Records

I am thankful that the USA is the country with the most privately owned guns in the world. If you think about doing us harm, think again. I am surprised however to read that China is the 3rd in the number of gun ownerships, consider that it is a communist dictatorial regime.

A nice article about governor Mike Huckabee. I don't think pen and paper can do the man justice. I think he's so much more. I am all out strongly supporting this man for president.

Sometimes I do think it's unfair to compare first generation of immigrants to the disadvantaged native minority because the immigrants could be the cream of the crops in their native country so they carry with them that drive to success and all the psychological advantages. However, Carl Brashear presented an inspiring model for anyone to strive to follow. So no, you do not have an excuse even if you are a native formerly oppressed disadvantaged minority in this country. You face the obstacle, stare in its face, overcome it, get around it, do whatever you need to do, and earn the respect, not demanding it through equal opportunity, or affirmative action, or whatever "I have a right to this or that" means. Yes you do, but God has a purpose in it to perfect your character. Life on this earth is only 70 to 80 years, eternity is more important. God is more interested in you becoming like Christ than to guarantee your rights for the short period here and now.

Usually if I am in Austin, I go to the Vietnamese Alliance Church to worship on Sunday. The service is at 11:00 am, usually is just perfect when you don't want to wake up early on Sunday. However, this past weekend, the board meeting started at 11:00 am so I was looking for an 8:00 am service somewhere. I thought of looking up First Baptist of Austin but Daniel just happened to IM me and so I asked him where does he usually go to church when he's in Austin for school. He told me about Hyde Park Baptist Church so that's where I went to service with Daniel on Sunday morning. We went to the "traditions" service and heard Dr. J. Kie Bowman preached. I was surprise when Daniel said let's go to the "traditions" one instead of the contemporary one. Maybe it was the best because according to the website, for the contemporary one, the sermon is a live broadcast of Dr. Bowman preaching and not seeing him in person. After the service, Daniel stayed for Sunday school, which he hinted was for college students and that I was too old for it. I went back to the Omni for the Sunday morning breakfast with Borah Van Dormolen, president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women followed by the board meeting.

Even with GPS, I was right in front of the Omni hotel in downtown Austin and still didn't realize it. The GPS said "you have arrived" and I was like, where? But over all, the GPS helped tremendously this weekend.

I arrived in the room where the Rules committee met about 20 minutes late but found myself not missing much since it was just started. We got through in about an hour or so. There were separate proposals to both eliminate the minority report and raise the percentage of committee membership required to have a minority report to 30% instead of 20%. Both were defeated. Afterward a group of us went to Katz's for dinner. Met and talked with Alan Steinberg, a 24-year-old from Fort Bend county who is running in the upcoming primary to earn the right to face the Democrat to retake Tom DeLay's 22nd district.

Congressman and presidential candidate Duncan Hunter spoke on Saturday morning. He's a great, principled, articulate guy. I just wish he had run for governor before taking steps to run for president. My favorite is still Mike Huckabee. And I found some more of his supporters at the convention, Nate Lambert of Tyler and Leslie Rutledge of Arkansas who is a member of the Young Republican National FederationBoard. We also heard from Texas Supreme Court justice Phil Johnson, Republican Party of Texas Communications & Political Operations Director Hans Klinger, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson as well as captain George Hurd, an Iraqi veteran. I felt particularly at home and comfortable among all these Republicans who understand that the 2nd amendment is most important as it guarantees all the rest of our rights as free people.

Steven Crowder was hilarious at the Saturday night gala. We also got to hear from former US ambassador to Bahrain Sam Zakhem. He's a great American, and a bold Arab Christian who is not ashamed to declare his faith and trust in Christ and the grace and love of our God before men.

During the entire convention we were graced with a delegation of conservative Lebanese Christians who came all the way from Lebanon to attend our convention.

I was appointed the SREC liaison at the new TYRF board meeting on Sunday. My counterpart will be Terri Flow from Austin. I am looking forward to attend these quarterly SREC meetings in the coming year.

After the board meeting, I stopped by Thi's house, we visited and chatted a little bit then headed to Starbucks to meet up with another friend Khanh, hung out a little more before I and Thi met up with Daniel for dinner at Rudy's. The drive home was so much easier when the sun has gone down. I always get very sleepy while driving with the sun shining brightly and reflecting off the road.

A good night of sleep last night still did not help me recover yet from two consecutive nights of 2-hour sleep each Friday and Saturday. Eliza Vielma and her team put on an excellent state convention. You go girl.


