Categories
uber-and-side-hustle

A bit more Uber driving

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I received a promotion from Uber and they promise $130 for 10 rides before May 22. And I decided to take the offer. I did 3 rides yesterday afternoon from 5 pm, and 7 rides this morning and afternoon. Total 10 rides or trips.

Today I had 2 eventful trips (among total 7). In one trip this morning, from Lindell Blvd near WUSTL I met a guy who is originally from Sweden, and he was not a fan of my car (minivan)’s cleanness (or dirtiness to be exact). In the afternoon, I shuttled a disabled person, along with a friend of that person, and 3 kids. Took a long time to load, and unload. This is probably the most severely disabled person I took in my total 315 trips although the passenger appears to be only in 40s. I have taken older passengers, and some use wheelchair too, but today’s passenger is challenging because it’s very hard for her to get on and get off (get on is harder between the two). It appears she doesn’t have any strength in her legs. I did one more trip after that one, which is take a HS kid to Jack in the Box, and I received the additional $130 after completing the that trip.

I noticed there was a promotion of $200 for 20 deliveries recently too, which I didn’t pay attention and didn’t take. It’s a bit harder to cmpelete 20 Uber Eats deliveries, as Uber Eats is much smaller than Door Dash, and regular Uber passengers.

PS: at this time I don’t plan to resume Uber, but I am going to periodically taking those “quest” offers (promotions). Note the total online time was 4 ours 20 minutes (or 260 minutes), total earning is about $250 (this is after including the #130 quest/promotion money). So about $1 per minute (roughly match my IT/software day job hourly rate)

PS 2: yesterday one of my Uber passengers is a Fedex driver, and I asked about driving for Fedex 🙂

what driver license does fedex driver require in missouri

is it difficult to be fedex driver

Categories
Investing

Value trap?

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$FISV (Siyu Li, X)

Also this one – last I recall, “system of record” talk was used by $CRM and $NOW too. Right now the market is skeptical on that – at the same time I am not a firm believer that Anthopic or Vibe Coding are winning or already won.

$PYPL (Morningstar Morning Filter YT 00:29:16 What takeover talk for PayPal may mean for its stock)

Last but not least, may I add the all mighty $BRK could become a value trap, too? I recall in 1960s, shortly after Warren Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway in a bit like “cigar butt” investing approach, he himself quickly realized BRK is a value trap too – he pivoted it to insurance very quickly, and the rest is the history. Btw, I understand people are looking at the most recent 13F filings.

https://x.com/stlplace/status/2055446494845571216

Categories
Software development

Togglz’s user name is case sensitive

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google search (Togglz user name case sensitive)

Activation Strategies

github

Why is Launch Darkly this expensive? (Launch Darkly is a comparable SaaS product) => Yagni

Categories
Life Life Tips

Sleep baby sleep

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We have the scoop on the ‘Scandinavian Sleep Method’ — and how it could help you rest easier (Yahoo and Amazon selling bedding products?)  

Why Your Phone Is Quietly Turning You Into a Loser Doom scrolling in bed is bad !!!

Have trouble falling or staying asleep? Try cognitive shuffling. 

If you often find yourself lying awake in the middle of the night worrying, sleep experts say that cognitive shuffling might be worth a try.

Start by thinking of a word — something neutral or positive, like the word “house.” Then, think of as many words as you can that start with the first letter: horse, harmonica, honey. Try to picture each object or idea for 5 to 15 seconds, maybe even imagining a scene with yourself in it. (You’re riding a horse. … You’re playing the harmonica. … You’re harvesting honey!)

Sleep Less than 7 Hours? This Exercise Can Save You || The Sleep Trick That Actually Quiets a Racing Mind

Categories
Investing

Berkshire Hathaway 2026 annual shareholder meeting

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The crowd size at the meeting went down quite a bit this year since Warren Buffett’s retirement.

But I think both Warren and Greg handled the questions well. I will put links later, but two things I learned from them.

Valuation is not attractive for them to deploy the cash right now. I think a good example is stocks such as $CAT, used to be blue chip stock, and now has a PE of 47. On the other hand, I just googled – what is apple’s PE when warren started to buy their shares in 2016 – it was 10 to 14. Back to $CAT, its data center segment’s backlog is substantial though – you will need to do a bit research to get a number – Google just gives an overall number.

Another observation or lesson I learned from Warren is here (YT) and tweet – this is about gamblign mentality which is prevailing in current market.

Greg and Ajit duo – and the default mode is No.

Another observation re: Greg (vs Warren). It seems to me Greg is more about operation efficiency, including but not limiting to technology innovation (e.g., from Geico to BNSF), while Warren is more hands off. “The devil is in the details” – I think from my own experience, this is a good thing. As long as we don’t go to “micro management”, we are good there. Note Greg is 30+ years younger than Warren, and has more background in operation compare to Warren’s finance background.

