Need to take a break...

I'm so busy these days that I don't think I can write on this blog regularly anymore... I still have lots of topics that I'd like to talk about but I just can't squeeze time out to do that. Maybe I assumed too many responsibilities since I didn't say no enough?

Anyways I'll still blog whenever I've time but just don't expect the regular posting frequency I've been keeping. My readers, thank you for reading my blog all along and I hope that you've gained something valuable from my posts. See you soon! :)

Happy New Year!!

I am actually out of town now so this is a pre-written message to all my readers:

Happy 2009!!

Although there is not a lot of you, I would like to thank you for reading my blog this past year :)

Linked from Tony's blog

When I was browsing people's blogs yesterday, I suddenly noticed that Tony (渣估) put a link to my blog from his blog:

Image from 追揸沽

It may not be anything significant to you, but it's the first time my blog ever get linked from another website! Well, I get a link from Tina's blog too but that's because she's my friend.

Yeah I know Tony has a very long list of links to other people's blogs. Still, it lets me feel that what I write here has a value to others, somewhat.

Thank you Tony! :)

Thank you The Light!

I would like to thank everyone from The Light (Lily, Cindy, Eric, Thomas, Ernest, Tim and Bonnie) for celebrating Katie's birthday tonight. It really surprised Katie and me :)

Special thanks to Bonnie for making a very delicious Bailey cheesecake!

Happy 2008!! (^___^ )

Just want to wish all my readers a happy and fruitful 2008! It's so late now, I'm going to sleep... (~___~ )

The Twins Concert is canceled!!

Just got this news: The Twins Concert that was supposed to held in Shrine Auditorium on next Tuesday has been canceled... Don't know why they did that but you sure can get a refund from the place where you purchased the tickets. If you have doubt about what I said you can check out this page on Ticketmaster. It's also marked canceled there... (-___- )

Wish you all the best Jill!

Today is my supervisor Jill's last day at UCLA. She's one of the best supervisors I've ever had in my career life.

How many of your supervisors actually care about your work environment? Jill is one good example. Thanks to her, I have a perfect place to work: good monitor, keyboard tray, ergonomic chair, etc. If you've read my post about ergonomics, I can tell you that I have everything I need that let me do what I mentioned in that post. I seriously doubt that if there're 50% of the bosses in the US who are willing to give their employees such a good work environment.

So long Jill. I wish you all the best for you new life in Texas :)

How many hours of sleep do you need?

Recently I find that I need more and more sleep. I still remember the days when I had a full-time day job as an engineer and a part-time night job at a restaurant as a buy boy; there's just no way I can do that anymore now. Every night I need at least 8 hours of sleep in order to function okay at work. I feel that it's a lot despite the common belief that 8 hours is normal.

Is the standard of 8-hours sleep normal or a myth? I really don't know. If you have a few seconds, I would appreciate that you participate in the little survey on the right hand side so that we can have a rough idea on how many hours people usually spend on sleeping. Thanks a lot! :)

Twins Concert at the night of Mid-Autumn Festival

Just found that that Twins is having a concert at the night of Mid-Autumn Festival in September. Below is the information of the concert:

Date and Time: 9/25/2007 (Tuesday) 8:00 pm
Ticket Price: $138/$108/$78/$48
Venue: Shrine Auditorium
Guest: Sun Boy'z

I'm probably going, anyone's interested also?

(P.S. Grasshopper is holding a concert in September too, but the cheapest ticket is $60 which seems to be a bit expensive. Besides, it'll be in Las Vegas and I don't think I want to go there again within such a short time :P)

Bye for now, Blogging Softly...

I've decided to stop writing to my software blog... See the details over there.

T-Mobile Hotspot @ Home

My friend just told me about this new plan named T-Mobile Hotspot @ Home and it sounds like a pretty cool concept. Basically, the idea is to use a Wi-Fi hotspot instead of a signal tower to make cell phone calls. If you use a Wi-Fi hotspot to make the call, all the minutes will be free, no matter where you're located, even in another country.

