Chan's Personal Blog

Well, let me welcome Chad and Justin as my first visitors from Canada. They've been out on a road trip, and they've made it to Santa Clara, California in the old Ford Aspire. I got a phone call from them today saying they were about an hour before they got into town. Lets just say their estimated time of arrival was a bit off. Two hours later, they finally arrived after a few unscheduled detours and tours. Lucky for them, I've got quite a bit of IKEA furniture assembled, so they're able to sleep on the futon bed. Unfortunately, my apartment is still a mess as it's littered with cardboard boxes and what not.

So, welcome to Silicon Valley, and enjoy your stay. Tonight we feast!

Prior to leaving Canada, I enjoyed a sophisticated evening at Symphony Splash with friends. One person asked me, what are you looking forward to in California. Near the top of my list was the excellent Mexican food in California. I remarked that I was going to finally be able to try Fish Tacos. The group expressed their disgust fairly uniformly by saying, "ugh, Fish Tacos?!" I was a bit surprised by their reaction, but then again, if they consider Taco Bell to be authentic Mexican cuisine, I should have known better.

In either case, I first learned of Fish Tacos from the Food Network. There's this one chef who's a master of Latin American cuisine, and he spoke said that Fish Tacos were quite popular. It usually consists of deep fried white fish, crunchy cabbage, salsa, a soft tortilla shell, and a splash of lime. Sounds good to me.

So, on my second day in California, I disembarked from my hotel in search of the famed Fish Taco. I found the elusive Taco at Rubio's Mexican Grill. I ordered the Two Fish Taco combo which came with unlimited tortilla chips. I have to say, those were some of the best tortilla chips I've ever had. The stuff you get bagged in the grocery store just doesn't compare with the fresh thing.



The fish tacos were really nice, especially with the shredded cabbage; it led to a nice crunchy texture. The salsa and lime kept the whole meal pretty light. So, to all the nay sayers, fish tacos are great! It's kind of a nice change of pace from beef tacos and what not, which can be fairly heavy.

Well, I've found an apartment down here in Santa Clara, and I moved in last Friday. This is the first place that I've rented, and it cost a pretty penny because I had to put down a huge security deposit since I don't have any credit history in this country. I've also been informed by my co-workers that I'm overpaying for this place. However, I didn't have a lot of choice since I had to find an apartment near a bus route that took me to work (since I have no car). There were cheaper places available, but it would have involved timely bus transfers, so I went with this place.

Check out pictures of my apartment here. Pretty bare eh? Hence the title, Insert Furniture Here.

Here's some random pros and cons of the place.

Pros:

• Walking distance to bus for work.
• Relatively safe neighbourhood.
• Very quiet, I don't even hear my neighbours above me.
• In-suite dryer/washer
• Easy bus ride to several malls.

Cons:

• Far from church.
• Not a lot of good restaurants within walking distance.
• The water is really gross.
• Bus service is awful on weekends, especially in the evenings.

The next apartment search (in one year) hopefully will be easier once I get a car, which opens up more options.

Well, pretty much everyone at work told me what a good time it was to join Yahoo. This week coincided with the end of quarter meeting with the division. The morning started off with a huge meeting. The big cheeses were there presenting major accomplishments for the quarter and managers were introducing their team members. It was a good way to see how everyone fit into the organization, and I got a good high level picture of all the cool stuff that was going on.

The next thing on the agenda was a Dim Sum lunch at a Chinese restaurant. At first when I heard that we were all going for Dim Sum, I wondered... why would we choose Dim Sum? For those who are unfamiliar, Dim Sum loosely translates to "order to your heart's content." The meal format is that you sit down at a table, and servers come by with carts of food (usually relatively small portions), and you pick what you want. In either case, the reason I was surprised we were going for Dim Sum was because usually you can get some authentic, scary, exotic Chinese food. Anyone for chicken feet? How about jellyfish? Congealed pigs blood anyone? I think these items would scare away some westerners. That's when I discovered at the meeting that 95% of our division was Asian, so suddenly everything made sense An exotic meal to us would be burgers and fries.

