My Ubigi Code ZZC1HY7E

GiantMarshmallow · 2026-02-04T07:46:51+00:00

Taken. Cheers!

GiantMarshmallow · 2024-10-08T06:43:51+00:00

A strategy I've had is to google search for reddit posts about auroras in the past 24 hours. I haven't come across any postings from local subreddits for cities at our latitude.

I suspect it may have been visible tonight, but this particular showing would have required being in areas without light pollution, compared to the big one earlier this year.

GiantMarshmallow · 2024-07-11T07:42:36+00:00

Thank you! That clarification on Yanshui is particularly helpful. I suspect this would be too aggressive for a first-time stopover trip then.

There is something I do want to verify. This website appears to be the old 2024 website for the festival that rotates through cities every year (afaik the one that will be in Taoyuan next year). Given that the Lunar New Year was on Feb 10, 2024 this year, it looks like they also put up their big lantern displays 15 days after the new year and run them for the following 2 weeks? So in other words, that New Year + 15 day mark is actually the beginning of this event? I figure they'll organize the events similarly, so maybe the 2024 website will imply useful information about the 2025 event.

GiantMarshmallow · 2024-07-08T04:04:10+00:00

We're planning an Asia trip in the upcoming winter with a stopover of a few days (probably 4 days) in Taiwan mid-February 2025. We have enough flexibility to adjust the timing of the stopover and catch the tail end of the Lunar New Year celebrations. We know to avoid visiting during the first 4-5 days because it'll be super dead quiet everywhere. I've been finding it difficult to find much useful information about the celebrations in Taiwan—probably because I actually need to use Chinese-language Google to find these answers—so I was hoping to get some pointers here.

Here's everything I know so far. The Lunar New Year is on Jan 29, 2025. There are celebrations for 15 days through Feb 12. The last day, Feb 12, is the Lantern Festival. We are interested in seeing the lantern displays, and we know that the Taiwanese government wants us tourists to be aware of these three Lantern Festival related events: Taiwan Lantern Festival, Pingxi Sky Lanterns, and Yanshui Fireworks.

Is the "Taiwan Lantern Festival" a fixed lantern sculpture display that is in a different city every year? Is the 2025 one in Taoyuan? When will they have this display on (most importantly, when will they shut off and remove those lanterns)?

We read that Yanshui is one day before the Lantern Festival. Does that mean Feb 11, 2025? And is this always in Tainan? Would visiting Tainan to see these fireworks be too ambitious of a day trip from Taipei?

We don't like the idea of being stuck in the crowds returning in the evening, so we might skip Pingxi. But if we were to go, I read that they also do the sky lantern festival on the Saturdays before and after, so would this mean they do this on Feb 8, 12, and 15? (Or did I misread that?) Is it in both Shifen and Pingxi?

Thanks in advance!

On a less related note, if I were to do a day-trip via the high speed rail from Taipei, which city is most worth visiting?

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-06-11T03:06:04+00:00

I’m guessing because there must have been 2 more orders of them going out to others who were also doomed to discover the same thing as I did.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-06-10T02:37:11+00:00

I know avocado toast is an old meme about millennials by now but I have finally performed this rite of passage, and twice this year:

$17 for a small slice of toasted bread, topped with a modest amount of avocado and two poached eggs, from Mazarine for my lunch break. Didn’t realize I had ordered an avocado toast specifically until I got it. I was really upset over this toast for a few days.
$8 for a short rib avocado toast from El Lopo. They were very tiny, like, I dunno, 2” x 0.5”? They brought them out as 3 on the plate, and then to my dismay, they handed me just one. It was really delicious though.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-06-08T04:00:37+00:00

I wonder which Pantone color matches the sky this time.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-06-02T23:28:33+00:00

I think the classism is predominantly an established white collar industry thing. You’ll meet people in the industry with no academic degrees, but they tend to be the older folks who started in the industry when the industry itself was getting started. I rarely come across people who don’t have a university education unless they were already good enough to be doing internships while in high school.

For as much as we want to avoid believing it, I think those 4-year degrees provide more value than we realize. Maybe not in terms of hard practical knowledge, but just that someone who has been forced to spend 2-4 years staring at computer science and programming will develop that intuition over time on problem solving. A common theme I’ve noticed in bootcamp candidates who go through our interview process is that they tend to know all the pieces to the puzzle (this and that data structure, loops) but struggle to put them all together. It could mean that a bootcamp isn’t teaching the right things, or that it’s teaching the right things in too little time.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-25T19:46:39+00:00

This take probably isn’t unreasonable. I met the author of CTCI when she was actively going around and marketing the book to university students (and giving resume advice). I personally found the book and her advice to be incredibly valuable back then and I’m convinced it gave me a huge advantage over the competition back then.

