Tuesday, February 27, 2007

[trip] Toronto - Day 7

When: Firday 2007 Feb 23

- Jesslin's lesson in nail buffing

[trip] Toronto - Day 6

When: Thursday 2007 Feb 22

- All my favs at "Happy to Meet You" restaurant: bitter melon, pig blood, kidney, liver, intestines, soft shell crab
- Using Jesslin's cell phone to use my AAA to call CAA to help Mary who locked the key in her friend's car, all at midnight

Thursday, February 22, 2007

[trip] Toronto - Day 5

When: Wednesday 2007 Feb 21

- Costco: Return $36. New purchase $38.
- Walmart: Returns $21. New purchase $34.
- Wehuns the excellent Barista

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

[trip] Toronto - Day 4

When: Tuesday 2007 Feb 20

- Great big new Chinese mall number 1
- Great big older Chinese mall number 2 (Market Village)
- Great big Chinese mall number 3 (Pacific Mall. aka Airplane Hanger)

Monday, February 19, 2007

[trip] Toronto - Day 3

When: Monday 2007 Feb 19

- 7:30am morning call by dad
- 9:30am still waiting for them to eat breakfast
- "Oh my god. This passport office really is in this ghetto strip mall"
- Vision test - A22
- Costco -- "20 minutes only!"
- Costco -- 1 hour and $465 later
- Barney robe
- "Oh my god. This passport office really is a ghetto mall too"
- Passport applicatoin - A641
- After half-hour, we got one spring roll and soup. Cousin mary nearly passed out.

[trip] Toronto - Day 2

When: Sunday 2007 Feb 18
What: Chinese New Year

- Passport Photo -- "M'am, you face is too shiney"
- Lion City
- Dad, Dr Sun, and baggy eye surgery
- Payless Shoesource
- Walmart (Erin Mills)
- Shoppers Drugmart
- Walmart (SquareOne)
- "Where did everybody go? Oh it's closing time ..."
- Always parking within 25 feet of the entrance
- Sam Woo
- "Please make your mind and order!"
- Everyone loves Magnetix -- "Buy five more of these boxes!"
- Everyone loves the 2000 chinese songs chip. Lovely bad singing all around.

[trip] Toronto - Day 1

When: Saturday, 2007 Feb 17
What: Chinese New Year's Eve

- Hold the thermostat at 87F!
- Oh my god Mary, this u-turn is totally illegal
- Oh my god Mary, this u-turn is also totally illegal
- All the kids -- grew up to be bigger and better version of their former selves
- Uncle CK and Auntie Sue's skydiving videos

[trip] Toronto - Day 0

When: Friday 2007 Feb 16

- Weather.com: High 27F.
- "Hmm I forgot to ask mom about her flight info"
- "That's okay. Mary will have it ..."
- "Hmm ... where is Mary?"
- Loving the leather chair, electrical outlet, and $20/day wifi in the Sheraton lobby
- "Hun, coud you call my cousin?"
- "Where is 'sis? Why didn't you come out together?"
- Setting the thermostat to 87F
- Should we sleep on the floor in the study, the upstairs bathroom, or the master bedroom closet?
- (We slept on the floor in the study. Closing guarding the thermostat)

[tool] Escaping WikiWord in Twiki

Twiki automatically recognizes WikiWords that do not have a page, and add a question mark behind it so that you can create a new page for it.

However, sometimes you just don't want the darn question mark there. The WikiWord happens to, say, be name of something with mixed case. To prevent the question mark from showing up, simply add an exclamation mark before. For example:
!JavaScript

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

[sql] Find all numerics out of varchar column

Problem:
I have a varchar column that contain a mix of alpha and numeric values. I need to find all rows where the column contain only numeric characters.

Solution (either one works):
select * from myTable where myCol not like '%[a-z]%';
select * from myTable where isnumeric(myCol)=1;

Source:
http://www.dbforums.com/showthread.php?t=1103852

Sunday, February 11, 2007

[muse] Improvement vs Measurement

There is a popular saying "You can't improve what you don't measure".

The statement is bit of a trap -- more often than not, it leads people to think that once they found something they can measure, they must be improving something. In reality, things are rarely that simple.

For example, companies often like to measure open bug counts, as a mean to drive improvements in software quality.

But, software quality isn't the end goal -- "Customer Success" is. In my experience, measuring bug counts alone was very harmful to customer success. In order to keep the bug counts low, the engineering team fought endlessly with QA and the customers.

I have tremendous respect/sympathy for anyone who has to come up with measurements -- It's a topic that appears deceptively simple, but in reality -- very very tricky.

Friday, February 09, 2007

[outing] Superbowl

Where: Daryl's house
What: Indianapolis Colts at Chicago Bears
Who: Daryl, Nat, Eliza, Rashim, Katelin, Pierre, and bunch of others


1st2nd3rd4th
Final
IND (4-0) 6 10 6 7
29
CHI (2-1) 14 0 3 0
17

- End of 1st Quarter: Indy's Romo-moment missed PAT means $20 for us from Squares pool
- End of 2nd Quarter: Vinatieri's miracle missed field goal means $20 for us from from Squares pool
- End of game: Previously missed PAT and field goal means $150 for us from Squares pool
- Who won the game? Who cares!

Saturday, February 03, 2007

[log] NBA 2K7

We got NBA 2K7 from Blockbuster. I am blown away by how great it looks.

- The first thing that caught my eye is how wonderfully the fabrics move with every player.
- Then I noticed how great the muscle tone and definitions are (and how they are tuned for each player).
- Then I noticed how good the crowd and people on the sideline look. They have different poses; They don't look "wavy". There are even people walking up and down the stairs and through the crowds.
- As the game went on, I can see sweat glistening on the players when they are making free throws.

Though, they didn't quite fix the "suddenly-frictionless-floor" problem. You can still see players running but either staying in place or sliding unnaturally.

But all in all, darn gorgeous. (Screenshot from 2k7Sports)

[recipe] Lamb chops

Just made this tonight. Jessica made this first at the house, and I just tried it with the last rack of lamb.

Season
- One rack of Frenched Lamb Chops from Costco (~$11)
- In a small mixing bowl, throw in salt (I like coarse kosher salt), and random choices of dry herb and spices (Dill with lemon, mediterranean seasoning, poultry seasoning, black pepper, terragon, basil ... Whatever is fine, really. It's pretty hard to mess this up)
- Cover lamb chop with herb (easiest to do this over paper towel)

Set up
- Get two aluminum trays, with one smaller that will fit into the other one
- In the bigger tray, put 1/2 inch of water
- In the small tray , line with aluminum foil (so you can reuse the tray with minimal cleanup)
- Put small tray in big tray
- In the small tray, put lamb on rack, bone side down
- (Make sure the entire lamb is inside the small tray, to save yourself from cleaning the oven)

Bake
- Put lamb chop in 350F, bone side down for 20 min
- Flip lamb chop so bone side is up. Raise to 375F for 30 min

Mangia!