I think this is a very common thing: at the car rental counter, the clerk asks “do you want to buy the comprehensive insurance”, and/or buy the full tank of gas, so that you don’t need to fill up the car when you return it.
My answer is always, no. Except once I probably bought the gas when I was on a business trip, and the reason, was the trip before that one, my colleague and I tried to fill up the gas at the last minute, and rush to the airport terminal. We didn’t buy the gas for that one.
In America, we always need to buy the liability insurance for car/driving. Comprehensive insurance is required if we have car loans (the loan company or bank need that). I think the requirement is similar for the home insurance.
For rental car, I believe liability insurance from our own car transfers while comprehensive/collision don’t. For the latter, I do have a credit card that offers “primary insurance coverage” – basically means if applicable, the credit card issuer can pay for the damage of rental car. The card has an annual fee.
Self Insure
This March, we rented a violin for our younger daughter, as we plan her to take the violin lesson from April. The violin shop asked us maybe helpful to add the violin to the home insurance, or buy the insurance from somewhere. The violin is worth about $950, btw. My wife bugged me a few times about insurance. And I said we are self insured. Meaning, if our daughter accidentally damaged the violin, I will pay for it.
Years ago, I worked for a coal mining company, and the company self insures all employees health insurance too. They still have a health insurance company to administrator it, but the mining company takes all the risk. It was year 2012, and coal mining company’s deals with quite big amount of money, in terms of the equipment and mining side of the things. Note this has been changed in last 10+ years, as the natural gas replaced coal as the main load for power generation, and the renewable energy (wind, solar) grew significantly too.
Warren Buffett, who is both the greatest investor of our time, as well as an expert on insurance, explained the need about insurance at about 44 mins mark of the video (he talked about 5 minutes on the topic). Below are most quotes.
There are two reasons a company (or a person) needs to insurance. The main reason to buy insurance, is to protect yourself from the loss, the loss you are unable or unwilling to take or bear yourself, this could both be objective or subjective. Sometimes a manager could ; the second reason is the price of insurance is favorable to us.
YouTube: BRK 1995 annual shareholder meeting
What insurance do I have
I have a term life insurance. Bought in year 2011. It’s 15 years. I think it will be more expensive if I buy now – due to aging. At the time I bought the policy, my older daughter is one year old and my wife didn’t work outside home. Another reason is I was changing jobs, and the life insurance policy at work place cannot be carried over between jobs. A side note, after I left my 1st employer in the US, I learned from my former boss once at the Macy’s that one of my coworker died suddenly, and he was younger than me. To make things worse, in his benefits selection, he seems didn’t select the company paid life insurance policy (or in other words, he didn’t opt-in, there was no cost). It’s just overall a very tragic situation. That’s the main reason we need to have a life insurance on the bread-winner.
I have car insurance (comprehensive) and home owner insurance (mortgage requirement). The cars are paid off, but comprehensive insurance helps in the case if we got in car accident: this actually happened last year when our 2012 Camry was totaled, and the insurance company seems worked for us well. They raised the premium afterwards, and I just switched to new insurance co. One thing I personally recommend, is the roadside assistance and the rental car reimbursement option, if applicable. I use AAA for roadside assistance, and I also work from home (we have 2 cars, both WFH) and that’s why I don’t add “rental car reimbursement”.
Health insurance through employer. This is common in the US. Another option is Healthcare market place (Obama care).
Bonus question:Extended Warranty (EW)
Our current 2 cars (one Camry and one Sienna) are both preowned certified. One common question is do we buy the “extended warranty” from the 3rd party provider (dealer always pushes for this). I bought it for Sienna in year 2013 as I just wanted to leave. I thought it was probably $1,200 for 7 years (100,000 miles, whichever comes first). The only time I used it is for roadside assistance (I do have AAA too, but wanted to use the service from Extended Warranty once. If I had saved the money myself, I would probably paid off the cost associated with the squirrel (rodent). Last year, with the preowned Camry, the dealer offered EW again. I recall it has tiers, and the cheapest is over 7k, and I declined.
Reading Time: 9minutesAnyone knows what this is? It’s a punched card for computer in the early days.
As the old Chinese sayng goes, 下棋找高手，弄斧到班门 (baidu)。下棋找高手，弄斧到班门。—-中国科学院 || Basically one needs to get trained properly or work at a place that has some good technology and process so that he or she can really understand what’ the proper way to do the work, and work with people.
