Big Foot!

Big Foot showed up in our tranquil neighborhood!

大腳怪獸來襲!

Ruby Rocks!

I had resisted Ruby ever since our first encounter at “RESTful Web Services“, because, quite frankly, it looked weird. Even though I’d dealt with quite a few programming languages, I mostly stayed in the C-family. And Ruby is nothing close to it.

Think of it this way: You are a native English speaker traveling in Europe. Some countries are easier for you to move around than others, but usually you can figure out what’s going on without too much trouble. Now you come to Asia for the first time in your life. Everything is new, everything is different, and you have no clue what is going on around you.

This is Ruby to most programmers coming from a C-family background. It’s not because Ruby is difficult, but because it requires a different mindset to learn the crafts. But, I’ve been told over and over, once one makes the gutsy jump, one can never go back to the old way of doing things. It’s like a spell.

My curiosity brought me to it. During my Amazon.com searches, I bumped into “RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails” and realized what I could do even as a Ruby/RoR beginner… I was totally sold! (I could think of another cool project to work on already! ) I could never imagine myself doing that with Java EE; just figuring out which framework to use for the presentation layer is a big project already. How do they manage to keep things so simple and elegant, while at the same time achieving so much more than others?

My language religion has been officially converted.

Spice Girls! (辣妹子)

辣妹子 (SPiCES!), located in Oakland China Town, is easily my favorite Szechuan (四川) restaurant in the States. Frankly I’ve never been to Szechuan to know the authentic tastes, but their Szechuan dishes all have been lavishly showered with the famous Flower Pepper (花椒) and their complex flavors are quite satisfying to my picky palate. So there.

Marsha and Fran introduced me to SPiCES! a couple of months back, and I fell in love with it right away. Needless to say, I insisted going there for my Goodbye party, even though both Ge Ge and Janny were not big fans of spicy food. (Well, I’m usually pretty considerate, but when it comes to food…) But, luckily, both Ge Ge and Janny were cool (Or, in Marsha’s words, “Good Comrades” or “好同志”) and actually seemed to enjoy the non- and mildly spicy dishes. Maybe it was the company making food less spicy for them, I don’t know, but we all enjoyed it tremendously.

So when it was time for the gang to meet again, I declared that we would meet at SPiCES! Why? Because we are Spice Girls and we just wanna have fun!

The thing I miss the most about my last company is my Spice Girls. It was my first time making so many good girl friends! (It was also my first time speaking more Chinese than English ever since I came to the States. Ge Ge commented that it was just wrong that I spoke Chinese at work and English at home. ) And because of that, we decided to get together once a month (not necessarily at SPiCES! again though) to share our latest gossip of work and home, like a modern version of Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club without the Mahjong part.

Go Spice Girls! 我們是辣妹子!

P.S. Shortly after I sent out my resignation letter, Fran and Ge Ge followed suit. Our usual work lunch crowd now only contains Janny and Marsha…

L’Iceberg

L’Iceberg, a deadpan Belgian comedy, feels more like a live theater show than a traditional movie. There is very little dialogue, but they manage to get the idea cross from their excellent and silly performance. I can’t say this better than NY Time:

“… L’Iceberg treats Fiona’s journey as a mythic quest. Its simultaneously silly and grave tone finds humor in the characters’ delusions and obsessions while celebrating their uniqueness.“

Highly recommend!

Fun SF Street Scenes

I wondered around SF SOMA area before my interview, to warm up from the slightly chilly weather and enjoy the SF’s lively street scenes. Unlike the Union Square area, it wasn’t swamped by tourists sniffing around for the next must-have luxurious items. It was more relaxing, more colorful, and more down-to-earth.

A bunch of SpinVox folks, wearing their signature alphabetical hats, formed various sentences in front of the CNet headquarter. At first I thought that it was a cooperation between the two companies, but from the CNet people’s surprise faces and their requests about what was going on, I took that it was just a smart ad campaign from SpinVox.

As the sun came out at around noon, about a dozen or so beautiful Cirque du Soleil performers dressed up and gave away a CD-ROM to their upcoming show — “Kooza“. You can take a quick peek of it at the following clip:

See, lots of fun and weird stuff happen in SF all the time!

A Reader’s Request

An avid blog reader of mine complained to David that my recent posts about my job hunting and JavaScript were too boring. David passed on her complain to me with some twist, “Tammy wants you to find a job as soon as possible, so you can start writing the fun stuff again.” But then he quickly added, “You should write whatever you want, because it’s your blog.“

*sigh* I see, I was the only one excited about my new geeky findings… I almost wrote about the other Java/JavaScript framework but decided against it for the sake of my readers. But I have several pet projects in mind that I want to talk about later on, and you bet that I’ll talk about them (if I ever get to them, that is). So there! Before then, I’ll do my best to keep my readers entertained with my exciting non-techie life.

Wait, the basketball season is about to start! Oh well, I guess that this time Tammy is gonna roll her eyes and fuss out loud, “When is the basketball season gonna be over?“

Fungus

This meringue-like fungus formed an interesting contrast to the tree trunk. They were nothing alike, but they lived in perfect harmony with each other.