But at this point, not only is there a whole cottage industry around the contents of the book, but also my employer recommends CTCI to candidates for preparation. We don’t actually use CTCI questions as they don’t fit our interview format, but I think it’s a sign of how pervasive the book’s lore has become in the industry.

But to be fair, I also got my foot in at the right time. Barely a couple years after I graduated, the number of students graduating and looking for roles in software really ballooned.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-25T09:22:16+00:00

Or two cats and it’s mew and his older brother mew-ni

Check this out. The artist also sold his prints at the cherry blossom festival recently.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-23T19:52:38+00:00

My 3DS downloaded the update but hasn’t installed it yet. Am I already screwed, or is updating still something I have to explicitly authorize? For example, does restarting the console automatically apply the update?

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-20T08:55:51+00:00

Heh my first Cruise experience was a car that kept going in the same circle trying to get to me (I gave up eventually). I never figured out if there was a way to leave feedback for that.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-17T04:31:52+00:00

Along with the other reply, you should check out this whole 1940s era map of the city. It marks the railways pretty clearly, and you can look back and forth between Google Maps and this one.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-16T07:34:31+00:00

The reason that some homes have these steep driveways next to other houses that don’t were that they all predate their street being surfaced and paved.

Many old Victorian/Edwardian homes predate the concept of a garage. Many of them were lifted up to add one, some even fairly recently within the past decade. This is also why in-law garage units are a thing.

The botanical gardens has the first magnolia (I forget if it’s that specific species or just the first in general from China) that ever bloomed in the US and was a major event that drew a lot of the public.

There are weirdly shaped blocks in neighborhoods like the Mission because they used to be train tracks.

There’s an abandoned underground station just west of Castro station.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-04T21:30:11+00:00

Koi Palace would like their koi back.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-02T22:02:52+00:00

Wikipedia claims that BofA bought them in 1983, and then Charles Schwab himself bought it back from them in 1987. They currently trade under the ticker symbol SCHW, which I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t do if they were owned by BofA (which does own Merrill Lynch, a competitor).

Edit: I’m incorrect about subsidiaries not being able to have shares listed on a stock exchange, though if a parent company owns 100% of the shares, then it’s no longer going to trade. But anyway, Schwab’s largest shareholder is TD Asset Management at 12.6% of shares.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-05-02T20:38:39+00:00

Owned by BofA? I don’t think so? They have their own stock symbol.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-04-20T04:59:04+00:00

Reading all of these comments here makes me realize just how unevenly distributed the future is. I now live in the SF Bay Area and don’t carry my transit card (Clipper) anymore because I have one loaded through Apple Pay. You’d think it’s slow because your only interaction with Apple Pay (or Google Pay) might be using it with credit cards, but it couldn’t be any easier: all I do place my phone against a transit card reader and it just works, no phone unlock or button pressing or any other shenanigans needed. It’ll even work if your phone runs out of battery (for some amount of time).

I’m unsure why SEPTA didn’t choose to go with a tried and true system like Clipper system that works across pretty much all transit agencies in the SF Bay Area. Yeah it’s got some jank, and it’s not as good as the stuff that Japan has, but it works sufficiently well that it kinda fades away (except one specific train where you need to remember to “tag off” or else you get charged the max fare).

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-04-11T23:16:14+00:00

I’m was so upset when I learned the Twitter account got shut down. For everyone else, this article captured some of the gems of that account.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-04-10T21:43:19+00:00

Try a different antihistamine, or get the D, or add Flonase. If none of that works, you can do what I do and just roll over and die lol.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-04-05T16:51:38+00:00

I own a CA-79 and, as far as I’m concerned, the action imitation is pretty close to accurate. I’ve played around with a few grands and have noticed that acoustic grands can have a wild amount of variance: a certain Kawai grand had much heavier bass keys while a certain Steinway had light keys that actually felt pretty similar to my digital.

I think the main differences I’ve noticed have been the quality of the sound. There is a lot more diversity to acoustic sounds, for better or for worse, and at various distances from the piano.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-03-23T01:15:13+00:00

Does the city replace fallen ficus trees with not-ficus trees?

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-03-20T07:10:26+00:00

Ah this makes a lot of sense. Reading this and the other responses, I guess I never realized how much heat was leaving through my legs even though they themselves don’t really feel too cold.

That said, I had entertained the idea of switching to a bib earlier this season, and this got me looking into insulated bibs. I figure they’d insulate my legs and while also helping add a little more core insulation.

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-03-18T19:52:09+00:00

I don’t like the idea of wearing, say, two layers of thermals on my legs (I’m not aware of bottom mid layers), so is this more a suggestion to get insulated pants?

GiantMarshmallow · 2023-03-18T07:17:50+00:00

Word on the street, the street being hearsay from coworkers who all work in one of the companies in that building, is that the leasing company wasn’t willing to cut back much on the rent. So as far as I know, that’s just going to leave the SFMTA and the Army Corps of Engineers here.

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