Netflix Time

I just wrote a python script to parse some data out of my Netflix streaming history. Here's what I got.

I spend an average time of 100 minutes per day, watching streaming media on Netflix.
On April 24, 2011 (Sunday), I spent 593 minutes watching The Office.
On November 21, 2011 (Monday), I spent 557 minutes watching Lost
On October 30, 2011 (Sunday), I spent 516 minutes watching Jericho.
On February 15, 2012 (Wednesday), I spent 438 minutes watching Prison Break.

There were about 20 days in 2011 which I spent more than 5 hours on Netflix.

Thank you Dave for recommending me The Office, and Boy for recommending me Prison Break.

I guess I'd say enough TV series for now.

The Vegetarian Spectrum

Two of my coworkers are vegetarian, and the whole company has six people. I guess it's natural that I had to ask why they became vegetarians during today's lunch. Both of them had different reasons and to think about it, I realized that all vegetarians I know (although not that many) had different backgrounds.

Let me list them out. I'll use fake names here. Some people actually gave me explicit answers. For some people, I just inferred.

1) Anthony became a vegetarian because he once had a conversation with one of his friends about the goodness of being a herbivore vs a carnivore. He couldn't back up his thesis about why eating meat is good so he converted.
2) Brittany had an anatomy class in middle school and the teacher had her cut meat. She was disgusted since then.
3) Paul felt that people shouldn't hurt other livings, so he denied eating anything with a nerve system.
4) Sally had a good mind and didn't like the notion of killing animals.
5) Tom's religion prohibits eating meat.
6) Gale saw how cruel animals were "processed" and decided to stop eating meat.
7) Dave wanted to become healthy and eating meat isn't exactly a great way to be healthy.

I'm inclined to be like Dave, but I still can't live without burgers. Thank you In-N-Out, Burger King, and McDonald's. (I'm being sarcastic.)

MBA: The Good Parts

Today I had a chance to talk with one of the co-founders of the company I work at and the CEO/CTO/CFO/[you name it] of another company with 80 people. He's a CS + MBA grad. I have always been curious what people learn in MBA as my dad always said you don't need an MBA to run a company. We ended up having a pretty interesting conversation and I thought it would be good to share.

First, he gave me a primer on the stereotypes of people who attend business school. He said 90% of people who go to business school need an MBA next to their name to bump their salary. And the other 10% are people who truly want to understand the art of business better. Clearly he fell into the 10%.

He told me that my dad was in fact right. You actually don't need an MBA to run a company.

I was curious. Then was it for networking or what?

He said no. The most awesome contacts he had weren't the people he met in business school, but were the ones he spent many years together in college and people he met through serendipity.

So what was special about MBA?

He said MBA gave him the "universal" vocabulary to conduct business. Without it, he wouldn't know what a cash flow statement was. Without it he would look at a product and say something like, "This is nice, let's make it better." without being able to objectively measure "nice" and "better".

Not only that, if he hadn't gone to business school, he said he wouldn't have had the confidence to take over and improve a 20-year-old business started by his family.

I guess business school doesn't solely consist of people in suits with spiky hair after all. Pretty cool indeed.

A (somewhat) concise explanation of HTTPS / SSL / PKI / Digital Certificates / Blah blah blah

Disclaimer: This is a technical blog. Sorry, regular readers :(

My work has recently forced me to understand HTTPS. It's been an area I've always shied from since 2004 -- I interned at an IT security department. I felt that the more detailed and accurate explanations on the web was a bit too much, so I thought this might be a bit more useful to a group of people. (In particular, I'm hoping this is useful to one of my friends who agreed that the video explanations on YouTube sucked.)

I'm no security expert, but I just know enough to get my job done. And here's what I have to share, a concise explanation of HTTPS. Topics includes SSL (secure socket layer), PKI (public key infrastructure), digital certificates, digital signatures, hashes, public/private keys, and stuff along those lines.

