Chan's Personal Blog

This evening while I was enjoying my dinner, I found myself rudely interrupted by an earthquake. Yes, you read that correctly. It probably shook for a minute or so? Ironically my immediate reaction after the quake wasn't to go outside to survey the damage. My reflex was to go online and scan for news stories and earthquake reports.

I came across this news article, "Moderate earthquake hits Northern California." Here's also a map of where the earthquake hit.


Don't worry, everything is absolutely fine. There was no damage at all where I live. But, it's probably the strongest quake that I've felt in a while.

Near the top of my priority list after I landed in the US was to get a cellphone. Psychologically, this was a hard thing to do as I absolutely hate cellphones, and I never had one until now. I find it extremely annoying when I'm at dinner with friends, and they're busying texting other people, or answering phone calls over dinner. It's even worse when a group of friends are doing it as the whole night is filled with random beeps and rings. It's really disruptive and it's poor social etiquette.

Nevertheless, I had to get a cellphone as I am rarely home. I started shopping for a cellular provider and I visited AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. One thing that I hadn't counted on was the fact that they needed a social security number to run a credit check on. At the time, I didn't have this number, so this was going to be tricky. Without any credit history, I would have to put down anywhere from $150-$1000 deposit for a wireless contract depending on the carrier. This was an unpleasant reality, and I hate having cash tied up in deposits as cash was sparse at the time.

Thankfully I found a very helpful sales rep at AT&T Wireless which changed everything.

Lately I've been getting requests to write more about money since I've been fairly light on this subject for a while. This is probably partially due to the fact that I had been unemployed for a good part of the year, so I really didn't have a lot to talk about in the subject other than wishing for more of it . However, my cash flow is positive again, so back to our regularly scheduled program.

I am again in the market for credit cards since my Canadian ones won't work in many cases. As Chad discovered while he was in California, he couldn't pay with his credit card at the pump because the machine asks for your zip code. Being a Canadian, we don't have zip codes, so the transaction couldn't go through. I've run into similar situations, and it has been a pain in the butt. Therefore, it's time to get an American card.

So, it's timely for me to blog about credit cards. It's definitely an important topic as many people, both young and old, run into problems with credit cards. It can be a great financial tool or a great financial burden.

PBS ran a great documentary entitled, "The Secret History Of The Credit Card." It goes over everything you should know about credit cards, and how to take advantage of them. In addition, it goes over some of the really nasty things that credit cards can do to you like raising your interest rates if you miss even one payment.


I strive to be like Ben Stein, who milks the credit card companies for all they're worth. He doesn't pay a cent in interest to them because he always pays off his balances, and he milks the company by getting all these rewards and points. It's an awesome system. Spend your own money, and some company gives you free stuff. That's why I use my credit card for everything.

Fight the system, fight the man. Pay off your credit card balances.

Time for a general update about life in California. The first thing that I'll bring up is that I finally received my social security number (SSN) in the mail. Thank you sweet merciful Jesus. Not having this number has been a constant source of frustration as a ton of stuff relies on this number. I can't open any investment brokerage accounts without one, can't get a driver's license. It's ridiculous, even one of my bills couldn't be paid online because they required a SSN. Why are they making it intentionally difficult to accept money?!

In either case, things are going relatively well. Still getting settled in. Every month is completely different than the previous month as many things are still in a constant state of change. The rest of this blog entry will be answering questions that I constantly get from friends.

How's Work Going?

Overall, things are going pretty well. My hours are less crazy than they were a month ago. The department that I'm a part of has a lot of smart and talented people in it. I really enjoy the lectures/talks/training sessions that are given at Yahoo as they're practical and intellectually stimulating. I've mentioned to that it's interesting that lectures here seem more interesting than lectures in academia, given the fact that you're attending these lectures out of interest, and there's no homework to worry about.

I still have a long way to go in learning everything since a search engine has a ton of different moving parts to it. A veteran Yahoo engineer recently joined our team, and he said this was very different from a lot of the stuff he had worked on in the past. He mentioned it's quite interesting when you go from a team where you knew everything, to a new team where you're the newbie again. I guess it's going from "big fish in little pond" to "little fish in ocean." I definitely feel that.

At times, it's intimidating being around people who come from fancy schools like Stanford or Harvard, or people who have a ton of seniority in the company. For example, in the adjacent row of cubicles sits Sara who's a star of the open source community as she's one of the top contributors to the PHP programming language, and she's written books about the subject.

Earlier this month, I had a post about the new Yahoo Search. This was a major product release, so they threw a big launch party associated to celebrate. I've finally posted pictures of the Yahoo Search Launch Party, so check those out.


The launch party happened over at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale. The main celebration and after party happened back in Santa Clara (where I work), and they had an open bar, and appetizers for all.

Well, this morning was quite interesting at work. I could overhear a lot of swearing and venting from various cubicles in the distance. I initially thought this was people reacting to the news story that "swearing at work boosts morale", and decided to put that into practice. Unfortunately, this wasn't a team building exercise; this was the real deal. Something had happened to our search in China, but no one knew why. There were mysterious reports of Chinese users trying to access Yahoo, only to be redirected to Baidu (China's native #1 search engine).

The fog of war subsided when news reports came through the wire. The article I read was "US Search Engines Hijacked In China." It wasn't only affecting Yahoo, it was also affecting Google and Microsoft.

Last weekend I had an unsettling revelation. I finally got my bathroom scale from IKEA out, and decided to weigh myself. In the back of my mind, I assumed I gained a few pounds because I've been eating well at Yahoo, and I haven't exactly been working out as of late. My co-workers have also informed me that they had gained on average 10 pounds after joining the company.

So, on the scale I went. Something didn't seem right when it said that I gained 20 pounds in 6 weeks. History has shown in the last 7 years, my weight hardly changes because I'm blessed with good metabolism. I found it hard to believe that my metabolism decided to just shut off in 6 weeks. I started starring into the mirror, wondering where that weight had accumulated. I didn't see any visible difference. In theory my clothes shouldn't fit either, so something must be up. My assumption at this point was that the scale was broken.

On a quest to find the truth, I went to some store which was selling digital scales, and I weighed myself. According to it, I had gained no weight since I left Canada. Needless to say, I breathed a sigh of relief. It looks like my cheap IKEA bathroom scale has a +20lb margin of error.

Upon returning home, I looked at my scale again, and on the side there was a label that prominently said, "Scale not for legal trade." How true that is. If you used this thing with a 1lb bag of coffee, it would probably read 21lbs.

One good thing that did arise from this experience was that I finally went to the gym to workout as this was a bit of a wake-up call, albeit a false alarm.