Wrapping up 2009

Wrapping up 2009
I think this will be the last posting for 2009. All in all, I believe that 2009 has been a good year for me.

I did have a wonderful Christmas this year. The Princess came home for a brief stay. Out Utes won a crushing victory at the Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego. Dr. Karen got married. Molly the Stylist had her photo taken with me.

Life is good for me.

Perfectomundo.

My old employer, Imperial Capital Bank, failed because of bad loans. This was not unexpected; I had seen some examples of really weak loan underwriting as far back as 2005 when I was still working there. I don’t believe the bank ever adopted a strong credit culture; instead, it opted for a do the deal culture. A strong credit culture probably would have saved the bank in the long run. I know there committed, honest employees at the bank. Too bad they were not in positions of leadership.

I do feel truly sad for the employees who put in so much of their time and effort in an attempt to help the bank succeed. They deserved much better from the bank. The senior management got what it genuinely deserved; valueless stock options and probably no chance of ever becoming employed by a FDIC insured bank again.

The blog got a visitor last week after my post about the school’s Christmas party or employee appreciation diner at the Aquarium of the Pacific. I guess they were checking on what I had to say about the Aquarium. It is a nice place to visit although parking is a bit pricey in the evening.

We had 129 visitors who viewed 144 unique pages in the last week. One of the visitors came from Vanuatu which is an island nation in the South Pacific. This was the first time that I can recall a visitor from Vanuatu.

Celebrate the New Year responsibly.


Be well and stay happy.

Christmas

Christmas
Christmas came early for me this year.

This year, the Princess flew down to Southern California from Seattle for an early and brief stay with the family. She flew in on the 19th and was headed home on the 23rd. Her husband, the Golfer, stayed in Seattle with the cats and dogs and the golfers who needed advise and help on what club to buy for the perfect gift.

The Princess and I had two opportunities for father daughter talks, when I picked her up and the airport and when I drove to the airport. Dads must grab what chances they have. You can learn a lot if you ask the right questions.

I did.

I learned that the Princess is in charge of scheduling all of the audit, tax and consulting staff for all three Washington state offices of her firm. I thought she was only in charge of the scheduling for her own office. She seems to enjoy the challenge and the power that comes with the job. The Princess said, “that sometimes she enjoys saying no to a request.”

Perhaps enjoys is too much of an adjective here.

I also learned that she likes the extra pay that comes from working in the private, for-profit sector. She also said that she doesn’t miss sitting around a cold office on New Year’s Eve and eating cold pizza or reheated pizza slices while processing last minute gifts when she worked at charities.

I also learned that both she and her mother strongly disapprove of my idea to grow another moustache. They both said no in unison. Right now, the vote is running against the moustache. Molly the Stylist is the only one who is strongly in favor of the moustache but only until Spring. The Princess and her mother did like my longer hair style that Molly thought would look good on me.

We celebrated Christmas at Doug’s and his mother’s home. It is larger than my small flat. My contribution to Christmas Dinner was the homemade stuffing and carving the turkey. I thought I did a very good job of carving; everyone liked my stuffing. The Princess said it tasted better than the kind that comes with a store cooked turkey.

While we were having dinner, Doug brought up the subject of where he wanted to go for the traditional Douguary Dinner. Doug and I have traditionally gone to Morton’s the Steakhouse or the new Wolfgang’s Steakhouse. It was unusual for Doug to be thinking so far in advance; we usually end up having the Douguary Dinner on the last Saturday in Douguary.

Doug said that he got the idea of a new venue from his girl friend. He mentioned the name but it was noisy at dinner as most family dinners are so I don’t remember it. One thing that he said was that I had to wear one of my plaid flannel shirts. I can do that; it will be easier to get ready, no tie to wear. Doug said the restaurant is on the smaller side and serves large portions of food. I can work with that.

Doug’s girl friend made a wonderful chocolate cake that I only later wished that I had taken a slice or two home with me. I mentioned that to Doug when I spoke to him yesterday. He said there was still a good portion of the cake left. I noticed that he made no mention of stopping by my flat to drop off some cake on his way to his girl friend’s home for Christmas with her.

I would have walked out to the curb to pick up the cake so he wouldn’t have lost too much time dropping the cake off with me.

