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2006-12-29

 

Dinning Discount from Entertainment Book

I buy Entertainment Book each year. I bought the Houston edition twice and just got my Los Angeles edition. The price was ok, since I got $10 off plus free shipping, and $7 additional cashback via FatWallet, making it a total of $15 instead of the marked price of $32.

Entertainment Books have many coupons and discounts. But the bigger reason I get them is to get myself to go out more; I use it for suggestions on places I can visit and restaurants I can go. So while it may not find me the greatest deals, I still enjoy it, despite the declining quality of the offers.

But the worst part of it is when using the coupons or discounts at restaurant. Sometimes I feel like I am begging for a favor. Like yesterday I tried to use it in Roll 'N' Sushi in Santa Monica. While the Entertainment Book clearly states that the offer is valid anytime, they refused to honor it and claimed that it only applies for dinners. The food wasn't good either: The miso soup was too salty, the rice in rolls were loose, the sushi chef kept talking while preparing the sushi and might have spat some saliva on them, and the teriyaki sauce tasted weird. It might be because the chefs are Korean.

So I sent a note to Entertainment.com. The first reply is disappointing. Even though I used their form and clearly stated the issue in details, they gave me one of those standard replies stating their position, policy, etc., and asked me to follow up with the exact same information I gave them if I were to pursue this issue further. I replied and now they say they're going to investigate. I'll see what happen. But given this kind of frustration, this might as well be my last Entertainment book unless my other experience on using the discounts be better.

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2006-12-26

 

What I Got for Christmas

Not being able to get Xbox on the cheap (and Wii at all), I had to get myself something for fun. I ended up getting, guess what, a 6-year-old console in PS2. Of course, it has to be a deal to get something this old. I got it from Overstock.com with another 20% off certificate I got from American Express. This makes the price goes from $128.99 to $103.19 and tax free at the same time.

If nothing else, this at least gives me the chance to pick up again the greatest game of all times, the Final Fantasy series I have missed since playing the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VI in Super Nintendo Entertainment System. I still wonder how I could finish the game without understanding the story...

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2006-12-24

 

Still No Xbox

But this is no longer because I don't have my Toysrus wishlist certificate. I finally got them 2 days after being told that it hadn't been sent, yet the tracking system from UPS reveals that it was sent the week before. So not only American Express sent my certificate late, they also lied to me that they have already sent it. Nice job!

By the time I got the certificate, the Christmas catastrophe is already happening. I am referring to the mindless shopping spray that happens before every Christmas. And L.A. is crowded like nowhere I've experienced before.

Of course, the big mystery of whether I got a deal using my certificate or not has a sad ending. When I got my certificate and went to two Toysrus, they were all gone. Wii. Playstation 3 (which I was not particularly looking for anyway). The greatest discounted Xbox 360. Nintendo DS Lite. Even Playstation 2 or Gamecube (!). They have sold out every single game console that they had.

It certainly sucks to live in a crowded place like L.A.

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2006-12-22

 

Presentation to CTO

Two months and change into my job, and I have already done a presentation in front of our CTO, who flew from Bay Area to hear about what our lab has been doing lately. It was a pleasant experience, as he is extremely technical (science degrees in Harvard and Columbia) to understand the crux of our stuff but also with a sense of humor and not afraid to crack jokes during the presentation. He jokingly (or not) said that I shouldn't have used an animated meat grinder in my slides, particular right before dinner time...

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2006-12-20

 

AmEx Wishlist Hatred

I'll say it again here. I know American Express is doing us a favor by offering the My Wishlist, and I am grateful to that even though I couldn't win any discounted product. But they really need to improve in multiple departments.

The first dumbness is mailing Overstock certificates with a generic URL. Of course that URL would be posted on every single deal site under the sun, and of course it would be abused by thousands, if not millions. I am ok with them disabling the URL and send me a one-time use instead, but why on earth do they need to shorten the use time from more than a month to 3 days? That completely destroyed my purchasing plan.

