About
February 11th, 2009
My name is Alan Le. I’m passionate about software development, design, technology, social media, gadgets and gaming. This blog will be my repository of things I find interesting.
Instead of writing something long on this page, I’m just going to copy the entry I posted on Friendfeed for the 25 things that you didn’t know about me meme.
1) I’m older than I look. So how old am I?
2) I immigrated to the US by boat when I was 6 to escape Communist Vietnam.
3) I lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines for about a year
4) I still have family in Vietnam and whom I visit every other year. As a result, I still speak Vietnamese fluently, but I can’t write it.
5) I lived in Pennsylvania for a year as well. I hated the freezing winters and humid summers.
6) I’ve been in the SF Bay Area for over 23 years now.
7) After dating for 5 years, I married the love of my life a year and a half ago.
I think I would probably die of starvation without her.9) I have an infant son named Edison that I love dearly
10) I used the name “a7an” after reading Snow Crash (There was a character named Da5id) and before there was l33t speak. The movie “se7en” reconfirmed my username which I’ve stuck with since then.
11) I was heavily addicted to MUDs (text-based precursors to MMOs).
12) I’ve been a huge gamer since a kid. A family member asked me why haven’t I outgrown them. My reply: “How can I outgrow having fun?”
13) I’m very competitive but I’m not a sore loser. When I lose, I try to analyzer how I can do better to win.
14) I use to played Counter-Strike in gaming leagues. I was also competitive playing SFII at the arcades and Starcraft on battle.net. I can’t wait for Starcraft II!
15) I was the 2nd lvl 60 druid Horde side on my server when I played WoW. I would’ve been the first 60 in my small guild too but my friend took a day off of work so he can grind the last lvl before me by a few hours. I’ve quit for about two years because it was too addictive and because I didn’t do much else for hobbies. I stopped playing sports, reading books, poker nights, other games, etc while playing WoW. It was a boon for my savings though 
16) I programmed my own Visual Basic games in junior high to bypass the “no games allowed” rules.
17) I love my job because I get to do what I’m excited about and good at. I work as a Senior Creative Developer at Vertigo Software.
18) I’m an omnivore and can eat pretty much anything. I like to pig out at buffets. My family usually have to wait on me to finish eating.
19) Exotic stuff that I’ve eaten include snakes, scorpions, Durian, crickets, chicken feet, and pig brains. Oh because I was the guess of honor, I had to eat the beating snake heart and wash it down with snake blood rice wine Anthony Bourdain style!
20) Tastiest food that I’ve eaten are fois gras, raw oysters, really good salmon sashimi, and great medium rare skirt steak.
21) I love Italian but hardly go out to eat it since my wife doesn’t like it.
22) I don’t smoke and only drink at social events.
23) I use to collect everything that I liked –comics, dvds, books, games, toys— and keep them in mint condition but now I don’t really care (okay just not as much).
24) I still like and watch anime. I catch every episode of Naruto from datteyabo. I recently watched Paprika on Netflix instant, and the whole Death Note series on Hulu.
25) I’m a total gadget freak. For example, I’ve had 4 different generation of iPods now.
Hi Alan,
Are you the same guy that posted on Vertigo about a WPF tag cloud sample?
I tried to get the zip file from there, but the link is broken.
Is it possible that you can send it to me.
Thanks in advance.
one and the same. The wpf tag cloud was something I wrote 3 years ago. Just uploaded it again for you here: http://alanle.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/WPFTagCloud.zip
Great!!!
Yes, I know, it was a long time ago.
Cool blog by the way, I gathered some tips from here.
Thanks again and happy holidays.
Hi Alan,
I was looking too at WPFTagCloud but couldn’t manage to build it with Visual Studio 2010. I get the following errors:
1. “Assembly must be specified for XAML files that are not part of a project. Reopen this XAML file after adding it to a project, close this file and reopen it using the project it is associated with, or modify the clr-namespace to include the name of the assembly.”
2. “The type ‘local:CountToFontSizeConverter’ was not found. Verify that you are not missing an assembly reference and that all referenced assemblies have been built.”
If you could point out what’s wrong I would really appreciate it.
Thank you