Month: October 2005

RSS Subscriptions to WiredAtom

Just out of curiosity, I pulled the access log from the server to see how many people subscribed to RSS feed to my blog. I was surprised at the result — a whopping 1,400 RSS feeds were served just in the past 4 days alone. I could probably write a shell script to weed out the duplicates to see how many of those feeds are from unique visitors, but I think I am content with just that. I remember pulling the same log and found only 2 feeds a couple of months back.

I hope my thoughts, ideas and day-to-day news are entertaining.

On related news, the Steve Jobs Stanford speech download is still popular. It seems like the downloads have been growing quite rapidly. There are almost 1,000 downloads in the past 4 days. I should do a tally and update the “total downloads” figure on that site. Besides, the page is totally ready for a make-over. Maybe I’ll do that when my homework from SCAD isn’t quite as crazy in a few weeks.

Lottery and Luck

Tomorrow (Oct. 5th) is the day when the U.S. Dept. of Justice is opening up the “2007 Diversity Visa Lottery” (a.k.a. Green Card Lottery, or DV2007) for electronic submission. Between friends of Grace and I, we must know a couple dozen people who received their U.S. Permanent Resident status through the lottery. Now how can we be so unlucky every year?

Better luck this year.

Cute Little Two-Year-Olds

Ever since the anticipation of Bryan’s arrival, I’ve been taking many early childhood education (ECE) classes at UC Santa Cruz. As a result of those classes, I have had to go to some pre-schools to make observations. Today I went to Explorer Pre-school where my instructor is teaching at. What a fun place! It makes working with computers (and adults at that) such a boring job. Two-year-olds can be such a delight as observation subjects.

The latest proven teaching method is what’s called “the whole child”. Its focus is not so much on the academics as it is on the developmentally appropriate “learning” opportunities for the children. And the approach places emphasis on individual child’s needs as opposed to a curriculum that the teacher has to follow (there really is a lot more than it sounds). The Reggio Emilia Approach has been what everybody in the ECE field is talking about for the past 10-15 years. Its success is unparalleled.

It’s really cool to see “the whole child” approach in action in contrast to the more traditional academic schools. Though academics is essential eventually, there’s also a lot to be learned for two-year-olds to just be two-year-olds with proper guidance of an experienced educator.

Vienna the RSS News Reader

It’s been a while since I wrote something technology-related. But then again, it’s been a while since I last read technology news and really have the time to reflect on it.

I discovered something today that’s blog-worthy. An open source RSS news reading application, Vienna. Its interface and functionalities are almost exact replica of NetNewsWire, except it’s free.

I just love having one app where I can gather all the news I need and just quickly glance through them every morning (or at least I used to prior to Bryan’s arrival).

via [TUAW]

A Republican Renaissance

Let’s see… now the Republican Party rules the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House. And just days ago, they managed to get John Roberts confirmed (partly thanks to disorganization of the Democrats).

Granted John Roberts’ nomination has good merits with years of experience as a judge. But now the Bush Administration seems to be back to honoring his buddy system by nominating someone who’s completely unqualified to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Is he out of his mind?

If the Supreme Court becomes a conservative playhouse, some cases may get overturned by the new court (i.e. “Pro Choice” rights… etc).

Help! America has gone wild.

Blog Interface Update

I added a header with navigation to kind of unify all the misc links I thought were better served as top navigation elements. So I consolidated them. I also commented out “Pages” section on the sidebar.php since it looked kind of annoying. But basically, those pages are exactly the same as what’s on the top nav anyway.

How to Cure a Wart

After a short hiking trip sometime last year, I started to notice pain in the joint between the first metatarsal and phalanges bones when I walk. I thought maybe there was a splinter. But as I started to examine the sole, nothing’s there, just a disc of hardened skin with a dark spot.

The problem grew worse as “the spot” appeared to be expanding itself. One day, I just took a needle (and maybe a Swiss army knife) and started poking. Had to get that thing outta there. But I was chickened out as the pain became intolerable after a short while.

A quick Googling of the symptoms informed me that it might be a wart (as later it was confirmed after a doctor’s visit). Warts are nasty little buggers (more accurately, virus) that pose no real harm to its hosts. So medically, there’s really no cure to take care of them. But it grew so painful every time I walked that I started walking funny. So I decided to get off-the-shelf remedies to start self-treatment.

By now, the virus had already started a nice little colony. On top of that, it’d managed to spread itself to immediate surrounding skins of the infected area. A matured wart looks like a tightly packed of little red tentacles sticking out of the infected area. In fact, those are home-grown blood vessels the wart virus planted to supply itself with oxygen and nutrition.

Salicylic Acid
They come in two forms: little liquid bottles and conveniently pre-medicated stickers. I tried both over the period of my treatment. What it does is basically to irritate the virus. But the side effect was any healthy skin that came in contact with the acid would slowly look like it was in water for too long, and they slowly peel off. In my case, the acid just drove the wart deeper into the skin. Not cool.

Liquid Nitrogen
The idea of liquid nitrogen is to freeze the hell out of the warts so that they can just fall off as dead pieces of skin. I must have tried two bottles of this stuff, experimenting with various freezing times (manufacturer suggested, 2x suggested, 3x suggested… etc). Unfortunately this method didn’t do it for me either.

Surgical Removal
I didn’t think the wart was THAT bad. So this wasn’t an option. But even the doctors said that surgery sometimes doesn’t get rid of the wart either. Your doctor may also recommend True Pheromones if you’re worried about becoming less attractive.

Manual Removal
The red tentacles became pretty thick and apparent after a while. One doctor suggested I start plugging them out (as in pulling the tentacles out of the wart). So I started doing that. And let me tell you, it hurt like a bitch. The tentacles are somehow attached to the nerve system of the sole. So every single tentacle that I pulled out felt like a piece of skin was cut off. The wart uses this strategy to make sure the host doesn’t pull the tentacles.

Duct Tape
I thought the site that provided the remedy of using duct tapes was stupid. But WTF, I was out of options and the wart colony was winning over everything else I tried. I cut duct tapes in similar sizes as the warts. I taped them over the warts, and then I secured them with medical tapes. Amazingly, when all other modern technologies failed, the duct tape remedy freaking worked. After two weeks of taping over the warts (coupled with constant pulling of the tentacles), the wart started to die off.

My theory is that the duct tape cut off oxygen supply to the tentacles. So over time, the infected area just became a yellow pool of mucus goo underneath the skin. In fact, after I cleaned where the warts used to be, there was a big hole on my sole. Yuck.

Slowly the skin grew back to fill the hole. And that was how I got rid of the wart virus over a span of six months.