Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

As usual, I went for a climb with my group after work today. After a few hours, we all decided to bail out earlier and grab a few drinks. One of us is only 17, so she asked for a glass of water and a few slices of lemon. As she finished squeezing the lemon juice into her water, she started dumping sugar in it… “What are you doing?” I was really curious. “Making a lemonade!” The girl was kind enough to let me take a sip. Wow… that was one good lemonade she made. You can’t actually tell the difference between this self-made under age drink vs. the real margarita on the rock just by looking at it! Best of all, it‘s free! Next time, when you are out there trying to save a few bucks, try this under age recipe. Not bad!

Wrap your brian around this little puzzle Apparently this is an IQ test given to job applicants in Japan: “Everybody has to cross the river”.

The following rules apply:
Only 2 persons on the raft at a time.

The father can not stay with any of the daughters without their mother’s presence.

The mother can not stay with any of the sons without their father’s presence.

The thief (striped shirt) can not stay with any family member if the Policeman is not there.

Only the Father, the Mother and the Policeman know how to operate the raft.

To start click on the big blue circle on the right.

To move the people click on them. To move the raft click on the pole on the opposite side of the river.

Depends on what you are asking, right? Want to fund your next dream vacation? Absolutely. What about Jennifer Aniston’s house? A million can get you started. If you want to rely on it to retire? Hell No!

Our retirement system got really f#$%ed up lately. Our parents are probably the last lucky generation to get both social security and company pension. As the traditional pension keeps vanishing and social security running dry in thirty some years, we are on our own, my friends.
So, let’s see how much you need to “live happily ever after”.

A few assumptions first:

1. If you make $50,000 a year and still want to keep the same income when you retire
2. Annual withdraw rate can’t exceed 5% so you don’t run out of your principle
3. Inflation rate is 3% per year
4. You retire in 30 years

You need $121,000 yearly income in 30 years to have the same buying power, which means, you need to have a nest egg of 2.4 million dollars when you retire. For those hot shot young consultants out there, 4 or 5 million may not be an exaggerated figure.

It’s better to save now than feeling sorry when you get older. cnn.money.com has pretty cool calculators to figure out exactly how much you need to save/invest every month. Check out the million dollar calculator and the saving calculator.

I think the “pay yourself first” concept is a really effective way to force yourself into the saving/investing habit. Setup auto withdraws, then feel free to spend the rest. Again, living under your means is always the pre-req, yeah?

Hope everybody can retire early and comfy, if not rich.

If you have never heard of Ghibli Studio or Hayao Miyazaki, I hope you heard about the Oscar Best Animated film “Spirited Away”. I admire Miyazaki’s work so much that I made extra effort to visit his Ghibli Museum last year when I was in Tokyo. This weekend, I finally had time to watch his 2004 production Howl’s Moving Castle in the theatre.

Wow, what a fantastic film! This is probably the best Ghibli production of all in my opinion. Although I was little shocked to learn that this film is based on a western novel which is normally not Miyazaki’s style, surely I wasn’t disappointed. Once again, the amazing artwork and the visual wonders he created had my jaws dropping the whole time. Finally, he created a young handsome ADULT male character in this film. (Anyone who recalls his previous works knows he always had some little 8 year old boys running around and falling for the 10 year old girls)

Miyazaki’s films are always visually stunning with bizarre worlds he created that are beyond imagination. From the floating castle in the Castle In The Sky to the bath house in Spirited Away, it seems that there is no limit when it comes to creating fantasy lands.

Howl’s Moving Castle is like an animated poetry that will keep you fascinated every time you watch it. You will love this one even if you are not a big fan of Japanese Animation.

I spent a few minutes and took the MIT blogger survey. As a reward of my time, I get to see the data MIT has collected. I found a similar survey done by BlogSearchEngine back in Dec, 2003. It’s very interesting to compare the results. Anyway, a few highlights based on this year’s MIT’s findings:

• Top reasons to write blog: Keep a personal journal, keep in touch with people, and write comments about today’s news and events.
• Most people have only been an author for less than 2 blogs in a given year.
• Most blog sites receive quite a lot comments, at least about a few per week
• Most blog sites are established after 2002
• Most people only post a few entries per week. Only 14.3% people post a few per day.
• Most blog sites have less than 10 readers per day.
• An overwhelmingly large portion of the blog sites (> 94%) only have 1 author. Very few have multiple authors to publish on the sites.

