2009 Summer concerts in Mountain View

Free Thursday evening concerts from 6:30 to 8pm:

http://www.ci.mtnview.ca.us/city_hall/comm_services/recreation_programs_and_services/community_events/summer_concert_series.asp

Mountain View Farmers' Market

Every Sunday from 9am to 1pm, there is the popular Farmers' market in Mountain View. You can find all kind of organically grown, fresh fruits and vegetables in addition to various homemade products. It's great and Min Lin has her favorite stand to buy really inexpensive Chinese vegetables.

At the entrance there is a huge basket sampling many of the products of the market. The woman at the stand told us: "Go ahead guys, fill it out - you have a great chance to win since there are few people that filled it out!".

So we did.

And we won.

They called us up a few minutes later while we were going to buy additional vegetables from the Chinese grocery on Castro. They told us "You won! Please fetch it in the next 45 minutes... oh, and don't come by bike, there's just too much!" - "...but...but"

... oh boy, trouble...

So now we had to figure out who to call up to share our new bounty. We eventually reached Wenbo; his family had just landed a day ago so were indeed in need of food. Even after just picking up the stuff we wanted and leaving him with a very heavy basket and bag of oranges, we filled out both of my bike saddle bags!

Karen, the person who had encouraged us to participate, was nice enough to help us with additional plastic bags to split the stuff. She also gave us the basket!

We talked for a bit; she works as an assistant-manager for the California Farmer's Market Association and they organize many markets in the region. She also mentioned to look out for the number on stickers of fruits and vegetables; #4 is conventionally grown, #8 is genetically modified and #9 is organic.

What was in the basket:

Shitake mushrooms, salads with edible flowers, baby spinach, zucchinis, Chinese eggplants, baby eggplants, lettuce, tomatoes, corn, broccoli, carrots, celery, various herbs, bok choy, strawberries, cucumbers, plums, peaches, apricots, oranges, potatoes, onions, blueberries from Triple Delight, organic fresh black raspberries from Prevedelli Farms, wildflower honey from Morganic Hilltop, sweet jalapeño marinade from Bolani, dried apricots from Apricot King and much more!!

Here's a summer garden soup made by Min Lin with fresh vegetables and herbs from the basket:

Recipe of Min Lin's summer garden soup:

Ingredients:

• 1 big tomato
• 1 baby green zucchini
  
• 1 yellow zucchini
  
• some fresh basil
• some fresh coriander
• some water, salt, pepper, ginger powder and extra virgin olive oil

Cooking directions:

• cut all vegetables, put all in a pot and gently cook until vegetables gets soften
• serve with a few drops of lemon juice
  
• good for 3 servings
  

Ricky + Min Lin Photos

Photos prises par un professionnel dans un studio à Taipei. Pas mal non?

Pictures taken in a studio in Taiwan by a professional photographer. Not bad right?

The place we took Glamor pictures is at a studio in Ximen Taipei (http://www.flower-waves.com.tw/personal/about.asp - website in Chinese only). Min Lin has negotiated the package and scheduled the photo session 3 weeks in advance. The package we paid was around US$400 with 20 photos and a nice album with our 20 photos of 6x8 size, package includes 3 styles, one on one photographer and stylist. The studio also have a selection of cloths, but it's recommended to bring your own cloths.

It took us around 4 hours for the glamor pictures session and after that it took us 2 hours to choose 20 pictures out of 120 pictures (the photographer and his assistants took at least 1 hour trying to convince us to buy extra pictures, US$25/photo for only digital version and US$40/photo with printed + digital version + nicer album). Overall, it was a nice experience, the only drawback was that final pictures and album was done only a month after.

Debunking Canadian health care myths

Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.

In actuality, taxes are nearly equal on both sides of the border. Overall, Canada's taxes are slightly higher than those in the U.S. However, Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash. At the end of the day, the average after-tax income of Canadian workers is equal to about 82 percent of their gross pay. In the U.S., that average is 81.9 percent.

Coffee Drinks Illustrated

http://www.flickr.com/photos/two-eyes/1285147549/sizes/o/

Typing it old skool

My birthday gift from Matt: a "new" IBM Type M keyboard from the original mold but with a USB interface! Love the taka taka taka of the hard springs inside - reminds me of programming on an IBM PS/2!

