Alive and Well

I've been having an excellent vacation so far. I am about to go bankrupt though.

I must not shop anymore.

Oh, and my hair is super fobby now! ^_^

What's with this whole waiting in line thing...

So, I was watching the news last night and they're saying how there's over 500 people waiting in line outside of the Sony metreon in SF for the release of playstation3. The reporter asked this one dude, who's been waiting in line for over 48 hours already, on why he's spent the last two days waiting in line for the playstation3. His immediate answer was "ebay."

So I went on to ebay and noticed that the highest winning bids are somewhere around $2000 (regular price is $600). So, this guy's gonna end up waiting for about 60 hours, and that means his hour rate there was $23.3. Poor guy.

And for me, I'm very happy with my missing gamecube.

Sup?

Two days til my trip to Asia! I really ought to start packing...

Election Day

Today's mid term election has gotta be one of the most important ones in recent decades. The war in Iraq, government corruption and the lack of a healthy economy have finally agitated us lazy Americans to fight back today.

I am personally quite sick of all the political commercials that have been playing over and over on TV. I am particularly annoyed by the way Phil Angelides tries to win voters over by constantly attacking our current California governor instead of telling us what he would do should he be elected. I mean, if I were running for governor, all I would just say would be something like...

I will stay the course. We have a plan for victory. I am the Decider. It's hard work. My job is to do my job. It's hard work.

Our next great generation

I went to a pet store to buy some dog food for pei pei a few months ago. I gave the person at the cashier $20.02 when the total price was $14.02. Instead of giving me $6 back right away, she had to use the calculator to come up with that! First thing that came to my mind was... how did she get hired to be the cashier? And then the second thing that came to mind was... oh man, the newest generation of kids suck at math! and then I thought... it can't be it. she's probably just an outliar.

Then I read this blog today, and I conclude that they all suck at math after all.

Who uses the Google on the internets?

I know this is kind of old news, but I feel the responsibility to post the video here about the kind of president who is leading our great country.

Enjoy!

I thought I was going to die

About two hours ago, my desk and windows started shaking violently at the office. Then, I heard a loud trembling noise coming from above my head. I looked out the window and I saw a F-15 fighter jet pass right above me, heading towards the Milpitas direction.



For a quick second, I swear I was praying to God that it wasn't going to turn around and hit me in the face.

Luckily, that didn't happen, and I survived.

100 million sites on the web??

CNN: Web reaches new milestone: 100 million sites

At first sight you might wonder how you can possibly visit all of these sites. It's actually really not that bad. Assuming you want to go to all 100 million sites and it takes you one second per site serially, it will only take you about 3.16 years to get that done.

Alternatively, assuming your hands can't type in all these sites too fast and you can't afford to sit around for 3.16 years with no sleep, you can actually write a script to do that for you. Assuming you're behind a 100mbps NIC and assuming an average response size of a webpage is 14kB, then you can probably issue ~892 wgets per second assuming the server side has 0 latency. Given that, it will really only take you ~1.29 days to do that.

Of course, that's only visiting the front page of every site. But hey, at least you'll get to go to the gusiness book of records for this.

Oh but wait, all the search engines out there have probably already done that. Pfft.

Halloween festivities

I had a wonderful Halloween yesterday. No I didn't go trick or treating - And no I didn't wear a costume. I did however attend this giant party here at work where I'd seriously say >70% of the people who were there were wearing costumes. Costumes ranging from Dr. Evil to Star ship troopers (is that what you call them?) to Mark Foley to Pirates to Mr. San Francisco (this guy who's 80% naked wearing S&M outfit and showing off his BUTT!). I was suitably amused.

The highlight of my day came from a quote that my colleague had said in the morning:

When I went to breakfast this morning, it occured to me, "Only in SiliconValley would you see a gorilla carrying a laptop."

I guess I find that to be quite true. :)

Near the evening it finally dawned on me for the first time that I really should go trick or treating. I mean, I've been in the states for over 12 years and I haven't once walked around the neighborhood with a basket-full of eggs. Right at the moment as I was about to leave work and head over to Costco to buy a couple dozens of eggs, Andy called and challenged me to play in a game of ping pong over at his house. How could I resist the opportunity to kick his ass, especially since he said "Oh I'm pretty good at ping pong. I'm pretty sure I can beat you." Oh well. Maybe I will go trick or treating next year instead.

Having just sat down comfortably at his house, the door bell began to go off in an increasingly annoying pace - "DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG!" In my head I was thinking "SHUT THE F!@# UP!!!!" Andy frantically ran down to open the door and it turned out to be a few kids stopping by to trick or treat. The first thing that came out of Andy's mouth as the kids said "Trick or treat?" was "What the hell???" Haha. What a punk.

After two hours of fierce competition, Andy and I split the series at 1-1. I think I would have won both of the series had he let me use his juiced up ping pong pedal that he was using against me. But it's ok - I don't really need an edge to kick his sorry butt! :-)