Off-Road Swap Meet, Again

I woke up this morning at 2:30am(!) to go to the Curt Leduc Off-road Swap Meet out in Cabazon with Randy and his friend Steve. We went to this event last year as well; we spent the night last time sleeping in Randy's truck... it was really really cold. This year, we decided just to get there early on Sunday instead of camping out... I wasn't going to do that again.

We got there a little after 5am and the sky was still dark.

Looking north, the San Bernardino mountains were covered with snow from the rainstorms on Saturday.

I didn't take as many pictures this time because I was carrying the big Sony camera instead of my point-and-shoot (my parents took it to Canada) and it was very much the same as last year... a lot of the same people with a lot of the same junk. We didn't get anything again since our shocks need to be custom made so they're hard to find at a swap meet. Randy's friend Steve, who is building his 5th JeepSpeed truck, did buy a bunch of stuff and filled up my 4Runner. We haven't done much to our truck yet so I doubt we will be able to enter any races this year.

More Kim Yuna

More from cashewmaniakpop:

Kim Yuna Olympics Videos

I watched the free skate last night and it was pretty awesome. Usually watching Olympics figure skating is a bit nerve wracking but Kim Yuna made it look effortless. I didn't bother trying to record it this time since it would take another gigabyte and I haven't found the right software to crop/re-encode yet.

Here are both performances in HD from SBS in Korea. Credit goes to cashewmaniakpop (which is also the password if you want to download).

Short Program

Free Skate

Apple Magic Mouse

I'm a bit disappointed in the Apple Magic Mouse I bought earlier. This is the mouse that has a "touchpad" on the top of the mouse to detect different mouse clicks and scrolling/swiping motions. The "magic" stuff actually works okay... it's the regular mouse functions that suck. The tracking (mouse movement vs. pointer movement) is really bad, almost like the Bluetooth signal is too weak. The pointer skips and moves sluggishly and I'm only ~12 inches from my Mac mini. I have a Microsoft BT mouse on my netbook and I can use it almost 5 feet away perfectly. I don't know if the problem is with the computer or with the mouse itself. I'm using Apple's BT keyboard and there are no issues. Maybe I'll try the Magic Mouse on my BT PC's and see how it works though I'll lose the secondary "magic" functions.

Sigh... and I upgraded to Snow Leopard mainly for this too. Firefox does crash a lot less with OS 10.6, though not sure if the fix was Firefox 3.6 or the OS upgrade.

More Strange Dreams

I had another dream this morning. Once again, I was talking to a member of SNSD though this time it was Yoona. I'm either going crazy or I need to get a GF... or both.

I don't remember much about the dream... the only thing I do remember was that she has really nice skin. :)

California Legislature Tackles the Tough Issues

What a bunch of $#@!$* clowns.

CBS News

The state Assembly is scheduled to vote on a resolution Thursday calling for a statewide "Cuss Free Week," to occur annually during the first week of March. If approved, it would go to the state Senate for a final vote on Monday.

The rest of next week will be officially swear-word free if both houses approve the resolution.

The resolution by Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada Flintridge, was inspired by a South Pasadena teenager, McKay Hatch, who founded a No Cussing Club at his junior high school in 2007. His efforts to stamp out profanity have generated international attention, with 35,000 members joining the No Cussing Club's Web site.

Portantino said the California Legislature - known for imposing strict clean air and clean water laws - is the first state legislative body in the nation to consider a statewide profanity-free week.

Sigh... sometimes being first and only just means you're stupid. So can I still swear when California goes bankrupt because these elected fools can't balance a budget?

Perspectives and Expectations

It's about 6:30pm and I'm the only person left on my floor in my building at work. I've been thinking about work a lot lately. This is especially true after the latest reorg in the finance department. I posted before that I am now reporting to someone that used to be my intern a few years ago and he was recently promoted to director, one step up from where I am now. I was quite upset at that at the time... even thought about tossing out my 5 year plaque and lucite cube. I've been at the same level for 4+ years and it seems that I've hit some sort of ceiling. I even sent out a few resumes last month but nothing serious.

Well, a few weeks have past and I'm still here doing the same stuff. If I step back a bit, I guess a great deal of how we feel has to do with expectations. If you asked me 15 years ago about my expectations for today, I'd probably say married with two kids, 4 bedroom house with two cars, and a somewhat senior level corporate finance position. Up until 5 years ago, everything was going according to expectations. Today... not so much. Is that bad?

