Category: Life

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Fun Life

Rich Dad Poor Dad

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Tomorrow is Father’s day. My parents are wonderful parents, they did all they can to support me and my brothers’ education, under difficult circumstances. But everyone has his/her limit, my dad is no exception. I think from “personal finance” point of view, my dad is a good saver, but he does not know much about investing (that’s understandable because when he was young there were no stocks, bonds). He does not like debt (even borrow from relatives); and he does not like risk either. Thus I don’t need to worry him buying Chinese stocks these days. Good.  

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Fun Life

Front Bumper Problem

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(Update June 6) The bumper is on the way now. It’s from: USAUTOPARTS NETWORK, 17150 S. MARGAY AVE, CARSON CA90746, as shown from agsystems. Not UPS or Fedex.  

(Original June 5) No I have not involved in car accident or anything. I merely demaged the front bumper because of my own carelessness: in the parking lot. Last time when I did the demage to the left side, I fixed it by putting a washer underneath and fastened it. But this time I demaged the right side. I tried the same trick but it did not work. So I went to the bodyshop. The quote is $825 (minimum) for replacement and paint (include labor).

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China Life

Education: a Universal Problem

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When I was in Shanghai in March, I watched a special program on China-CBN (Di Yi Cai Jing) talking about “school for migrant workers’ kids”. Not surprisringly, the schools’ condition usually are much inferior to same level schools attended by “city kids”. The Shanghai Municipal Goverment gave 60 m Yuan this year for the “migrant kids’ school”. This is nice, but not too enough to cover all the kids, because they are millions of migrants workers in Shanghai, and I believe there are at least one million kids attending those schools (so roughly 60 Yuan per kid).

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Life

Tragedy in Virginia Tech

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By now we all know what happened in Virginia Tech, a big public university with good engineering reputation in Blacksburg, Virginia. Although many people are really angry at “how can this happened again, even after the Columbine”, I think right now the proper thing to do is: give our thoughts and prayers to the people lost their loved ones. After all, life is the most precious thing.

I never visited Virginia Tech, but I visited Richmond, the capital of Union, a few years back. I did like the hills and natural scenes there.    

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Life

Second Opinion

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These days the health care system, and the hospitals in China are under a lot critism. I believe the system got problem. There are some bad apples among doctors, and other people who are supposed to take care of patients rather than “take advantage of” them. Read this story from Wang Jianshuo if you have the patience. Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident.

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Business Life

How Much Have I Changed in 6 Years?

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I have started working for about 6 years. Although I worked for the same employer and stayed in the same city, I can tell some of my changes in all these years.

First is hobbies. I used to be crazy about the cars. I can tell the most cars’ make and model on the street, except some classic models in 50s and 60s. I spent a lot of time on the web reading all the reviews, checking out cars in the dealers’ parking lot. And once I even bought and returned a car. We all know returning things to stores is relatively easy in the States, but returning cars is not, and I highly recommend readers not do that. This hobby faded away since I bought my condo, and I started looking more carefully about my personal finance situation. I think I still like the new car smell, but if I have to take a loan with interest to buy it, I won’t.

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Life Stocks

Affordable Luxury in the United States

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I first heard about this “affordable luxury” term when I bought my Nissan Altima GLE, with sun roof and leather seat, about 6 years ago. The Nissan salesman told me Altima is an “affordable luxury” car. By that he meant the car has the features I mentioned above, plus alloy wheel (looking good), and the price is affordable (MSRP $22015, I got it for $18789 after $1400 rebate).

In recent years I feel this affordable luxury concept has penetrated the consumer markets very well. Here are just a list of things I think can be applied this flag (I may update this list from time to time).

Youth Apparel: Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters, Aéropostale, and Urban Outfitters. To be honest, I can not tell too much difference among the “A” stores, but Urban is more for college kids because I felt back to fraternity once I visited store.

IMG_4203

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Fun Life

Are Human Beings Usually Over Worried?