I noticed that no matter how correct I am, if I tell a guy he is wrong and I am right, it’s guaranteed the conversation will absolutely go no where. Even Oprah is educating the women not to tell a man he is wrong no matter how ridiculous his thought or action is. In her full length article featured in the June issue of O, some psychologist suggested a tactical method for woman to resolve such conflict. The method can be summarized in the following haiku format:

Start with “You are 100% correct.”
Followed by a sentence to state your correct thought.
Then ask something from the man.

According to the psychologist, the man will be happy enough to do what you ask when his most ridiculous thought received approval from you.

Ok, let’s put that method to use. So, let’s say if my friend Cyco Miko (a guy) tells me, “Yuna, I think the sun rises from the west”. I should say, “Oh, you are absolutely correct. But I prefer the sun rising from the east. Now can I have your Acura RSX please?” I suppose I can ditch my CRV and live happily ever after with his RSX???

I finally got the Gallery plug-in working on the site. However, I haven’t managed to figure out how to integrate blog plug-in(WordPress) to work with the photo plug-in(Gallery).

Anyway, I loaded a few albums as a start. Check out my recent Aspen Climbing trip.

If you want to access the photo album directly, go to http://www.yunasville.com/Gallery

My friend Colleen runs an annual License Plate game. Whoever spots all 50 state license plates first wins the title. The game starts in May and usually the winner is announced sometime in July.

Before a massive cross-pacific bridge is built, Hawaii plate is probably the hardest one to spot in the mainland. So you can imagine if a rainbow plate pops out on a road in Virginia, people are going to get excited. That’s exactly what Colleen has reacted. But wait, the plate says it is from Tennessee. As a long term Tennessean, I don’t recall seeing this design, but I know our state offers quite a few customized designs to get a few bucks out of the residents. It’s not like we have 500 states, with 10 million professional and amateur artists, we ought to be able to come up with something more distinctive than this! If the state pays something, I won’t mind muscle through my so-so artistic talent. I think I can do better than a rainbow. ;D

Noodle and Race? Nice… I suppose I can order a bowl of noodle with asian then…

My parents still have a lot of troubles understanding English movies. As a result, they normally borrow or rent the Chinese published copies with subtitles to enjoy the Hollywood films. Half of the time, the subtitle was so confusing that I ended up being their translator. I remember one time when my dad was watching Terminator 3, he got all confused about why a woman was raped for 3 years. I scanned through the DVD and found the entire movie was butchered by the bad translations. Just to illustrate how bad this is, take a look at the screen shots from this Chinese version of Star Wars III. (Thanks to Paco for the link).

I don’t deny the fact that English is very difficult to master. I am still struggling with the p’s and q’s sometimes myself. But I am hoping anybody who is about to translate a movie ought to know the difference between “ I am in you behind. ” vs. “I am behind you. “

Not long ago, I was still carrying a heavy heart while visiting the lower Manhattan and the new train station in ground zero. Now the Londoners are experiencing their version of 7/7 nightmare. It took my family a few hours to locate my sister who studies in London University this year. She is sound and alive all because of her last minute plan change so she didn’t hop on that subway. Four years ago, it was me my family was trying to find…

I didn’t intent to write anything to express my political opinions on the site. But this is getting too personal now. What the hell are we doing in Iraq? So many young kids are dying everyday…. for what? Al Qaeda is the one we need to track down. They bombed Madrid last year and now moved on to the high profile London. Chicago and Sears Tower the next year?! It’s time for the politicians to forget about votes, benefits and status. Fighting terrorists has long been a global effort; however, nobody is able to effectively target the Al Qaeda network. I don’t have enough political knowledge to understand why. But I feel that whatever we are doing in Iraq does not pose any direct threat to the Al Qaeda network and if that is the case, we are not fighting the war we suppose to fight.