I saw this in the journal and quickly used wikipedia to learn a bit more about this thing called "chinglish". Apparently there are plenty of these "lost in translation" signs which the Chinese government are irritated enough to do something about (translation, the 2008 Olympic). These signs if anything, are entertaining, albeit in a nonsensical-esoteric sort of way.

Jay Leno's would love these for his "Headlines."

This one cracks me up. More below:

[disclaimer: you may find these offensive, and the author does not subscribe to these humors, except on randomn days. If you see other funny signs like these, it would be fabulous for you to share them.]

This is the best thing...EVER.

It's priced at $499-$599 and is available through Cingular, which means the iPhone may not be for you if you are making indoor calls. But who cares when you can get the NYTimes like this.

Is that Jonathan Ive, famed Apple designer's actual cell/work phone? (I tried calling the work one and got a voicemail of Apple, the second one was a general voicemail. Haha. Umm ahem: Please do not try this at home kids.)

Until my current Verizon phone runs out, I'll continue to pull along this bag of bricks, "my fivers": 20 gig iPod (non video), 5 gig iPod Nano, Palm V, LG vx8300, Dell Inspiron m600 laptop, Canon SD630 camera optional.

Psst...really, these all-in-one devices are highly overrated anyhow.

Show of hands who's buying one?

I have just recently moved to another cube and everything seems different. I feel disoriented physically and have to try to get a new feel for the space. The funny thing is all my usual routine of IM-ing coworkers, emailing, debugging, designing, etc...are all tied to the physical space even though most of what I do is through bits and bytes. In other words my virtual space is tied to my physical space. However it's safe to say that adapting to this new space will be easier as my cube-mate is in the same team and won't go through bouts of anger management issues.

On to another matter. I have been thinking about personal finance recently. I would like to do a simple survey and it would be great if you could answer some of these questions by commenting here.

Do you use personal finance softwares such as Quicken or MS Money?
Would you be interested in learning more about retirement planning, saving for your kids college tuiton, life insurance, budgeting, tax, investments, etc?
Would you like to have a personal certified financial advisor analyse your retirement goals and provide a personalized reports/statements for you?
Would you use this service online if the tradeoff between doing it yourself and having a web-based software and CFA do it for you is very close?
Lastly what would you pay for such a service?

Thanks and have a good day!

Sandy and myself went over to downtown Palo Alto last night for my company's Insight 2006 dinner at Il Fornaio. I had the sea bass while she had the chicken. According to their outdated 2001 menu both of us would have to hunker down $52.95 per person for our meals. Luckily my company footed the bill. The chicken was tasty but the fish were, according to Sands, "fishy". I like their hors d'oeuvre as well as their ambience. I'd like to think a certain someone would benefit by taking his future date there. =P

During dinner I sat next to a CEO from Manhanttan whose former careers as a chemical engineer, a director of an investment bank, and now running his own venture capital firm has earned him his rights to tell me these advice:

Don't be afraid to change career. Kids in your generation can have five careers. What matters is not how smart you are, that helps. It's how you work with people and if you get along with them. (—David J. P. Meachin)

Sometimes rather than thinking of something to write I like to just rummage around the various blog sites to see what everyone else is writing. Sometimes I like to leave comments on these sites. An idea occurred to me—and folks bare in mind I haven't really thought through these things—someone could write a way to aggregate the "most recent comments" that we leave after reading wuboy, drewboy, kat15812, jeeyoungi, clieu, jimmyjam206, laurenine , mdw, and someone I really really like site.

Think of bread crumbs trail in Hansel and Gretel. A comment here, a comment there, some more at blahblahblah...there ought to be a way to sweep up all those crumbs into a "container"—most recent comments by so-and-so. A blogs comment thread if you will.

I have a favor to ask you guys. The Silicon Valley Marathon is coming up pretty soon. Now wuboy, that is to say Andy, myself, and Mistriss Miranda (M&M) are running this thing. And we would like to come up with some names that come in three. Lost? Here are some examples: The Holy Trinity. The Three Amigos. The Animaniacs (Wacko Yacko Dot). X-MEN.

But and here are the tricky part. They must not be a unit that are tied together. Lost? Here are some examples.

I cannot go as "G", wuboy "R", and M&M "X". Because then we have to stay together to make GRX make sense. So the order is important. Also if possible it should include a girly part ot the three as M&M is a...girl.

The winner will get a picture of the three of us with the winning names on our tee-shirt and our shiny medals.

So it has come up in the GRX community that the Indescribable Tour in Palo Alto has been sold out due to the huge response. People I know are looking for ticket(s).

Here are the results of a recent wanted search for "chris tomlin" over at Craigslist:

On one such listing someone wrote this: “I'll pay you more than what you paid!”