Categories
Fun Music

国粤双语

Reading Time: < 1 minute

国粤双语歌曲的例子

我是比较后知后觉的人。但是英文里有一个说法：better late than never. 我大概最早是今年上半年看到的Ayen何璟昕在2022年在中央台三套(CCTV3)表演的《追梦人》《天若有情》。你可以注意到她先是以国语的追梦人开始，中间插一段粤语的天若有情，最后又回到国语的追梦人。

后来发现Ayen在各主流视频平台上有不少国粤双语的歌。于是我最近 created 一个YT Playlist – Ayen何璟昕-国粤双语。An example 另外一个例子: also 人生何处不相逢 + 最真的梦 ｜国粤双语 Acoustic Cover (link is from YT Shorts). A longer version from Ayen via Bilibili is here. 人生何处不相逢原唱是陈慧娴(Bilibili 链接)；最真的梦的原唱是周华健。

国语版和粤语版

Btw, 我是最近才知道不少歌是同时有国语版和粤语版的。A面&B面——国粤双语歌曲三十五首全纪录 – 日记 – 豆瓣.

再比如说“你是明日意义”这首歌是“漂洋过海来看你”的粤语版。这篇博文的密码是tomorrow, btw。Another example is this relatively new song 故事的最终粤语版：Cantonese lyricist is 心之洛 and the singer with acoustic guitar cover is Ayen何璟昕 (both links are YT). The mandarin version is sung by Zhang Bichen, 【新歌首發】張碧晨《在故事的最終》溫情上線（電影【哪吒之魔童鬧海】片尾曲）| CC字幕. I like both versions, but I liked the Cantonese versions’ words and singing slightly more 🙂

Actually, yesterday I noticed Ayen is not the only singer does this 国粤双语, Alan Tam 谭咏麟, one of the most famous singers from HK, sung this one at Hunan TV a few years ago – the original songs 突然想愛你 (mandarin) 留低鎖匙(Cantonese) were both originally sung by Valen Hsu or Xu Ru’yun 許茹芸. She is recently performing in the mainland, btw.

Also 执迷不悔 (Live) sung by the singer Sara Liu Xijun whom I also like quite a bit.

When I realized this, I tend to believe they are not the only 3 singers do 国粤双语. This way of singing probably existed before 2021 and 2022.

Categories
kids

Some kids not that interested in learning to drive nowadays

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I learned this from my own kid – our older daughter. She got the permit a few months ago, but she was not that motivated or interested in learning to drive. She is not the only kid in her peer group that are not that interested in learning to drive.

I know 2 boys who are a bit older than our older daughter. They are 19 and 16 respectively. They are not interested in to learn to drive either.

Case 1: another friend whose son is a college freshman at SLU (Saint Louis university), and the boy recently had 19th birthday. But he was not that interested in learning to drive until very recently – my friend (his mom) cannot drive him every day due to health issues. So, they have to resort to Ubers. This is actually something I noticed when I drove for Uber too – at least one rider, a young adult (girl) told me she is not that interested to drive on her own. I recall she mentioned once she had a car accident.

Case 2: the boy is a junior in the high school. I offered to his mom that I would teach him to drive if they are interested. But so far, my phone has not rung yet 🙂

Personally, we are okay with S8 our older daughter not learning to drive now. Because also recently, a new friend (a Ph.D. and also assistance professor at Wash U med school), told me that teen’s brains are not fully developed to handle the stress of driving, that’s one reason there are more accidents when teens drive and sometimes the accidents could be serious. Obviously, I don’t what any of that. In other words, as long as I can drive and have free time, I will continue to shuttle my older daughter around although technically she can start to learn, and age-wise she can receive a full fledge driver license as soon as she is 16 – which is a few months away.

But I would probably more stressed out when she actually hits the road – something similar to the feeling I had when she went to the Cub Creek Science Camp, a sleepaway camp in Rolla, Missouri for a week 🙂 I cannot stop checking emails for 3 days until Wednesday evening she sent us the email.

