Obsession with twngan

Either that, or I did badly on my interview with him. I heard about two graduating students getting offers from them, and both of them are higher than my offer. One is even 6k higher. Not sure if the HR person that was a pain in the axx was honest in saying that they won't be able to match my other offer.

Despite that, people getting better offers than mine still don't seem to be excited about them and are not considering them. There was a time that most best people wanted to join M$. Now it is probably just a matter of how many people the nonevil company can take...

One other minor thing I needed to do before leaving is getting rid of the coins, as it wouldn't make sense to ship them to California. Like most people, I keep my coins, mostly pennies, in a basket and never bothered to bring them to a bank or something. Granted, services like Coinstar can easily convert them into cash-equivalent, but the 8.9% service charge just seems like robbery.

The way to avoid this service charge is to get/reload a gift card. I didn't realize I got more than $21 there. (There's probably no way to find out if it is accurate, unless I care enough to count the coins ahead of time.) I reloaded my Starbucks card, because to me it is the closest thing to cash. But you can choose others like Amazon, iTunes, Borders, or LNT, to name a few. Check out the Amazon's Coinstar page. They even tell you how many nickels you would need to buy their top sellers!

I am going to have another road trip this year. This time is my relocation to Los Angeles. Symantec only allows a 3-day trip, which means even for a direct trip it would still take 9-hour a day on the road. Guess I can't really go to many places. A natural division of the trip would be spending the second night in Tucson, Arizona but the first night somewhere in west Texas. Probably I'll pick Fort Stockton. I hope this is going to be a fine place to stay for the night; at least it has a Hilton Hampton Inn.

There are stupid things I need to do right now, like joining the evil AAA and have a road trip checkup on my car. I'm hoping that the trip would be more enjoyable than the one last year. I'm going to stay on interstate highway 95% of the time, so at least no "the road ends in 2 feet" or "no pavement ahead" signs...

Labels: road trip

Today I needed to ship some documents to California so I went to a nearby Kinko/FedEx. Standard overnight shipping costs about $24. Ouch!!! Anyway, three quick facts:

• I suspect they lose money on many photocopying. I copies 2 sheets of paper. It costs $0.17, but I paid with credit card, so I believe the transaction fee is more than the amount I paid.
• I tried to setup a FedEx account online in the hope of getting a 15% discount. That didn't work - I didn't know they need one whole business day to activate a new account. Maybe that is on purpose.
  
• While I rushed to make sure that my envelope would be on the flight tonight, the lady in front of me was sending a very large but flat package. She went inside the counter and requested to try all combinations of dimensions (e.g., swapping height, length, and width) to see if she can get a lower price. "It may sound crazy," she said. She seemed to be very familiar with the procedures, and put the mailing sticker to her invoice herself, but then she left the invoice on the counter, only to have the staff to chase her to her car and wasted me more time.
  

At least that's how I feel like. NWA gives a list of "money-saving idea" to the employees it laid off that it later had to apologize for "degrading its former employees." The list, seemingly a bit unusually, is not really that outrages. I do some of those stuff, and probably need to do more as very few of you support my blog. Cutting shower time seems to be a good start...

I'm going to move to L.A. early next month, without being able to start my new job right away, due to work authorization issue. So I am now calling all of you to give me some support so that I could pay my $1,800 rent :P Here's how.

• I've updated the template for this blog. On top of clicking my ads, now you can use the above link to buy from Amazon to let me earn some referrals. Remember to come back and use the link whenever you want to buy from Amazon.
  
• Join Mr. Rebates through the link and start buying through them. I'll get 20% of the rebate you get. They're the best!
  
• Join Ebates too if you want. Make a purchase and get me $5.
  
• Ask me to refer you open an online saving account in ING DIRECT. You deposit $250 or more, you'll get $25 bonus and I'll get $10.

I just got this toaster oven. It was the cheapest one I could find with convection. While I have not heard about this Euro-Pro brand before, Amazon seems to have ok review, if you ignore those few that say it stopped working after a bit. I bought this from LNT. It is selling for $49.99. But I used a 20% off online coupon, selected in-store pickup, and went through Mr. Rebates to get $1.6 more back, so it is just over $40 (including tax).

