Eat the Word: NASB, here I come!!

During a Q&A session last Sunday, DF will be starting a men's group at church where he'll teach us how to study the Bible. He uses the New American Standard Bible and said we'd spend the 1st three months just on the 1st page of Genesis! I think a lot of guys got really excited at this point, and were ready to sign-up.

Then he drops the bomb: Oh yeah, there's going to be a little homework... just 4-5 hours each week. I'm on, man. Going to be fun.

Anyways, I splurged on a new NASB. From a previous post, you know I was on the ESV, and grew up on the NIV. But I'm thinking this one will be my day-in/day-out Bible as I hope and pray DF will be with us for a years to come. With DF, I'm really looking forward to maturing more as a Christian and growing more as a student of the Bible.

iWantOne

Steve Jobs' keynote introducing the iPhone is amazing. The iPhone looks amazing.

I'll stick w/ my trusty Nokia 6230 a little while longer and wait for the 3G iPhone w/ more storage.

I got all excited since I get 20% off equipment from Cingular w/ my company's corporate program, but Apple shot that down pretty quickly.

Lunch at the Beach Chalet

G made reservations for lunch at The Beach Chalet to celebrate my mom's birthday today.
I arrive 1st b/c I just finished a meeting at church. When they arrive, I help them disembark and go to park the car.

G calls me on the cell:

G: Did you find parking yet?
Me: Yeah, I'm on my way in.
G: You will be in for a big surprise when you get up here.
Me: Uh, OK..?

Find our table and they just finished settling down. Take off my coat.
G: Look who's right in front of you.
Me: Who? I don't see anyone.
G: Look at the guy who's right across from you.
Me: Where? (looking... looking...)

Me: Hey, it's Joe Montana and Jennifer!

I fought my urge to ask for his autograph since I figured he wanted to be left alone and no one else seemed to pay him any attention.

Anyways, that was pretty cool.

But not as cool as the time we spotted Maggie Cheung in Waikiki and again on the return flight to S.F. She was also in First Class along w/ us. This in 2002, before little G was born.

G: Hey, look who's in front of us to the left. (settling into our seats)
Me: (big smile)
G: Now you get to look at her the entire flight! (red eye HNL to SFO)
Me: But I'm just looking at the back of her head!

She autographed my United Airlines "Hemispheres" in-flight magazine after we disembarked.
As we went our separate ways, M shouted and she turned around and flashed her trademark smile. Beautiful.

"Earl Grey. Hot."

I was just nuking my lunch (I know, it's 3:30PM!) ...

... and a lady made a fresh cup tea at the tea/coffee station next to the microwave. By the very distinct aroma, and dark black color (ahem, colour) I could tell it was Earl Grey.

**Everybody** knows Captain Jean-Luc Picard orders his favorite tea, curtly, "Earl Grey. Hot."

Being a Star Trek geek in my younger years, I actually tried Earl Grey just because of Picard. I found Earl Grey to be like coffee- it's an acquired taste. Acquired.
"Warp factor 9. Engage."

DishTV HD

Unfortunately, we don't get any TV reception using an indoor over-the-air antenna at the new place so we ended up getting DishTV and went for the HD DVR.

Observations:
- The connection to the satellite is not as reliable as when we had Dish before at our old place.
- Don't watch that much TV, but when scanning what to watch, I pretty much only look at the HD channels.
- Setup the DVR to record movies off HBO-HD (3 mo. free) so we can watch 'em whenever.
- Speaking of which, HBO-HD has Star Wars Ep. 1 and 3 in high-def already! It looks great, needless to say- much better than std. DVD.
- The NFL Network has "America's Game" which profiles a specific NFL team's season. Got the 1994 49ers one that has Steve Young, Brent Jones and Merton Hanks talking heads with narration by Bruce Willis. Nice to reminisce that last Super Bowl.
- Pretty much anything is better in HD... like Food Network.
- The Kung Fu Network (HD) is... interesting.

Anyways, the real fun will come when "LOST" re-starts next month. Maybe I'll even get on the "24," "Battlestar Galactica" bandwagons.

Also caught Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" on HBO-HD which I'll write about later, but in short: thumbs up.

Scavengers

If you didn't know, engineers are also scavengers.

The past few weeks at work, we've had "Clean and Beautiful Days." The facilities peeps put out tables and trash bins for everyone to clean out the junk from their cubes. So it goes, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."

Before my one week off for the holidays, I hadn't noticed anything worthwhile, but now that I'm back... !

Anyways, I snagged an IBM ThinkPad docking station for my T42. I already have one at work, but having one at home wouldn't hurt. Good find even though it's missing the power cable and brick, which should be cheap to replace. BTW, Lenovo changed the docking connector for the T60... too bad.

Also saw what looks like an HP LaserJet 4 something. We have a 4L at home now. It's buried under some other stuff, so I'll rescue it later tonight when there's less people around.