Nails Fashion

Alyssa (aka Jenepher) and Vivian recently opened a nails salon at home, completed with a business name (Nails Fashion), and a sign:



I was half-invited, half-forced to become a customer of theirs, and the manicure they provide mostly involved putting tiny stickers on my finger nails.

Surprisingly, when we went to our local mall this evening, they spotted the name of a nails salon there is "Fashion Nails". The two silly sisters were very excited to find this competition.

Pedalling for a "free" bike

On my way to work this morning, I suddenly realized that the cost of my bike, divided by the days I rode it to work, has dropped below $5, which is cheaper than driving. To me, this makes the splurge on the bike somewhat justifiable.

Next goal: make the bike costs less than taking the bus. This will take a couple more months and quite a bit of workout, however, once I get past that, the bike is effectively free. How cool is that!

Happy Father's Day to myself, part 7

I am still kind of shocked that I have been in this tough business for so long (even more so for surviving it). It certainly didn't get any easier with time, in fact, it has gotten harder and harder over the past seven years. But I guess I should "enjoy" it while I can, considering that a guy at the post office just reminded us this yesterday: "Your kids are really cute! Too bad that they are going to turn into teenagers some day".

Anyway, I had a very enjoyable Sunday. Kids were behaving pretty well the whole day, even made me some nice cards and crafts. I spend a fun and eye-opening afternoon visiting the Total Wine, which turned out to be a crazy super-doper-big store; I mean, holy moley! How can someone pick a bottle out of that store without going nuts is totally incomprehensible to me. Knowing my recently developed interest in wine, Ann got me a very nice set of wine accessories; I look forward to putting them to use soon. After the kids went to bed, Ann also told me a surprising secret. The kids consulted her several days ago about getting me a fountain pen for the Father's Day, because "We think that's daddy's favorite thing". They then decided not to get one because they figured a nice one is way beyond what they can afford on their allowance.

I was deeply moved. My daughters know me so well and have the thought and full intent to make me happy. I am so happy and don't even know how to express that.

Out of one writing, back into another

The most recent writing frenzy at work has finally come to an end. Feeling somewhat relieved, the thought of blogging seems to be flowing again.

Looking back, no wonder I was sort of stressed out. Over the past month, I finished a manuscript from scratch and submitted it, got another revised and formally accepted, attended the SMBE meeting and gave a short talk there, and most importantly, sent out the first batch of job applications.

Time to get back to play with perl some more, while waiting for some good news.

DokuWiki is awesome!

After poking around a bit, I settled on DokuWiki to set up a small experimental site. All the good things that I heard about it seems to be true. Setting up is totally painless and fast, it took less than 10 minutes from downloading the source code to having the first page up. The syntax is pretty straight forward, although I'd prefer the default rule for header levels to be reversed (without installing plug-ins). Customizing the appearance, either by tweaking the templates myself or installing custom themes, is also easy enough, but because I like the default ones, I don't plan to change that yet.

Guess now the really challenge is to put enough useful things there. Right now I only have some random notes on the site, serving as memos for myself. Hopefully I'll have the time to organize my major bioinfo protocols there soon.

Time to tidy up

Just discovered a wonderful tool to tidy up my perl codes, Perltidy.

I don't think my codes were bad, but seeing them got "prettified" by this nice tool is kind of cool. Somehow they got this nice sterile, straight-out-of-textbook feel to them after the reformatting. Reading old codes is almost a fun thing to do after this, so I went crazy and reformatted my whole library.

Getting all confused

In my dream last night, I was racing through Taipei's streets at 100+ mph on my Ninja. It was very exciting and all, but somehow, something wasn't quite right: Instead of using my left foot, I was using either of my hands to do the shifting. Then I looked down, and to my surprise, the handle bar, breaks, and shifters were from my bicycle.

Looks like I am spending too much time on saddles these days. When I woke up, I remembered something funny that happened several year ago. Soon after I got the Ninja, one day I noticed myself leaning into a turn when I was driving our minivan. Good thing that I didn't try to pull a wheelie.

It's not fair

The girls had their last day of school today. We are all very happy that the school year is finally over and almost everyone can enjoy the summer vacation. But, here is what the girls have to say: "It's not fair! Why daddy has to go to work and not staying at home with us?"

Yeah, right. Why? Hmmm... may be I should throw a tantrum at work tomorrow?