Let's start with this spreadsheet.

	Term	Definition	Reason
	HTTP	An application layer protocol for surfing the web.	So we have a standard for writing and showing webpages.
	SSL	A protocol that wraps other application layer protocols so that it's secure.	So we can communicate across the network securely.
	HTTPS	HTTP wrapped with SSL.	So we can browse the web securely.
	Encryption	Ways to scramble data.	So Mr. Nosy doesn't know what you and me are talking about.
	Decryption	Ways to unscramble data.	So you know what I'm talking about.
	Keys	Something that can encrypt and decrypt data.	So we can encrypt and decrypt data. Duh?
	Symmetric Key	A key that can decrypt data that was encrypted by itself.	So you and I can use this single key to encrypt and decrypt data.
	Asymmetric Key	A key that can only decrypt data that was encrypted by its pair.	So it's only half the damage if one key was stolen.
	Public/Private Key	An asymmetric key pair such that if one encrypts, the other can decrypt.	So I can use one key to encrypt data, knowing that you can use the other key to decrypt data.
	Public Key	One key in the Public/Private Key pair that the owner decides to make public.	So people can write to me securely (because only I have the private key to decrypt the data).
	Private Key	One key in the Public/Private Key pair that the owner decides to keep as a secret.	So I can assure people that I was the one who sent the data. (Only I have the private key to encrypt the data. You can verify it by decrypting it with my public key.)
	Hash	A small computed number that represents a bigger chunk of data, such that even the smallest change to the big chunk of data can result in a different hash.	So if you knew this data is supposed to have hash X, but you computed the hash from the actual data and got Y, it means somebody changed the data.
	Digital Signature	A hash encrypted by the private key.	So you know that the hash itself is not changed (only I can encrypt the hash with my private key).
	Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)	A group of technologies to help verify public keys.	So that you know that the public key is actually mine and not an impersonator.
	Certificate Authority (CA)	Somebody who you trust.	So you can believe anything that the CA digitally signed.
	Digital Certificate	A document containing my public key, digitally signed by a CA.	So I can give it to you and you can verify if it's really me or not.

Now that all the terms are hopefully understood. Here's basically how HTTPS works. I'll call this protocol Mini-HTTPS because a lot of detail is skipped and is not exactly HTTPS. However, understanding Mini-HTTPS will definitely help you understand HTTPS if you want to.

1. A user downloads Chrome. Chrome comes with a lot of digital certificates from CA's you trust. You trust them so much that you allow them to be shipped with Chrome. The digital certificates contain the CA's public key and is signed by the CA itself.
2. You open Chrome and go to https://plus.google.com.
3. Chrome detects that the URL starts with "https" so it needs some security checking.
4. Chrome sends, "verify yourself" to the server.
5. The server replies with, "here's my digital certificate, along with its hash encrypted by a well known CA (digitally signed)" It's like when you were a kid, if your Dad says you can trust somebody, you believe him.
6. Chrome verifies the certificate.
1. It tries to decrypt the digital signature (the hash encrypted by the CA) in the certificate. Chrome can do this because Chrome has the CA's public key from (1).
2. If it can decrypt it, it means that the CA really signed this (because only the CA has the private key to sign this.)
3. Since the CA really signed the certificate, it knows that the server can be trusted. Otherwise, the server wouldn't be able to get a signature from the CA.
4. The resulting decrypted hash is untampered for sure because otherwise it wouldn't be able to decrypt it successfully.
5. It computes the certificate's hash by itself and expects to get the same hash as the decrypted hash from (6.4). If they're different, it knows the certificate has been tampered with.
6. It now trusts the the server is really https://plus.google.com because its certificate is "CA approved" and untampered with.
7. Since Chrome trusts the server, it can confidently use the server's public key shipped with the certificate.
8. Chrome creates a symmetric key to be used for the entire session. It doesn't use asymmetric keys because it's more expensive. A one time symmetric key would be secure enough because if the key was stolen, only this session will be affected.
9. It encrypts the symmetric key with the server's public key and sends it to the server. (Only the server can see this symmetric key because only the server has the private key.)
10. This symmetric key is used to encrypt normal HTTP traffic through out this session (session is defined as "everything until the client says it's done").
11. When the client is done with this session, it sends "close session" to the server.
12. No more HTTP encryption between the client and server beyond this point.