Categories
Fun kids Life

Random thoughts on the holiday season

Reading Time: < 1 minute

One thing I liked about the holiday here is they sell See’s candies in stores. At normal time we can only buy them online or at Kansas City (more below). Macy’s at West County mall has them: the West County mall also has a popup store in the hallway of 1st floor – at the best spot in terms of foot traffic. I remember a few years ago we visited Kansas City during thanksgiving holiday and we stopped by the Nebraska Furniture Mart which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (so is See’s Candies). I bought a few boxes of See’s candies there including the peanut brittle. We all liked it a lot. Personally I don’t buy much else on holidays – so does my wife. Kids like to buy a bit more than us – which I fully understand and support. The Christmas 🎅 here is equivalent to the lunar new year 🧧 when my wife and I grew up – we always get new clothes and 压岁钱🧧. It seems yesterday when our older daughter was crying (scared by the Santa) at a place like 图三。It was probably only 2 years ago when she asked me: dad, can we stop pretending all these Santa Clauses and elf all these nonsense for our younger daughter S6 (her little sis), because it’s getting harder and harder to make the 4th grader to believe? I said sure 👍. Just on the record, our older daughter S8 figured out herself that we are the real Santa when she was a 2nd grader [捂脸]. I guess my wife and I didn’t try harder enough and S8 is also very smart。

光阴似箭，我查了一下：陈慧娴原唱的港乐经典千千阕歌是我高中毕业去上大学那一年首发的；江珊原唱的梦里水乡是我大学毕业🎓的第二年发行的。今年陈慧娴60岁了- 可以退休了，陈姐，把机会尽量留给年轻人吧 – 当然如果你来北美巡演，说不定我就来给你捧场。江珊到年底就58岁了。我自己有时也在考虑我啥时候退休呢：我现在估计到60岁左右肯定是要退的[捂脸][呲牙]

Categories
Life

Happy Thanksgiving – Minjie’s 2025 thanksgiving letter to family and friends

Reading Time: 7 minutes

It’s that time of the year again. The holiday season usually starts with Thanksgiving holiday here in the USA (the 4th Thursday in November, I just did a google search on that btw). And ends in the New Year. Many years ago, to be precise it’s when our older daughter attended the Hope Montessori Academy in Creve Coeur between 2013 and 2014, the directress (the boss) there Susie Shelton-Dodge always liked to say this during holiday season: hug your kids more, because it’s also usually the most stressful time of the year for everyone. This is because of the extra work related to holidays for the grownups: holiday decorations, buying gifts for everybody and so on. And I agree.

I also looked at my blog recently and found I have written a few short ones between 2006 and 2009. I decided to go back to this old habit and also, I am doing this after seeing the great Warren Buffett wrote at least 3 thanksgiving letters in recent years (2025, 2024 and 2023). Btw, I talked a bit more about his letters here. Back to the topic.

Thanking my family

Keep in mind in September 2006, I was very fortunate to meet “my future better half” in Shanghai, and my life has forever changed since then – for better obviously. Anyone wants to know how I met my wife – let me save that for next year’s letter, or you can ask her now 🙂

Hint: I highly recommend the girls from Zhejiang province, especially the girls from Jinhua 金华 (in the middle of Zhejiang Province, more about Jinhua wikipedia, britannica here 🙂 I will talk a bit more my impression on the girls and guys from Jinhua . Yes, guys from that area too – in case you are a girl and are looking for a guy 🙂

My wife

On that note, I want to publicly express my thanks and gratitude to my wife. Similar to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger used to say from time to time: one wants to marry up in terms of one’s moral standards. I believe they both publicly said their wives have higher moral standards than themselves. And I am 100% sure my wife has much higher moral standards than me too. Or if I could use an example, she is a person who likes to help others but doesn’t want any public attention or acknowledgement. Some of our friends can attest to that. Or in other words she is a very generous person. Reflecting back I think that’s the first quality I noticed back in 2006 and 2007 and decided she is someone I want to 漂洋过海去看她。

More about the song here – note the password is all lower case “tomorrow” 漂洋过海来看你, and I mentioned one of the adventurous trip I had in March 2007, STL to PVG to see my then GF/now my wife.

