It is not just Amazon. Costco also delivered my order one day early. The only problem is that it is one of the days I go into the office. In order not to leave the box outside my door for twelve hours, I asked my sister to put the box in my garage. No big deal.

When I opened the box however, I found nuts everywhere inside. I had ordered a bag of trail mix, and the bag was ripped. I also spilled a bunch of nuts and candy all over the laundry/storage room floor. That sucked trying to pick up everything from the floor.

I pulled up the Costco app and asked for a replacement. The system was pretty quick and placed a replacement order for me right away. The shitty part is they want me to return the “defective” item, or they will charge me for the replacement. Luckily, I have thirty days to do so. I ordered online so I can avoid the Christmas madness. The bag of fruits and nuts only cost $16 but I cannot eat the contents if the bag is torn. When this happened with Amazon, they just shipped me a replacement without demanding the damaged bag. Someone should review the returns and make a decision if they want a customer to spend a hour returning something that is obviously unusable and not resellable.

KROQ is a music station in Los Angeles that plays alternative music, whatever that means. Since I moved to LA in 1985 and graduated from UCLA in 1990, I tuned in to KROQ a lot during that time.

I found a playlist on Spotify and there are songs that I have not heard since the 80’s. Here are a few songs in no particular order:

I always thought this was from Journey.

I still have the Substance 1987 CD. Blue Monday is track #4 on disc one.

I believe the last time I heard this song was 1983 in Cancun while on a high school band trip.

Now I feel bad for making some poor guy work so early.

Since Christmas is in a week, I bought some gift cards and small stuff on sale. I am also going to the office for a few days this week, so I want to be home when packages arrive. Amazon has a bad habit of delivering packages early (or late) so I asked for this shipment of gift cards as early as possible. Well, I guess early is 4:40 am.

I am certain that I was not the only person on the delivery route.

My sister’s family is visiting in-laws over Christmas, so I have been asked to dog sit again. Since they spoil their two dogs, I need to stay the night over from December 20th to 30th so the dogs will not be lonely at night. I have already told work that I am returning to working only two days in the office due to COVID and other viruses.

I am hoping my work laptop will work with my sister’s computer dock, so I do not have to bring a ton of IT equipment to her house in order to work. We will see if my HP laptop will work with her Lenovo docking station.

I have not watched any World Cup games this time. Even though I played on my junior high school team, I was terrible, and I have been a lukewarm fan ever since. In addition, the fact that the World Cup is held in Qatar and with FIFA being super corrupt, it just makes the entire spectacle less interesting. I actually thought the tournament was over, but it appears the final game is tomorrow between Argentina and France.

Out of all the teams that qualified this year, I was kind of following five of them: USA, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and Tunisia. USA is pretty obvious since I live here. I also lived in Canada, and though they would do well since they won the qualifying tournament. Instead, Canada got smoked 0-3 in the first round. Embarrassing. At least the USA team made it to the second round, barely. Japan and South Korea also make it to the next round but lost; got to support the Asian teams since there are so few. Finally, Tunisia because I visited there before. It is not a common tourist destination, so I always hope they win some World Cup games.

The final game is at 7:00 am local time tomorrow morning. I probably will not watch unless I am already up. I am not even sure I can receive the game since I do not have cable. If I had to choose sides, I would probably go with Argentina since this appears to be Lionel Messi’s last game before retirement. It feels like a lot of people are cheering for Argentina because of Messi.

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Google search results for:

FIFA corruption

Qatar slave labor

Qatar anti LGBT

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I uploaded some photos I took in Tunisia in a prior post.

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I was up early this morning but forgot about the World Cup finals game. I just saw the news that Argentina beat France on penalty kicks. The final score was 3-3 (4-2).

In a previous post, I mentioned that I purchased a new iPad Pro since all my older iPads were obsolete and retired by Apple. I am very happy with the new iPad, but there were a few old apps that I could not find. The most disappointing was Air Video HD. I purchased that app in 2014 to stream videos from my main PC. Even though I have bought a network attached storage (NAS) server since then, I still use the old app on all my devices. Unfortunately, the app is no longer available on the Apple app store, so I thought I had to do without.

Today I learned that you could reinstall old apps that you purchased on to new devices if you are using the same Apple ID. I managed to find my old purchase and installed Air Video HD on my new iPad. There are other apps on my iPad Air 2 that I could not find in the app store so I will have to reinstall them using this method.

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One of the other unavailable apps is OnSong 2020. I purchased that several years ago when I planned on auditioning with my church to play bass. However, I was sick at the time, and the previous music pastor was not very welcoming. I believe that was a $20 purchase and I was upset that the new version, OnSong 2022, is a subscription only product. Again, I was able to find and reinstall the old version, and now I need to transfer my songbook to the new iPad.

