My colleagues, Tom and Sean, asked me to pinch hit for their blog, The Cheap Seats. But a recent turn of events has made me the main author of the blog, which I will graciously accept.

So I am now going to author two blogs. This blog will remain my personal page and I will maintain the focus of cheapseats on sports.

Take care, Tom and Sean, and I wish you both the best.

Its already June and I'm looking back at the month of May and I only posted 3 entries. I've fallen behind on my movie updates - I have 5 movies to talk about. And my wife and I have made a couple of small trips that I want to post. I've been meaning to give a HD TV update and talk about some TV shows too. Real quick, if you're looking for a show to watch this summer, watch Fox's On The Lot on Tuesday nights.

May was a busy month, both professionally and personally. I'm not complaining but it does make me wonder why we push ourselves to do so much sometimes. But I also think that if we have the energy and the motivation to do what we want, then we should go for it. I'm the type of person that wants to do everything, and I think there's time to do it all too. But sometimes there isn't time for it all. But when there is time and you get to enjoy it too, then that's when its all worth it.

So stay tuned for what I've been up to and what I will be doing in the next few weeks. I finally leave for my baseball road trip with da boyz next Friday (6/15). We're getting really excited about it and I can't wait for the time off work and just hanging out with the boyz and watching some good 'ol baseball with a beer and hot dog in my hands.

One of the first things I do when I come in to work is I turn on my XM radio. I like to work with something playing in the background. But this Monday morning was different. My XM receiver wasn't receiving any signal. A bunch of thoughts immediately went through my head on what was wrong. I thought someone fumbled with my cables and perhaps my antenna was moved. Maybe I had a loose connection somewhere. But all those looked good and I finally thought that I had broken hardware. I was bummed. I tried fumbling with things for awhile but there was no improvement. So the whole day I ended up listening to my FM radio (oh no! haha). I didn't get any satellite reception the whole day.

But then last night I got an email from XM with the subject line "Service Degradation Alert". Here's what it said:

You may be experiencing temporary degraded performance with your XM reception at the present time. XM is aware of the issue and working diligently to resolve it as soon as possible. We anticipate full signal strength will be restored by early Tuesday morning.

That made me feel much better. I'm glad to know that there isn't something wrong with my hardware. And I'm glad to see that XM sent a notification to its users on what was going on. Though it was quite late...I'm sure they knew of the problem a lot earlier in the day. But I'm still glad they let their subscribers know there is a problem and they admitted it.

And this morning, I got an update with this subject line "XM Service Update" that said:

As many of you know, XM customers have experienced service outages or significantly degraded service since Monday mid-morning, May 21.

We quickly identified the problem and are working hard to return to our normal levels of service. The problem occurred during the loading of software to a critical component of our satellite broadcast system, which resulted in a loss of signal from one of our satellites. We expect normal service to resume midday today (eastern daylight time).

XM apologizes for any inconvenience this has caused. For updates, please go to http://www.xmradio.com.

In the meantime, you can enjoy many of our music channels on XM Radio Online (http://xmro.xmradio.com) if you are close to a computer.

Again, we regret any inconvenience for not having your XM Radio service fully available.

As of right now, I'm getting sporadic reception. I'm not sure if its because I changed the position of the antenna, or if the satellite service is not yet back. Hopefully it returns soon, but we all know that it take longer than planned to bring things back online

I'm sure XM learned some lessons from this outage, and I've been a subscriber for almost two years and this the first noticeable service degradation I've experienced. Not too shabby. I still like my XM. Just give it back to me. Now. Please.

I got stuck onto Pam's world and now I got tagged on the latest music meme. Thanks!

So this is a difficult one for me because my wife and I actually like a lot of the same music. (Speaking of, I still need to post my entry on the recent concerts we attended.) It would be easier for my wife to do this list, because she can add her 80's & 90's Cantopop music(just like Pam) and New Kids on the Block songs. But then again, I got used to her Cantonese music even though I have no idea what they're about. There's one song, I think by Faye Wong, that I liked and thought it was a happy cheerful song, but Amie told me its actually a sad song. Oh well.

So here's my list:

• Christina Aguilera - I've been a fan since her first album and my wife tolerates her for me because she admits that Christina can sing. But in return, I get to hear my wife make her whiny impressions.
  
• Buckshot LeFonque - A pop jazz band started by Branford Marsalis while he was still on the Tonight Show. 1 song in particular - "Some Cow Fonque (More Tea, Vicar?)"
  
• Les Miserables Soundtrack - My all-time favorite musical. Maybe I should have taken her to this show before Phantom of the Opera which is her favorite.
  
• Guns 'N Roses - I have to thank my high school friends and college roommates for adding them and other rock groups to my musical taste. My wife isn't really into the rock genre.
• "Love Will Keep Us Alive" by the Eagles - We both love the Eagles and I really like this song but this song bothers my wife because she keeps picturing a female singer, but its Timothy Schmit's voice, and it doesn't help that he has long hair.

That was fun...I was going to tag others but they've been tagged already and/or they haven't updated their blogs in awhile. You know who you are...so get back to it. Oh wait, there's TRJ, who just started his blog.

During my drive to work this morning, I was listening to a local morning radio show and they were talking about "the secret". This is the first I heard about the controversial philosophy, which was recently made popular by an Australian woman, Rhonda Byrnes. And of course she has a book and a movie about it. She was also a guest on Oprah, so I read the story on Oprah's website to find out more and came across this paragraph:

Rhonda defines The Secret as the law of attraction, which is the principle that "like attracts like." Rhonda calls it "the most powerful law in the universe," and says it is working all the time. "What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want, and that is based on what we're thinking and feeling," Rhonda says. The principle explains that we create our own circumstances by the choices we make in life. And the choices we make are fueled by our thoughts—which means our thoughts are the most powerful things we have here on earth.

This philosophy makes valid points but do you believe it is as powerful as Rhonda claims? I don't fully subscribe to that self-help philosophy, but I do believe that positive thinking yields results.

The radio show also brought up a point that good things that happen in life require hard work and some luck. They said these quotes, which I believe in more than in "the secret":

"The harder you work, the luckier you get."

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."