Besides knowing the “what”, “why” and “how”, a few other benefits (some are not that obvious) include the prestige comes with a brand name employer (let’s just say Mastercard), as well as the confidence as well as experience, that one will likely gain from working at a place that have outstanding engineers and people all around. Those are probably similar reasons that parents want send kids to good schools (from K-12 to college), as well. Personally I felt I gained most of my confidence in life, during my middle school years at Zhenhai Middle School.
Re: confidence (or nervousness or introvert/extrovert). Now I think about it more, I tend to believe this is probably both a person’s personality, as well as a person’s background (life experience). I know I mangled a lot of things together here. But I have observed a lot of people over my school, career and friends circle. One thing we can agree is confidence is quite important in life and work. Also, whenever possible, I encourage my kids, my significant other, my friends, my students or my colleagues to help their confidence.
Got right training at the beginning of the career
My own exp at the my 1st employer (Unigraphics Solutions, EDS PLM Solutions, UGS, Siemens Industry Software, same company the name change was due to the ownership and corp brand change), and later Mastercard seemed confirmed this Chinese saying. I learned much on software development while at the UGS. And later at Mastercard I learned about customer production support, production release and deployment, at other places it could be DevOps team or Site Reliability engineering type of work, at MC it’s called BizOps, and I also acted as tech lead role there.
In case you are wondering what exactly UGS does, after reading the Wikipedia entry here. I would say it’s a software company that was founded 10 years before Microsoft was founded in 1976, at one time created its own OS and hardware, and those folks know a thing or two about software and software development. At the very beginning of my career, I saw the “punched card” above at one of the spare room or storage room in year 2000/2001 when I was working there. That’s how the software was written and integrated then 🙂
Job Title
One thing I noticed there is it’s quite hard to be promoted to the “Senior Software Engineer” title at UGS. It needs both years of work, and the recommendation of colleagues. Note it was in year 2000 till 2008. In other words, unlike the job title nowadays, “Senior Software Engineer” really means someone who is senior and has a lot of experience. Nowadays though, in many places, big or small, the lead/staff software engineer, principle software engineer are fairly common. So there is that. At one time, I ever got into a discussion with two “Senior Director of Software Engineering” at Ascension, regarding the difference of lead vs staff software engineer, and my preference for lead vs staff. Maybe we should all go with the “Member of Technical Staff” which is invented in the Bell Labs (I assume).
The next job I would like to have, if I decide to do more serious engineering work anyway – probably some company like Apple, or more likely a remote friendly company who is a both serious/meaningful and fun/rewarding place, since I don’t have any intention to move to the bay area or Austin, where the engineering center of Apple is.
My observations on different workplaces in the area
Without that being said, I did worked at quite a few places in the St. Louis area, mostly as full time employee, but sometimes as IT contractor, and I believe it’s probably a decent idea to share my own observations and experiences. Note I intended this to be a straightforward (or honest) opinion from me, as practical as possible. You may refer to glassdoor.com or indeed.com to get others’ opinions. Disclaimer: when I evaluate a company, please note I am not evaluate its employees. For the most part I am talking about the culture and the management style.
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Ameren: I interviewed and got an offer there once. But unfortunately the offer didn’t come as speedy as the one below. And at the time I already accepted Ascension’s offer. Later I got one more interview (probaly in year 2019) but that one didn’t yield an offer. If there is 后悔药，I may go there 🙂 One of the few commercial companies in the area that offers pension and I believe their pension is solid. We are not ditching electricity, even with all the EVs, right?
Ascension: they are the parent org of the largest catholic hospital chain in the US. In terms of all hospital chains, I think they are distant 2nd behind Kaiser Permanente whose presence is mostly in California and west coast. Ascension’s presence is mostly around mid-west, Texas and east coast from New York to Florida. I worked there for about 2.5 years. I should probably stick around a bit longer to make sure all my 401k (403b to be precise) vested. In general healthcare is not the most agile or nimble place to work, and Asc is no exception. In the time I was there, and after I left, I heard some crazy stories in terms of the corporate strategy shift, hiring/firing, and so on. The direct reason I left Ascension was I got a bit tired of my architect job, and felt I like go back to do more coding.
This is one of the projects I have some contribution (not much direct contribution, more like a caretaker, or pseudo type of role). The company probably spent millions of $ on the app, but I noticed it never really went to production. It was an executive’s pet project. The project has some dependencies on back end from a vendor. A new software development manager was hired before I left, and dare I say his performance testing plan (or scenario) was not realistic either. That being said, the dependencies on vendor for web service and data are also a big unknown at the time.
Btw, this reminds me it the failure rate on healthcare project is high, another one is MyMercy at Mercy that I worked on in year 2014 and 2015. One question I have: what’s the percentage of Software Dev project failure rate in the healthcare industry? Do we have any survey or data?
Bayer (formerly Monsanto): I interviewed there twice. No offer. One employee and one recruiter left me impressions. After the 1st interview (more than 10 years ago), the employee pointed out a silly mistake in my resume, it was a typo. None the less, very few people in America will point out your mistake, mostly because they don’t care or they feel not polite to do it. But no feedback means no improvement. The 2nd time, the recruiter Ray is a great person. Bayer (formerly Monstanto) is the pioneer in terms of AWS adoption in the area. Their CTO left for another company in the area (RGA – Reinsurance Group of America).
Charter/Spectrum: their main IT office is now in the Riverport Drive, it’s actually the very 1st building I started work for Unigraphics back in year 2000. I got one interview there (forgot which year). The tech lead (or architect) was pretty much a snob (over the years, I have done quite a few interviews, on both sides of the table. I did many tech interviews when I was working for Asc). I recall another similar situation at Reuters back in year 2009: a guy was quite arrogant there as well.
Centene: another healthcare place, this one is Medicaid insurance and some Obama care. I interviewed there twice: different time and for different positions (dev at their Chesterfield/Town and Country office via recruiter, and DevOps at Clayton). Overall I felt both teams are quite arrogant and obviously there was no match. The 1st time they left me there, when I was supposed to meet a director. But the director never showed up. At the same interview I learned a bit about how they handle multi-tenant for their core app (Medicaid management), essentially they setup one code and one DB (Oracle) for one state. They probably have a dozen or 20+ states and thus they have 12 or 20 code bases for each state. Obviously in a company like MC this would be laughable and will not work for the loyalty platform I worked on: we have way more than 20 customers. Incidentally at Asc, we did one database for one customer for the Covid Fast Screen app for our customers too (one code base though).
Later (last year or two) a friend (a former colleague) asked me whether I was interested in their team at Centene. I politely declined 🙂 Also Centene, along with Express Script and MasterCard, used to be on the top 3 hard working (or expect you to work hard) workplaces in the area. The rest of the places are mostly reasonable: 9 to 5 means 9 to 5. I worked at MC and I can say most positions involves some work: or some politics. Btw, regarding overtime, I talked a bit here, and also please refer to this Tweet (in Chinese) which is line with my view.
Cigna (formerly Express-Script): did I say it’s one of the hard working places in the area? The rumor I heard from a friend is at one time they pushed him (or his coworker) to work 120 hours per week. Horrendous place even for a few weeks, right? The reputation may have changed since the Cigna acquisition. I never worked there or interviewed there. But I almost got one interview there once (in year 2019?).
Emerson Electric (or the new co formed after White Rodgers, their former climate control division): I applied there once through recruiter (the White Rodgers or Sensi division, now called Copeland). That’s about it.
Enterprise (now official brand is Enterprise Mobility): it seems they don’t treat contractors very well. I worked there at year 2013 as contractor and testify 🙂 I was told it’s going to be contract to hire, which is also my intention and expectation. At one time, I even got a manager. Note at Enterprises contractor doesn’t have a real manager (other than the person who approves the timesheet and thus the paycheck). But the project got cancelled in the middle, the only little nice thing is they gave me two weeks notice. In the US, it’s common practice employee gives 2 weeks notice before leaving, but the employers usually don’t. They could give severance pay etc., but they usually ask the employee to go immediately.
I work for them as employee now (different divisions inside the company), and I think they treat employees decently well. Hopefully a decent place to wind down one’s career and so on (maybe I should delete this comment 🙂 I think Reed Hastings of Netflix summarized this “family vs sports team” for workplace very well 🙂
Equifax: onsite interviewed there once (2018). No offer.
Government and government contractors: the federal government, from the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Federal Reserve, to USPS, to Boeing and their vendors. No comments. Never interviewed or worked in that sector. My gut feeling is they are similar to Enterprise, from organization point of view (big bureaucratic).
Mastercard: probably one of the highest paid place in the area (if we considering the bus and 401k match). On the other hand, you know the money is not free, right? Expect more stress from the work (both technical work and politics). Once I worked 2 out of 4 days in a thanksgiving break. That alone was the direct reason I got into fight with my wife. Money cannot buy everything. Remember their ads slogan: There are some things that money can’t buy; for everything else, there’s Mastercard.
Mercy: they pay better than BJC, may be similar to Ascension. It has similar problems as Ascension. Although my boss and coworkers are all good people.
Panera Bread: interviewed there twice, neither yield an offer. Should I say they are snob (I mean the corporate people, not the store people). The 2nd time interview was done via Zoom, as it was during pandemic. Their CTO is from Mastercard and it seems he brought over quite a few people over (is it legal?). Store people are all nice, and once I even saw the interviewer and their former CEO and founder Ronald M. Shaich at their Sunset Hills store.
Remote or WFH: this is a viable option now, because there are many companies that welcome remote workers in recent years, initially due to the pandemic, and now it’s become a norm for many companies now. Some companies that are remote friendly include Affirm: maybe they are looking for people from Square and Mastercard? 🙂
Siemens: I heard in recent years they are not as good as 23 years ago when I started there. It seems they are all work from home now and the Riverport Drive office (built in year 2001) is on the market. And it seems they rarely hire any entry level people in recent years.
Square Inc. (Block): the payment company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey. I actually interviewed for a DevOps (SRE) position a few years ago. A decent company, and the payment industry is a good place to be in terms of job stability and pay (think Mastercard :-).
Unidev: my suggestion is don’t go there. I went there due to quite unique circumstance 🙂 They do have one fantastic person though (hint: her current title is “Secretary & Treasurer”).
Unigroup: I worked as contractor there. They treated contractors better than Enterprises.
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Bonus questions:
Is it okay to step back or go down career ladder in one’s career?
The answer is yes. You do what’s suitable for you and your family. Listen to your heart, and equally important or not more, listen to your spouse or better half 🙂 In fact I heard from one of my favorite (former) coworkers and he did that once in her career. And yours truly made this move in year 2021, too.
Also it seems the starting salary for the entry level position in the area doesn’t go up much. My starting salary for software engineer in fall 2000 was $56,000. And nowadays I think the average is probably 60 k or 70k. If we consider inflation in last 20+ years, the starting salary didn’t grow. That’s probably many young people left for Silicon Valley, Seattle, Dallas, or Austin for jobs.
Reading Time: 5minutesThe four pieces medal for 2019/2020 SnowBall series: it’s 40 years anniversary of the series
I like to run when I was in middle school, for two reasons. I was not too bad at running, in fact I won a few track medals for 200 meters and 4×100 meters relay. I failed pretty bad in the 800 meters race (in my grade, one grade has 4 classes). But I am probably one of the fastest running 800 meters in my class, and I felt good about it 🙂
But I don’t always like being woken up and run in the winter mornings. It’s called 早锻炼。I don’t always dislike it either.
And 早锻炼 is still encouraged in college, although it’s mostly involves wake up, walk near the soccer field, wave to the 学生干部 who does rollcall, before heading off to student canteen for breakfast. Once, I recall our counselor who is a lady and she was only 4 years older than us, and she came to our dorm in the morning and tried to wake us up and go to the morning jog, and I was not up that day. The teacher’s name is 张圆圆, and I regarded her as a big sister: at one time I recall she asked me if I know another mutual friend of ours (and her dance partner). But unfortunately I learned in recent years that she passed away due to illness.
My weight gain over the years
I think back in year 2011, I hiked in the trails in the Power Valley with a friend. It was at that time that I suddenly realized I was out of shape after I looked at the photo of myself. I was 40 years old then, and our older daughter was born one year earlier.
It took me some more years to start running and joggling in the hope of control my weight. In year 1997, when I came to the USA, I probably weighed 105 pounds. Fast forward to year 2002, I gained some weight, probably at about 135 pounds. I lost some by doing Tae Kwon Do at World Martial Arts Academy between year 2002 and 2005 (mainly 2002 to 2004). I went to the location at Telegraph road, near highway 55 and 270.
Fast forward 10+ years. I finally decided to give running a try in year 2017. It went to the J for swimming sometimes, but I gained some more weights, probably at 155 lbs (pounds). I recall one of my college friends could not recognize me when I was in Shanghai in summer 2016 (both due to my aging and weight gain). I could barely run 200 meters in year 2017.
Frostbite series is organized by the St. Louis track club, and they have a short and long series, and has 5 races spanning over 10 weeks (2 weeks between races). The race is always held in the Forest Park on a Saturday morning.
Snowball series has a distance slightly longer than the Frostbite short series. It’s also held on Saturday mornings. The day doesn’t conflict with Frostbite. So in theory a person can do both series. I ran Snowball series before pandemic.
Races I have run over the last 5 or 6 years
I run mostly school, community related races; including once girlsontherun with my old daughter (when she was 2nd grader?)
The only race I won something (JCC labor day 5k run, it seems the record below has some error?)
Again I did the two series I mentioned above: the Snowball (before pandemic) and Frostbite series (post pandemic).
