Before I moved to San Carlos, I submitted a Change of Address with the USPS. At the time, I picked the “Family” COA to ensure that the maximum amount of mail would be forwarded to me. After all, sometimes I would get typo’ed mail like “Denny Cheung”.

You can imagine how surprised I was when I started getting forwarded mail from Comcast, AT&T, State Farm, etc for other Cheungs at my new address: Peggy, Margaret, Tony.

It turns out that the people who moved into my old apartment are also named Cheung. Fortunately, I was able to contact these Cheungs from the phone number that was listed in the AT&T bill - after all, I couldn’t exactly send a letter to these Cheungs.

I called the USPS and asked them to change my COA back to “Individual” and just my name. We’ll see how well this works in amount a week.

A scenario like this is improbable, but clearly not impossible. I wonder what it’s like in a place where having the same last name is more common.

The other day I decided to check to see if some better seats had opened up. I went to AA.com and was promptly told that my reservation had been canceled.

Yeah, that’s not good.

After some investigation, it turns out that the travel agency that Microsoft uses to book tickets didn’t complete the purchase, even though it appeared to me that it had been completed via the web ui - and they weren’t quite sure why.

Good thing I checked! Otherwise, that could’ve been a rather nasty surprise on the day of travel.

Since the incident back in January, I’ve kept my eyes open to new cars in the marketplace. One of my biggest disappointments is the fact that cars keep getting bigger and bigger. For example, the 2008 Honda Accord looks pretty snazzy and could be a good replacement for my wife’s car. Here’s a picture from Autoblog:

However, the dimensions of the Accord have grown so much that it’s now consider to be a large car by the EPA - instead of a mid-sized car. Apparently the 2008 model is 2 inches longer - does the Accord really need to be so wide and so long? Already it’s quite spacious interior-wise - especially the width. In the old days, a 72.7 inch wide car would have bench seating in the front to fit 3 people across!

While it hasn’t quite grown into a new category, the BMW 3 series has also grown in size. That’s one of the reasons why BMW is introducing the 1 series.

Let’s face it - parking spots aren’t exactly growing in size, roads and highways aren’t growing, so I wish car makers would hold some sort of line and stop competing on “largest”. In some ways I can’t blame them, I bet their product planners look at trends in American consumers and say “We need larger cars!” since everything else is always getting bigger.

Edit: In case you were wondering, the Acura TSX is actually what’s called a Honda Accord in Europe.