When I purchased my current printer (HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw), I gave my old one to my dad. It was a HP LaserJet 1022n, a small black and white laser printer. I cannot remember when I purchased the 1022n, but likely more than twelve years ago. It is an awesome printer, and still works great. Anyway, the toner was running low, so I purchased a replacement toner cartridge. The OEM HP cartridge was about $90 on Amazon, but there are lots of third party options. I finally chose one with a lot of positive reviews and Amazon reminded that I purchased the same item in December of 2014 for $20. That last toner cartridge lasted eight years! Snice I was happy with the last cartridge, I went ahead and ordered the same product. Amazon then said I could save some money by signing up for a subscription, and the typical order frequency was five months. Somehow, I doubt I will need another replacement toner cartridge in five months. Also, it was less than $15 with tax, compared to $90 pre-tax for the HP branded toner.

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I also had to buy new toner for my color laser printer since the starter toner that came with the printer ran out quickly. Because it was a color printer, the complete toner set included four colors/cartridges. Again, the OEM HP toner was really expensive, about $316 on Amazon. The third-party toner I purchased was only $60 and I cannot tell the difference between HP and not HP.

My parents were supposed to move today. They called MoveCentral and scheduled the movers to come today. The move window was supposed to be from noon to 5:00 pm but we asked them to come as early as possible since Laguna Woods will not let moving trucks in after 4:00 pm.

So, at 12:30 pm we got a call from the driver/dispatcher saying they will not make it today since the morning job is running long and needs three more hours. My parents were up all-night packing and disassembling furniture (me too) so this really sucks. We called the original contact person, and the only option was to reschedule for tomorrow. They still will not give us the morning slot since that requires a four-hour minimum. We are not moving that much so no way will it take four hours. She also said something about not confirming the day before. My dad did get a voicemail and text, but since he was busy packing, he did not see them until midnight. She was trying to use that as an excuse, but why were we contacted about the no show today? Were we still scheduled for today without an explicit confirmation yesterday? So much conflicting information.

Anyway, I asked the moving contact to note the 4:00 pm deadline and have the driver/dispatcher call us if they run into another “emergency” tomorrow so we are not sitting at home waiting for no-show movers. I imagine they try to book as many customers as possible, take a deposit, and hope people will not cancel when they no-show. What a shitty business model.

I am 50/50 on whether they movers show up tomorrow in time to make the move. Zero trust.

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Update: 2/28/2022 1:42 pm

Movers are here. Showed up around 1:20 pm.

Last time we hired movers, they stole a box, probably during the “lunch break” they took while driving from old apartment to new house. They got some decent Japanese ramen bowls and a few bottles of Korean plum wine.

This past Thursday I went to my parents’ new house and installed Internet and Wi-Fi for them. The $650/month HOA fees include lots of amenities but do not include electricity or Internet. Since my parents are online all the time, they chose the fastest service available at Laguna Woods, which is 100 Mbps for $50/month. After getting everything hooked up and working, I tested their Internet speed using Speedtest by Ookla and got about 85 Mbps down and 20 Mhps up. Not bad.

At home, I have the 150 Mpbs service from Cox Communications and it costs $84/month. I am also capped at 1280 GB per month and have only gone over once in the past eleven years. My home Internet is number one, four, and five results above.

The outlier is definitely number two, and you can see from the icon that it is a 5G mobile result. I was in some random parking lot near Laguna Woods and got the 290 Mbps test result. At first I thought the result is either an error, or there is some “gaming the system” going on. Just to double check, I tethered my MacBook Pro to my iPhone 12 (that is getting the 290 Mbps connection), and got around 160 Mbps.

So, the latency and upload speed is not good, but I was able to watch Netflix on my computer without any problems.

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Speaking of Internet via cable modem, Laguna Woods also includes basic cable with the HOA fees. I brought over one of the TVs my parents wanted and verified the cable channels are there. If you look at the channel list, there are a few missing channels. The biggest omission is KTLA 5, which is a popular OTA station in Los Angeles. Weird that the channel is not on the cable list of channels. Perhaps there are licensing issues? Some personal vendettas between Laguna Woods, the cable provider, and the TV station?

My parents’ house purchase will close escrow this Friday. I have lived with them for the past eleven plus years so it will be strange to live alone again. The last time I lived by myself was right after my divorce. My parents were living in Canada, and my sister was in Portland, Oregon. This time, my sister is five minutes away, while my parents are 20 minutes away.

