The President of the United States of America! (And update on life)

At Reynolds Coliseum to see Obama! Im at NCSU and Im going to see Obama! This is so fricking cool!!!!! Its full of people and its so hot. I think, and hope, that this will start soon! Ill update this later.

SUPER LATE UPDATE:

That event was FRICKING AMAZING!!!!! I don't know what to say about it! It was just awesome. The NCSU Marching Band played great music, then there was a small business owner talking, and then I saw the President! (granted, I was across the coliseum from him, but still, I saw him! I saw Obama!)

I took some pictures and videos of it all. Most are up on Facebook already, and I'll add some to the blog later this week. Now that we're almost in the beginning of December :-P

I do hope that the whole American Jobs Act passes. This recession is really getting annoying now... Hopefully France, Germany, and the US can plan something to try to get everything sorted out. And China should join in and help too. Obama is a great speaker, but the Congress hasn't been doing what we have been wanting it to do. Reminds me of what in Argentina is the "Que se vayan todos" movement some years ago, where people would vote so that NOBODY got re-elected and to see some new faces in Congress. I wonder if that would be of any help here nowadays. Get some fresh minds in there.

Moving on... Occupy Movement. What do we do about it? What are we doing with it? What is it doing? To tel you the truth, I hope that they do get SOMETHING done. I've gone by Occupy Raleigh some times, and I have stayed there a while. Good people, very educated and most of them know what they are talking about. But how can we all become part of a solution to work together? Clearly the neoliberalism and capitalist corporations have been ruining us... But so has our own government, whom we are supposed to be part of. So what can be done about it all? Clearly we need to go out and vote and call our Senators and Congressmen what we want, the issues that are important to us, and make sure that they know we are not to be played with.

Next thing... Relationships. They are hard. Long distance just means they get exponentially harder by the centimeter. I guess in the end, everything that can happen will happen, and we just have to make the best of everything. We have to learn from our mistakes, crawl before we stand up, and walk before we run. If you love somebody, will you let them go? Food for thought people.

Well, I have enjoyed updating my blog again, hehe. But I have to go do some homework and study. Finals are coming up! I am pretty ready for my French test of course, Industrial Engineering shouldn't be too bad. Physics will be tough, but I think I can take it. Chinese (yes, I'm learning Mandarin) should be interesting. I'm doing pretty good this semester, so really looking forwards to teh classes next semester! Anyways, I have to go study! Wish me luck people! Good bye! To a good future and a great week!

El Tano

Okay..... I got a couple of things to say...

I have a couple of things to say.
First of all, if you haven't tried it yet, and you're using Google Chrome, you should get Add Speech extension and the Angry Birds for Chrome extension. They are awesome.

Now on to more serious business.
I had a foot wart. It first appeared when I was like 8 or 9. Now it's back. It came back last October or so.

My wart after it fell off some 30 minutes ago today.

The hole on my foot, with some blood from the old scar.

At first I just left it there, it was small and I didn't care. But now I have been fighting it with Walgreens brand Maximum Strength Wart Remover Liquid. It has like 17% Salicylic Acid. Today I saw the first big effects of Salicylic Acid. I was playing the guitar. And I got an itch on my foot. Without thinking about it, I scratched and BAM! The wart started peeling off with my skin. I had kind of broken the papillae before just because I was confusing my skin with the removal liquid, so there was a little crust along with the skin. But that's not the point. The point is that it just pretty much fell right off. Sure, it's not gone completely and I still might have a couple more weeks of treatment, maybe less. But can we use a mix of  this with some Salicylic Acid to help fight cancer? Can we use it at least for skin cancer?

Think about it.
Apply patches or bandages with some good concentration of Salicylic Acid. Moisten and change patches every 12 hours. Over the course of time, the skin gets ready to peal off. And then suddenly, we have no more skin cancer!!!

The bubble that forms when you apply the Salicylic Acid.

I'm sure it's not as easy as that.

But think about all the money saved. Think about all the pain and suffering you'd be saving your patients from. There's so much to do with this!!!
Somebody really needs to start doing some serious research as to how we can make a good concentration of Salicylic Acid that will play together with the other cure to make the cells die and to make the cells shed.