One way to look at it is that my life is >50% over and I haven't accomplished anything. I'm still single, living at home with my parents, and working at a (potentially) dead-end job. However, I am paid well for what I'm doing (whether I'm underworked and thus underpaid is another issue) and we just bought the "new" house together. Perspective. I guess my problem now is that I really have no goals. It seems all I do is travel between work and home, and watch some Korean TV in between. Actually, life is pretty comfortable and I'm probably just lazy. I think I am still burned out mentally (sort of) from my past marriage and the more recent long-distance almost-fiancee ex-girlfriend (not at the same time, of course).

Maybe I'll start off with small goals. I met a coworker at lunch in the cafe and he asked how I was doing. I jokingly said that I'm just focused on getting lunch at the moment but it was mostly true. I think I will direct my energy towards getting some dinner now and maybe clear out a few more boxes from the garage when I get home.

==========

Wow, that was kind of boring... sorry, Haley.

Kim Yuna

I'm not much of a figure skating fan but since I was testing out my new toy (USB TV tuner), I recorded part of NBC's winter Olympics broadcast of women's figure skating. I caught the short program for Mao Asada and Kim Yuna. The clip was about 12 minutes total and took up ~1.3GB on my hard drive. I'm encoding Kim Yuna's performance using Windows Movie Maker and will try to upload to YouTube later... it's taking about 45 minutes to encode.

Here's a video of her singing along with Taeyeon of SNSD. She's the second one to sing... not too shabby.



See, I can tie in K-pop to almost any post. :)

==========

This web video publishing thing is tough. My computer finished encoding the file and the result is a 370MB WMV file. I'm trying to upload to YouTube and it will take about an hour. Maybe I should have lowered the video resolution.

==========

Dang! It took two tries to upload and immediately it gave me a copyright warning. All that processing must include some video and/or audio matching algorithm. Don't want to get strike three on a figure skating video so I'll try to get it below 100MB and upload it directly to Blogger.

==========

I give up. I'll wait until someone else more technical to upload and I'll just link to it. :(

New Toy

I bought a USB TV tuner and it arrived in the mail today: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q. It's a USB dongle with a CATV coax plug.

Right away I had install problems since you have to insert the included CD and I was installing the software on my netbook (no optical drive) and my Sony (optical drive can't read CDs). I finally did get one of the many PCs at home to share its CD drive so everything installed. I'm using it with the provided antenna and so far it seems to pick up over-the-air HD signals. I think it will also work with the output from a cable/satellite box so I can record TV shows directly to a computer, bypassing the DVD-recorder. However, the card-size remote control seems to be DOA so I'll need get that replaced.

Since it uses the CPU to decode and display the TV signal, it runs a bit slow and choppy on my netbook. I'm just about done scanning for channels on my Sony Vaio; hopefully it will run faster and allow decent recordings.

==========

The channel scan returned a lot of digital channels. Interestingly, it seems to be mostly foreign language channels. Since this is LA, I expected lots of Spanish stations (and there are) but there are also lots of Korean, Mandarin, and Vietnamese channels as well. Just KSCI (channel 18) has 8 different digital channels with multiple languages. I found CBS and NBC as well but no ABC for some reason.

==========

Ahh! I just tried recording something at random from NBC-HD and it records at 1920x1080. It looks nice but also eats up 1.5MB per second or ~5GB per hour. I guess I'll need to edit and re-encode any recordings to make it more manageable.

==========

I also noticed that if my Blackberry checks email or something, the digital picture goes nuts. The phone also messes up speakers and my iPod when it connects. Maybe it can crash planes during take-offs and landings.

Star Golden Bell Challenge

This is another Korean TV show that I watch quite often. It's on every week and usually you don't find many fansubs for the entire episode since there's a lot of talking. KBS World does show it with English subtitles but again, they're about one month behind. This is episode 271 with After School in line 4.

Adult iPhone Apps

BBC News

iPhone developers angry as Apple purges adult apps

Developers have expressed anger at Apple's decision to ban some adult-themed applications from its iPhone.

Thousands of apps with adult-themed content have been removed from the store since Friday although some, such as one from Playboy, remain.

Apple has said that certain apps were removed following customer complaints.

Developer Jon Atherton is angry that previously-approved apps have been pulled, and accuses Apple of "experimenting with our livelihoods".

...

ChilliFresh is an Australian company that creates apps for the iPhone, including the recently banned Wobble, which provides pictures of women's breasts.

"I'm now worried the eco-system is run by puritans and is not fair to all players," developer Jon Atherton said on its website.