Former US ambassador to Bahrain Sam Zakhem and Karl Ninh


The Lebanese delegation and Karl Ninh


Dallas YRs at the 2007 TYRF annual convention

Even though the Dow recovered today nearly all the losses it took earlier in the week, I am still more than $6K down from the high I had at the beginning of July, when last contribution to my Nortel 401k was made. The Shared Tech 401k wasn't doing much better since I've been contributing starting July 1st, when all the stocks were at their high. But on the Shared Tech account, contributions have been continuously made so I hope stocks were bought while they were low on Monday. All is for long term. I still have 39 years before having to deal with forced distribution at 70 and 1/2.

Rule for success: "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise" from Ross Perot in the audio book Forever Texas I am currently listening to. Since I am working for someone else and have no control over advertising budget, I would modify it to "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and exercise."

My experience with the GPS, it takes longer to adjust the measurement of speed at which the vehicle is moving, at least 3 to 4 seconds compare to the coordinate, which are adjusted much faster, almost every second but then the exact location has a margin of error from 5 to 10 meters. Also, if the vehicle is moving at 45 mph, it covers the distance of one second, longitude or latitude depends on whether you travel east-west or north-south, at an elevation of 500 ft from sea level. Just simple useless roughly estimated observations as I was on my way to work this morning.

I have a compass in the truck and mobile Google Map on my blackberry so I thought never have to worry about getting lost again. Wrong. When there is no street sign whatsoever, as in the case of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida after Rita, or Biloxi, Mississippi after Katrina, how do you suppose to turn left or right on to a street without any street sign. So I went and got myself the Maestro 4040 and I am pretty happy with it so far.

We went out for sushi tonight at Fujiyama. I rarely ever eat fish unless it's sushi. I typically get my sushi fix once a month. I just love their butterfly kisses house special there and my brother likes their lobster rolls. Their Sashimi are also pretty good. Tempura udon is also a decent item.

I am a pretty reasonable guy as far as going green and striving to be environmentally friendly. But it has to make economic sense and it must be my own voluntary decision. I am absolutely against forcing it down people's throats by legislation or the court's fiat. I am all for educational efforts to raise awareness of the issues, with facts rather than hypes. Everyone is for sustainable energy, and saving their own money. But as British architect Bill Dunster said, it has to be tested out first, make sure it's not only proven theoretically but practically. Whatever alternate energy product must not be consuming more energy to produce than it's producing, which I believe all the craze about ethanol is. I mean even for people who without Christ would forever be tortured in the lake of fire in hell, Christ didn't force it down their throats but patiently waiting and giving everyone a choice. It's a stubborn thing called free will, Bruce Almighty comes to mind. God, the Creator and the Redeemer, who left all His glory, came and took on our sins, died to give himself as a ransom for everyone who would accept His forgiveness and thus eternal life instead of damnation, for a person's own good for eternity, didn't force the person, who die and make Al Gore "god" to tell me how to live my life? With that out of the way, I believe these are the five reasonable ways from the September 2007 issue of BestLife Magazine that each one of us could individually consider to save energy and to save money at the same time:

1. Hot-water Panels.
2. Solar Roof.
3. Wind Turbine.
4. Water Harvester.
5. Geothermal Well, which is what president George W. Bush already has installed at his Crawford ranch.

A group of us community leaders had lunch with Dallas mayor Tom Leppert and his wife Laura today at city hall. My first impression with Tom during the campaign was that he is a committed business leader. He was questioned about his standing on green buildings. His answer was that he's all for it but it must make business sense. That impression was cemented today with his many answers regarding the direct flight from Asia to the DFW airport, the Trinity River Project, Dallas air quality, Dallas' competitiveness in the flat world economy, .... His wife Laura has great political sense, who provides great support to her husband, and does all she can to promote his public image, unlike some of the political spouses like Giuliani's wife Judith Nathan, or Fred Thompson's wife Jeri Kehn, ... who manage only to generate bad press for their husbands.

Here is where I am. I agree with the president on the war, in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever else that US special forces are cleaning out the terrorists. I am very appreciative of the president for his appointments of strict constructionist to the bench. However, I am very disappointed with the president and a Republican congress unable to get the tax cut permanent and reform Social Security with personalization. I strongly disagree with the president on his legalization of illegal immigrants. How many of you Republicans, both fiscal and social conservative, out there stand where I stand with regard to the president's policies?

I replaced a 512Mb memory module on my work laptop with the 2Gb module supplied by Dan and now have 2.5Gb of memory. It's sweet! No more paging to file on disk. I love my job and work is even more enjoyable now, praise God! One noticeable difference is that when I popped the laptop out of the docking station, don't have to wait for the system to adjust at all. Everything instantly look as if the laptop has never been docked.

Check out this amazing weapon that is now deployed in Iraq.

I agreed with this. I always prefer to driving my own car rather than anyone else's, doesn't matter if mine is a beat up car and other's is the latest luxury SUV.