Zhanga: April 2008
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 (0 comments)
I was grading some assignments today and stumbled upon total retardation. I'm going to show you a little bit of code so retarded that my dog would cry, if I had a dog. Just look at the white parts:
if (1==1)
{
for (Player current: myPlayers)
{
if (current.getRank() == rank)
{
temporary = current.getName();
}
}
return temporary;
}
else
{
return "NOT FOUND";
}
In English: If one equals one, then do some stuff. Otherwise, umm you know, just in case one doesn't equal one, return "NOT FOUND".
3:57AM
Monday, April 28, 2008 (1 comment)
Akbar came to Duke last weekend to see me! (Not to see his girlfriend, of course.) It was exciting. In fact, this post is being written completely voluntarily!
Actually, I do have one thing to say. Let's take a poll: is orange juice (real fruit juice, not the 3% "orangeade" crap) healthy? If you were a health nut like Akbar, would you drink it? Or does juice contain too much sugar?
12:48PM
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 (3 comments)
The Zhanga has a separate page for each post now (the old month view still works). Comments are now displayed under the post instead of above, and are shown only with their parent post, rather than with all the posts from that month. That was just a relic of me being lazy for the last five years.
This probably also means RSS is coming up.
6:11AM
Sunday, April 20, 2008 (0 comments)
I'm writing a Chinese essay and am crippled by a sudden wave of 热干面 (re gan mian/hot dry noodle) craving. Help?! I can't find any on Google on this side of the world...
Which reminds me of one of the funniest things Jen says in the IT Crowd: "I have it on good authority: If you type 'Google' into Google, you can break the Internet. So please, no one try it, even for a joke. It's not a laughing matter. You CAN break the Internet!"
11:46PM
Friday, April 18, 2008 (0 comments)
Dell's kind of funny. A week ago, they sent me an email saying my order was confirmed and I'd get an email when it was shipped. Yesterday, Dell emailed me to tell me the order was shipped and gave me an estimated delivery date of... yesterday. Of course, they sent the email after it was already delivered. Thanks. (It shipped two weeks early, which surprised me.)
In related news, Dell's prices are seriously awesome. I paid $20 without a discount for 3-5 day shipping of a 35 lb package. That's how much it costs to ship 3 ounces of stuff from Ebay...
12:38PM
Thursday, April 17, 2008 (0 comments)
Some international student from China made NY Times headlines today. She was in the Duke Chronicle yesterday, and is all over the Chinese Internet. She's currently the most-searched person on Baidu, which I believe is the most popular search engine in China. Even my mom sent me a link to an article about her on a popular Chinese site.
I have a lot of work to do tonight, so this post is just a friendly warning of a soon-to-come gigantic rant about the current Tibet issues.
7:16PM
Monday, April 14, 2008 (2 comments)
Ok, definitely learned my lesson. Don't ever eat large amounts of watermelon immediately following a risky meal. By risky, I mean Mexican food. I must have set some sort of record last night in that bathroom.
5:29AM
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 (2 comments)
Targeted/contextual advertising FTW! Hanif was looking for a new soulmate and look what he found on my April 2005 page...
I went to the same page and refreshed it a couple of times. Google cycled through four distinct ads. Their titles are (no joke):
- Watermelon
- Stupid Ringtones
- Pimp My Layout - Free
- Are You Zhang Ziyi?
Ignoring the pimp my layout one (it's for Myspace... they missed the mark on that one completely), I'd say targeted advertising is scary accurate these days.
12:01AM
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 (2 comments)
I'm in a really, really boring history class right now so, as I usually do when I'm bored, I wrote a program. This one counted the referers to this site from Google...
Top three search queries that land on my site from Google:
| 3173 | huge penis |
| 366 | big penis |
| 122 | belinda |
Some others from near the top of the list:
| 87 | Huge Penis |
| 65 | "huge penis" |
| 62 | penis |
| 61 | HUGE PENIS |
| 34 | huge penis |
| 21 | huge penis |
| 20 | penis huge |
| 20 | huge penis' |
| 19 | hairy balls |
| 19 | fat cock |
Next time I get bored, I'll do statistical analysis on how likely Google vs. Yahoo vs. Microsoft users are likely to like cock.
7:34PM
Monday, April 7, 2008 (1 comment)
I dug up an email from 2003 when I said that I'm not opposed to the war. What was I on?
In other news, who's excited about H&K2 in 18 days??
