The cooling fan on my workhorse computer was making a lot of noise. It probably broke six weeks ago. It was making a lot of noise, and shaking the laptop badly. It was just unbearable. I tried a cost-free approach trying to fix it. It involves removing the fan, then disassembling the fan blade, and putting some engine oil on the revolving part. Then I assemble the parts and put the fan back in. It worked for about 5 minutes. Then the noise and the shake started again. I guess this would not work. So I purchased a replacement fan from Amazon. The new fan doesn't look like the old one. And I was able to install it. After installing it, the noise and shaking are gone. It has been for a week. It still works. I think this will work for a while.

With this computer, I created almost 770+ videos. That was a lot of time spent on running high CPU usage for a while. No surprise the fan would break after 2-3 years. This fan probably was bad quality. I remember six months after I bought the computer, the fan started having issues. I am surprised this fan has held up for this long. Anyway, I hope this new fan will hold up for a longer time. I will continue with my video editing activities, and I will not hold back. If the fan acts up again, I can always replace it.

I was busy playing a game recently. I am almost done with CyberPunk 2077. After I finish it, I will play it again on PS5. Ha Ha Ha Ha!

I went out to fish a few times. I had most of the luck at Ithan Valley Park. I caught 5 common chubs. I looked up the word "chub". It was a species that is related to carp. They can grow into something really big. The ones I caught were only a finger long. The trout fishing season will open on April 6th for adults. I am looking forward to it.

I have done the tax for this year and got a lot of refunds. I received the federal refund yesterday March 27th.

The roof still leaks, I am going to buy some more of the roof patch stuff and get up and patch some more. I am sure if I put some more of the patching stuff on the roof, it should stop the leaking. I am planning to pave the driveway this summer.

I have completed one CodeProject tutorial. The new ones are posted on this site. I am still relaxing -- the reason for the lack of update. Hopefully, I can get back to work soon.

Not sure how it happened, someone opened a Chime account for me. It is not me who did it. And the company attempted to send the card to my Illinois address. After I researched online, I filed a complaint with FTC against Chime. By Feb 20th, Chime responded and a day later, they closed my account.

I am surprised that my approach worked. I had no information on what the account number is. All I had is an email notification and a physical letter saying an account was opened in my name. The online research suggests that an FTC complaint could be the fastest way. And it was, all I have provided was my email address and Chime was able to cancel the account. At least, they cancelled my account. I am still unsure who opened account, adn stupid enough to send me a letter to my right address, and yet send the card to the wrong address. It just doesn't make any sense. Anyways, I hope this matter is resolved.

I bought a new battery to an old Dell laptop. We thought the battery was dead. After installing it, the battery still wouldn't charge. I was in the process of filing for the battery to be returned. Then I realized the power cord is bad, causing the issue. After switched to a new power cord, the battery was charging. Same with my old Purity bluetooth ear buds. It was dead for at least a year. Yesterday, it started charging again. Turned out the USB cable I used was bad. I need to check both the cable and the battery if something similar is happening again.

On the warm Sunday afternoon of Feb 4th, the day Spring 2024 is established, I caught one fish in Ithan Valley Park. The temperature is about 41 F. And I was on the bridge road that leads into the parking area, I spotted the fish close to the bank along the places where the tree root was extended into the water. I made several casts and finally landed one fish. The fish responded well to wax worms. I dragged the line and hooked the fish once the line was pulled.

The thing that really upset me was that the place where the bigger fish used to hang out was now filled with rocks. I guess the city was doing construction to fortify the root of the second bridge. Now my favorite fishing spot was gone. I have to find a different spot in that park to do fishing in the future. It was pretty sad. Anyway, I still caught fish at a different place in that creek. It is still a viable place to fish.

It has been a crazy January for the new year. The Frigidaire Stove I bought when I moved into this new house has an issue with the main cooking burner. There were two heating rings. The inner one was no longer lit up. I spent several weeks pondering what to do. Finally, I called the appliance repair company. To my surprise, the repairman was able to fix it. It cost $369.

