Google Talk Beta Released!

No more speculation. Google Talk Beta has officially launched! Get your copy here. All you need is your gmail account. If you don't have a gmail account, let me know and I will get you one. My email address is patrickli3@gmail.com.

Oh and one cool thing to mention is that you can dock your IM client to the new google desktop sidebar. It's really slick.

Dogs and babies can coexist peacefully

My nephew, Jason, might one day become the next famous jockey.

Having a dog without really having a dog

I think this is the perfect solution for Anita's desire to have a dog.

This is depressing...

Since I am having trouble sleeping tonight (darn coffee!), I decided to google around to see what I could find about myself and people whom I haven't spoken to in a long time.

Came upon the intermud protocol page which I helped implement about 10 years ago. Hmm I wonder what the other implementors are up to nowadays. After looking them up, I am wondering what the hell happened to me. Let's take a look at a few of the people that I looked up from that page:

• Greg Stein - Now an engineering manager at Google. He's also the Chairman of the Apache foundation. Speaker at the Oreilly conference and a heavy contributor of open source projects such as Subversion and Python.
• John Viega - CTO of Secure Software, Inc. Co-author of Building Secure Software, Network Security with OpenSSL (Oreilly), and Secure Programming Cookbook. Nice profile on the Oreilly page as well.
• George Reese - Wrote too many Oreilly books! View that link to view it yourself. Now a CEO at Valtira.
• James Donald - My closest buddy back then during development. I guess we had the most in common since I was 14 and he was 13, and everyone else were in their late 20's and early 30's. He got his BS in EECS at Berkeley and is now obtaining his phd at Princeton in EE. He's the first genius I've ever met. If you look around on his website you'll be amazed by how much he has already accomplished already in his life. I don't think I will be able to accomplish even half of that throughout my entire life. sniff sniff.

So back to me. What the hell did I accomplish during my last 10 years? I guess the highlight was the fact that I played Quake and got to meet with John Carmack. But besides that, I have accomplished nothing on a personal level =/.

Filtering Blog Spam

Looks like blogger has done something that will solve Rico's headache on blog spam.

Cheers!

Joining the Dark Side

Most of you know that I have always complained about my back being stiff and tight. I've tried chiropractor, back doctor, massage, swimming, jucuzzi, etc. While each of those would provide some very short periods of relief,the pain would quite often come right back the next day.

Being a nice guy I am, I naively let Anita convince me to go to the Yoga classes with her that's offered at work. In my mind, Yoga is such a chick sport (should it even be considered a sport), and how is moving around on a piece of mat going to help your back?? But then again, since it's free, I decided to check it out anyway.

I have gone to two sessions so far this week, and surprisingly the outcome has been quite positive. Each session really worked me out. I woke up the next day and my arms, shoulders, hamstrings, abs, and thighs were all sore! I don't think I've ever sweat so much in my life from just standing at the same spot for an hour. For those of you who have jacked up backs, I highly recommend trying out Yoga. And don't be afraid of going just because you're a guy... 40% of the class were guys when I went, and I was more flexible than most of them!

Anyhow, I have officially joined the dark side with Anita. Our plan is to convince Abe and Dan to join it as well.

Oooh.. and you know the picture at the top right? One of the students was doing that during the session today! She's craaaaaaaazy!

More Random Blogging

I went to the bathroom at work today, and someone was shamelessly playing some game on his cell phone in the toilet stall with its sound turned on! The whole time I was in the stall next to him, I would hear "beep! beep beep! beep!" with the background music of the game playing as well. It was really bugging me because I couldn't figure out what game he was playing. I know he wasn't using the same phone that I have though because I don't think any of my games would create those sound.

To the person who's sitting next to me playing the game on his cell phone at the bathroom today: Next time, could you at least ask if I wanted to play battleship against you via bluetooth?

A Message to Trevor...

Trevor and I had a bet last night that the 49ers were playing against the Raiders in San Francisco. Trevor insisted that they were playing in Oakland instead.

The first thing I dd this morning was to look it up online, and yup, I was right :D.

You owe me a drink!

Random Observation of the Day

While my friends and I were walking towards a sushi restaurant for dinner tonight, I noticed a Tapioca express located in the same plaza, right along side of the parking lot. Outside Tapioca express there's a big sign that says:

Tapioca Express
"Suddenly, I want more!"

I started cracking up after reading their motto. My friends didn't get my sense of humor, but I hope some of you out there would find that kind of funny as well.

Random Thought of the Day

Ok guys. I am about to stir up a very heated debate. While I was showering this morning, I noticed that there were a bunch of ants in my shower tub, diligently walking around in search of food. That image somehow triggered a very interesting question in my head:

Who will win a 100 meter race - The ant or the turtle?

vs

According to this page, ants travel on average about a foot per minute, so that's about .30 meters per minute.

According to this page:

"In a speed test carried out in the Seychelles a male giant tortoise could only cover 15 feet in 43.5 sec (0.23 mph) despite the enticement of a female."

so that's 0.11 meters per second, so that's 6.6 meters per minute (wow, this is faster than I thought)


So in theory, the turtle will easily beat the ant, right? But remember, you will almost rarely have just one ant just walking around. So we have to assume that during the race, this ant racer is accompanied by tens and hundreds of ants in the vicinity.

