Buffet Craze

Todai buffet used to be my favourite for Chinese-seafood buffet. Their Sushi and seafood are super. The price tag is around $20. During the boom time in 2000, people feel they are rich and Todai was very popular. I remember I always need to wait 10~15 minutes to get a seat in the weekend.

But recently I went to Todai again in the weekend. Half of seats are empty. I think it is simplify caused by competition. Here are a few popular chinese-seafood buffet around:

1. Chinese Buffet
2. Crazy Buffet
3. Super Buffet (coming soon)

All of these name are pretty catchy. I have other suggestion though, for example:

1. Ultra Buffet
2. Buffet R Us
3. Warren Buffet

Anyway, name isn't important, price and quality is. Most new buffet restaurants charge $7.99 for lunch. It is pretty attractive in fact.

To my friend

My good friend in Seattle will have a big surgery in two weeks. I would like to designate this blog for her successful surgery and full recovery.

Housing Mania : garage utilization

In my condo complex, many resident use their garage as a storage. Their cars never park inside. With housing price so high and average living area are getting smaller. It is understandable to use every inch of the space for better usage.

Here are some other creative garage utilization I saw before:
- remodel as a fitness room (my next door)
- make it two bedrooms (no air circulation dude)
- build it as cats playground (she is a cat lover)

This seems funny but actually quite practical. The average housing price is above $600K in the valley. Assume garage space occupies 20% of the house. This translates to $120K worth of value. Let's say you always park the car outside. Then pay full cover insurance so you don't need to worry about car stolen. It probably costs $1K more on insurance per year. Still it is peanut compared to $120k. And now you have an extra space for living.

Does this sound ridiculous!? My wife thinks so. Therefore my car still stays inside my garage!

Fab and Fabless

When I joined the industry in mid-90s, a lot of companies are making good money on semiconductors IC business. Meanwhile, fabless design house are getting started. Fabless mean they don't own a fabs. They do chip design only. Then outsource the fabrication process to independent foundries such as TSMC. The disadvantage is that they don't have control on process quality, which can affect their IC product quality directly. Therefore, the people in this industry used to say: the real guy has fab.

But nowadays. The wind has changed.

As the IC chip scales to ever smaller, the manufactory steps are getting more complicate. For the latest TSMC 65nm fab, the cost is over $6 Billion. This is not the money that any company can afford. A company got to sell A LOT of chips to make return of this investment. Let's do a quick math. Let's say a high end chip can sell $100 a piece. They need to sell 60 million of them to break even!

So in today's IC industry, even big companies like Motorola and Philip build jolt fab together. The cost of investment are just too big to do it alone. Meanwhile, fabless design houses are getting more common. Let's name a few famous one: Broadcom, Qualcom, Xilinx, etc. They are real IC chip players, but not necessary have fabs.

Soaring tool costs to delay 450-mm fabs

No tech blog today

No mood to write about tech life in the valley now. Because it seems so unimportant comparing to the situation in New Orlean. I just have one comment. For those top government officers who said the victims staying in New Orlean should share the blame, they don't have a good mentality to be excellent leaders. If only tens to several hundred people didn't follow the mandatory evacuation, we can say those people are not wise. But if you have thousands of them staying, and no meaningful rescue effort after three days, you know something must be wrong in the system.