Reading Time: < 1 minute Yesterday (11-24-2023) was Black Friday, and I think I haven’t done shopping on BF for a while. Until this year. We did a bit BF shopping, mainly for our 13 year old as she was interested. She seems know some of the deals including the Bose bluetooth headset (Costco has $120 off deal). I didn’t

Reading Time: 4 minutes Surviving as an IT, especially a software developer contractor is not easy, from my personal experience and observations. I have mostly been an employee (sometimes people call it full-time), with a few stints as a contractor (my LinkedIn profile here). I worked as a contractor mostly because I needed to bring bread (or bacon) home,

Reading Time: 6 minutes What is it? (overview) It’s a “practice and timed test combo” for math fact, plus some word problems (problem solving). It’s owned by Diana D and she has run this program in the area for about 18+ years. Some people may compare it with Kumon, Mathnasium etc. I don’t have much knowledge on the latter.

Reading Time: 3 minutes I think this is true for my 13-year-old. Yesterday evening I gave my 2-year-old iPhone 12 to her after I migrated everything to my new iPhone 15. And she was happy to see the missed text messages (friend’s b-day party invitations), and the never-ending YT Shorts 🙂 Again I am thankful that she accidentally broke

Reading Time: 2 minutes I hope so. Last October the Costco U city opened, Oct 25, 2022 to be precise. A year later, we have a few more restaurants etc. opened, Raising Canes, Panera Bread, Chase Bank, Chipotle, and Chick-fil-A (open this Friday 11/17/23?). And now I walk around the area, I think it’s a notch above the fast

Reading Time: 3 minutes (Update 03-20-2024) The phone works great. But it seems I cannot get the Sim Lock to work. Also they only have 3 attempts: the 1st time I didn’t know what I was doing (I thought I was going to set it up), the 2nd time I followed the wrong advice from Google Gemini (the default

Reading Time: 2 minutes Or college counseling, college admission (from college point of view). Some tactic (most important of all, don’t mention mental health/struggle etc in the college app); and some aspirational advices (e.g., happiness, expectation, find passion). It was presented by Interface edu and the event was hold at SLMCS. My comment: mental health is actually the No.

Reading Time: 4 minutes (Update 11-11-2023) I got the new iPhone 15. In the process of setting it up. So far fairly smooth, in terms of transferring the content over from my old iPhone 12. The only minor hiccup is the eSim (Wikipedia, Apple) on the new phone: I went inside the Mint Mobile app and did it. I

Reading Time: 2 minutes I went to my 9 year old (4th grader)’s class recently and tried to talk about the “The Stock Market Game” (btw, it looks like my main winner is Nike for now 🙂 Below is something I shared in my daughter’s class. I also tried to answer some questions on individual stocks too, e.g., Adobe,

Reading Time: 3 minutes 上面这张照片(taken at CCRC)没有小孩，this is done on purpose. 这个是从楼上的bar/restaurant 拍过去的。我的两个小孩开始打网球🎾有一年左右, 她俩都有进步：从一开始完全是新手到现在可以和同级别的小朋友打几个回合了。想到我自己真正开始打网球还是来美国以后，读研究生时跟同学打了一下。97,98,99年美国打网球的地方跟国内相比简直是天壤之别。我当时在罗拉的沃尔玛买了个威尔森Wilson 铝合金的网球拍。后来工作后在圣路易斯的Sports Authority （S A）买了个同牌的碳素纤维的拍子。SA 好像在2008年的金融危机中倒闭了。我自己大概有十几年没有打网球。记得06年在Woodsmill 的tennis club 周五晚上跟朋友打过球：庆祝过cardinals 那年拿到world series 的冠军。再之后就是去年开始跟家人，孩子打了。我估计我会很快打不过她们了：因为她们在进步，我在原地踏步再加上年龄在那里。我也是在过去一年中意识到小孩们打球不容易。有一次在CCRC看到两个高中男生打得虎虎有生气：我估计他俩可能在本州高中生里面是高手了。今天是星期天下午，我看老大打球，教练我估计是大学生（年轻人），他玩一个轻吊，一个高中男生（我女儿的搭档）跑过去，失去平衡，摔倒在地，眼镜掉地，肩膀也好像也摔痛。我的太太最近跟拉肚高中校队的小姑娘学网球。据她说，校队不好进。后来我想想其实做好每一件事都不容易。但是反过来说，进不了校队，爬不上常青藤（或相当的学校）也没啥。因为我自己就没有做到这些：and I don’t think my life is less meaningful due to that [捂脸][呲牙] This reminds me of a related topic: Micro Managers And Micro Management. If you have Netflix sub, you may want to check