Jazz Fab Tour

Our group (operations finance, cost accounting, and purchasing) went on a tour of Jazz Semiconductor this afternoon. Jazz used to be part of Rockwell, then part of Conexant, spun off by Conexant, and last month merged with Acquicor in a $260M deal. Interestingly, officers of Acquicor include Steve Wozniak (founder of Apple) and Gilbert Amelio (Apple CEO from 1994 to 1997).


Jazz building on Jamboree Road. I think a semiconductor fabrication plant is the last thing you would expect to find in Newport Beach.

The tour was pretty quick. The director of process engineering showed us a display of their 200mm 0.25um process then took us on a window tour (looking through windows) of their production line. Since the fab is older, they still had class 10 clean rooms which means we could not go in without a clean suit. Newer fabs, like the Chartered fab we visited last year in Singapore, had machines that maintained its own clean environment internally so the rest of the fab did not need to be as clean which is much cheaper to operate. The fab runs 24 hours with two 12 hour shifts and they work 7 days every two weeks. I'm not sure how they make money operating out of Newport Beach and even though they're a separate entity, a lot of Jazz's business still comes from Conexant/Mindspeed/Skyworks.

Golf Tournament

I played my first round of golf on a real 18-hole golf course today. The Operations group holds golf tournaments quite often and we decided to field a finance team this time. This was part of the reason I took the golf class at IVC this summer. The tournament was held at Tijeras Creek Golf Club in Rancho Santa Margarita and it was 4-person scramble with each team member contributing $100 and at least 3 tee shots. There were 20 teams of 4; our team was made up of Bret (my manager), Mike (my analyst), Steve (cost accounting manager), and me. Mike and Steve are pretty good golfers and Bret plays occasionally while I've never taken a tee shot on a golf course before. I had to borrow a set of golf clubs as well since I only have three clubs (3W, 7W, PW) from Leon.


Bret on the driving range. He couldn't get his clubs out of his garage so he had to borrow Mike's extra set.


Steve's tee shot off the 2nd hole.


The all important beer lady.



The 14th hole where you have to hit the ball across a ravine on to the green 150 yard away.


Mike hitting on the 14th hole. The rest of us shot into the ravine.


Our golf cart (full of empty beer cans). This was definitely a golf cart required course.


Houses along the golf course. Bret hit several houses and lost many golf balls.


Putting after a particularly tough hole where we had to use my chip shot. Anytime we had to use my non-tee shot means we're in trouble.

Our team ended up with a 73 which was 1 shot over par. I ended up contributing 4 tee shots even though one of them was not very good; we didn't want to wait until the end when we had to use my tee shots. I was pretty much useless on the fairway and I sank two putts. The low score of the tournament was 64 (-8) and the high was 91 (+19). Our score put us in the top-third which was pretty good considering there were only two decent golfer on the team.

The next golf opportunity is a finance event in December, also a 4-person scramble. I'll be visiting the driving range to practice hitting with irons as soon as my forearms stop hurting...

USC MBA High-Tech Association

A co-worker and I went to another USC MBA event tonight on-campus. It was a round-table event sponsored by the High-Tech Association; the current president (student) worked for me as an intern this past summer.

The guest speaker was Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone company. He talked about the mobile market and how it was going to change from a subscriber based model today to an advertising based model like Google. Great, I was just thinking the other day that I need more advertising in my life...


High quality picture of Mr. Sarin from my mobile device (Treo)

The round-table session went okay even though our table didn't attract as many people as Yahoo. Must be the hype around the $1.6B Google/YouTube acquisition. Once again, all the foreign students from China found me and gave me their USC business cards. I never understood why they hand them to me... am I supposed to call them? For what?

NewSong NOC Worship

Ring...
Me: Hello?
Phone: Aren't you playing bass today?
Me: Huh? What time is it?
Phone: It's almost 8am.
Me: Aaahhh!