Still, I think it will be weird living by myself in such a large house. The house is not huge, but 2,200 square feet is too big for one person. Also, for the past five years I have been either sick (on dialysis) or recovering from major surgery, so my parents have been doing most of the chores. I do not have many physical limitations, but they always tell me to rest when I try and help.

I am beginning to think that this is part of Amazon’s business model. Since I made this post in September, Amazon has failed to deliver on next day shipping several times, including today. Since my new MacBook Pro only has USB-C connectors, I purchased some adapters. The first ones I bought had fat connectors that would block ports when used.

So, I went back to Amazon and found some that had a short cable to move the large USB-B port away from the computer.

The description said that this product was available with free next day Prime shipping. I do not need these connectors today and it did not affect my purchasing decision, but I can see how having next day delivery may nudge me into buying a product instead of waiting. The fact that shipment delays happen quite often with next day delivery suggests 1) Amazon drivers have too many deliveries on each route, 2) it is part of the algorithm to increase purchases, 3) Amazon’s inventory management system is not as good as they think, or 4) all the above. The only downside is having frustrated customers eventually cancel their Prime membership, which I am contemplating. Amazon Prime video is not that great; I just need to check how cancelling Prime affects Alexa integration with the rest of my IOT devices.

Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and CCP (made in China). Both are huge assholes but very difficult to stay away from.

During the past two years, partially due to all my surgeries then COVID, I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos. Views are typically split between K-Pop music videos, clips of Korean variety shows, science/technology vlogs, and whatever random content recommended by the YouTube algorithm.

Here is my YouTube journey from last night:

• Season 9 episode 1 of I Can See Your Voice (Korea) was available online, so I downloaded and watched it. One of the tone-deaf contestants turned out to be a world-class violinist.
• I searched for her name on YouTube and found many videos.
• One of the videos was two Asian guys talking about a 12-year old prodigy. That turned out to be a TwoSet Violin video about Chloe Chua. Researching further, those two guys are professional violin players, and Chloe Chua is a violin child prodigy.
• Watched a few more of their videos, but this one caught my attention. In it, Chloe is supposed to be giving Brett and Eddy lessons on playing Paganiniana. I do not know if they are playing worse on purpose, but she is awesome.
• Here is the sheet music and performance by Hilary Hahn, another violin prodigy. This is supposed to be one of the most difficult pieces to play on violin.

• Watching all the notes fly by reminded me of another piece of music. I used to play trumpet from junior high though first year of college, then for a few more years while I was working. I am not that good. I can play most orchestral music but have problems with high or fast notes like 16th and 32nd notes. I also do not improvise well, so any jazz solos are usually pre-written out. Anyway, something like Paganiniana on the trumpet would be Variations on ‘Carnival of Venice‘ (for trumpet or cornet) by Jean-Baptiste Arban. He published The Arban Method for trumpets and cornets in 1864 and I have a copy of it (not the original of course), though I could not play anything in the book.
• Here is the piece played by Wynton Marsalis.

Chloe has a YouTube channel and there are several performances with a classical guitar that are great.

Today (February 1, 2022) is Chinese New Year. This year, it is the year of the tiger. Here is a list of all the Chinese zodiac animals:

Our family had dinner Sunday night. We ordered some dishes from Lunasia in Cerritos instead of cooking ourselves. People traditionally eat dumplings as a New Year’s food, but we did not order any. Chinese or Lunar New Year is a much bigger deal in Asian then in the West. People here may know about it and a few coworkers tell me Happy New Year, but for most people, it is just another day.

新年快樂

I just realized you can embed a song from Spotify. Cool.

Why is there so much blank space in the block though? Playlist?

Oooh, you can see all the songs in the playlist and choose too. I wonder if it will play ads every so often.

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Well, the playlist was fine for the first four songs, but would play wrong songs further down the list. Not sure if this is true for all playlists. Girl Krush is a Spotify curated playlist.

I made several posts in the past about being a fan of K-Pop, mostly female soloists, and groups. Here is a page from my Spotify 2021 review thing:

I also watch a lot of Korean variety shows, which feature many K-Celebrities. I have noticed a lot of them talking about their MBTI type, especially younger people. This was not a thing until recently. MBTI stands for Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator. From the Wikipedia article:

In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, such as “INFJ” or “ENFP”.

Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it has been criticized as pseudoscience and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator

My first introduction to MBTI was during MBA school orientation. It was more of an ice-breaker exercise, and no-one talked about it afterwards, except whether they were E (extrovert) or I (introvert). My guess is that most people in the US do not know or care about their MBTI type, and it is seen as pseudoscience entertainment, like astrology or Tarot cards.

