Archives for July 2006

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What am I doing?

31 July 2006 | Random | No Responses

Last night, my dad and I went through the steps for making kipfles wraps on the phone. I’ve made similar to the filling, and I’ve folded thousands and thousands of kipfels, but I never made the dough. While talking to my dad, he mentioned one of the ingredients was cream cheese.

Me: What can substitute for cream cheese?
Dad: They don’t have cream cheese there?
Me: Do I live in Philidelphia?
Dad: Well … I don’t know, maybe sour cream, or use something like Cool Whip?
Me: Do they have Cool Whip in China? Anyway, forget the cream cheese, I remember there’s some Jewish lady who makes bagels that are sold in a couple stores in this city, so maybe I can somehow reach her. What about Pet Milk?
Dad: They don’t have Pet Milk?
Me: Not that I’ve ever seen.
Dad: It’s milk that comes in cans.
Me: I know. We have milk that comes in bags.
Dad: Dried?
Me: No …

When I came to work today lamenting the lack of ingredients, my boss suggested I check his Insider’s Guide to Beijing book. I did.

Wow.

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Koreans released in Somalia

31 July 2006 | Pirates | No Responses

In an effort to continue making this site appear a blog, I bring more pirate news courtesy of Talbain. The Korea Herald reported this week that eight Koreans were released after being detained by pirates the last four months. The prisoner exchange brought the pirates $800,000 USD which seems fairly good swag for only 25 fisherman.

The government has said the kidnapping appeared to be connected to monetary demands rather than political issues.

There have been frequent hijacks of boats containing international relief supplies by pirates in the area, but there have not been any casualties reported after the victims were released in return for money, the ministry explained.

Not to play Captain Obvious, but maybe that’s because the kidnappers are pirates. Pirates are not affiliated with governments, and probably have little motive in grabbing a ship other than one part to get a ransom and two parts because they can.

Mentioned in Sega-16

30 July 2006 | Press | 2 Responses

Somehow I missed this one, but I was mentioned in Sega-16’s preview of Beggar Prince last August.

You can read the article here.

NINJA 2.0.0.0 Final Delayed

30 July 2006 | NINJA | 3 Responses

This weekend I’ve been feeling pretty sick, and any time I do have is going into our code crunch for Monday’s eForms alpha at work (eForms is the half of our company’s accounting software that I am in charge of). As of now, I’m still behind schedule and chances for a mostly functioning alpha look bleak. I would pull an all-nighter and make it happen, but that would leave me dead on Monday night, and that’s not an option since Monday is 七夕.

I can promise you whatever delay there is will be worth it. NINJA is currently halted while I restructure libPirate to be a class-based library. NINJA will basically become an interface to accessing libPirate’s functions. In fact, if you look at the current version, most of its code is mirrored in libPirate. This means users can upgrade NINJA just by dropping in the latest libPirate stable release.

I’ve also rewritten the GUI to access NINJA as an asynchronous process so NINJA will no longer freeze when you apply or create a patch. I also plan to make the console output more verbose to give better indication NINJA is still running.

Teaching in China (Part 1)

27 July 2006 | Rants | No Responses

I was offered a position teaching at 外交学院 in May 2005. Starting from June, I prepared teaching material every day until I left the USA on August 22. However, arriving in China, I quickly realized how useless all my preparation would be.

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Backlogged

27 July 2006 | Random | No Responses

I have to do the following things and am not making any progress on any of them:

All I can say is, I’m trying.

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