This is my first use of HTML in at least 20 months. I'm trying to un-XAML myself to create this site. I always wanted to host a site like this - in fact I have been but those free websites with ads are hard to maintain.

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This posting is about parking in the main campus. This happens to 2 of my colleagues and just want to send out a heads-up that cars do get towed away and you gotta pay $290 for the *great* service they provide you.

Last 3 months, my PM's BMW got towed away for parking in the Carpool lane and I think that's all fair because he probably got tons of parking tickets from security and he just ignored it. The good news is that he's not going to violate any parking rule anymore.

However, just last Thursday another colleague got his vehicle towed away outside Building 36. He was parking in the curbside without red or yellow indicator. His SUV was towed away and I have to drive him to a tow company close to East Lake Sammamish to pick it up. He has to wait there for 30 minutes for his SUV.

There's a problem in this case because there's no consistency in the decision to tow a vehicle away. In the building near by like 1,2,3,4,5,6,10 curbside parking is allowed because there's just not enough parking spot. Since building 36 is just next to them, he thought the same rule applies but obviously he's wrong. He got an email about the incident and instructions to collect the car. Of course, there's the $290 that he needs to bring.

There's a good ending, he was so pissed that he send email to security/parking folks the following day and wanted to challenge them in district court. Finally he got an email reply with apologies and reinbursement. So the next time your vehicle got towed and you think you are right, you know what to do :-)

Yahoo! Mail is now providing 100MB of storage. Most probably following what Google GMail is doing (1GB). This will pressure other player in the industry to follow suit. I think it's a good time to grab some Storage Stock in NASDAQ.

If you own an Apple OS X, make sure you patch your OS. It's a pretty bad security problem.

While browsing stats on my blog site (it's nice to know that any "NNTP" from Google search comes to my blog :)), I realized that there are some hits from A9.com. I went to a9.com and found out that it is a beta search engine from Amazon.com.

I bought a vacation package from Expedia 2 days back and I have such an experience with logins. First of all, I have Expedia.com login and 2 Passport login. When I’m ready to make the big commitment, I got error during the processing. I tried 2 Expedia logins and my 1st passport login (digitalnetbizz) – all failed to process, probably they don’t really want my business. Then I thought of a great idea, using another Passport login (for simplicity b@hotmail.com).
Now, the vacation has been purchased and here’s where the confusion begins. Expedia send the confirmation email to digitalnetbizz (1st email). Shouldn’t it send to b@hotmail.com?
Yesterday, when I try to print out the itinerary and vouchers for the services I purchased, I opened my email (digitalnetbizz) and as usual click on some private Expedia hyperlink to print those stuffs. I got error in Expedia – unable to retrieve my itinerary. Hmmm… I email to customer service and they reply something like this:

>Dear Expedia.com Customer,
>
>Thank you for contacting Expedia.com.
>
>I was able to locate your itinerary under the account with member id 
>digitalnetbizz. We regret that we are unable to process your request via 
>email.   If you need further asssistance kindly contact us at our toll free 
>number at 1(800) Expedia (1 800 3973342) or 1 404 728 8787

Well, at this point I’m pretty sure that I booked my vacation using my digitalnetbizz passport account. I called Expedia, they walked me thru the sign-on process as though I’m my 3 years old nephew or my grandma. After trying for 25 minutes, I’m just getting the same error message. The representative told me to give her my fax number so that she can fax it to me. I don’t have one at home and need to use the fax redirection at Microsoft. I think this is the single biggest relief for her after having to stay with me for 25 minutes.

This morning, I called them again (waiting for 15 minutes and listening to some classical music on their line) and finally got to a representative. I told her to fax it to me and she was asking me if I have try to login etc.. I replied and told her I tried it on 4 different machines (2 XPs, Longhorn, Mac) and it’s just not working. They told me that they will fax it to me within 1 hour. I’m still not getting the fax yet.

Just 10 minutes ago, I recalled that maybe it somehow link to my b@hotmail.com login and Expedia backend is all screwed-up. I tried it and it works at first go :-). Anyway this is my story about too many logins.

After much consideration, I finally decided to go Waikiki Beach (Hawaii) for vacation [end of this week :-)]. Got a pretty good deal and direct flight from Seattle. Looking forward to it.

Found this site using Google search.
This software can change your Windows XP to be something like this:

   

I was suprise to see that there are such study being made. I kinda browse it thru. This document is interesting. Click here for the document. [beware its 90+ pages]

Welcome to my self-test site. I would like to start an online journal but my current MSDN blog site is all about technology and products - so here's why I'm doing this.

At the same time, I would like to refresh my <HTML/> so that I can start another little hobby project which has something to do with HTML transformation. I somehow feels that Microsoft DHTML can do more than what we normally use it for - so I'll try to make sure of some of this cutting edge techniques until XAML is everywhere.

I have read thru 3 XQuery books and *IMO* the XQuery book from Michael Brundage is the best so far.

Read my previous blog about WinHEC Avalon NNTP Reader here and source code here.