Month: September 2005

Paypal Phishing

This week I must have received 6+ emails from crooks who pretend to be Paypal via those Paypal-official-looking emails which direct me to a fake Paypal site. The objective, of course, is to get me to provide my user name, password and other juicy information such as credit card numbers. I think I prefer the numerous “business offers” I’ve been getting from military generals in Nigeria and/or Congo (VERY attractive business deals, I must say).

Seriously, I think crooks like that should be put in jail for so long that even their mothers forget they exist. They are in the same league as spammers and people who sell your telephone numbers to tele-marketers.

Speaking of tele-marketers, Grace has been complaining about the number of tele-marketing calls we have been receiving. So I registered our number at the National Do Not Call Registry (U.S. only). The neat thing about the registry is that once it takes effect, for every call you receive from tele-marketers, you get to take down their information and report them. And you get to tell them that you are on the registry (and they’ll remove your name from their call list immediately). Each “Do Not Call” number they call, they get hit with a stiff fine from the FCC (or whatever).

I love laws that punish jerk merchants for making our lives less enjoyable.

Classes and More Classes

I was one class shy of getting my Master of Fine Arts degree when I left SCAD to join a startup in 2000. That’s a decision I would later at least partially regret, mostly because my mom has nagged me just about every other time we speak. This year I decided to get the degree over with once and for all.

As my luck would have it, it turned out I’d been orphaned in my own major. Because of the rapid changes in the computer arts industry, SCAD had to specialize Computer Art into four distinctive majors (Animation, Visual Effects, Interactive Design and Game Development, Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics). Based on my industry experience, they decided I belonged to Interactive Design and Game Development. A professor painstakingly correlated all the relevant courses from way back when to the standards today and found that I still need to take one class in addition to thesis… The class turned out to be “Human-Centered Interactive Design”.

Perfect! I’ve always wanted to sharpen up my user interface design skills. And besides, good UI design is a cross discipline skill — everything we use and operate today has some kind of user interface design element in it.

The best part about this is that the class is also available online, something SCAD has been talking about doing for years but finally got it going. I logged on to the elearning system (run by Blackboard) and was horrified… because I’d miss one week worth of work already…

On top of the catch up work I have to do from SCAD, I also need to attend to the two classes I already registered at UC Santa Cruz (database class and unix administration class), both of which are pretty heavy on reading and labs. Add to all this, Bryan has been a handful… This is going to be a tough quarter to get through.

Speaking of UI design, the professor made three books as required reading, which later I found out are bibles among UI design books:

Politics and I

I did a political matrix test once a few years ago on where I was politically. I think I was on the extreme side of the liberal spectrum. So I thought I’d try to find out what’s changed now. I found this The Politics Test and gave it a try.

Result:

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive)
and an Economic Liberal (16% permissive)
You are best described as a Socialist

You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

Some charts to go with the result.
Political Matrix result
Political Matrix result
Political Matrix result

Another test I took shows that I am a Moderate Liberal. I guess it all depended on what buttons they pushed during the questionnaire.

UPDATE 04/19/2006: I took the Moral Politics political test again, and the result this time is consistent with the fact that I am a socialist!

John Roberts Confirmation Hearings

This blog entry pretty much says it all. A commentator on NPR calls Roberts’ confirmation hearing “a virtual cure to insomnia”. In fact, Roberts’ answers are very difficult (painful, even) to listen to; he dances around the question and replies with the skills of a seasoned politician. What a nut.

Blog Interface Refinements

Tweaked the css file to make the following changes:

1. Calendar: Added a border to “Today”.
2. Calendar: Lightened the background on “Today”.
3. Sidebar: Added cosmetic treatments to the sidebar titles.
4. Content: Added underline to the entry title for better definition.
5. Content: Added entry divider for better readability.

PIcture Perfect

Every couple of weeks, I receive a newsletter from a photography site called Masterfile. Each time it contains interesting articles on certain topics of contemporary photography. Today’s issue is about baby photography… What fun!

I wish I had the money to invest in a better camera for Grace’s pregnancy and Bryan’s birth. But being unemployed, still in school, supporting a family and having a newborn, that isn’t exactly a wise decision.

Baby fever

Image: Copyright of Masterfile.

Katrina Humor

Katrina Humor

翻譯:
左邊路人甲: “你是說照片裡的直升機不是在救水災難民?”
右邊路人乙: “你想太多了。他們正在把一個黑人居民丟回洪水裡面啦!”
(此圖隱喻著美國白宮和州政府當局對美國窮困及低收入黑人在這次災難反應緩慢的醜聞。一班人認為, 由布希白宮代表的右派體系對窮困及低收入黑人都是以睜一隻眼, 閉一隻眼的態度去處理。)

via [Mister Snitch]

Updated Galleries

I spent some time updating templates for most of the gallery pages. I have replaced tables with style sheets, which are a lot easier to maintain and update. One thing that took me a while to figure out was this: when working with JavaScript functions, it’s not a good idea to name css attributes that begin with numerics (i.e. 2003).

After updating the templates, I also added new albums to the New York and California galleries. In addition to that, I added a few more pictures to Bryan’s September album. Eventually I will unify everything under one PHP file with some kind of dynamic updating when I upload new albums to the directory.

Enjoy.

花了一點時間把照片的網頁部份整理了一下。這次把 < table> 全部換成了 CSS 的語法。這樣以後也比較好整理。過一陣子再整理成 PHP 的動態網頁, 這樣一來會更好維持。我在 “紐約” å’Œ “加州” 的部份多加了一些新的照片。當然詠熙的部份也多了一些九月份的照片喔。