Sales Conference

Some highlights of the conference this year:

Al Gore came to speak! Woman empowerment will solve global warming. For details about this, please ask Beah.

I don't know how we pulled it off, but MC Hammer was the surprise celebrity judge for the talent show. Craaazy.

OSO Google attempts to break the Guinness World Record for the largest cake decoration competition or something like that. This is my team's cake. The idea started off promising...I blame Leotta for not using his muscles to tear the spatulas away from these people and then channeling his mother to build an awesome rickroll cake.

I don't have a picture for this one, but I was also pleasantly surprised by a case study session I had with Harvard Prof. Francis Frei. She was excellent and insightful.

Better than last year I think.

Relay 4 Life

We participated in Relay for Life this weekend -- AGAINST cancer! This is the event where you create teams and have at least one person walking around the track at all times for 24 hours. We were part of the Google team (the top team, woot!) and took the 3-6 AM shift.

The most exciting part of the walk?
5 AM: The big announcement...it's exactly halfway through the event...and we get the honor of...turning around and walking in the other direction! I almost couldn't handle the excitement.

Props:

• All donations to the 3-6AM team -- Thanks for the support!
• Reid for driving and giving me a brief tour of Stanfurd.
• Charlene for donating to a complete stranger on accident.
  
• Nelson for running the most.
• Michael for running the least.

Pathetically Entertaining

It Started With A Kiss is a very cute drama with a well-paced story line and satisfying ending. The music was suiting and catchy. It is also the third highest rated drama series in Taiwan. With that said, the main character is the most frustratingly insulting female lead I have ever seen. The basic idea of the series is a very dumb girl who falls in love with the smartest boy at school.

[As a side note, apparently schools in Taiwan divide students based on intelligence. All the smart kids are in the A Class while the most troubled students are in the F Class - I don't quite know how I feel about this system, so I won't debate it at the moment.]

Back to the story. The male character is conveniently perfect in every possible way...all except for his arrogant demeanor which often leads to some rather harsh interactions with the girl. Normally I would pity the girl (which is the reaction I think they were trying to go for), but they made her so incredibly pathetic that I was having a hard time rooting for her after awhile. So she is mind-numbingly dumb...ok, that's fine. I can handle that, but one would usually expect that she would have SOME other sort of admirable quality. Maybe she's creative. Maybe she's athletic. Maybe she can cook, clean, be hard working, be coordinated, make a decision, have a spine or do something...anything! What DOES she do in the series you ask? She throws herself at this guy who constantly rejects her and is, at times, quite mean to her (I feel kinda bad saying this but rightfully so). She has no talent, no aspirations and spends most of her time day dreaming about how to land him for a husband. Basically, she shamelessly followed him around for four years while I counted the endless number of steps backward she takes for all women kind.

They say the lesson to be learned from this series is persistence. What a bunch of hoo-ha.

My Theme Song

There's a girl i know who's hop to da hip
and she goes by the name of k-koklynn yip
she pops da code-a like a soda so don't ya even trip
ba-ba-ba bop be-be be-bom ba-da bop bip bip!

-Charleezy

Audio Converter Without the $$$

Years ago I downloaded a couple of radio dramas...yes, in the days of TV, DVDs and the internet, I still find pleasure in stories told on the radio. I can't say how popular it is now, but I think it was a rather big thing in Asia in the 90's. Anyhow, I still listen to them once in awhile, especially on long drives back home, but one of them was in .ram format. Ah, RealPlayer...I don't see too many now, but if you like to download random international things, I'm sure you've come across a number of these files. Unfortunately, these don't convert in itunes nor are they compatible with other portable players, so I went in search for a converter online.

After much work searching and coming across TONS of gross download sites and shareware trial versions, I finally found something that worked. The program is called SUPER. Instructions on how to use it can be found here for those of you who are technically challenged. =)

If you try to download the app by following the links on that site, you'll find yourself going in circles and misled by conveniently placed ads. After clicking through three pages of bait, you finally get to the download page. I'll save you the trouble and link you there now. If you scroll all the way down, you'll eventually get to a very inconspicuous link that looks like:

Looks shady, but it works...I can now enjoy the dramas from my ipod and there were no nasty side effects that I know of...I hope...