Entries Tagged 'Life' ↓

It has been eight years, but I still remember a lot of details from that tragic day of 9/11/2001. I was barely 18 and just moved into the dorms at UC Berkeley. My roommate was a jovial Arabic girl from San Diego trying to be a doctor and a lawyer. It was just another day of school.

Before class started, my roommate told me that someone bombed the World Trade Center. All I thought was, “well, that seems like a popular target”. There was a girl in our hall that came from New York, and she was watching the small TV in the lounge. I walked past her and she seemed somewhat petrified by the images on the screen. Columns of black smoke replaced the once gleaming towers. It wasn’t a bomb that did this, it was planes. I had to go to class.

In class I saw a friend from high school, and he told me that the towers completely collapsed and there were simultaneous plane attacks in other parts of the country. He laughed and said that at least the terrorists will not try to bomb the World Trade Center anymore. Details were still streaming out, but we weren’t exactly concerned. We were 3000 miles away in California. How could this affect us? All we saw was the constantly pristine blue California sky outside.

When I got back to the dorm for lunch I saw that my mom left me a message on the answer machine. She insisted that I get an answer machine before I moved into the dorms. All she said was, “Xin, AMERICA UNDER ATTACK. BYE” My roommate and I cracked up at this message because it was serious and yet at the same time so comical. How could America be under attack? How much damage could this event possibly do? It was incredulous. It was just a couple buildings that got destroyed? Right?

For the most part that day was almost like just any other day for me because New York was a world away. It was the days and years to come that stirred up fear and unrest in everyone. The death toll in the attack and the constant warnings of further attacks made everyone on edge. Even my granddad in China told us not to go outside to public places, because he was afraid for us. The entire world changed for the worse on that day. The safety that we took for granted was no longer a guarantee.

Now eight years later America is still fighting the terrorists and Ground Zero is still vacant. I would say that wounds caused by 9/11 definitely have not totally healed, and for some the scars will be permanent. When I look back on that day I see how naive and immature I was about the whole event, and I wonder if the hijackers who died on that day now see what a mistake they made.

Finally, I hope that those who remember the events of 9/11 teach their kids never to hate something or someone so much that they are willing to destroy themselves and others. The senseless deaths on that day also remind me not to take my life for granted no matter what, because each day is a gift from God.

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Today the White House released a transcript of President Obama’s prepared speech to schoolkids on September 8th.  This is a speech that caused a lot of uproar amongst many parents because they felt like Obama was becoming a bit too Big Brother.  I think a lot of the controversy could have been avoided if the transcript were released earlier and the somewhat lame lesson plan by the DOE was scrapped.  Anyway, I read the entire speech and here are some of my thoughts.

First, the main theme of the speech  is that staying in school and working hard is the way to success.  I agree with that 100%.  If my parents did not pursue their advanced degrees here in America then I would not be here at all;  if I did not finish college I also would not be where I am; if my hubby did not get his engineering degree he probably would not be making video games now.  I definitely believe that education is the way to upward mobility here in America, and I am actually glad to see a lot of people I know going back to school this year to improve their skills or learn a new trade.  Although I have forgotten a lot of the details of things I learned in the 16 years of schooling I had, I  think I will be using the basic math and language skills for a lifetime.

Obama also gives a fairly good reason for kids to stay in school.  He says that in school you can discover what you are good at by trying out different classes.   I think that is somewhat true, but not always.  I went to  public schools in America for 9 years before going to a public state college for 4 years  so I can say with confidence that NOT all schools give kids the opportunity to discover what they are good at due to resource constraints or institutional requirements.  Public secondary schools in general are extremely structured and you have to take a core set of classes to graduate.  I have known some kids in highschool who were really talented in things that the schools just did not teach at all.  Obama is right in saying that school is where you can discover if you are good at things like writing or math because every school teaches those subjects.  However,  it is not necessarily a good place to discover if you are a good cook or great artist because not all schools have the bandwidth for those “extra” programs.  Kids still have to discover their talents on their own,  so I think college is really where people can freely experiment with a huge variety of subjects.  However, finishing secondary school is usually a prerequisite for college and not everyone could afford to go to college.

