Posts filed under 'General'
For people with visiting family members from other countries, B-2 visa must sound familiar to you. Typically your family members will be granted a stay of six month upon they pass the US Immigration and Custom checkpoint at the airport. If you wanted to extend their stay for whatever reasons, you have to file an request to US Homeland Security, this request must be filed with $200 per person processing fee, this sounds expensive.
Actually I found you can get that extension in a better way - just bring your family members to a cruise which stops at the Carribbean ilsands (like Bahama). Because the island is a foreign country, and upon return, you will have to pass the Immigration checkpoint, which they will grant you another six month of stay without asking you any questions! You might think why cruise? because I guess Cruise is a controlled env, people who is allowed to enter the cruise departing from a US port should already have permission to stay in US, so US DHS just assume you have valid permissions and all they need is just another putting another stamp on your passport.
Maybe you call my title “cheating” since you still have to pay for the cruise, but to me “Cruise” price in a heavy discounted season might be much less than $200, and don’t forget you’ll get served really well on the ship.
December 18th, 2006
It is very dificult to arrange any travel after the addition of Owen to the family, this year’s fall foiliage trip has to be simple, that left us with only one choice - our backyard, which is only 30 meters from where I publish this blog..
After the backyard trip, we stopped by Jane’s school before we had our celebration for Jane’s birthday at Red Palace. The color at Duke Garden is very good, it is even better than the touristy Williamsburg according to the words of my mom.
November 5th, 2006
as rajesh suggested.. commenting system is now enabled on all albums of my photo gallery (only exception is you cannot leave comment on the gallery front page). feel free to leave some remarks on it, could be anything you like or dislike.
November 2nd, 2006
1. start up items
start up configuration is now stored at: /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
/System/Library/StartupItems (for system startup items) or /Library/StartupItems (for locally-installed startup items).
2. root user is disabled, but you still can access root user, just type
sudo su -
3. use Synergy for sharing your keyboard and mouse. and your key mapping changes from xp
windows key - Option key
Alt key - command key
4. to share windows folder, use “connect to server” under Finder -> go menu
smb://host/shareName
To be continued.
October 25th, 2006
After a few days of research, finally I settled on the plan of my first family cruise, it is a 7 nights East Caribbean on Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) Jewel, the selection process was pretty hard, since we wanted both good itinerary and good price, after reviewed the profiles of more than 10 ships on cruisecritic.com, it is a no brainer to take the recommendation:
Best All-Around First-Time Experience: Norwegian Jewel These newest and largest ships in NCL’s Freestyle Cruising fleet offer a unique experience that’s more like that of a land-based resort and less like a traditional cruise than any other, allowing passengers to eat where, when and with whom they want in the cruise industry’s widest range of restaurants.
since Jane has to stay at home with Owen, it will be just me and my parents.
Here is the itinerary:
- Nov 26 Leaving Miami
- Nov 27 At sea
- Nov 28 San Juan, (day trip to visit old San Juan)
- Nov 29 Antigua, (take the famous Antigua Eco-Adventure tour as touted on BBC)
- Nov 30 St Thomas, USVI (half day trip to St John’s beautiful beaches, of course include Trunk Beach)
- Dec 01 At sea
- Dec 02 Great Stirrup key (this is a private island owned by NCL)
- Dec 03 Back to Miami
Before I do anything else, the first homework for me is to make plan to attack the good food, since we have only 7 nights, but we have 10 different style restaurants on the boat! (some of them do have “cover charge”) 
October 15th, 2006
Since we never got a HOnda car in our garage, so I paid some attention to the new annoucement of the new Honda model, which costs 3-4 million, the new model is a not a regular car, it is plane..check out the introduction here
October 4th, 2006
As a Yahoo shareholder, sometimes I felt very guilty but I just cannot help using and promoting the product or service from its competitor - Google. Today’s subject is google RSS/Atom feed reader.
One line explaination of feed reader for dummies: A feed reader is like an email reader for lazy people (like me) to read website’s update in one program without going to the individual websites.
If you don’t have a RSS reader yet and don’t want to spend money to buy a standalone software, google reader might be a good choice for you. You can easily subscribe to any RSS (or Atom) feed enabled websites, include my blogs (just type my blog name in the add subscription box).
Google reader is lightweight, it even comes with keyboard shortcut, neat!
October 2nd, 2006
I am sure you forgetful people have forgetten what really has happened on the largest stage - the world cup final. So this page tries to bring that memory back to you from different perspective. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/zidane_headbutt_outrage/.. The evidence is absolutely stunning.
July 14th, 2006
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