Archive for November, 2008
November 27, 2008
2008 Thanksgiving Dinner
Vy and I have been to a few Thanksgiving dinners, but never had the chance to cook it ourselves. So this year, since we are stuck in SD without anywhere to go, we decided to make our first Thanksgiving dinner. At first, I told Vy that I would make the whole dinner and have it ready for her when she came home from working on Thanksgiving at 11pm! Well, Vy didn’t want to be eating a huge dinner at 11 so she decided to cook on Wednesday.
She started cooking a few hours before I came home from work. I left work at exactly 5pm so that I can help her out. Luckily my friend Banana An reminded me about the turkey that still frozen and in the fridge. I took a “break” around 8:30am to drive back home to take the turkey out so it would thaw.
I didn’t do much of the cooking except for the pumpkin pie, which is really baking. Vy is a great cook, she knows my taste and I’ve adapted to hers. She made the turkey, potatoes, and the sweet potatoes. The pumpkin pie was very easy to make. There were only three ingredients; pumpkin filling, condensed milk, and two eggs. Mix them up and pour into pie crust. Bake for 30-45 minutes and it’s done. Very yummy. It’s our favorite recipe so far for pumpkin pie. We are very thankful for each other as we don’t have any family here in SD. Both of our families are in SJ.
With our leftover turkey Vy made turkey pot pie and oh boy was it yummy. It was so good I had two servings this morning. I love holiday food.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tags:baking, Cooking, Dinner, homemade, Thanksgiving
Posted in Cooking, Events, Food, Personal | 1 Comment »
November 15, 2008
The way to invest has always been buy low and sell high. However simple as that sounds it’s probably one of the hardest things to do. We all heard of how the stock market is in such a turmoil these days. Everything has lost 50-60% and sometimes even more.
For me that sounds like it’s buying time. Sure, the market can go lower and even tank. Nobody knows what it will do and that’s why you have to just close your eyes and pull the trigger. I’ve been putting a little money in here and there. On Friday, I plunkered down some more and bought Citigroup. Their ticker symbol is C. According to Yahoo Finance, Citigroup stock trading range on Friday was 8.79 – 10.11 and ended the day at 9.53. I won’t tell you exactly how much I invested but I’ll tell you this – I got in on the lower end of that range. I did not do my due diligence in researching the company before buying the stock. However, I believe it’s large size can withstand the current economy and come out stronger five years from now. Let’s wait and see. I’m putting calendar reminders to revisit this in 1,3,5 years.
Tags:Citibank, citigroup, Finance, investing, money, portfolio, Stocks
Posted in Deals, Finance, Stocks | Leave a Comment »
November 11, 2008
About two weeks ago I had to ship an external hard drive from San Diego to Seattle. My friend asked me to purchase the hard drive and copy all my “videos” for him. I found a Cavalry terabyte external drive from newegg.com for about $120 with free shipping. It’s large capacity and low price makes it perfect for videos files. However we both wished it had Firewire for faster transfer speed. Anyways, back to the post office. So when I arrived to the front counter the Postman asked if I wanted to ship this “Priority Mail” or regular. Priority Mail was close to $13 and regular 1st class is about $9. Since it wasn’t a time sensitive I decided to ship it regular mail. This was on a Monday. The box arrived at my friends house on Wednesday. I was astonished at how fast it got there by regular mail.
I truly believe that “Priority Mail” is nothing more than a sucker premium. If you are a sucker you will pay the premium. I don’t believe that the US Post Office is overwhelmed with packages on a regular basis. I’m sure they are swamped during Christmas season but that’s probably the only time you might want to pay the premium (sucker).
Tags:Newegg.com, Premium, Shipping, Sucker, US Post Office
Posted in Bargains, Deals, Finance | 1 Comment »
November 10, 2008
DNS is Domain Name System. DNS translate web domains into Internet IP address. All large ISP have their own DNS servers. These servers provide all the IP address conversion quickly so that your computer gets to whichever web page you are looking for. These servers are strategically located all over the US. When you use the ISP provided DNS servers there are no way to manage it or receive any kind of reports. ISP provided DNS is a one trick pony. Does excatly what’s it is supposed to do and nothing else. So what if you want to manage or at least view some kind of reporting on your Internet usage? OpenDNS is your answer.
OpenDNS works the same way except it allows control and features that your ISP does not provide. The first feature I like is the filter. You can set OpenDNS to filter out websites you feel inappropriate for your web surfing. Open DNS provides six filtering levels high,moderate, low, minimal, none, and custom. I use custom filtering for granular control. On the custom filter page you can also set individual domain to either always block or never block.
Another feature is the shortcuts. I just started using this feature and find it very useful. For instance, I personally use Yahoo mail as my primary email so I created a shortcut mail to point to mail.yahoo.com. So when I type in my address bar mail I get automatically routed to Yahoo mail. I also created one for gmail, my secondary email.
OpenDNS adds a layer of security that helps my home network from connecting to websites that are either phising or contains malware. OpenDNS works either by individual PCs or by your complete home network. I use the complete home network. Here is how to setup OpenDNS on your system.
Tags:Custom, DNS, Filtering, Hack, Internet, IT, Network
Posted in IT, Tech, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »
November 9, 2008
Vy came home today and she had a surprise for me. A 3.3lb lobster for dinner. Yummy. We never had bought a live lobster for dinner before. 99 Ranch Market had the lobster on sale for $7.99 a lb making our lobster $26. We searched and searched for lobster recipes and found nothing interesting or within our cooking skills so we decided just to steam/boil the lobster. We ended up making garlic noodles with lobster. My favorite garlic noodle recipe is from The Crepes of Wrath.
We modified the recipe a bit to fit our taste. Only half the brown sugar and half the butter and we added shiitake mushroom. The garlic noodles came out great and we had our lobster with it. I have some leftover for lunch tomorrow.
Tags:Cooking, Dinner, Garlic Nooldes, Lobster, Vy
Posted in Cooking, Food, Personal | Leave a Comment »
November 5, 2008
For those of unfortunate users of the old IBM Thinkpad T43 there is an annoying feature that enables a numlock on the keyboard. This should fix most Thinkpads that have numbers on the keyboards instead of the regular 10-key on the right side.
1. Start->Run->Regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Keyboard
3. Change the value for InitialKeyboardIndicators from 2 to 0.
Tags:How To, IBM, IT, NumLock, T43, Thinkpad
Posted in IT, Tech | 6 Comments »