Another fairly hefty message in the speech is that failure is acceptable and the way to success always contains some stumbles along the way.  That is obviously pretty cliche, but it is also true.  Obama suggests that students should overcome failure through hardwork, practice, and seeking for help.  All of those are sound advice for kids.  Of course he had to throw in that you should not give up on yourself, because “when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country”.

Obviously this was a positive message meant to inspire kids to work hard in school and become successful.  However, I felt that it did not really clearly define what success is.  There is one short paragraph where Obama said that kids might think that it is easy to become “rich and successful” without any work because TV shows rappers and basketball stars living it up.  Honestly I think it is kind of sad that he disparages entertainers and sports stars because many of these people work pretty hard at their professions, too.  Also there is another section that talks about how kids need to be able to fight the challenges of this nation with the skills they learn in school and also “build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy”.  So is success financial? Is success fame?  Is success being more educated by your parents?    I don’t think that was extremely clear.  To follow the theme of the message, I guess Obama wants kids to figure out what being successful really means.

Anyway, I will stop writing this essay now because it is feeling too much like I am finishing a school assignment.  The bottom line is that I definitely feel like having at least a  college degree gives people an edge in employment and earning potential, but if you are truly good at something that the schools do not teach then you should go for it.  Traditional structured schooling is not right for everyone, and those who are successful share a passionate drive to achieve their dreams, and they all work hard at their goals.   Happy Labor Day everyone!!

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This week my hubby and I are starting the third year of our marriage.  Last weekend we took a short trip to San Francisco to celebrate our second anniversary, and it was quite a bit fun.

First of all, a big thanks goes out to my inlaws since they gave us the gift of two nights hotel stay at the Westin St. Francis right at Union Square.  This allowed us to take the BART to the City and stay there for the whole weekend.  The hotel is old but very classy, and its glass elevators are quite fun to ride.  Some other guests were actually just taking the elevator for fun and we actually encountered a line for the elevators.

Usually we like to splurge on food on special occasions, but this time we had to be somewhat careful because of my gestational diabetes.  We decided to forgo the one gigantic  expensive meal and just look for cheaper places and  eat smaller portions. So before we left home we wrote down a list of cheap and moderate restaurants we could walk to.

On Friday night we arrived in our hotel at around 8:30, and then we rested a bit and went to Cafe Claude.  This is a small French restaurant that features live jazz music every night.  When we got there at 9:30 the whole place was packed, but we did have a reservation.  For starters we ordered their escargot and we got a lovely little plate of six snails topped with small puff pastry that was soaked in butter and parsley.  It was quite tasty and I think we wolfed them down a bit too fast.  For the main course I had the coq au vin, which is a fairly traditional French dish of chicken cooked in a red wine stew. Cafe Claude’s version also had pearl onions, mushroom, and bacon bits.  The chicken is stewed for hours until it is so tender that it falls off the bone.  The scent of this dish was so lovely and rich that I kept on sniffing it.  The hubby had an ahi dish with a bacon sauce.  I only tried some of the bacon sauce and it seemed pretty good.  The finally for dessert the hubby ordered a coconut flan, which I tried one small bite of, and it was quite delicious. The whole meal was around $70, but it was definitely worth it.   After dinner we walked to the Metreon and watched the last showing of District 9.  We haven’t seen a movie in the theatres for a while because of Netflix, but we did manage to get $7.00 off on the tickets with some Entertainment Book coupons.

On Saturday we headed over to the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park  to see the special King Tut exhibition. We got there at around 11:00 and the tickets were sold out until 12:30, so we started to walk around the other exhibits. The hubby liked a lot of the modern art being exhibited.  One particularly interesting piece is called The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro by sculptor Al Farrow.  This is a medieval church made out of hundreds of disassembled guns and bullets.

Finally we got to the King Tut exhibit and saw some of the treasures from the tomb.  What really surprised me about the special Tut exhibit is that a lot of treasures were made out of wood, but they lasted for thousands of years.  I was also quite amazed by the craftsmanship on a lot of the objects exhibited.  It took us over an hour to see all the galleries, and then we were too tired to see the rest of the museum.  The cool thing about the de Young is that it is on the Bank of America’s Museums on Us program, so we could go back and see the rest for free on select weekends.

