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As a cat and modern design lover, I am always looking for cat items pleasant for both the cats and my aesthetic standard. I had my eye on the canine scratcher for a while, but its over 1000 USD price tag made it out of reach. However, recently, I found that it now costs "only" 395 USD. I pulled the trigger w/o too much hestitation since I need to buy the cats a holiday present anyway. However, I was still a little nervious at the purchase, as it would be a huge bummer if the cats don't like it. But I really love the design and can totally see how it fit with the rest of the house w/o screaming "cat furniture". Continue reading »

I was brought up as a Han Chinese and I myself have never doubted that identity.  However, I do know that I look slightly different from people around me when I grew up. Darker skin, slightly curly hairs, deeper set eyes and other distinctive facial features. Put it simply, my face does not look like an average Han male face. However, nobody really said anything about my appearance except that my old brother occasionally joked about it (he looks like a normal Han Chinese by the way). After all, I look just like my father. Continue reading »

I recently stayed in Manhattan for a few days during a business trip. My colleague and I were looking for places to buy some special chocolate to bring back home. We asked a few locals New Yorker as well as consulted the web for recommendations. Here are the list of stores we collected.

• La Maison Du Chocola (store website)
• Vosges (store website)
• Jacques Torres (store website)

We only have 3 hours to spend in the city. So we went to La Maison Du Chocola store in the Rockefelle Center, the store closest to our hotel. Continue reading »

As many of friends, I recently acquired a HP Touchpad largely due to its low price. I don't really need a tablet, as I am sitting in front of computes almost all the time. My original plan was to turn it into an interactive cat toy, at least sometimes, so I can keep the two cats entertained while I am working.

Unfortunately, I could only find one game designed for the cats "The Catnip Collection". According to its website, it "is a variety of toys that will amuse and challenge your cat and its human".

The reviews seem pretty decent (4 out 5).

https://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=com.wtflolomgbbq.haxe.vct Continue reading »

Huahai and I have just returned from our first trip together to Italy. The trip itself was wonderful and unforgeable. However, it usually took a lot of planning for such an extensive trip, unless you hire someone else to do it for you or join a tour group.

We usually enjoy traveling at our own pace and explore the area; therefore, we (basically myself) always do our own travel planning. Unfortunately, as a very busy professional, I do not really have much time to do the planning. (Can you believe someone have actually spent half a year to plan a two-week's trip to Italy and produce a travel plan with 90 pages?) Continue reading »

My colleague has highly recommended to me the following CSV reader/writer: http://supercsv.sourceforge.net/

I am yet to test it out, so I will need to come back provide my review. But just put a pointer here, since this tool is not realy easy to find without the right keywords.

For some reason, my main working machine, a Windows XP desktop, recently  started to crash a lot followed by the blue screen of death. The error message output at the blue screen does not seem to be helpful.

***STOP: 0x0000008E (0xE0000001, 0xBA490925, 0xA880D820, 0x00000000)
***watchdog.sys - Address BA490925, base at BA90000, Date stamp 480254ab Continue reading »

It has turned out that Netflix has abandoned the plan, finally.

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When Huahai told me the news late last night that NetFlix is splitting into two, my first reaction was that he must be reading from Onion! After all, based all what have learned from the business school classes and information economics classes, it makes perfect sense to provide bundled services, especially when it comes to information product.

However, the news is definitely true, as further confirmed by the following letter that I received this morning.

Continue reading »

I was looking for buying birthday cakes for the cats' birthday. Surprisingly, although it is very easy to find dog bakeries, there seems no existence of a single cat bakery. Luckily, a single Google search online brought up many birthday cake recipes for the cats. I picked one simple recipe with my cats' favorite food --- tuna.

So here is the tuna birthday cake for the cats, decorated with shrimp with catnip garnish.

It looks very nice, but most importantly, it was an instant hit. The cats jumped on to the dinning table as soon as I put the cakes on it. Continue reading »

We are getting rid of our front lawn --- to save water and money!

A landscape designer helped us did the design to convert our front yard from an old deteriorating classic English garden into a vibrant modern garden full of native plants.

Given our shoe-string budget, we plan to do most of the work ourselves. However, since both of us work full time, it will be a while before we can actually start the project, but being a person who loves to plan,  I have started collecting resources to do the project frugal way already! Continue reading »