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DrunkenBlog posted a video of Steve Jobs demoing NeXT.

Click to download the video (50MB)

To be frank, NeXT was butt ugly. But some of its technologies and innovations were quite impressive its day. DrunkenBlog posted another article about striking similarities in some of the apps under OSX and NeXT. I guess when being good just wasn’t enough, you just gotta ride on the cool kid to bring out the edge.

Has anyone noticed what was wrong with the video? Somehow Steve just didn’t quite look himself in that grown-up-wannabe attire. Maybe that was why NeXT didn’t do too well — he tried too hard being someone he wasn’t. He’s meant to be a rebel.

Video courtesy of OpenStep.se.

Dreams are mysterious. There are many theories and hypotheses on what they are and why they exist. But even given the science we have today, nobody can give us a straight answer still.

I posed this question to myself earlier. Can blind-at-birth people dream in color? Can deaf-at-birth people dream of sounds? What are their dreams like?

A quick Google search resulted in an answer I think makes a lot of sense.

Basically the author of the subject contented that, when blind-at-birth people dream, they are not capable of “seeing” in a sense that most people associate visiually seeing as. Other articles also mentioned that the notion of “color” and “sound” are not inherited in the genes. They are the product of experiments and experiences in a person’s life. Therefore a person who’s never seen any color or heard any sound will not have those memories in their brain.

On the other hand, deficiencies in vision is usually made up by other senses of the humand body. In the case of blind-at-birth people, their smell, touch and hearing senses are heightened in their dreams. And their dreams are more sophisticated that stimulate different parts of the brain more in a way that ordinary people simply aren’t capable of experiencing.

Languages are purely conceptual and inaccurate inventions of man. When we are able to see, the powerful sensation of vision (and associated visual “descriptions”) frequently overwhelms all the other senses. Even in dreams, visual elements are often the only thing we tend to remember when we wake up. Oddly enough, sometimes images we see in dreams can seem more saturated in color and definition than real life. And even more frequently, it’s the the feeling of the “atmosphere” in our dreams that’s longer lasting than anything else. Only rarely do we remember touch or smell from our dreams.

Blind/deaf-at-birth people’s dreams exist in a completely different realm. I can’t imagine how intensive certain “atmospheric” feelings are without the distraction of vision in dreams. I remember dreaming things that are so intense that I forgot I was dreaming. And that was with the benefit of being distracted by vision.

“Star Gazer”.

That’s the term given by the ultrasound operator at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center today when we went for another round of check up for Grace. Last week, her doctor was concerned about the pace of our baby’s growth, so she scheduled today’s ultrasound.

When we saw the image of him on the screen, the baby was facing upwards with eyes wide open (supposedly) — hence “Star Gazer”. I wish she’d come up with a more elegant name so that I could make that his nickname. “Star Gazer” sounds just as lame as “Skywalker” or “Obi-Wan”.

Nonetheless, I wonder what the baby sees in that little world of his. A lot of references point out that babies actually “dream” when they are still inside the womb. My question is: ABOUT WHAT?! Don’t you need to have some kind of physical or visual reference to dream about something?

So I wonder — can people who are born blind dream of colors? Can people who are born deaf dream of sounds?

Back to the ultrasound. As added bonus, we also got to hear the baby’s heat beat (strong) and his blood flow from the umbilical cord (smooth) which the operator had to measure today.

Grace’s getting another ultrasound in three weeks — a couple of weeks shy of delivery date, Aug. 6th. Hope all is going well.

This “trick” puts whatever you have on your Screen Saver as the desktop image. While it’s not all that useful, it’s a pretty cool trick to show your geeky friends. Sorry, Mac OSX only.

1. Open “Terminal” (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal)
2. Type in exactly (no spaces or new lines):
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/
Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/
ScreenSaverEngine -background
3. Press “Return”; watch the magic
4. To stop it, press: “ctrl” + “c” keys (in that order) within the Terminal

Cool huh?!

References from this Mac Dev Center article.

Windows Dev Center released an article on Using Tabbed Browsing in Internet Explorer 6.