I don't have an iPhone so I really don't care but if you're business model is writing software to show women's breasts (linked to the iPhones accelerometer probably), you probably should diversify. I mean, how many 14-year olds have iPhones anyway?

Invincible Youth (G7) Cut

As punishment, two of the girls had to grow some bean sprouts during the week between tapings. The video is a cut from Yuri of SNSD. I've grown sprouts before using moist cotton pads but they were mung/green beans, not large black ones here. You also get a shot of their new dorm which is supposed to be a lot bigger and nicer than their first one.


In order of appearance (if anyone cares): Yuri, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Sooyoung. Interestingly, the 연 (yeon) in Hyoyeon is the same Chinese character (淵) as my name. I've never seen a girl use that character in their name before... or otherwise I have a girl's name. :(

BTW, most of the comments on the video were not about bean sprouts or their dorm but rather the first 5 seconds.

Goo Hara

I showed someone a clip of Invincible Youth and he thought Goo Hara was the prettiest out of the G7 girls. The show's nickname is G7 since it has 7 girls from different K-pop girl groups: SNSD, KARA, T-ara, Brown Eyed Girls, Secret, and 4Minute. Goo Hara is part of KARA.

The video is KARA performing one of their songs live. This show is unique since it has a camera focused on each group member. It gets a bit crazy when SNSD performs (9 members). I had to upload this to YouTube since I could only find SD versions. I'm not sure where I downloaded this HD version.



KARA is "famous" for their butt dance in their song Mister. Goo Hara is the skinny one with the (darker) red pants (2nd girl singing). I realize they're all kinda thin, especially by US standards, but she's really really skinny.



==========


OK, this one should work... until my YouTube account is suspended.

New ATM not as good as old ATM

Chase recently "upgraded" all their ATMs to machines that OCR your checks and cash for deposits. You can insert a stack of up to 30 checks and it will scan and determine the deposit amount directly from the check... in theory. I had a few checks to deposit and the machine would only read two of them. I tried six times to no avail and there was not an option to enter the amount myself. If the machine can't read it, then it won't take the deposit. How convenient.

I guess with the old machines and deposit envelopes, banks need to hire someone to open up each envelope and manually process all the checks. This way, the data gets encoded during the initial transaction and banks can cut down on their labor. Of course, this only works as well as the technology. I haven't called their customer support line but my guess is that they will tell me to go to a branch during business hours, defeating the purpose for having ATMs in the first place. Sure, technology is great, but there has to be some kind of backup when tech fails. Maybe this is part of the trend to automate and lower costs for customer service, much like the lame automated answering systems that never seem to have the option you need. I just keep pressing "0" as soon as the computer answers to get a live CS rep.

RuneScape

Sometimes Internet anonymity is a bad thing since it encourage all kinds of weird and anti-social behavior. I found this MMORPG called RuneScape online. I'm not really an online type gamer but I thought I'd check it out anyway. I signed up and created a female avatar yesterday. Just now, I logged in for a few minutes and some guy (I assume) started following my character around asking if I wanted to have cybersex. Excuse me? My first thought was, "Is that an option in this game?" Anyway, it got old after about 30 seconds and I found a way of blocking player characters. I was going to reply with some witty remarks but decided it would be a waste of time chatting with junior high school boys. I bet he would never run up to a girl on the street and say that kind of stuff, especially one carrying a sword.

LAX Security Line

I dropped off my parents at LAX this morning for their trip to Toronto. They usually never fly American Airlines but since I still had some miles on my account, I use it to get them 2 one-way tickets; they're flying Air Canada on the way back. I dropped them off at around 8:10am at terminal 4 and they didn't get through security until 9:40am. I did see lines on the sidewalk for both terminal 4 and 5 as I drove away but wasn't sure if this was the new wait due to underwear-bomber or if there was some specific event this morning. 90 minutes to go through security... sigh.

Electricity Usage

I checked the meter today and we've used 205 kWh in 8 days which is more than my last month's bill. We have two refrigerators at the new house: the new Samsung one and my old Frigidaire. Together they're rates at slightly over 1000 kWh annually or about 1/3 of our Tier 1 baseline.

Anyway, I think the big users of electricity is all the AV stuff we have. I remember reading that my Vizio TV is ~350W and having 4 stereo systems probably doesn't help. My dad has been busy changing as many incandescent lights to CF bulbs and removing some bulbs from multi-bulb fixtures. I'm not sure how much it will help but the house is now dimly lit.