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“Over-worry” is probablly not a good word to describe the Americans because if you go to malls these days, you know why: people are shopping like everything is free. Just kidding. I do think the consumer spending of developed nations especially the US is a big driver for the economy growth in developing countries such as China. Holiday shopping in the US means millions jobs in China: from engineers to migrant workers; from Fedex to UPS; from iPod to Shoes…America is an optimistic nation and American consumers will put everything on credit card. This is good, except everything should have a limit.

But I am talking about the other extreme today: the over worry or over reaction to some new unknown phenomena. I remember before year 2000, we were all so worried about the “Y2K bug” in computers and put billions of dollars into information technology, software upgrade(a lot of Indian IT firms grew out of this Y2K scare). When Jan 1 2000 finally arrives, the planes still fly as usual, and eBay still works,…but no one questioned whether the money spent on Y2K is worth or not.

A few years ago, year 2002/3, the US economy was in recession while the real estate was flying high, people started to get nervous: housing bubble! Sell your house now! Well, the bubble last at least until 2005/6, and the real estate bubble is only seen in over heated area such as CA, NY, Boston, Vegas and Phoenix.

Back to my favorite topic, the stocks. This Feburary, Crocs, the funky footwear (for summer) company, did IPO and some “experts” started saying “stay away from the stock CROX, it’s a fad won’t last”. Well, the stock almost doubled in Nov. When I went to malls these days, I saw people buying this thing like crazy.

This remind me the word at the tower of UT-Austin: you shall seek the truth and the truth will make you free. To be honest I worried about my stocks after I bought it from time to time, the only thing I am doing now is learn more about the financials, business of the companies.

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Life

Taekwondo Kids

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I remember there is a movie called “Karate Kids”, but I am not talking about that; I am going to talk about the kids in my Taekwondo classes. Since I joined the local Taekowndo club, I have seen many kids, and what impressed me most is not the kid who got black belt at the age of 8; on the contrary, I remember the promotion testing the most. Every two months the school will have a promotion test, during which the white belt will test for yellow belt, yellow for green, and so on. One of the testing requirements is “breaking the board”, for the kid it’s a very thin and small wood board. But sometimes some kids are scared about this and just could not break it; the instructor would come up with all kinds of encouraging words, and helped the kids. Sometimes I felt even if a kid just touch the board a little, the instructor could fold (and thus break) the board. Although I have not tried it.   

Today I saw a little girl did exactly that. Her kick is “jump side kick”; she would run, and then just stop when she reach the board, in other words she does not have any speed or power when she get there. My instructor, did the usual thing except “fold” the board. Finally the kid made a touch and break it.

I think similar to the “breaking board”, a lot things are not  as hard as they look when we try. Sometimes all it takes is just a “touch”. On the other hand, if we don’t try to “touch”, we don’t have any chances.  

Tae Kwon Do

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Life Technology

Instant Message Scandal

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OK, I will take a break from the stock lesson today. I am going to talk about the TV media here. I bet president Bush doesn’t like what he sees on TV these days, not just daily casualties in Iraq and Afganistan, and the conspiracy theory of lower gas price. Being a president, the president can not be a winner on this gasoline price issue. When the price goes up, people complains; when the gas price goes down, people are suspicious why the price goes down exactly before this congress mid-term election. Of course the biggest headache for him and republican party, is this “Foley” scandal. Yes, it’s not Shanghai had the big scandal lately. These days when you turned on the TV (say, CNN, FOX, or NBC), you will hear and see the Florida congressman Floey’s scandal (criminal investigation is under way). The center of the matter, is Mr. Foley sent instant message to under aged boy who works for congress. So let’s call it “Instant Message Scandal”, or “IM Gate”?

Many people think the instant message does not have any record. And I think that’s one reason people say stupid thing in IM. Wrong. It turns out many IM providers keep copies of conversation on the server. Also the participants can save the conversations on the computer. More specifically, the Google talk (by default) stores the chat content in your Gmail account.

I remember Warren Buffett once said : when he was not sure about doing something in business, he will use the criteria “can this be put on the front page of local newspaper”. He certainly meant put be on the paper as a good story. Ironically, Mr. Foley’s story did show up in a lot newspaper’s front page, in a totally different tone.