My first time playing on the worship team and I overslept; call-time was 7:30am. I even set my alarm early (6am) for this morning so I can go help setup. There are 8 separate alarms on my Treo and I didn't enable the particular one I set for this morning. I jumped in and out of the shower, grabbed my bass, and drove real fast to Wilshire Auditorium. I think I made the 20 mile drive in ~15 minutes. It turned out that they had sound setup problems and didn't start sound check and run-through until I got there.

Overall, I think the worship went really well despite me playing bass. I got lost several times trying to look at my music, my fingers, the worship leader, and smile at the congregation simultaneously. I also had some technical issues with my in-ear monitors so I couldn't hear the rest of the band a couple of times. It was a totally different experience from Wind Symphony where I was one of six trumpets in a group of over 60 people on stage.

My parents came to the 2nd service and took some blurry pictures; I told them not to use the flash.


This is the clearest picture and I wasn't even playing :)

New Computer: Picture

Even though it's supposed to be a notebook computer, I think I pretty much bought a desktop. The smaller notebook PC is my work computer (Dell D-410).

I installed a few games and they run fast! A few (Half-Life, Halo, Homeworld 2) even run on full 1440x900 widescreen mode.

Co-workers

Just got back from clubbing and karaoke with some co-workers. Let's just say that I'm glad I'm not their manager, even though I was partially responsible for hiring some of them. At least that was my takeaway from our Sexual Harassment class.

What I should have been doing is practice my bass part for this Sunday... :)


Trumpet player with jazz band downstairs in the club. I didn't get a picture of the girls I was dancing with.

New Computer

I bought another computer and it arrived earlier today. My dad's hand-me-down computer in Canada is messed up so I decided to give him my current WinTel notebook (Compaq Presario 1722US: P3 1.1GHz) and purchase a replacement. I ordered a Dell Inspiron E1705 and upgraded the processor to a Core 2 Duo so it should run pretty quickly. The computer is HUGE. I guess I didn't pay too much attention to the dimensions and it didn't look too big on Dell's website; it's 16.5" x 11.3" and weighs ~8 pounds so I probably won't be carrying it around anywhere.

For the Compaq, I bought another 256MB of RAM to bring the total to 512MB so it will run a bit faster. I used the system restore CDs that came with the computer to wipe the HDD and start over. I think we bought it for Shirley in 2001 so the restore CDs installed a bunch of old software... like AOL 6.0 and MS Money 2001. Right now it's installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 and it's taking forever. My mom's computer is also messed up even though I keep telling her not to open/download every piece of junk mail. I'll probably spend my entire week in Canada next month fixing computers, sigh...


Trees from a park (or cemetary) in Oakville near my parent's house [Oct 2004]

IVC Wind Symphony

The IVC Wind Symphony and Orchestra shared a concert Tuesday at the Barclay Theater (UCI). I play trumpet in the Wind Symphony.


Orchestra call time. The group has only been around for three semesters and they sound pretty good. It's interesting that when IVC announced the new orchestra group, a lot of Chinese and Koreans showed up with their violin. There are not too many Asians in the Wind Symphony.


Orchestra on stage; Wind Symphony is about the same size


Guest conductor: some VP from Allergan. He basically waved his arm around while we ignored him and played a Bach Minuet. Each year, we let someone from the IVC Foundation guest conduct the same song. I'm sure some money changed hands...

NewSong NOC Pics

I took some pictures at last weeks NewSong 12th Anniversary service at NOC:


Brian Kim


Dave Gibbons

I was in the sound booth at the back of the auditorium.

Fantasy Football, Week 6

From 0-3 last week to 3-0 this week.

Ring of Fire (some money): 54.91 vs. 52.26
(I still have one WR left)

BRCM Keeper (more money): 103 vs. 78
(we each have one WR left)

Yahoo Public (no money): 76 vs. 72 (final)

Company Finance & Operations Panel

On Wednesday, I was a panelist at an event sponsored by the USC MBA career placement center. Actually, my manager received the initial invitation but he had a schedule conflict so I went instead. There were four panelists including myself and we shared why we chose finance, how we found our job, and what company finance was like vs. corporate finance. The other panelists were from Intel, Cisco/Linksys, and Amgen.

