Zhou Dynasty

First day of Cargill Today was my first day of work at Cargill. I arrived to work at 8am and spend 5 hours in their orientation program. The program itself was pretty boring. However there were a bunch of Chinese from China there. It turns out that the Foreign Trade Minister of China was there to give a speech on the open trade with China. It was a pretty big event I guess. After the orientation I went to my group otherwise called the IT Infrastructure group. We are a higher level support for Cargill's network infrastructure. So basically we solve their complicated networking problems. Work was challenging today. I got a new computer and had the task of setting it up with the XP image. It took me and my co-worker 4 hours working on that thing and it still hasn't completed. We kept running into problems during the slow installation process, forcing us to start over again 5 times. I think this job is going to have a lot of toying around with PCs and kicking/fixing them.

Feels good Work was very rewarding today. I completed my first ticket today. The ticket had 5 people who needed some software installation. Wasn't too hard, all I did was check their status and remote controlled their machines to do the installtion. However if I had not learned as much as I did in the past two days, I would have no clue how to manage this network. My knowledge on being an IT analyst and network administrator since the past 2 days has trippled. Today I even got to help install two Dell servers onto a rack. We went down to the server room and it felt like it was 50 degrees in there. All you could hear is the continuous humming of servers, probably a couple hundred servers all together. Long lines of cords and ethernet cable and fibre optic cable ran everywhere as well. It was fun. But my co-worker cut himself and pinched his finger. So he was bruised and bleeding when we were done. I didn't know server racking could be so dangerous.

Idiot Omg I'm an idiot... I went to borrow a pair of scissors from Wendy and I saw the Natalie Imbruglia cd sitting on her desk. She told me it was hers and asked me if I wanted to borrow it, so I did. Then I went over to Mick and borrowed his Sony headphones. Then I came back into my cube with excitement and plugged in the headphones and started the cd. The first song was "Torn", I think it was the only popular song she had. But I couldn't hear it very well so I turned up the volume. It was good to hear Torn again... but then I noticed Chanel trying to get my attention. I finally looked up and she asked me if I was listening to music. I said "yeah how did you know?" She said "we can all hear it, its loud." Then I looked at my computer and found out that the headphones weren't plugged in. I had my headphones on and was listening to the song through the speakers! When I finally realized this I became very embarassed and blushed, and everyone was laughing at me, the intern.

Google's GMail I didn't know this but apparently a bunch of people out there are really desparate to get Gmail. They fear that due to Google's revolutionary free email service and it's popularity, they will not be able to obtain the email address they want and will have to go with something like mr_c00l_dud3@gmail.com. There's a website gmailswap.com which lets members post offers in exchange for a gmail invitation. And on ebay, gmail invitations are being auctioned off at just under $100. Let me just take a second to rub it in.... I have GMail and (most of) you don't, haha. Feel free to email or spam me at billyzhou@gmail.com, it won't matter because I got 1GB of space and spam filtering to protect me from annoying viagra emails! On a side note: I saw Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban.... and it was good. Harry is becoming more of a man, I love the character development. And Hermione is getting to become a hottie herself... Go see the movie, you'll like it.

China Pics! My China pictures are posted! Get 'em while they're hot!

Attention Xanga Slaves (Users)!! It has been brought to my attention that the poor souls over in Xanga land must pay in order to host their own images. I've always enjoyed posting up images on my blog for free, but that's because I have my own server. I think posting mages with your blog entry is really cool and really adds a lot more content. So I've set up a free image host I call PhotoMe. I've decided to make this free to everyone because I myself enjoy free things and I would love to share it with my friends as long as it is within my means. Just go to http://photome.snespro.com and register for your free account. Keep in mind that the images you post will be viewable by other members of PhotoMe. Enjoy! And don't be afraid to let me know what you think!

Computer graveyard What a day at work... They sent me to the infamous stock room in the basement of the building to take out existing hard drives from the dead PCs of the past fiscal years. When I was first given the job I was pretty damn excited, I love tinkering and opening up machines. But these IBMs were waaaaayyyy old....I think the tiny stock room is haunted by the ghosts of the IBMs. It took me like an hour to remove 4 hard drives. It was not easy. Those PCs were so damn dirty, and the case design is not as simple and intuitive as the Dells of today. There were a bunch of other machines I didn't touch because they were either rusted or burnt. So I came back up with the drives and they said I need to get the ones from the rusted and burnt machines too and they handed me a glove! Wtf!? Who do they think I am?? What if I cut myself or something? Are interns that dispensible nowadays?? I put on my glove and went down into the basement and I sat on the toilet to kill some time. Pretty soon it was time to go home.

Eating lunch Do you ever eat lunch or dinner by yourself? For some reason I can't go out and eat by myself. I've always had this problem ever since I can remember. Anyways, today for lunch I was going to go get a sub to bring back. But I found a little Chinese restaurant called Lucky Inn. I knew it had a buffet and it was a family style restaurant and I knew that I'm tired of eating those buffet things, but for some reason I couldn't help myself and I went to eat there. The food wasn't bad and the price is ok, but the buffet is small compared to my family's buffet. The whole time I was eating I was wondering about who owns this place and whether or not I know him/her since everyone knows each other here in MN. So does your family own Luck Inn in Eden Prairie?