My parents and extended families

I know I probably put the order a bit backwards in the traditional Chinese terms. Because the traditional Chinese society is family oriented and they go by 辈份，I know I know. I definitely want to thank my extended family for everything I have today: they including my maternal grandma and my paternal grandma, my parents and my brothers, my uncles, aunties, cousins, nieces and all of my wife’s family especially my father-in-law. Sometimes I wish he is my dad, please don’t tell this to my dad 🙂 I was joking. I love my dad a lot too – I remember my dad and I walked on the hot Shanghai streets in summer 1989, on my way from Ningbo to Wuhan for my college HUST. Those are “my dad and I” moments.

And I am both grateful and thankful to my wife’s mom who I never met: she passed away before I met my wife. I think from my wife, I can see how generous a person my mother-in-law was. And also the special bonding moments my two daughters and their grandma may have missed because she passed away so early. But that’s life. We win some and lose some. Sometimes the loss or the pain from the loss seems impossible for us to bear or overcome. While I am not a very religious or spiritual person, I think as long as we remember the loved ones we lost, they are in heaven now without all the suffering on the earth, and they also live in our heart. Now I recall learning about the passing of my wife’s mom is probably one of the first few questions I asked her, during our 1st blind date in September 2006. Please note this is not unusual in first dates, if people are serious. Family demography is a quite common conversation topic. Another thing I noticed is she (my wife) never looked at phone when we talked.

You can see the old picture (1975?) of my paternal grandma, my dad, my bothers and yours truly here. And that article has a 1961 photo for my big uncle (my mom’s big brother) too. I will find a picture of my mom when she is young in my next CHN trip hopefully. Both my parents are alive and in early 80s, but their health is not great now. Btw, if you want to the article that have my family photos, you will find a funny story happened during my 1989 Gao’kao.

My daughters

Last but not my least, my daughters, 也就是我的两个前世情人– I didn’t realize this has some controversy per google and a movie, I can see the downside of using this term. So from now on I will just say my daughters. I talked about my daughters quite a bit here in my blog but I masked their names in quite a few (not all, due to my laziness) places to protect their privacy.

I am exhausted, but I will soldier on

It’s a pleasure to be your cool dad

How to communicate with adolescent or teenagers

Dad daughter moments

Yes they definitely made me a better person as I learn from them everyday. Just like I learn something from my wife everyday.

One of my life’s highlights so far, is not going to Panera Bread, or Starbucks or library and read books there with my daughters, as I imagined before I married and when I was single. They quickly outgrew that. Hanging out with dad is no longer fashionable. But I still enjoy taking them to the Target store, or other crafts or grocery stores, when they are shopping for something in the brick and mortar store. I guess I can still hang out with my wife at least 🙂 Recently I also realized the praises their school teachers put on them are usually genuine, not just 客套话，during the parent teacher conferences. Some of the comments made me very very proud. That’s why I go to those conferences. Another reason is my wife is too either shy or too busy to go. I know my daughters are very sweet, very much down to earth, and quite intelligent and hardworking kids. Again most of those attributes are inherited from their mom. And some are cultivated or shaped by their school teachers over many years.

I know I am a bit blunt from time to time, and I talked too much sometimes, a few other times I looked at my phone too much instead of listening 🙂

Dad Jokes

Sometimes I joked with them. And they would truly be embarrassed if I joked with them before their friends or friends’ parents. And they would warn me: dad, you joked (talked) too much and your jokes are not even funny. I know I know. But that’s the whole purpose of dad jokes: they are not funny and they are intended to embarrass their daughters 🙂

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

Wikipedia

Recently I received a friendly reminder on this topic from a relatively new friend who is 12 years younger than me, and he is also from Jinhua area. He said: guys and girls sometimes have different perspective, guys may be more logical, girls may be more emotional or intuitive (good intuition 良好的直觉)。I guess this is similar to the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex 🙂

Thanking my friends

Both old and new. I will likely miss some friends here. But I hope you won’t mind.

And one friend I only got to meet (or see) once – she is the girl I met in the train from Ningbo to Wuhan when I was in college. I talked about the story here and here and let me quote a bit: 有一次在南昌转车，好像是南昌到北京的车（经过武汉）。不光没位置，而且连站的地方都没有。火车还在株洲还是武昌附近弄了很长时间的临时停车。记得当时一个武大还是华工科英的88级的女生给削了一个苹果，印象很深。在火车上基本上不想吃东西，也不怎么喝水。Yes this girl is from Jinhua.