I was at the meeting about 4 years ago – YT video.

Categories
advice and tips China Life Tips

China travel tips, 2026 edition

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(Working in progress as of 04-05-2026, soft launch for now as I expect summer travel to take off towards the end of May. Thought may be helpful for friends who have not visited China for a while)

I am learning from the one and only Apple in terms of their iOS new versioning convention – iOS26. Their new versioning scheme is not entirely ground breaking, btw. If you pay attention to the new cars in the USA (likely in China nowadays too), the new car model or next year model is usually available the year before. For example, right now 2026 Toyota RAV4 is already available. I was a car junkie back in the days – I could tell almost every car’s make and model on the highway when they drove by because I am a slower driver 🙂 But this is mostly useless knowledge too 🙂

Yesterday I came across 2 blog posts almost 20 years ago – More Shanghai travel tips and Travel tips for Shanghai. A lot has changed since then, this is obvious because not only because of the 20 years but also because of the smartphone revolution happened in last 15 years or so.

App, 微信支付 WeChat Pay

Let me give an example, I recall in March 2023, after a break of more than 3 years (2020, 2021 and 2022), I flew back to PVG and saw my parents again in Ningbo. At the KFC store, they already stopped taking orders from the counter, everything is done via app or via 微信小程序。I didn’t know. Just like I didn’t know way before that, at a bank branch in Shanghai, I am supposed to take a number from the computer (printer), which is equivalent to the ticket dispenser here in the US. But I didn’t know and waited in line directly until I realized that I didn’t have a number. Anyway, at KFC, the cashier or 伙计 tried to teach me to download the KFC China app on my iPhone, and because my app store country is set to the USA, it could not find the app 🙁 She has to manually put in order for me, and I was able to pay via WeChat pay though.

Hotels

I wrote quite a bit of kids friendly hotels that I stayed in China: mainly Shanghai and Ningbo Beilun.

Eat

This is mostly for my own benefits 🙂

Shanghai: 台乡缘（2024）

文兴酒家久光百货店（2025）

桂满陇虹桥枢纽浙菜 (2025)

Ningbo:小鱼厂私厨 鄞州 (2025)

Categories
advice and tips Saint Louis

I’m looking for a new gym and/or swimming pool

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And I am open to all suggestions 🙂

Some background – amid the most recent war and the turmoil in the middle east, I thought about quitting JCC earlier next year – I shared my thoughts here YT Video (in Chinese) a few days ago.

Now I think I may do it a bit sooner – the earliest time I think is starting next month May 2026. This is a bit like if people decided to move on from a relationship or a job, it doesn’t make much sense to hang around long, if they don’t expect things to change. In this spirit, I think about cancelling the membership at the end of April – before they start charging me the month of May membership. I know I had said a lot of good words for the J, the short name for JCC, over the years: including my blog posts over the years and this one in particular. Both my kids participated the Day Camp there in summer. But now I think it’s time to move on.

I am thinking about some alternative locations for indoor swimming, if I continue to do that. Another thing I like to have is an indoor walking track – West County mall is one option (in that case The Lodge at Des Peres may be fit the bill?). I like to walk outdoors. But here in STL, there are quite a few months in the year that the weather will be either be too hot or too cold to walk outside, or too rainy. And I can think of the below list. I will be taking time to decide my next move as I am not in a hurry. I would join the Olivette’s Five Oaks off Warson, the closest community center (walking distance from my home), if they have one of those. But it seems to me they only have work out (exercise) machines (treadmills, bikes, weight machines etc.), and pickleball and basketball court. I am decent on pickleball, but I haven’t been fully sold on that sport. Btw, about 2 years ago I poked fun at the pickleball here.

The list

Center of Clayton || Membership rates below (monthly), probably the closest among all the gyms.

 catergoryResidentCorporateNon-Resident
 Youth (3-17)$32$38$42
 Adult$47$56$67
 Senior (65+)$38$45$49
 Family $78 $90 $111

======

Maryland Heights Community Center: it looks like their rate is much cheaper than the J membership.

Prices below are listed as Resident/Non-resident

Adults (Ages 16-61):

  • 12 Months: $270/$324
  • 6 Months: $169/$203
  • 3 Months: $101/$115
  • 1 Month: $41/$49

======

Not too far from Maryland Heights CC, the YMCAs (Edward Jones branch)

Richmond Heights

Lifetime Fitness (this one is a bit more expensive; I feel it’s too expensive for my income or taste)

Forest lake tennis and swimming club (outdoor pool only): my younger daughter is already doing weekly tennis clinics there.

