Nathan Ng

Posting from San Jose Airport!

Here I am, waiting, to leave on a jetplane. I don’t know when (or if) I’ll be back again.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have a picture to go along with this post. I mean I could use my iSight camera, but seriously, people behind me would probably be bugged out. So here we go! Random picture FTW.

Oh yeah, flights are delayed.  Bugger.

Bye California!

Update: I’m counting 5 MacBooks and zero PCs in this area.  Three prev-gen Pros (not including mine) and 2 prev-gen regulars.

Update 2: Someone pulled out an HP laptop!  I saw 5 iPhones, 4 BlackBerry.  Apple’s winning everything here.  And hell I’m extremely bored.  I still got an hour to go =/.

I’m on the news!

I have no idea why they used this shot, but they caught me taking a picture of our structure with an iPhone.  And I laughed.  But whatever, still made it!  LOL

In short, I participated in a charity event called Second Harvest, where we competed (intra-company) to build the craziest sculpture possible using food that we’re donating. So we came up with THIS:

Monster Truck that’s STOMPING out the hunger! That truck (along with all the vendor stands, bleachers, obstacles, and the road, ALL MADE with food), came up to around 3500 lbs. of food. The press was here and everything along with judges from various fame. We’re now competing for regionals (feels like high school again), and hopefully taking the crown!

Surfin it up!

HELL YEAH BABY!  First time surfing baby!  The coops and I hit up Santa Cruz for some lessons and some gooooo wave surfing baby.  Quite the friggin’ awesome.  Rode 2 pretty big waves, with the last one being insanely long!  Felt like nothing before, except maybe owning an insanely steep snowboarding hill haha.

Daaaamn that was awesome.

Randoms #1

Alright I’m going to stop my long picture blog posts, because, quite frankly, I’m getting tired of writing articles.  So I’m going to post random shorts of fanatical nerve movements inside my brain.

1) I WANT AN HTC TOUCH HD.  OR AN XPERIA X1.  OR A T-MO G1.  OR A BLACKBERRY STORM.

2) New Macbook Pro leaks?  Dock on the TRACKPAD!  Pretty cool, kinda unsure of how its gonna actually play out.

3) Sweeeeeeeeeet (Look underneath).  The stuff they have in here is actually really useful for helping you to decide. Why doesn’t Canada have something like this? Then again, we don’t have Arnold either – for better or worse lol.
 

4) HEROES was FRICKIN’ INTENSE.

Clueless Travelling I: Santa Cruz Beach

Welcome to the new series: Clueless Travelling.  In this series, my roommates and I will not attempt to know exactly what we are doing and where we are going.  In this week’s episode, we present to you – the Santa Cruz Beach… one of them.  

So here we are!  Not really the nicest beach ever, and its rides rival, well, Ontario Place.  But hey, there are some AWESOME Gargoyles.  

Okay so we actually found something to do – something that I’ve actually been longing to do: VOLLEYBALL!  Not too many pictures, but enough to blog about it.

Yeah, these idiots are my roommates.

Oh yeah and I guess I should mention: doooood some of these roads rival some that I’ve seen in Initial D.  Okay not really full out hairpins, but there ARE hairpins… they’re just dragged out long enough that you can’t drift (… hmmmmm on second thought…)

Second Week: Lessons Learned

Here we go again.  I started work, and there were a whole ton of things I discovered.  Keep in mind, CDS told us we were going to be ‘culture shocked’.  Really the only shocking thing so far was the sheer number of boxydelic Scions and gorgeous Maseratis.  There are quite a few things that were interesting though.

1) Canadian telecommunications SUCK (I assume everyone knows already).  I discovered that Americans don’t actually have to pay long distance fees.  You can call from California to New York and it’ll all just be local minutes.  WHY MUST YOU OVERCHARGE, TELECOM OVERLORDS.

2) American car rentals are sweet.  Since its paid by car size, you can switch cars anytime you want.  My roommate had a Sebring for the first week.  Not bad, but eh, in the end its a Chrysler.  So on the weekend, he traded for this:

Yeah, fitting 3 people in the car isn’t the greatest thing in the world.  But hey, we’re in Cali.  We got ta look good.

3) I really, really miss Tim Hortons.

Final comment: remember how I was raving on about zero clouds?  well they finally hit.  Mornings are now cold, clouds are in the sky, and evenings are cold.  Granted, anywhere from 12 – 4pm is still mad sunshine, but damnit, for the other 20 hours of the day, I’m getting friggin’ Toronto weather =/.

