Random Brain Dump

It has been a busy 11 years and 7 months since my last post on this blog. I haven’t done a good job of updating my life, but this seems like as good as any other moments in the last 11+ years. So here goes…

It has been an interesting weekend for our family. I am both proud and sad at the same time as Suzanne, Allison and I dropped Katelyn off at UC Davis for her sophomore year. She will be sharing an off-campus apartment with her cousin. Since she spent the freshman year at home during the lock down in 2020, this feels like her first year. I looked forward and dread this moment at the same time. I also so wanted this moment for Katelyn too.

As a father, I can’t say enough of how much I am proud of my first born. She turned my world upside down ever since she greeted this world, 19 years ago. And no words are descriptive enough of my love for her. I figured bidding her farewell will make me a wreck, so I wrote her a short letter and hid it inside her suitcase, telling her what she means to me and that how our home will always be her home even as she finds her way to independence and true adulthood.

Good luck Katelyn, go find your passion and do what makes you happy. We are always here for you… Watch out world, here comes Katelyn S. Lam!

Above is a snapshot before we left Katelyn’s new apartment.

So I’m putting together a list of top 10 movies with the characters who hate their crummy jobs. I am only up to 5. Any suggestions?

1. Adventureland
2. Clerks
3. 500 days of Summer
4. Being John Malkovich
5. Office Space
6. ?
7. ?
8. ?
9. ?
10. ?

I was working on my laptop computer the other day in the family room. The girls just finished playing and they both decided to pick up a book and started reading. A few moments later, I over-heard Allison commented to Katelyn how she doesn’t like the idea of polar bears chasing and attacking poor penguins.

She’d made similar comments to me in the past, but the general response I usually gave her is how that’s just natural. You know, the circle of life thing… Apparently, that wasn’t a satisfying answer for Allison because she’s repeating same question to her big sister. A few days earlier, we also had watched a PBS nature show where David Attenborough was narrating a piece about polar bears going hunting for beluga whales trapped in the ice. Watching this probably triggered the concern about polar bears going after penguins in Allison’s head.

Then I observed a remarkable sisterly act from Katelyn…

She asked Allison to go to the living room and bring back a globe. We have a wooden medium-sized world globe that sits on a stand. Allison lugged the globe back for her sister. Katelyn put the globe in her lap and asked Allison to sit next to her. She pointed at the top of the globe and explained to Allison that it’s called the Artic and it’s where the polar bears live. She then inverted the globe and pointed to Antartica and explained that’s where the penguins live.

Katelyn went on to explain to Allison how it’d be impossible for polar bears to attack penguins because they live in the opposite sides of the earth. She explained:

The polar bears would have have to swim very far from north to south to get to the penguins!

Allison just said “Oh!” and seemed relieved.

I didn’t say a word– partly because my jaw just dropped. Couldn’t believe what I witnessed; I got a big kick out of what I just saw. Katelyn not only was addressing her little sister’s question but also tried to prove her point with a visual aid! And she did it with the intent of soothing her sister’s “concern” for the penguins.

It didn’t even occur to their ol’ dad that polar bears and penguins live on opposite poles. Smack on the head! No wonder I never ever saw any video footage of polar bears chasing after penguins. Man… my own daughter made me feel dumb. Katelyn did a better job then I did trying to make Allison feels better about polar bears going after penguins. She truly impressed me and made me a proud daddy.

I don’t expect Allison to ask the question again, thanks to her je-je (big sister).

I stumbled across this little nifty debugging feature in Eclipse this morning. Turns out that you can write a little code snippet as part of formatters for different classes.

This is very useful because you can get custom display an object in debug mode without touching the original code override the toString() method in the class.

Code Assist also works in the little code snippet editor, of course…

Sweet!

This little graph is showing the decay of IE once overwhelming dominance in the browser market:

I’ve added a Twitter widget on the sidebar. So now my tweets are published on Random Brain Dump as well. Next up, is to integrate a Facebook plugin.

