Month: July 2006

Bloody Nose

Bryan woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night crying. The ritual has been to rock him gently back to sleep in the dark– and that usually works. But this morning he cried a little harder for a little longer. At first we didn’t pay much attention, but the second time he woke up within 10 minutes, I turned the light on and found his nose covered with blood!

Although we found no cuts, bruises or any obvious signs of wound on any parts of his body, the amount of blood (enough to cover the entire upper lip and then some) worried us. I quickly cleaned him up to examine further but still found no open wounds. And he stopped complaining as soon as I cleaned up his nose.

Margaret said her daughter also had bloody nose once when the weather was really dry. Hopefully I will never see blood on him ever again! Poor kid…

What Does the Deaf Dream?

I asked myself that same question a while ago about dreams of the blind and deaf. Apparently the answer involves a lot more than I’d thought. The article links intellectual development to language development, which is an entirely interesting topic I’d never thought about.

One of these days I have to look into Noam Chomsky and the like and their theories on langauge and brain. This philosophy in conjunction with neuroscience is fascinating stuff!

Internet Explorer Woes

I probably wrote about this before… But I am going to rant about it again…

Microsoft Internet Explorer SUCKS ASS! And the engineers who came up with versions 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 should go to hell and stay there.

It’s probably not entirely their fault that IE has sucked ever since its inception. For what its’ worth, Netscape 4.x sucked so bad that it skipped 5.0 and went straight to 6.0, which help contributed the collapse of the once great Netscape empire.

That said, how much IE has sucked in the past 6 or 7 years since the fall of Netscape just goes to show that monopoly in any given technological field DOES harm innovation. Had Netscape stayed (or Firefox came out earlier), IE wouldn’t have stayed sucky for 3 versions straight with little to no improvements in each version.

On top of that, they are so broken that developing web interfaces for them is virtually impossible. I have had perfectly coded sites working with all other major browsers BUT IE! So that meant I have had to come up with hacks and work arounds just to make things work for IE, which is so damn non-compliant with standards in a very ugly way… And like I said, people who keep using IE to surf the web aren’t helping with the cause either… (why anyone would use IE to surf the web is beyond me… it’s so tied in with the operating system that any hacker going through IE, which is nortoriously known for its suckiness in security, can practically get the entire computer fried… figuratively speaking).

I had this beautifully written pure css sytle sheet design that worked perfectly in Firefox and Safari, but as soon as IE sees it, all hell broke lose. So now I gotta use stupid tables just so that I don’t have to waste time tweaking the css just for damn IE.

A lot of comments in codes I have read often include phrases like ”

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/*fix for stupid IE*/

“, or ”

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/*hack for stupid IE*/

“… With the intorduction of IE7 beta, which I have tried, things aren’t getting better. I hopte Firefox will just run IE over and Steve Ballmer can just run Microsoft to ground (at which he’s already doing a pretty good job) so that we will never have to deal with another inferior, buggy Microsoft product again, EVER!

God damn! Microsoft… Seriously… Go to hell with IE! Damn it…
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There, I vented. I can’t stress just how pissed I can get working with Microsoft technology at times… Sometimes I wish I can just choke Steve Ballmer into fixing these damn problems in IE. I guess I should probably document some of the issues I have dealt with and solutions I found/discovered/made (thanks, solely, to Google… no thanks to MSN).

An interesting side note… while working with Murdza on a mass mail campaign, the project redered out perfectly in EVERYTHING but Hotmail… So I had to find fixes just for stupid Hotmail… It’s no accident that Hotmail is another inferior product of Microsoft’s that way too many ignorant people are still using as if it’s oxygen for their lungs… Fricking convert to Gmail or Yahoo Mail already… damn it…

Stupid Microsoft…

Scamming the Scammers

Remember all those money making emails you get from Africa (“I am the son of the late Price _______. I have a great proposition for you…” )? I have always wanted to reply them with a plan to scam them but never got the time to really think about how to do it. But apparently a group of people did.

It made me feel good reading it…

License to Raising Children

We live in a day and age (and specifically in Western Worlds, a society) where almost everything we do needs some kind of proof, certification or license to show that we are capable of doing what we say we can do.

Job hunting — diploma or relevant skills,
Driving — driver’s license (different license types for different vehicles!),
Teaching — teaching certificate for k-12,
Owning a pet — pet license,
Owning a gun — gun license (boo!),
Fishing — fishing and gaming license,
… etc.

So, if something as trivial as owning a pet needs licensing, I don’t understand why there isn’t a license for being parents?! If we need a license and proof to take care of someone else’s children (in the case of K-12 teachers), is it not important enough that we get a license that shows we know how to take care of our kids as well?

Children are probably the single most important asset a society has for its own long-term survival. But yet we do everything we can to trivialize childrearing and children’s education. Ever since I took those Early Childhood Education classes, they’ve opened my eyes on just how typical parents (mis)treat their children in all kinds of circumstances.

That’s why I believe that before becoming a parent, everyone should attend compulsive but FREE government funded childrearing and education classes and pass a basic “parenthood competency exam” to receive a license. Having observed what some people do to their children, there has to be a comprehensive understanding on just WHAT children are and how to give them a healthy life. This kind of law will probably never fly, but if you think about it, the society as a whole will be a better place if one were implemented well.

Take, for example, abused children are more likely grown up to be abusers themselves. If the society can spend the initial dollars and initiatives to make sure these kinds of problems are fixed in the beginning, it wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars later trying to patch the problem — and the “problem”, of course, is what started as an innocient child. I think I wrote about this before.

I guess issuing licenses for the right to become parents is a little too extreme. And I guess that won’t stop idiots from getting licenses either — considering how many drunk driving violations there are every year despite driver’s licenses.