goings on

start stream of consciousness

akk it's already wednesday!

let's see what's been going on...

friday morning me and my biz partner collected some financial data for our potential deal. friday L and i had dinner with his parents and then gymmed afterwards.

saturday we had a pancake breakfast at original pancake house in fremont, i ordered the swedish pancakes. they reminded me of the malaysian dish roti prata. haha. i peeled off portions of really really thin and crispy pancake, rolled it up, and dipped it in butter and lingonberry jam. hunny's bro stanley got the blueberry pancakes, so i still got to taste them. hehe. then we were rushing off to get ready for tammy and alberts wedding in burlingame. got ready in 20 min and rushed out the door! the wedding was very simple - the ceremony was at the little gazebo at a golf course just off of 280. it was soooo windy - we felt like the photographers were going to get blown off the cliff while getting their good camera shots! gene was the officiant - he was kinda nervous since if the wind blew away all his papers, he would have no idea what to say! then we headed to south san francisco for the banquet - hunny and I didn't want to go home and then head out again so he studied for his certification exam (exam in 2 weeks!) while i read my business book at starbucks. then we headed over for the dinner at grand palace seafood. yummy yummy food - lobster, shark fin soup, sea bass (sorry jyan - it was yummy), quail. i saw tommy and his new wife there but it was kinda awkward to say hi. just as i was going to say hi on the dance floor, they moved to the other side. awkward! well i suppose some things are better left alone. he looked happy, so for that, i'm happy for him. maybe i should have gone over to say hi first , i dunno. there's never really a good way to handle things that pertain to ex bf's and gf's when things got as serious as they did. i also noticed there were many other ex - couples at the wedding which was interesting. but we are all mature and can put aside our own minor issues to be there for good friends. :)

sunday hunny and i woke up wayyyy early (8am - way early for us!) to meet up with paul and his new gf to go to the warehouse jeans sale. i have seen the invites before but never really wanted new jeans enough to wake up early and go to sf. however this time paul said he wanted to go, we would also be meeting his gf for the first time, and we would also get to eat lunch together after the shopping. plus it was a really good deal - $65 for one pair and 5 pairs for $250. we were sure between the four of us we could get at least 5 pairs - 50 bux for designer jeans - yay! cuz no way would we pay over 100 bux for jeans. haha. after 45 minutes of waiting even though we arrived before opening and two hours of shopping, we walked away with 14 pairs of jeans and one dress. all for 50 bux each. such a good deal though! i got hudsons, chip and peppers, and jeans of virtue as well as a bcbg dress. original price for all of these were over 200 bux each! i'm so chinese...haha...showing off my good deals. after the shopping we went to have soupy dumplings at shanghai dumpling house in millbrae. yummy yummy! i liked the original pork ones better than the crab, the green onion pancake was really good, i'm craving dumplings. since i was being such a chubby girl - hunny and i gymmed afterwards when we got home.

the rest of the week has been busy. planning things for stirr and for the biz. still been able to fit in the gymming - spinning monday and running yesterday. will probably take a day off today.

i'm very very glad i took so many negotiations classes - coming in handy! hopefully i will have some good updates by the end of the week. busy busy busy trying to get things ready. also my bro ryan, michelle and baby are visiting from thursday until saturday! yay!

end stream of consciousness

visit from sandily

sandily came to visit me yesterday! i haven't seen her in ages. her new baby little erin is so cute! such a little cabbage patch kid. she's so much bigger! and eating some solid food now! twas great to see sandily though, man, raising two kids and still working sounds so challenging! i think i'm very cool with my auntie status right now. haha.

random and late note. i love that show so you think you can dance. i'm so glad sabra won! she's so talented to have such skills after only 4 years. right now i'm listening to some songs which were used for the dance routines for the shows. makes me want to get up and dance! although i get dissappointed that i don't look as good as the dancers on the show and i sit back down. hehe.

fave dances from the show -
dominic and sabra's hip hop dance with the chairs
danny and lacey's Viennese waltz to avril's song keep holding on
the citizen cope - let the drummer kick back dance
hip hop to fergie's Here i come

glengarry glen ross and redwood room

Glengarry Glen Ross is the title of a 1984 Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play by David Mamet. The play shows parts of two days in the lives of four desperate Chicago real estate agents who are prepared to engage in any number of unethical and/or illegal acts (from lies and flattery to bribery, threats and intimidation to burglary) in order to sell undesirable real estate to unwilling prospective buyers. The play draws partly on Mamet's experiences of life in a Chicago real estate office, where he worked briefly as a typist in the late 1960s. The title of the play comes from the names of two of the real estate developments being peddled by the salesmen characters.