In the week of Jan 14 to Jan 19, the furnace/air conditioner unit for the upstairs heating/cooling started having issues. The noises coming out of that unit sounded like a running jet engine. It was so loud and scary. That week was the coldest week of the winter of 2023 to 2024. The unit was working 150% against its full capacity. The fact that the unit was installed in 2005 and had been running for the past 18 years was not helping. I called Adam Mechanical. The repairman (Joe Hanson) told me the inducer unit was breaking down. The replacement cost $1110. I got that fixed on Tuesday, Jan 22nd. Now the unit is running like a cat purring. I have spent $3500+ on this unit so far. I hope it can run for a long time. As for parts, I will keep replacing them as I can.

The unstable toilet in the shared bathroom was fixed. There was a draining issue in the stand in the shower room of the master bathroom. I took care of it with my drainage cleaning auger. I bought this cleaner for the sink in the master bathroom. It was a great investment. The cost of this is $28. If I call the plumber, it would probably cost $90+. I had to use it twice to get the drain working. For the first time, I didn't poke deep enough to get all the mess out. On the second time, I was able to pull all the clogged mess out of the drain. It was combined with hair and cloth linen dust. Now the drain is running great! You see how crazy this first month of 2024 has been!

I am still stuck in the holiday mode. Every night, I struggle with the thoughts of working or playing games. Cyberpunk 2077 is very addicting. Even if there is no quest, I can still have fun by wandering the street and killing the NPCs who are committing crimes. By doing this, I can hoard the new weapons, breaking down for components, or sell them for eddies. Then I would upgrade my equipment and repeat. It is mindless, but thrilling in a sense. I love it.

Anyway, I cannot abandon my current project. I am currently designing a static site and want it to have search functionality. For that, I needed either a database or searchable indexes. I choose the latter. I built a second site to do the indexing of the pages. It would have the functionality of listing all the indexed documents and adding new/editing existing documents. To make the whole process easier, I think it is necessary to have the functionality to parse a well-formatted HTML page and extract all the pieces of text, then feed it to the indexing engine. I will work on that next. Now, I am working on finishing the functionality of displaying existing documents for editing and saving the changes back into the indexed repository. It is going to be a lot of fun with this small project.

After Death Stranding, I resumed playing the game Cyberpunk 2077. When I first played it, I had trouble aiming. So I spent at least half a year playing Mass Effect, and Far Cry 5. I was hoping playing these games could help me improve my game play. Now that I have completed Death Stranding, I continued with Cyberpunk 2077. It turned out to be a great game, once I got out into the open world. I loved the combat in the streets against the random encounters. And it turned out, that it wasn't me who had an aiming problem. Well, I do. But the game itself also made it difficult to aim.

The static site using the Jetty server is going well. I was actively working on it because I was on vacation. I am getting myself some time off. Gaming is becoming addictive at the moment. I am hoping this is not going to become a real issue. I think I can pull myself out once the new year starts. I will probably drop the static site and go back to working on the Twitter replacement project. There is a lot of work to be done there. And the work is getting interesting.

When I started playing Death Stranding, I wondered when I could finish that game. It looked pretty daunting at first. So I stopped for a while. I picked it up recently and finally finished the game. Apparently, at the normal level, the game is easy to play. The cinematics are pretty cool. What surprised me is that at the end, it shows cinematics for an hour and a half. It was unbelievable. I was getting a bit bored with it. At times, I found the game relaxing, all I had to do was carry stuff and walk. I am glad it is over. I will pick up a new game soon.

What is tough about the end of the year is that I get bombarded by news and ads about discount items. I get promotional emails from Temu at least three times a day. And I got numerous "reminders" that the Xbox Series X is $349 at Walmart or Amazon. I almost placed an order. Then I thought about the renovation, and the number of consoles I had, all the games I had, I didn't have time for a new console. Maybe I will get one at the end of the year next year. The constant reminder of consumerism is the ultimate mechanism that can wear down a man's resistance to buy things they desire, just look at Mr. Money Mustache. Anyways. The holiday season is almost over, and I will not get a new console.