The event went well and there were many good questions during the Q&A time. One of the students asked what skills we looked for when interviewing MBA graduates with no prior finance experience. The other panelists talked about having good communications skills, being assertive, etc. When it was my turn, I said, "Pivot tables and VLOOKUP."

Afterwards, a 1st year MBA student from China came up to talk to me (I always seem to get the Chinese foreign students). We talked about a couple of things then he asked me how he can improve his communication skills. I told him he should watch more TV or go to a bar and talk to people. Seriously. It worked for me (the TV part)... I learned a lot of my English from watching Sesame Street.

Spider

I hate spiders. Actually, I hate all types of insects (I know spiders are not insects). So imagine my horror when I found this in my closet as I was about to go do laundry:



I was too freaked out to focus correctly but you can see the spider was big enough to cast a shadow at the back of the closet several feet away. Ugh! There was also a huge web about three feet across; I'm glad I didn't run into it face first. After taking the picture, I found the nearest magazine and smacked the spider in midair. It landed on a chair, stunned, so I flicked in on the ground and smacked it a couple (ok, eight) more times. Just to be sure, I picked the spider up with a paper towel and flushed it down the toilet.

Shirley used to make fun of me all the time about my fear of spiders and bugs. Each time I saw a spider in the house, I used to make her get rid of it. I think Shirley had a "pet" tarantula as part of an undergrad psychology experiment at UCLA so she has no fear of spiders. However, she had extreme dog phobia. I remember one time we were walking on the beach path in Long Beach when we saw another couple with two small dogs in the distance. When Shirley realized that the dogs were unleashed and running towards us, she screamed and jump on my back. As the dogs got closer, she tried to climb higher and put a death grip around my neck. I recall saying, "If you keep choking me, I'll pass out and fall down and the dogs will get you." Mercifully, the dogs lost interest and wandered off in time for me to remain conscious.

To this day, I avoid the 2nd Indiana Jones movie so I don't have to watch the walking/crawling through insect scenes. That and the little Chinese boy was really irritating. Needless to say, I would suck on Fear Factor.

Laundry

Can't sleep... I think I'll go do laundry. It's 4am so the laundry room should be free. When I had my house, it would take forever to do laundry since I had to run each load in series. Now, if the washers/dryers are free, I can run all 3-4 loads in parallel and be done in 2 hours. That's probably the one and only advantage of living in an apartment. :(

Yes, 3-4 loads. I usually go through my entire wardrobe before I do laundry.

Imagine?

This weekend I'm running FOH sound at NewSong NOC. It's NewSong's 12th anniversary and the theme is Imagine. There is usually a special song each week and this week it's "Imagine" by John Lennon. I own a couple of Beatles CDs and I like a lot of their songs but I don't think "Imagine" is appropriate for a church service, especially considering the lyrics and John Lennon/Yoko Ono's politics.

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

Hmm... sounds like communist-utopian nonsense to me. Well, at least I'm just running sound and not actually playing the music. I hope they're not planning to use this song again next week when I'm playing bass.

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. ... I don't know what will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. We're more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

- John Lennon, 1966

Yeah, whatever...

Grandma Update

My grandma is doing much better. She came off dialysis and they moved her out of the ICU last week. I went to see her last Saturday and she was awake and alert although she had no idea who I was. While I was there, a nurse put a mask on grandma to administer some inhaled medicine and grandma was yelling that we were trying to suffocate her. I guess if she has the strength to complain, then she's probably recovering well. Two weeks ago, she was given only a 10% chance to live by her doctor.

With my uncle arriving from Shanghai this weekend, my parents are going to spend next week in my apartment. It's back to sleeping on the couch for me again.

