their jobs easier, the tools available for our providers' to use for reporting purposes and analysis, automation techniques, etc. We thought we rocked. And we did..but wait a minute...this time around, there was something really unexpected in store for everyone in that room.

The best presentation, believe it or not...was the Accounting Department. Oh yeah! You read that correctly - The Accounting Department. See, in every conference, the accounting department gets to speak after we've had our lunch break and late in the afternoon. It has always been boring. I mean seriously, who wants to know about Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements and Income Statements, and how Acct pays the providers bills and keeps them legal with the IRS, Right?

But THIS time, Accounting thought out of the box and decided not to bore everyone with the usual jibber-jabber. This time around they decided to tell us everything in a performance based presentation they called "Accounting Rap". Right before they were about to start their presentation, they requested Justin to pop in a CD labeled 'Boyz in Da Hood' while the team of 10 - 15 walk out of the conference room to put bandannas on, long white Ts with everyone wearing thick gold chains with huge diamond studded $$ sign medallions. One of the guys wore a large gold-plated wall clock around his neck imitating Flava-Flav. Nobody in the conference hall knew this was happening outside, and we popped in the music when we were cued, and they all walked in like gangstas and got to the stage and started rapping to Easy E's beats. But the lyrics were written by the accountants and they rapped what they do as a department....It was hilarious and hands-down THE BEST presentation/performance we'd seen. It was so good and well timed that there was a moment in the song where there was a one second pause in the beat to highlight a verse of the lyric that related to the President of the company, plus all the accountants had rapper names, like "Lady Jen", "Money-G", "Notorious RVU", etc. It was just amazing. Accounting has surely established street cred, ot more like "office-cred" within the staff. Respect!

Next year, our team will have to come up with a totally different plan and a brand new approach to our presentation...maybe a comedy routine, I don't know. What I do know is that we need to kick some butt.

Got home around 7PM, and am now totally relaxed.

One thing I want to plug in here is that I have a new blog listed on my blog roll. Karlita's Way, which is really a clever name (like Carlito's Way), is Karla's blog and I am glad she finally moved (I hope) from MySpace to Blogger. Take a moment to read the blog, because she only set it up a few days ago, and has posted quite a bit of stuff, some good, but as of most recently, something really terrible that happened to her and Kevin, her husband. Their Yukon got stolen a couple of days ago, and she's posted pics of what it looks like now after the cops found it all stripped up. Hope it all works out for them pretty soon.

One more thing...there's a reason Blogger has a comments section :) But for those of you, who may feel it is too much work to actually click a couple of links and type out a few alphabets to form a sentence that you have to think about and post a comment on my blog, I have now put in place a 1 - 5 star rating widget after each post. All you have to do is hover your mouse over, rate the post and that's it. It's easy, simple, and let's me know whether what I am writing appeals to you guys or not. I would really like for some feedback and would really love it if you did both, comments and ratings...but that I leave upto you.

Thanks for reading.

Last, but sure as hell NOT the least: