plaxoed!

Hey, I was on news.com again (no no, this isn’t like last time)

Haiping (a long time colleague of mine and now an engineer at Facebook) is standing behind me. I wonder why they didn’t get our names to add to the picture caption.

Pete’s sister was taking a business communications class and one day, he turned to me and said that I was in her textbook and they were talking about me in lecture. Nice! I wonder what they had to say

She’s visiting Pete this weekend and she brought the book along. It’s called Business Communication, Building Critical Skills, and it’s written by Kitty O. Locker (of Ohio State booooo ) and Stephen Kyo Kaczmarek.

It’s only a quick reference in the book, but I am curious to know when people are discussing my story in class. If you’re a professor or if you’re a student in a class about this stuff, let me know; I’m always happy to discuss these things

This past weekend Rose and I went up to Tahoe with our grx small group, Immersion. The trip was mostly uneventful except for two things: a clever plot on Saturday night that demanded payback and the weather Sunday morning on our way back to the Bay Area.

First, the weather.

I checked the weather report for this weekend on Friday before we left and it said that there would be a little snow Saturday night through Sunday morning. Sounded perfect, snow overnight and fresh powder during the day. Turns out that instead of a few inches of fresh, we got dumped on! Here are a few shots Rose took from the car while we were driving Sunday morning.

So turns out that we got outta there just in time. After we got past the summit on 50 eastbound, they closed the freeway for avalanche control. We decided to hightail it outta there and it took us about 8 hours to get home. Today, we heard that it took some people 12 hours to get back yesterday, so it looks like we were actually lucky

Ok, now for the more interesting part: revenge?

On our first night up at Tahoe, Friday, we had two rooms. One for guys and one for the ladies. Since we had 6 guys, the guys room was larger - a two story unit with a bed on the top floor and a couch on the first floor. Huy, Eddie and I slept on the first floor and Alan, Jimmy, and Hugh slept on the top floor. The next morning, Alan and Jimmy complained of not getting a good night’s sleep, but didn’t really say why. We figured it was an uncomfortable mattress or something.

Then on Saturday night, Alan, Jimmy, and Hugh tried to drive home after the day up at Kirkwood. By the time they started to head out, the storm was already coming in, so they turned back around and stayed another night at Tahoe. At this point, we only had one hotel room (we checked out of the other room) and I figured we could probably all jam up in there for a night. However, Jimmy and Alan insisted on getting another hotel room. We figured they just didn’t want to cram 9 people in a standard small hotel room.

They found a room at a motel down the street and got ready to move over there. Now comes the clever part, they left Hugh behind in our room, and said they’d come pick him up in the morning. Odd, we thought, but whatever.

As most people can probably guess by now, Hugh is an awfully suspicious character in the story. Turns out, Hugh has a serious case of sleep apnea, and it was exceptionally loud. He was choking and coughing all night, basically preventing everyone but me from sleeping (I’m always passed out cold). Rose is a very light sleeper so she ended up getting basically no sleep all night!

Well, needless to say, this was a deliberate act of war. So that night after we got back, after Alan had gone to bed, we took my old foam mattress and did this:

Then we added these:

And lastly, here’s the scene this morning:

Bwahahaha! Watch out Jimmy, you’re next!

Just noticed that flickr has removed the upload limit for pro accounts. Yay, consider my complaint answered!

Here’s a picture of me last week:

Here’s a picture of me today:

Hehe, yeah, I shaved.

I’m probably one of the last people in the blogosphere to take advantage of this offer, but here’s my post to get myself upgraded to a Zooomr Pro account. They offer 4GB / month of upload capacity - double the Flickr limit - so maybe when I run out over there, I can switch to Zooomr?

Hey Zooomr guys, if you really want me to embrace the service, how about an import function from Flickr so I can store all my photos on your site? (I think that would quickly bust my 4GB monthly allotment)

Oh, and you really gotta buy zoomr.com if you really want people to be able to find your service

This past weekend, Rose and I went with a bunch of people from small group to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. As with any such event, there were of course a ton of people, lotsa traffic, and parking was a headache… soooo the Pumpkin Festival itself wasn’t so interesting. BUT, on our way home, we stopped by a massive straw maze and saw a sign for a pumpkin launcher and we knew we had to go check it out.

At first, we thought it would be a Lord of the Rings style catapult pumpkin launcher, so we were slightly disappointed when we just saw a large slingshot. But then we observed a few pumpkins being launched and we knew we had to try it. We bought some launching pumpkins…

And let ‘em fly!

Those pumpkins actually fly pretty far!

