Spirit Airlines will raise its fee for carry-on bags to up to $100, becoming the first U.S. airline to charge so much for a service that most other airlines offer for free.
From Gizmodo: The Quietest Place on Earth Will Drive You Insane Within 45 Minutes
There’s a small room in Minnesota that blocks out 99% of all external sound. That’s an impressive number! Also impressive: nobody can take more than 45 minutes alone in the room before they go nuts. More »
from Gizmodo
From Morning Edition: Cameras Follow World’s Greatest Sushi Chef
Jiro Ono, 85, owns a small sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. The 10 seats at the sushi bar require reservations months in advance. In the new movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, director David Gelb explores the chef’s relationships with his sons and the art of sushi-making. Gelb talks to Renee Montagne about Ono’s story.
from Morning Edition
San Francisco Tour with Peter
It’s been a while since I had visited the Bay Area so I took the Saturday to (re)visit the area. Â First of all, someone should’ve told me that it is PACKED with traffic! Â The traffic in Houston was NOTHING compared to the Bay Area! Â Second, that the parking would be horrendous! Â I wanted to visit the Coit Tower but ended up parking way off and walk up to the tower.
That’s Coit Tower in the center…
The hills really ARE steep in San Francisco!
That’s Alcatraz, the infamous prison island…
The views are simply breathtaking! Â It’s true that San Francisco is a beautiful city… I don’t deny that at all…
It is as hilly as it seems from this view!
View on my way down…
Coit Tower from the bottom…
And who can forget the (overrated) Golden Gate Bridget?! Â 😛
And driving across it…
And I got to drink lots of great coffee!
And I got to see my cousins… This is my cousin Michelle and her family…
And this is Sunny and their daughter…
Silicon Valley Nerd Tour
So while I was in the Silicon Valley area, I decided to do the ultra nerd tour! Â I already missed a few like Twitter and Yelp but here are those that I managed to see… in the order of places visited…
Apple (even though I may not like it!)
Seagate!
Google!!
Intuit
Facebook!
Facebook II!
Skype
HP
Nokia
Microsoft
Yahoo!
eBay
Netflix
Motorola
nVidia
Tesla
They had a Tesla showroom at San Jose mall area that Jim & MJ took me to! Â It was awesome looking car! Â Just… bit out of my range at $100k…
How to Travel to Cheju Island 101
So as most of you know by now, my family got a chance to take a long vacation together. This time, I had saved up enough vacation to go to Korea for a month. I could’ve stayed longer but there were no return flights left for me (without increasing the price signficantly) in July.
It was fun and crazy month, let me tell ya… but it was also our tenth (yes, 10th!) anniversary! We had taken lots of sacrifices to get to where we are today and we hadn’t spent many of our anniversaries together, let alone do stuff together. So I was more than determined to do something special… something memorable.
I had never been to the Cheju Island in the south… the Korean Hawaii, if you will, as it is also a dead volcano. We had sufficient Korean Air miles saved to buy two tickets, two nights of stay at KAL Hotel, and 3 days of car rental. That was awesome and it was Soojin that made all the stuff happen. By the way, renting cars in Korea is friggin’ expensive!! It’s not like here where it’s more reasonable at $30/day or so… In Korea, it was more like $100/day! Yikes!
Anyhow, we get to Cheju Island and take the shuttle ride to the Hanjin Car Rental only to find out that… you need an International Driver’s license to rent or drive a car! After much panic and trying to think our way through it, Soojin asked if we could hire a “driver” (기사). By God’s grace, we were sent a man who seemed to be in his late 40’s to early 50’s. His name was ê¹€ë‘환. No I am not kidding! Just take a look at him!
Let me just say, do NOT judge a man by his cover! While he may seem like a hybrid between a thug and 70’s pop singer, he was definitely a worthy tour guide. Get this. His rate was $50. Per day! No kidding! He was not only kind but was very thorough and made a plan for us but was flexible to what we had wanted to do (and not do)! And of course, he knew some of the best places to eat! One of the best dishes ever was ê¿© ìˆ˜ì œë¹„ (pheasant dumpling soup)!
If you are ever in Cheju Island and need a great tour guide (but you’d need to be able to at least understand Korean as he doesn’t speak any English!), give him a call! He’s my man! ê¹€ë‘환 기사 010-7709-0823 and tell him that the couple from Texas sent you! 😛
Exposure on Radiation – Pun Intended
*Source: xkcd.com
With the Japanese nuclear power plant leaking radiation, many are concerned how that would affect us. We ourselves and many families will be traveling to Japan and are concerned how that would be. Rest assured that it’s not nearly as bad as most of us tend to think.
As Popular Science explains, we are exposed to far more amounts at other unsuspecting sources like using old CRT monitors and the insane amount on a flight from NYC to LA!! Yikes. So unless you walk into a nuclear plant, we have not that much to worry about. Oh and there’s a rather great note at the bottom of the blue chart that states that cell phones generate ZERO radiation!!!