On Saturday afternoon we headed over to the Mission district for a street food festival.  By the time we got there a lot of things were sold out, and there were so many people in the lines for each booth that it was hard to figure out where to stand.  We were really hungry so we sort of gave up and went to a nearby restaurant and had some Mexican food.  The next few stops were on the hubby’s list because he saw the restaurants on a video game webshow.  First there is this interesting ice cream shop called Humphry Slocombe that serves ice cream flavors such as Salt and Pepper, and Foie Gras. There was a pretty long line that almost went around the block when we got there.  When we finally got to the front of the line I sampled a Thai Chili Lime flavor ice cream and something called Secret Breakfast, which is bourbon and cornflakes flavored ice cream.  The Thai Chili Lime flavor was pretty darn bizarre and it made me wince a bit.  Finally the hubby settled on one scoop of Vietnamese Coffee and one scoop of Secret Breakfast. I ate a couple spoons of his ice cream instead of getting my own since I didn’t want to spike my blood sugar.  Next we walked to Dynamo Donuts, which the hubby has been raving about because he wanted to try their bacon donuts.  Unfortunately, it was already closed, so we headed back to our hotel.  After napping for a few hours after the 6 hours of urban hiking, we ended the night with some cheap Thai food at Siam Thai, which is a cheap but very flavorful Thai restaurant tucked in the Parc 55 Hotel.  I had some basil duck here, and it was quite good.

The next day we checked out of the hotel and headed home, but we made a stop at the Mission district because the hubby really wanted to try Dynamo Donuts, and I saw tons of beautiful murals in that neighborhood the day before and I wanted some pictures. Apparently the Mission district is quite famous for the hundreds of murals inside it, and we had no idea.  It is about a six block walk from the 24th and Mission BART station to Dynamo Donuts, so we walked and took pictures along the way.  One particularly decorated alley is called Balmy Alley, and this contained the mural of a woman giving birth and also  a really detailed  mural by Sirron Norris depicting a robot like being composed of Victorian houses called Victorion.  The following pictures were taken by the hubby:

Victorion by Sirron Norris

Detail of Materialist Displacement By Federico Alvarado & Manuel Sanchez

The whole neighborhood is full of these murals and it really makes the walk interesting because it is truly like a giant modern art gallery, but at the same time these murals are the complete opposite of the idea that fine art should be privately collected and displayed in locked up, temperature controlled rooms.  I truly loved how expressive and free they are.   Finally we reached Dynamo and the hubby got the bacon donut he has been talking about for a week and I ate half of it.  It was small, but quite good.  Before going back to the BART station we stopped at St. Francis Fountain,  which is another locale the hubby saw on the video game show.  There was quite a crowd there already and we had to wait a bit to get a table.  I had some eggs with vegan chorizo there and the chorizo  tasted and looked just like real chorizo.  The hubby had a full order of The Nebulous Potato Thing, which looked like a giant potato hash with a bunch of stuff in it.  He actually couldn’t finish the whole thing because it was so big. After that meal, we walked back to the BART and headed home.

In conclusion, we thoroughly enjoyed  our last weekend trip before the baby arrives, and my blood sugar levels were actually in a good range the entire weekend because I walked so much. My legs were sore for two days afterward.  I have lived in the Bay Area for 12 years now, but I really do not go to San Francisco very much, and this weekend I definitely experienced some new things in the City.  My favorite part was actually seeing all the different murals because that was the only place we went to that was not crowded and full of people.    We did not see all of the murals since we just went down one street, and many of them are so intricate that you could just stare at one for quite a while. If you ever visit San Francisco I highly recommend seeing these murals at least once, and the great thing about them is that they don’t cost anything to see.  All you have to do is to take a Muni or BART to the Mission district and start walking.

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My husband and I are technically both software engineers.  The difference is that I release enterprise software, and he programs games.  In less than two weeks his company will be pushing out the game that they have been working on for three years, and I am very excited for him.

This will be the first game that the hubby is shipping, and right now it is in open beta.  It seems that pre-order sales are going really well so far and tens of thousands of people have tried out the beta.  His company actually did not expect the game to be so popular in beta and there were some server issues and crashes, but those seem to be mostly ironed out by now.

