Sunday, February 27, 2005

[find] archive.org

Just learned about www.archive.org the other day. Very cool.

Monday, February 21, 2005

[recipe] Stir-fry shredded pork w/ bean sprouts & straw mushrooms

This worked out well today.

- 0.7 lb of pork cutlet (very cheap and comes in thin slices)
- a big handful of bean sprouts
- one can of straw mushrooms

- Cut the pork cutlet into very thin strips
- Put three tablespoon sherry and dissolve a teaspoon of corn starch. Sprinkle salt and sugar on the pork and marinate in the sherry for 3 min.
- Stir-fry the pork, and then whatever sauce you like (today I tried the "Fish Fragrance Shredded Pork" sauce) and then stir-fry in the bean sprouts and mushrooms.

Quick and easy.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

[find] Print photos and designs to canvas and acrylics

Came across these services today that lets you print your own photo or designd to stretched canvas, or, if you want to be ultra modern, to acrylic panels. Very neat.

www.photos-on-canvas.com

www.acrylicize.com

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

[info] California real estate broker license

As in most states, CA has two types of real estate license. A Salesperson license and a Broker license. Only a broker can independently conduct a real estate transaction.

Interesting thing is, normally you would have to get a Salesperson's licenese first, then accumate 2 years of working experience in real estate to qualify to apply for Brokers license.

But if you have a 4-year college degree, you can skip right to applying for Brokers license. Who knew that diploma has some use?

http://www.lumbleau.com/Courses.asp?ContentID=24977d307d190a117dd5014c (These guys let you borrow the text books for a fee and course prices are the cheapest that I can find so far)

http://www.dre.ca.gov (The California Department of Real Estate)

[tech] Dr Watson log

Learned more about debugging on XP today. After Dell sent me a new internal wireless card, I decided to upgrade the network driver. I went to the Dell website and downloaded the latest Broadcom utility and driver.

The package installed and the computer rebooted. All is fine for about 20 min. And then, boom, the hard drive kicks into churning mode and my computer completely locked up.

I started up FileMon (what a god sent), though it was locked out and took a few minutes to start, it showed me immediately what the problem was: bcmwltry.exe (Broadcom Wireless Tray) and drwtsn32.exe (Dr Watson) kept on starting.

Now Dr Watson, that's something I hadn't heard in a while. After a little research, I learned that Dr Watson is still well and alive in XP, and it writes a log file:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson\drwtsn32.log

I love log files! It was 35M when I got there, and as I opened the file, I noticed that it kept on growing. The log file confirmed that bcmwltry.exe keeps crashing.

I went to services.msc, and shut down the Dell Wireless LAN Tray Service -- that shut down wltrysrv.exe, which was the thing that kept trying to start bcmwltry.exe.

And of course, my wireless card still works without the service. So indispensible service, do you suppose, was provided by "Dell Wireless LAN Try Service"?

[info] Estimated tax payments

This is what I gathered from combing through irs.gov.

The required estimated tax payment for the year, is the lesser of:

a) 90% of your current year tax obligation, or
b) 100% of your last year's tax due, or, 110% of your last year's tax due if your adjusted gross income exceeded $150K.

So to be safe, best to look at your last year's tax return, and go with option (b) to avoid penalty.

Since the government wants your money early, they want you to pay through out the year. If you don't pay the correct amount, you get penalized for underpayment.

I am still trying to understand the underpayment situation (Form 2210). More to that later.