The only thing I can think that would limit it would be the fact that you could only use it for skin cancer. I guess it might not be very applicable to other types. But that doesn't mean it's not worth a try, does it???

I hope somebody who's going into biomedical engineering or something like that reads this blog. Don't forget to credit me for this idea later on!

Anyways. Those are the big things I had to say.

Other than that, my future plans...
If you don't know yet, in August I'm going to The Netherlands to study at TU Delft!!! I got accepted!!! Woo!!!!! I'm super excited, and really looking forwards to doing lots of research and work.
But before that, Esmee is coming here in July!!! WOOHOO!!!!!! That I'm definitely excited for.
And I surprised her, bought her the ticket, and now I told her the plan of going to Orlando so we can go to Disney World and Universal Studios!!! 2011 is going so much better!!!

Well friends, that is all for now I guess. I'll update you all sometime next week, after all, Wednesday May 25th is my 21st birthday, hehe.

Have a good week!

Adios!

Now Recording.....

So... For those of you who don't know, I play the harmonica and the guitar. I've been playing guitar for a longer time, but for the past year and some months I started playing the harmonica, even bought some more harmonicas, since I used to have only one in the key of C.
I played harmonica when my ex-roommate Josh played guitar. And it is really fun. Sometimes we still get together and play some music.
Anyways, so I realized the other day that the Rockband Microphone for the Wii is just a USB Mic by Logitech... So I plugged it into my Ubuntu laptop and tested it on the Sound Recorder. Then I installed Audacity and thought of trying to record something from it.
This is what came from that recording, my little cover singing, playing guitar, and harmonica.
My cover of "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty

I know its no professional sound and the voice volume is a bit off. Also the harmonica at parts seems to be overblown... thats what I get for using cheap Hohner Bluesband harmonicas, which are still awesome for me, hehe.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy that song. I am thinking of recording some other songs soon. Maybe "No se estar Enamorado" by Jarabe de Palo, and some Estopa songs.

Also, my friend Lucas, who has a studio, told me he's starting a band and they could use one more guitar player, so I might go practice with them. But he has had some other projects before that didn't go through before, so I'm not getting too excited about this one.
But I will let all of you know what happens with that if it does go through.
I hope you all have a great Thursday!

El Tano

Now Recording.....

So... For those of you who don't know, I play the harmonica and the guitar. I've been playing guitar for a longer time, but for the past year and some months I started playing the harmonica, even bought some more harmonicas, since I used to have only one in the key of C.
I played harmonica when my ex-roommate Josh played guitar. And it is really fun. Sometimes we still get together and play some music.
Anyways, so I realized the other day that the Rockband Microphone for the Wii is just a USB Mic by Logitech... So I plugged it into my Ubuntu laptop and tested it on the Sound Recorder. Then I installed Audacity and thought of trying to record something from it.
This is what came from that recording, my little cover singing, playing guitar, and harmonica.
My cover of "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty

I know its no professional sound and the voice volume is a bit off. Also the harmonica at parts seems to be overblown... thats what I get for using cheap Hohner Bluesband harmonicas, which are still awesome for me, hehe.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy that song. I am thinking of recording some other songs soon. Maybe "No se estar Enamorado" by Jarabe de Palo, and some Estopa songs.

Also, my friend Lucas, who has a studio, told me he's starting a band and they could use one more guitar player, so I might go practice with them. But he has had some other projects before that didn't go through before, so I'm not getting too excited about this one.
But I will let all of you know what happens with that if it does go through.
I hope you all have a great Thursday!

El Tano

Wow, haven't posted since last year!