So for those of you insisting on using IE6 instead of the ever-more-popular FireFox, even you guys can enjoy tabs in one single window while surfing your favorite websites. No more waiting till 2007 when Microsoft releases their Next Generation IE7 in their next major upgrade of Windows (code name “Longhorn”). –> Some screen shots of Longhorn

The Canon camcorder that single-handedly prevented me from attending Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford is getting a free repair from Canon. I called Canon, and apparently they have a “good will repair program” going on for the model that I own (translation: avoid class action lawsuit).

The way Canon went about doing this was impressive. Even though the warranty had already expired, they honored the repair for the CCD nonetheless. Their willingness to stand behind their products and their issues makes me a happy Canon customer. And happy Canon customer buys more Canon products!

I had planned on going to this commencement this morning. Then I discovered my camcorder’s CCD chip has gone bad and is unable to record (apparently a wide spread problem); I decided it’s not worth my while to go if I can’t record the God of Computer himself (having to deal with traffic, the sun and the crowd). With a bit of luck, I found out that his speech was going to be broadcasted live through Stanford’s very own KZSU 90.1FM. And of course, the station is listed in iTunes under “Radio –> Public”. Bless iTunes.

So I recorded his speech using RadioRecorder.

Download the clip in:
Best sound quality: AAC - 16.8MB for iTunes in MPEG4 encoding
Good sound quality: MP3 - 17.0MB for you poor souls without iTunes

If you appreciate the effort I took to have recorded the audio, polished it, converted it into AAC and MP3 formats and actually made them available to the public, please consider a donation to help offset the cost of the bandwidth I know the audio downloads will sure exceed. Thanks.

Here’s an article about the commencement itself if you are interested.

To further help spread the clip, I also created a page dedicated to the speech so that visitors don’t have to go through my blog unnecessarily.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: It appears that Stanford has released the video version of the speech on its iTunes music store (for free). You can access it through your iTunes application (if you are still not using iTunes, it’s about time to start using it!). Get the speech in video here.

If you don’t see it initially, dig around. It’s there (Stanford -> Heard on Campus -> Visiting Lecturers and Speeches). Al Gore spoke there once. I wonder where THAT speech is… hmm…

As if moving wasn’t stressful enough, we began to realize that the phone line wasn’t working not long after we moved in to the duplex. And this just compounds on top of the terrible service we received from SBC right before the move (rude customer service rep). But that could just be a small isolated incident.

It turned out that the first SBC technician crossed our line with someone else’s — that explains all the calls for “Diana”. When we called the number we have been assigned, though it rings, none of the phones in the house makes a sound. They ended up sending another guy out to fix the problem. That took them 1.5 days. Argh!

The problem extended to the DSL line as well. A call to tech support discovered that though SBC’s data division did switch my service to the new address, they “forgot” to add my information to the local router (hence the “could not find PPoE server” error messages). I have been going cold turkey for two days without the Internet. I tried checking emails using my Earthlink dialup, but seriously, once you go broadband, narrowband just blows.

It took SBC about four hours to get back to me with a working line. I give them credit for calling me back when they said they would. Kudos. But that’s not the end of the drama. The saga continues with the connection sporadically getting dropped (taking the phone portion of the line with it) for at least 15-20 minutes at a time. WTF!

So while they try to add my account info to the local telco router, I wait — and I continue to unpack my apartment which currently looks like Picasso’s lesser known work “Violon, verre, pipe et encrier”.

After consulting the Great Chinese Calendar (per my mom’s advise), we decided to schedule today as the “Big Day” for our pending move to the new apartment. Today’s supposedly an acceptable day for not only moving household items, but also bed setting. There’s a school of philosophy that believes in the proper positioning and settling of the bed. And of course, that includes the time and date on which the bed is to be moved.

The scheduled move time was between one and four in the afternoon (looks like our friends from the moving industry picked up on this long time tradition of the phone and cable guys!). But instead they showed up at five (after several phone calls). As I am typing this, they (two medium built foreign-speaking men) already moved all the boxes into the truck.

Argh! I hate moving.