BTW, that 25 MW mini nuclear reactor I linked to costs $50 million or $2/watt which makes it more expensive than solar. Hmm...

Happy Together Season 3

I recorded episode 133 from KBS World last night. I've noticed that their shows don't start and end on schedule so even though I recorded for 90 minutes, I only got 55 minutes of the show; the last 5 minutes got cut off. The shows are about a month behind the original airing dates in Korea for them to add English subtitles. This episode originally aired on January 21st, 2010.

Here's part 1. I ripped the entire show as one MP4 file and used QuickTime Pro to select 10 minute MOV segments for upload to YouTube.


Guests: 황정음, 유이, 지상렬, 케이윌

Mac Box Set

Sigh... despite all my complain', I ordered Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) for my Mac mini and it just arrived today. I got it through Amazon instead of Apple so it cost me $131. There are three discs in the small box: Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWorks. I have about 11GB free on my HDD... hopefully that is enough space. I probably should back up my HDD before I upgrade. These things are supposed to be simple but something always goes wrong. :(

On the plus side, I got two more white Apple stickers to stick on my WinTel machines.

==========

Well, it took two tries and now it seems to be installing the new OS. The first time I tried to install, the system rebooted then spit out the install disc. I was sure it didn't install but I checked anyway and it was still v10.4.11. The second time the disc stayed in the drive and proceeded to boot. Hmm, right now it says 41 minutes left but it's been that way for about 5 minutes. At least the blue progress bar is moving.

==========

Wow, I just realized I'm live-blogging an OS install. How lame is that. I need to redeem myself and post more K-pop stuff. :)

==========

All done. Now I have v10.6. Much like installing Windows and endless service packs, now I have to install a bunch of Snow Leopard updates. Dang it. All I wanted was for my new cool Magic Mouse to work.

One weird thing... when I started the install, I had 10.67GB free. After the install, I have 14.08GB. I'm sure all these updates will eat into my free HDD space but it appears that Snow Leopard takes up less room than Tiger. Either that or I had gigabytes of temp files and other crap on my computer.

Okay, no more OS upgrade posts/updates...

Yoon Eun Hye CF

I wrote another post about how the CCP were a bunch of whiners complaining about hurt feelings again when I read this:

speaking for one of your 3 readers, i am only interested in seeing k-pop,c-pop,j-pop girls in scantily clad videos. have no interest in china or computers.

Uh... OK.


I think it's a commercial (CF) for some Korean skin care product but that's not important. The girl is Yoon Eun Hye and she used to be a member of Baby VOX, a K-pop girl band from early 2000's.


She's the one in the middle wearing the ugly "constructed" (aka wifebeater) cap.

Electricity BIll

I just got our first full month bill from Edison and it's crazy high. I guess there's some type of tier pricing structure that penalizes you for using more electricity, kind of like our progressivepunitive income tax structure. Back in the apartment, I never went past Tier 1 pricing of $0.12/kWh since it was only me and my baseline was something like 500+ kWh per month. At the new house, our baseline suddenly dropped by half to 250 kWh per month. Since now there are three of us in the house, the usage has gone up but we're well into Tier 4 which is $0.25/kWh.

I was on the phone for 30 minutes with Edison and basically the PUC (Public Utility Commission) sets up the tiers and they don't care how big your house is. In addition, since we have gas appliances, our baseline drops further. So back when we were living in two apartments, our baseline was over 1000 kWh month but now it's ~25% of that. For about the same amount of kWh, we were paying $70/month total but now it's close to $120/month. What's even scarier is that we've only really lived here for 1/2 of the billing period. Sigh... the bill next month will probably be over $200 which seems ridiculous.

Maybe I should look into solar cells or a mini nuclear reactor. Hey, I may even get a tax rebate so I can get some of my taxes back.

New Blog

I seem to only blog about three things: China, computers, and K-pop. Since I'm going to start uploading my current iPod playlist online, I'm moving C/J/K-pop MP3 posts to another blog so my 3 readers won't have to scroll through a bunch of K-pop songs.

New blog is called Asian Pop Music (how creative!) if anyone is interested.

K-pop on iTunes

Heh, SNSD's new album is available on iTunes Store. It is a bit hard to find since you have to search for it using Hangul: 소녀시대. Searching for "SNSD" or "Girls' Generation" doesn't return any relevant hits.

I just bought "Oh!" for $0.99. I have the entire album downloaded from somewhere but since I blog about them all the time, I should contribute something, eh? I also bought a Brown Eyed Girls remix MP3 a few weeks ago. Hopefully they will release more Asian Pop on iTunes Store in the future.


