Wherever I go, there are always lots of meetings! I guess there are necessary evil, but they are such a waste of time. In light of this, I absolutely loved today’s Dilbert comic

Yesterday I was riding to school and attempting not to get run over by yet another insane driver …. or biker …. or pedestrian who thinks traffic lights are for decoration and this is some bizarre game of frogger. Anyhow, as I was going through the morning chaos, it suddenly hit me:

Why is a hamburger called a hamburger if it is made out of beef?

Consulting my good and all knowing friend wikipedia and my fool-proof intuition, I came up with the following three possible explanations:

1. At a fair, some guy serving meatballs got the idea to flatten them for better portability. Since they were made of pork, they got the name “hamburger”. The only problem with this explanation, is why is it now made of beef?
2. At a different fair (what is up with all the fairs anyway? I guess that’s where the smartest chefs go to work, lol), a guy was serving sausage patties. They ran out of pork and decided to use a cow instead. They found the beef to be rather bland so they put lots of gunk on top and voilà the hamburger was born. The name of place place? Hamburg, New York.
3. This is simply a mystery of life, to be contemplated while riding through Beijing traffic … kind of like the buttered cat paradox. But I’ll think about that on a different bike ride.

What is your take on this?

I have a bunch of new pictures to upload, but I took a really funny one today I wanted to share with you all.

On my way home from school, I saw this small bicycle carrying a HUGE load of Styrofoam. I passed the bicyclist and then took a picture for you all. I later saw the same guy with the bike parked at a street corner. However, the load was so large that the Styrofoam was laying on the ground and the bicycle was pointing up in the air, lol.

It’s kind of strange, here in China. People use cars to transport people and bicycles to transport goods. Since there is so much traffic, you hardly see any trucks on the road. You’ll see people with a boat load of hula-hoops, shoes in shoe boxes, etc, etc on the back of their bicycles.

Tony Hansen, in Orlando Florida, used about 45,000 lights and $10,000 worth of equipment to rig up one awesome Christmas display. It is very over the top, and I wouldn’t want to be his neighbor, but it is cooooool

You can read about it in the Orlando Sentinel and I’ve posted YouTube videos below.

Enjoy

Something really strange happened to me this week. I was going over mycredit card statement and there were four separate transactions listedwith a architectural magazine. I knew that I never subscribed to such amagazine ( especially since I am a computer scientist, not anarchitect ), so I gave them a call.

However, what I found was very surprising.

It turns out that these were not charges but credits. Somehowthe magazine was alerted that someone had tried to charge four giftsubscriptions on my credit card. So, they immediately canceled theorders and credited my card for the four charges.

The funny thing was that I was never charged for those amounts, sosomehow the magazine mistakenly thought that I was changed and give meabout $300, free. I called them up to let them know the error that theyhave made, but they said that everything was fine according to theirrecords.

It’s kindof funny to get my statement and see that I have a negativebalance, meaning that the credit card technically owes me money