I did receive some very thoughtful and well considered gifts from my family. I also have my health and I am very thankful for it.

My Brother called me during the week to wish me a Merry Christmas. We talked about the family. He said that his son and his girl friend went to Paris for a week and that his son took over 2,000 photos while they were there. That’s a lot of images. It would also seem to point to a wedding in 2010 for my nephew and his girl friend.

All things considered, I had a very, very nice Christmas.


Be well and stay happy.

Utah Goes 10 and 3 in a Rebuilding Year

Utah goes 10 and 3 in a rebuilding year
Our Utes came through in San Diego again this year at the Poinsettia Bowl, beating the University of California Berkley 37 to 27. As usual, our Utes were the underdogs. The win pushed Utah’s record against the PAC-10 Conference to 8 and 3 and prolonged its consecutive post season bowl game winning streak to nine; tying USC behind Florida State.

This season was supposed to be a rebuilding year of sorts after last January’s Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama. Our Utes had lost a number of key players to the NLF, graduation, and missions.

Christmas came two days for early for the Princess and me. My Brother got on the Utah bandwagon and is very happy that Cal lost.

This article is from this morning’s Los Angeles Times.

Utah storms back to beat California, 37-27
By Ben Bolch
December 24, 2009

Reporting from San Diego - Robert Johnson might have provided his team with the perfect recruiting slogan.

"You come to Utah," the senior free safety from Los Angeles said, "you win bowl rings."

Johnson collected his third piece of postseason jewelry Wednesday evening at Qualcomm Stadium after Utah scored 27 unanswered points to rally from an early two-touchdown deficit and overwhelm California, 37-27, in the Poinsettia Bowl.

Freshman quarterback Jordan Wynn completed 26 of 36 passes for a career-high 338 yards and three touchdowns for the Utes (10-3), who stretched the nation's longest bowl winning streak to nine games. Utah tied USC for the second-longest bowl winning streak in NCAA history, behind only the 11 consecutive postseason victories recorded by Florida State in 1985-96.

"I believe our guys outwork the opponents in the bowl situation," said Utah Coach Kyle Whittingham, who improved to 5-0 in postseason games. "They understand that a bowl game is a chance to win another ballgame, and our guys have done that for a lot of years now."

It was the third bowl victory by a Mountain West Conference team this season and the second over a counterpart from the Pacific 10 Conference in two days after Brigham Young upended Oregon State on Tuesday in the Las Vegas Bowl.

Cal Coach Jeff Tedford said his team did not underestimate the Utes.

"That team right there had seven starters back on a defense that beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl," Tedford said. "That's a good football team."

Making his fourth consecutive start in place of injured tailback Jahvid Best for the Golden Bears (8-5), Shane Vereen had 122 yards rushing and two touchdowns, with 77 of the yards coming in the first quarter as the Bears built a 14-0 lead. The former Valencia High standout ran one way and then cut back for a 36-yard touchdown to give Cal an early 7-0 lead.

When Cal linebacker Eddie Young intercepted Wynn's next pass and returned it 31 yards for a touchdown, the Bears held a 14-0 advantage and appeared to be on the way to helping Tedford improve his 5-1 bowl record.

Then their offense went into hibernation mode. Here's how the rest of Cal's first-half drives ended: punt, punt, punt and halftime, with the Bears gaining three first downs along the way.

"They kind of took us out of our game," said quarterback Kevin Riley, who completed 20 of 36 passes for 214 yards and one touchdown with two interceptions. "We didn't really get anything going."

Utah held Cal to 11 yards rushing over the last three quarters.

Meanwhile, Wynn, a true freshman from nearby Oceanside High, continually gained confidence, completing all three of his touchdown passes in the first half as the Utes took a 24-14 lead.

"I just kind of relaxed and didn't force it in there," Wynn said.

Wynn's favorite targets included receiver David Reed, who caught six passes for 103 yards to set a school record with 81 catches and 1,188 yards in a season.

Johnson intercepted a pass and broke up several others with bone-jarring hits. The former Fremont High and Los Angeles Southwest College product added a second Poinsettia Bowl ring -- the Utes also beat Navy here in 2007 -- to go with the one from the Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama last year.

