All Things Yummy

I was clicking through the journal (I still cringe at the word blog for some reason…) and reading through some of my old entries. It’s kinda nice having glimpse into my thoughts in the times gone past… Anyway, there’s a 6 month gap and here’s a quick recap of what happened in between.

Last I wrote, I had just graduated with bachelor’s degree and had already been enrolled in grad school to do research into control systems. Over the summer, I built the Midnight Sun VIII Solar Car and particpated in the American Solar Challenge 2005 in which our car came in fifth place in a race that took us from Austin, Texas to Calgary, Alberta in 50 odd hours. Right after that, I was invited for an interview at Altera Corporation who offered me a job in Santa Cruz, California where I work and reside now.

Well, I guess that pretty much sums everything up. Let me know if you want my updated contact information.

Have you heard of Amazon Prime? It’s a service in which you pay $79 / year to get 2 day shipping free on everything that Amazon.com sells without minimum purchase requirements. Couple of months ago, I was offered a free trial for 3 months, which I’ve been taking advantage of. I can really see the benefit of such a system - this is Amazon’s version of gums and candies at the checkout lane. Amazon Prime allows completely compulsive purchases. Once your account is enabled, you all it requires for you to do is click a single button. No, seriously, just a single button. Whatever you wanted will arrive at your doorsteps a couple of days later. In one extreme situation, I had ordered a dental floss as a filler item among with couple of other household items. The floss, $1.69, arrived in a box by itself with an receipt for $1.69 two days later. It’s an amazing marketing idea, though I probably won’t renew when the trial period ends in a month since most of my purchases from Amazon can easily be grouped in $25+ bundles which also comes with free shipping.

In any case, I’ve been purchasing some baking items while ordering basic cookware sets for Gary. These boxes, among few other purchases were delivered and dropped off at my apartment’s leasing office since I wasn’t home. When I dropped by to pick up the boxes, I was asked “Congratulations, are these your wedding gifts?”. Er, I suppose some people get married much before they hit 23, but I sure don’t feel like I’m mature or grown up enough yet. I guess I’m growing up, though it sure doesn’t feel like it.

I’ve been reading through Self-Made Man. Some interesting insights into male psyche from a lesbian woman infiltrating into men’s world disguised as one. I’ll probably have more to say about it after I finish reading and digest the information a bit.

By the way, if you’re serious about baking, the KitchenAid stand mixer is amazing.

I got a new pair of glasses couple of days ago. They’re high index transitions (ie, becomes dark when I’m outside) lens on sort of rectangular thick-ish dark matte blue titanium frames. I’ll try to get a picture up soon. Anyway, first thing I was asked when I walked into the optometry was whether I was covered under insurance or not. Upon providing the said insurance, I overheard them talking to each other.

“Check this guy’s insurance, it covers everything!”
“Wow, even this! That’s not usually covered”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plan this generous…”

Apparently, Altera has very, very nice vision policy. When it came the time to pick the type of lens, they were pushing all sorts of add-ons. High index, transitions, several different types of coatings, when them offering ever increasing series of services until the final bill (most of which was paid by the insurance policy) came to little over $700. As I was picking the glasses up, I mentioned how I was surprised by the amount. The receptionist there said “Well, we could’ve done things to make them more manageable, but with your plan being so good, why not take advantage of it?”

About a week ago, I called a local dentist to schedule a checkup. After getting my name and phone number, the third question was whether I had a dental plan.

“Do you currently have a dental plan?”
“Yes, I have one at Delta Dental”
“Have you used the benefits this year?”
“No, I’ve just recently started working here.”
“Oh, good! We’ll get you scheduled for the full service then, we’ll get your teeth checked from top to bottom and get the X-Ray taken and everything”

As one of the privileged, the service I’m receiving in US is much better than those in Canada. But I can’t help but feel that I’m getting the top tier, deluxe versions of treatment, while others are at various different tiers depending on how good the insurance policy is and whether they have the money to pay for it or not. Going to an emergency room in Canada is an excruiciating experience - you walk in and sit in the waiting room for 2 hours until a nurse comes by with a form for you to fill out. After you had in the form, you wait another couple of hours until a doctor may grace you with their presence. When I had to visit an emergency room in US (back in summer during the solar car race), as I walked in, the nurse there already had all my information, a nurse practitioner checked my vitals in 5 minutes, and I saw a doctor another 5 minutes after that. As opposed to sitting in a waiting room with 20 other people, there was just one other person waiting in a completely empty emergency room. I haven’t quite made up my mind about which of the two emergency rooms seem more dysfunctional.

Having experienced both socialistic and capitalistic systems, I’m still ambivalent about where the line should be drawn. I can clear see that the both systems are broken, but their broken parts and working parts seems to be so closely intertwined together that it’s almost impossible to mix the two.

By focusing on preventative care, health system can cheaply prevent people from becoming sick (and spending a lot of money) and that seems like the most natural way to improve the health system… But the Canadian system seems to be stretched to the point where there are no resources to be spent in preventative care and the US system seems like they haven’t yet fully figured out how to provide preventative care while staying profitable and out of lawsuits…

Just finished doing the Taxes for 2005. It seems like I will be getting couple of thousand dollars back from the IRS which makes sense because I only worked for little under 4 months last year. By first experience with taxes in US was relatively painless - I received the W2 form (as opposed to T4 in Canada) from Altera and 1099-INT from Emigrant Direct and I went to TaxAct.com.

After following their question/answer interface, I downloaded couple of PDF files, put in my credit card number (for the California tax filing - federal one is free through IRS’ FreeFile program) and finally click the Submit button.

Everything seemed to be online and completely automated. It said I will be getting an email within 24 hours when my return gets transmitted to IRS and to the California tax authorities, and between 3 and 5 days until I get the confirmation from the respective agencies that my return has been accepted (or rejected). After about 10 days, the refund should show up on my bank. Hopefully this is all I’ll have to deal with until the next year.

Seems like a Conservative Minority Government, though the final result is much closer to the prediction of ElectionPrediction.com than any of the other newspaper pundits. Apparently Paul Martin also resigned as (soon to be) the leader of the opposition. Poor guy, I had such high hopes for him when he first took over from Chretien, but it’s turned out to be an inept and vision-less leader. Conservatives, being a minority government, will have to take things slowly and moderately, which should (hopefully) mean better, more thought-out legislations coming out of the House of Commons. We’ll see what kind of coaltion Harper builds in the upcoming days.

In this article, one pundit even goes as far to say that Conservatives might have a majority government. Wow, this is getting really interesting. Not living in Canada, I don’t have access to the general mood of the area, so Internet is pretty much the only conduit of information for me. But with this many differing opinions…

Interestingly enough, Glove and Mail puts the election prediction results at about 140 seats for Conservatives and 75 seats for Liberals which is significantly different from the prediction given below. If the results are closer to Globe and Mail’s predictions, then Conservatives will have a solid minority government… I guess we’ll see tomorrow night.

Sorry about another 2 months hiatus. Blogs are a very good way of keeping in touch with people and people who I have on my rss list (Lawrence, Bobby, etc), even if I don’t talk to them for a while, it feels as if you are still in touch with them since you know what’s going on in their lives.

Anyway, I’ll try to write more often. For real, this time.

Big news for today is that I finally gave up trying to get the server back from iStop. I was hoping to get the server back eventually and get my data off it… but I don’t think that’s going to be happening anytime soon, so I sat for couple of hours today and reorganized / resized / uploaded all my pictures from 2004 on. Brought back lots of good memories.

Canadian Election tomorrow - Kumi reminded me today. Seems like Conservatives will have a minority government but it’ll be interesting nevertheless. Since all the other parties are left-leaning, I have no idea how they’ll be able to get anything done with such a slim majority. There’s no way Bloc Quebecois and NDP will agree with Conservatives on may of the issues that they’ve been campaigning about, and Liberals and Conservatives plainly hate each other, so that leaves Conservatives without a dance partner. How long would this government last?