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So can someone explain to me the “real reason” why the Feds shot down California’s proposal for a waiver to implement stricter rules on carbon emission? Is this one of those “about face” rulings? Or does it have real merit in it? I mean, if the politicians are too bought off by the motor companies to get it done, why can’t individual states implement something better? And let’s not forget, it takes a while for those cars to populate the roads en mass that can even make a positive impact on the environment… hence, the sooner, the better… The Fed’s plan looks pathetic compared to rules already in place in other industrialized nations. So if the car companies can make cleaner cars for THOSE countries, I don’t understand what the big deal is to implement the same thing in the U.S.?

Just for the record, I am not ranting on the U.S. Government and U.S. companies because I am anti-U.S. But rather, I hold the U.S. to a much higher moral ground than almost any other country because of their strong influence and, well, the U.S. government’s self-confessed high moral, “God-given right” to influence issues they impose on other countries.

And that’s why I get pretty sick of the people running the show today, both in the government agencies and in private corporations, that they are just such hypocrites when they preach one thing and do exactly the opposite (much like many, sorry, self-proclaimed religious people, I know) and still feel good about it. Stuff like “SiCKO” and this latest interview of Mark Schapiro on NPR just makes me sit in my chair at awe wondering just how in the name of this wonderful Christian God of theirs are they doing the world any kind of justice by making those decisions affecting the lives of millions.

The interview is informative, insightful and very educational. But at the same time, it’s scary and sickening to see what the actual “gut” of what’s going on between Europe and the good old U.S. of A.

Anyway… just another day’s rant. Sorry. But DO listen to the interview. It’s fascinating.

I’ll keep this short and try to be as objective as possible…

I’ve used Aperture for quite sometime and loved it. The problem with Aperture, though, is its inability to interpret certain RAW files produced by my camera properly. It got me to question whether RAW conversion should have been done somewhere else, which led me to looking into Adobe’s solutions — Adobe Bridge + Adobe Camera RAW.

A few problems with Bridge:
1. Unintuitive interface — a lot of assumptions were made on that you understand what each feature does; I literally had to force myself to stop using it and hop on lynda.com to take a quick tour before all the other stuff even made any sense! Adobe, this is NOT how you design great software! Take a chapter from Apple — the way features are laid out and structured should be self-explanatory!
2. It relies on other Adobe software titles to do the heavy lifting; Bridge is really just an asset management and grading system. For RAW conversion, I have to launch ACR; for basic book layout, launch Illustrator or InDesign… etc. Aperture, on the other hand, has a straight forward built-in support for some of those features in ONE place.
3. I can’t grade images while viewing them in full screen mode! What gives!?? How else am I supposed to tell if an image is sharp? Through the stupid tiny, pathetic, inflexible magnifying glass provided by Bridge? That feature is a joke compared to Apple’s solution!
4. Grading has to be done by 2-key combos — a rating of 2 has to be done via command + 2 where as in Aperture, my fingers are a lot happier with just hopping through the numerics. No combo keys!
5. I can’t see the rating in the main preview image or window like I can with Aperture! So if I want to know what rating I gave to an image, I have to peer elsewhere on the convoluted UI! It’s extremely inefficient.
6. If I want to play with the potentials of an image, I am forced to launch ACR, but even then I can’t just make a new version of the image and play with it until I am happy with one version like I would in Aperture (without having to make a copy of the image, that is). I literally have to stop doing one thing just so I can do something else. In Aperture, editing, grading, cropping, keywording… etc can all be done simultaneously without forcing user to “switch mode”, or so to speak.

That said, there’s ONE advantage that Bridge has over Aperture, that is its “labels” feature. Besides grading images, I can label an image with a color for any purpose. But this is such a trivial feature that I wouldn’t switch my work flow just for that.