Oh! - SNSD/소녀시대

I Hate Windows Again

I've been trying to install Turbo Tax 2009 for the past 2 hours and still no success. It seems like an easy task... buy Turbo Tax from Costco, open package, insert CD, and install. I've done this for the past 10+ years.

First problem was that my Sony Vaio won't read the CD. That's strange... I was just ripping a DVD-RW from my DVD recorder. After ejecting and reinserting the CD a few times, it obviously wasn't going to work. 5 minutes on Google reveals that the Sony Vaio CR420E with Vista has some type of registry problem under certain conditions which causes the computer not to recognize CDs. What?!

Sigh... okay, download the fix (from 2007), install, and reboot. Woah, all my icons and personal settings are gone AND the CD still won't read. Fortunately, I've had this error before and rebooting bring back all your settings BUT the CD still won't read. At this point, I thought maybe it was a bad CD. Since Turbo Tax ships one CD for Mac and Windows, I stick it in my Mac mini and it reads fine (of course). Hey, I can share the drive and install across the network. 10 minutes later, my Mac DVD drive is mapped to my Sony Vaio but it can only see Mac OS files. Arg!

Since I have a million computers networked at home, I went to my mom's new Dell Inspiron with Windows 7. The CD reads fine but I couldn't connect to the now-shared DVD drive. I had set up my mom's computer without a password and Windows sharing requires a password. More sighing... when I then tried to create a password, Windows 7 Explorer/Control Panel crashed. After restarting and retrying this three times, I gave up on sharing.

Finally, I ended up copying the entire CD (Windows files) to a 4GB USB flash drive on my mom's computer and that seems to work. Of course, the elegant solution was to skip the CD in the first place and download it from Amazon or Intuit. Now all I have to is actually prepare the tax returns. :(

==========

I tried playing a audio CD-R that works fine in old school CD players and it won't play on my Sony either. I guess the problem is with my Sony.

One More...

OK, one more upload. This time a Chinese song to keep things in balance. Original song is 4:48.


原來你什麼都不要 - 張惠妹 (A-mei)

Another MP3 Test for 4shared.com

Butterfly - Koda Kumi

iTunes says 4:22... let see what the embedded flash player decides to play.

==========

Hmm, this one is even worse. The player only plays about 40 seconds of the song (or less). I read through some forum posts and I guess the embedded player is only playing a converted flash preview and not the entire MP3. Maybe the preview is generated dynamically and that's why the length varies each time. The MP3 player on the actual 4shared download pages appears to be okay though. Oh well...

Embedded MP3 Player Test

Color Your Soul - The Clazziquai Project

==========

Hmm, it works... kind of. The embedded flash player cut off the last 30 seconds of the song. I'll try another song.

WLAN Dropouts

I'm having a weird problem with my wireless routers. When my parents moved back to California, I bought a 2nd Netgear wireless router to set up as a repeater so they can share my connection at the apartment. When we moved to the new house, I continued the same setup. For the past few days, devices connected to the repeater have dropped out at random. My Mac is connected the router via a cable so I can login to the router to see what devices are attached. Right now, I can only see my Mac, networked laser printer (cable), my netbook (wireless), and an old Dell connected to the TV downstairs. The other two computers and a networked inkjet printer does not appear. What's weird is that my Sony Vaio, which is right next to my Mac and router, can't seem to connect either. In fact, it doesn't even see any networks even though there are probably 30 wireless access points near our house. Strange. I should have ran a CAT-5 cable when our carpet was being replaced upstairs.

I just tried my cure-all PC solution (restart the computer) to see if it will fix the problem. :(

==========

Well, my Sony Vaio is back on the network. The repeater is still not showing up though...

DVD Recorder

When we got cable at our new house, I opted out of getting a DVR. Instead, I spent ~$150 and bought a DVD recorder from Amazon. I got the Toshiba DR570 which includes a TV tuner so I can use it in my office to watch TV on my LCD monitors. Anyway, I've been test recording some stuff from KBS World and I thought about posting some stuff to YouTube since the shows include subtitles.

I'm not sure how the other people upload so fast. In my case, I have to take the recorded DVDs and rip it to AVI/MP4 files. I did a test from a recording of Invincible Youth that was on last night.