Fantasy Football, Week 5

:(

I lost in all three leagues.

The resaon why I'm not a doctor...

Bored

I'm getting bored with work. There's lots of stuff to do and I have a good staff but it seems like each month is the same, just the numbers are different. Same analysis, same slides, sigh...

This is looking more and more interesting. I wonder how much of a paycut I would have to take to be an entry-level chef somewhere.

Firefly

I downloaded a free episode of Firefly from iTunes Music Store and watched it last week. I heard about the show when it first came out several years ago but didn't watch any of it. It turned out to be quite good so I found and downloaded all the episodes and the movie Serenity, which was based on the series. So far, I've watched three more episodes plus the movie and I'm hooked. The downloads are a bit dark and small so I'm planning on buying the DVD set from Amazon.



Too bad the series was cancelled after only 10+ episodes by FOX. With all the other crap shows they have, I'm not sure why Firefly got cancelled mid-season. One thing I'm ambivalent about is the use of Chinese in the dialog, almost exclusively curse/swear words. The story takes place ~50 years in the future where China and the U.S. have joined to form the Alliance, so there are a lot of Asian elements in the series. Quite often, the characters would say something in Mandarin as part of the dialog and there would be no subtitles. That's pretty cool! Since all the main characters are non-Chinese, the downside is that the pronounciation is so bad that you can't tell what they're saying unless you're paying very close attention. Maybe this is a good thing since there's a lot of swearing. There's no way they would be able to air this on FOX if they did all that swearing in English.

你他媽的。天下所有的人都該死。
渾蛋！
哎呀。我們完了。
This is some of the Chinese dialog in the pilot show that I downloaded from iTunes. Of course, I didn't get any of it watching the first time. Even knowing what they're supposed to say, it was still hard to understand. They should have hired some Chinese actors to do the swearing.

Grandma

My grandma got real sick this past week. Because of her Alzheimer's Disease, she's been living in a nursing home for the past several years. This is her 3rd trip to the emergency room since moving into the home. Evidently, a kidney stone block urine into her bloodstream and she was in toxic shock. Add this to a host of other medical conditions, including stomach cancer, they had to do emergency surgery on Wednesday. I went to see her after work on Wednesday and she didn't look too good.

Several days ago, her kidneys failed so they had to hook her up a dialysis machine. I spent the entire day at the hospital yesterday (Saturday) and by the evening, she was able to open her eyes for a couple of seconds which was a relief; we haven't been able to get a response from her since the surgery on Wednesday.

I just heard from my parents that her kidneys are functioning again so she's off dialysis but I think she is still on the ventilator since she can't breathe for herself. My parents are flying in from Toronto later this afternoon and my uncle is flying in from Shanghai in a few days. The other uncle drove down from San Francisco this past Wednesday. I have three other cousins in Los Angeles and all four of us have been to the hospital. I guess this is turning out to be a family reunion of sorts.

Fantasy Football, Week 4

Got distracted this week by other things and I left Larry Johnson on the bench. Arg! Don't think it would have mattered since all my other players in that league sucked this week.

In the other money league, I'm down 114-109 but I still have Donovan McNabb left to play. Let's hope he can get more than 5 points.

As usual, I kicked butt in my other other league since no money is on the line.

Fantasy Football, Week 3

Aiya! I think I'm going to lose this week in all three of my fantasy leagues. The only one I have a chance of winning doesn't involve money. :(

Forbes 400

Tied for #160 on the list at $2.0B...

Henry Nicholas III
Henry Samueli

iPod Restore

I decided last week to move all my personal files off my work computer, which includes about 4,800 songs in iTunes (~26GB). Running my Mac mini as a FTP server, I've managed to upload about 2,400 songs from my PC. It also seems to make a difference which OS you first connected an iPod. All this time, my iPod was in "Windows" format which means I can't update the software using my Mac. To fix this, I had to restore my iPod which wiped out all the audio and video files. I guess I'll be busy for the next several days moving the rest of the songs and reloading files to my iPod.