Pretty crazy. Haven't posted in some time now.
So much stuff to comment on....
Lets see. In no particular order...
I've seen Dutch people ice skating on the pond here in the neighborhood (which is 2 to 3 meters deep).
I've celebrated New Years with Esmee, her grandparents, her uncle Gerard and his family.
We shot lots of fireworks, inflated some hope balloons, had a great time.
I got a guitar, a guitar case, and Boondock Saints 1 and 2 Blu-ray for Christmas. The guitar from Esmee and the other 2 things from her grandmother. In reality Esmee told her grandmother I would love those things, so lots of kudos to her, jejeje.
I got sick last week and had pain all over my body and some fever. Couldn't go to the Escher Museum OR Ikea on Wednesday. For those of you that don't know, I really like the Escher paintings and had wanted to go to the museum since the first time I heard of it, and I just love Ikea.
We went to Esmee's second cousin, Kai's, birthday and I spoke more Dutch. One of Esmee's second uncles invited me to watch a football game if I'm here more during the season. He is a Feyenoord fan, but Esmee's other uncle, Kai's father, is an Ajax fan, so they seemed to make fun at each other quite a lot. Overall it was a great evening.
We babysat Nina again, was really fun, we ate pizza, drank Taksi Pineapple juice, but Nina wouldn't fall asleep. I drove us there and back, so it was always fun to drive on the snow.
I drove Esmee to Pijnacker to pick up Julia, then to Zoetermeer and I dropped them off at Imke's for a girls night that they were going to have. Sounds like they had fun except for Imke's choice for a movie, if you want to know about it, ask Esmee. I picked them up and then we went home.
On Christmas Eve we went out to eat at McDonalds because I really REALLY wanted to eat a Big and Tasty, since they don't have those in the US anymore. It was worth it. Pretty much we all got Big Tasty's except for Esmee, who got 2 cheesburgers.
It snowed some more spontaneously here and there time and time again. The snow was pretty much untouched until this past week, when temperatures became constant at a high of 2C, and by today I think most of the snow all around here has melted.
Hopefully this thursday we will got o the Naturallis in Leiden. I'll probably drive on the highway and all, will be exciting! Not that it would be my first time though, since one time last summer on the way back from Zoetermeer Esmee's GPS sent us like all the way to The Hague to do a U-turn and then go back towards Berkel on another exit. Yes, her GPS is very weird.
It's very weird to think that I'm leaving in 10 days... I just realized that today....
It's like all this vacation is ending way too soon.
And suddenly next week on Thursday I'll be flying to NY.
It all gets me a bit depressed really.
But I guess I'll just have to enjoy these last days here even more and do as much as possible.
Which reminds me, I'll finish this blog right now. I'll write later in a couple of days.
Oh, btw.
I bought Esmee a ring and earrings for Christmas. She loved them. Too bad the ring is a bit small, but on Wednesday we'll have to go and change it for another one I guess.
I hope you all started a great year great and keep good energy, good thoughts, and a good vibe. I have a feeling this year will be good.
Doei!