The 10 minute segment (YouTube max) took about 7 minutes and the resulting AVI file was ~70MB. This was easy since it was the beginning of the show... not sure how I can keep ripping 10 minute segments while excluding commercials. Maybe other uploaders pulled their files off a DVR or an online subscription.

==========

Leon, I bought a 10-pack of DVD+RW for my DVD recorder. Maybe that will help PMI's old business. :)

Oh! Week 2

Oh! - SNSD
Live performance on Music Core [2010-02-06]

No dead air at the end this time. When SNSD debuted about 2 1/2 years ago, they seemed to wear the same stage outfit during every performance. Now each performance of each song requires a different costume and stage background. SM probably has several dedicated wardrobe people following SNSD around to all their scheduled events. It must also take forever to tape each music show each week if they have to change sets between each song. K-pop is hard work!

I read in a news article that their wardrobe costs for 2009 was around 1 billion Won or about $860k. That's almost $100k per girl! I wonder how much SM charges for each event and how much trickles down to each girl. They must also need a warehouse to store all that clothing unless stuff gets donated after each promotion. Not sure how useful this costume is off-stage... maybe during Hallowe'en.


Into the New World - SNSD
Debut performance (lip sync'ed) on Inkigayo [2007-08-05]

The 3-T's

On my first trip to Beijing to teach some finance seminars back in 1998, I was advised to avoid talking about the three T's: Tiananmen Massacre, Taiwan, and Tibet. What I've found during my more recent trips is that local Chinese people are either ignorant or don't even want to talk about the three topics.

Recently, Taiwan and Tibet are in the news due to the US. We agreed to sell some defensive weapons to Taiwan (but no F-16s) and now Obama has confirmed that he is planning to meet the Dalai Lama, as all previous US presidents have done. In response, the CCP has been whining and bitching about "damaging" Sino-US relationships. Seriously, I think the commies need to grow up and talk about these issues. Their strategy has been to be hyper-aggressive towards Taiwan and Tibet yet ignore Tiananmen. Is this a long term strategy? Are they just focused on controlling their own population in the short term?

Blogging/Social Networking Guidelines

Our CIO at work sent out a document with blogging and social networking guidelines. It's interesting... we don't have a written policy about dress codes but now we have one for blogging. I read the first draft and it seemed pretty sensible.

Rule #1: Don't forget about your day job. :)

Mac OS X Upgrades

I just bought a Magic Mouse from Amazon but I guess I neglected to read the fine print. The mouse only works with Leopard OS and above (v10.5.8) while I'm still running Tiger (v10.4.11). I'm a bit disappointed in Apple. How hard can it be to write a driver for a mouse?? They probably kept it this way to force people to buy OS upgrades. I can't believe I'm saying this but Windows is "better"! I have three Windows versions running on computers at home (XP Home/Pro, Vista, Windows 7) and everything seems to work interchangeably.

It's not the $150 I have to shell out for Snow Leopard (v10.6.x). I have my Mac working fine now, though Firefox crashes all the time. Upgrading OS inevitable means hours and hours of troubleshooting and reinstalling software/drivers. Sigh... Though if I upgrade, I can run Google Chrome on my Mac instead of Firefox/Safari/Camino. Just kidding, I'm not using Camino.

So now I have a $70 mouse that doesn't scroll up and down. Should I spend another $150 on an OS upgrade? Maybe I can find someone (I think maybe my sister) with an older Mac mouse and trade.

==========

Crap. "Mac Box Set" is $134 from Amazon. It's basically Snow Leopard with iWork'09 (don't want since I have MS Office 2008) and iLife'09 (nice but really don't care). Sigh... $134 for an OS upgrade when everything already works well as is, except for the Magic Mouse. And I bought it so I can scroll around without a trackwheel. :(

Disneyland

I went to Disneyland this morning with my sister, Rebecca, and the two girls. My mom's friend's son works at Disneyland and got us in for free, even parking... thank you Albert!


Ticket prices

Since the tickets were free, we didn't feel pressured to rush around to see/do as much as possible. We only went on kiddie rides today so no Star Tours or Space Mountain. We did go on It's A Small World... I had forgotten how annoying that song was. The park wasn't as crowded as I thought it would be on a Sunday. Maybe because it's SuperBowl Sunday; we left at ~2:30pm so we could get home to watch the game.

Aircruise

Just under 4 days from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Looks cool... wonder how much tickets will cost.



The design uses hydrogen gas which is quite flammable.



It's interesting that the concept is funded by Samsung. Of all the huge Korean conglomerates, I thought it would be Hyundai since they already build cargo ships.