"Me getting recruited here, I was feeling like I could probably win some rings," Johnson said.

"I've been here three years and won three rings."

ben.bolch@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

Think Pad T500 Laptop from Lenovo

Think Pad T500 Laptop from Lenovo
I bought the T500 because I was so unhappy with the first one that I ordered from Lenovo. The primary reasons for the new laptop were my hard drive on the old T60 was making sounds that were not normal and this made me anxious about how long it would last and I hated the Windows Vista operating system that was installed on the machine.

Lenovo did an absolutely great job of handling the manufacturing error of shipping my original Y550 with Vista installed instead of Windows 7. I ended up completely satisfied with the resolution and Lenovo’s customer service.

The T500 is the same size as the T60 it replaced which is really sweet because I didn’t have to order a new docking station with the new laptop. I have a USB port surplus now with four ports in the docking station and three in the laptop. I could probably have more if I hooked up one of my small USB routers but that would be pure overkill and serve no useful purpose.

One of the new features that I paid extra for when I ordered the T500 was Intel’s Turbo Cache memory chip. I am not a computer wonk and probably never will be. I am enchanted with how it accelerates the stat up process. I asked one of my computer networking students at school to give me a simple English translation of what the chip did for me.

The Turbo Cache memory stores all of my frequently used programs in a flash memory chip that is next to the Centrino vPro chipset. The impact of this is the startup program doesn’t have to search all over the 250 GB hard drive to find the program elements which results in a faster startup run sequence. With 2 GB in the memory chip, I should be able to store several programs there.

Uh huh.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I may have gotten the student’s message slightly off. His message does make sense to me based on my observations. I do know that the startup function runs faster. Of course, this could also be a function of more RAM and a faster chip.

The T500 does come with a NASCAR like collection of manufacturer’s stickers on the hand rest. I’ve gotten used to seeing them.

I do love the fact the T500 came without the evil fingerprint recognition security feature. For the average person, I think this is an absolutely great advance in security because the user doesn’t have to remember a complex set of characters and symbols to unlock their machine. Since my primary chemotherapy medicine has essentially eaten away almost all of my fingerprints and generally shrunken the skin at my finger tips, fingerprint recognition was a useless feature for me.

One of the really great results has been improved program operation. All of my programs seem to work well with Windows 7. I did have to download only one driver and that was for my SONY digital camera that was purchased before Windows Vista came out.

The Windows 7 file transfer program from one computer to another computer performed well beyond my expectations. It transferred all of my old settings and passwords. Granted the process took about 25 minutes, it was much shorter than making copies and swapping CDs in and out of disk drives.

Whenever I have purchased a new computer, it usually takes me twenty minutes on a call to the ISP customer non-service center to reset up my Internet connections. With the Windows transfer program, I only needed to click my mouse two or three times and I was ready to go.

Perfectomundo.

The display seems to be sharper and clearer than the old T60 which is nice if you have to wear glasses like I do for up close work such as typing on a laptop keyboard.

I am still experimenting with the display settings as I fine tune the machine’s operations. At some point, I may just accept the fact that some programs will have a slightly different look to them when compared to everything else. I think that I can live with that outcome. Besides, those programs that have a different look are ones that I do to use all of the time.

I guess that you can say I am very satisfied with my new Lenovo T500 Windows 7 laptop.

[Full and Fair Disclosure: The T500 is my fourth Lenovo laptop. My first Lenovo laptop was an IBM 385ED machine with no USB ports, a 3 ½ inch floppy drive, and only a pop-out RJ11 modem jack. I have come a long way with Lenovo as you can see. I am not a Lenovo employee either.]


Be well and stay happy.

Catching Up with Myself

Catching Up with Myself
Yes, I have been busy and I have been away from the blog. This is, after all, a hectic time of the year for me and most everybody that I know.

Dr. Karen and me
I went to see Dr. Karen on the 11th for my regular once every three weeks visit. In addition to the appointment, I was also dropping off my Christmas gifts of Belgian dark chocolate brownies to the nursing staff and Dr. Karen.

The nurses love the brownies; they’ve had them before and Wendy and Vhrunda always say that I can bring them more at anytime. I wasn’t terribly surprised when they ignored my comment that each brownie was between 200 and 250 calories. They were too busy looking for their favorite flavors.