We also have to assume that the turtle stinks really badly, and hence is quite attractive to the ant(s). I mean c'mon, have you ever seen a turtle that doesn't actually stink? So if both assumptions are true, the ant will end up hollaring all his friends over and start to attack the poor turtle. The turtle will then pull of this amazing stunt by retracting its head and legs into its shell to protect himself. Little does he know that the ants are small enough to penetrate through the shell, and end up eating him up alive.

While all of this is happening, the original ant racer starts to slowly walk towards the finish line and win the race without much pressure... But that can't be true as well, since ants never really walk in a straight line unless it sense something that they want to eat. Since the turtle is just right next to it, the ant cannot help but be forced to keep eating the turtle away, and hence never finish the race.

I conclude that it will be a draw.

Thoughts?

I was never that bad!

Well, otherwise, I wouldn't be blogging this today, I guess.

CNN: Man dies after online game marathon

I bet $2000 that she will no longer be his wife

CNN: Man Forgets Wife at Gas Station

Deep Sea Fishing

Yesterday, I went deep sea fishing for the first time in my life with Trevor, Katrell, Christophe, and Li. After this experience, I can confidently say that I will never do that ever again.

This is the boat that we took to catch some salmon:



Here's the timeline of events that occured from the day before the fishing trip until the day after:

Friday:

8pm: Got home from work
9pm: Met with Ming and Cindy in Santana Row for drinks to celebrate their engagement. Had two redbull and vodkas.

Saturday:

12am: Got home from Santana Row
12:30am: Went to bed
3:15am: Woke up and got ready to go catch some fish!
3:45am: Started driving over to Sunnyvale to pick up Christophe
4:15am: Arrived Sunnyvale, picked up Christophe
4:45am: Stopped by work to load up on some water and snacks
5:30am: Arrived at Berkeley marina
6:30am: Departed from marina to the deep ocean
7:30am: midway through our destination, pretty happy so far as you can see from the picture:



7:45am: Arrived destination. The professional fisherman dude put on the bait for me and got the fishing rod all set up for me.
7:50am: It got extremely cold, so I decided to go back inside the boat and put on an extra shirt underneath my sweater
7:51am: While I was still inside changing, people outside started screaming... "Hey! this one got a bite! this one got a bite!" It turned out it was my bait that the salmon was eating. So the professional fisherman dude ran up to my fishing rod and started pulling it up. He was really good! so I kinda just stayed and watched the action from the inside and rooted for him quietly.
7:53am: I finally finished changing. I walked up to the professional fisherman, who was still fighting back and forth with the fish, that this rod belonged to me. So he handed me the rod and told me to finish the final part of the process, which was to keep turning the reel to pull up the fish. Somehow I managed to screw up and he grabbed back the rod right away and was able to catch the fish for me in the end.
7:54am: The salmon that I caught turned out to be pretty big (about 15 lbs). Everyone cheered as it was the second salmon that was caught during the day.
7:55am: I started feeling very dizzy, so I went back inside to lay down and rest, feeling my mission had been accomplished.

9am: Woke up, wondering when we would go home, then went back to sleep.
10am: Woke up, wondering why I didn't just stay home, then went back to sleep.
11am: Woke up, wondering why I paid $100 for this fishing trip, then went back to sleep.
12pm: Woke up, wondering why I didn't just goto costco to buy some fresh salmon instead, then went back to sleep
1pm: Christophe came up to me and asked if I was cold. I said yes, and he kindly offered me his jacket. I thanked him, put on his jacket and then went back to sleep.
2pm: Woke up, wondering why I'm such a weaksauce for getting sea sick the entire day! Slapped myself a few times, and then completely passed out.
3pm: Got back to the berkeley marina. Claimed back my fish, took some pictures pretending to be hella good at fishing, and showed it off to the people who were walking around the area.

6pm: Got home. Told my parents my heroic stories on how hard I worked to catch the fish
6:30pm: Dinner time! Salmon sashimi for dinner! lots of it!
9pm: Passed out, still feeling sea sick.

Sunday:

10am: Woke up, feeling sea sick.
11:30am: Opened the fridge looking for some more sashimi, and realized that they're all really fishy now!!!! *sigh*

Overall, it was still a lot of fun, given I don't get that many opportunities going out to the deep ocean to hunt for some fish. The valuable lesson that I learned from this though, is that I'm not really the type of person who would enjoys doing anything that requires sitting around for a long period of time doing nothing. In addition, I do not enjoy touching anything slimey. I thought it was quite gross having to touch the anchoive (the bait) and poking the hook through its eyes, and then not having any clean water to wash my hands with!

A few other things worth noting:

• I wasn't the only person who was sea sick on the boat. There were a little boy and a little girl who were also sea sick as well.
  
• No, I did not throw up, but the little boy and little girl did!
• It's probably a good idea to wear a jacket when you go deep sea fishing.
• It's probably a genius idea to get plenty of sleep the night before you go deep sea fishing.

For more pics of the fishing trip, click here.

The Mighty Mouse!

Looks like Apple has done it again! Check this out... I want to buy one and keep it as my pet!




You can use the button to do all sorts of tricks:



I'm not sure how comfy that little thing lies on your hand though. Do you think someone like my grandma would know how to operate this?