Warm-er weather

As the title says, the weather is a bit warmer.
The past week the snow has been slowly melting and the ice on the canals has been slowly returning to its liquid state. It is kind of weird to realize that the ground temperature is warmer than the water temperature. The snow was melting very fast, but there are probably canals that still have ice on them now, after 7 days of no cold temperatures. Well, it's still chilly.
The highest temperature was 6 degrees probably once or twice this week. Today it's been 3 degrees all day and at night seems to be going to 1 or maybe a bit lower too. We'll see how it goes over the next couple of days.
If you haven't already, you should go look at my pictures on Facebook. Sorry for the weird order, if you want to know the order I won't explain it again, but you can see it on the post just before this one.
Wanna know something interesting? I almost got in trouble at a supermarket for taking pictures :-P It's all because they have this very interesting and efficient system... You pay like 50 euro cents for this wireless scanner and you take it along with you in the supermarket. Every item you pick up you scan and so it tells you how much money and what items you're spending on. No longer want an item? Press delete and it's out of your list. When you're done, you go to a separate area next to the registers. There all you do is you hang the scanner, the machine detects how much it has to charge, you pass your credit/debit/pinpass/whatever card, you print the receipt. You walk up to the doors, scan your receipt, and the door opens to let you through.
Well, I took a picture of the little scan and where you pay and all. And the manager of Albert Heijn came to tell me you can't take pictures without permission. But I answered in Dutch so he just spoke very fast in Dutch too. Then Esmee said I was a tourist from Amerika and he said how he didn't think the system would be in Amerika for another like 20 years or so with how slow it is in a lot of things, so I showed him the pictures and he said it was fine.
Funny anecdote I guess, haha.
This last week we didn't have to babysit again. I don't know how, but the computer is repaired. Apparently after McAfee was gone the 2nd time, those viruses were erased too. Trend Micro hasn't found any again either. We'll see how it keeps going.
Friday we ate fries from the snack bar. I also ate a kaas suffle, really good cheese thing. Tomorrow I'm going to make empanadas, so we'll see how that goes!
In other news, I have been applying for some temporary jobs, all Christmas season and stuff. Hopefully I can work soon.....
And I want to go to the Escher museum in The Hague. Maybe this or next week I'll go, hopefully with Esmee.
Also I think this week we're going to go to Ikea. I always love going to Ikea, loads of fun and get to eat some swedish meatballs, hehehe.
For Christmas there are some different plans, seems like we had invited Oma and Opa for dinner and all, but they might go to Appeldoorn to Gerard's house to celebrate it. So we'll see what happens in the end.
For New Years, called OudeNieuwe in Dutch (Old New... weird name), Imke and Marc have invited us to their New Years Party, so I will be buying some fireworks this week, either at the Driesprong or back at the Intratuin.
Intratuin by the way is such an awesome shop! Imagine a Lowes where a lot of the products change seasonally and they have like Christmas decorations. But not just Christmas decorations. The whole place felt like I was entering a theme park or something. It was so cool! So many Christmas things all over the place. Trees, Santa Clauses. They even had a manger and some goats. Oh, and this VW Minivan with a train track running through it and with more Christmas decorations! Oh, and since there is a gigantic pet section, people go shopping with their pets. Yes. People had their dogs with them. I guess it makes sense to be able to try a jacket on your dog before you buy it. But probably the best thing of Intratuin was that I FINALLY SAW CLOGS! Like real clogs! Wooden clogs! It was awesome!!! I almost bought some but I didn't really have the money for them at the moment. Maybe later. Would be a great thing to have as a decoration. Maybe for my parents house :-P
Also, let me tell you about the Internet/Cable/Phone here. They pay like 58 per month. The Internet every like 3 days stops working. UPC really sucks apparently. And its supposed to be fiber with 25mbps or so but running speedtests I only get like 2.75 mbps... So yeah, Esmee says they get screwed by UPC. I wonder why they don't switch ISP's. I guess the rest of the things work pretty well. Except the phone seems to lose calls very often. I don't know, just kind of odd to me I guess.
Oh, also, there is no 24 hour support line. Dutch people should really request that. It's good and can be very important. What if your phone stops working and you have no cell phone? I do wonder if other companies have that here.
Anyways. For this week I guess I'll see about some temporary work and will look forwards to going to Ikea and the Escher Museum.
Oh, want to know the stupidest thing of going to Den Haag to get my sofi to work here? My camera died before even leaving. Yeah. Sucked. I finally go to Den Haag and the battery dies. But I promise photos when I go to the Escher museum!
Anyway. I hope you all had a better and warmer week than I did. I'll update sometime mid week I think.
Doei!

Sinterklaas weekend!!!!!