Crack in the Firewall?

My friend Leon commented that he can see my blog from China today. I think all of blogger.com was inaccessable from China in the past. Not sure what or why he can access it now; I'm sure it's not the Koda Kumi picture.

Let's see how long it takes to get blocked/banned again... :)

CFO Retires

Big news at work today. Our company's CFO announced his retirement, effective immediately. This is more important to me since the CFO is my boss's boss's boss. Not sure if we're going to hire an outsider, or promote from within which will cause serious musical chairs/job rotations again.

박정아 (Park Jung Ah)

I just bought a K-pop CD by Park Jung Ah, one of the singers from the group Jewelry. This is her 1st solo album.



Here is the M/V from the 1st single, Yeah. Cute Korean girls AND ice hockey fights... what else can you ask for in a music video?!



I don't understand any Korean, other than hello and thank you, so I not sure what the songs are about. My guess it's not too different from Chinese pop songs: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl dumps boy, blah blah blah. A lot of the song lyrics include 사랑해 (sarangae) which has something to do with love.

I also bought this album; I don't understand Japanese either. :)

Fantasy Football

Last year, I signed up for a public league (free) with Yahoo! and came in 5th out of 10. This year, I'm in three different leagues with money on the line in two of them. The season has barely begun (one game last night between Miami and Pittsburg) and already I'm overloaded with data. I'm getting statistics and news from both Yahoo! and CBS Sportsline while trying to remember who is starting on what team.

Anyway, I think I got lucky in my $100 league (mostly finance people from work). Pittsburg defense came up big and gave me 17 points. In addition, my opponent's 1st string RB and WR are both out for week 1. In my $50 league, I got the 1st pick of the draft so I'm counting on Larry Johnson to have a huge game this week.

I've been putting off getting cable for the past 6 months, even watching Spanish stations during World Cup, but I think it's time to have it installed for football. I was going to give my 36" tube TV to a co-worker but she went out and bought a 40" LCD TV so I still need to get rid of the 250 lb. monster in order to make room for a LCD HDTV.

Oregon Coast

View from the beach house in Lincoln City, Oregon

I spent the weekend (plus Friday) in Portland visiting my sister and Rebecca. My parents were there as well, after their vacation to Alberta earlier this month. I took a flight from LAX instead of SNA which meant I had to leave work early and fight rush hour traffic Thursday afternoon. The ticket was cheaper from LAX but in hindsight, I probably should have left from SNA. In addition to paying $33 to park my car in Lot C, I got the lamest parking ticket ever. Evidently, LAPD comes around and checkes each car in the lot. I got a $25 ticket for not having a front license plate on my 350Z. Sheesh, is that how you reward your customers? Next time, I'm going to pay a bit more and leave my car in a private parking lot.

The plan for the weekend was to drive to Lincoln City on the Oregon coast and spend a couple of nights in a beach house my sister rented. Since there will be 5 of us, I rented a SUV from Avis via Priceline. They gave me a new Ford Explorer for $38/day which was much cheaper then the prices at the Avis website. The Explorer was roomier than my 4Runner but handled like a boat and the interior was ergonomically incompetent.


First stop: Tillamook Cheese Visitor's Center


Typical Oregon beach weather


We did have nice weather for one afternoon... it was still cold though


Sunset

There was not much to do in Lincoln City so we ended up shopping at some outlet stores and the local Indian casino. Having been to Las Vegas many times, Chinook Winds was pretty crappy in comparison. I think there were less than 10 tables (blackjack and craps) total and the rest were slot machines. The did have free soda dispensers though. We also spent the majority of both evenings playing mah-jong. I ended up winning $5 from my parents!

