Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture"

Ahh.. I feel like I haven't blogged for awhile. How is everyone out there doing? Do you guys still read my blog? :(

I had trouble going to bed last night, and so I decided to spend two hours watching Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture." For those of you who don't know who he is, Randy is a CS professor at CMU who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year ago. Doctor tells him that he only has a few more weeks to live.

Must be pretty crazy trying to figure out what to do with your life with only a few weeks left. Randy decided to give one last lecture to everyone. The lecture wasn't about computer science or anything technical, but rather it was about how to follow your childhood dreams.

The lecture was a little less than 2 hours long, but I found it to be one of the most inspiring and amazing videos I've watched. I feel like I've learned a lot about him after only watching this lecture. I tip my hat off to him for giving such an honest, powerful talk to others when he really didn't have to.

Here were a few cool quotes from the video:

"When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."

"The brick walls are there for a reason; they let us prove how badly we want things"

You guys should watch it. It rocks.

Here's the first part of it.. You can click on the bottom link to view the rest of the clips.



Watch it here

Pretty good quote

“I have noticed that in technology we’re surrounded by very smart people. IQ is virtually a commodity. However, there are those who are analysts – can ask 1 million questions, and be skeptical of everything; then there are doers, people who apply their intellect and resourcefulness to find solutions. Find those people and keep them close to you. Stay a 100 miles away from the former”.

Wedding slideshow!

http://weddingphotojournal.com/s-chan-li/

Enjoy!

What to eat for dinner

My wifey is abandoning me for dinner tonight. She's gonna be going to a nice sales event dinner while leaving me all alone.

Who wants to go to dinner with me? :(

I am the very model of a modern major Googler

I hate posting about work stuff, but I found this pretty entertaining song on youtube today. It's a satirical work to the tune of "The Major-General's Song"

Just listen to it, it's kind of uhm.... err... it's REALLY GEEKY!

I didn't know Barry Bonds had a dog...

Look at this!!

I'm pretty elite

Sometimes you get reminded that you're really cool by the strangest thing. For example, I logged on to my gmail this morning, and I saw the following page (pay attention to the # of unread emails):

Hello from Puerto Vallarta!

On my mini-moon right now... Wanted to share you guys the view from the balcony. :)

My wedding slideshow

We ran into some technical difficulties while playing the slideshow at my wedding. :) So I decided to post it here for those who didn't get to watch the entire thing.

I will also be making this available on my wedding website pretty soon.

Shocking surprise

During a bi-weekly team meeting today, I was surprised by the team with lots and lots of gifts for my upcoming wedding. It totally caught me off guard, and the only thing could come up from my mouth was "thank you sooooo much." They really didn't have to do this!

I really wish I could invite my entire team to the wedding. However, due to the golf club's capacity, they have a capacity limit of 230 people only. Unfortunately we have already reached that number. :(

So those of you who are coming, you should feel lucky! Make sure you get REALLY drunk at the wedding. :)

10 days left til...

no more freedom!! :-(

Just kidding. :)

There's still so much left to be done though. I actually don't know if I can finish it all by then. If I don't finish them all, I guess I'm going to have to postpone the wedding...

Let the countdown begin...

11 days to go! Are you guys excited too?

Car says, "Wash me please!"

This is what happens if you don't wash your car often enough. The car will wash itself.

A little background about what happened here. Christelle came over to Google for dinner. As she pulled into the parking spot, I instructed her to pull up to this particular spot. After we were done with dinner, we found her car taking a shower happily

It's 3am and I'm still awake.

note to self: do not drink Vietnamese iced coffee at night.

Picture speaks a thousand words

Go warriors! See you guys in round 2!

300 rocks

Finally went out and saw it last night at the IMAX theatre in SF. What can I say. It's probably one of the best movies I've ever seen in my life. I highly encourage those who haven't seen the movie to go see it on the IMAX screen. It's sooooooooooooooooooooo nice.

Spartan King Leonidas: [Turning towards the Spartans] Spartans! What is your profession?
Spartans: Harooh! Harooh! Harooh!
Spartan King Leonidas: See old friend, I brought more soldiers than you did.

I want to be a Spartan now!