The longest distance I ran is half Marathon: I ran 4 times so far, once right before pandemic shutdown (03/07/2020) and it was also the only time I ran with 2 hours 30 mins. I signed up the same race for March 2024, and my 1st goal is to beat the 3/22/2022 time (12:56 minute per mile). A bonus is to run the race under 2.5 hours.
My races results over the years
Athlinks (google social login, goes back to year 2018). Results are shown below. This seems included most of my races. The most important column is probably the pace: mile per minute.
page 1
page break
page 2
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page 3
Two more websites that have my race results: both are not as comprehensive as Athlinks above.
raceroster (my FB social login, goes back to year 2019)
That probably summarized most of my races. I have many memories from races, mostly are fun ones.
Incidents
I saw two incidents happened right before my eyes at Creve Coeur park. Once in the snow ball series, the snow was melting, and a small portion of the paved trail (under the 364 extension bridge) still had quite a bit of water (maybe a foot in terms of the depth). When I ran there, I was thinking: gosh, now I am like the horse that had to cross the water. And I saw a gentleman who may be a bit older than me, fell, and blood coming from his legs. The full length of the paved trail is about 3.6 or 3.8 mile, so all in all, this is not too bad. I don’t think the runner’s life is in danger in anyway. It’s just looked a bit scary when we ran through the 10 meters or 20 meters of the water.
Another time Also at the Creve Coeur lake park, the half marathon, a gentleman, who seems in his 70s, fell down right before my eye at about 11 miles mark. Fortunately it’s right the 1st aid station is, and people rushed to help.
Last but not least, if you only interested in walking or hiking, I have a blog post on St. Louis Area Nature Trails.
Thinking it may be helpful for me to explain all this, as I never heard about those coming from China to the USA in late 1990s. Maybe the employers are doing those in China nowadays too, but at my time, I never heard about it.
Background Check
There are background check, and sometimes there are employment history verification etc. Nowadays background check usually has two approaches: 1) The government database check, e.g., before someone get firearms, they usually need to run a check; 2) The second approach is via a commercial company (database) check. I did both. Actually recently I just did one when I am volunteering for the school.
Example 1: there are companies that do background check for employers. such as this one called Clariti (now it’s a part of GHRR). You may read this clariti background check reddit thread if needed. It seems to me they are mostly trying to verify past employment history as well. Note in the reference check, they could do similar check, if it’s just a call from HR. I do follow the instructions carefully when I do this sort of thing. Below is copy paste of some of the instructions.
Complete all fields. Use your legal name and information and add any maiden or previous names to the additional names section. Please provide all addresses where you have lived for the past 7 years. Review your answers for accuracy and spelling. If you have any questions or special circumstances you should call our office at before submitting this request.
My comment: sometimes I doubt the effectiveness of this sort of background check. But we still need to respect the process though, as this is quite common step before some employers can formally onboard someone.
Example 2: I did this one MACHS Fingerprinting Background Checks website twice as a requirement for my volunteer work for Ladue School. I think first time they came to LMS and fingerprinted people on site. Mostly recently I went to this place called IdentoGo (it looks like a private company, but they work with government agencies such as FBI for background check). I go there, did my fingerprints, and they sent my information to their backend for more processing. And they also sent back information to the Ladue School on the 2nd day. It seems they are pretty efficient in terms of processing.
Reference Check
I have done reference check for colleagues and friends from time to time. For that purpose, I usually make sure I get an updated resume, and also ask my colleague or friend what should I say (I usually say nice things).
Drug Test
For my 1st job, I did the drug test via the hair sample. More common drug test is via urine sample. I did urine sample a few times in my career, all for pre-employment drug testing. Again the need for drug test also varies by employer.
A while ago, in year 2010, I got this rule from a friend. My friend spends most of time doing IT/software contractor work, long term contract though. I asked him “how long should I stay at this place because there is a senior guy seems doesn’t like me”, to be precise, he was trying to get me fired. My friend told me the rule of thumb below.
Try to stay at full time (employee, or permanent) position for one year. Stay at a contractor position for 6 month or more. Some old fashioned people may call out you as “hopper” or “job hopper” if you have a lot short stints in your resume.
And below is my recent observation and my quick thoughts. When interviewing for my current job, my big boss (my manager’s manager) did raise the tenure (short work stints) and I was prepared. “see, boss, I worked for this credit company for almost 4 years”. And I also worked for my 1st employer for 8 years. All are facts, but I stayed not just due to loyalty 🙂
#majorsObservation#onCareer: noticed an old friend, who went the manager track. Not many Chinese people are people managers instead of individual contributors. But I also noticed his last 3 jobs are all shorter than 2 years. My gut feeling is even 2 year is too short
I think the below tweet (or X) summarized it well. In other words, our day job is to bring the bacon (or bread) home. 用中文讲就是养家糊口。I am discussing a related question (overtime 加班）more below.
