Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

CitiBank

Citibank has this Flash web page called "Budget Builder" which is supposed to show college students how to plan their budgets and to save money for new toys. It came in a email promoting itself.
Being bored, I click on the link, and I'm greeted with the standard loading page.
Apparently somebody at Citibank doesn't know how to count because the screen said Loading... NaN%.
Way to gain trust, guys. If you can't calculate the percentage downloaded, how do I expect you to calculate how much money I should have?

"Peter Gibbons: You know, corporate accounts is sure as hell gonna notice $305,326.13, Michael!"

(For those of you who don't do CS, NaN stands for Not a Number, the result when somebody does something mathmatically bad like divide by zero.)

Giant Lemon

Yesterday my mom went to water the plants at the old house (since the tenents moved out.) There's a lemon tree in the back yard. I think there's a grapefruit tree in the back yard also. Whatever the case, something seems weird about the lemon tree since the lemons look like this:

If a lemon is the size of somebody's head, I guess I'll have a lot of lemonade real soon.....

Intel Itanic..... It takes talent to suck this bad.

So on The Register, there's a new article talking about the Intel Itanium processor. Affectionately dubbed "Itanic," it's a 64-bit processor that has been in development since the Pentium Pro (~1994) and consistantly overhyped. The performance was supposed to be absolutely stunning. In the first release of the Itanium (~2001), it certainly stunned me with benchmarks coming in at about the speed of a 75Mhz Pentium 1.

Anyways, IDC sales forecasts were supposed to include $30 billion in server sales by 2001. The revisions now expect that to be $7 billion in 2007.

Here's the charting of what the forecasts went from.....

Sure everybody naturally makes mistakes, but when you're 96% off, you deserve a prize.

Cars and uh.....

So, today I went, for the first time, to a car club meet. Andy mentioned that the Golden Gate G35 club was meeting in Mountain View today, so after dropping by Halted Specialties (a surplus electronics store that was having its annual sale) I went to go check out the meet.

And apparently my mom has decided to play more with the "you need to meet more girls" issue.

Excluding a dealer, I've never seen 20+ G35s gathered in one spot before. The people were friendly; while looking over what people did to their cars they would make comments and inquiries and also introduce themselves to people they haven't seen before. I noticed that a decent number of the cars were lowered and had some cosmetic mods. I also met a guy who had a G35 auto sedan with twin turbo, intercooler, knock sensor, a handmade mesh grill, and a bunch of other stuff. (I forgot to get the spelling of his name, so I'll try to note that later) Says the car gets 400+ hp at the wheels or something to that effect. Whatever the case, when looking under the hood, I was impressed.

There was also some pizza and sodas as well as a raffle and demo of CrystalGuard, a sealant which is supposed to protect paint. Since we were using the CrystalGuard distributor's parking lot to meet in, it was reasonable that we'll listen and possibly buy some of the product. From what I could tell, it seems to be very similar to a crystallize epoxy. The idea is that a glass/flourine compound deposits harden into a layer that is supposed to be hard and shiny at the same time. So instead of a layer of wax, or polymer glue, or some other kind of plastic, you end up with a layer of crystal which is harder. The stuff's imported from Japan, so I guess there might be better explanations through google.jp if only my Japanese skills were up to par.

Anyhow, afterwards, about 10 of us went on a drive from Saratoga towards Daly City. We didn't actually make it there since the G35 with the twin turbo blew the engine somehow when we were up in the hills. Near Skyline/De La Honda Road, if I recall correctly. I feel sorry for the guy, as he obviously put a lot of work into his car.

I eventually had to leave to drive back down to Cupertino since my mom wanted me to go meet up with the CPA at 4:30pm to get an overview of what my IRA looks like and why.

While I was there, she introduced me to her niece, and encouraged us to go grab dinner together. She's from Taiwan and studied in Oregon. This week was her last doing training in San Jose for work. We went to a Chinese restaurant on Castro St. in Mountain View, and then to Verde for some pearl tea.

Fun person to talk to despite that we didn't really seem to have much in common. "I'm an engineer; She's an accountant," etc. Nevertheless, it was interesting to discuss stuff that sometimes doesn't come into conversation as much especially since some of it normally is well known here because it involves California as a state and hence involves the residents. (The governor recall stuff, number of Asians here, etc.) Discussion from the perspective of somebody who didn't spend most of their life in California adds quite a bit more.