Worse, I still haven't got my Toysrus certificate I won 18 days ago. I just called, and they told me that they haven't even shipped it. My sister won the certificate later than me and she got it last week. There are plenty of people getting it a couple days after winning it. I would be fine if it were logistic issue and no one could have the certificate soon, but I can't take on this kind of unfairness. Particularly when the $100 gift card Xbox promotion is ending Sunday, and the next shipment of Wii is the day after tomorrow...

The good feeling I got for this whole promotion has completely gone. Time will tell if it turns into hatred.

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2006-12-19

 

Gift Exchange

Our lab held a white elephant gift exchange today. Just like most of our normal meetings, we have remote participants dialed in. The rules of the gift exchange are pretty involved, and it took me a while to understand. Setting the price at $20, most of the gifts are toys (an unusual proportion of them are Mario figures, probably because of the many proud Wii owners in our lab). One of the gifts is 48-pieces of Ferrero Rocher, which is going to make the 2-year-old twin boys of a colleague very happy. I hope they are not going to have too much sugar nor teeth problems.

I originally eyed on the sushi-preparation set. I stole it from the guy sitting in the office opposite from mine. But then it got stolen and I stole a French press instead. I was hoping someone would steal my Fresh press, which then would give me the chance to grab the sushi set for good, but that didn't happen. Interestingly, the most contended gifts are the Mario ones. The people in the labs have a thing for toys (particularly my boss; you'd know what I mean if you got a chance to look at his desk). If I took one of those, I would be making sushi tomorrow evening...

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2006-12-18

 

Deal of the Year

I am recovering from the mourning from missing possibly the deal of the year.

I mentioned about winning some 25% off certificates from American Express' Wishlist. Another certificate I won about two weeks ago is from Toysrus. Together with the $100 giftcard they give for each Xbox 360 purchase, it effectively makes it 50% off, from $400 to $200.

Wait, there's more. There was also new shipments of Wii. Those people camping outside Toysrus for the Xboxes "accidentally" also get new Wiis. With 25% off. So for less than the original price of an Xbox, they get both an Xbox and a Wii...

The saddest of all, of course, is that I haven't yet to receive my Toysrus certificate, so I didn't even have the chance to get them... I shouldn't blame American Express for not sending my certificate sooner, as they're just doing people favors, but I have to blame my apartment. They have this hateful practice of sending our packages to the cleaners in the garage in one of our buildings. And then X days later, where X is a random variable with possible outcomes in { 0, 1, 2, 3, ∞ }, a slip will somehow show up on my mailbox. Yes, with an ∞. Sometimes they don't even bother to put the slip to notify me.

Do I need more reasons to leave my apartment once my lease expires? Yes? Fine. What about constant noise from emergency vehicles and helicopters? Remember what happened in New York?

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2006-12-12

 

Incentives for Peer-to-Peer Streaming

No, this is not the title of my new paper. Heck, I will never write any paper like that again. But somehow it seems that a lot of people are interested in this topic. This is the third time I received a request for reviewing a paper in this topic, and for the second time it is a journal submission. Am I an authority on this topic or what :P

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2006-12-08

 

Walking to Office

I have been walking to office more lately, partly due to the worsening traffic in the area after work, but more because the walking experience has become more enjoyable with my new flashy iPod, which, apparently, is a "repository for stolen music."

Anyway, the walking part itself is quite exciting, especially when I am close to arriving office: The last 5 cross streets are Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. I wonder why they missed a Rice Street. Well, it could be that we don't deserve that. It seems that, particularly since I left, the productivity of some group... looks very interesting.

2006-12-03

 

Santa Monica Party

Yesterday I went to the annual Holiday Party for the Santa Monica site. The actual location is The Highlands Nightclub in Hollywood.

In the notification email I received, they didn't mention much about the party, except the time and location and the evening dress attire. It wasn't a big deal, except the place was hard to find (how do you notice a place hidden on the 4th floor in a shopping plaza?), that I didn't know they pay for valet parking outside and parked elsewhere for $10, that they canceled the raffle, that there weren't much else to do than the buffet and drinking...

The only interesting note is that I shared the table with someone looks like Jun Ji-hyun (or 全智賢). Surprisingly, she was not from Korea but from Taiwan.

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