Now, the reason I am REALLY doing this is for Adobe Camera RAW. It’s a lot more flexible and can really sink its teeth into the wide dynamic range that my RAW files give me. The color adjustments made with ACR are also a little more pleasant and more flexible to control. But besides that, there’s really no way in hell I’d continue using this system once Aperture 2 is released with matching abilities in RAW conversion. And since Aperture has this great feature that allows me to two-way an image version with Photoshop, I really see no reason why I’d use any of those other convoluted and useless products Adobe has launched!!

So my struggle continues as I try to find a good work flow for digital photography. I’m a little frustrated with Adobe in that with its 20+ years of experience in making graphics software, its softwares still can suck so badly compared to a less-than-two-year-old Apple software! Yes, you can call me an Apple fanboy. But that’s just the harsh truth about Adobe.

Now I know I won’t even bother with LightRoom, Adobe’s answer to Aperture AFTER Apple launched Aperture (how embarrassing is that for Adobe having to catch up to Apple!). All the reviews about how LightRoom forces users into using “modularized” approaches is exactly the feeling I am getting with the Bridge + ACR combo. To that, I say “Thanks. But NO, thanks.”

Windows rant ahead. Brace yourself.

I have no idea why, but my virtualized Windows XP just started bitching about svchost crashing and started acting all weird on me — and this was on an installation that’s only used (or turned on, even) when I needed to test my code on various versions of IE. At first I thought maybe VMWare got corrupted, so I did a fresh install of VMWare. Then I thought maybe I could revert Windows XP back to its previous known good state. None of these helped, of course. So I did what any sane Windows user would do — complete re-install of Windows XP from scratch! Hah hah! I feel sorry for the poor souls who have to deal with this kind of crap all the time.

Thank god VMWare makes Windows installation easy and fast (at least 1/2 the time it takes for a fresh install on a real PC!). The first thing I do is to get rid of all the fluff out of Windows — games, MSN Explorer, Accessibility programs, Windows tour, Outlook Express (officially dead program by Microsoft’s definition)… etc. Then I started installing various versions of IE (5.01, 5.5, 6.x & 7) and other perceived “goodies” including MSN Live Messenger. Then Windows XP complained again in its own cute little way — it’s looking for msoert2.dll… WTF!?! It’s a fresh install! It couldn’t possibly have something missing that MSN Live Messenger needed!

Then Google said it was a library that was removed when I got rid of Outlook Express. So why is it that MSN Live Messenger 8.5.xxx, the latest and greatest from Redmond, needs to depend on a library from a program that’s supposedly extinct? Locating and putting back the msoert2.dll file back to Windows/system32 directory made it happy again though. And that’s all I cared.

I am guessing it’s a hook for MSN contacts to appear in Outlook Express and Outlook so that people who spend way too much time in those programs can start up chat sessions without having to look for the MSN Live Messenger contact list.

All this crap brought back the good old days of Windows tech support and having to decipher cryptic Windows errors. “Good” times.

Our next door neighbor finally moved out last weekend after our landlord evicted her. But just right after the earthquake hit, our crazy ex-neighbor mysteriously showed up at the front yard and started swearing at Grace and our other neighbor. After what she has put us through, she’s now crazy enough to come back and tell us that it was God who was now punishing us… Hah hah… But she got pissed when our neighbor replied that maybe God was trying to get her instead.

All this God nonsense amuses me.

Grace took out a camera to fake taking a shot of her car. She floored the pedal and fled the scene. But no matter, Grace got a hold of her license plate and called the cops on her again for another incident of harassment. Generally I hate drama like this. But this is getting to a point where it is actually funny.

What a day.

UPDATE: The cops came and spotted her car parked down the street. So now they are circling the neighborhood looking for a chubby silver haired lady hiding somewhere in the bushes. Cue the music [Cops theme song] “Bad boys, bad boys. What you gonna do. What you gonna do when they come for you… ”

UPDATE 2: It appears that the neighbors across the street helped hide the crazy ex-neighbor when the cops were around. I wonder if that qualifies as assistance in helping to hide a suspected criminal. Hmm… And just like the crazy ex-neighbor, they were shouting racial slurs. Maybe we should be moving out of this place. It’s hard to imagine that in California people still have such outspoken views in Hitler talk.

