Well after a fun trip with family in Canada for my cousin Priscilla's wedding (click to see this trip) and a super long 4 days back at the office on a coding marathon... I made it to my much anticipated trip to Hawaii ... w00t!

So I left LAX this morning at 11am Pacific time and arrived on Oahu 1:15pm hawaii time.

Picked up the rental car around 2pm and took the scenic route down to the hotel along Ala Moana blvd...  it was hella packed.
Good stuff though , even though it was only 8miles, it took an hour to get to the hotel because of the traffic.

After I got settled in, I went out to the ABC store to pick up some food for the week. Went out to surf for a little, came back, grabbed a bit to eat at burger king and then now Im back in the hotel about to write a bunch of letters to friends =)

I dunno why but a bunch of people thought I was a local so I've been getting fat discounts on my purchases lol.  I asked some guy where the nearest post office was and he was like "u local kine dunno where da mail place is?" lol I just said I havent been around since 2005 and he was like "oh yah braddah just down there, make a left there on that street" ... lol didnt think that I could understand some piddgin.

So tomorrow I'll be meeting up with the Hawaii chapter of Team Integra. Ben and his wife offered to take me to one of the local meet up spots. I'll have pics up of that tomorrow.

Thats it for now, I have lots of letters to write =)

To recap:

Sunday -  a really good friend and I got into a fight and up to now she still does not want to talk to me. Plans with her this weekend were basically thrown out the window... so what am I going to do? Work over time to keep my mind off her and to make some extra cash since I'll be leaving the country next week.

Sunday Night - cousin sent me a txt saying my grandma was in the hospital.

Monday morning - cousin's text came in garbled and I thought she said  our grandma was dying ... week started off shitty.

Monday -  got into an altercation with a friend who didn't like what was posted on my twitter/facebook. What ever, it was squashed.

tuesday - came in at 730 am to work because a computer/programming glitched caused several inventory items to be listed at a million bucks. People complained and our account was suspended on amazon. We were locked out of the backend so we had to manually edit 13 thousand inventory items as oppsed to having our program update all the prices. Worked through lunch.  Finally got a hold of my cousin and she gave me the correct news about my grandma so i relieved.... Was gonna have a dinner date with a friend I have not seen in a while and she couldn't make it so those plans were canceled. Halfway home and the battery in my car decided to die and I had no radio or guage lights. It was effin 9pm and I couldn't see what speed I was going. Good thing my headlights still worked. I had to go to a autozone to buy a new battery for 100 bucks. FML.
Got home in time to watch the lakers lose.

Today - Got to have lunch with Joyce at least... put me in a good mood up till 2 hours ago

SOME ASSHOLE TRIED TO RUN ME OVER WITH HIS CAR.

So I went out on my longboard skateboard to cruise around and get my mind off everything that has been contributing to my shitty week and I see some headlight coming at me in the other direction so I pull far to the right and stayed really close to the curb on the right side of the road to let this guy pass. All of a sudden the asshole turns his car towards me and almost hits me head on. I immediately turned the board around and skated back to confront the asshole and yea basically he was telling me to stop skaing in the neigborhood and other random nonsense. I say whatever and skate back down the block to my house. the guy kept looking at me and staring me down so I skateback and I ask if he has something else he wanted to say to me cause he kept looking down at my house. He threatened to call the police and that was it told him off basically telling him i should be the one to call the cops because he trie dto run me over. That would have been attempted manslaughter. We go back andforward till he gave up knowing he was in the wrong and he just goes inside his house. what ever.

The next time this guy tries to pull that stunt again i am going to turn my board toward him and let him hit me so I can sue his ass for assault.

ugh....

Thanks for the talk Cyndi <3 I owe you.

Wow I haven't written in this journal in a while..I've been posting more updates on my twitter account @helloitsben , i guess it's just because It's connected to my phone and it allows me to post about things as they happen. I would post this entry on twitter but that was designed for quick updates, for something im about to blurt out, this would require the power of my xanga account.