saturday nite hunny and i were invited to the Glengarry Glen Ross play by elaine and her friend mark. two if his friends canceled so we took their place. i was so excited to go see a play! it has been years since i've gone to see one. the play went very fast, the first half was over before we knew it due to the fast dialogue. my fav character was richard roma, even though i didn't like him the beginning. i think his acting was the best. there was also another actor that looked like a younger and cuter version of vaughn on alias. hehe:) i also thought it was very revolutionary for it's time since there were a lot of references which i thought must have been very daring to say in the 80's. recommended that you go see it!

after the play we hung out at clift hotel's redwood room. my new drink of choice is a blueberry vodka tonic. the bar area was pretty full so we just hung out on the couches in the hotel lobby. twas a great time chatting it up since both mark and elaine are full of great conversation. we talked about genetics, drugs, business, food, friends, and a million other things. after hanging out for a few hours at the hotel we decided to go eat since hunny was hungry again. also hunny has never been to osha (the cheap thai restaurant, not the occupational health and safety administration) so we decided to take him there since it was walking distance. we shared a couple dishes and chatted it up even more. twas a perfect day. dragonboating in the morning with diana and henry and then dinner, a play, drinks and more food at nite with elaine and mark. life is good.

dragonboating

saturday i woke up bright and early to arrive at the dragonboat race site at 8:30AM. holy schmoly that was early for me. poor diana was also there before me and she only got 3 hours of sleep because she was still working friday nite. i actually should have been ontime but i showed up at the practice site and not the racing site so i had to drive a little ways off.

at first i was kinda grumpy waking up so early. but when i got there, i was actually getting excited. there were so many people and so many companies. diana and i were helping out an old school friend, henry, who said the xilinx team needed more girls. actually his gf works for xilinx and not him. he works for gordon beirsch brewing beer! good to be a chemical engineer huh? haha.

i wasn't racing with xilinx for the first race so i subbed for cisco. i don't think any of the people there had attended a practice so during the race, paddles were hitting eachother left and right. i wasn't tired at all when we finished. the second race was a different story, everyone was perfectly in sync and i could really feel the boat being pulled by the paddles. we were going so fast, yet all of us were so tired at the end. since we were the fourth boat out, we had to spend the energy aligning ourselves with the other boats and didn't have any rest time before starting. crazy! but we did really well regardless. :)anyways, here are pics!


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here is when i realized we were about to take off and i didn't have a paddle. haha

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oh btw, we had the second fastest time for all the second round races. however they only took the boat which won each heat to move them on into semi finals. oh well.

cute overload

lucas is so cute!

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chocolate sushi

when sab cam back to visit, diana, sab, caroline and i met up at chocolate sushi in sunnyvale to eat. this is a belated post since i was late in uploading pics. also i want to test out the blog link on the new updated dropshots.

the food was really yum. better than blowfish and not crowded at all. the price was reasonable also! will go again.

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great success!

after working with my business partner yesterday we finally got our formulation for B2 just right! woo hoo! so exciting!

the smallest things make such a huge difference.

time to do the dance of joy!! :)

satisfaction

i derive great satisfaction from figuring out technical issues which have me stumped for a while. ever since i upgraded my firefox to 2.0.0.6 i have been having problems with flash animations. i tried to fix it at first and none of the solutions worked permanently. so i gave up for a while since i was too busy. then today i decided to try to fix it again. after 20 minutes of searching and trying new fixes, i found a fix that works! yay!

so it you have a mac g4 and want to run firefox 2.0.0.6 and max osx (10.4.10) and you are having problems with your flash animations (e.g. can't see video embedded in webpages like youtube and myspace) and you see a quicktime symbol with a question mark instead, then do the following. the problem is that the quicktime plugin is conflicting with the flash plugin. go into system preferences, quicktime - advanced. Uncheck "Enable Flash". then click the "mime settings..." button. once in that window, expand miscellaneous and uncheck "Flash Media". click OK and you're done!

ahhhh i love it when i can fix things.

once thing that has had me stumped for a while now. how do i configure different wep keys on a mac to connect to a wep enabled wireless network if the wep key is something other than 1? yes i've tried just inputting the generated code, didn't work. yes i've tried $ sign before the key, didn't work either.