So after firing off a few pumpkins, we went to the straw maze. It was $5 / person ($18 for 4) and the lady at the door said it would take 30 minutes, so we figured it’d probably take 10. But since we were there, we decided to go in and run around.

All told, it took us about 45 minutes to get through the thing. It was much larger than we anticipated and it was actually a ton of fun. Dan, being an search engine engineer at A9, suggested a depth-first search algorithm. Clearly the people who constructed the maze were a bit smarter than that algorithm because it pretty much got us completely lost in less than 5 minutes. Eventually, we did make it out though (although we probably ran into every dead end in the entire maze).

Verdict: highly recommended!

Rose moved from Seattle down here to the Bay Area last weekend and I flew up to drive down with her. We rented a 16′ Penske truck and a tow dolly to move her stuff and her car. (A tow dolly is a half trailer type thing that hangs off the back of the truck which you put a car’s front wheels onto and it allows you to tow the car behind the truck.)

So we loaded up Rose’s stuff and attached her car to the back of the truck and started off to California last, last Friday (9/22). We were a bit weary of the tow dolly at first (we kept wondering if the car was still back there), but it seemed to be OK after the first few stops so we stopped worrying about it…

10 hours into the drive, Rose is driving the truck through Northern California and I’m asleep in the passenger seat when all of a sudden she wakes me up. “Mark! People keep driving by, flashing their lights, honking their horns, and pointing at the truck!”

We look back there and there’s flames and sparks shooting out the back of the truck. Uh oh. We pull over and find this:

Niiice. What you’re looking at is what was left of the tow dolly tire. It must’ve blown on the freeway, at which point with the weight of Rose’s car pushing down on it, it burst into flames and was literally shredded. Fortunately, Rose’s car was still attached to the tow dolly (although barely) and there was no noticeable damage to her car.

Worst part of the ordeal was that it took over 2 hours for Penske to send a repair guy to replace the tire. Argh >

Anyways, I didn’t really know that’s what a tire looked like on the inside. Here’s a closeup of the insides:

Best part: I ask the tire repair guy how this could’ve happened. He shrugs and says “you never know with these trailer tires. They just blow like this all the time.”

Well, I didn’t get to finish blogging about Singapore last night, so on to Day 2 in Singapore!

We woke up and went to Chinatown to walk around and pick up some food. We followed another great walking tour and saw a ton of sights including a street market, a temple, a mosque, and of course, a food court!

If you’re ever in Singapore Chinatown, I definitely recommend you check out the Maxwell food centre, and in particular, try the $2 Laksa and $4 sliced fish bee hoon (a fish noodle soup).

After filling up our stomaches, we went to Bugis street, which is another large shopping area. There’s a nice air conditioned mall called Bugis junction and there’s also a flea market style area with lots of little shops and a ton of local flair.

Also in the Bugis area is the Singapore National Library, which as it turns out is much cooler than it sounds. It’s got some pretty cool architecture, great views from the top floors, and even an outdoor courtyard area for people taking a study break.

After the library, we headed to Esplanade, a crazy double durian shaped structure that houses Singapore’s concert hall and theatre.

Inside Esplanade they’ve got some art pieces on display, a few restaurants, and a rooftop deck! If you’re in the area in the afternoon, the Japanese restaurant has a great happy hour deal (a bowl of udon noodles, a hand roll, and tea for $5 SGD… very tasty ).

Lastly, we saw the Merlion on the waterfront downtown… which is where I had my accident. But once again, it’s getting late so I’ll save that story for tomorrow

We spent 5 days in Thailand, which was just about enough to relax a little at the resort and get a good feel for Bangkok. Our next stop would be Singapore, where we would have 2 days and 2 nights; we could probably have used another day here in Singapore - we had an action packed time running around in taxis, the MRT, and buses.

Right after we got to Singapore and checked into our hotel, we rode the MRT to Little India. It was our first stop in Singapore and so we quickly introduced ourselves to the s’porean food court system

Next, we went on a walking tour through Little India - the guide brochure was provided for free by the Singaporean government

To finish the night, we walked around Orchard Rd - where our hotel was at. A pretty lively shopping area, even at night. There were street side vendors and the malls were open pretty late. Our first stop was to eat at Food Republic, a food court inside the Wisma Atria mall.

Then we did a little window shopping…

Finally, we got back to our hotel and saw this hilarious sign:

Like I said, action packed Check out the rest of the pictures from our first day in Singapore on my Flickr. I’ll be back tomorrow to blog on the rest of our Singapore stay; in the meantime, it’s bedtime over here in Hong Kong