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2007-07-30

 

Missing BBQ

Moved from Houston to Los Angeles, barbecue food is one thing that I missed most. Well, maybe except cheaper everything. And freeways that you can usually drive at freeway speed. And more friendly (at least apparently) people. And many else. Anyway, my point is, it becomes much harder to find decent bbq outside Texas.

A few months back I tried Baby Blues BBQ, winner of the AOL CityGugide best bbq award. Other than the waitress was only interested on her cell phone conversation, the food was only mediocre. So I didn't even bother to blog about it.

Last week, not wanting to give up bbq entirely, I tried the best barbecue food according to Citysearch. (Interestingly, Baby Blues was second on the list.) The food in Woody's was a bit better, but still nothing comparing to my favorite Meyer's (in Elgin, just outside Austin) or my favorite chain Rudy's. I don't think I am going back to Woody's because of the not too good neighborhood in Inglewood and the cleanliness of the area...

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2007-07-28

 

LA Times

I have a subscription to LA Times for "weekends," which includes Thursday to Sunday. I am not a fan of its content; I subscribed it only for the Sunday coupons, but with the deal I got ($20 a year) it was actually cheaper to get the whole weekend.

Anyway, it is unbelievable. Like today, on its front page is an article about... the increasing price of beef noodles in Lanzhou. Why would anyone in LA cares about that? I am Chinese and even I don't. Lame!

2007-07-26

 

Apple Sold

I finally sold all my Apple shares. Bought at $89.93, I sold it at $147.57, one of the higher prices of today, after the great Q3 result announced yesterday and before it was affected by the general market. The over 64% of profit in slightly over 3 months is really amazing. Not that I don't think the stock value is not going up, as I think Apple will still go strong with more refined versions of iPhone coming out, but I think it was a good time to leave with a guaranteed profit.

I could have earned more if I invested more, but a larger portion of my portfolio is betting on another technology company. The last four month holding their stock "only" brought me 33% of profit. But I'm still hopeful on their big coming move over the summer...

2007-07-24

 

Painfully Debugging

I spent the last two day debugging painfully. It was bad enough that the debugging was done in a beefy 64-bit Linux machine with 8GB of RAM connected via Xwindows tunneled through ssh in a Redhat Linux environment running as a VMware image in my Windows XP laptop. The bug did not emerge until after running the program for half an hour. And the only message I got was a segmentation fault. And debugger only showed corrupted memory...

At last, I realized the bug was because when I compute the memory size for allocation, the result overflowed the 32-bit unsigned long integer. Sigh.

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2007-07-17

 

Motorola Sucks

I am never going to buy another Motorola product, especially mobile phones, again.

While function-wise my Moto Q does everything I expected it to do, it does nothing exceptional. Windows Mobile is horrible. It makes the phone so slow it is only marginally acceptable. The battery life is a joke, as often it cannot last for one day with moderate web surfing.

But the worst of all, it dies randomly. And by that, I mean all of a sudden it just refuses to reboot. This is what happened to me today. I spent hours figuring out what's the problem and how to fix it. Turns out, it is a well known problem, and many units, if not most, are with this defect. I even lost all my data when I tried a master reset (and how can such a buggy hardware comes without a reset button!?).

Anyway, after some effort, it is working again now. God knows when it will die again, and if I could revive it again. For the remaining 21 months that I am still going to be in contract with Sprint, I can only hope...

2007-07-16

 

Carnage II: The Return of the Ants

Yes, they are back. And they found a new path. Now everyday when I walk to my car, they are moving above my head...

What? How come this episode has nothing to do with the title "Carnage?" Have you not seen movie franchises milking the same title with unrelated sequels?

2007-07-15

 

Another Vegas Trip?

Man, Vegas loves me...

Just got noticed that I got a free trip to none other than everyone's favorite sin city. It includes cheapo JetBlue flights to Vegas (no more driving through the desert and passing through the unpronounceable Zzyzx road) and two nights in the four star Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. Note that a Saturday night stay in the hotel could cost up to $400. It even includes a Saturday night musical show Mamma Mia.

Why did I pay for my birthday getaway trip, again?

 

Carnage!

Several hundreds, if not thousands, of dead bodies lying down in my apartment on the way to my parking spot. What a terrifying scene!

The ants in my apartment have been building a path from the garbage room to wherever their sweet home is. It has been like that for a few weeks. You could easily kill like 50 of them by stepping on their way any time. Probably due to complaints, the apartment is finally willing to do something to eliminate the ant problem.

Gosh, it is still nothing comparing to the frequently noisy motorcycles and sometimes cars with radio volume turning way up. I need to move again once my lease is over in 9 months...

2007-07-10

 

Vegas Trip

Back from the exhasuting Vegas trip, I was so tired for the last two days. The traffic was not good on the way back, with frequent congestions in the interstate. And the temperature was insane (115F/45C). It was the first time I feel my Corolla was not powerful enough when going uphill in the desert with air-conditioning.

But on the good side, it was also the first time I saw a Smart ForTwo. I thought they were not available in US yet. It was every bit like I thought, small, cute, easy to park, etc. Too bad I didn't get to talk to the driver...

Oh, you want to know about the concert too? It was loud and flashy. What else do you want to know?

2007-07-06

 

Free Pr0n

What to know a great way to get free porn? Join Geek Squad...

Oh by the way, happy birthday to me. Thanks everyone for saying nothing and sending me nothing.

2007-07-01

 

Birthday Getaway


I couldn't believe I am actually doing a birthday getaway this year. Well, not exactly on my birthday, but close enough. I am going to Las Vegas next weekend to see Sammi Cheng's (Hong Kong pop singer) concert in MGM Grand. Since I haven't got any birthday gift from any of you yet, I'll need to look for a way to get back my trip expense in Vegas...

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