And another friend who already passed away a while ago 😭: she is a friend in my SHUFE days, technically she is my 师姐，but l later learned she is actually a classmate of my wife’s sister in high school. She paid the $30 application fee for me in 1997 when I came to Rolla (now Missouri S&T).

My old high school 高中 friends who picked me up and greeted/treated me in my June CHN trip. Later we had tea together in Beilun. We haven’t seen each other since 1989, but we 想见如故。For me it felt just like yesterday. We may have more gray hair but we are still the friends 36 years ago. We can argue about things but we won’t get into a fight 🙂

My old middle school 初中 friends I met in Ningbo in this June.

I am glad to meet my HUST friend in Ningbo, who I haven’t seen since 2016.

My old friends I met in Shanghai this June: yes, including my SHUFE friends and the couple who helped connected me with my better half back in 2006. And my old alma mater HUST friends who I haven’t seen since 1993 or 1997 or 2016. I understand I cannot see all my friends in one trip. But I do fondly remember my Beijing trip 20 years ago and I met my old HUST friends. And the HUST friends I met in Shanghai in 2016. I am happy to meet all of you.

My music teachers. I want to live a life with music. There are also couple other reasons too: to be able to play in public and show off, and also to counter or slow down the aging of my brain and hands.

Besides that my two daughters are doing music too: percussion and violin respectively. They are better musicians than me right now. My wife also has more music talent than me too, so far at least – I am trying to catch up though. She is likely the source where my girls got their music gene from.

My friends I only met on social media (WeChat, XHS etc.) but we do talk in good terms. Someday our roads will cross each other and we will see each other in person 🙂

And all my teachers, classmates, colleagues and friends over the years!

Last but not least, want to share a song with you all:

YT 油管:【纯享】叶蒨文深情演绎金曲《祝福》感动全场！Sally姐高音太稳了！《声生不息》 Infinity and Beyond EP1丨MangoTV

国内的朋友，可以看看 – 哔哩哔哩：美女粤语歌手何璟昕，央视现场倾情演绎吉他弹唱《祝福》。

当然你也可以在国内各大平台上找叶倩文在湖南芒果台“声生不息”第一季或她早期的演唱 – 祝福。因为最近开始学粤语，我也很钟意（喜欢）这首歌的歌词（kkbox)。我把歌词贴在下面：

========

作詞：潘偉源 作曲：梁弘志

祝福

徘徊叢林迎著雨 染濕風中的發端
低訴細雨路遙若睏倦 靜靠灣灣小草倚清泉
悠悠流泉隨路轉 偶於山中轉數圈
一片軟軟漸黃落葉 蕩向清溪之中早飄遠
啊～～過去 過去多少次心亂
今天 今天隨著雲煙漸遠
聽聽鳥語 靜望雨絲飄斷 悄悄的風贈我衷心祝福一串

徘徊叢林迎著雨 染濕風中的發端
低訴細雨路遙若睏倦 靜靠灣灣小草倚清泉
悠悠流泉隨路轉 偶於山中轉數圈
一片軟軟漸黃落葉 蕩向清溪之中早飄遠
啊～～送你 送你祝福永不斷
輕輕地飄 尋覓無邊路遠 借那鳥語路上細添溫暖
拜託清風 奉上衷心 祝福千串
啊～～送你 送你祝福永不斷
輕輕地飄 尋覓無邊路遠 借那鳥語路上細添溫暖
叮囑清風 奉上衷心 祝福千串
拜託清風 奉上衷心 祝福千串

========

欣赏到中文（粤语）的美了没？我猜测其他语言包括英文是有可能写出类似的意静的歌词的：但是我现在是肯定写不出来的。英语和总体文学水平都有待提高。

Categories
advice and tips DIY Life Tips

When should we stop doing yard work?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I think it should be now.

Joking 🙂 I was thinking doing it until 60. But the other day, my piano teacher, who is probably 20 years older than me, told me he is still doing yard work. I am 54 btw. My younger daughter’s violin teacher who is 13 years senior than me, does yard work too. So music makes one younger – that’s one motivation factor that I am leaning music now 🙂

This morning (Saturday 2025-11-15) I cleaned up about half of the leaves 🍁 in the backyard. My joke of the day is: 前人种树，后人捡树枝和树叶🍂。

Btw, I do mow my own lawn since August 2019. I guess I will do the yard work until I feel not physically able to do as I age, or I really hate it. Hopefully I can do it for a while, at least. Right now, it’s still not too bad.