However, MBTI is very popular in Korea. I have seen the cast of many variety shows discuss their type on-air, like their obsession with blood types. It is probably just for fun, but like every attempt to label people, it become bad if used by government or companies to set policy or make employment decisions.

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A quick search on YouTube for “Amazing Saturday MBTI” returns a bunch of video clips. This is the episode I just watched that prompted this post. Sorry, no English subtitles. If you have never watched this show, it is really funny. Moreso if you speak Korean or can find subtitles.

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Since it was so long ago when I did my first MBTI test, I went online to try again. The first Google search result for “MBTI” produces this link to 16Personalities. I answered their long list of questions and it said my type was ISTJ-T. I guess there is a bit of science in pseudoscience since some of the descriptions agree with my self-assessment, but that is also how fortune-telling works. The career portion was most “accurate” since I do work in a field that is mentioned in the resulting report.

The House of Small Cubes or つみきのいえ is an animated short subject film by Kunio Katō. I downloaded this several years ago but just rewatched it.

The film starts off with an old man sitting in a small room in a house that is surrounded by water. We soon realize that due to rising water levels, he needs to keep building upwards to stay dry. As he is moving all his belongings out of the old, waterlogged room, he drops his pipe down the hatch that connects to the submerged room next level down. He decides to get some diving equipment, and proceeds to dive down to retrieve his pipe.

What follows is a trip down multiple levels of his house, all the way to the bottom floor. The dive also becomes a journey through his past: taking care of his sick wife, his daughter getting married, daughter as a small child, and to when he met his wife. We also see both of them building the small original house that now serves as the foundation of this submerged tower.

At the bottom, he finds an intact wine glass that he brings back with him to the surface. In the very last scene, we see him pouring out two glasses of wine during dinner. I assume he is toasting his now deceased wife.

Climate change message aside, I found this film really sad. I guess there are multiple perspectives: he could have lived a long, happy life and not is content with his retirement (other than the rising water). However, I see a lonely, old man looking back at happier days. That probably has to do with how I feel. Even though it has been a year since my kidney transplant, my life still feels very precarious, as if I am still on dialysis.

Even though I am not as old as the man in the film (maybe), and I did not have any children, I do have lots of regret when thinking about the past. I still think about my ex-wife, even though the divorce was over 15 years ago. Since she is still alive and (presumably) happily remarried, the sense of loss I feel is harder to define. There is also regret in the poor health decisions that lead to my bypass surgery and kidney failure. Overall, there is a fear that my life will become just like the film: sitting alone at home looking at old photos and thinking about what could have been.

My gaming PC is working again. I spent about $165 total on a new power supply, a new hard drive, and a SATA adapter. The computer is better than it was before since the power supply outputs 650 watts vs. 460 watts. That means the power supply runs cooler; it also has a much larger fan. My 3.5″ drive is fairly old, coming from a previous PC. It also runs extremely hot. The 2.5″ drive is much cooler and quieter. Overall, the PC now runs cooler, and I can tell the fan speeds are lower too.

This is the drive I purchased. Interestingly, I bought the same drive four years ago when I first got the PC. There was a tiny 256GB SSD included, and I added the (now broken) 2TB drive and purchased the smaller 2TB drive to hold games. Hopefully after the latest fix, the computer will last a few more years.

My gaming PC is dead. I purchased the system directly from Dell back on 11/8/2017 so the computer lasted four years. At the time, I had some spare parts leftover from another dead PC, so I purchased a bare-boned system from Dell. I then added more memory, a second SSD, a large internal HDD, and replaced the graphics card with my older Nvidia GT970. There were son initial issues with power management, but the system has worked well for the past four years. Today, there was a notification to reboot the computer to complete some random software update. After the install, my PC turned off and just sat there. I tried turning it on several times since, but the PC just sits there like a large brick.

After much googling, and the fact that the self-test on the power supply unit (PSU) is negative, I purchased a replacement from Amazon. It was a 650W EVGA PSU that was highly recommended by many sources. The current dead PSU is only rates at 460W. The unit cost $90 and will arrive tomorrow.

I really hope this works. It will already be a huge pain-in-the-ass to swap out the PSU. There appears to be a myriad of connectors to remove and reconnect.