Hmmm, maybe that wasn't too concise, but I think it was a good shot. Let me know if I can make anything clearer.

Experiment

I came up with an idea.

I'm gonna post 5 consecutive "Get free ringt ones now!..." on my own Facebook and Google+ wall, then I will wait, and then I'm gonna see how my friends react. This is an experiment to see how many people are aware of internet scam and how people react to it when they see somebody that might be a victim. (Ok, to be honest, it's just for fun.)

I will make up for wasting people's time by visiting their Facebook/Google+ pages one by one and waste the same amount of time there.

Right now is about 5.30 pm CDT. Let's do it!

The Office

I never thought I'd be writing about this but it's been a while since I found interesting stuff and wasn't too lazy to write about it.

Recently (say 3 weeks ago), I started watching the Office tv series. It's about a group of people working in a branch of a corporate paper company. The manager is the worst one can have. He's lazy, pretentious, and selfish. I really hated him in a lot of episodes. The team is basically a group of idiosyncratic people, with an exception of only a few that are considered normal to me.

I watch around 3-10 episodes a day depending on my energy -- yeah that's how I use my free time -- and now I've reached about its 105th episode.

So in one episode a guy named Jim is marrying Pam, the secretary, at Niagara Falls. The wedding, well, almost all weddings, didn't go exactly as planned. But eventually the wedding happened. At the church, Jim and Pam were surprised with a "JK Wedding Entrance Dance Style" (http://vimeo.com/6986692).

Now, as much as I hated a lot of the characters in this series, I was kind of moved by the way everybody had fun and was happy for Jim and Pam's wedding. I thought that that was actually enough to consider somebody a good friend. No matter how reproachable someone may be, if that person at least is happy for you when you're happy, then you've possibly found a good friend.

This series does teach a bunch of life lessons throughout the show, but I particularly like this one.

Anyway, I really have to praise the cast of the Office. I think they've done a fabulous job in making me think that they are in fact the fictional people in the series. I'm adding this to my favorite tv series list in facebook.

By the way, reviewing something is pretty fun. I'll have to do this more often.

Cool websites with 4 letters

It's one of those Friday afternoons that sometimes your mind just drifts away from work and you look for something fun on the internet.

Today's activity was finding cool 4-letter domain names. For example blog.com is a 4-letter domain name, b-l-o-g. Out of innocence, believe me, I tried this name: p-l-o-p dot com. (Warning: don't try it yourself. I'll tell you why in a minute.)

I though it might be something related to programming languages (PL). In fact, there's a conference called "Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP)".

So I entered that address into my browser to see what kind of website is gonna show up. Bam! My corporate homepage appeared with a message saying. "This website has been blocked. Reason: Pornography."

Oops... Maybe I should have googled it first. :P

How to surf Facebook safely at work

Disclaimer: This is not about bypassing your company's/school firewall. It's about making Facebook not look like Facebook, hoping that people who just walk by won't notice.

The idea is really simple:
A) Disable pictures
B) Make everything black and white

I use Google Chrome for personal web surfing at work so this is how to do it with Google Chrome.

Step A
Here's how to disable pictures.

1) Open Google Chrome and go to the options menu.



2) Once the dialog pops up, go to the Under The Hood tab and press the button Content Settings...




3) Another dialog pops up. In the Features box choose Images, then choose Do not show any images



4) Close out of that dialog.
5) Close out of the other dialog.

Next, make everything black and white. You're gonna be editing one file. Different machines have different places you need to look at. Here's the default locations. For each location, change USERNAME to your user name on that computer (not your Facebook user name!)