Mac mini Surgery

Yup, that a meat cleaver (with Chinese characters on it)

I forgot to buy a putty knife to open up the Mac mini so I looked around the house for a comparable tool. I also had to use another knife (paring knife) and a couple of Dave & Buster PowerCards to get the case open. It ended up taking me about 20 minutes of prying and cursing to get the !*@&#^% cover off.


Naked Mac mini, cover, and "tools" on my nice placemat

Once the case was open, I had to detach the AirPort (802.11g) antenna and remove 4 tiny screws. It's amazing how much hardware Apple packed into such tiny box but it makes it hard to upgrade components. There are two DIMM slots in the Mac mini which comes with 256 MB modules for a total of 512 MB.


New memory modules on top vs. original memory modules at the bottom

The 1 GB modules had a lot more chips, with chips on the back of the DIMM as well. The actual memory ICs on the new DIMMs were manufactured by Elpita(!) while the original ones were made by Nanya. On my first attempt, I didn't seat one of the new memory modules properly so when I rebooted the Mac, only 1 GB showed up. Good thing I anticipated this and did not close up the case thus saving me another 20 minutes of grief... :)


2 GB!

Amazing. My first computer (Commodore VIC-20) had about 3,500 bytes (that's right, no-prefix bytes) of RAM while my next computer (Apple ][+) had 48 KB of RAM. With 4x the original memory, my Mac mini is a totally different machine. It now boots up quickly and launching/switching applications is really quick. I'm going to reinstall Warcraft III and see how fast it runs compared to the PC version.

The obvious question is why Apple ships the Mac mini with only 512MB? Before the memory upgrade, the Mac mini was really slow and definitely not useable for business. To switch between MS Word and Excel would take at least 15 seconds. Apple should have included at least 1 GB of memory which would only cost an extra $30-$40. Instead, I had to spend >$200 for the new DIMMs and now I have two useless 256 MB DIMMs. Grrr...

Del Mar (last time!)

Our finance department event at Del Mar went okay. Several people backed out at the last minute but we still ended up with about 75 people. I brought a camera but was too busy running around to take many pictures. I only bet on two races, winning one and losing the other, so I was up a whopping $0.30 for the day... :)

For the eighth race, we were able to send two people down to the winner circle to congratulate the winner and get pictures taken. I took a picture from our skybox balcony; they're the ones in beige and pink.



Also for the eight race, a group of us (not including me), managed to pool $240 and bet on the longshot to win (#6 horse). It was 25:1 when they placed the bet and the odds jumped up to 43:1 at post time. I think the horse came in 6 out of 8 but it was pretty exciting in our skybox during the race.



I've organized this event for the past four years. If I still have staff next year at this time, I'm delegating.

Slow Mac mini

I finally got tired of my slow Mac mini. Launching programs and switching between applications is incredibly slow. Even my old Compaq 1.0 GHz Pentium III with only 256 MB of RAM runs faster.

It has the 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo processor but only 512 MB of RAM. I've been reading that the slowness is due to memory shortage and a slow hard drive so I ordered two 1 GB memory modules. I'm hoping that giving it 2 GB of RAM will minimize the frequency of virtual memory swapping so the slow hard drive won't affect performance too much. Of course, that brings the cost of the Mac mini >$1,000.

==========

Oh, to get the Mac mini case open, I need to go to Home Depot (or Lowes) to get a very thin putty knife. Apple decided not to use screws to hold the Mac mini together but rather 15(?) plastic tabs that are next to impossible to open without breaking. Sigh... I remember having to buy special tools to crack open my Mac Plus almost 20 years ago to add memory (from 1 MB to 2.5 MB!).

Del Mar again

I went to my manager's party at Del Mar on August 6th. Since we were in one of the private skyboxes, it was a lot more fun than the last trip. I brought my old Canon camera so I can use up the roll of film that's still in there but I did get one picture on my digital camera.



I'll be at Del Mar one more time this Thursday for our finance department event. This is the 4th year I've organized the event; I think I'll delegate that job next year. We'll also be in a private skybox and I chartered two buses for the trip. My only task left is to buy beer and other refreshments for the bus ride Thursday morning.