I am too cheap to dial 411

So I use 1-800-GOOG-411 instead. It's free. :)

My wedding website

Woohoo. My wedding website is finally up. Go and check out Anita & Patrick's Wedding site!

I'm a dork

I woke up this morning thinking today was St. Patrick's day. Because of that, I naturally thought that it would be a good idea to wear this shirt to work.



Halfway through my meeting this morning, someone saw my shirt and asked, "Today is St. Patrick's day?" Another person responded "No. It's tomorrow."

Man I feel like a dork.

Recursive cats

You are about to see the coolest thing you have ever seen in your life.

What happens when a cat looks at another cat on the screen, that's looking at another cat on the screen, that's looking at....

Find out what happens here!

Living in 2007

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2007 when...

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7 Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile.
: )

12. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list

AND NOW YOU ARE LAUGHING at yourself.

Go on, forward this to your friends. You know you want to

I'm a YouTube Junkie

The benefit of becoming a member of youtube is the ability to track the number of videos you've watched. Here's my stats:

Joined: March 15 2006

Last Login: 2 days ago

Videos Watched: 1,221

Ouch. Assuming each video averaged out to be 5 minutes, then I've watched 1221 * 5 / 60 = 101.75 hours of videos! That's an average of ~18 minutes per day wasted that I could have spent it on other things like... watching videos on Google Video!

Is it too late to change profession?

Back in the day when I used to play Quake all day, my parents used to tell me I was wasting my time for nothing.

They were wrong.

Surgeons who play video games more skilled

Happy PIG year.

So, I believe the Chinese new year eve is this coming Saturday. We will enter the year of the PIG when the clock strikes 12 on Sunday morning.

What does this mean? Well, this should be a good excuse to throw a New Years eve party! Who's in?

How to make minced beef over rice

When I go to ghetto HK style restaurants, I always like to order my favorite 窩蛋免治牛肉飯 (minced beef over rice). I've always wanted to learn how to make it since I was a little kid, and now, thanks to the Internets, my dream has come true!

Learn how to make it here

John Legend visits Google

John Legend visited us last week and gave me a small little concert. One of the Googlers named Brian Bautista asked John whether or not he could sing a duet with him for the song Ordinary People, which John gladly accepted! It was definitely the highlight of the concert. I'm a John Legend fan now.

The Best Valentine's Dinner

This year's valentine's day marked the one year engagement anniversary between me and Anita. Tired of all fine dining outdoor and celebrating, I decided to do the unimaginable - Cook dinner for the very first time at home and surprise Anita!

To prepare for such a meal, I began doing my research about a week in advance. I asked my friends, went on the Internet, looked at cookbooks, and watched the food channel secretly. Soon after I realized that all of those sites and shows were filled with impossible recipes that I would have no confidence in cooking. I said to myself, should I make steak? chicken? fish? ramen? After more thought, I decided to go with chicken since it's the toughest one to go wrong. Ok, chicken it is!

But then chicken can get dry too, and most of the recipes that I found online were sorta boring. Maybe I shouldn't cook dinner after all.

Then, just at that very moment, my sister IM'd me online! I decided to ask her how I can cook chicken without messing up, and she gave me this super duper secret recipe that's guaranteed to be yummy. Sweet.



Ingredients

So off I went to the grocery store and I bought home tons of food! I took me about a total of 3 hours to finish cooking everything. I made:

• southwestern corn soup
• soy sauce chicken with oyster sauce that I forgot to add
• ice-cream with fresh fruits and chocolates

Overall it went very well. I think Anita was impressed by my cooking given the fact that it's my very first time cooking a full meal. I think I just opened a whole can of worms though. Anita wants me to cook for her every day now! Help!

I've also documented my cooking process here. Enjoy!

will.i.am visits Google

will.i.am from the black eye peas visited Google yesterday. It was sorta neat as he demonstrated how to put together music quickly on his laptop. I got to snap a quick photo of us chillin:

Crazy ski trip

Headed up to Squaw Valley last Wednesday for a company ski trip with Rico and Jon. I'd thought I would be pretty jetlagged since I had just arrived from Asia less than 12 hours ago, but surprisingly I was totally awake and ready to go!