The Lodge (Des Peres)?

Categories
Business Investing Software development

Vertical industry software

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or SaaS

CashBoard: quite a while ago, I did a side gig job (year 2012), and I used this app for PDF invoice (professional looking)

ServiceTitan Inc (now a public company TTAN): saw a plumber uses this to generate receipt for me when I paid via CC. Just as I was looking at a possibility to look at buying some of their stocks, I realized they have quite high stock based compensation. ServiceTitan Announces Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results (My Q: are they the biggest in the industry?)  

Google Search: “how much of servicetitan’s operating free cash flow is from stock based compensations”

Niche players in their respective markets

Bumped into latter two because my younger daughter does violin and dance.

MyMusicStaff (Teipen Music Academy uses it)

The Studio Director (SLAD uses it)

Other examples of vertical industry software (or SaaS)

Constellation Software (Wikipedia): this is a Canadian conglomerate of vertical software companies. It’s probably the latest of its kind. Its stock is traded at Toronto Stock Exchange.

Personally I worked for companies such as Siemens Digital Industry Software (Wikipedia) and Autodesk, both in the CAD, and related CAM, CAE, PDM/PLM industry.

Categories
Edu-and-Ladue-School kids Life

镇海中学石蕴玉老师

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我初中的英语老师。”其实我喜欢石蕴玉老师，她也走了，戴着一圏圈的近视镜，一个个过我们的英式英标” (我的王同学说的）。石老师有可能是解放前在上海的租界教会学校学的英式英语：这本身并不重要。她是我的英语启蒙老师：她是非常好的启蒙老师。万事开头难 –  “The first step is always the hardest“。这也让我想到另外一句“千里之行始于足下”（记得当时周老师常说这句，他会把它刻在讲义里）。对我来说，美式英语大概是高中时在镇中的新的语音实验室里听托福或类似节目才开始的。

我估计我们上初中时，石老师大概有五十岁左右。如果说周国夫老师，我们的班主任/数学老师，是严父，那么我觉得石老师就是慈母。我估计石老师大概比周老师大几岁。周老师对石老师也比较尊重。石老师眼睛高度近视，在我们那个年代80年代初，我的初中是 83 到 86年，她的眼镜也就非常厚。她好像身体不是特别好，印象中有一次好像她有视网膜脱落。我估计在我们那个年代，这种手术可能要去上海或者杭州这样的大城市。

我记得两件小事。有一次，她让我上讲台去背书，我不知道为什么反正那次我背不出来：可能是我没有好好准备，也有可能是我比较紧张。我那时可能是初中二年级，我小时候比较喜欢哭。那次不知道为什么，我背不出来，忍不住，就开始哭。石老师没有批评我，她只是鼓励我好好学习。

还有一次，我不小心把英语作业本的封面给撕开了一道缝，我也没有胶带，或浆糊，直接吧作业本。后来，有点在我意料之中的，石老师把我的作业本给补好了。

我大学毕业四年以后就出国。我记得大概是二十年（具体哪一年我现在记不清了）之前，我的一个老家在镇海的初中同学告诉我，石老师去世了。

Categories
Software development

I learned a bit more GitHub Copilot recently

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I worked on a small project (in the Agile or JIRA world, it’s a story), and I experimented Copilot more this time, in fact, I think I tried to use Copilot as much or as practically as possible, for 2 out of the 3 main coding tasks. This is in addition to the Copilot code review feature which I have been using probably for a year now. Back to the coding tasks: refactoring and adding unit tests are the two main tasks that I used Copilot extensively. I also think Copilot did a decent job on bath. The 3rd task, which is to create a controller (an end point), I forgot to try the Copilot – hope I can try something like that down the road.

I used the IntelliJ Ultimate edition for my Java project IDE, and I was familiar with some IDE basic features on refactoring, such as extract methods, or change method signature. This mini project involves moving code from one layer down (from UI to the service layer). Copilot did it in one shot when I asked it to perform the task, from and to, mainly using the correct prompt.

For Unit Testing, I did two things, I changed the mocking framework from EasyMock to Mockito (which is more modern), also I added and cleaned all the unit tests, as much as I can. I admit I am still learning on the unit testing front. Sometimes I felt it’s somewhat like “teach an old dog a new trick”, I mean the “test driven development” or writing a complete unit test suite. But I am getting there: not just on Java, for JavaScript, I had some fun writing Jest test as well. For Java it’s JUnit.

Code review

This is similar as before I worked on this mini project, but I am getting more out of the Copilot code review comments, most of which I think is valid.

On a side note, I did a coding test for this LinkedIn AI trainer gig – not sure that I passed it, as I was not very confident on my Python language. But I still think it’s good exercise for me – I mean the coding test via HackerRank.