Anyway, I have been using this oven for everything in the last few days. It performs surprisingly well. Today, I even tried to toast a sandwich. It tastes so great that I don't see myself going to Quiznos anymore...

With the crap-selling event cooling down, now it is time to see what happened.

• A (probably unsurprisingly) large number of interested buyers are Chinese. A common problem for many of them is that they used Chinese mail accounts (Yahoo China) or put their Chinese names and signatures into the emails. That easily triggers DSPAM into quarantining them.
• A lot of people just sent me an email saying that they are interested in this and that, and then don't reply my emails anymore. Maybe that has something to do with spam filters too? Even so, at least they should have checked their spam folder.
  
• A guy called to ask about my stuff. He spoke Szechuanese with me. Or maybe Mandarin with words pronounced in Szechuanese, I don't know. It was very hard to understand what he says (and he had a lot of questions, too). Anyway, no complain here, as he came after calling and bought stuff, unlike many others.
  
• The same guy took an hour to locate my unit after finding my apartment. This is despite the fact that I have told him my unit is very close to the Shipley Donut in the intersection.
• Maybe I have put too high a price tag on many items, especially computer accessories. Probably need to have another discount sale, before a "garage" sale at the end.
  

I just updated my Windows with some "critical security updates." Turns out to be a deadly mistake. It refuses to boot anymore. Of course, it comes with a BSOD, and it complains that the file urlmon.dll is corrupted and failed the checksum test. Since the motherboard also complained the machine rebooted abnormally, I suspected it could also be the heating problem. But dusting does not work this time.

This comes at a very bad time, since I have just sold my backup desktop machine. It would be hard for me to prepare a rescue disk.

Glad that I have a Ubuntu live CD with me. Unlike some people I know, who are zealous about Ubuntu for its GUI, I am more a fan of Gentoo Linux for its "recompiling everything optimized for your machine" philosophy. Yet the practice of freely handing out CDs from Ubuntu sometimes comes very handy. So I downloaded a good version of the dll file from DLL-files and then used Captive to mount and overwrite the file to my Windows NTFS partition. Now the machine finally agrees to reboot, only to complain that this time browseui.dll is corrupted. Lather, rinse, repeat, finally it boots again.

So I wasted an hour fixing the machine after security updates, and then another 15 mins telling you about it in this blog. Thank you so much, Microsoft!

Even though I am still one month from moving to LA, I am already selling my crap. I composed a list of almost 100 items, many of which I knew that are probably not going to sell. It is really fun, seeing people coming and moving my crap away. Oh, and seeing the wallet growing is nice too. Within 12 hours of posting my ad, I have already got $280 into my pocket.

Morale of the story? I have too much crap.

Labels: selling

Destination: Brazos Bend State Park.
Location: 40 miles southwest from Houston downtown. If you drive 10 mph like in LA, that would take you more than 4 hours.
Animals: Alligators.
Activity: Feeding mosquitoes. Running into spider webs. Feeding more mosquitoes.
Ultimate question: Why would people pay $4 entrance fee for the privilege of feeding mosquitoes?

Today when I am home, I have two cats camping outside my door. One bigger and one smaller. I don't even recognize them; are they the mom and one of its kitties? A couple? Gosh, so many of them come and go, it is really hard to know them all.

That brings me to play games like this. Drive around and kill cats. Or web sites like this:


Alright, I admit it. I will need to see a psychiatrist very soon if I am staying here. Glad that I'm moving. I believe there would be no cats camping outside my door at 9th floor...

Driving in Texas is like in heaven. (Unless when you just started learning and not yet get used to the speed.) Most roads, except a few portion of West Loop, Katy Freeway, and 59, are hardly congested. But I never appreciate that until my house hunting trip in LA. I really like the idea of driving faster than 10 mph on freeways... Anyway, one thing I got after this trip is that I become much more patient.

What I still don't understand, though, is, why every time when I go to Starbucks, there is always some women backing up their cars with one hand on their phone? Is it because their driving is not bad enough with both hands and paying full attention? Or, even worse, they stop in the middle of the driveway blocking everyone to talk on the phone.