Cost associated with trees

Btw, over the years I realized there are potentially two risks involved with trees near the house.

One is the tree could fall, and it could hit the house or people. In fact, this happened to me (my house) twice. Once, a few years ago, in a summer, neighbor’s tree fell on our fence, in the process it broke the electricity wires, and knock off the power. Another time, a branch fell on our roof – for that one, I was sort of expecting it, but I was not proactive enough, to remove the dangling tree branch on the big, sweet gum tree in the backyard. One day, my neighbor emailed me and said you have a tree branch sticking into your roof. I immediately realized what happened. Btw, it’s the same neighbor – the first and the second incidents.

I consider the safety of human beings the top priority. That brings another point or cost associated with tree maintenance – removal of the dead tree. That’s not cheap either, especially when the tree is big. I had experience on this too: a few years ago, I had to call tree company to remove a dead oak tree, that tree is probably almost 60 years old, and was infected with some sort of galls – caused by gall wasps or more specifically Andricus kollari. The bill was about $2,200 (in summer 2022, to put things in perspective).

Categories
advice and tips

Toyota Sienna 2012

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I owned it since summer 2013 and wrote my Toyota Sienna quite a bit over the years. I commented it on a YT video too.

我的2012年丰田Sienna：是2013年夏天买的旧车27,000 miles，一直开到现在。昨天开到了150,000 miles。

I debated a bit between Toyota Sienna and Honda Odyssey at the time, decided to go with Sienna because it appears Odyssey may have transmission issues as it ages.

Overall I am quite happy with my purchase.

Main repair costs

The rodents (squirrel): the main reason was I didn’t have a garage between summer 2013 and summer 2019. And I had to park outside: I usually parked at the same place, and on some work from home days, I didn’t move the car. It took me a while to figure out the rodents don’t like the orange smell of the “Bounce” dryer sheet, and I was able to use that to keep them away. I also moved the car around as needed.

The tires: which is not unusual. Because it’s a bit heavy. But proper tire rotation and balance, and wheel alignment will help too. It seems I usually got about 40 k miles from a set of tires.

Reference

YT: 2万美元二手日系8座MINIVAN厢型车——丰田塞纳/本田奥德赛/美国二手车/美国车价/汽车市场/车评/通病/体验。

Categories
401k and Personal Finance Music Stocks

Looking at Visa stock $V

Reading Time: 4 minutes

It seems I should have hold on to my $AXP American Express stocks in last few years, as I just look at the 3 main credit card companies in the US, note Visa and Mastercard are pure credit card networks, while American Express is essentially two companies: one is a bank, another one is also a credit card network (and it’s much smaller than Visa and Mastercard in that aspect). Here is their 5 year stock price comparison chart.

Warren Buffett Talks Visa and Mastercard (2018)

Peter Lynch

Also, I need to review this at 6 minutes mark more often: Peter Lynch: Why 1% Investors Don’t Fail. The Charlie Rose interview was done in 1993, I believe. Because they talked about Bill Clinton a lot, and some other clues.

I agree with Peter Lynch re: the 2 points that he raised.

ONE – Grass is greener on neighbor’s yard. In a recent blog post, I talked about a mechanical engineer chasing hot dot com or telecom stocks in 1999 here. I am guilty of this too.

TWO – Applicable to me very well: patience, $AXP is a good example of the stocks I owned but I traded it away too quickly. There are many similar examples. In the old days we have to pay transaction fees, and basically, it’s harder to make money with all the fees. Now, even without fees, we miss the upside of a stock if we don’t have patience (or faith, or confidence) on a stock. I agree with Peter this “quick trading” is similar to gambling 🎰. Update 11-14-2025: USA Today – There’s a reason you’re so hooked on soda. It’s not entirely your fault. While I usually don’t buy into the conspiracy theories, I do believe some of the promotional tactics that’s being used in the business (including Coca Cola and Pepsi) went a bit too far. Yeah, Robinhood App is included too.

