I've been working at the Mountain View office for more or less 3 months now. Unlike the San Francisco office, the MV office is kind of in the middle of no where. That said, nothing stops me from finding a weird thing or two there.

First of all, the elevator inspection permit expired a little over 10 months ago.

Not really a result of discovering that, I am now taking the stairs whenever I can.

I don't remember which day it started showing up, but someone abandoned a koala stuffed animal near the spot where I usually park my car. I took a picture of it last Friday for some reason, and sure enough, it's gone when I returned the next Monday.

Andrew, click here.

Found out that Yahoo! launched a trip planning service, since I have this secret plan to travel to Chengdu, China (and more, probably Yunnan and Tibet) next year I decided to give it a try.

After I logged in I got a AJAXy Web 2.0 site with a text box that let me enter "Where do you want to go today?"^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wa destination. Since I didn't know how to spell 成都 in English I simply entered "China". Yahoo is smart enough to give me a list of cities that it thinks I would like to go, and Chengdu is last in the list (actually I didn't recognize it without googling for it, but that's just me...).

After selecting the city I got a "Things to do" list, and apparently Yahoo doesn't think there's anywhere worth going other than Mount Emei Scenic Area, Mount Qingcheng, and Huanglong Scenic and Historic Interest Area, none of which I knew anything about. But who cares, I checked all 3 of them anyway. There's another "Hotels" list, which shows a list of hotels (duh!). Yahoo lists the price ranges next to some of the hotels, since Sheraton sounds familiar so I checked it. If you care, a night costs from $75 to $2937 per night (of course, if I click the "Reserve Now" link I can only reserve rooms from Yahoo! Travel that are at least $129).

There are also other things that I can add to the trip like restaurants, shopping and entertainment, none of which show any result for Chengdu. From the trip planner I can also check for availability of my hotel, but it only allows me to plan for less than 330 days ahead, and even then it told me there's no single room at Sheraton from May 1, 2007 to May 8, 2007, which I doubt.

And perhaps not surprisingly, clicking on "Map View" just showed me a world map.

All in all, it maybe a useful site, but Yahoo really needs to expand its database to cover more cities and hotels. I will probably look at it again next year when I really need to plan for my trip.

由小到大我都沒甚麽朋友，如果友情像金錢一樣能夠數量的話，那麽我一直以來都是一個窮人。

有時候覺得自己像一個街頭賣藝者，整天都在鬧市表演，可是走近我給我錢的卻少之又少。說我表演得差我是怎樣也不會承認的，間中也有聽到讚美的聲音，當然他們是否發自內心就不得而知了。等了許久終於等到有人走上前，卻是一個想問路，又不好意思不跟我聊上幾句的人。想問甚麽就問吧，何必勉強自己說一些自己也不在意的話？

我是一個窮人，所以對每一分每一毛都很重視，也會忍不住向經過的人要賞，但我不是乞丐，要是問了一丶兩次都沒有反應的話我就不會再自討沒趣。只是每當看到他們都會想開口說點甚麽，口已經張開了，話卻又吞回肚子裏。還是算了吧。

其實很久以前也有幾位每天都來捧場的人，不過後來他們不再經過那裏，再後來我也沒在那個地方生活。當然現在也有一丶兩個支持者會間中喧寒問暖，對此我也是無比感激。

有可能是自己不懂得投資吧。別看金錢需要投資，其實友情同樣需要投資，可我卻是一個被動的人，很少主動付出甚麽。只能說是性格使然吧，可也說不出個所以然。

罷了。