Anyway, Im having one of those crappy weekends. I guess it all started on thursday when the executives at work asked me to plan and implement a category 6 ethernet network at the new office our company will be moving into next week. I agreed knowing this would be a fun job. So I put together a small team comprised of my friend who just graduated from college and an intern. The installation went smooth and it was a one day job. We were there from 9am till about 1:30am the next morning running 48 ethernet wires in the ceiling, the walls and termininating all these wires at each end and at the patch panel. We installed almost 5miles worth of gigabit ethernet cable. That was a really impressive task for a team of 3. Unforntuately the property manager thought  we trashed the hell out of the place but more on this later.

The next day I came into work only to start sneezing my face off because of all the dust i breathed in at the new office. The place was just painted and the floor and ceiling had so much dust, my black shirt I was wearing turned white by the end of the day. I ended up going home early because I could not stop sneezing and every time i tried to type something it would come out like "'ptkdl;ahkiv/W".  Bahh

So half way through the day, I get a call from one of the executives who informed me that the property manager was freaking out because aparently my team "trashed the whole warehouse and put holes and foot prints all over the walls and broke lighting fixtures". In my mind I was thinking "wtf? we did not have a friggin party in there".

I called the contractor and asked what the damage was and I said I'd come by on saturday to look at it. By the end of Friday I was feeling like ass I didnt even have the energy to go to my DJ gig in Huntington Beach, plus Trina was mad at me for some reason.

Saturday I get up and head to frys to get some things to complete the network installation and I headed to the new office to look at the damage and put the finishing touches on the network.

Here's some of the damage:

we were accused to doing this to the wall in the warehouse. we were not working in the warehouse, we were working in the offices.

apparently we put three large scratches in this area, those wires there are not our wires. she also accused us of punching that hole there.

this part of the ceiling was never touched as our cable run was on the other side of the room

these two were caused by my friend who fully admitted to breaking those and he didn't bother telling me, he accepted full responsibility.

Ok just because this was near our distribution box does not mean we caused it. we were not even near that wall.

we had to cut a hole in one of the tiles to get these cords down into the box (don't mind the duct tape, we ran out of zip ties ;p)
she said this tile was destroyed.

um, this tile is nowhere near any cables we ran.

To replace those damaged tiles, it is coming out of my pocket. FAiL.

So I leave the place and I decided to call my friends to find out if anything was going on but apparently not. So I drop by Cyndi's and basically got harassed by Trina coz she was intoxicated and she told me to leave. WTF did I do. Cyndi told me to stay but I was so pissed off from having a shitty weekend I just left. Cyndi tried calling me to come back but i just turned off my phone coz I was jsut not in a good mood.

It is now 1:47 am in the morning, sunday and Im supposed to go out with Mylinh later since me and her were too busy to have our little outting but right now I feel like complete ass and in such a bad mood that I might have to just cancel and shut everyone out for a day, maybe even a week. Hell I should just go to Hawaii and cut communication to the mainland for a while.

Had a quick weekend getaway to vegas, met up with some friends there. Did the usual:

Drinking
clubbing
gambling

Felt good to unwind.

I saw Air Force One land near my work =)

So today I got out of the office for a 3pm break and to soak up the lovely southern california sun when I was distracted by the sound of two F-16s flying over. I didnt think much of it since they usually land at the Long Beach airport  across from work. But I remembered that President Obama was supposed to be flying into Long Beach today. I looked over toward the south end of the runway where the Airlines usually make their aproach and sure enough it was Big Blue coming in for a touch down. I  reached down for my phone to take a picture and realized my stupid ass left my phone on the desk. Oh well, I still saw the 747 make the approach and disappear behind the C-17 hangars. 10 minutes later I see Marine one take off toward the south. Damn I wish I was eating at DaVinci restuarant when AF1 was coming in...

This wasnt the first time I've seen Air Force One come in to the LA area, I wrote about it in a previous blog entry [Here]. I left my camera in the office... TWICE! bah

Tomorrow, Marine One should be flying over us again while they take President Obama to his next destination in LA. I make sure to keep my phone nearby this time.