Jai called earlier to see how things were going thinking we’d already moved. He calls from time to time to check on us. Though we haven’t seen him in a few months, it’s still nice to hear a friend’s voice once in a while.

The cats didn’t take the move too well. One of them (Baobao: the fat one) we managed to shovel into the bathroom like we’d ingeniously planned. The other one escaped from the bathroom and hid herself in the closet. Sucks to be cats.

What sucks more are cat owners. Our arms and chests were scratched up like Jackson Pollock’s “Galaxy”.

After the movers unloaded our stuff at the new apartment, we went back to fetch the cats. It was easy to convince Wawa to load her up in the car. Baobao was a very different story. The first challenge was to hold her (at which she hisses). Another challenge was to be able to hold her AND carry her all the way to the car — impossible. You may be saying “use the pet carrier!”. But noooo. She’s already associated the pet carrier with “going to the doctors and get jabbed with a needle”. Just seeing one makes her nervous, let alone getting her into one.

At the end, we spent 20+ minutes dancing with her and cornered her at her favorite lookout window. It was over when we got her front paws into the carrier. No animals or humans were hurt in this exercise.

Baobao ended up spending the night exploring the new apartment. Wawa took the night off and hid herself under our bed. As for us, we dropped like a couple of dead flies on our bed after shower. Perhaps it was the new place; or perhaps we were too disoriented from the move, neither of us slept well.

I hate moving.

After weeks of fact-finding and agonizing time spent waiting, my Thai Police Certificate finally arrived as part of documents needed for our application for Canadian PR.

Grace and I had a bet on which country’s police certificate would be completed first. Taiwan won, hands down. It was done within days (having every bit of information online didn’t hurt).

Naturally, the bet came down to between Thailand and Malaysia.

Thailand didn’t provide much online. But at least a form was available with some instructions from a Thai Embassy in Canada. Armed with that information, Grace still had to call a couple of Thai Embassies in the States to really get the nuts and bolts of the process down.

The same couuldn’t be said about Malaysia, however. The only available information I found was from an Australian Embassy where Malaysia has special diplomatic relations with, hence the instructions were useless. And when Grace called the Malaysian Embassy in L.A., they bounced her between different departments before someone was able to give her something informative. And the person even gave her a tip: “It’d take 3-6 months to process”. The person hinted that it’d be safer to bet on the “SIX” month side of the timeline. And that was back in March.

To be fair, Thai Embassy wasn’t much better. Grace had to call three different embassies just to get everything (L.A. branch bounced calls to automated machine; NYC branch simply defers responsibility to other branches; Chicago branch was the only decent one with a very nice staff). And when she finally talked to someone, instead of a lame “three to six months” guarantee that the Malaysian Embassy provided, the Thai Embassy basically said “it’ll be done when it’s done” without any specific timeline. However, the nice lady on the phone did stress that the process would be “a lot” faster if someone in Thailand were to follow-up physically; my mom came to mind immediately. I also had to get finger printed (for the first time in my life), not one sheet, but THREE sheets of original finger prints.

Taiwan has its issues; efficiency certainly is not one of them. The push of its e-government, where almost every bit of information a citizen would need to make his/her life easier is onilne, has been a very successful one. I can’t even attest to that kind of efficiency about government agencies in Silicon Valley, where the dot-com boom was supposed to have revamped how the government operates.

So efficiency test results: Taiwan one — Thailand/Malaysia: zero.

Deon and Su-fei hosted one of their last BBQ events in their old house in Vallejo. They’ll be moving to their new home (currently being built!) at American Canyon in December. Congrats to them!

I ended up spending most of the day with Nicky. Hah! What a day.

Nonetheless, Deon and I still managed to talk some business before the other guests arrived. Good to have that personal time. Sometimes it’s just tough to spend quality time even with friends when there are so many things going on (not to mention so many people!).

We had to take off early. But both Margaret and Grace pretty much crashed as soon as they got home. Not sure why they were so tired when “I” was the one spending the most time with the baby. But I did take a nap when Nicky sleeping (with all the noises around her). Now I truly know what it means to “sleep like a baby”.