Windows XP
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css

Windows Vista
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User StyleSheets\Custom.css

Mac OS
/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Step B
Going black and white.
1) Once you locate the file, open it in notepad or your favorite editor.
2) Paste the following into that file.

* { background-color: white !important; }
* { color: black !important; }
* a:link { color: black !important;}
* a:visited { color: black !important; }
* a:hover { background-color: white !important; }
* {font-family:monospace !important; 
font-style:normal !important;
font-weight:normal !important;
font-size:medium !important;}

3) Save the file.
4) Done! (You might have to reload the current webpage to see results.) The page now, doesn't quite look like Facebook unless you really look at it.



Oh, and to undo it.
1) Go back to Google Chrome's same menu and just chose Show All Images (Recommended).
2) For the file you've edited, just delete everything inside and save it.

I don't know if it's worth writing a small program to toggle this, but we'll see. And yeah, I've been through this just because I wanted to surf Facebook at work. :)

The Asian Sensation

So Dear and I were having dinner at Sushi Thai and we had quite an interesting conversation with a couple sitting next to us.

Them: What's that you're having? Sushi samplers?
Us: No, we ordered 4 sushi rolls because we printed out this discount coupon.
Them: This is our first time here we don't know what to order.
Us: Where are you guys from? I mean, how long did it take you to drive here.
Them (well, just the guy): Probably not as long as coming from China!

Maybe I got it totally wrong, but did he just imply that he thinks we're from China? Yeah, right, all asians look the same. We didn't take it seriously though. :)

2010

At the end of each year, I usually I summarize the stuff that happened during the year. Here's a list of the best moments I remember.

My best moments of 2010 was the moment that I
1) knew that mom was safe in the ICU.
2) got to be in Thailand and everybody in the family was there.
3) knew that Dear finally became a medical resident.
4) learned that my sister would be having a wedding in Thailand.
5) watched Korean drama with Dear every night.
6) got to visit my best friend in St Louis.
7) had a concert with my great friends in Seattle.
8) got to hang out with my beloved friends in LA for the last moments.
9) got to play soccer at UCLA.
10) adopted Jelly to our family.
11) got a job offer and Dear made me a special dinner.
12) saw the beer selection in Milwaukee's liquor stores.
13) saw snow.

Just looking at the list, I can't stress the following enough: "Great moments in life rarely happen when you're alone."

I don't usually post bad things, but this is a year to remember. My prayers have never involved such many people as this year. Here we go.

1) Many loved ones were lost, including loved ones of my best friends and people I know.

Losing somebody is the worst of the bad things, because, again, "great moments in life rarely happen when you're alone." It's the direct opposite, isn't it?

Take care everybody! Don't forget to keep in touch some time because I miss you.

Road to Milwaukee (part 1) - Napa: Donuts and Wine

Continued from http://ok-cool.blogspot.com/2010/11/another-move-out.html

June 1, 2010
Los Angeles, CA to Napa, CA
~400 miles



We left LA around 5pm. Here's a little view inside the car.



It took us about 6 hours to reach our lodging place in Napa. We didn't really see anything at night. We were exhausted and hungry. Dear was provident enough to bring food from LA.



After we ate, we decided to rest.

The next day we made a stroll around the place. It was actually pretty nice.





First things first, we needed to reduce the car load. We headed to a Kinko to ship some stuff out.

Next was the favorite part. We planned to get some nice breakfast and do some wine tasting!

We headed to The Boon Fly Cafe for some breakfast. The donuts were just awesome. If you ever liked those baked donuts with sugar coating, these are THE donuts you must try.



Not only that, the food overall and atmosphere was nice.





The scrumptious breakfast was only part of the fun. We headed to the winery. We sighted some pleasant views along the way




And I had to do this.



And finally wine time :D





The day had to end there because it was about 2pm and we needed to drive north up to McCloud, CA.

pee pee

Ladies might not know, but a typical sight in the men's room looks somewhat like this.