It’s not worth it. Ideally we should avoid overtime as much as possible.
Work smarter, not harder. –quote one of my former coworker at Unigraphics (UGS, EDS PLM Solutions, Siemens Industry Software)
I have been in the US for a bit over 25 years now. From time to time, I need to go overtime for the work. From my early days in the graduate school doing research for the professor, to work as progammer for my day job. Most of times it’s either voluntary, or I have no better other choices.
One night it’s already past 10 pm. But there is some urgent work or expectation for me to “solider on”. I was trying to fix some problems as a result from the security scan.
Later, once, I still went to work when I was coughing pretty bad. Eventually I went to urgent care due to that. It took me a while to recover from that.
我记得当我接到华工的入学通知书时，还是悲喜交加。主要是担心上学的行程较不方便：我在长江轮船的博客上也有提到。四年以后，我试图通过考研再试试上海某大学，还是因数学考试没有准备好而再次失败。没有第三次，第三次我来到了密苏里大学罗拉分校（现在已改名密苏里理工大学）。看来我跟理工大学有缘。有一个原因可能是因为我们那时候有一个说法：学好数理化，走遍天下也不怕。Another reason is I was under the impression having a profession is good to make a living, something along these lines (In the blog post, How To Survive As An IT Contractor? I mentioned my maternal grandma and (actually my maternal uncle, my mom’s brother) think it’s good to be an engineer.
同时我一个人可能把理工大学给用完了，我的十三岁的大女儿现在是没有上理工大学获学工程的打算。当然女大十八变，我希望她将来至少在数学和计算机方面是相对较强的。(Update 09-20-2025) This is no longer accurate, I think she is now planning to study in Engineering, as she believe that she can make a difference in climate change by majoring/focusing on engineering. Remember the old Chinese saying “女大十八变“？I think it’s all good, btw.
Some friends asked me about the year end tax moves, such as the tax loss selling etc. Here is a good article on the topic – Tax-Loss Harvesting: What It Is, How It Works. My take on tax: this is at least secondary maybe even more down the priority list. The No. 1 priority in the personal finance/investing is don’t lose your money. Ideally we don’t want any type of loss. Tax loss is applicable only after we lose the money during investing. If we don’t have loss in the 1st place, would it be better?
But I do appreciate the mindset of 亡羊补牢。Or salvage whatever we can (not exact translation).
Another question is what to contribute if we need to contribute to the regular IRA account. The latter is an easier question. The deadline to fund IRA is actually usually the tax day (the middle of April), so we still have time. As to investments, I only recommend the S&P 500 index funds and I explained it more here.
With the enhancement of the 529 plans by the law passed by congress in the recent years, it becomes a tool for retirement as well. Read this for more details.
The thing I taught my 13 year old the other day, is the 12/6 compounded interest rule (snowball effect), an investment that grows 12% annually, in 6 years it will double. From 2010 to 2023, since I invested in S&P 500 index fund, and the S&P 500 index did well since 2010, the money I put in quadrupled. It was a small amount of money. But the compounded interest concept is important and we saw it in action.
Another thing many working people can consider is the HSA account. I heard it has even more benefits for retirement compared to the 529. So something to read about, think about and do something about 🙂
Like many good things in life, don’t rush it. Take the time, savor the moment, think it through, before jump into the market and make big moves: Rome is NOT built in a day. So was the business empire such as Berkshire Hathaway, or the GPU, AI chip designer nVidia. They are built in decades.
Hindsight is 20/20
Look at the about 1,137% or 11 times gain of $CVNA. Below is the YTD chart of Carvana vs CarMax ($KMX), Tesla ($TSLA) and S&P 500 index. But the million dollar question is: who bought and hold the $CVNA this year (until today)?