Churches in California

August 31, 2008

So… many of you know that I come from quite a small church in Markham, ON.  In all honesty, we’re quite lax and dare I say, not-at-all inspired/motivated people.  So two Sundays ago, my parents and I attended this baptist church called, North Valley Baptist Church.  We parked on the street and the FIRST thing I saw: a big African-American man fully-suited (a REALLY nice suit to boot) with tie and everything.  So I thought, whoa, must be chairperson or something.  As we near the entrance of the church, my parents and I, were fully shocked.  Groups of every sort of people – kids, teens, adults, seniors, of all ethincities – fully suited up and dressed as formal as you can be.  So naturally, my parents and I felt entirely out of place – we stuttered and decided to go in anyway.

We entered the sanctuary and we were totally in AWE (and VERY intimidated – picture below).  We found a seat amongst a thousand people and opened a really cool bulletin (on par with Creekside quality).  The chairperson started to lead through the service.  Each session was a jaw-dropping experience.  Let me list some of the ‘features’ of this traditional baptist church:

• MASSIVE choir
• 4 bright-shining, eye-hurting pearl white grand pianos. (2 full-sized, 2 smaller)
• 4 pianists (and a rotation with another 2 depending on the songs the choirs sang)
• Miniature orchestra, complete with a harp
• Four-man acapella group (with an ! asian!)
• Loudest sounding singspiration ever, complete with beautiful solos, orchestral pieces etc.
• One of the most insane hardcore sermons I’ve ever seen (imagine P. Andrew sermons x 10)
• Baptisms every week (2 people during the Sunday I went)
• Alter calls every week (5-ish people accepting Christ the Sunday I went)
• Services for hispanic, filipino, and soon, an indian service)
• Mornign, afternoon, evening and Wednesday services
• Lower deck, fully-packed with people
• Upper deck, half-packed with people

First Week: Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned from America (from a Canadian perspective, obviously):

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1) $1 McChickens own everything. If I were to create the supposed company that owns all companies, I’d name it “One Dollar McChicken”.

2) Nice cars are essential to awesome lifestyles. If you were ever a mayor of a city, and you needed something to boost city morale, increase tourism, and create (an illusion of) a higher standard of living, the answer is simple: buy your citizens nice cars.

3) Americans love blue WAY more than Canadians. The logic is as follows: Canadians don’t wave their flags around. The Canadian flag is red and white. The American flag is red, white, and BLUE. Americans wave their flag ALL OVER THE FRICKIN’ PLACE (they literally sell them in home depot!). By process of elimination, Americans love blue. This one really isn’t a lesson though.

4) Silicon chokes the world.  Torontonians (and probably most Canadians) are probably more environmentally conscious than Californians. From the media, I would have thought that Americans were dead-focused on being green and saving the environment. Heck, all the presidential campaigns are fighting for our sources of fuel. In Toronto, I’ve grown up with recycling and the 3Rs have been so ingrained in me, that throwing a glass or plastic bottle into the blue bin is natural. In California, I don’t have an actual recycling bin… anywhere. Now, most people who know me know that I’m not exactly the most environmentally conscious person in the world. But even I feel bad about throwing a glass bottle of pasta sauce, into the GARBAGE! This baffles me.

5) Clouds suck. In other words: ZERO CLOUDS ROCK. Sorry I take that back. I would actually really love a cloud right above my window *fans self*.

More lessons later.

Day 5: Hollywoooooood

August 29, 2008.

I must say, Hollywood is definitely something. Keep in mind, this was a normal business day. Like seriously, back in Toronto, if you see a car shop on the street, you imagine its full of ricers or old broken-down family cars. In LA? You see this:

Aston Martin V12 Vanquish – Check
Bentleys – Double Check
Ferraris – Double Check
Lamborghini – Check
Porsches – Double Check
BMWs – 6-Series Check
Benzes – A Buncha’ Checks!

And you know, you start cruising down the streets and these things randomly pop up (that’s an angel on the hood of the right car btw – i.e. Rolls Royce):

Jag-fest! Of course, there’s much more (visit my Facebook album – BRABUS S-series!), but you’ll probably get desensitized by the end.

Finally, can’t leave Hollywood without a picture of it!

Oh yeah, and I own Chuck Norris. Good Game Chuckie.

Day 4: Dessert!! – only with one s and a hell lot less sweet.

August 28, 2008

Our road to Los Angeles looked like this:

An hour later, we ran into this:

And… yeah. Oh! Here’s something a little different:

So to keep things interesting, I’ll post another Scion.