Min Lin however is not so happy with the noise... Mouahaha

I'll have to bring it at work to try it out on my colleagues!

HTC Hero - First Look

Taiwanese (HTC) are really good at making lickable user interfaces for mobile phone ;-)

Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X 10.5.7 crashes and Ubuntu 9.04

UPDATE: After a little bit of research, I found this:

http://www.pjentrepreneur.com/2009/01/21/update-mac-book-pro-blank-screen-problem/

I've had a Mac Book Pro air laptop since June 2007, one of the 3,1 model.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro3,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP31.0070.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.16f11
Serial Number (system): W8722D1NX91
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled

My experience with it has been relatively good and I've been happy with an OS that straddles ease of use with the power of Unix under the hood. I spend hours every day at the computer (probably around 3000 hours on this one since I've bought it) so it is important that it works and although I love figuring out stuff at work I want my computer at home to help me relax.

Since the update to Mac OS X 10.5.7, my computer has been acting up in weird ways. Of course, I'm all out of luck since I did not renew my warranty. I'm not the only one as Min Lin had to change her hard drive for another one when the SMART monitoring started indicating imminent failures. Luckily that was pretty cheap to do in Taiwan.

I've always had display problems of some kind in previous releases. I have a dual-monitor setup (MBP 15 inch display with a Dell 2405FPW 24 inch display) and sometimes one of the display would start flickering for a while, or one of the display would not come back from sleep (with Detect displays resolving that issue) or...

But with the latest update, this went from annoying to disastrous. The OS' WindowServer (equivalent to Xserver) will completely freeze (not even a killall -HUP WindowServer from an ssh shell will recover it) with very abstract artwork being displayed. Using Skype now is a guaranteed crash.

I call this one "windows in the snow"

What is more annoying is that at reboot the boot up process will eventually crash indicating that you need to reboot once again (and again, and again...). The only way to recover from this one seemed to be to boot in single user (Cmd-S at boot) and run a fsck -fy that would ALWAYS find that /var/run/pcscd.pub (incorrect block count for the file pcscd.pub (should be 16 instead of 17). "pcscd is the Unix daemon that handles smartcards for OS X so this appears to be due to some built-in problem in the OS where that particular process file is always open.

I've been researching these issues, but opposite to certainly Linux and sometimes Windows, Mac OS X users are proud of being able to be generally ignorant of anything "technical" and so when confronted with an actual problem they are less than helpful at describing bugs and resolving them instead of just blindly trying things. Apple's help is similarly suited to users that don't know much so you are pretty much stuck figuring the issue yourself. Not only that, but I've read in some places that Apple was aware and may be working at solving these issues but they haven't and will not say anything publically.

From what I gleaned, all this seems to be due to a long present issue with the NVidia GeForce 8600M GT and similar video cards - an actual firmware bug that from release to release gets worked around differently. So under that nice aluminium casing there is actually a lemon! Of course, they probably have/had code to work around the issue which explains the generally satisfying experience but as the OS code evolves so do regressions appear making using Mac OS X on this defective hardware unsustainable in the long term. Which is really sad because when you invest 2K$ in a computer you expect it to last for more than 2 years... Any other company would see itself a subject of a class action suit, but of course fans of Apple are generally more fanatic and can afford to swap a lemon after a while....

So just for kick, I've downloaded Linux Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (Jalopy!) 9.04 LiveCD. Surprisingly, this boots and works straight up from the CD-ROM. Surprising since the last time I looked into it you had to jump through all kind of hoops to get it to run on the special EFI architecture that the MacBook have.

Ubuntu has its own problems of course and some of those issues that have been known for a long time (such as the inability to drive the Dell 2405FPW higher than 1280x1024 when it is a 1920x1200 display), the very jumpy touchpad that I had to disable or other subtle user interface bugs (such as an invisible force field that prevents dragging windows from one display to the other). These of course will just get ignored if I report them as they are always working on the next generation instead - most of my bugs related to Linux distros have been closed in the past as deprecated in new releases even when they are very easy to reproduce.

But at least I get hope that it is possible to run this hardware without crashing all the times. It also seems to strangely help with resetting whatever issue is occuring on the Mac OS X side...