Yeah I know my drawing is crap, so let me explain. The white thing's a urinal and the yellow stuff is men's produce, and let's stop right there because you don't wanna go as far as the liquid's outlet, right?

It's a fact of life. There's ALWAYS pee on the floor.

Since we're human, we can only make but mistakes. There's no incentive for not creating a splatter right? Plus most of the time, we're not focusing on how well we're aiming.

So is it the urinal's design to be blamed? Is this problem even solvable?

Another Move Out

The night before we moved out, we think we got everything planned. Since we had experience moving twice, we were better at ball parking what would fit in the car.

We weren't very good at ball parking what would fit in the closet though. On the night of May 31, almost everything was boxed and had their place in the car. We had some extra stuff but we found a 24/7 FedEx Kinko and sent out some packages around midnight. The only thing left was things in the bathroom and closet, which I thought was negligible. We went to sleep around 4am.

The next day I wanted to visit my advisor one last time, and Dear wrote farewell letters for her fellows at work. We were done around 2pm and that's when we really started moving stuff into the car.

The boxes we packed fitted nicely. There was some space left, after every box was moved in. So far so good.








Things got a little rough when we explored the closet. Clothes were piling up and at the end I couldn't see the rear mirror. (Forgot to take pictures because we were in a hurry).

Finally, we left the house around 5.30pm. Dear had brought a polaroid camera from Thailand, so we stopped by the camera shop to by some films. And off we went!

Our first destination was Napa, CA.

The 3rd Road Trip

Back in March, I posted our road trip plan but never got to follow up. Now's a good time.

So the plan changed a little bit, but I think it became even more fun.



This time we ditched Las Vegas and chose nature by heading north through Oregon, to Seattle. And then there's Aspen which is one of the nicest cities we've been to.

The move out merits a separate post. Actually I think I'm gonna start writing now.

TOPU

I discovered a few days ago that I had to take the TOEFL, a standardized test. I went online to register for the test. It seemed that the viable test dates in Milwaukee all fell on weekdays. There was this one testing center though, which was about 20 miles to the west, that had an available Saturday. Whatever.

It was a military school so I didn't expect it to be fancy or anything. Plus my sister in just had a bad experience with a particular test center in New York -- restrooms with vomits, cramped up testing rooms, to name a few -- so I was kind of ready to face anything.

Today was a Sunday and Dear was still working when I finished church, so I decided to drive to the test center to get a sense of how early I should wake up on the test day.

I entered this town called Delafield. It looked like a nice, seemingly-historic city. I drove a little deeper and the test center was on my left, St. John's Northwestern Military Academy.

I was speechless.



Man, this was the most beautiful TOEFL test center I've ever seen!

There were many buildings so I asked some people at the "front desk". One guy was an Asian. He seemed to have no idea where the TOEFL is usually taken. Good sign, because I might have a test room for myself. He called up a military student who was literally swinging a gun while marching. (I'm pretty confident there were no bullets.) Suddenly, they started speaking Korean.

"Blah, blah, blah, TOPU."

I watched a Korean drama and noticed they used the sound P whenever they use an English word with F. For example, "fan" is pronounced "pan". So in this case, TOEFL is pronounced TOPU.

Anyway, the student had no idea either and the front desk told me to probably come back and ask on a weekday when a lot of people who might know are around. I figured I'll just call to ask.

On the way back I took some pictures of the town. This seemed to be the whole city.



As if the pumpkins were forming a vocal ensemble to sing a Halloween carol. Well, happy halloween then!

The Ham

We were grocery shopping.

What's been said: Can I have a pound of ham?
What's been heard: blah blah ... half a pound of ham.

Lesson learned: Half a pound of ham is not enough for a week. We'll have to come back to get some more.

