Driving Back To LA

It wasn't fun leaving Vegas, especially when you had a blast the previous night.

Before we hit I-15S, we decided to visit Oom Cun Sien in Henderson since we haven't visited him for a while. I believe it was 2 years for my dad and 3 years for me, I remembered: the last time we stayed over, my dad woke me up to let me know that a tsunami hit Aceh. Also, Ida needed to tap the internet for 1 hour to finalize her report.

We arrived in LA a little late and we feasted at President Thai.

President Thai

498 S Rosemead Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91107
Tel: (626) 578-9814

http://www.president-thai.com

This is one of the Thai restaurant that I like since the servings are not too sour or too hot, maybe the food is closer to the Teo Chew style with Thai background.

What good here? I think everything is excellent. The recommendation page is a good start.

Fun In Las Vegas

Let's leave it at that ...

Driving to Las Vegas

Vegas, here we come!

The traffic was reasonable and it wasn't crowded at all.

Timberland at Primm is closing the door and they are throwing everything away. Looking at the inventory, I gather that they will close the door pretty soon.

Warner To Sell DRM-less Music Via Amazon

From nyt: Warner lets Amazon sell their music without DRM

Checked: Rock Lobster (B-52) is now available.

Dealing With USCIS

There is no better way of spending your vacation by queuing up the USCIS line 6:15 in the morning. It was cold and windy, luckily I was wrapped up like Michelin man, waiting in line, alone, until hell broke lose at 6:30. Out of no where, 20 people showed up and queued up behind me. Amazing.

The guards were late, I wasn't let in until 7 o'clock sharp, although I should be let in at 6:45, extra 15 min in the cold. Also I was totally irked by the jackass, who checked my bag, thought I might do the federal government harm if I waltzed in with my Pentax. WTH? I can understand no knife policy, but no camera? What about embedded camera on a phone? Should I go in without cell phone? Jackass private security had no answer. But, in order for me to get in, I had to walk back to the parking lot to drop the camera in my car. Extra 15 min well spent. I waltzed into Room 1001 with the 7:15 people. Ridiculous.

It is great that the USCIS InfoPass system works for people who has an appointment at 7 or 7:15 since I walked out at 8 sharp. I will not recommend using the system to acquire appointment at 10 o'clock since you might end up meeting the officer around 12 (lunch time).

On the way home I heard, from KPCC (NPR), that someone whacked Bhutto.

Also, dad bought eee PC, the 4GB with web cam version, and prayed that it arrives before he departs for Jakarta.

Dinner at Din Tai Fung.

Post Christmas Craziness

I tried the clothes that Ida bought me for Christmas presents, most them were off-sized, thanks to the made up standard of the clothing industries. No surprises here, time to exchange the gifts.

Roads were clogged, malls were filled to the brim.

Pasadena was alright, it wasn't too crowded. But purchasing clothes was painful experience: lots of the desired size was taken, and previous coupons didn't work anymore. But nothing, could be compared to crawling for 20 min along Baldwin Ave in the afternoon and two and half hours of sneaker shopping.

Christmas

Christmas has arrived and we celebrated it at Simi Valley, this time I didn't bring anything to the table since I was preoccupied the day before.

Smells Like Teenage Spirits

Ida is here in the south land

... and we went to watch Jay Chou's world tour concert.

Lights Out

Something bad happened last night, the lights were out around 6PM and it wasn't restored until the following morning around 7/8 AM.

Most of the blocks had their light restored around 8PM but not ours.

We had to resort to the ancient activities when the light are out: swapping ghost stories and playing with the settings of my digital camera, well the later is not that ancient.

Pre-Christmas Days

Useless should be labeled to these days before Christmas. Nothing but making sure that I could leave the office till the closing of the year.

Ida will fly down for Jay Chou concert so the trip to SJ is canceled. I guess I have the time to sort the junk that I brought back from Jacksonville.

Lights are out tonight, so we are in the book store reading the past, present and future.

1929 America Before The Crash - Sloat
Secrets of The Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country - Greider
Economics Making Sense of The Modern Economy - 2nd ed - Cox
Guide to Economic Indicators: Making Sense of Economics - 6th ed - The Economist

Linux Server In A Stick

Ingredient:

1. 2GB bulk USB stick from Micro Center - 15.00
2. Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Live CD (from ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso)

Follow the instruction at pendrivelinux.com.

Let the hacking commence ...

Perl 5.10 And Parrot 0.5.1 Are Released

According to Perl Buzz: Perl 5.10 is released to the wild. It's a nice Christmas present and it coincides with the 20th anniversary of Perl.

People from ActiveState did a great job by releasing the Win32 binary early.

Oh well, time to test the new binary and the modules.

Fixed Phone Pie Is Shrinking In US Too

Follow up on the previous posting that touts cell phone only adoptions in EU households, /. posts an article from itfacts.biz, in which scraped an article from Bureau of Labor Statistics titled: Spending on Cell Phone Services Rapidly Approaching That of Residential Phone Services.

Whew! Talking about going through 2 brokers to get the info.

Anyway, the conclusion:

1. Spending on cell phone service grows, while lower on fixed phone, the trend has been steady since 2001.
2. Spending on cell phone service is predicted to exceed fixed phone this 2007.

Monkeys Count Too

From NPR: Researchers (Cantlon and Brannon) at Duke University conducted tests to gage the accuracy of arithmetics between 2 female rhesus monkeys (Boxer & Feinstein) and a group Duke undergrads.

This is one the findings:

And they [Boxer and Feinstein] were right about 75 percent of the time.

But this is the key difference between the species:

"When you take away language from a human during a math task like this," Cantlon said, "they end up looking just like a monkey.

Scary... the monkeys would be getting at least a B, and some poor humans (most likely from LAUSD) get F.

Links:
Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students
Paper @ Duke: How Much Does Number Matter to a Monkey (Macaca mulatta)?