Why Do They Hate Airplanes?

UK Panel Asks: Why Do They Hate Airplanes?
by Scott Ott

(2006-08-10) — The British Parliament, in a rapid response to a terror plot foiled by Scotland Yard yesterday, announced formation of a study panel today to determine why some Muslims hate airplanes.

Early reports indicate 21 men have been taken into custody in connection with a plan to take down an unknown number of U.S.-bound passenger jets originating in Great Britain.

The expert panel will examine various theories about why airplanes engender such hatred among devoted followers of a peaceful religion.

“Is it the horrendous noise? The speed? The condensation trails?” said one unnamed source close to the panel, listing some of the areas of inquiry the experts plan to pursue. “Because if it’s any of those things, we can get to work on engineering changes to make airplanes more tolerable to our Muslim brothers.”

Agape/MBCLA Outing

Here are some pictures from this past Saturday. A coworker invited me to her small group's beach outing at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point (next to the Ritz Carlton). It was jointly sponsored by another small group from a different church so there were a lot of people. Since both groups were Mandarin/Taiwanese speaking, it was a bit Chinesey™. I don't think I spoke English the whole time but everyone was pretty nice, putting up with my kindergarten Mandarin.


Singing... Chinese songs. Not sure why the guy's shirt is open. Nice houses in the background though.


My coworker is the one in pink


Mmm... BBQ meat!

Canon PowerShot SD600

The Canon digital camera I ordered for my mom arrived so I brought it with me on my "day off" and took some pictures. I decided I would drive to Torrance and revisit some of the places that were part of our wedding day.


This is PCH Seafood Restaurant. It looks a bit run down on the outside (and inside) and hasn't changed since I first ate here in 1985. While I was at USC (1st time), John Chen and I used to eat here every Friday after our morning class. It has nothing to do with my wedding; I stopped here to get lunch. Their cashew chicken is one of two dishes that I will drive an hour to get... the other is #6 (garlic chicken) at Versailles.


Chinese Community Church of South Bay: this was my home church for almost 10 years and it's where the wedding ceremony was held.


Our photographer took us to a catholic church in Palos Verdes that morning and took some photos. I remember is was windy and we almost lost Shirley's veil over the side. I still have a 12"x18" picture of us... not sure what to do with it now.


View of the costline from the church


Redondo Beach from Avenue E and Esplanade. I proposed somewhere down there almost eight years ago.

7

Tomorrow would have been our 7th wedding anniversary. I've decided to take the day off from work since I won't be too productive anyway. Hopefully this is the bottom and things will improve after tomorrow.

HondaJet

It looks like Honda is making airplanes now, including the jet engine. It's a very small jet with seating for 7, like a minivan or SUV. The range is only 2,000 km, so to fly from LA to Toronto, you would need to stop and get gas somewhere in Nebraska. I wonder how much it's going to sell for.

Of course, the HondaJet is nothing like the Saab Gripen which seats only 2 people and costs $25M.

Joystick

It was really really hot this past weekend so I ended up sitting in front of the air conditioner all weekend. With nothing else better to do, I re-read three novels by Michael Stackpole based on the BattleTech universe. It took me about 12 hours to read all three books.

In addition to the novels, I also bought a lot of MechWarrior PC games during the past 10 years. I used to play them on my old PCs with a Microsoft Sidewinder joystick but now everything connects via USB ports. After reading the stories, I felt like blowing things up with lasers and missiles so I went to Fry's on Sunday and picked up a Logitech Extreme 3D joystick for $30.



Even though the game was six years old, I managed to install MechWarrior 4: Vengeance on my work computer running XP Professional. So far, it seems to run okay except the missions are more difficult than I remembered; I keep getting killed even on the easiest level. I thought I finished the game when I first bought it. Hmm, I'm going to blame it on the faster computer or new joystick... but it's probably old age.