Oh how much fun that was!!!!! What a great weekend!
More snow all day Friday and Saturday.
A great day of Sinterklaas celebrations on Saturday.
Went to see Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1 on Sunday.
Too bad most of the snow seems to have melted.
But a great weekend regardless.
By now I have uploaded all the pictures I've taken so far. Though for some reason Shotwell didn't upload them in the correct order... So you should look at the first 69 photos starting from number 69 going up to number 1 and then the second half of the photos starting from the last one up to number 70, I think that's the way they are uploaded. I did upload them in two groups and I guess that messed it up more.
But from the beginning.
Friday night it snowed more. And the temperature stayed at -10 on Saturday too.
Saturday we went to Zoetermeer to do some Sinterklaas shopping, since Ramón had not bought his Sinterklaas present yet and I had to buy chocolate for Romeo. Esmee also needed a winter jacket. Pretty much it was the 4 kids crammed into the back of the small Citroen C3 again. It was pretty scary with all the snow on the roads and with more snow falling, there really was a strong blizzard outside. Really sad for all the South Holland Sheep you could see, they were all standing outside and looking for grass to eat.
We got to Zoetermeer after seeing a lot of frozen canals and ponds, and the first thing we did was bought tickets for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 on Sunday. After that we walked on the snow through part of the dorp and then entered the inside shopping center/area. Romeo bought some boots, we looked into some other stores, and then Ingrid and Esmee went to look at women stuff, so the rest of us, all kept walking through the dorp. Ramón bought a set to make tapas, we kept walking and went to the Free Record Shop where Rico bought 2 Jeff Dunham DVD's, then we walked back to the shopping center and met up with Ingrid and Esmee, who had bought herself a new jacket. Then we all had lunch, ate some sandwiches, and kept walking around. After some more walking we went back to the garage and drove through the storm back to Berkel en Rodenrijs.
Saturday night we all went to Oma and Opa's to celebrate Sinterklaas. Arie and Ilona, with Bjorn and Kristen of course, went to Oma and Opa's too, and we all had dinner, then Oma brought the bag of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), the helpers of Sinterklaas, and we all started taking presents from it. I got 8 computer games which I had gone with Opa to buy at the Intertoys. Later we all brought our gifts that we bought for the game, sat around the coffee table, and started playing.
It was a very interesting and fun game. Ingrid set a timer to one hour, and then there was one die to roll. The die was passed clockwise around the table and everybody would roll it. If you got a 1, 3, or a 5, nothing happened. If you rolled a 2, all the gifts were moved to the right. If you rolled a 4, all the gifts moved to the left. If you rolled a 6, you could trade gifts with somebody else and open the gift, if it wasn't open already. The gifts, in no specific order, were a birdhouse, a table ornament to put cookies and things on, 2 Jeff Dunham DVD's, a set of Tapas, a set of chocolate fondue and other chocolate things, a National Movie Theater Gift Card, a Hedwig/White Owl puppet/ornament thing, a set with soap and bubbles and cream for a bath for women, and a Portable Speaker. After some time of playing the game started getting pretty tense, Rico wanted his Jeff Dunham DVD's, Opa wanted the Portable Speaker, Ilona wanted the birdhouse, no man wanted the bath set, and nobody could look at the timer to see how much time was left. Suddenly, in the last move, I passed the bath set to Esmee, I got the Speaker, Rico passed the Jeff Dunham DVD's to Arie, Ingrid received the chocolate fondue thing, Ramón the tapas, and Rico the table ornament thing. You can guess Rico was very sad he didn't get his Jeff Dunham DVD's, haha.
After the game we drank some tea and coffee (well, Esmee and I just drank tea) and then we walked home in the snow. As we were walking home Ramón and Esmee started throwing some snowballs, then Esmee slipped, then we arrived home and Esmee declared a Snowball fight outside on the back street. So Romeo, Esmee, Ramón and I went to the back and started throwing snowballs. A great way to end that great Saturday.
On Sunday we all were very lazy in the morning, then had lunch together and then we all went to watch Harry Potter. By then the temperature had risen to 4 degrees, it was the highest of the week, and a lot of snow was melting already.
EDIT: While waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 at the movie theater, we were listening to Sinterklaas music that was playing on the speaker system of the building. Apparently, all Argentinean kids songs are based on Sinterklaas songs. Or at least they all have the same melody. It was a very weird thing for me to find out on Sunday.
The movie was really good, but the ending kind of sucked. I guess for a book that you have to split into two it is hard to decide where to best split it and how to make it an ending point.
After the movie we went back home and then Esmee started doing her homework. Suddenly all these windows started popping up on the computer with some program trying to write on the hard disk. I realized they had a virus. I tried to get McAfee to scan the folder that the virus was coming from, but McAfee wasn't doing anything. So I uninstalled it and then I installed Trend Micro. I ran it through the night but somehow the scan was stopped in the middle of the night. So today I've been running it again.
On Wednesday I'm getting my Sofi number and then hopefully I'll be able to start working asap and make some money again.
Anyways, I hope all of you had a great Sinterklaas and are having a good December so far. Mine is going pretty well I think. I'll post an update later this week I guess.
If you haven't already, go look at my pictures on Facebook!
Dag!

El Tano.