Dinhternet

This week, peo­ple came to my site after search­ing for:

Daniel W (“gov­er­nor watts” x3)
Bran­don T (“bran­don take­mori”)
and Michelle E (“michelle encarnacion”)

I haven’t men­tioned any of you by name in a while. Are you search­ing to see what I said about you, or is some­one else cyber-stalking you? Hey, it could be a friendly stalker. (From Qwantz.com). Maybe a long-lost rel­a­tive look­ing for you? (From Wondermark.com.) Or maybe you’re just an online celebrity?

Sur­pris­ingly, I almost never get hits on my site from searches for my own name. Or they are good enough to not need to Google me. Which isn’t that hard, now that I think about it, because I try to put this link up everywhere.

So I had a friend in high school named Daniel W. He was a Nin­tendo freak. Every time he walked by a piano, he would play the orig­i­nal Mario theme. He intro­duced me to Don­key Kongo before it existed in Amer­ica. (He had imported the Japan­ese ver­sion, which I think is far superior.)

Any­way, this guy went on to UCSD, where he was very active on cam­pus. He even ran for Gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia in the spe­cial elec­tion way back in 2003, using his Wheel of For­tune win­nings as his cam­paign fund. He wasn’t try­ing to win as much as raise aware­ness for his single-plank plat­form, which was lower tuition for col­lege stu­dents. Some­thing I could def­i­nitely get behind, so I voted for him. Unfor­tu­nately, not many oth­ers did, so Dan had to find some­thing else to do.

Enter the JET pro­gram. Dan is over in Japan teach­ing mid­dle school­ers Eng­lish at the moment. And he does stuff like this on his time off:

This vid is now get­ting passed around all the video game sites I read and even got to the front page of Digg! Dan is by far the most famous guy I know. Won­der what he’ll be doing next.

Hmm… stum­bled home last night and passed out with the inten­tion of sleep­ing for two hours and then study­ing. Two turned into four. Woke up and crammed as much as I could with Will’s old BIO 10 book, which isn’t even the same book as the one I’m sup­posed to be read­ing. Went a lit­tle early and saw Alice as I was wait­ing out­side. We reviewed a lit­tle and she taught me a cou­ple of things that ended up being on the test, so thanks Alice! The final was basi­cally like one of the midterms. Twelve def­i­n­i­tions and two short essays. Fin­ished in about half an hour and ran the hell outa there. Oh yeah, and I noticed that Jenny, MJ, and Yurika were in my class. I’m pretty sure I’ll be notic­ing a lot more of the APhiO in my classes from now on. Went home after that and called up Phim­phao and Daniel Watts. Phim­phao was study­ing, but I took Daniel and Everly out to Pluto’s for lunch, then went back to Phimphao’s, where Daniel showed me Don­key Kon­gos, Nintendo’s answer to DDR. After that, Daniel wanted to take a nap before dri­ving back to San Jose, so I went back to the apart­ment and chilled for a while. Cathy came by and made din­ner! Yay! Then we went to Baskin Rob­bins’ for some $1 ice cream with APhiO. Then it was yet another movie night at Momma Tang’s place. She enjoyed immensely. Espe­cially since she has to work on a six-page paper. Well, after the movie, we all got kicked out, so here I am back at the apart­ment once again.

Today’s quote comes from Daniel and me dis­cussing a Japan­ese study abroad program: