Winter Solstice

Not sure if anyone knows (or cares) that we just passed Winter Solstice on the 21st.
The days will start to get longer from this moment on; which is good because in a symbolizes that we should become more energized.

Here are some more useless facts about winter solstice:

1) Winter Solstice came about becuse the axis around which the earth rotates is tilted, so in hte northern hemisphere, it is the day where the sun is at its southernmost point in the sky.

2) People often assume that the sun will set later ONLY after Winter Solstice. That is not true. Becuase the orbit of the earth is elliptical, the sun starts to set later at night around 1 week prior to winter solstice, its just that the sun will not rise earlier until the winter solstice.

3) In north pole, this is the day where there is the midnight sun! and vise versa, in south pole, this is the day of lightless day.

Urban myth coming True

Once upon a time, a music aficionado worked here. He had great passion about music and in attempt to share this joy to man kind, he painstakingly, over the course of one year, compile a collection of all the music every known to man (some say its only HIS collection, which is still quite impressive for according to some, he had a collection of more than 2000 CDs of every genre) and transferred this treasure into two external hard drive. Once he finished this project of love, he sailed into sunset with his lovely girlfriend and was never seen again....

This myth, which has been floating around the office for quite a while, and there were many attempts to uncover this treasure, but no one was able to find it. And the treasure was thought to be lost to man kind forever.... Until TODAY. When your truly discovered one of this immaculate collection. I am so touched that I can almost cry now!

Arggghhh!

The keyless entry and engine start function of my new car is really pretty useless option. I mean, why do you even want a keyless entry and engine start button on a car anyway. Are we getting so lazy nowadays that we don't even want to do the simple chore of turning the ignition key? whats next? a car that drives itself?

The reason I brought this up is because today, I locked myself out of the car. and it was a super crappy experience. The morning started off nicely. I was fully energized after the steak dinner last night and a full night sleep. The coffee and Croissant in my favorite morning bakery was fresh as ever, and in my morning commute to work, I did not hit a single light and spent the most of time having a great conversation on the phone. But somehow, amist of this perfect morning, something had to go wrong.

As I pull in to the parking lot, (with one hand on the phone and the other biting on the croissant), I realized that I am actually late for a 8:00AM meeting scheduled last Friday. As I hurried and said goodbye to the person on the phone, I rushed out of the car and pushed the black button on the door. and zip, the door locked down. with my car still running and the key inside.

So there i was, without the company clearnance key, my work laptop, my report, standing there like an idoit and kicking the tires (somehow, I managed to remember my croissant and coffee somehow). What made this worse is that all this happened in front of a lovely blond who works in marketing. After she stopped laughing, she offered to call AAA. But I kindly declined because I didn't want to AAA folks to mess up the new car window. So I called "Tustin Lexus" and after 1/2 hour, they sent over the masterkey and opened my car door.


The lesson learned here:

1) don't get too carried away by a great start to the day - and always, always remember to have the Lexus key in your pocket.

2) Before you start cursing "Mother F$%ker" or any other obsene superlatives to your car, make sure you are all alone.

From happy thoughts to philosophical thoughts...

I have been following this story closely for the past couple of weeks. The more I think about this, the more
I am confounded by it. The moral question I am raising here is “If a person really repents his sins, and as in the case of Tookie, preached a message of non-violence, as mere mortals, do have the rights to decide his life or death”.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/us/death_penalty


SAN FRANCISCO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to block the execution early Tuesday of Stanley Tookie Williams, rejecting the notion that the founder of the murderous Crips gang had atoned for his crimes and found redemption on death row.

My Ride.

Gotta work on my W side sign!!

Black Hawk, The Racoon Killer!

I got my new ride! And it is a 2006 Lexus IS250!

Pictures will be posted shortly (with Eye Drs. awesome Nikon camera if he should have it with him).

I have decided to name my new ride Black Hawk "the Racoon Killer" because a) the car is black, and it really does look like a hawk when look at it from the front. and b) In my first joy ride near Hasting Ranch, I have already ran over a Racoon....Don't worry, there is no damage to the car, but the poor racoon. He must didn't even see it coming...

I still have my lovely Silver Fox, even though it is currently parked at the dealer ship awainting my pickup later today. I shall leave the Silver Fox in my Irvine Den for the week, then decide what to do with it. She has been great to me for the past 6 years. I hope my Black Hawk will do the same.

Steve Jobs Standford Speech

this is truly one of the best speech I have read and I would just like to share it with everyone.


'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Taiwan's Election

For those of you who knows me well, you might have noticed that over the past few years, I have become less vocal about politics, less ideological and more indifferent about world affiars. In additional as a sign of maturity to not talk about these issues, the truth of the matter is that I still DO care. But I am less inclined to talk about these topics because they will inevitibly create frictions. I am just waiting for the moments when the world becomes more of a centrist place before I share my views with friends again, and as always, I am also open to different point of views. Just not those that are absolute. The election in Taiwan yesterday, I hope, is a great starting point...

The local (county) level election in Taiwan concluded yesterday. Among the total 23 seats of county-level mayors, the KMT won 14 seats, compared with the former eight seats, and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won six, down from 10, according to the results announced by the Taiwan authorities late Saturday. For the past six years, the ruling DPP really disasppinted me. Six years ago, when Taiwan elected President Chen as the first none KMT president, my hope, like everyone elses, was high. While I am not a believer of some of the more radical DPP policies, such as seeking independence, I did have high hope that the DPP leadership would create a more developed civil society. Unfortunately, the result over the past six years was the opposite of my hope. The DPP, over the past six years, has created nothing but more ethnic frictions amongst the various groups in Taiwan. The economy of the country has been stagnant for 4 years, corruption and incompetence is rampant amongst the DPP officials (not saying the KMTs are much better). and the people who truly suffered are the everyday citizens of the country. Taiwan, in my eyes, over the last six years, was without direction. And it is sad to see.

I hope with this election, paving the road for next years house and legislature election, and the 2008 presidential election, things will change.


As a person born

...

This song is called "Vidicated" by Dashboard Confessional.
I am strangely drawn to this song. I can certainly empathize...

http://www.ifilm.com/player/?ifilmId=2642903&refsite=7103

Crazy Thur.

I had a crazy day today...had plans to just go about my business at the library for some GMAT prep. then got a call from a friend who invited me to a house party---the requirement, LOTS and lots of beer. It was a pretty happening party. tons of hot chicks there! (somehow, my co-worker has managed to get to know the model friends next door) but somehow, my heart was just not into it....had about 6 beers and a few shots of taquilla. then this girl that my friend brought started talking to me and make small talks...she seemed quite sweet and cute. But for some strange reason, i was totally not into her. i think it must be the alchohol buzzing. so i spent the remainder of the nite just chilling with my friends....(hope i didn't offend that girl :P)


okay, i am totally buzzing now. i think i should get to bed now....