progress on the B's

went down to LA and SD for some meetings relating to B2. learned a TON and it was a great chance for me to get to know my business partner for B2 better. we got along great as expected and even talked a great deal about our personal lives. ordinarily that would be a no no, however both of us are easily able to separate business and pleasure and there would be no hard feelings if we decided not to go ahead with the partnership. however, i think this is going to be a great partnership since we complement each other unusually well. we think the same thoughts at the same time and we generally have similar opinions on things. we even have the same taste on many things. anyhow, as of right now there is still much planning to be done and we have pushed out our launch until febuary of next year to allow for better market timing and planning.

as for B1, i found a competitor. darn it! even with the same marketing that i had in mind. however their marketing could use a lot of improvement and even has some false advertising which i can market against. i still think i can have a good opportunity since the competition is not really well adopted. however that only means i should work faster. putting together a more targeted approach and timelines.

other than business, the trip in LA and SD was fun! i saw my bro and then met up with some of my partner's friends to eat some ramen and chat in a bar. one of her friends does something called pharmeconomics. er? that was my reaction also. basically it's financial projections of drug treatments. for example, although a drug may be cheaper, it might have more side effects and thus warrant more patient treatment. overall, various treatment combinations are studied to determine what is the most cost effective and least risk involved. i didn't know such a position existed, but it makes sense with HMO's nowadays. anyways, her friend just finished his Phd and has only been working for 6 weeks. and he is our age. imagine, being 30 and never having worked before!

while in LA i got to meet up with irene, ansen and jyan. first nite was dumplings at ding tai fung, dessert and then chilling in old town pasadena at vertical bar. second nite it was a nice chill dinner at bistro 45 and then watching the mr and mrs smith and then the break-up at irene's house. jennifer aniston looks so great in the break up. i loved her fit body and loved loved loved her wardrobe.

ah speaking of fitness, went spinning monday and gymming yesterday. off gymming i go!

math doesn't suck

winnie cooper from wonder years (ok her real name is danica mckeller - she went to ucla, go bruins!) just came out with a book that tells girls "smart and beautiful is better than dumb and beautiful." while i applaud her message to young girls, i wonder how many ten year olds (the target market for this book) know who winnie cooper is?

personally, i used to suck at math up until seventh grade when i got an awesome teacher. then i sucked a little again in early high school, but got a another awesome teacher for calculus (mr beck ur awesome!) and rocked my calculus AP exam to get a 5. after that however, my math skills deteriorated due to young phd's with heavy accents who i couldn't understand during lecture and didn't care to explain things well. oh well. math came back to bite me in the butt during grad school. lagrangians what?! but it didn't suck too badly.

proud

hunny says he's so proud of me. those words mean the world. for someone who is not making a salary, going out on a limb and taking a huge risk by not taking the typical job - it's just so comforting to hear that others believe in me. i'm not normally the one who takes risks. i normally drive the same path i always drive so i don't get lost and order the same dish at my favorite restaurant because i love it and i won't have to wonder if it will be good or not.

for the next few months i could be doing work every weekend and maybe seven days a week. maybe it could be a year. if i had kids and a mortgage i know i would not take these risks. but i feel like now is the only time i can, so i'd better do it! i am so grateful to my family, my friends and my hunny for supporting my decision to he an entrepreneur. instead of "you're crazy, go get a real job" i hear "that's a great idea! go do it! let me help!" i feel so lucky to have the support that i do.

i also hope i'm doing my part and supporting others! ryan did a recent facelift to dropshots and it's great! much faster, love the infinite scrolling. a webpage that works like a desktop application! koolness. go check it out! and imagine, he's doing all this AND has a brand new baby!

the new dropshots

hunny has been working a lot lately due to his new job he took in april. he has been working 6 weekends in a row! :-o! but i admire him so much because he works the extra hours and never once does he complain about it. instead he loves his job because he's always learning so much and he will be able to climb far and accomplish a lot at his current company. i am so proud of hunny also, with all that he has accomplished in only three years. he always inspires me to do more because he's never lazy when it comes to his body and his work. i want to strive to be the same way.

i had lunch with my old roomie jeff today after playing with the new website of his start up. launch will be in a few weeks. LOVE the new website! the workflow has completely changed and rather than being just a nice to have, i can totally see it as a must have for foodies. official launch is not yet, but keep your eye out for tastebudd.