Reference: Peter Lynch Wikipedia

Sell the winner and keep the losers

Something I realized that I was doing a lot recently. The initial reason or one common reason I don’t sell stocks was my long position is under water. But as I think more, I sold the winner instead – although I usually made a little bit of money. This strategy if amplified, would be really bad if the losers keep losing, e.g., $LULU, $WSC and previously $LEG and so on. I really need to re-examine my strategy here. It’s not about the monetary loss, but more about the opportunity cost as well as over-diworsify. I think ideally, I want to own 10 or fewer stocks and have time do research on them. Otherwise, it’s just like gambling: which I want to stay away from, and which is also the one reason I am trying to use less Robinhood App.

The reason I was talking about or reflecting here is because over the time I realized that #discipline is the key to investing success. And I need more of that.

More on discipline: I think it probably means I should reduce the number of stocks I own at one time, as well as the screen time on the stock trading apps.

(Update 11-12-2025) This tweet caught my attention.

If you put 2% of your portfolio into something and it became a 10 bagger, I’m not impressed. But if you put 20% in and it became a 10 bagger, that’s real skill. The difference isn’t just in return, it’s in conviction. How much you allocate before the outcome is known says far more about your investment acumen than the result ever will.

Warren Buffett’s 2 approaches to diversification:

“Very few people have gotten rich on their seventh best idea, but a lot of people have gotten rich on their best idea…”

Deleting the trading apps on my phone?

I actually did it a few times. Last few days I happened to listen to this song – 烟 (许佳豪) – 删了吧『要不你还是把我删了吧，我咬紧牙关命令我发出这句话。』【動態歌詞】 || 何璟昕 (Ayen) – 刪了吧（粵語版）『終於你決定把我刪了吧，如此不上心竟開始應復都無暇，無心的我道出一聲晚安吧 你滿足嗎。』【動態歌詞MV】

Different topic, but same idea. I recall the pre mobile phone days, the life is much simpler, and we don’t have to deal with deleting someone from our WeChat contacts, or text messages and so on. Similar for stock trading too – we only have access to the computer at the brokerage firm, and a lot of people have to share that computer. Unless you really have a lot of money and you will have access to the VIP room at the brokerage firm.

Strategy shift over the years

(Update 11-13-2015) I believe that’s how Warren Buffett did over the years. For example, he did “cigar butt” style of investing, and eventually switched over to Coca Cola, Gillette and American Express “blue chip” types of companies. The recent example is Apple.

I think I need to similar switches for some of my accounts, e.g. the original Robinhood App account.

Plan of attack: I have 27 shares of $V now, and my initial plan is to hold both meaningful number of shares of $V (30?) and $MA (20?), for longer term. That means I will sell some smaller stock positions.

K shaped stock market

I talked about K shaped economy here. Also refer to CNBC – AI stock boom leaves many behind, economist says: ‘It really widens the wealth and income gap’

It seems to me the stock market is also K shaped, in the sense that big tech and AI/semiconductors companies were doing very well in last few years, while the rest of the market, including the rest of the S&P 500 companies were just doing so-so. Per Google AI Overview “how much stock market gain is due to ai”:

Artificial intelligence (AI)-related stocks have been a highly concentrated force in the recent stock market rally, accounting for approximately 75% of the S&P 500’s total returns since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. (Source: Fortune; moneycontrol)

Categories
Software development

My impressions on Copilot

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Code Review

At my current work place recently we switched from Atlassian’s Bitbucket (stash) to Microsoft’s GitHub for our source code version control system. Along with that, we get the GitHub Action (which is somewhat like Jenkins, the CI/CD tool) as well as Copilot Code Review and other Copilot tools.

Let me talk about Copilot Code Review first. In general I say it’s pretty good, with its quick human readable overview or summary for the code change. I think it’s probably better than I would write myself: if I ever have to write such a summary.