No, I am not abandoning this site. Yes, it has been 9 days I didn't update. That doesn't mean I was lying flat. I was busy working on my new site. I was having a great time with it. I did a lot of writing. To my surprise, I have a lot to write about when it is something I am interested in.

Anyway, my plan is simple. I will keep most of the site static. The part of "Contact Us" will use the back end for message processing. Also, I will design a new way to handle content searching, probably using Lucene. It is going to be an interesting project.

I am almost done with Death Stranding. It is an interesting game. Don't know why people wouldn't like this game. I think it is relaxing. It also gives me a lot to think about.

Recently I started designing a new website. It is called "F*ck Yeah Fishing". I was using this as an opportunity to learn. I want to go back to using the J2EE application server for hosting Spring web applications (via a WAR archive). I want to use the latest Spring Framework, Thymeleaf markup, and WebJars to create this website. In the process, I will learn how all these latest technologies can be integrated to create a website from scratch.

I was also bored with the current Twitter replacement work. For that, I have completed the work of adding images. Adding MP3 streaming is partially working. I still need to add the functionality of displaying MP3s to be chosen for posts. After that, I will work on associating a post with a YouTube video. There is a year's worth of work to be done. I am taking a break from that.

I have learned a lot from the new project. At first, the Slick Slider wouldn't work with the latest JQuery and Bootstrap. I had to replace it with Bootstrap's slider. The collapse-able header failed to work, and I had to fix the data attributes on it. Since the new site is mostly static, all I need to do is fill in the text and images for most of the project. The hard part is designing the mechanism for saving user's data. I don't know what that is yet. We will get there.

I will end this memo with a mention of my well-being. I have felt a slight agitation recently. And I don't know what is affecting my mood. I could be bored because there is nothing else to do, being restless, or worrying about my short-term financial status.

It is closing to Thanksgiving. And I started buying stuff. This is the time of the year when things are at the cheapest prices. I took the opportunity and upgraded my work-horse PC again. I upgraded the memory from 16 GB to 32 GB. My reasons are simple. I needed the extra memory to run Java Eclipse, my sample applications, and ShortCut for video editing at the same time. When all these run simultaneously, it would use all the free 15 GB of memory. Doubling the amount of memory allows me to do all without my PC getting squeezed. And so far, the effect is awesome! This is my first time using a PC with 32 GB of memory. It is a giant leap for me.

I also bought a bunch of games for myself. I spent $94.72 for the nine games. That is an average of $11 per game. These games are definitely in the price range of a watermelon. I love it. The holiday season is the best time to stock up on new or used games.

I know I have not been updating as frequently as I should. There is not much going on recently. My life is a routine. I start work at 9 AM and finish around 5:30 PM. Then I would take my kids for after-school activities. During the weekend, I had to chauffeur the kids some more. I have spent most of my free time either reading or working on my new project. I just solved a big issue with the application. It uses both JWT and cookies for authentication. The authentication cookie is managed on the Angular side. The way I designed the mechanism for this is not working correctly. Sometimes, when the user logs off, and then logs back in, the images attached to the posts are not displaying. After extensive debugging, I realized that the bad cookie was overriding the new cookie because it did not have an expiration date and it did not have the proper path. So the bad cookie lingered on. I finally fixed it by properly setting the expiration date, and setting the path of the cookie, so that the old one can expire after the time is up and the new one will always be set for the base path of the end point. This is one hell of a bug.

My house was invaded by yellow jackets. I killed about 100+ and saved all the dead ones as fishing bait for next year's local fishing expedition. I had to freeze all the dead ones in the freezer, or they would rot. Sometime this fall, I tried the yellow jacket as bait and it had some good results. That was why I decided to try these insects as a new type of fishing bait. I have a small side project, and this is part of the plan.