This was the first time that Dr. Karen received her own box of brownies. She is more concerned about my health and eating healthy foods in general. She was apprehensive about the calorie count. I think that concern dimmed a bit when I told her the brownies could be frozen for up to four or five months.

Dr. Karen will be the first to freeze the brownies. Everyone else finishes them off in a week or less time.

Getting back to my medical condition, Dr. Karen said that my lab tests were good and what she expected. I am in a medical limbo of sorts until after I see the colorectal surgeons on January 4th when we talk about their treatment plan.

My next regularly scheduled appointment with Dr. Karen was scheduled for January 1st. I told her that I was more than willing to show at the usual time for an appointment.

Dr. Karen smiled and said, “That’s ok Charles; let’s just slide your appointment to January 8th.”

Perfectomundo.

The January 8th appointment means that I will get an extra week off of Xeloda. That has to be good.

Growing another moustache
I had given some thought to growing my moustache back this Winter. I have asked a number of women that I see regularly what they think of the idea. Molly the Stylist thinks growing it back is an excellent idea but that I should cut it off when Spring comes around. Wendy and Vhrunda were too busy with the brownies. Half a dozen of my former female students that I have spoken to since school started think that I should grow it back. There is, of course, a possible element of student insincerity and currying favor with the instructor in or with some of those comments.

I will ask the Princess and her mother when I see them on December 22nd when we will observe Christmas.

Fountain pens
I have a couple of rather old, more than thirty years old, fountain pens. I keep them mostly for sentimental value largely because of how I obtained them and how I used them over the years. They have deteriorated and were no longer working. I was on the verge of throughing them out when I decided to see if there were any fountain pen repair places in Southern California.

Actually, there are several repair stores in Southern California. I found one that I will visit during my Christmas Break from school. I hope that I won’t have to spend a small fortune to repair them.

University of Utah football
Our Utes ended up doing very well in the BCS standings and with a very commendable record of nine wins and three losses. All three losses were to teams that were ranked higher in the BCS including two teams who ranked in the top ten in the nation.

Not a great season but a very good one nonetheless.

Go Utes. Beat Cal.

Visitors
November was a good month for visitors. We had 673 visitors come to the blog; this was up slightly from October. In the last week, we had 143 visitors who looked at 166 unique pages. The most popular page is January 1, 2007 with the current blog posting as the second most popular page.

I guess it is good to be in second place after a page full of photos of young women in skimpy bikinis. I guess it would suggest that the majority of the visitors to the blog are male

School and the School Party
The December Term is now two weeks old. So far, this is looking like it will be a good term for me. The class rosters seem to have settled down.

I do have a very large Microeconomics class with a roster of 39 students. I do expect that I will lose a couple of students when school starts again in January when they pick up their third consecutive absence. This is also my most difficult class because I have no experience with the students.

I have the same group of students, 12 in all, in two classes so it has been easy to work with them. The other nice thing about these classes is that they are program specific course so the students are more interested in coming to class regularly.

About half of the students in my other two classes are repeat students who have been in two or three of my previous classes. That makes it very easy to learn the names of the new students.

The school had its annual holiday party last night. Well, it used to be called the holiday party; now it is just called the staff appreciation dinner. The school keeps moving the venue around every year. I guess this is so that everyone gets to drive some distance each year.

This year’s party was at Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific. I went by myself since I am, as Doug would say, between girl friends.

On paper, it sounded like a good idea, having the party at the Aquarium. We could have drinks and wander around the aquarium before enjoying a buffet dinner, hopefully, one with no fish dishes. Regrettably, there was a mix up with the school’s reservation and there was no wandering around. We did get passes to the aquarium if we want to come back during this week. I think I will pass on the return visit.

Fortunately for everyone, the weather was nice enough to allow us to have our drinks outside so we had a great view of part of Long Beach Harbor and the former RMS Queen Mary. Since it is December, many of the ships were displaying lights and that added to the festive nature of the evening.

The food was rather good for a buffet. It didn’t get too dried out and there was a wide variety of choices. Last night was the first time that I have seen prime rib of beef without any ribs in the slab of beef. I guess this was done so the slices of beef could be smaller or thinner. I went back for seconds on the beef.