2:49PM
Thursday, April 3, 2008 (0 comments)
A rant, a throwback to 2004-style Un-Xanga:
I tried to sign up for a Citibank savings account at the end of January. They were paying 3.67% (3.75% APR), which is very high for a large, established bank. I don't know anything about the little online banks, so I don't feel confident depositing a bunch of money into them.
First, I tried to sign up online. That didn't work out since, apparently, they have a database of driver's license numbers and SSNs (a little creepy), and my name doesn't match or something. I don't actually know the reason; that's just my guess.
So I tried to sign up over the phone. One thing that pleases me about Citi is that the wait hasn't ever been more than a minute for me. But I guess the incompetence of the staff more than makes up for this.
After I finished speaking to them on the phone, I was told I'd receive some mail telling me what else I needed to do. This included faxing in two pieces of identification, plus a monthly bill or other document with my name and address on it. I told them I don't have monthly bills, and they told me a university tuition bill would be fine.
Since I don't have a fax machine, I sent my mom high-resolution images of my driver's license, social security card, and passport. She printed these onto full sheets of regular white paper, and faxed them to Citibank. She also faxed a bill from Duke.
A few days later, I called Citibank. They told me that the passport was readable, but the driver's license and SS card were not. They recommended that I expand the cards when making copies. Uhh, what? Expand them to larger than a full sheet of paper? Also, they now needed address verification in the form of a phone bill.
My mom re-faxed the documents plus our landline bill. Again, the ID cards were unreadable or some such, but the phone bill was ok. So just to make sure, I asked them what they had received and what exactly was still needed. They said they still needed the driver's license and SS card. Apparently, by this time the passport had become "unreadable" as well, but they also apparently didn't need it any more, either.
I figured that maybe my mom has a crappy fax machine. I decided to hunt down a fax machine on campus, which was another adventure I'd rather not go into. Let's just say that I caused at least one grumpy secretary to hate me that day, but I did manage to get the documents faxed.
Two days later, I was told the documents were received but both were, again, unreadable. The third transmission from two different fax machines of full-page printouts was again unreadable? Do the rest of their customers have magical fax machines or something? I asked the lady what exactly about the cards were unreadable, and she told me the driver's license photo was too dark. Ok, what? This is an online account. They don't even allow this type of account to receive in-branch service, so they'll never see my face. Why does the photo matter?
Then I asked about the social security card. She had a great answer for this one. Apparently, they could not validate my card because it didn't have my date of birth and my address.
Me: Sorry, what? Ok, ma'am, do you have a social
security card?
Woman who barely speaks English: No, I do not.
[Me wonders why he even bothered to ask...]
Me: Well, if you did have one, you would know that
social security cards don't have the date of birth or address on them. Do you
really require your customers to fax in social security cards with their date
of birth and address?
Also, during this phone call I was told I needed to verify my address. Apparently, the phone bill was no good because it had a parent's name, not mine, and the university bill was no good because it wasn't monthly (despite being told these would be sufficient earlier). The driver's license, which has my address, also can't be used for this purpose because it can only be used for ID. What?
I had had enough, and so I let them know my thoughts. You can probably guess how that went.
By this point (a month and a half after signing up), spring break was already arriving. I was going home, so I would have a fax machine and could spam them with as many copies of my crap, in as many shades of light and dark, as they wanted. So when I got home, I called them to ask yet again what they still needed.
"Thank you sir. I see that your account has been validated. How would you like to make your initial deposit?"
I guess yelling at the lady woke her up and she figured out that social security cards don't have home addresses on them.
A few days ago, I tried to transfer money from a non-interest-bearing account to this Citibank account. To do so, they require an authorization code, which they send via email. I requested the email. Nothing came. I requested another one. Nothing came. I called their support line, and the guy told me to try again. Again, no email. After being put on hold for a while, I was told that in order to transfer funds, I needed a checking account. Wtf? So I went through their signup over the phone, which took like half an hour. I finished this process two hours after I began trying to make the transfer.
As I finished signing up, the email came. Guess I didn't need that checking account after all. Then 12 hours later, another email came. Does it really take Citibank's email servers 2-12 hours to process an email message?
I hope Citibank enjoys making money off of this checking account that will never see a penny. Whores.
11:52PM
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 (1 comment)
Two minutes ago:
Me: Oh no! I didn't get to April Fool's
anybody!
Unnamed One: April Fool's? Isn't that April... 4th?
12:37AM
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