Saturday, September 13, 2008

Website Fun: StuffWhitePeopleLike.com

Recently Lauren got me hooked on this site, Stuff White People Like. This site is dedicated to pointing out white people culture. I love making fun of my Caucasian background, and skin. Let me shed some quotes on you so that you can understand this classicness:

"There are a number of industries that survive solely upon white guilt: Penguin Classics, the SPCA, free range chicken farms, and the entire rubber bracelet market. Yet all of these pale in comparison to classical music, which has used white guilt to exist for over a century beyond its relevance."

"Among the wrong kind of white people, there are few more hated than the wigger or whitethug. Though it is very acceptable and common for the right kind of white people to dress and act as though they were Japanese, Chinese, or European, it is completely unacceptable for them to act like rappers."

"Within a matter of months, MySpace had gone from a virtual utopia to Digital Detroit, where only minorities and indie bands remain. If you plan on befriending white people, it is essential that you join them in the digital suburbs and open a Facebook account immediately. It’s also a good idea to make up a story about how someone from high school sent you a friend request and after accepting you discovered that they were fat and unsuccessful. White people love these stories."

ASM and Raffles


I don't know what it is, but I always seem to win raffles.

So this last Thursday we had the first club meeting of ASM, the Association for Systems Management. It is reckoned to be the most active club within the Marriott School. We went to a ropes course near Utah Lake. It was so much fun to climb and what not. We were also humans escaping from a little barge to a little plank so that we could get zapped up by aliens (might I mention also that Alex couldn't pick up her feet, so she kept on losing parts of her body to the sea of liquid nitrogen). Then I had to climb up a log about 40 feet, and walk across one between two trees about 50 feet above the ground. It was nerve racking, but I loved it.

Then at the end we listened to a presentation by Ernst and Young. They were voted by Business Week to be the best company to start working for after college. They really gave a great presentation. I would enjoy working for them in the IT security field. They have some security centers out east in which they are paid to hack into people's computers and find vulnerabilities. They also do lots of work in LA for Hollywood-based companies. It also sounded like a lot of fun.

Then we had a raffle at the end. I always seem to win raffles. I don't even say that in a stuck-up way. I just win raffles a lot. Five posts ago I wrote about winning a raffle in the baseball stadium. So that makes me two for three in the last few months. This time I won an 8GB iPod touch. Which I might add is the greatest technological gadget I've ever had. Everybody is probably already bored of hearing me talk about how great my iPod is, but really, it's awesome. It does convince me that buying an iPhone would make me more productive. Except the whole $90 a month data plan thing.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Tones is getting hitched

So I'm sure that most of you guys have heard this already, but I proposed to Alex last Thursday (September 4th). And she said yes. So that makes me engaged.

Everyone that reads this probably wants the story. So for the record, I had the ring for a couple weeks beforehand, knowing that I wanted to propose, but I had no idea how. I have always imagined the whole proposal to be something different and special for every couple, so even if nobody else cared, I had to make it special for Alex and myself.

In fact, I might dare day that I wasn't necessarily planning on doing it that Thursday. I wasn't sure if there was enough time. But somewhere along the course of that day I worked out the plan. So I had an idea. And a ring. Which for me, equals not being able to hold it in anymore.

Here's what I did: I made her a book. Alex, in her apartment, has coffee table books with titles like How to find Mr. Right, Boys are Stupid, and other stuff. These books are composed of funny/thoughtful pictures with descriptions under them. I made her a book titled "How to Find a Guy or Dude So Ridiculously Awesome That You'll Probably Want to Marry Him." It took so long to set things up. I had to pick all the pictures to put in there. And think of cool things to say about all of them.

But here's where I went wrong: I just had to buy her flowers. Unfortuntely I remembered that just about 3 minutes late. Because that is how late I was to get to the flower shop. So I stupidly spent about 45 minutes trying to find flowers anywhere else. The whole time I had in my head a quote from a friend that day, "If you are going to propose, you better get her flowers." So I have going through my head that the night just won't be cool enough without flowers. And they have to be lillies. Getting the wrong kind of flowers might have been worse than no flowers at all. So I didn't get her flowers.

Finally I got everything together, and I'm leaving my apartment, and calling her. I knew I was going to have an interesting night, because she had the voice of, "I know you haven't been at school, and you've been doing random stuff for a long time tonight that I can't know of." She seemed a little burned out of waiting. We went out to ice cream, and then went to our secret hole in the world park outside of Orem. It's kind of our special place to go and talk and have fun, and know that nobody else will bother us. Since we both discovered the place together, its a cool "us" place.

So there I gave her the book. She read through it to the last page. And she just stares at me. I looked at her and said, "So what is missing in all the pictures?" She stared at me for the longest time ever, without saying anything. Then finally she says, "a ring?" I replied, semi-reluctantly, "Oh yeah. That's right." I paused for about a minute. I figured I would milk this engagement for all its worth, as if we were on an episode of the Office. I then said, "Okay, who am I fooling." And then I proposed.