For months I have been more excited about the game than he was because I was able to play the game more than him.  He was busy working on creating the systems and fixing problems.  Also, when you work on the same product for so long you can easily get sick of it.  However, last night he got to see the nearly finished game in action and he thought it was actually quite fun and finally he said that he is excited about the launch of the game.  Thousands of other players were playing at the same time and that made it much more interesting  and hilarious than just testing the game alone. For example, we saw a newbie player who could not figure out how to block hits from the bad guys and just kept on standing in front of a gun and dying over and over again.  Even after my hubby told him how to block hits he could not figure it out.  I was just sitting on the side and laughing my butt off.

I am just glad to see that so many people are enjoying a product that my hubby helped create. Three years ago he quit working in enterprise software and took a huge pay cut to take this job at the game company, and now he is finally making a little more than his former salary.  I think he was pretty brave to do that because the gaming industry is actually a pretty risky business since it takes so much investment to create a game, but if the game is  a dud the entire company could just go kaput. This is especially true when the company is small.   So I guess right now I am also breathing a sigh of relief because it looks like this game is poised to be quite successful and that means job security and possible bonuses for the hubby.

The hubby’s company is launching another game next year, and I am hoping that one is even more amazing.  In my career I have released dozens of products already, but in all honesty none of them really excited me that much.  I know that the products I released have impacted many people around the world, too, but a game is just much more fun, tangible, and comprehensible to most people. I mean, even my parents do not know or care that I helped make software that optimized call center performance, or software that help people write more secure code, but they know that the hubby makes games.

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I don’t write about health on this blog much because I am really not a health nut.  I do not exercise a lot and I was about 10 to 15 lbs overweight before I got pregnant.  This is definitely something I have to change because I just got diagnosed with gestational diabetes.  This is a condition that is completely controllable, but I will have to make an effort to manage it.

For those who are unfamiliar with this condition, gestational diabetes is caused by the placenta’s  hormones blocking the mom’s insulin function.  According to the American Diabetes Association some pregnant women need 3 times as much insulin as normal to control blood sugar.  In my case I also had some risk factors of having this condition such as being slightly overweight, being Asian, having a family history of diabetes,  and being over 25 years old while pregnant.  These risk factors made me twice more likely to get gestational diabetes.   The worst negative effect of this type of diabetes is that the baby might be getting too much blood sugar and end up being really fat.  This may cause the delivery to be very difficult, and that is why my doctor ordered another ultrasound for us in a few weeks to check on the size of the baby.  If the baby is too big then I would need to be induced early or have a C-section.  The good news is that with a good diet the baby can be completely normal and the diabetes should go away after delivery.  Also, I am not really feeling any ill effects from this problem.

Right now I have been referred to a dietician at the hospital, and I will be receiving my blood glucose meter soon and I will have to prick my fingers to test my blood sugar 4 to 8 times a day.   I have also been sent a good set of study materials on how to plan my meals and count my carbohydrate intake.  I am also told to keep a log of my food intake with my blood glucose values.  It is really like keeping a written down budget of how much food I can eat, and I think the organization is helpful.

I really see this complication as a blessing in disguise because I am being disciplined to eat smaller portions with low carbohydrates and low fat.  I usually do not eat a lot of sugary foods, but I do eat very large portions for my size and I eat a lot of carbs.  In the long run this new diet plan will be really good for me because I know how bad long term uncontrolled diabetes could be.  One of my grandmothers went blind because of the  disease and her brother lost his legs.  Women who get gestational diabetes are much more likely to get Type 2 diabetes in the future unless it is controlled so I need to work on prevention right now.   Controlling my intake of food is going to be more challenging than controlling how much money I spend because I really love to eat, but I know that having a long term disease like diabetes can be very costly.  I have already started to eat smaller portions and it is not that horrible.  Hopefully this experience will get me more into cooking healthy meals because I would need to know what exactly is in my food.

My mom keeps on telling me that a healthy life is really more important than a wealthy life, and I think that is true because if you have a ton of money but cannot enjoy it due to bad health then it is really not worth anything.   I think I could really improve my health a lot if I just stick to my diet plan like I stick to my savings plan and I think I could do it because moderation and impulse control are the two most important factors in both.

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