AIM Profile Export 1

So AdiumX (A Mac OSX AOL Instant Messenger Client) lets me put stuff into my profile, even though it's past the 1024 character limit for a profile. But periodically it yells at me. Normally I'd just clear it out to a file or something and possibly lose it.

Now I can stuff it here.....

How to get your Econobox into the 14's (or How to make a 2001 Nissan Sentra do a quarter mile 1 second short of a Porsche 911..... for free.)
"http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=776885"

"If My Driving Sucks, please call *ASS"
"http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115808&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=155&tid=17&mode=thread&pid=9806134#9807122"

Poor, poor kitty. I'll dedicate my next "Mechanical Critter" in Warcraft III in honor of the cat.
"http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/11/04/wcia04.xml"

Clipped from a slashdot post:
Re:Others | (Score:1) by usotsuki (530037) on Wednesday August 27, @02:53PM (#6807653) (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dapple)
"Niwa ni wa, ni-wa niwatori ga imasu"

In (ni wa) the yard (niwa) there are two (ni-wa) chickens (niwatori) :D

-uso.

And inspiration for all the EECS girls who haven't graduated yet (or found a job):
"http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbartik.htm"

And for all the Transformer fans out there:
VWHiRes.mpg

Great, so now they tell me my email is like a drug?
NYTimes Archived Article(Might not be accessable anymore)

Clipped from a Slashdot post:
Piracy is such a harsh word | (Score:5, Funny) by scubacuda (411898) on Friday May 30, @11:13AM (#6077007) (http://www.greplaw.org/)
I prefer to call it
(hand over one eye)
ARRRRRR-chiving!

Build a man a fire, he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

From the NT days: "You are running on NT. How far can you go today?"

Too much fruit.

Okay, about a little over a month ago I was in the hospital for "intestinal obstruction." Basically it's where stuff is stuck in your intestines and doesn't want to move. The downside is that it makes you feel like your intestinals are about to explode, well because they kinda are.

Anyways, to keep things moving along, the doctor mentioned that I should change my diet to include more fiber, and gave me a list of food with more fiber.

Many of these are fruits. Now, in the past few weeks, I've been eating a lot of fruits in the morning and near lunchtime. Grapes, unpeeled apples, cherry tomatoes, unpeeled pears, unpeeled peaches, bananas, and some prunes. (yes, the peel is good for you) What I've found out is that while it seems to be good for my intestines and sounds very healthy overall, the amount of sugar in these fruits is starting to give me a headache. I just finished a plate and I feel like crap. I wouldn't be going too far out on a limb if I said it's the same feeling you'd get from drinking a 6-pack of Mountain Dew in 15 minutes. So.....uh..... I think I have to go back to favoring eating those wheat biscuits cuz I think I'm going to keel over.

Broomball

On Friday night, I went with Brian and his church friends (Andy and Joyce came too) to go play broomball at Vallco Fashion Park.

Now most of my friends considering me playing broomball [again] to be some sort of death wish, but really, it's not that bad. We played with one ball instead of two. Teams were roughing 10 people instead of 20. And since we were playing with a wider varity of ages instead of angry raging engineers, everybody stopped moving and whacking when people fell down instead of beating them up more. :) So all in all, it was a lot less chaos and much safer. No teeth whacking, no head on collisions, no running up to people and kicking them in the shins("Hi Katherine!").

Andy came well equipped with 2 helmets, huge ass gloves, and hockey pants. Joyce's first reaction to seeing me there was something along the lines of "don't die" :P Even with smaller teams, it was hard to keep track of who was on which team. It seems all I really knew was that Andy and Ricky were on my team and that's about it. Oh, I also managed to get an action shot or two of Brian and Kinson during the time my team was off the ice rink. Some of the other photos didn't turn out too well cuz my camera's batteries were almost dead (too dark) and I didn't adjust the shutter speed until later (blurry).

Assuming you might not know of my broomball history, I used to go with my roommates at Cal to HKN's broomball events where the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th instances of "The Curse of Apartment 10" occurred. The 2nd instance was Rupert and I colliding on a bad maneuver and snapping my left collarbone. The 3rd was Nick tripping on wet ice and falling on his face, cracking off a tooth. And the 4th incident, one day off from the year anniversary of the 2nd incident, and once again the day before a foreign language final, was Roger swinging his stick high while I tripped having his aluminium broomball stick meet my face in the middle and cracking off two teeth. Yeah. It almost sounds like somebody's out to get me up there. Either that or a coincidence that you'd only see in a movie plot.