Now, the code review comments. There are various levels of comments in terms of severity. If you have done any code review, you will probably know quite a bit of suggestions or feedback are subjective, because coding is still not exact science, or like some of the other disciplines such as Mechanical Engineering. I will categorize the comments below:

  1. Nitpick: Copilot actually says that word. We can ignore those.
  2. Format or spacing, we can accept the suggestions, and commit directly. That’s probably the only place we can directly commit.
  3. Other suggestions: I think most are valid. And we should try to incorporate them in our coding. For example: things around better error handling, more robust code, efficiency, break out functions from common code (copy and paste code), and so on. This including feedback on the unit testing too. One thing to keep in mind, always run unit test or debug the code changes before we commit, don’t just commit the code change in the web browser. Because I learned the lesson hard way: I commit code directly, then I realized that I broke the CI (continuous integration) build.

Coding Assistant

My own exp: I have done a bit experiment on this, both via the Copilot inside IntelliJ and VS Code. I will continue use Copilot. Somewhat like code review suggestions: coding assistant (or Q&A) is not AI does the coding for us, we still need to think about the usual stuff: design, testing scenario, debugging, and so on. Again we can think copilot as a colleague or a coworker in pair programming, but we always need to verify in addition to the usual “trust”.

I noticed one approach that one coworker was using. Ask Copilot questions, and use the answers directly, and so on. It seems to me this is a bit like a junior engineer’s approach. And I can see one downside of this approach, see below picture, original source: this is a joke but it has some truth.

Vibe Coding (from XHS, or Red Notes)

I have done similar things in the past, except before all the AI tools, I was mostly googling, including using answers from stackoverflow.

Categories
401k and Personal Finance

New Roth Catch-Up Requirement for certain employees in 2026

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Received below from the HR department of the company I am working for.

New Roth Catch-Up Requirement
Starting January 1, 2026, a new rule under the SECURE 2.0 Act will impact how certain employees can make catch up contributions to the Enterprise Holdings Retirement Savings Plan.


What’s Changing?
If you’re turning age 50 or older in 2026 and your total 2025 FICA wages (Box 3 on your 2025 form W-2) are over $145,000, any catch-up contributions you make in 2026 are required to be after-tax Roth contributions.


What does this mean for you?
If your FICA wages are over $145,000 in 2025, catch-up contributions must be made as after-tax Roth contributions in 2026. This will be done automatically thru our payroll department.
If your FICA wages are $145,000 or less in 2025, this regulation will not apply to you, and no changes will be made to your catch-up contributions.


What are Catch-Up Contributions?
Catch-Up contributions are extra contributions that participants aged 50 and over can make into their retirement plan. Participants 50 and over can contribute $7,500 above the standard limit of $23,500 (for 2025), and participants aged 60 – 63 can contribute $11,250 more than the standard limit (for 2025).
Effective January 1, 2026, catch-up contributions will be automatically made as after-tax Roth contributions for employees whose FICA wages were over $145,000 in 2025.
If you do not want to make Roth catch-up contributions in 2026, you will need to change your 401k contribution rate to 0% before you reach the 2026 standard limit. The IRS has not announced the 2026 standard limit yet; however, it was $23,500 in 2025.


What are Roth Contributions?
Roth contributions are after-tax contributions, which grow tax-free and can be withdrawn tax-free in retirement, as long as five years have passed since your first Roth contribution, and you have attained the age of 59½.


Steps you can take now
• Talk to a financial or tax advisor to understand how this change may affect your retirement strategy.

References

2026 Retirement Plan Contribution Limits and Catch-Up Rules (Mercer Advisors)

Categories
Stocks

Ingersoll Rand

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I happened to receive an IR email from Allegion: upon further look, I realized it’s a spin off of Ingersoll Rand (I talked about IR here and here). That’s probably the time I bought the stock. I sold the IR stock long time ago (I cannot recall and don’t have a record).

Since then, the original Ingersoll Rand spined off Allegion PLC (NYSE: ALLE) in 2013. The tools business of original IR was spined off as Ingersoll Rand (stock ticker is IR). And the remaining business is mainly Trane and Thermo King are called Trane Technologies with stock ticker TT.

So one S&P 500 company essentially become 3. I don’t know if I have hold on to the stock, how much return is that? Recently I had similar experience with Honeywell and they spun off material business as Solstice.

Separately, I recall I had an onsite interview with IR in Feb 2005 (per my yahoo email), in New Jersey. They didn’t extend me the offer after interview.