Just a normal day

I figured I have been writing a lot on ideas and stuff I find interesting, but I never really wrote a log of my normal day. Something like a conventional diary (although I argued in my Thai blog post that a diary is free-form). I believe one day it will help me bring back my memories in Milwaukee when I want to think about it. Here goes.

Today I woke up around 3am to pee-pee. Tired from last night watching Futarama, I came back to bed and slept more. Around 5.30am I woke up because there was this flash nearby. Turned out to be a thunderstorm just above our heads. There wasn't an issued warning though, so I guess it wasn't that severe. We tried to sleep again but the lightning was to bright and the storm was too loud. We finally got up.

Our day started as usual. As soon as I exited the bedroom, I saw Jelly waiting nearby the door. She was probably awoken by the storm as well.

We discussed what we would have for breakfast. There was this breakfast place called Trocadero which had great American food and donuts. It opened at 9, so we thought we had something to eat while waiting. (It was 6.30am.)

We heated that leftover ham & cheese bagel we got from Einstein the day before and had half each. Dear also had the chocolate Lucky Charm.

Dear skyped home while I took a shower. After the shower, I shaved. Usually I shave once a week and it's been a week. Dear finished calling home. I tried to call Mom but nobody answered. I think she's doing much better since her heart attack 18 days ago.

It was Dear's turn for a bath. Dear opened the water into the tub for a whirlpool bath and came back to the living room. She went on Youtube and not too long afterwards I heard the lyrics "เมื่อคิดให้ดีโลกนี้ประหลาด" that I've been hearing for the past couple of days. It was a Thai soap opera called วนิดา which I have no interest in (yet). I said "yet" because Dear always works her magic on me. Last time I didn't want to watch the Korean drama You're Beautiful at all, but later I got induced and finished the series twice.

Dear's bathtub was ready for the whirlpool. She disappeared in the bathroom for a while, and I started writing this log.

When Dear finished, it was time for brunch at Trocadero. It was raining and starting to get cold so I wore my UCLA sweater I almost never wore in LA. We were among the first customers so we got nice seats and the waitress was still happy. Dear ordered coffee and her croissant egg sandwich. I ordered eggs and sausage. We also got their famous donuts. They were really nice.

The meal was lovely. We decide to do some grocery shopping afterwards because we're almost out of tissue rolls -- everybody who poops knows it's something indispensable. Dear also bought cat treats for Jelly. When we returned home, Jelly liked the treats indeed.

It was high time we cleaned up our home. I took care of the living room and Dear cleaned the bathroom and kitchen. I was pretty tired so I took a break. Dear started to cook dinner. Today we're having Yum-Ma-Ma, which is kind of a spicy noodle salad, and steamed shrimp. The shrimps from Whole Foods are fresh and nice.

Dear hasn't finished cooking yet, so I came to the computer to blog.

The End.

Faith

This will be one of the few blog entries that includes my religious views.

Many of my friends might already know that our family has recently been in a difficult time. In short, Mom had a heart attack and was admitted to the ICU.

Two years ago, through "luck", my Daddy figured that Mom had a heart disease. That night, Mom had a serious stomach ache and was taken to the hospital. For some reason, my Daddy took a listen to Mom's heart and knew something wasn't normal.

Daddy got the staff to run some tests and later on we found out that Mom had a blood vessel that wasn't suppose to be there since birth. This "special" blood vessel caused some amount of good blood to flow back to the lungs, when it's supposed to feed the body. She never had symptoms because she never played hard sports. If she did, I don't know what would have happened.

After we learned about the problematic blood vessel, she had surgery to remove it. She became healthier and healthier over the years, and she  was even able to come to my graduation.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, Mom was sitting in the cafeteria of the hospital she worked at. She felt dizzy and suspected it had something to do with the heart. Her fellow doctors took her to the ICU immediately. It happened that she had what was called an "aneurism", which is essentially a very swollen blood vessel. This aneurism works similarly to a dam that sometimes keeps blood there for a little to long that blood starts to clot. The problem happens when this blood clot is set free from the dam and gets stuck in important blood vessels. In Mom's case, it was the blood vessel that fed the heart. So essentially, her heart wasn't fed for a couple of minutes and she had a heart attack.