Anyhow, on the way out, I bumped into Ben Lyon in the parking lot. (I think I spelled his last name right) He was one of the people in the same group at Apple during my early internships at Apple in Input Devices. He's older than me, graduated from CMU, and while I don't know if I can actually exactly mention what he worked on, I can at least say that it's on the market and it's a feature considered very cool. He didn't remember my name (It's been like 3 years since I last working with him), but mentioned that I should forward along my resume to him. Hmm, guess I gotta start digging in my old mail archives for his email address soon.

WTF is a "blog"?

It's going to get asked sometime so I might as well write on it in advanced:

"Why arn't you using xanga, blogger.com, or <insert-favorite-journal-service-here>?"

You know what? I hate the word "blog." WTF is a "blog"? "bleh-log?" Somebody misspelled "bog"? Some ass trying to be cool and giving something a name that sounds vauge.... like "blob"? How the hell do you come up with a word that non-intuitive and lame-sounding at the same time?

When I first heard it used as a word, it made no sense to me. I go to a page from google after naturally searching the word "blog" and I just find a bunch of random posts. And I'm like, okay, so there's some guy's journal. Nice. Doesn't have too much stuff there. Now what's the "blog" thing people are talking about? It took me a whole week to figure out that the journal is the "blog"! Dammit. How was I supposed to know that it's "weblog" shorted by arbitrarily cutting off two letters? If you're going to abbreviate something, that's certainly not right since it's obviously more intuitive to use letters from the front of each component of a compound word. Even with my shitty English skillz, I can tell you that.

All of a sudden, lots of software came out written by people who thought "blogging" is such a new and cool idea. (news flash: it's a journal, just like what everybody's been doing since the stone ages, so stop acting like it's new.) And so the name seems to have stuck. At the same time, "xanga.com" got started.... and people verbed that word too. WTF IS XANGA SUPPOSED TO MEAN? What? It's cool cuz it's got an X in the name? Sounds eXXXXXXtreme, doesn't it? Freakin' a..... You know, I totally would have been cool about it if it stayed as just a name of a website that provides webspace for creating journals. But for somebody to come up to me and say "hey, dude, check it out, I just started xangaing," just totally ruined it.

And don't get me started on "moblog".....

Anyways, years ago, Lisa told me that writing a diary/journal would be something good to help me practice my writing skills and record down stuff I've thought about over the years. That recently coincided with the mixing of a bunch of personal projects ideas I've had, the need to organize, index, and post them, and also my increasing use of my digital camera, as well as the "oh, i'll start making a decent webpage someday." So, all together, this webpage is supposed to be a record of all those cool things I did in my free time and whatever crap I can think of. And how much I hate the word "blog."

For the last time. It's a journal. It's a diary. It's a weblog. "Blog" is not a word. Use it and I'll be forced to slap you silly with a large trout.

Genesis Capsule

The Genesis Capsule plowed into the ground at 100mph.
Paranoid UFO watchers everywhere rejoice at the pictures.

And of course, the best thing to say when something like that happens is "oh shit."

.....Initialized.

Well, I finally started a log/journal/weblog. As the fifth installment of the "Hansel's Web Site Building Adventure," hopefully this will actually amount to something. Somehow I gotta take my artistic (yeah, right) user interface design skillz and merge them with this web publishing suite called Movable Type, and then link it up to the CopperMine Photo Database suite. Now if only I could get FileMaker 7 integrated into this too..... (who am I kidding? I can't deploy that on a company site license; gotta get around to purchasing my own copy sometime

For your entertainment, I'll feature personal thoughts, projects, stupid links, and excessive usage of my digital camera or something like that. Oh, and be prepared for some "I ate fruits and vegetables" kind of entries as I'll take the suggestion from Jen about keeping tabs on what I eat.

Previous Web Sites:
1st: Attempt at replicating eWorld style graphics. (geocities)
2nd: Attempt at making a web site entirely out of Macromedia Shockwave (geocities)
3rd: UC Berkeley Residential Computing Staff Site - www.rescomp.berkeley.edu/hchung
4th: Prototyped templates and .Mac templates. (homepage.mac.com/hchung75)
5th: This thing, will attempt to take #3 and #4 and merge them in as project data. (www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~hachu)