I've been pretty busy lately trying to design a new version of my website. I've actually decided to buy two new domains:

http://www.helloitsben.net - this will be my new personal homepage where my xanga posts like this will be synchronized and integrated with my new framework

http://www.helloitsben.com - yes same name different ending, this will be my DJ website.

by the way, i do have a twitter: http://twitter.com/helloitsben ... follow me =)

Stay tuned =)

This weekend I had the opportunity to DJ at  UCLA's Dance Marathon , it was a 26 hour marathon to benefit three beneficiaries and raise awareness in AIDS research and prevention in children. The crowd had me hyped up, check out the vids, sorry for sound quality, my web cam cant handle high sound pressure levels:

Me Closing out my DJ Set

(Click to watch video)

Derek Closing out the 26 hour marathon

(Click to watch video)

Pics:

This was my fav part of the night, I love a DJ booth with a view.


DJ Kase, another one of the SSL homies, he had an old school set b4 I went up.

Here I am, check out our performer shirts.

The end of my set.


Matte black, I think I'll keep this look for a while.

the final hour

Derek closing his set.

wow what a weekend.

so last night my phone decided not to play any ring tones and started complaining all my sound files were corrupted. I tried to do a soft reset and the problem didnt go away. Windows mediaplayer was corrupted on my phone. Weak sauce. So I plug my phone into the computer to try and save the contacts and lo and behold the stupid OS on my BJ 2 Crashed. Instead of a blue screen of death you see with windows, in windows mobile you get the white screen of death. Great huh? BLAH.

I had to hard reset the phone and I had to reload all my mods Ive done to this phone. No biggie, I had all my mods backed up as one huge cab file. 10 minutes later my custom OS Skin was running, skyfire was running, tiny twitter and all my ringtones were back on the phone. the only thing that could not be reloaded were all my contacts =( so Im still trying to get everyone's information... this time Im transferring all of these to a CSV file on my computer that will sync with Google contacts and gmail which will then sync with my BJ2 and the iPhone ... w00t.

Lets start off the week with some rain and some Fail

So this week has been one super cold week in so-cal. Normally we would have temps in the upper 70s to the mid 80s in winter but well the temp this week has not gone above 50. BRRRR ice cold. I kicked off my week at Disney's Cali adventure on sunday for my lil niece's birthdays. It's funny how I live 15 minutes from disney, I've been around the area so many times but I have NEVER been inside california adventure. It was my first visit and it was kind of cool I guess but the park itsself was a big fat FAIL. I mean wow... sn0oze lol. By lunch time I was ready to go home lol.

Dont get me wrong, the handful of attractions were good but I felt like they could have done better. we'll see since they will be rolling out a lot of new changes by 2010.

Monday the rain started to pour and my new Analog jacket came into work just in time to keep me from getting drenched. That was some cool stuff. By tuesday the rain let up and the cold air mass just decided to settle over so cal where it kept everything a nice frosty 39 degrees. The windchill made things worst, hopefully it warms up soon.

Valentines Week

I don't know how it happen but I ended up with 3 valentines this year haha. This is going to be fun.

last night I was boiling some water for cup o noodles in one of those water heater pitchers. When I tried to pour the water in the little cup, the top of the pot came loose and twelve ounces of  212 degree water rushed out of the top  instead of the spout and made a home on top of my left hand. ... sizzle.

yea I burned my hand but its not that bad. I immediately ran to the bathroom where I covered my left hand with a blue aloe vera gel used to treat 1st degree burns, you know the stuff that paramedics carry around. I have that stuff for sunburns... works wonders. I wrapped my hand in cotton wrap for about 30 minutes and let the gel soak in. So now it feels like I was just sunburned. On the upside, It burned off all my dead skin =P exfoliate ... yea haha.

It started raining today at lunch, such a relief from a week of having a straight 80's. Yes 80 is the norm in socal durning winter . Any way, there's something about rain that relaxes me, it probably was the combination of music blasthing through my earbuds that made me stay on task. Now to just keep this habbit up =)

In other news, I dont feel as bad now when I have one of those crappy moments. Cynthia sent me this link earlier today: http://www.fmylife.com/ F*** my Life. Some of the entries on there are freaking hilarious and some of them I can totally relate to. This entry was pretty funny because back in college, everyone in the computer science bulding hated the mechanical engineer majors for getting on the elevator from the second floor when we have to go to the 4th and 5th floors. haha