97年夏天我第一次来美国，我的飞机航班是东航上海虹桥(SHA) 到洛杉矶 (LAX, China Eastern MU 583), 当时好像用的是麦道11(Btw, 93年好像有一次事故），再从洛杉矶坐TWA航班飞圣路易斯(STL)。我在洛杉矶机场犯了一个不大不小的错误。我当时很想上厕所，急着从机场（入境处和海关）出来，结果一出来就拿错了行李。等我发现我拿错了，我已经出了海关，我赶紧用我的英语跟美国机场的工作人员解释，还好他听懂了，让我进去跟东航的地勤人员说上话，交换了行李（取到了我自己的行李）。这个箱子是当时上海第一百货的牌子，估计我们都是在一百买的，这个箱子实用也较便宜。这一次是我的口语第一次在美国派到用场。
PS: 大概在2005/6年在圣村的机场，又碰到一件类似的事情，这一次是Diplomat的灰色硬壳箱。对方把我的箱子拿到家以后，没有多想，直接撬锁。后来她通过航空公司陪了我大概是五十还是一百块钱(USD)：她没有拿我的东西，就是赔我的坏掉的箱锁。那个箱子今年回国才退休。Also: I have other stories with the diplomat luggage (1 and 2) back in 2007 when I tried to replace a broken wheel. So this one really last for a long time: at least from 2007 to 2023. I think I bought it before 2007 too.
Learning Englishin Missouri S&T at Rolla
Note the adults tend to stay or social with her/his own ethic group or friends, and use the 1st language he/she is familiar with. When I was a graduate student in Rolla more than 20 years ago, I used to have an American professor, and he made a comment which I agree: American grad students stay with the Americans, Chinese students stay with the Chinese, and Indian students stay with Indians.
I have Indian born advisor, and I talked to Indian born graduate students. One nice thing is one fellow graduate student sometimes corrected my English, and that really helped. Not many people would correct or point out. Btw, that particular grad student is now a technology VP at a credit rating agency.
At one time, I was able to translate for the professors during a meeting. I think the fellow graduate student is from Africa and he has some accent, but it’s not too hard to guess or figure out.
Host family When I was new to Rolla, I got to learn the Stoltz family through the international office’s host family program. And they helped my English (via conversations), and get familiar with the America culture in many aspects. I still remember, the dinners, the trips to the Governor’s Manson, to Branson and the Xmas gifts.
Fraternity
At one time because I live with American undergrad everyday, and listen to their talking daily, I felt English is almost like “my native language”. Also once my “big brother” told me: you lived in a quite unique fraternity. And I agree: in the beginning of my stay there, I rode bike from school to the fraternity house every day. When the weather was bad I would call the house for help, and my brothers never failed to pick me up. That includes the rides in the snow days too.
I retook the English test again a few years later: got a “fair” grade from another Indian born professor.
TV and Movies are also a very important source of education for my Oral English. Back in those days it was mostly the Blockbuster videos, and just movies on the TV. Now it’s mostly streaming mostly from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. American middle schools and high school tv 📺 or movies 🎥 High School: Gilmore girls (Netflix) High School: Breakfast club (I watched via Amazon Prime, free) College: back to school 🏫 (Amazon, for a fee)
Holiday themed movies
Love Actually (a classic, watch it on Netflix before 12/31/2023)
Romantic series: the Virgin River (Netflix, the series 5 just debuted and the last episode has holiday theme/Christmas celebration)
Other comedies:
Seinfeld
Friends
No Hard Feelings (Jennifer Lawrence, new on Netflix)
NPR
Most listened programs: morning edition, all things considered, market place, planet money and ted radio hour.
Listened in the past, enjoyed but no longer available or no longer listen much due change of taste or programming: Diane Rhem show, Fresh Air (Terry Gros), Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Weekend Edition.
I taught in China. Many years ago in SH. Failed. Will talk more about that exp. later, hopefully 🙁
When I was new to Rolla, I failed in the Teaching Assistant (TA) English test – later I tried to practice oral English with a English teacher during lunch (once a week). I didn’t teach when at Rolla (again because I flunked the spoken English test), and had to look for RA (research assistant) job in the school. Later on I taught in Abacus Rolla, to a few fellow grad students, and I did okay. It was friendly environment too.
This fall I started teaching graduate course at Webster U. 韦伯斯特大学客座教授（其实就是兼职 adjunct professor 🙂 Couple funny things:
I was nervous before doing this, but my wife and 13 year old daughter were quite nervous too;
I think it’s giving me some energy interacting with younger folks (all graduate students are younger than me). I do interact with my kids quite a bit too: to be precise more than interacting with them, or Uber-ing them around. But most kids will eventually grow up and live on their own. That’s where interacting with young folks becoming more important: I believe that’s one reason Warren Buffett likes to teach at school sometimes, or hosting the MBA students at his company’s HQ or at the annual shareholder meeting. Also the BRK meeting, plus Charlie’s Daily Journal Co and past Wesco shareholder meetings allow both of them to interact with many people, including many young people too. That’s one secret sauce of their longetibity.
