Bay Area 5.6 Earthquake

Bay Area got a 5.6 jolt at around 8PM on Oct 30 Tuesday. My family and a friend (thanks Timmy!) called immediately after to check up on us. We were all fine. But it brought back memories of the 1989 quake.

Growing up in Taiwan, earthquakes were part of life there. But the 1989 one was the first big one I experienced in the Bay Area after immigrating from my home country. I can still remember I was a freshman in high school and was just putting on my contacts upstairs in the bathroom when everything in the medicine cabinet fell out as the whole house shook! Scary memories.

The first thing I did last night as we walked away from the doorway was to twitter about it. Yeah, I'm an addict as Jean pointed out.

Within seconds, I was seeing about half a dozens tweets about the earthquake, not to mention all the status updates within FaceBook as well. Scoble even recorded a TwitterGram and sent it within minutes. Yet another example of how people on Twitter are increasingly getting their news first hand from Twitterverse. @ahockley had this tweet below. Hee, guess I beat the CNN.

Seesmic

Seesmic has been getting lots of buzz lately in the Twitter world around Loic's circle. Loic is a successful entrepreneur from France who recently moved to SF to start Seesmic.

So what is Seesmic? It's like a video-Twitter. You record the video and voila, (if you have Twitter setup) Seesmic automatically sends a tweet. I recorded this to ask 2 questions about Seesmic and Loic in turn answered my questions within 30 mins here.

Seesmic is currently still in alpha and the only way one can get an invite is from Loic himself via Twitter, I was lucky enough to get an invitation code from him last week. As he said it himself, this is probably the first start-up launched on Twitter exclusively.

Gmail IMAP!

Gmail turned on IMAP feature this week! Prior to this, POP was the only protocol available, so when I delete mails on the iPhone, I would have to 'archive' it again via the web.

A workaround for me was to use the http://m.gmail.com, which works great on the iPhone, but I still preferred reading my mail on the build-in Mail.app on the iPhone.

Since it was a slow rollout, lots of peeps have been begging to get it. Gmail team finally gotten to me today! After I waited and begged. Now reading email on the iPhone would be synced up with the server so I don't have to delete twice. I like :-)

Google even have a help page specifically for iPhone setup, and a short video below.

I'm sure iPhone will soon have new Gmail setup on the iPhone so users don't have to manually setup via the 'Other' option. LH has additional tips to help you setup folders in the Advanced option.

Apple.com humor

We work hard here @ Apple, but we have fun too. Go to apple.com, type in "virus" in the search box.

Facebook easter egg

Cool, I think I just found a FB easter egg by accident, maybe it's a "feature"

Go to your Friend List, click on the "Show" drop-down, select the dashed line separator (-------).

Watch all your friends in a grid view. Try it.

One less Cupertino council candidate

On November 6, we get to vote for the next Cupertino city council members.

Given that I went to middle and high school both here in Cupertino and now live and work in the same zip code. I thought I should know a bit about the candidates and where our city is heading towards. So few weeks back, I attended a forum where all 6 candidates were present. I got to learn a bit about each of them and their policies.

I was largely undecided until tonight! We hate getting junk call! So tonight when one of them had their 'volunteers' call to remind us to vote for #6, that did it! I was so annoyed that I wrote the candidate to tell him that he has 100% for sure just lost a vote.

His campaign's action just made it easier for me to decide. After all, I disagree with his stand on being the only candidate who supports using public fund for campaign anyway.

One down, 5 more to go... Maybe I should write the other 5 to warn them not to call me.

How to be green and save $0.03!

I've had this post in draft mode for months now. Few weeks ago, I learned about Oct 15 2007 "Blog Action Day". Perfect timing.

Jean and I try to be green whenever we can. We do some silly things in the house that other might consider wacky.

• Guests often ask why we have 2 buckets next to our kitchen sink with dirty water in them. It's our way of recycling kitchen water and reduce water usage in the yard. Did you know that the potassium in dish detergent is actually beneficial to plants outside, just a bonus side effect :-) Oh yeah, and Target brand dishwashing liquid is biodegradable/ecofriendly.
  
• I'm constantly digging holes in the backyard for composting. We throw all of our kitchen scrap in there, yard trimmings, etc. The only time we stop doing so is when we're out of spaces in the backyard.
• We try not to use our cars too much on the weekends. Whenever we can, we walk all over Cupertino to stores and restaurants. We make it an incentive for ourselves if we are craving not-so-healthy food.
• Now for the grand finale! We all know about reusing grocery bags and bringing your own bags, but did you know that at Safeway (and maybe others too), they'll take $0.03 off your purchase for every bag you re-use? But we've found out that they're not very consistent all the time, so you might have to remind the staff.

Have a good week and do something green today :-)

Free Wii remote jacket

Are you a Wii owner?

In case you haven't heard, Nintendo started including the remote jacket with all their new remotes. For those of us who purchased the console prior to this, you can get them shipped for free at this Nintendo site.

According to the site, they start shipping them on Oct 15 2007 [Mon].

All you have to do is provide the serial number on the back of your console and indicate how many jackets you want.

sad plant

Even though I'm not a big cat person, I get a kick out of the hilarious captions of I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER.

I looked over at my sad plant in my cube recently and thought this one might be appropriate for it.

"I iz steel alife!"

OK, so my is not that funny. But these last few on ICHC still crack me up from earlier this week.... oh man oh man, someone stop me... happy Friday :-)

No, really, I'm Jean!

We're contemplating moving from Dish Network to Tivo/Comcast thanks to James' awesome deal as a Tivo employee. But the plan to migrate and decommission the old Dish setup might be complicated. As we're currently in a freeze period (according to Jean) due to the season premieres in full swing.

So as part of the "planning" required by CFO/CEO/COO (a.k.a wife) I called Dish to confirm we're not under any contract in order to cancel without penalty.

Dish: "Hi, my name is David, what is your name?"

Me: "Thomas"

brief pause on the other end of the line...

Dish: "First name spelled J-E-A-N?"

Me: "Yes" (trying not to crack up as I realized I forgot the account is under Jean's name)

Dish: "How do you pronounce that?"

Me: "Jean"

Dish: "But you said your name is Thomas?" (with the most confused voice)

Me: "No, I didn't" (barely holding up straight voice...)

Dish: "Oh OK, I'm sorry, what can I help you with?"

Whew, fortunately "Jean" works for both sexes. Poor guy, I felt kinda bad throwing him off like that :-)

Apple orchard

Checked out these pictures that I read about on FSJ. Scene from The Missouri School of Journalism.

Looks like an Apple orchard.

all nighter

I have not pulled an all-nighter since Purdue days. Um... ok, maybe once few years back when I played Grand Theft Auto (which by the way, is just wrong, wrong!) with the boys all night.

I pulled one on Friday night/Sat morning! We've been having some issues toward AAPL's year-end so I was afraid to come into work on Friday. We didn't get home until 6AM on Sat morning.

Yes, not kidding you, I worked for 20 hours straight with a team of 4. Now, if I had stayed at NASA, you think that would've happened? Nooooo.....

So here's what happened... We got notified of some issues ____ ago from ____. So we started fixing the root cause, which was ____. But the issues turned out to be like an onion, the more you peel, the more it stunk. So we decided to do _____ which would fix the _____ to revert back the mess that _____ created. But around 9PM, we realized s*it! We didn't do ____ like we were suppose to, so instead of _____ we actually _____ Urgh! So we begin to fix that issue and did _____ to all ______ customers and eventually _____. Yeah, tough problem.

Oh yeah, I work for Apple. So no comment on the issue. Maybe my CEO would blog about it later.

Now wish me luck this week.