Best margarita salt Today I went to a Cargill site in Savage to deliver and setup some new laptops that I've been working on. This place has a lot of salt because its one of the plants. Anyways I introduced myself as intern-Bill and now that name has stuck with me. And even worse, now they're calling their own intern intern-Jon. Jon was confused until I explained to him later how I earned him his new nickname. Before I left they gave me some free salt. Not just any ordinary salt, I got a round of special salt with 33% less sodium but all the taste! When I was about to leave they asked me if I want the best margarita salt... how could I resist? They gave me a 3 pound box of their Kosher salt! Man, that's a lot of salt. Supposedly Cargill makes this salt in St. Clair, Michigan and it is the only place in the world that still makes kosher salt by using sea water and letting it evaporate. I can't wait to try my world-class margarita salt when I get home. Wow, I didn't know salt could be so interesting!

Big HDs make me drool It's always fun to think back to 1994 and remember the 1.4GB capacity of storage space I had. I had two SCSI hard drives with 700MB each, man I was the king those days... I stored over a 300 pictures of Dragon Ball Z that I downloaded through AOL 2.5 using my 14.4kbps modem and 10 free hours of the initial membership. Yes, I did exceed those 10 hours, I think the first bill for the month was over $60. Unlimited internet access was still an unthinkable service back in those days. I can't believe how fast technology advances. Today in 2004 I am configuring 200GB external hard drives that have firewire and USB connectivity. There are hundreds of these hard drives that need to be configured. Just the site of 30 of these hard drives in the storage room makes me drool. Isn't it great how we have it today? We have 200GB hard drives and unlimited high-speed internet access. No we don't download Dragon Ball Z pics anymore, that would take too fast, we download entire episodes and movies now.

Tired Why do I stay up so late all the time? Damn I'm tired today. I found a new thing to do when there's some free time at work. Go to www.manadarintools.com and go to their Character Flashcard page. There you can learn the meaning of Chinese characters, how they sound like and how to write them. Then you can download Chinese character sheets, print them out and start practicing your writing. I'm trying to learn about 10 words a day. So far so good but my hand writing totally sucks. I feel like a little kid trying to draw. Ok that's my tip for the day, time to start fixing things.

Latest on my bike For those of you wondering why I haven't gotten my bike back yet, it is because the bike doesn't belong to me anymore. When my bike was stolen, my insurance company paid the bank off because I borrowed money from the bank to buy the bike. Now if I had $8000 just lying around gathering dust I wouldn't have to borrow money. Anyways, I just called my insurance agent and he told me that a salvage company picked up my bike. The company is going to auction the bike to the public (oh nos!). So now if I want to buy back my motorcycle I'm gonna have to bid. Isn't that sad? To lose your sexy two-wheeled motor vehicle to some thief, have them ride it for almost a year, and then find out that the police got it back but it's not yours anymore and it's going to be auctioned off like a farm animal.

She likes fish! Chew Shit Fun likes mudskippers, catfish, snakheads, and weatherloach. And yes, her name really is Chew Shit.

Crying a river Ok it's like raining squirrels and hailing dogs outside and I get off work in 10 minutes. I just checked the traffic conditions... and they don't look good. Damn I hate working in the south west suburbs. If only I accepted that job in the north east, I would have no problems with traffic at all....

My day so far This morning I woke up to a phone call from David's brother. I checked my watch and I was already an hour and a half late for work! I said "shit!" and jumped out of bed. I don't know why my alarm didn't go off, I will have to investigate later today. Well it turns out that David's brother came over because today is his U of M Orientation! Ahhh.... the memories! Orientation marked the beginning of a new life for me, the college life. I wish I was in his shoes, starting out fresh and not knowing what's ahead of me. Another weird thing I noticed was that during MY orientation, I ALSO overslept! What a coincidence to oversleep on the day your friend's brother has his orientation. Well now I'm at work and David just called me about 5 minutes ago. He brought good news that we got into the Tarrie House. Tarrie House is a set of apartments behind Dinnaken. That was our first pick for a place to live next semester. We're both very surprised to get in. As we start out next semester it will be starting the end of our college life. Sigh, I just wish I was a freshman again.

Hot Asian chicks...

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I got a webcam
Ahhh.... technology is great.

Low on gas It is Wednesday and I feel like it is Sunday. What a long week it has been. I had two company orientation days back to back and boy was it fun. First day consumed 13 hours and second day was 9. I can't believe how crappy it can be just sitting there listening to presentations over and over with 2 minute breaks every other hour, litterally 2 minutes. On top of that I haven't been sleep well each night and wore the same pair of boxers for 2 days straight. Working out? Yeah right, no time or energy for that. I feel a little better today because I finally got to wear a new pair of boxers as I did laundry yesterday. I also got a haircut so I don't feel like the Chinese shaggy now. Now the only thing I would need is some uninterrupted sleep. Damn I've been hooked on this game called Bushtarion. And thanks to me, 6 other friends are now hooked too. Wanna get addicted too? It's free online dope.