After reading about the details, here're some reasons you may consider using this new service:

• You're currently a T-Mobile customer and don't really have good signal at home but you have a broadband Internet connection
  

• You're currently a T-Mobile customer and do have good signal at home, but you talk so much that you always use up your airtime minutes (you know who you're)
  

• You like to hang out at Starbucks and Borders bookstores and like to talk a lot on the cell at those places (Starbucks and Borders are T-Mobile HotSpot locations)
  

• You want to get a free Linksys or D-Link wireless router after a $50 rebate
  

• You want to get a Nokia 6086 or a Samsung t409 for 50 bucks
  

It's not that useful for me since I don't stick to the phone like teenage girls do :P

P.S. If you're interested you can read this article to learn more about it.

Buy 1 Smoothie get 1 Free at Jamba Juice

Got this link from my friend on Friendster:

http://www.jambasummer.com/freesmoothie/thankyou3.htm

Just give them your first name, email and zip code and you'll see the coupon page. Buy any one smoothie of any size and get the second one free for any other flavor of the same size or smaller. Offer expires on July 4^th. Maybe you can get two smoothies and watch fireworks with your lover that night :)

Updated: HanaMaru sent me the direct link to the coupon page:

http://www.jambasummer.com/freesmoothie/thankyou1.htm

Thannk you HanaMaru! :)

Happy Mother's Day!

My mom is very nice and reasonable and I always consider myself lucky to have such a great mother. Mom, I'd like to let you know that I appreciate your unconditional love to us and what you've contributed to the family throughout these years. You just rock :)

Wish everybody a Happy Mother's Day! (^___^ )

Happy Birthday Katie! :)

Went to Cheesecake Factory last night to celebrate Katie's birthday. The wait was long (expect a two-hour wait at a Saturday night) but their service was just exceptional. Here was the Godiva Cheesecake we ordered

As most of our friends know, both Katie and me eat very little, so we couldn't finish the cheesecake. The server packed it for us and this morning we figured that she wrote another happy birthday greeting to Katie on the to-go box (although she misspelled Katie's name as "Kate")
I was pretty impressed by this little thing that she did, considering the fact that the restaurant was completely full of patrons and all the server were busy like hell. To the waiters and waitresses at most Chinese restaurants: something you may want to learn here. Try your best at what you do and people will notice the heart and hard work you've put into your job.

And, most importantly, wish you a Happy Birthday Katie! (^___^ )

Blogging Softly

As you may have noticed already, I created a new blog named Blogging Softly last week. I'll write about any topic related to software there, such as reviewing software that I love/hate.

I also thought about writing technical stuff like a how-to on integrating Apache with Zope. It'll benefit both other developers and me since other developers may have the same problem and I can refer to the how-tos when I forget about the details.

However, that probably would be too technical for most of my current readers? I probably should just write software reviews for a while and see how it goes :)

What do you like to read?

Since I started blogging at this site in October last year, there are probably some regular readers of my weblog. As you can tell from the description of my blog: Alex's random thoughts on miscellaneous stuff in his life, my weblog doesn't really have a specific topic. I just wrote about anything that I liked to talk about.

It feels free to write about any topic, but I also would like to know what you actually like to read. Anything you like/dislike about my weblog, I'd appreciate so much if you would leave me a comment. I'll reply to all comments and you can leave a comment anonymously if you don't feel comfortable disclosing your identity. Thanks a lot and I hope I can get some voices :)

My weblog is AnswerTips-enabled now

Just found this cool feature at Answers.com yesterday: at a AnswerTips-enabled website, one can double-click on any word and a bubble of information about that word will pop up. Very handy whenever you see some word you're not sure what it actually means. Oh well, I don't really use any SAT or GRE verbal words here on my weblog (because I don't know any), but I guess it's still cool to have this feature :)

Very busy these days...

I'm very busy these days so probably won't have time to update my weblog for a while.. Thanks for your patience during this period.. Happy Valentine's Day to all my readers! (though it's passed already :P)

My weblog shouldn't be down anymore

A while ago www.alexweblog.com rendered that "Not Found Error 404" page quite often and Blogger support told me that they've "have reviewed and fixed several bugs on the new version of Blogger" around a week ago so I guess this problem won't occur again. If you do see anything wrong with my weblog please leave me a comment, thanks! :)

My weblog on Google's first page?!

Something pretty exciting happened to me today: I found that my weblog is on Google's first page when I did a search with the keywords "alex weblog"!

Given that there're so many Alex's in the world, I was pretty amazed that my weblog is at no. 4 in the search result. Yeah Eric said that it's not really an interesting fact to be on the first page, but I'm still pretty motivated by this. I'll write more good posts and hope that you'll come back often! :)