Allison woke up early this morning and she spent the morning with me watching a little TV. She agreed when I asked her if she wanted hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. As I was putting the eggs in the pot, she stooped up from the couch and yelled out cooking instructions:

“Daddy, cook the eggs 15 minutes and then 15 minutes. Okay?”

That’s her way of telling me that she likes her eggs extra-boiled. 🙂

I recently discovered this nifty mode called “wdired” (writable dired). It gives “dired”, the simple directory management tool within Emacs, some editing functionalities.

In short you can “edit” contents in a directory. With it, you “edit” a directory like a file buffer. So instead of making changes one file at a time, this mode lets you leverage Emacs editing commands and batch up your changes in a buffer and then apply all of them when at one shot when you “save” the buffer.

This saves me a couple of minutes when I had to do some mass file manipulation last week. I was able to use query-string to selectively move large number of files and fix broken symbolic links.

Sweet…

Our family was at our favorite noodle house a few weeks ago for lunch. While waiting for our bowls of noodles, Suzanne & I were entertaining the kids. I tried to plant a kiss on Suzanne to which the kids usually get disgusted and go “Yewwwwhhh.” Suzanne playfully refuses the kiss, to which Allison surprisingly threw up her hands and suggested:

“But Mommy, it’s all about love!”

There’s a Vietnamese restaurant called Anh Hong in Milipitas. They serve 7 beef courses. The food is expensive but good and the place is relatively clean. But everything else sucks about this restaurant.

We frequent this restaurant for years, but started to stay away from it after several run-ins with the horrible waiters and bad management. We reluctantly came back to it last night via an invitation from Betty for a Father’s Day dinner. We’re never coming back.

This establishment is over-run by some kind of freaking food nazi’s. They make up all these stupid rules, simple requests turn into big arguments. Oh yeah, they argue with customers. I know better to expect first class service in Asian restaurants, so we’re talking lowered expectations here… 🙂

The waiter greeted and sat us down. I immediately recognize the old man and started to think “oh no, it’s the Vietnamese 7-Beef-Food-Nazi.” He came back for the orders and things immediately started to go down hill. We ordered 3 servings of their 7 beef courses. When asked for substitutions on 2 out of the 3 servings, the food nazi’s told us that is impossible: “you either substitute all or none of the servings”. We tried to understand why, but they argued they don’t make exceptions. Strike one for customers! The 3 servings came out in 3 different plates for our table. We didn’t understand why they can’t do simple substitutions for 2 of the 3. WTF?

The waiter then asks my wife how many of hot pots we need. She replied 3 since we have a long table, he then told us we can’t have 3. He gave some BS reasons which I don’t even remember because I had started to tune him out. Strike 2! Why bother asking us then?

Next, he kept dictating how much my wife should order despite her telling them that we are ordering other things and that we know what we’re doing. Strike 3, you’re out Mr. Customer! Frankly, I can’t tell if these morons work on commission or tips…

The only part of the order I was happy with is my beer. That’s assuming of course he didn’t spit in it.

I wouldn’t have posted had this been an exceptional or isolated case. We’ve had the same run-ins each time we come to this restaurant last few years. I’ve complained to ownership (the guy who runs the cash register booth) and only to have him repeat the same stupid rules to me. Once a few years ago when I complained, he even argued with me about what I ordered like he was there taking the order, which he didn’t of course, and that I was an idiot. He was basically telling me that I was an “incompetent” customer. Haha…

Obviously, this restaurant doesn’t believe in making their customers happy. While their food is good, I am sure there are other good Vietnamese restaurants out there. It’s amazing that I kept coming back hoping things will improve each time.

No more, I rather eat Taco Bell (I know I can get a quesadilla with no spicy sauce and extra cheese) than dealing with these food nazi’s, thank you! I’m taking my business elsewhere.

Doc & Betty, sorry. We may have made it difficult for you guys to return to the place… 🙂