People suck.

People suck a thousand times worse when they are on anonymous social media like Reddit.

I used to follow many subreddits (sub) about China and Taiwan, but I have removed them from my subscription list. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tries very hard to equate the party and the nation, all discussion ends up being political. It has spent billions of dollars on anti-Western propaganda, social media disinformation campaigns, and mass censorship worldwide. There is no way to discern whether a commentor is just pro-China, a CCP agent, or a paid shrill. If you look on Reddit, the biggest sub on China is /r/china. The population seems to be mostly ex-pats and they generally have a negative impression of the CCP. I get the sense that many enjoyed their time in China but hate what it has become under Xi Jinping. It also attracts a bunch of anti-Asian racists, wannabe commies, and people that usually post in /r/sino.

Sino is a strange sub. I cannot browse that sub for more than five minutes without getting angry or physically sick to my stomach. About half the posts praise the CCP by reposting media from China state owned media, and the other half are just anti-America rants. As a Chinese American from Taiwan, the entre sub is offensive to me. Their tagline is “News, Information, Discussion on all things China and Chinese Related” but any user that is slightly critical of the CCP is immediately banned. Just like the CCP.

There is a website called Map of Reddit where most subs are shown with lines connecting to other subs with similar posters. Here is an explanation from the creator:

Each dot is a subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are usually close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits.

Interestingly, if you look up /r/china and /r/sino, they are located in very different areas and connected to very different subs.

From the maps, it appears that /r/china posters are somewhat interested in East Asia since they also post to /r/taiwan, /r/japan, and other related subs. However, /r/sino users appear to be just a bunch of communists and socialists. I guess they only have a small passing interest in China. Since Chinese state media agrees with their worldview, they gather to feel good about communism and to shit on America. Just remember that if you are trying to get news about China from Reddit.

I tried reading some posts from /r/china recently and I think I will still continue my self-imposed ban on new and commentary from China.

A strange thing happened to my Tesla this week. When I got in the car to drive to work Thursday morning, I noticed the energy meter was blank. Since it usually shows energy usage for the past thirty miles, the display is never blank. I then checked the trip data display, and it was showing zeros too. I have never reset the trip counter before.

When I got to work, all the displays above were still showing blank data even though I just drove forty miles. Interestingly, a third-party app called Tessie did not have any problems collecting trip data.

Since I did not know if this would cause other issues in the car, I set up an appointment with Tesla Service center in Irvine to have them check the car. I am sure it is a software glitch, though I did not update the car’s operating system recently.

This evening however, after dinner at a Thai restaurant with my parents and sister, the display came back suddenly. All my historical data is gone, but the car is tracking miles and energy usage. Strange. When the issue first appeared, I reset the console computer several times while driving, but it did not help. I am going to wait a few days to see if it keeps working before cancelling the service appointment.

Each time we have an open requisition and receive candidate resumes, there is an argument about school reputation versus experience. Our CEO is the ultimate school snob. His philosophy is to hire the smartest students from the best schools and let them do their thing. Me, I really want to hire people with some experience, so I am not telling my analysts to not hit reply all and send email to 10,000 coworkers.

I have a new analyst starting tomorrow. He graduated from University of Illinios Urbana-Champaign (#41) and has about four and a half years of experience. I scanned through the US News & World Report National University Rankings and most of the finance team comes from the top 50 schools, while the accounting team comes from more local schools like Cal State Los Angeles/Long Beach/Fullerton/Dominguez Hills. There is nothing wrong with those schools, but our company discriminates against non-ranked schools when recruiting candidates.

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I graduated from university many years ago. Hopefully no one is judging my work based on ancient educational history, but my schools are still ranked #20 and #25.

Since I attended USC for graduate school, I am unsure if the #25 ranking for undergraduate program applies. I will need to find specific rankings for my two master’s degree programs.

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Heh, there are rankings for everything.

Engineering Schools: USC Viterbi #15, UCLA Samueli #16

Business Schools: USC Marshall #19

It has been ~30 years since I attended university, so the current rankings have no relation to what the schools were like back then.

Spotify came out with their annual summary of your listening habits. There are no real surprises. I typically start my main K-Pop playlist when I get into the car, and the Top Songs listed are songs one, two, three, six, and eight of the playlist. Likewise, “What is Love” by TWICE is the first song, and my car will start with that song even though I have shuffle play enabled. This is the second year that BIBI has been my Top Artist.