For hiking or walking. Some are paved, while others are not. By nature I mean there are trees etc. around the trail. I am adding difficulty levels (categories) for hiking or walking. By easy, I mean it’s suitable for family. By moderate, I mean, the old or the young may have some challenge complete the whole trail due to distance, or the surface.
Easy
Gentry Park at Bridgeton: paved
Malcolm Terrace Park: some nature walk, 1 mile round trip from the pavillion (the longer loop).
Millennium Park: paved.
Stacy Park: some nature walk, newly installed in last few years.
Venable Park: full name is Dr. Phillip Venable Memorial Park.
Warson Park: Stacy Park: some nature walk, newly installed in last few years.
Chesterfield central park: all paved
Creve Coeur Lake (paved), the loop is about 3.6 miles. Gets popular in nice days (weather). Note many St. Louis county parks have the exercises equipment or station along the trail, sometimes my kids would like to play with them during the walk. The only thing we need to be careful is: sometimes an equipment could be broken – stay away from it. Don’t attempt to work on the broken equipment, and got hurt (then sue the county park division 🙂
Powder Valley: mixed paved vs gravel. There are a few short distance trails.
Boot Leg Trails at Creve Coeur Lake: note this is a trail sometimes the bikers riding bikes. Most of them are mindful of the hikers, but in general try not to listen to AirPods (especially with the noise cancelling features) so that you don’t get hit by a bike. I think the Lost Valley in St. Charles are like that too.
Quneey Park: this along with the Boot Leg, are probably two popular longer trails in the St. Lous county. I recall I ran once at the park during the SnowBall series a few years ago (maybe year 2017 or 2018?). There are two popular winter run series in the STL area, the other one is Frost Bite. I am running the latter series last year and this year. Both are good. I had quite some memories over the years from the Snowball series, including once, had to run briefly in the Creve Coeur lake (paved) trail in the melted snow water: one gentleman fell unfortunately, and that’s the reason I remembered.
Lost Valley: St. Charles. We did a large portion of the trail during the rock runner morning run. Below is quote from Andy K. who is the organizer of Rock Runner
Technical Level Yellow as the trail includes a variety of the following: single track, gravel road, creek crossings, dirt and semi rocky trails, switch-backs, moderate climbs and descents
For the History Buffs among us, here is a great link with tons of information and pics surrounding the unfortunate events in the 1940’s in the surrounding area of the park. Lost Valley area history
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Mastodon: Jefferson County
More nature trails
I also maintain a Google doc that has more nature trails in the area. I intend to maintain that google doc as time goes. Probably hike (re-hike) some of those trails too.
During 2020 to 2022, we (as a family, many times with friends) hiked quite a few places, especially in the year 2020 and 2021 (due to pandemic, I guess the moms were worried about kids’s well beings, and they don’t like kids glue their eyes to the iPads all day). Unfortunately “gluing to iPads or computer” is the new normal now with the pandemic is largely behind us 🙁
In Summer 2022 I also joined the Rock Runner by Fleet Feet and got to hike or ran in some of the area nature trails.
PS: AllTrails has a nice website and app for the trails in the US. I used their paid app in couple years and they allow the map to downloaded so that even in the trails (a lot of times we don’t have reliable cell data), we can still have the map and GPS.
再过几年，如果不出意外(knock on the woods)，我会送我的老大去上大学。希望是一所她理想中的学校。今年是我大学毕业30周年。也就是说我是34年前（也就是1989年夏天）开始去上大学的。我家在宁波，我的大学在武汉。那时候国内火车没有现在那么发达。但是那时候有轮船，有客运的海轮和长江轮船。宁波到上海一般是坐海轮或是火车，上海（十六铺码头）到武汉（汉口，忘了几号码头了）有长江轮。大学生坐火车有半票，轮船没有这个优惠。火车要相对快一些，但是有时候（很多时候）会没有座位。轮船较慢但是有床位可以睡觉。可以说各有利弊。其实还有飞机，宁波到武汉有运七(Wiki, Baidu))的飞机，很可能是螺旋桨的飞机。我没有坐过（因为机票更贵），但是我有镇海中学的同学坐过。
总的来说，坐船比坐火车还是舒服很多。因为火车，尤其在春运期间，不仅没坐的位置，有时连站的位置也没有。我以前在这两个博客文章里也讲过, search for “train” (blog post 1, blog post 2)。我记得，有一次，我从宁波回武昌，从南昌转车，经株洲，最后到武昌，总共大概站了十几个小时。那时候是绿皮的火车。我记得有一段时间，我站在一个东阳到武汉大学上学的师姐（88级），她给了我一个苹果，削了皮的。
