Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The absence of rice at Costco and Sam’s Clubs in the US has gotten a lot of press coverage in the past few days, but there’s no substitute for first-hand observation. Here’s what it looks like at the Mountain View Costco at the shelf where the rice would normally go. Fortunately, that wasn’t one of the items I was looking for.

See also: Rice shortage reaches Mountain View Costco

In the recent weeks the rising costs of agricultural grain production has lead to shortages and riots in various parts of the world, including Indonesia, Vietnam, and other countries. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see this article today describing rice shortages in the US, including at the local Costco over in Mountain View:

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

The Russian Soyuz carrying Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-yeon returned safely over the weekend, albeit 260 miles from the intended landing zone in what Interfax (Russian news agency) describes as a rough landing, exceeding 10g’s. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

…because I have a job for him. It looks like our washer needs a new drain pump, because yesterday afternoon it started trying to spin with a full tub of wet clothes and water, accompanied by unusual noises. There’s lots of good information online for do-it-yourself repair, including how to disassemble the washing machine and various diagnostic procedures. The hacker/engineer side of me wants to start taking it apart just because we can. But the weather is great outside today and I’d rather spend my limited time on fun stuff outdoors and leave the pump replacement to trained professionals. If I could find one. There are no Maytag repairmen anymore, only authorized service providers, who are apparently quite busy. It might end up being easier to just buy a new washer, I can get one delivered today.

Yi So-yeon, the first Korean astronaut, went to the International Space Station today on a Russian Soyuz. She is a bioengineer by training, and will be conducting various experiments during the next nine days.

In addition, there has apparently been a lot of work making Korean food ready for space travel:

The Korea Food Research Institute and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute have spent years turning traditional South Korean delicacies into a form that can be stored and eaten in zero gravity, including steamed rice, red pepper paste, doenjang fermented bean soup, green tea, red ginseng tea, instant noodles, sujeonggwa cinnamon punch and, above all, kimchi – the pungent pickled blend of cabbage, chilli and garlic that is the national dish.

Anyway, it’s pretty exciting for Koreans, although this picture from the CNN article make her look slightly wacky, vaguely reminding me of visits to my aunt’s house when I was a kid.

It’s the time of spring when all the flowering trees bloom. There are a lot of cherry and wisteria trees in our neighborhood, it looks nice and as the petals start falling in a few weeks off later it will look like every home held a wedding recently. Good weather for being out and about. Speaking of which…

The Wachovia Bank (formerly World Savings) branch over at the Stanford Shopping Center was robbed last Thursday. This is already a little unusual, but what caught my attention was that they were robbed by an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. And he got away! He apparently stopped by The Sharper Image and asked for a shopping bag on his way over to the bank.

Every time we stay in Waikiki, I look forward to picking up Korean food to go from Choi’s Kitchen, one of the many interesting options at the food court hidden at the back of the International Marketplace. The first couple of years on vacation in Waikiki we mostly ended up either eating at a restaurant or at the snack bar. This can be both expensive and not so good for maintaining a healthy diet. For around the price of eating at McDonalds or Burger King, you can have a combination of teriyaki chicken, Korean BBQ beef, and a selection of Korean banchan (side dishes) including kimchee, sukju namul, seaweed salad, and many other choices, plus a generous serving of steamed rice. We usually get a couple of the chicken + beef, with 4 side dishes, and carry it back across the street to eat on the beach. There is also seating area at the International Marketplace, if you don’t want to go with take out. Many locals come through for lunch, while there are more tourists in the evening, some of whom come to see the live entertainment in the courtyard. Personally, I think the food is great, and the entertainment not so much. I’d rather be on the beach.

Spring seems to have brought on a new variant of the Nigerian “419″ spam fraud campaign, substituting Benin for Nigeria. Going through the e-mail that came in during spring break, weeks I’m seeing a lot of e-mail with titles like

“FINAL NOTIFICATION OF RECEIVING YOUR HERITANCE FUND IN ATM MASTER CARD”

“CONTACT YOUR ATM MASETR CARD”

“CONTACT EMS IMMEDIATLY ON +234 8022856155″

“CONTACT FedEX EXPRESS COURIER COMPANY LIMITED FOR YOUR CONSIGNMENT IMMEDIATLY”

“CONTACT REV DR.KENNETH OKOM DIRECTOR OF ATM CARD BANK”

“CONTACT MR FRED IKEM FOR YOUR $950,000.00″

The general theme in this sort of spam is “We’re waiting for you to confirm your bank information and send a small processing fee so we can send you a lot of money.” This campaign mostly mentions a program from the Republic of Benin to give away money through funded ATM/Mastercard accounts for various reasons ranging from inheritance to payment for previous services. Some of these have an interesting wrinkle though:

I just noticed that my Wordpress installation got hacked by a search engine spam injection attack sometime in the past few weeks. This particular one inserts invisible text with lots of keywords in footer.php. The changes to the file were made using the built-in theme editor, originating from ns.km20725.keymachine.de, which is currently at 84.19.188.144. The spam campaign automatically updates the spam payload every day or so. The links point to a variety of servers that have also been hacked to host the spam content. Here is a sample: http://www.nanosolar.com/feb3/talk.php?28/82138131762.html
I’ve sent an e-mail to Nanosolar, so they’ll probably have that content cleaned up before long. But the automated SEO spam campaign updates the keyword and link payload regularly, so any affected Wordpress sites will be updated to point at the new hosting victims.