Cu Family NY Trip

For the second weekend in a row, I had out of town family coming to visit. This time, it was Audrey, Uncle Johnny and Auntie Linda from San Francisco. I decided to combine all of the days I spent with them into a general blog post and Picasa album. This includes:

Tung Yi Fung
As with all visitors, we took them to the usual place. I met up with the rest of the family on Thursday night after work. With the light weeknight crowd, we were able to enjoy an unrushed meal with the best dishes there.

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MoMA
On Saturday, I met up with Audrey to check out the current exhibits in MoMA where I have a corporate membership. Auntie Linda and Uncle Johnny went shopping in the Midtown West area. Most of the MoMA photos can be found on my Dragonsaber News site.

Sentosa
After the museum, we headed to SoHo to meet up with one of Audrey's friends. Then we all headed to Flushing for a family dinner at Sentosa. We got there around peak dinner time, but luckily got a table for all 7 of us on the first floor. We got all of the usual dishes except the lobak and skate.

Family Lunch
On their last day, today... everyone met at my parents' house for lunch.

Andy & Wesley's Birthdays

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New World Mall

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The New World Mall opened a couple of months ago, but this is my first time walking around it because it's been too crowded. I went early in the morning to get these rare people-free shots. There aren't a lot of shops inside the mall, especially for its massive space, but it's setup for profit. The food court in the basement, grocery on the ground floor and banquet style restaurant on the top floor are the foundations to the mall. They take up the most space and provide people with more of the usual in Flushing. Only part of the first floor and second floor have actual shops and they're all what you'd expect in an Asian style mall... gift shops, salons, clothes, movies, etc.

It's located just outside of the subway entrances and takes up a good portion of Main St. and Roosevelt St. in the downtown area, so you can't miss it. It should be a lot more successful than the Caldors it used to be decades ago.

Red Bowl Noodle Shop

Location: 40-52 Main St., Flushing, NY 11354
Cuisine: Chinese, Noodles
Hours: DAILY (24 hours)
Phone: (718) 353-7683
Prices: $12/person (Lunch)
Credit Cards: All major

Food: 8
Service: 7
Value: 8
Environment: 7

Frequency: Unique

The Red Bowl Noodle Shop is one of the most noticeable buildings on Main Street because there's a large bowl at the top and you can see if from several streets away. I ate there once, many years ago, but it was a different restaurant at the time. The Red Bowl Noodle Shop is new enough that it doesn't have much of a web presence yet. My mom knew about it from friends, so we decided to try a new place for my Dad's birthday.

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The food was good with portions varying on each dish. The restaurant looks like a fast food place, but the food is pretty good and better than take out. There's a lot of variety too as they offer the usual safe Chinese dishes combined with some less common ones.

Service was OK, but it took a little long for them to setup a table and seat us. The place wasn't even crowded at 5:15pm. They also took too long to refill our teapot. The place had nice decorations and is relatively clean for the amount of traffic that passes through.

Sunday's Surprise Visit

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Tiger to Snow Leopard

The Upgrade
While most people were probably going from Snow Leopard to Lion this weekend, I was upgrading my G1 Mac mini from Tiger to Snow Leopard. The system had gotten corrupted over the past few months for some reason. Everything became slow and the Internet connection was spotty, only going through about 5% of the time. So instead of returning to factory settings, I took the opportunity to go up 2 versions to Snow Leopard (10.6). Almost nothing is compatible with Tiger (10.4) now. When I first got the iPad, I tried to set it up with the Mac mini and it was incompatible! I ended up syncing with my Core i7 PC. Ironically, the iPad IS compatible with Windows XP... a 10-year old OS.

iTunes and Media
One of the concerns of switching operating systems was my iTunes library and purchases. The solution was simple though. All I had to do was backup my Music folder and copy it back after the upgrade. As long as the path to all of your music and movies remain intact, you should have everything as is after the upgrade (and after you logon to the iTunes store for the first time). Your movies will even be in the same position you left them in.

iLife
The main purpose of my Mac mini is for video editing. The $29 upgrade to Snow Leopard gets rid of the whole iLife suite though. So I had to spend another $25 on iLife 11 (on order) so I could get iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. The new version should give me 2-3 versions of themes I was behind on too. That alone is worth $25 to me.

Windows VM
As part of Apple's backwards compatibility issues, I also had to change my VM. Previously, on Tiger, I was running Windows XP over the first version of Parallels. I switched to the free Oracle VirtualBox, which is a smaller program with the same features (same VM I used to run OS X on Windows 7). The Windows VM acts as my home network's file server, so it's a minimal install. Out of the 80 GB total hard drive space, I only allocated 15 GB to the Windows VM. After the installation, all updates and Google Chrome, there's 6 GB free for me to move files around across my systems.

Driving Simulator

Originally, I said to myself that I wasn't going to go crazy and setup a steering wheel for Gran Turismo 5. The setup takes up too much space and the steering wheels start at $150... almost the price of PS3 itself. Premium wheels that have more weight and are life size cost around $300... a hefty price for a controller that will only be used for one game. The best low-end wheel, the Logitech Driving Force GT went on sale a couple of weeks ago at CompUSA though. It went from $150 to $100. I had plenty of Amazon rewards credits too, so I basically got the wheel for free on years of accumulated credits. The rest of the items I already had.


This weekend, I checked out my real car to see where everything was placed. I replicated the setup as best I could, placing the pedals about 2 ft diagonally away from the wheel. I aligned the brake pedal with the center of the wheel. It's funny that we never think about these things while driving. Just placing these items in the right spot made the game easier to control and the driving feel very realistic. The only thing I should fix is the table the wheel is on though. I just put this together with things I already had. So the only table I had of the right height was a laptop stand. It really needs something more stable because the force feedback on the wheel is strong, even on the lowest setting. And of course the sharp turns require big wheel movements.

Other items in this project include a Hannspree 28" monitor and iLive Soundbar. For the monitor, you'd want to stick with something from 28"-32"... not too small and not too large because it's supposed to look like a driver's view of the front window. It should be placed about as far from the wheel as the end of the window on a real car. The soundbar is must for any small LCD just because they need speaker upgrades. If you want to go overboard, then a 5.1 system will make the sounds more realistic.

Happy 4th of July!

3rd of July BBQ

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The 4th of July fell on a Monday this year, so I got Friday and Monday off. I think it would've made more sense to give us Monday and Tuesday since Independence Day is really a late night holiday. Since that wasn't the case, it was nice to have the family get-together on Sunday, July 3rd. That way, we could relax knowing the next day is an off-day.

Wireless Eee Macbook

When I last left off on my Windows XP/OS X Leopard dualboot netbook, everything was functional except for the wi-fi on the OS X side. Most instructions I came across mentioned a hardware swap of the internal 802.11n card. I went as far as doing a trial run of this just to see how far I had to dig to get to the wi-fi card. On the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, it's surprisingly hard to get to. You seriously have to take apart the entire machine, including part of the monitor. So I backed up on that idea and put everything back together. I don't think it's worth the risk. There's actually a much simpler solution that none of the sites mention and I hadn't thought about it initially either... a Mac OS X compatible external USB dongle! There aren't many of these out there and of course it's ideal to find one of those new ones that has a short dongle. I did find one on Amazon for just under $15 (AirLink101 AWLL5088) and now I have wi-fi on the OS X half of the netbook. Since it has the short dongle, it's pretty much just as good as an internal one. It doesn't stick out and I don't have to remove it when I pack up the machine.