Not sure what made me started it, but a google image search of myself turned up some unexpected results:

• A picture of myself taken by my CS162 GSI
• A mooncake brand named after me

Wonder where I can buy that mooncake in the states :-)

Spent Monday to Wednesday at Riverbed's internal training. Learned quite a bit more how the entire system is supposed to work together, also learned quite a bit about some stuff that I don't think I will ever use. The training was quite tiring, since it started at 8:30 every morning, and I had to get up at 6:45 to barely get there on time. I am glad that it's over.

Called direct loan. When I graduated early last December I was supposed to notify them so they can work out the date I should start repaying my loan. A couple days ago I got a letter saying that my expected graduation date is in May, and that reminded me. I wonder why my school didn't contact them for me. Anyhow, that call only took 5 minutes, so it's not that big of a deal.

Finished reading 歷代經典寓言故事, which is one of the books I bought in Hong Kong. Two down, 3 more to go.

So the company I work for Riverbed Technology filed for IPO today. You can view their filing here. Google News has a couple results for the filing as well.

Totally unrelated, but NYT has a article titled Google in China: The Big Disconnect. At 10 pages, it will take more than a coffee break, but I honestly think it's a worthy read.

I wrote quite a bit during my trip in China, and I've been slowly typing them up. Part of the journal can be found here. I will upload the rest as soon as I find time to.

The entries are in Chinese, and I don't plan to translate them to English, at least not any time soon.

I've been using Quodlibet to play my music for more than a day now. Normally I don't care much about music players, since most of the time I just click on the "Play" button and hide it. However Rhythmbox has been crashing a bit too much for me since I upgraded to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu Dapper. Quodlibet is also gstreamer-based, and unlike rhythmbox, is written in python. It's a little tricky to install it at a place other than /, but it can be done.

Also found out about ReplayGain, which is a mechanism that Quodlibet uses to do volume normalization a la iTunes. I've been looking for a way to do that under Linux forever, without knowing that Rhythmbox supports it. A couple minutes in #quodlibet and some googling tells me that I need to use other programs, for example metaflac, to generate the ReplayGain tags that Quodlibet and Rhythmbox use to adjust the volume.

The version of Rhythmbox in Dapper also let me find out how crappy EasyTag is when dealing with UTF-8 tags, but Quodlibet can edit tags too, so EasyTag is gone from my computer.

I do lose the nice notification bubbles that Rhythmbox shows whenever a song is played, but I can live without those.