What did we do when we first arrived at Squaw? You got it! We headed straight to the bar and ordered ourselves some long islands. It's always interesting to load yourself up with alcohol during the day time. In no more than 15 minutes we got a good buzzed and were ready to head up the slope.

And then we realized it was a bad idea to drink before snowboarding. We couldn't control ourselves at all in the icey weather. :) How did we fix that? Well, we headed to a different bar and had another long islands!

By the time we were done drinking it was already 2pm. We proceeded to head down the black diamonds maybe 5-6 times and then we decided to call it a day.

After snowboarding we headed over to the resort at Squaw Creek to check in. I got room number 302 (aka HTTP redirect), and when I opened the door, I realized that I'd hit the jack pot: It was an end-unit suite with a huge living room and bedroom. I immediately said to Jon and Rico - We GOTTA have a party here tonight!

Fast forward a bit, we went downstairs for the company party, got pretty drunk, and headed back up to our room for the after party. I must have told a lot of people about the after party, because soon after the party downstairs was over, we had at least 30-40 strangers in our room partying. I had no idea who they were, and I don't think they had an idea who I was, either.

Overall I thought it was a great trip. The party downstairs was fantastic. I took some photos with my camera, and I will post them up later on tomorrow.

Time for bed. Night.

I'm [literally] on the jet plane...

I'm sitting here on my flight back to the states as I type. They actually have a laptop charger on the plane, so I'll get to use the laptop for the remaining of the flight. Yay!

For those who have already heard, the reason I went back to Hong Kong was because of the passing of my grandma in Hong Kong. I decided to fly back for the funeral so that I could keep my parents company during the stressful time they would endure in Hong Kong. Leaving from work for a week is generally difficult because of busy it gets over there, but luckily my boss was extremely understanding of the situation and I was able to fly to Hong Kong without worrying about work for a short period of time.

During my trip I got the opportunity to reunite with a lot of my relatives and long lost cousins. I don't ever recall having 90% of my cousins unite together at one place all my life. As my Uncle Francis pointed out, it is actually quite sad that most Chinese families don't have regular family reunion events. It remains a question why it takes something like the death of someone in the family in order to unite everyone together in one room.

It was quite an experience seeing all my cousins again. Of worth noting, I got to see my cousin Cindy from Victoria, BC for the first time since over 12 years ago. Gee, basically she was 13 and I was 15 back when we saw each other. Prior to that I had only seen her perhaps twice, and so it was quite strange to meet up with her during our adulthood. Since our age is so close to each other, it was surprisingly effortless trying to get along with each other. And since we didn't really know anyone else in Hong Kong, we pretty much became each other's buddy during our stay. Cindy and I had many great conversations about life, food, fashion and family in general and it was very refreshing to catch up with her. It's like having a little sister that I never had to whom we could share about our issues openly without worrying about being judged. It was also great seeing my other six or seven younger cousins whom I had never really hung out with in the past. In some way I felt a natural responsibility to spend some time with each one of them, get to know them, and really provide a role-model type image to them as an older cousin. Argh I feel like an old fart.

One of the biggest sacrifices when deciding to go to Hong Kong for the funeral was the inability to watch the Super Bowl live with anyone. Fortunately I found out while in Hong Kong that Cindy was actually a psycho sports fan, and so we decided to get up at the crack of dawn to watch the game at some sports bar in Lan Kwai Fong. Oh man I don't think I'd ever waken up at 6am to go to a sports bar and drink lots and lots of beer while I watch football. That was definitely one of the highlights of my trip. Well, sort of. The game kind of sucked, and they didn't play any of the Superbowl commercials there. :-(.

Overall, I'd say I had a great trip. As opposed to spending all my money on new clothes, I ended up spending most of my money on food, drinks, and foot massages. Oh my god foot massages are SO AWESOME in Hong Kong. It only costs about $13 HKD for one hour of intense massage. I went to this foot massage place four days in a row and became a regular there. I even took Cindy there twice and I think she's addicted too! Haha.

Hmm let's see what else I did while I was there. Oh! Katie, Ada, Cindy and I went to Lan Kwai Fong on Saturday night. Cousins reunite! We went to this yummy Spanish tapas place called La Bodega and we proceeded to go to Dragon-i, Drop, and Yum la for more drinks after. It was great.

