My NBA starters and De Niro

Though it was raining at times, it's a great weekend after all.  Met with Maya (after 30 years) and her friend, caught up with my laundry, clean the house (just some parts of it). But my weekend was mostly spent watching the NBA All Stars (wearing my Dwight Howard jerseys) with the kids. We love basketball (it's ironic we are in a city without an NBA team). Of course I provided the food and Deirdre provided interesting NBA trivia.

One question Deirdre asked me, "If you get a chance to pick for starting line up, who would it be?". I said, Dwight Howard definitely would be patrolling the center. Charles Barkley will be a strong presence at the block, Larry Bird will be raining those threes,  Michael Jordan taking the one on one situation and finally Steve Nash dishing pin point passes and playing the pick-and-roll with either Barkley or Howard for the Jam!

Of course it's just a fantasy... now back to reality, the game is over, the West won over the East. Though I voted for Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant got his 4th All Star MVP award.  It's back to work tomorrow, but before i turned off the TV, I chanced upon this classic scene from Robert De Niro pretending to shoot the TV (with Jackson Browne's Late for the sky song) in the movie Taxi Driver.

Song for Adam

I could not understand why today, I was just listening to Song For Adam over and over as I was driving to work.

The song spoke of death (suicide) of a Jackson Browne's friend.  Quite an irony on valentine's day. I finally realize that the song is a metaphor or even an allegory of love that was lost.

These days...

I just heard it's valentines day. How could I missed it? It's easy...it's the last thing I'm concerned with at this point. Although it may be worth thinking back the time I may have forgotten to do. But then again as Jackson Browne said " I had a lover, it's so hard to risk another these days".

it's all about the cloud

I just finished the re-launching of abrenian.com after so many attempts. Instead of the traditional hosting environment, I decide to use amazon ec2 cloud for my platform using an ubuntu cloud image.

abrenian.com has been continuously running since 2002. Since then, there were many transformation as far as the underlying technology.


The site is now running wordpress, which started as primarily a blogging software but now considered as a full blown Content Management System. The email system is completely hosted by google apps.

It sounds expensive you think? Not really. Consider this...google apps is free, wordpress is free. Although amazon ec2 is pay as you go, it's less expensive than the more traditional hosting. Plus I can run other web applications on the same server image.

who can beat the cloud?

who's lucky?

Josh got a new car. The salesman asked me why I should buy him this sporty Nissan 350z. Quite simple. He deserves it.  Plus, there's only one reason for me why I work hard.  To give them everything I didn't had a chance to have when I was at their age. The salesman says he's lucky. I said no I am lucky.

Now if I can only come up with more to replace my aging Toyota Camry. But then again, I can wait.