I hope Armageddon hits the next time I take a vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really like to talk about my job too much, because when the day is over, there’s really nothing at all that interesting about it.  It’s about as Office Space as it gets sometimes, to be perfectly honest.

However, this week has been particularly arduous.  One of my colleagues is on, has been on, and will continue to be on an extended vacation, thus leaving my department a little short staffed.  Suffice to say, things have gotten a little hairy in their absence, and it dawned on me that such seems to always be the case whenever this colleague of mine goes on vacation.

Naturally, as easy it would be to declare such intentions as deliberate and malicious, we all know that it’s just completely freak coincidental that shit hits the fan whenever this person takes off.  Nothing against them at all, in the least bit, I like them very much quite the contrary.

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Embracing the hipster nerd I truly can be

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For pretty much the last 20 years, my eyes have been problematic. A lifetime of playing video games, watching too much television and an career pursuit and occupation that requires me to look at computer screens for way more than I’d like to admit, have rendered my eyes in pretty bad shape. My vision is poor, I have perpetually dry eyes, and when things are really bad, light sensitivity, ranging from mild annoyance to being incapable of being outside on a sunny day.

Needless to say, I got glasses at a pretty young age, but by high school I was wearing contact lenses, and have been wearing them pretty much ever since. Because I was a dumb teenager with erratic sleeping habits, I fell asleep with my contact lenses on way more times than any person really should, which led to exacerbating my eye problems at times.

Since then, I’ve done well enough in caring for my eyes, as far as staving off infection or bacterial problems; as well as I can considering my job requires me to be staring at computer screens all day long. But there are still bad times like when I play too much LoL and/or don’t get enough quality sleep, where wearing my contacts isn’t always the best idea.

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Scoring a goal in the World Cup has to be one of the greatest feelings ever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Considering the fact that South Korea had been considered one of the worst teams to enter the 2014 World Cup, I’ll take a draw against the much more favored Russian squad.  One point is better than zero points, although I really had my hopes soaring for three points, when the Koreans drew first blood and scored on Russia first.  Unfortunately, the defense couldn’t solder on for the remaining 15 minutes, and they allowed the equalizer just minutes later.

Regardless, a tie is not a loss, and the last thing I want to see is South Korea get bounced unceremoniously out of the group stage.  In spite of monumental bias and criticism from global media outside of South Korea about how weak of a squad they should be, how they didn’t score so much as it was Russia’s goalkeeper fucking up, and how they probably won’t make it out of the group stage; Korea’s already put their stamp on the World Cup that they’ve come to play, and if at least anything at all, had at least one moment of glory to bask in.

Seriously though, are there many better feelings in the world, than what it looks like to score a goal in the World Cup?  Goals in general are excruciatingly rare as it is in the game of soccer to begin with, but to score one for your home country, against the best squads in the world, on the grandest stage of them all, while somewhere around a billion people are watching in the stands and on television sets all across the entire planet?

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Order has been restored in the NBA

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I’m not really a fan of the NBA. I often cite things like the emergence of thug-like behavior of many of today’s players, the fact that so many players are greedy and no longer care about winning as long as they’re getting paid top dollar, and the presence of primadonna pretenders that completely derail what a team sport like basketball is really supposed to be.

And then we have incidents like the Donald Sterling racism scandal and subsequently the completely misguided fake support of the Los Angeles Clippers to put way too bright of a spotlight onto the NBA, but the NBA naturally doesn’t care; and they didn’t mind, because exposure equals dollars, and fake or not, people poured an influx of cash into the Clippers, regardless of reasoning.

However, in spite of my indifference towards the NBA, there’s always been one thing that I’ve remained a fan of throughout the years: the San Antonio Spurs. As clichéd as it sounds, it’s because the Spurs play the game in a manner in which I respect and admire, and win in spite of the ever-changing (for the worst) environment of the league around them by doing such. They’re often cited as being a boring team, but frankly I don’t care; I love the way Tim Duncan has banked in ugly jumpers for the better part of the last two decades, and the way Manu Ginobili regularly deceives the opposition almost for no other reason than the fact that he looks white (he’s Argentinian).

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The weekend I’d been looking for

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to the start of the baseball season, this past weekend was one particular weekend that I had mentally earmarked as one of weekends that I was looking forward to the most.  Sure, I have ambitions and plans of grandeur when the summer arrives, and in a perfect world, I make every flight, the weather is never an issue, and I’m able to tackle four new MLB and six new MiLB ballparks before the start of July.  However, things haven’t worked out so kindly throughout the span of the last few weeks, and be it poor weather, unlucky flight conditions or both, a lot of my trips have been derailed and ultimately cancelled, leaving me kind of distraught, and with more time to brood and go crazy.

But this past weekend was undoubtedly the one weekend I was looking forward to immensely, because it combined several things going for it that if they all worked out, would lead to a successful good time.

Fortunately for me, with the weekend now a time frame in the past, I can say that basically everything did work out, and it was a successful good time, and I’m quite pleased with it, to the extent that it’s worth writing about, because frankly, I think a lot of my posts throughout the last few weeks have kind of had an undertone of disappointment or an unhappy sentiment to some of them.

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I wonder what’s going to happen to ISIS on Archer?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the situation in Iraq; how coincidentally after U.S. troops have been gradually withdrawn from the country, an Islamic extremist group has emerged and is taking over territories with threats that they’re going to take over Baghdad soon.  A real Charlie Wilson’s War kind of story, where American presence leaves, and shit hits the fan, or something like that.

Naturally, there are large contingents of people quickly blaming Obama for it, because it’s just so easy to blame Obama for everything wrong with the entire world much less the United States, but, if I may get political for one rare second, I don’t.  I don’t blame Obama, I don’t blame Republicans, nor do I blame Democrats or anything.  This is just one of those scenarios, where, and I help but feel that I can’t be the only one who feels this way, is to simply think “fuck Iraq, let them deal with their own bullshit.”

I mean seriously, it’s a country, a region that’s beyond trying to help, and I’m long past thinking that it shouldn’t be America’s responsibility to try and rehabilitate an entire country that simply does not want to be changed from what they are.  Changing them just garners more resentment and more resistance, and it escalates into more and more violence and death.

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Cost vs. labor exemplified

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Funny story.  One of my colleagues is on a long vacation, leaving my team of slaves short one.  Naturally, when a team’s ranks are reduced, it’s to be expected that the remaining members pick up the slack to some capacity, which is fine and all, since that’s how a team operates.  Needless to say, my workload has grown a little bit on my co-worker’s absence, but I’m alright with that, because the same can be said about the other members of my team.

However, it’s the circumstances in which my workload’s increase has come about that has me a little perplexed, which is a nicely-worded way of saying “I do not agree with the way things are, and I shake my head when I think about it.”

Basically, a number of people I work with have been tasked with removing time stamps from well over 800 JPEGs.  Be it through using the clone stamp, healing brush, liquefy tool; whatever it takes to make sure that these images no longer have time stamps on them.  Subsequently, while they are off in Photoshop lala-land, I am the one who is getting the brunt of the actual, meaningful work overflow.  I’m confident enough to say that I’m probably the most qualified to be doing the work that matters, but my current workload is looking pretty gargantuan at the moment, which doesn’t exactly make me feel peace of mind.

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