She's now in a safe state where the clot is gone and her heart is regaining power, but the aneurism is still there. It's like a time bomb that can explode any time in the future, and if next time she's not in the hospital, it's going to be bad news. This might be even worse than cancer.

Come to think of it, Mom was very lucky.

If Mom was a sports person, she might have had a heart attack long time ago.
If Mom didn't have a stomach ache that night, we might have never knew about her heart disease.
If Mom wasn't in the hospital the time she had a heart attack, we might have lost her.

Mom was saved several times and I have faith that there's a reason. People believe in coincidences, sciences, karma, and so on. I believe Mom was a kind and loving person and God has been there to help her all the time.

We're looking for a cure. Doctors in Thailand say that Mom's aneurism was one of the biggest and in the hardest locations to do surgery on. Who knows? Maybe Dear got accepted to a medical program that has a strong heart department for a reason.

Amidst the sadness and fear, there is hope and positive light. This is the beauty of life and I appreciate every second I live.

You should too.

The move out from Ann Arbor (August 2009)

Our road trip to Ann Arbor ended at the beginning of July, 2009. I started to look for part-time jobs immediately. Why part-time? Because Dear was applying for her medical residency and we would have to fly out together. Why fly out together? Because it was a family decision. Dear wanted to make sure we were moving to a city where we could both be living in.

I was pretty desperate because Ann Arbor was such a huge computer industry (if you can detect the sarcasm), especially for part-time jobs.

At some point, we received a letter from Immigrations (aka USCIS) saying that Dear was about to get her permanent green card -- back then she was holding a conditional green card -- and needed Dear's fingerprint. We had to go to Texas for a fingerprint.

After some pondering, we decided to move back to LA, visiting Texas along the way.

We had about 10 days to leave Ann Arbor because we had to reach Texas at the scheduled appointment. It was a little rush but I became a professional seller on Craigslist in no time.

My personal rule was, "If you want to sell quick, show the full price, say that it's in excellent condition, and sell it at 1/3 the original price." This rule worked pretty well, as we were able to sell almost all of our stuff (except clothes) in time. To get an idea, here's a bunch of our stuff.



Yeah, that's just about what we sold. Not only did we need to sell stuff, but we also needed to sublet our apartment as well because we're leaving before the end of the lease.

We found a couple of candidates. One that never called back, two nerdy dudes, and a small lady who liked the swimming pool in the complex. We, including our landlord, had interviews with them and ended up choosing the nerdy dudes.

After things seemed settled, it was time to move out. Bye, bye home.

   

As expected, the day we left Ann Arbor was a hectic one. And it had to rain. With a lot of help from Dear's friends in Ann Arbor, we managed to get our stuff in the car and leave Ann Arbor around 5pm.

Nothing was really exciting about this road trip back to Los Angeles and we didn't even bother to take pictures, so I think I should summarize it in this blog entry. Here's the map.



A) We left Ann Arbor around 5pm on August 8.
B) Stayed at my cousin's house in Bloomington, Illinois that night.
C) Stopped by Boy's house (St. Louis, Missouri) for two nights, August 9-11. Had Vietnamese seafood, beer, good Japanese food, desserts, Korean crepes, and those nice stuff. Thanks again Boy!
D) Stopped by my aunt's house in Plano, Texas on August 11-14.
E) Stopped by Amarillo, Texas on August 14. Boring.
F) Rested at Albuquerque, New Mexico on August 15. More boring.
G) Stayed at Las Vegas, Nevada on August 16-18. Celebrated our wedding anniversary there :)
H) Hurray, we're back in LA.

That's how non-interesting the trip was. But anyway, a lot of interesting stuff did happen afterwards, such as the match. I'll blog about it later.