Got a new HDTV
June 11th, 2008
The 27″ in my bedroom broke so we decided to get a new HDTV. Since Andy’s working for BestBuy right now, he does very decent discount. We got a 42″ Insignia 1080p LCD HDTV with 4 year warranty and a TV stand for $952. It would be $1350 without employee discount.
Old TV in bedroom
New TV in bedroom
TV in living room
Sony 50″ rear projection. We had this one for about 3 years.
Dodo’s Text Counter
May 30th, 2008
I needed a text counter at work. I searched around trying to find a jQuery plugin that fits the bill but I didn’t find anything. So I wrote one myself. Check it out 
It should be pretty flexible.
- Requires jQuery
- Define the maximum of characters the user may input
- May be applied to one or more input text or textarea fields
- Also disable the user from entering more characters after s/he reaches the maximum
The Storm Riders
May 11th, 2008
I was positively surprised to find the movie The Storm Riders on youtube decently dubbed. It’s one of the best Kung Fu movies I’ve seen. Real Hong Kong style. Way better than the new Forbidden Kingdom. No dis on Jet Li or Jackie Change but their new movie which I have seen in the theater is way too tuned down for the PG 13 rating and Americanized. I think it failed as a Kung Fu movie.
Plus The Storm Riders has way cuter actors like Ekin Chang and Aaron Kwok. Go watch it if you have nothing to do
The Storm Riders: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Iron Man
May 5th, 2008
If you haven’t seem the new Marvel movie Iron Man, you really should! We watched with some friends yesterday. It was highly entertaining and impressive. All these super hero movies are similar but this one definitely has its uniqueness. I love his humorous conversation with his robots. You cannot obviously question all the science to details in movies like this but I still wonder how he stayed alive in a burning iron suit LOL.
Tulip Time
May 2nd, 2008
I took a day off to go to the annual tulip festival in a local dutch village Pella. Although it was raining, we still had a fun time.
another reason why I love foobar2000
April 7th, 2008
I’ve been using foobar2000 as my media player for quite some time. It’s lightweight, highly customizable and uses little resource. Today while I was listening to some soothing music, I remembered back then I had a CD player that had a sleep function where you can set a timer to have it automatically turn off in 30 minutes. I thought would it be nice to do something like that with foobar since I leave my laptop on all the time by my bed. Sure enough, I didn’t have to look far, foobar’s got an awesome plugin foo_scheduler that does that and much more. It can perform many actions on a scheduled basis including, start, stop, lower volume, exit and even shutdown your computer. Alternatively this is the first thread I stumpled upon. It contains much valuable information for scheduling your computer.
花非花
March 26th, 2008
花非花，雾非雾。夜半来天明去。
来如春梦几多时？去似朝云无觅处。
小时候上语文课要背许多古诗。大多数是唐诗。前几年回国我特地买了一本《唐诗三百首》以为会学一些新诗。其实脑子里有印象的诗还是小时候讨厌背的东西。记忆最深的是这首白居易的《花非花》。这首诗对我来说很特别。它不是语文老师而是音乐老师教的。教它的目的是为了让我们学为这首诗写的歌。教之前老师让我们闭上眼睛，在我们脑海里打造了这首诗的弥朦境界。那时的我可能只有小学三年级。但我被催幻了被打动了。我仿佛真的进入了诗人的世外桃源。我想那是我对诗词的情窦初开吧。
