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Costco Playing Both Sides
I love Costco. The store offers high-quality merchandise at low prices. This weekend, I joined the mad holiday rush and made a quick dash into the local warehouse store. Near the entrance, the Mountain View Costco was selling exercise equipment: treadmills, stationary bikes, etc. Just in time for New Year. I guess their members need…
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Review: California Cafe
Had dinner at California Cafe in Palo Alto. I had no problem finding the Stanford Barn, but the restaurant was tucked into this small corner that required some effort to locate. The crab cakes, organic greens and mango lemonade were quite tasty. The appetizer comes with two crab cakes. Moist on the inside and crispy…
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Chinese Adoption Blog
The New York Times has a Relative Choices blog that focuses on adoption and the American family. One of their bloggers is Jeff Gammage who writes about the experiences of his two daughters, both of whom were adopted from China. He recently wrote about the Chinese language and culture classes that his daughter attends, and…
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Chinatown, 1925
TIME Magazine: Tong. Western Union operators in Boston were puzzled, last week, by a number of enigmatic telegrams sent from their station to various parts of the U. S. The messages appeared, at first glance, to be in code, but a closer scrutiny revealed that they were merely lists of names—Chinese names. The above passage…
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Chinese History From a Western Perspective
Time: Second Thoughts on the Chairman. Not even Mao was perfect, it turns out. Propped up by two solicitous aides, Ye Jianying, 81, the venerable chairman of the National People’s Congress, tottered up to the rostrum last week to deliver the keynote speech for China’s 30th anniversary celebration. If you are ever curious about how…
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FireFox Drop-Down Menus Broken After Leopard Upgrade
I upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard last week and have been struggling with various “issues” that have come up. The latest involves Firefox. I’ve already come across two web sites that use drop-down menus; however, the menus don’t drop. Who wants to browse through a menu by hitting the up arrow / down arrow…
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AT&T FamilyTalk Plan is Not Family Friendly
“Your World. Delivered.” Or, so they say. Anyone try to get a FamilyTalk plan that includes cell phones with phone numbers from different area codes? I think this can be done, but after spending 50 minutes talking to various customer service people within AT&T, I have run out of patience. I don’t need this that…
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Beard Papa’s Open in Cupertino
Beard Papa’s is now open in Cupertino. I was in the area for other purposes and happened to discover a Beard Papa’s right in front of me. So, I had to stop in (of course) for their delicious cream puffs. So, I started off by asking what was the special flavor of the week. Vanilla.…
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Happy Moon Festival
Hope you all were able to enjoy the Moon Festival with your family members. I couldn’t figure out how to take a photo of the full moon, so I looked it up online. I set the Nikon D50 to manual, then set the ISO to 200, aperture to f/16 and shutter speed to 1/200. Worked…
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The Long Tail of Mooncakes
In preparation for the Mid-Autumn Festival, I bought some moon cakes from my local Asian supermarket. Usually, I’m not a big fan of moon cakes because I don’t like the dried yolk in the middle and I’m not too hot on the traditional flavors. So, while shopping around, I came across of box of tea-flavored…