Before I progress any further, I have a photo album of the trip for those who are impatient.

For anyone who has been following the U.S. stock market, you would have noticed that it has been extremely volatile as of late. The root of the problem has been subprime loans which are mortgage loans that banks gave to people who really shouldn't have qualified for a mortgage (hence the term subprime). Essentially, people were taking out mortgages with no down payment, at introductory low interest rates. However, interest rates have increased, and people can't pay for their houses anymore. On top of that, people who can't afford their houses are dumping them onto the market which lowers house values. This is a self-perpetuating problem though.

1. You can't afford to pay your mortgage, so you decide to sell your house.
2. When you sell your house, you can't sell it enough to cover the mortgage because house prices have dropped.
3. Now you have no house, but you have to continue paying off that mortgage.

Mr. Jim Cramer made some colourful remarks about the problem on CNBC and The Colbert Report.


Enjoy.

Sorry for the lack of updates this week, it has been a very hectic week. I just finished moving from my hotel to an apartment, so this is yet another transition move. Still trying to settle down and find a balance, but I'm still not there yet. Anyway, on with the story.

I could have also named this blog entry, "The Revenge of The Border Agents", in reference to an interesting time I had getting into the United States last week.

The day that I got into the country, I immediately went to apply for a social security number (SSN). I had to do things fast because I had a rented car for only 10 days, so I had to do all my important errands in that amount of time. The day that I went, the SSN computer systems were down, so they couldn't enter my information into the system, or give me a tracking number which would allow me to check the status of my application. I left there thinking, all should be well. How wrong I was.

Yesterday, I received a letter from the SSN people stating that my work visa was not right because they checked it against the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) database, and their records show someone else with that work visa number. I privately joke that the the border agent in Seattle (the one that was really mean, then suddenly really nice during my application) purposely screwed over my application just to get back at me, that's why she appeared so nice.

To get this resolved, I had to go to the DHS in San Jose to get everything figured out. I quickly discovered that getting service from the DHS is no easy matter. In order to speak with someone, you have to go in-person, and make an appointment online. They won't even let you into the building without a receipt that says you made an appointment online. On top of that, they won't let you into the building until 15 minutes prior to your appointment. It gets worse, the buildings have super high security for some reason. No cellphones or cameras are allowed in the building at all. When you get there, it's just like going through airport security; you have to pass through a metal detector, and all of your possessions have to be scanned for dangerous items. Only difference was that I didn't have to take off my shoes when going through the security checkpoint.

Needless to say, all these layers of security seems really bizarre as a Canadian.

Well, today was my first day working at Yahoo. The day consisted of many different people giving orientation talks, and we got a tour of the Sunnyvale HQ which is pretty massive. The coolest thing that I saw was the operations control center. People working there had to make sure that all systems were operating fine by monitoring them. They have massive plasma screens on the walls which shows the status of every important system. Along the top wall, they had many clocks set to different time zones, and lots of computers generating fancy graphs and what not. It reminded me of a mission control room from NASA, or a military war room. The entire room is observable because they have glass walls. I think it'd be really interesting to watch the control center in action while a real system emergency took systems down.

In either case, I won't bore you with the details of orientation. By the end of the day, I was pretty exhausted because of the deluge of information being spewed at me. But, while I was walking to my car in the parking lot, I saw two familiar people in a car. I did a double take, and sure enough, it was Jerry Yang (CEO & Co-founder of Yahoo) and Terry Semel (former CEO of Yahoo). They were just pulling out of their parking spot, and I just stood there starring in awe. I'm sure this was quite awkward for them because I knew who they were, but they had no idea who I was. Eventually, I made eye contact with Terry, and he gave a strange look, and then they drove off into the sunset. It's definitely a new experience by being able to bump into high profile people just like that in Silicon Valley.