kai's blog

This weekend marked the start of 2007-2008 English and Bundesliga soccer season.

I watched 3 EPL games on Fox Soccer Channel, and one match between Bayern Munich and Hansa Rostock on GolTV.

The goal by Gerrard of Liverpool against Aston Villa is a fantastic freekick at the closing minute of the game. I was hoping to show it here with Youtube. but "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NetResult"(quoted from Youtube).

On the other hand, Bayern Munich's squad is really loaded. On paper, it has the best talents all around in Europe. That's why they crashed Hansa Rostock 3-0.

Tags: soccer dishnetwork tv epl bundesliga laliga

Google released Street View feature in Google Maps yesterday. Luckily(or unluckily depending your view), the street I live on is covered by Street View on Google Maps.

The street view is stunningly realistic, and it's pretty easy to navigate. The first time I used it, the movie "Deja Vu" came to my mind right away. It's like the movie scene where police were looking at the past through lots of videos.

Compared to what I saw in Street View yesterday, I saw my neighbor opening the door of his car in Street View today!

According to O'reilly Radar, "Google partners with Immersive Media, a company that has an eleven lens camera capable of taking full, high-res video while driving along city streets. Each captured pixel is geotagged and primed for consumer use".

Tags: google map gps privacy dejavu streetview

I started to use TestNG for testing in Java today. and it took me a while to find out that the workable Configuration for TestNG, Maven 2's Surefire, is:

• TestNG 5.1,
• Surefire 2.3

The real important thing is to specify <classifier>jdk15</classifier> for JDK 1.5+, or <classifier>jdk14</classifier> for JDK 1.4 in your pom file. The reference can be found here

If you don't specify the classifier, it seems to run in jdk14 mode. so all of my tests using annotations didn't run with Maven.

Tags: java eclipse testng maven surefire testing

A couple of weeks ago, Zack, the web developer from DiamondPeak.com, notified me that one of my Youtube videos is featured on the website

In case it's no longer featured, here it is:



I never thought about my video would get featured somewhere. It was just for fun and showing the nice things about Diamond Peak.

Tags: snowboarding diamondpeak

Finally, the Golden State Warriors are going to the playoff for the first time in thirteen years(that's freaking long wait).

I am just so happy for all the loyal Warriors fans, the city of Oakland, the bay area.

It's playoff time. Bring on the Dallas Mavericks!

Tags: nba warriors basketball

When Yahoo Pipes came out, I was really excited about it and wanted to modify RSS feeds provided by Farecast(I am a big fan of Farecast). Farecast allows tracking of airline prices via RSS. But it doesn't provide an option to filter by price(say I am only interested in getting notifications about fares under $200 between Oakland and Salt Lake City). so I was trying to figure out how to use Yahoo Pipes to get rid of all the feed items that have a price higher than the on e I specify. But I never figured it out.

About two weeks ago, I met Maciej Ceglowski from Yahoo Pipes in Platform 2.0 conference hosted by SDForum, and he showed me how to do it.

Tags: yahoopipes farecasst

here's a delayed recap of my Fantastic snowboarding trip in Salt Lake City in Feb:

My wife and I flew to Salt Lake City on Fri. night from Oakland. On Sat, we snowboarded in Brighton between noon and 7pm. Because we got up late, we went for Brighton's night skiing offer to get a full day of snowboarding. Brighton isn't a big resort. It's pretty crowded with a lot of snowboarders. The condition was so-so, but it started to snow hard in late afternoon.

The next day, we went to Snowbird. It had the best condition I've ever had. It snowed all day. The powder was so good(soft, deep). The mountain is so big. It wasn't crowded at all. Everything was so perfect. The only thing we regretted was that because it snowed hard, we didn't go through the turnel on the top to the other side of the mountain.

Tags: snowboarding utah saltlakecity snowbird brighton

I am going to Salt Lake City, Utah for 3 days of Snowboarding this coming weekend.

I am proably going to Snowbird, Solitude, and Snowbasin for .

This is my first time to Utah. I surely hope that the snow is going to be execellant and I can handle the real powder in Utah.

Tags: snowboarding utah

It has been such a weired winter in San Francisco Bay Area. Record low temperature with dry weather, very little rain.

There has been really lack of snow in Lake Tahoe area. It's 40% off the normal snow pack.

This feels like the effect of Global warming. For California, profound changes as planet warms

This is scaring. No more snow sports in Lake Tahoe in the future?

Tags: tahoe globalwarming weather

When I was driving to work this morning, I heard about the breaking news of Beckham coming to the U.S in KCBS, a news radio station in the Bay Area. See, even a news station knew this is a huge sporting news.

Things chanaged so quickly. Last night, Fox Soccer Wolrd Report mentioned that Beckham's spokeman came out to deny that negotiation with Real Madrid stalled, and Beckham intended to re-sign with Real Marid.

Beckham is said to make $250 million over 5 years. That's a lot of money: $50 million/year, 1 million/week. He will make more money than any other athlete int the world, including NBA, NFL players.

Tags: soccer davidbeckham mls