Recent content by UltraPenguin

The first thing I do when I'm shopping at the local asian grocery store is to check the country of origin. If its made in China, it goes right back to the shelf. I'm starting to see more and more perishable foods from China. Stuff like dumplings and even mushrooms. It amazing that its...

Worst gift was some Mormon children's book I got from my friend when I was 10. All the gifts I get from workplace gift exchange have also been pure crap. Junk like a fugly pewter mug, ceramic angel figurines. These gifts are so bad, I would be embarassed to re-gift them. No more...

My old company for the hourly wage workers, 5% 2nd shift (4PM to 12AM) and 10% for the 3rd shift (12AM to 8AM).

Of course dinos lived at the same time as man. Noah employed flying dinos to gather all the animals for the ark.

Its fine for basic commuting and city riding. Double check the assembly and consider putting some slicks on it.

The faulty capacitor problem was known for a while before Epox manufactured my board. Yet, they still used the faulty caps. By then, the industry would have know which caps/manufacture were faulty. I also have a Epox Nforce 2 board with bad caps. I've seen some mobo advertise that...

My 8rda+ also developed bad caps after 1.5 years. Kinda annoyed at Epox for using junk caps just to save a few dollars. At least Epox has a 3 year warranty on the mobo. I RMA mine to Epox, took about 3 weeks to get it back.

Yeah, I think most of them were impacted. I do remember one was a horizontal impaction. I remember that one because it looked so strange on the x-ray. You can get discounts with some dentists and endo by offering to pay immediately. Sometimes 5 or 10% discount. At least some discount for...

It was about 10 years ago, my dentist refered me to a oral surgeon. I think it was somthing ~ $3000. My uncle (general dentist) in Taiwan extracted them for me, he lol'd at needing a oral surgeon.

I'm only bitching about the price of dental work in the US. In Taiwan the price for the same root canal is about 1/5. A couple of years back, I needed to have four wisdom tooth removed. It would have cost a ton in the US. I saved ~$2k by flying back to Taiwan to get the work done...

I felt ripped off when I went to the endotontist. The endo had the nicest dental office I've seen. $800-1000 for a root canal (30-40 minutes of work). I was uninsured at that time too! My regular dentist even jokes about how endos are making the big $.

I tend to use Matlab for numerical analysis and Maple for symbolic manipulation. At my university, the EE used Matlab, while Maple was optional. Maple is really handy for the classes that did a lot of equation manipulation. It saves a lot of time with integration and algebra.

USB/Firewire external optical drive. Or the optical drive on my desktop across the network.

I like the portability of the IBM/Lenovo X series. Excellent build quality and keyboard. The new X60 looks pretty nice. The lack of optical drive on a notebook isn't a issue for me, since the only time I use a optical drive is to install software.

Stuff I find amusing at the gym.... The guy that puts on more weight then he can handle. Such as doing a whole body preacher curl. They have such horrible form, I tempted to tell them to put on less weight. A fat 250lb woman that does curls with 2.5 lb dumbells. People that goes through...