After failing to deliver my package Tuesday, Amazon was able to deliver it by Wednesday noon. As I mentioned in the original post, I had ordered a tamagoyaki pan. Like many items on Amazon, there were many identical pans “produced” from various strangely named brands. This typically means that all the items were made by one factory in China, and either sold by different importers or the same company trying to create fake competition. These pans were around $15-$20, and came with the identical spatula plus some other accessory. I managed to find one that was made in Korea for $20 that had thousands of positive reviews so I bought that one instead. There was also a very nice Japanese pan made of cast iron, but it was $55.

Since it was around lunchtime, I made a test omelette to see if I can even roll the egg properly. I used three eggs, some chicken broth instead of dashi, pinch of salt and sugar, a bit of light soy sauce, and dome bacon bits that I bought for salads. The heat was probably too high since the eggs cooked very quickly, which made it hard to roll evenly. I managed to get four pours with the egg mix, but the final layer broke off. The photo above was about two and a half eggs worth. The final taste was okay but overcooked. I will try again with two eggs and lower heat to see if I can make the layers thinner and softer.

Three eggs at once is too much for one person anyway.

I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon since I should not really go out that much. So this past Monday, I ordered a tamagoyaki pan to make Japanese omelettes, some salted peanuts, and a book called Red Roulette. When I placed the order, the check out page said the package would be delivered in one-day, so yesterday. I waited all day for the package to arrive, and at 8:30 pm I received a delivery attempted and failed message from 8:16 pm. I checked the activity history on my security cameras there was definitely no delivery attempt made during that time.

This is the third or fourth delivery failure from Amazon this year. It is pretty incredible that they can delivery my crap that quickly, but do not make promises you cannot keep. The tracking data also said the driver was back at the Santa Ana distribution center at 8:30 pm. That is pretty quick if there was a real delivery attempt at my house at 8:16 pm. My guess? My package did not even get put on the truck at 10:26 am, and was generically marked as a failed delivery at the end of the route. That is total bullshit. If the package did not get on the truck in the morning, then send me a message. In either case, the package is not coming, and I do not need to wait around all day for delivery. Instead, I get these useless delivery time updates , but nothing is delivered. It is dishonest and I think it gives their customer a worse experience.

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An Amazon delivery van is parked across the street as I type. Maybe it is a package for my neighbor. Let see if anyone rings my doorbell. Maybe I can make a Japanese square omelette for lunch yet.

I saw a reference to a political compass on a post on Reddit. Instead of just left (liberal) and right (conservative), another dimension is added in an attempt to group people politically. There is a short introduction video on the website linked above:

In addition to left and right, the second axis measures authoritarian vs. libertarian. If I were asked to place myself on the 2×2 grid before taking any tests, I would be slightly right and slightly libertarian. When asked about politics, I am usually slight-left on social issues and middle-right on fiscal issues.Here is my result from The Political Compass (TPC) after taking their online test:

The results placed me pretty close to where I expected: I want the government to leave me alone, and I think my taxes are too high. There is another website that examines your Reddit comment history and an algorithm will evaluates you on the same axis.

This result still has me as a libertarian but at 86%, it is more confident than TPC. However, the same analysis has grouped me as a liberal with 72% confidence. I am unsure which comments in my history pushed the analysis heavily to the left. I would love to understand the algorithm that make the determinations.

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So the California governor recall was yesterday (9/14/2021), and it looks like Gavin Newsom won by a landslide with two-thirds of the vote. Reading some of the comments online, many people thing it was heavily swayed by having Larry Elder as the top Republican candidate. Regardless of your politics, I think supermajorities for either party is dangerous. Democracy needs a vigorous opposition, or you end up with authoritarian governments like China or Russia. I wish the current Republican Party would disavow Trumpism and put up candidates that are electable. Same for Democrats. I want to vote FOR someone instead of always trying to find the lesser evil during elections.

There was a crazy lightning storm in Orange County this past Thursday. I was at my church’s cell group meeting at The Market Place in Irvine when the lightning and thunder started. It actually rained a bit while I was driving home, but it was mostly a light/sound show.

There were some pretty good photos that were posted on Reddit, but I also took some outside my bedroom window when I got home. Since it is nearly impossible to time a lightning strike, I left the phone on the window ledge and took two videos.

The two “photos” above are actually screenshots from iMovie running on my iPhone 12. The phone/computer got stuck trying to convert and send via AirDrop. Those two lightning bolts appears to be quite close. I wonder if they struck anything valuable on the ground?

Since we are in the middle of another drought and wildfire season is upon us again, I was hoping for some rain.