I enjoyed myself at the party. I wished that more of the staff had shown up for the event. That would have made the evening better for me.


Be well and stay happy.

Molly said, "I see you got the memo on wearing plaid Charles." or my Wednesday Grand Slam

Molly said, “I see you got the memo on wearing plaid Charles.” or my Wednesday Grand Slam
Molly was in a very good mood when I arrived at the salon yesterday. While she was finishing up on one client, I went next door to the day spa to see Natalie and drop off her Christmas gift from me.

Natalie gave me a big hug greeting because I hadn’t seen her the last time I was in for a haircut. She almost screamed with delight when I handed her the box of personalized M&Ms. I knew that she would because we have had many discussions on the joys of chocolate and M&Ms. They are one of her very few weaknesses.

Molly was just like Natalie; she almost screamed with joy as well. Chocolate, in almost any form, is Molly’s big weakness. She gave me a big hug after I handed her a box of personalized M&Ms. Then, we talked about how to cut my hair.

I asked Molly about leaving my hair thicker or fuller on the sides. Molly thought for a moment and agreed that I would look good with fuller hair. I asked if she could cut my hair a little shorter in front. It has a tendency to fall down and hang in front of my eyes shortly after the haircut. I think I look silly constantly brushing my hair with my hand. Molly said that she would cut it shorter but that it would still fall down, just not as far.

I almost didn’t recognize Rachel the Receptionist because she had changed her hair from blond to a medium brown. Most of you know that I do have a good sense of humor and that I enjoy a good joke. Rachel always asks me if I would like something to drink when I walk into the salon. I always say no because I have had my morning coffee. I was running ahead of time on Wednesday so I stopped by the Belmont Shore Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for my usual large ice blended drink. It was not as good as the ice blendeds from the store in Torrance. I walked into the salon with the drink in my hand.

Rachel said, “Hello Charles.”

I said, “Hello Rachel.” Then I asked if she was going to ask me if I wanted a drink.

Rachel said, “No, cause you have one in your hand.”

I handed Rachel her Christmas M&Ms, a small bag of red ones and a small bag of green ones. She was surprised because I don’t think she saw this coming. I found out that Rachel also loves M&Ms and chocolate.


This is a photo of Molly and me; she’s the one on the left. She wore a plaid blouse and I had on a plaid shirt also. You can see me if my green plaid shirt if you scroll down a bit.

Teaching
I finally received my teaching assignment confirmation email yesterday. I am still teaching five classes. That is good. The Associate Dean asked me if I had any concerns about teaching two new classes when I was at school yesterday to pick up some textbooks. I said no and reminded him that I started teaching just four years ago and I had five new classes to teach.

He smiled.

I picked up my textbooks for my two new classes. They seem to be fairly nice and all. The text for my new Project Management course looks almost identical to the one I have been using to teach another version of the same course.

Since I was at school, I stopped in to check my school email. One of my instructor friends told me that the attendance records for the new term were available.

Sweet.

I logged in and found that I had been misinformed by my chair about the class sizes. I knew that my Microeconomics class was going to be large. It has a tentative roster of 34 right now. My two Project Management courses had been scheduled for six students; now I have the same ten students in each section. The other Economics course was supposed to have12 students and now it is at 22. My Research Methods course was going to have ten students and now the roster is close to 25.

I also know that not everyone who is on the roster today will be on my roster when classes start next week. I also know that some students will drop the courses so the final roster number is yet to be determined.

On the plus side, with the exception of Microeconomics, most of my classes have former students so I will have fewer names to learn. On the minus side, the students in my Research Methods class will have significantly less personal attention from me. This is very regrettable because many of the students are poor to very poor English language writers.

On balance, I am happy with my classes. So far anyway.

Lunch with Doug
I headed out to the Counter Burger in South Orange County to meet Doug for lunch after picking up my textbooks. We both like the Counter Burger because we can create the hamburger the way we want it to be; sort of like Burger King’s “have it your way” concept only with more and better choices and options.



Doug took this photo of me while we waiting for our food to come out from the kitchen. Now, you can see why Molly talked to me about wearing plaid.