I really wish I could be there a bit longer to catch up with my other friends such as Anita's brother, sister, and some of my old classmates. Unfortunately I only had 6 days there, and I had to spend the majority of the time with my parents and my grandpa.

Hopefully I'll get to go on a real vacation soon! It's unlikely though since my wedding will be in June, and I'd need to save up some more vacation days for the honeymoon. Oh well.


Update (11 hours later): Uh. The flight is running 2 hours over its intended arrival time. Looking at the GPS imagery, it looks like the pilot has decided to fly all the way up by Alaska and then going down south past Vancouver, Seattle, and then finally to San Francisco. WTF mate?

Pictures are now up!

Hong Kong Day 2

I'm still jetlagged! Got up an hour ago (4am) and I can't go back to sleep again.

Hungry!!!!

Hong Kong Day 1

Ahhh I'm finally here after the sucky 14 hour red eye flight. Got here at 6:30am and didn't check in until 8:30am. Then the chick at the reception desk was very nice and gave my parents and I upgraded rooms to the hotel. Woohoo. My room actually has down comforters and pillows! I feel so privileged.

First thing my parents and I did after checking in was to go downstairs to the ghetto Chinese restaurant downstairs for some good jook and beef cheung fun. There's just something about these restaurants that makes it sooooooooooo good. Oh one more interested change here is that they've just passed a law to prohibit smoking from all restaurants, indoor buildings, and parks. Just like the law in California, but even stricter. Sorta hard to imagine such a law here since the majority of the people here smoke like chimneys.

Afterwards we met up with all of our relatives for lunch to discuss about the things that we are going to have to do. And after that I walked around a bit by myself, got a good foot massage, and met up with a long lost friend for dinner.

Was going to meet up with my long lost cousin at night but I was way too tired to go out. I passed out at 10pm, and got up at 4am this morning. :-(. I might as well stay up for another hour to wait for the google earnings to come out on CNBC.

Oh one more thing that happened tonight. The phone in my hotel room rang for 2 seconds for some reason at 4am!!! Who the HELL was that?

Off to Hong Kong I go again

Cya guys in a week! Rico and Jon -- Promise me you won't watch the superbowl until next Tuesday! We will have alcohol, chips, and everything else to go with it!

I don't give a crap about latency

I haven't been able to get cable modem at my condo for the past year since SBC had signed some exclusive deal with the complex where nobody in the complex could get internet service from anyone else. Luckily, the contract was voided a month ago, and Comcast began to wire in their service here. Woohoo, finally I can watch videos on youtube without having to wait!

In order to lure in new customers, the Comcast sales rep are here this afternoon at the clubhouse to take in orders.

While I was there, this nerdy looking guy (he kinda looked like Jim Carrey from dumb and dumber) asked this sales rep lady a question: "Do you have someone technical here who can answer about bandwidth and latency?" The lady turned around and said "I'm not sure, but there are definitely technicians here who can answer your questions."

Since I had done some research the night before, I went ahead and told the guy that downstream would be 6Mbps and upstream would be 386kbps, and that is much better than our current DSL (386k upstream and 386k downstream).

Then... He asked the inprobable question: "What about the latency?"

WTF dude. Latency to what? Google? Your favorite porn site? The comcast backbone? Who the HELL cares. Do you really think you will get anything more than 30ms to your backbone? What are you, a die hard counter strike player who sucks so much to the point where you need 10ms less latency to shoot some dude in the head while you're camping? All I care about is the ability to watch streaming videos online and download tv shows at lightning speed! PERIOD!

Ok I'm done ranting. I'm looking forward to welcoming the comcast technician in the next hour with a wonderful can of Coca Cola.

How to Get in the Zone When Coding

In the world of programming, there is a term called being "in the zone" which is often used to describe instances where, while you're high quality writing code, you are completely oblivious to what is happening in your surrounding.

For most people, they often get themselves in the zone by being alone in their office with the door closed. Some people may listen to their favorite music, and some might choose to pull an all nighter with no interruptions whatsoever.

For me, personally, I get myself in the zone by putting a lion above my head, like so:



How do you get in the zone?

David Blaine on youtube!

I really didn't want to post this here: