Kung Hey Fat Choi

Happy Chinese New Year to every one!!

Mission Peak

The highest mountain peak in South Bay is "Mission Peak" in Fremont city. I see it everyday when I drive home. It reminds me when I was in Seattle, the Mt. Rainer was also a beautiful landmark for me when I drove to work.

The mission peak hiking trail is one of my favourite. This trail isn't easy. It takes me at least 2 hours to get to the top, good exercise though. At the peak, I can see the whole south bay, even San Francisco downtown in sunny day. It is a very refresh view.

I used to go there hiking often. Last year, I was very busy so I pretty much stop all activities including hiking. But now I start to have more free time, so I'm thinking to go up there agian in a weekend.

1st ever blog tag

STP

The combination of:
1. following a stock since its IPO
2. it keeps going up $1~2 every day
3. hesitate to buy

= painful !!

Disconnected Management

A friend of my friend recently has some complaints to his manager. His manager was once a technical guy (20+ years ago). But now he starts to forget the difficulty of each technical tasks. And often assign tasks to his employee with unreasonable scope and time frame. For example:

* Manager says: Just do a sweep of analysis on all possible cases, create some nice charts, so I can make a decision. (Well, many cases are similar, it is waste of time)

* Late Friday afternoon, manager says: "Kick off this job so we will have the data next Monday. Have a nice weekend. (He seems to think it takes zero time for preparation. And he assume nothing will go wrong during the weekend. But if something goes wrong, he think the engineer makes bad preparation)

* Manager: write a script program to automatic this task, so just one click to do the job. By the way I need the result tomorrow. (So he thinks it just take one click to write a script program)

* The engineer is in a hurry to finish task ABC, which his manager assigned yesterday. Then the manager suddenly come and says: "Do you think XYZ is also important. Please give me the result of XYZ also tomorrow." Then the engineer asks, "Should I try to finish ABC first?" The manager replies: "It is your call." (ABC$&%*XYZ)

Well, this friend isn't just finding someone to blame. He does praise his team lead (not the manager) know how to break down tasks, and assign them to his teammates with reasonable time frame.

Solar Cell 123

One of the latest hot technology in the Valley is Solar Cell. It hits the right market nowadays: Energy. Solar cells are made by silicon mostly. Its function is to translate sun light into Energy. So, source is free and the cost is the device itself. One application is house hold electricity generator (placing solar cells on the roof). Product lifetime is usually 20 years. Some keywords for this topic:

1. Dollar per Watt : most solar cells in the market are $4 per watt. It means you need to invest $100 on solar cells to operate a 25 watt light bulk. But then you never need to pay electricity bill again. Most researchers are working on $1 per watt solar cell, which believed to be the breaking point for Solar cells to become main stream.

2. Efficiency: most solar cell have only 10~15% efficiency nowadays. So it can only translate 15% of sun light into energy. This is mainly due to the limitation of silicon itself. Higher efficiency translates to lower Dollar per watt.

3. Spectrum: If the Solar cell can absorb light with border spectrum, there will be more source available to convert to energy (think as a radio that can receive more channel). This again translates to lower Dollar per Watt.

Well, just some self-study to prepare for this soon-to-be main stream technology.

Solar cell reading 1
Solar cell reading 2

First NBA game

In the last Wednesday of 2005. I brought my brother, who was visiting me from Macau, to watch his 1st NBA game. It was also my 1st.

There are several professional sport teams in the bay area, NFL Raiders, 49ers, MLB Giants, A's, NBA Warriors, NHL Shark, and formerly MLS Earthquake. I went to watch Giants, A's, and Shark before, but never watch any NBA or NFL game. The main reason I missed those games is because of the expensive tickets. But this time my brother come to visit me, and he is a basketball fan, so I open my wallet.

We left home from San Jose early, one hour before the game. We get to the Oakland area 30 minutes before tip-off. But don't know if it is always like that or we were unlucky. There was a huge traffic jam in the last two miles. When we entered the arena, the game was already in the 2nd quarter. We were pissed off. But when we saw the basketball court and the full crowd, we quickly became so excited and enjoyed the game immediately. It was Warriors vs. Celtics, closed game throughout. It become a tie game with 30 seconds left. Then the arena started to play the Rocky music. Everyone started to stand and yell. Emotion was so high. Then Derek Fisher took the last shot and finished off the Celtics ... everyone in the Arena became crazy!!

Woo! It was a fun experience. My brother loved it. It worths all the money and traffic jam.