As usual, Doug and I had a great time at lunch. We got there after most of the noontime lunch crowd had left so that left the Counter Burger on the quiet side for a change. We had a nice tale next to a window on the sunny side of the building. I keep making the same mistakes when I go there. I ordered sliced avocado instead of guacamole that would spread much easier on the burger. I also ordered a honey mustard sauce when I really should have asked our server to bring me some Dijon mustard.

RED CLIFF
Going to see RED CLIFF was the last activity of the day except for the longish drive home from South Orange County at night.

I will admit that I went to see the film with very high expectations. I had read some of the reviews and they were all glowing. I had also read the book, “The Three Kingdoms,” so I was familiar with the historical context of the film.

The version I saw was a shortened version for Western audiences. It was about two and half hours long. I am waiting for the full length DVD set which ought to run somewhere between five and six hours. The film is in Mandarin with English subtitles. After a few minutes, you don’t really notice the other language.

Having been well prepared, I was so completely unprepared for the film watching experience that John Woo created for me and the rest of the audience. After seeing this film, I think that Woo is one of the best epic film directors ever. I’ll put him up there with De Mille or John Ford and be willing to take the Pepsi challenge.

The fighting scenes are the best choreographed ones that I have ever seen. Some of you may have seem CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON by Ang Lee and been amazed by the wire sword fights; I was. But, I was completely blown away by the intricate detail that went into the live action battle scenes. The major battle lasts about twenty or twenty five minutes long. It is a graphic and bloody battle but there is no true gratuitous violence in the film.

The cinematography was brilliant and the juxtaposition of some elements, like the young boy playing a flute while the army was practicing its combat tactics, was perfect.

All of the actors and actresses were superb. I just wished that the closing credits would have included the role the actor or actress played in the film so I could make a better connection with them. Hopefully, the multi-disk DVD package will include more information about the cast.

The CGI work was on a par with anything the Pixar or Industrial Light & Magic can create.

I highly recommended the film to Doug.

As for me, I will be buying the full length version on Blu-Ray as soon as it comes out for sale.

This was the end of my personal grand slam; getting four major events completed in one day.


Be well and stay happy.

Cyber Friday and Cyber Monday [posted on Tuesday]

Cyber Friday and Cyber Monday
I feel proud of myself in an Internet sort of way. I was able to complete my laptop shopping and some Christmas shopping on Friday and Monday without much of a delay. Of course, the fact that I was ordering standard products today may have had an influence on easy of a task I had to face.

The laptop should arrive around the middle of December if I am lucky. That will be good for me since I should have time over the Christmas Break to become familiar with it and to download most of the stuff on the current laptop.

The other order was for brownies. They should arrive by the end of the week if I am lucky. Hopefully, with the weather change to cooler temperatures, they will arrive in perfect condition. The brownies are for my favorite oncology nurses and Dr. Karen.

Utah Football
All is not so lost for our Utes. I was reading in the local newspaper sport section this morning that our Utes are still ranked in the Top 25 in three out of four major polls. I will admit that being ranked 25th is not the ranking that I would have hoped the Utes earned.


On the other hand, there are a lot of teams that never were ranked in the Top 25 by any poll. Even more will be staying home in December so they can watch the Utes play in another post season bowl game.

Perfectomundo.

RED CLIFF
I got really lucky with my plans to see the new John Woo film RED CLIFF. Doug had checked, using his iPhone, where it was playing when he was here for Thanksgiving. He used my ZIP Code as the search from location. He came up with a theater in Westwood and one of West Hollywood as the closest ones to me.

Neither choice appealed to me because the drives to get there are crummy.

When I checked the show times for the theater is Westwood, I discovered that the same chain was showing the film out in South Orange County.

Excellent.

In addition to having lots of parking and being 405 Freeway on-ramp close, I can also see it as part of a lot of errands on Wednesday. I am scheduled to see Molly the Stylist first then I will swing by school to pick up two textbooks that came in late. Since I was already now in Orange County, I called Doug to see if he was available for lunch; he was so we will meet for lunch at the Counter Grill. After lunch, I should have plenty of time to get over to the theater for the 3:30 showing of the film.


Be well and stay happy.