Obsession with twngan

Don't be misled into thinking that this is a Vietnamese place. It is a Chinese restaurant close to Sugar Land, albeit with a Vietnamese taste.

What's so special about this place is its waiter. After ordering three dishes of meats, he suggested ordering a dish of veggie. After I said no, he still asked, "are you sure?"

And then when I asked for the check at the end, he looked at the pot of (very hard and overcooked) tofu and asked if I wanted to have it to go. I said no, and guess what, he still asked, "are you sure?" And then later when he gave me the check, he asked again, "are you sure you don't want to have the tofu to go?"

How could he be so annoying?

Labels: food

Finally my Mac Mini is on its way coming. Let's see how much I really paid for it, shall we?

Base Price	$598.99
Employee Discount	-$59.90
A9 Discount	-$8.46
Total	$530.63
Value of gift certificate for using Amazon VISA card	-$15.92
Amazon.com Rebate	-$25.00
Effective total	$489.71

I know! It's even cheaper than the low end version!

last night from a detective from Boise, ID. He asked me if I noticed anything special while I was there during my trip from Seattle back to Houston. As he told me, there was an incident where a husband has assaulted his wife in a parking lot near the hotel I stayed. Too bad I didn't notice anything, and can't give him any information.

I have returned to Houston last night. The traffic was much better, and the effect of the hurricane is hardly noticeable. The biggest one would be the few traffic light failures, causing the congestion within Houston worse than the way from Austin to Houston.

The life as a refugee in Austin wasn't the most enjoyable one. There was not much to do, and I was so bored that I went to the 6th Street for the Old Pecan Street Festival. But the dumbest thing I've ever done in my entire life was to see the bats. I waited literally for an hour and a half, feeding all the mosquitoes nearby, just to see some stupid bats flying around...

With the possible arrival of the Hurricane Rita, I evacuated from Houston. I left at 8pm, and was lucky enough to arrive Austin at 4am (the normal driving time is 2.5hrs). At least I was not heading to Dallas, as I learned that people leaving at 9:30pm arrived 2:30pm the next day, while people leaving at 4am decided to return to Houston because of the insane traffic.

Just learned the details (i.e., numbers) of the offer I am going to receive. Damn, it's too good to refuse. Let me just say that it has an above-expectation salary, yet the extra of money I can get during the first year is equally impressive... What should I do?

Next week is our annual departmental Corporate Affiliates Meeting. This is the opportunity for us to showcase our research work, an attempt to seek more industrial support and collaborations. We also make a resume book available to those companies, helping us to look for jobs.

"So what's wrong?" you might ask. Well, our department staff sent the login information for the resume book to the affiliates on Friday. Right after that, it was our scheduled Campus Computing Systems Outage. The whole department web site is down for more than half a day.

Maybe it is just me, but I have some questions. Could they have sent the information at a worse time? Are they trying to showcase our system failures?

Since I am going to France for Middleware in November, it is natural for me to see if I could exploit it and save money and/or travel time going to Hong Kong on the same trip. During the search, I've uncovered the following facts:

1. To fly from France to Hong Kong with Continental, you have to stop at New York.
2. Despite the fact that Continental has code-share with Air France, you can't fly Air France to Hong Kong.
3. If you want to fly Air France all the way instead, the trip from Hong Kong back to Houston has to stop at Paris.
4. The lady answering phone calls in Cantonese in Continental has not heard of Lyon; in fact, she thinks Paris is the only city in France.
5. It is cheaper to buy the trip Houston → Lyon → New York → Hong Kong → Houston or two separate trips Houston → Lyon → New York and New York → Hong Kong → Houston, than the more natural trip of Houston → Lyon → Hong Kong → Houston, even though they have exactly the same flights.
6. This trip, alone, suffices elite status in Continental.
   

You probably don't get why I am so upset with the cat in the flat. After all, a cute little cat roaming around is not the worst thing in the world.

Think about this.

Our apartment has trash pickup service. Every morning, someone will come to every door and take our trash away. I had fish for dinner last night (which tasted great, by the way). This morning, I found out that the bag I put outside the door was in a mess, with fish bone all around. I spent the morning cleaning it up. The cat was staring at me the whole time from behind, just like I was doing the weirdest thing.

C'mon, someone or some dog, get the damn cat!

Wow, got an offer and an invitation to interview in Redmond today. Maybe it is time to really spamming everyone with my resume now.

With big money grant, one nice thing to do to keep the money source happy is to create a nice-looking homepage. Here it is, Accurate Voting Center.

Want to make a guess who wrote this? How about a hint: whose picture there is the biggest?

Another hint? Okay, just compare its template to this.

Finally I have interviewed with Microsoft. I was expecting interesting behavioral questions, like why I would like to work for them or why do I think that they are special. Instead, they are only interested in people with pointer manipulation skills... Damn Java, making me forgetting most of those shit.

What to do in Labor Day? RedBox! I've got a promotional code that grants one free DVD rental during the break. Of course, I didn't get just one. This is the time when having more than enough credit cards pays off: I've got enough credit cards for me to see all movies I wanted to see there without paying a penny.

Well, maybe more than enough. I have seen Alone in the Dark, the worst motion picture ever. It's a scary movie, scary in the sense that it exists...

After waiting for so long, I finally have a (second-hand) flat panel on my desk at work. I can now do my research more efficiently... or not.

Labels: work

When I came back to Houston, I've noticed that the Ethernet port on my DSL modem has fried. Well, it can still connect to the service, just that I can't connect my computers to it, making it not particularly useful. I had been back to the dark ages, where people use scary, horribly slow phone line modem to go online since then. Today, I finally got a better DSL modem, Speedstream 5200, I ordered from eBay.

Why better? Well, it has a USB port, which means that if the Ethernet port fries again, I can still skip my router and connect it directly to my desktop...