bday dinner yesterday at Amber.
It was nice and they made the restaurant workers sing for me, how embarassing.

BBQ at Lin's today.

new website for mta.info conversion in progress

got the iphone today. As Ollie would say, "it was like the town bicycle and everyone got a turn to ride it". starting with the semi-gay tech who man-handled it for three days to the CTO then to the second in command then to me after almost a week.
I don't see what the big deal is. Not like it is new technology. If we got this like four years ago maybe I could understand why they would be fawning over it. But today? Just ludicrous.

What is even more ridiculous is that damned PK who developed the app for the phone then left the company as soon as he finished it and now I'm stuck support it because they put their foot in their mouth when they announce this wonderful new app and made a big hoopla about it to everyone. They can't not roll it out now with nobody to back it up. Turns out I'm the goto guy again. Gaaaaaaaah!

So the rumors are true. Brought the mom to Mizumi on Northern Blvd. and they were as cheap as advertised.
$32 bucks a person for all you can eat Japanese and more. The drinks weren't included, but there are free refills. Would you pay $2.50 for a cup of green tea?
Their sushi bar was ok, however they had eleven stations more or less, but there were only five tongs with which to take the food from. Factor in all the greedy uncouth Chinese who take one tong all the way through the whole line and you end up create the bottleneck of food that the restaurant planners had in mind.

So it is true. The New York Dept of Finance generates bogus tickets when it needs money.

I just got one in the mail today. It was unbelievable! w t f

---

update 1
Turns out that it was the guy who had my old car who got the ticket. He left the registration sticker on there but was in another state.

---

Rode my bike with Brian today. He was kind enough to stop by and bring his air pump since I keep misplacing mine.
We went on the trail to Fort Totten and also along the highway, then cut over into the park and took the scenic way back. An easy 9 miles or so.

a great feeling of accomplishment when we finallllly finished the deferred payment online thing.
you'd think changing one silly administrative fee for the application is like changing the sales tax from 8% to 9% for the program but it was much much more involved. Namely because they now want it to be 8% fro  m xx date range, and 9% from a different zz date range. Originally it was simply a constant and they would change the 'constant' 8 to a 9 and done. But nooooooooooooooooooo, another words, it is now dynamic with an extra dimension of time.

it could have all been easily avoided if they gave me the correct function to use in the application. but as usual they are very sneaky. damned Reena. what a lying piece of slime. since my side doesn't change (it is the front end), and they make changes on their database back end all the time, we all know who the real culprit is. But then they accuse me of having a "broken" application. it's only broken because they made it that way, but either they are too dumb to realize this or just playing the deceptive role to the accounting department.

Of course the change was required immediately but we go at the governmental pace of 4 days = ASAP. came at a bad time since I lost PK, it was gonna happen eventually when he found a better paying position elsewhere. on top of the "regular" duties of 5 other agencies which I now "work for" as well.

on top of all of this, during the 4 days, I've come to realize a few things. first, Paypal does crap behind the scenes that it doesn't document for security reasons, which makes coding for it a pain in the ass. for example, if you want to test in the sandbox yet you also want to pay as a real client, you CANNOT use the same computer or or same browser or else eventually your browser becomes corrupt and sends the wrong header and "crashes" paypal.
second, Reena doesn't like to admit her mistakes. after discovering why I was having such a hell of a time not getting the code to work, I finally see the data is bogus. instead of having a properly formatted time field, i get a "23:10.47" when it should be along the lines of "23:10:47". instead trying to make her fix her mistakes in the data, i did a work around to pre-format the data and massage it into what we expect, with the help of our good buddy Chao. Although these days I noticed chao's patience is also wearing thin. It must be his girlfriend's fault. he wasn't like that before he met her. His wild side is finally asserting itself. good for him, but bad for coding.

anyway, little do they know, me and the interns from back in the days were already immune to the head of the accounting/finance dept who wasn't the head back then when he stopped us in the hallways and tried to discipline us for carrying heavy computer equipment "improperly" or just too fast I forget.... We said to him, "don't worry, we're professionals". Quip added to our repertoire. Bonus.

Me and Nudy still have a good laugh about it these days.

T-18 hours until I'm on my way to Taiwan! yayyyyyy

worst train day that i can remember. it never pays for me to leave the home early thinking that by some stroke of luck I would actually benefit by arriving at work early as well. The two simply do not correlate positively.

Both trains TO work had brakes in emergency. so it went local all the way. It was unbelievable. Normally I am only on one train that has such a thing once every six months, to have them happen at the same time it couldn't be coincidence.

Then the train coming home had "signal problems" at the height of rush hour. and then to top it off when we passed through the retard section of the line, some incident happened and on the local station and they stopped the train for a long time with no announcements. From what I gathered, it was a homeless man causing problems on a packed train car so much so that literally people were running away from that car.
3 hours to get home, and to think I left early from work...