Obsession with twngan

I got an email today requesting to buy my cordless phone. The only problem is, I don't recall trying to sell one.

Turns out this lady from Dallas found the moving sale page I created almost two years ago, before I moved from Houston to LA. It is hard to imagine how she found that page, given that it is not linked from anywhere. And more strangely, she seemed to want me to ship the phone to her. The shipping would probably cost as much as the phone.

Not that I still have the phone.

Labels: selling

LA has a complicated public transit system. There's the giant Metro that runs over 200 bus lines and 5. Then there are countless other carriers serving different parts of the greater LA. I have been using this public transit system more lately. I would cite the higher gas prices as a reason, although there's another one that I'm not going to disclose here...

With so many carriers, sometimes it becomes necessary to transfer from one to another. My experience is limited to Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus and Culver Citybus. But there are already enough amusement.

• The non-transfer fare is the same, 75 cents. Simple, huh?
  
• Transfers within Culver Citybus are free.
• Transfers within Big Blue Bus cost 50 cents extra, so it's $1.25.
  
• Transfers from Big Blue Bus to Culver Citybus is also $1.25.
• Transfers from Culver Citybus to Big Blue Bus is 25 cents extra, so it becomes $1.

This also means the same transfer trip in different directions could have different cost...

UCLA is a top public school with a prestigious CS department. There's a large influx of interns that turned to full time employees in my company. But more importantly, it has the third best medical center in US, which is exactly why I'm a patient there. You'd have thought that with this combination they would have the best technology at their disposal. Well, I'm in no position to judge their medical equipments, but certainly that's not the case for their billing system.

It used to be that the only option for paying is to snailmail them --- either with a check or a credit card number. It got me excited when they decided to create a new billing system to allow you to skip mailing. No, they still don't have a web payment system, but now you can use the next best thing: the telephone network.

I figured it would still beat mailing a credit card number. So I called and expected to input my credit card number with touch-tone. Apparently that's still too advanced. They actually wanted me to read aloud my account number, name, credit card number, etc to create a voice message for someone to manually process later. After thinking for a second, I decided to save stamp and take the more convenience route of reading my credit card number to a machine.

But the WTF didn't stop there. I got a call a few days later, and was told there was something wrong and they couldn't get the payment processed. But I didn't have the card with me, and had to tell the lady to call back later. Yada, yada, yada...

They finally exceeded themselves. They made their billing system even worse than the worst possible.

As this movie franchise is being resurrected with its 4th film, I thought it was about time to see the first one to check what I have missed. Quite frankly, not much.

The story was pretty lame at today's standard. But what I couldn't take was its music. They have that victorious music whenever Indy has some success --- any level of success, regardless of how minor.

I guess that at least saved me from putting three more movies in my moving queue.

It's been a very long time since I got any paper accepted (as I spent most of my time coding at work), so I was quite excited to learn that my paper from work has been accepted by CEAS which is an email conference. Of course, I have no idea why I was submitting to an email conference, or even why I had been doing things that would turn out to be submitting to an email conference. Regardless, this is a fun experience, as it is my very first single-authored paper.

Labels: research

I just had my very first gas refill of over $40. Not long ago, my average was only about $20-24. Of course, my gas tank was almost empty this time before I refilled, while I used to refill when it is a quarter full.

I don't really have any complaint for it. The gas prices in US are considerably lower than most places around the world. I would complain about the lack of feasible options aka public transportation, but there's no point doing it here.

High gas prices actually might be a good thing. There will be less cars "needlessly" driving around the town, making driving a little bit more bearable here in L.A. I can only hope that the traffic would be tolerable other than early mornings...