Forbes published the 2005 Top-25 Most Expensive ZIP Codes in US; California is the home to half of the top-10 and nearly 2/3 of the top-25 spots!! The nice weather and sceneries came with a premium. I guess this justifies why I am having money troubles. :-)

Another piece of useless fact, just in time for the weekend... Do you know what “ZIP” stands for? No? Thank me then:

In case you ever wondered, ZIP stands for Zoning Improvement Plan. A relatively recent innovation, the codes only came about in the 1960s when the U.S. Postal Service decided it needed to figure out a better way to manage an increase in population, as well as an influx of business mail.

Before that, the postal service only used addresses, although large cities have had postal zones since 1943. Now, there are more than 40,000 ZIP codes. The first of the five numbers refers to a broad region, from zero for the Northeast (draw what conclusions you will) to nine for the West Coast. The second and third digits narrow to population centers and the last two represent individual post offices or postal zones.

-- Quoted from Yahoo!

Rebates can a great money saver, however they are only good if you remember to save the receipt, mail everything out in time and have the patient to wait 6-8 weeks before getting your money back. As for me, I can’t recall how many times I forgot to follow up with the rebate procedures and had to settle for a rebate of big fat $0. The merchants must love the kind of shopper like me. :-(

"Shit" -- a catchy word indeed, and definitely one of the most used word in the English vocabulary, but did you know the history behind this emotion-filling-satisfaction-giving word? Betcha didn't! Read on to find out how Shit Happened... :-)

Dell is dropping its PC price like a rock! Last week, there was a $750 off Inspiron notebooks deal, and today, there will be another round of $750 off for its Dimension desktop and Inspiron notebooks!!

Sounds like spring cleaning in the Dell's warehouse these days... clean off the inventory to make room for the upcoming Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core processors? Starting Monday, Dell will offer Intel's Pentium® Extreme Edition 840 with 800MT/s FSB and pairing it up with the Intel® 955X Express chipset (a.k.a. Glenwood -- One of the chipsets that I worked long hours on back at Intel-Shanghai!!!!) in its Precision 380 workstations and Dimension XPS desktops. I can’t help but to feel like I am somewhat part of the 955X launch… :-)



$750 off XPS is pretty tempting, it should be a very powerful machine, but I am a believer of the upcoming Dual-Core processors and chipsets that support DDR2 and PCI Express graphics. Many people might want to argue with me on these new technologies pushed by Intel, but hey, I will still root for something that I once worked hard on.

Vivian and I both took Friday off to reserve more time preparing for the event. We went nuts at Costco, and topped two shopping carts with food and supplies. Back at home, Vivian whipped out Deviled Eggs, Smoked Salmon and Sea Food dips from the kitchen for appetizers, and I marinated pounds and pounds of meat and chopped up bags and bags of veggies.

Close to 50 friends, colleagues and neighbors came by last Saturday afternoon. Vivian was busy running up and down the stairs giving tours to our guests; I was on the grill details, occasionally zigzagged through the crowd and held brief conversations with our guests. The weather was great with not a cloud in sight, which helped turning the outdoor patio into guests’ favorite place to have a burger, a beer and a nice conversation with old/new friends. (More...)

YaGoohoogle? You probably like “WTF?”. Well, before you do that, allow me to explain...

Yahoo! + Google = YaGoohoogle :-)

Anyways, someone created this site, which allows you to search simultaneously with Yahoo and Google, and it displays the results in a side-by-side panels. Give it a try when you are really bored...

Fishkill, NY? Heard of it? Not me…
Just learnt IBM has a bunch of establishments in Fishkill, NY, which I have to visit next next week. Not sure what I should expect base on the name of the town. :-)

I paid $2.93/gallon two days ago at the pump, although I was filling my car with 91-grade premium gasoline, the regular 87-grade wasn’t much cheaper either. It is outrageous how expensive gas these days are! As the matter of fact, the radio said the gas price went up another $0.06 per gallon yesterday, I guess I should be glad that I filled up my car before the latest price hike.

As far back as I can remember, I recall seeing $0.87/gallon gasoline, which was probably when I was still in middle or high school. The price since then has increased more than three folds, and personaly, for the first time, the car's gas mileage was carefully considered when I bought my car; and I am sure it is also making all of us think twice before drive the car 200 feet down the block for ice cream at neighborhood 7-Eleven.

By the way, these sites list the latest gas price in our area; use them to find the best deals instead of driving around in your car looking for a bargain. :-)

http://www.gaspricewatch.com/
http://www.gasbuddy.com/

Seems like Vivian and I have been shopping unstop for the past two months, aside from home appliances, clothes and furniture, there were plenty of supply runs to our friendly neighborhood Home Depot as well. All the shopping has been exhausting both physically and financially. :-P

Over the weekend we finally secured on a set of dinning table, coffee/end tables and even bargained for a nice discount too, quite proud of that actually. While waiting for the furniture to be delivered this Friday, I wasted no time and wrapped up my research for that perfect TV set for the family room. HD, ED, DLP, LCoS, LCD, DVI, HDMI… I dove in to the sea of alphabets for weeks and came out on the other side with the decision to purchase the Dell W4200HD Plasma; the price is right, the picture is vivid and the design is sleek; it shall be the ideal final touch to our family room.

We’re almost there!

Yes, yes, I am getting older again, and getting closer and closer to that dreaded 30 mark. Vivian and I made the agreement not to exchange elaborate gifts and overly celebrate our birthdays this year in order to maximize our contribution to the principle of our mortgage (A sign of growing up perhaps?) :-)

Anyways, Vivian still went and got me a mug and an ashtray from Tiffany’s. I had the same exact mug for years, loved it, but unfortunately cracked it few days ago by pouring hot tea in to it (note to self: never pour hot liquid in to a valued crystal container!!). It was good to have the same solid mug in my hand again!



Ashtray? You might ponder? It is a pretty one, big, and made out of crystals, and part of the Tiffany’s Atlas collection. We will be using it to hold our keys and small lose items we throw around the house everyday when we get home. It looked very nice on the table in our foyer!

Thank you bb!!

Still on the topic of Google (one of my favorite topic as you can see), it is celebrating GMail’s first birthday, and the good (and rich, and highly envied) engineers in the Googleplex are doubling everyone GMail account size, to 2GB! Happy happy joy joy!

Not sure if this is an April Fool’s Day joke by Google or not, but it is definitely interesting. Fruity drinks by Google? Well, their logo is sure fruity enough. Check out the Google Gulp intro page, it even got Auto-Drink™!!

Btw, I have been using numerous Google logos on this blog, hope they are cool enough and won’t suit me for using them. I don’t mean no harm, just like the bright colors in their logo... :-P

Last time I painted anything was back in High School when I volunteered to help paint a Safe House for domestically abused women.

Others told me that if I don’t fix things around the house a year after I move in, I will never have the motivation to work on it later. Knowing my procrastinating self, I knew I better get started before I get too comfortable with everything.



Vivian and I wanted to paint the garage very badly; it was naked with sealed dry walls, very ugly. Although we can never go wrong with white walls, it is a bit too plain; so, we decided to paint the wall facing the driveway baby blue (you can probably tell who’s the real decision maker in our house. :-P ) to spice it up a bit.

I had a day off from work in observant of Good Friday, and so, my three day weekend started off with a two hour trip to Home Depot to pick up all the supplies. More...