Ever since our neighbor turned nuts, we’ve been trying very hard to ignore her and her intentional verbal attacks, especially on Grace (and sometimes in the presence of Bryan). Today she did it again by picking a verbal fight with Grace and made a bunch of vulgar and racial slurs. Grace got fed up and called the cops on the neighbor (with the blessing from the landlord as well)*.

Being that San Jose is supposedly one of the fastest cities of its size in America, the police came swiftly to understand the situation. It appears that what the neighbor has been doing qualifies as “harassment” and has to be stopped. So they took statements from both Grace and the neighbor and made an official complaint of the incident. On a related note, one of the officers mentioned that our neighbor even made some racial comments in front of them as they were taking statements from her. That should clear any doubts whether she did any of those things had there been any disputes.

So now our neighbor’s supposed to stop talking to us or do anything that resembles any form of harassment or else the cops will have her kicked out in three days — something the landlord didn’t want to see happen but probably wouldn’t mind at this point. Our landlord dreaded on kicking a tenant out because of all the potential legal actions she could be dragged into should the tenant decide to take matters to the court. But with this latest incident, our neighbor had simply lost any and all possible legal foot to stand on.

Right now as I am writing this, our neighbor’s angrily slamming every door she can find in the apartment. In fact, she’s been doing that for the past two hours or so. We just might have to call the cops again for “disturbance”… But man, we just hate to spend tax dollars on stupid stuff like this! Our neighbor is probably in her 60s or 70s — I guess some people just never truly grew up.

* Backtracking things a little here: A couple of weeks ago, as Grace was taking Bryan to pre-school in the morning, our neighbor decided to confront Grace about why we are trying to have her kicked out… etc. She did that in a physically imposing and “threatening” way and kept following Grace to the car and even as Grace reversed the car in the drive way. We were going to call the cops then, but then we decided to call the landlord and have the landlord tell our neighbor to stop doing that.

I never paid much attention to how photos appear on the web until recently I’ve decided that I need to diversify my income sources by branching out into photography, which has been an old love affair of mine. Over the span of a week or so, I’ve soaked up so much information on just the idea of presentation of colors that it really sickens me how Apple’s Safari (and browsers based on its rendering engine, such as OmniWeb, Shiira among others) is the only browser that gets color renditions correctly according to the artists’ intent. Nine years after the initial dot-com boom and six years after its bust, I can’t believe only ONE technology company gets web-based photography presentation right!

Without getting into too much details, basically the chief complaint is, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer are only capable of displaying a very narrow set of colors that are capable of being displayed by modern monitors. This was done in the old days to insure compatibility of color display between various makes of monitors and applications via which images were rendered. But the “old days” have long gone, and browsers are still stuck in the 1990’s.

Now I understood why my images appeared muddy on Flickr. But since there are way too many of them to fix and re-upload, I’ve gone to hell and back trying everything to make sure the richness of colors captured by my camera is properly displayed on the web. But I think I am only half way there in finding an acceptable work flow that works for me.

So anyway, this is just a rant on one of those tech things….

Almost every bank, credit card company and pretty much everything else is trying to get people convert to online banking and payment system nowadays. It makes a lot of sense because usually that means big savings for them having to process fewer paperwork manually (that’s what I think anyway). But sometimes they are just so badly implemented that doing anything online with some of these companies just cause me more headaches.

Take, for example, one of the credit card companies I have been using for quite sometime. One month, as if they’ve just decided they were going to make their online transactions more secured the night before, they implemented a popular feature: provide an answer to a secret question that only you’d know.

The only problem with that was, their questions didn’t make any god damn sense — one question asks for my mother’s maiden name — as if that’s so secret for Asians… Some countries simply do not adopt that practice and any friend of mine would know what my mother’s maiden name is. Another example is a series of stupid questions that even I don’t have the answers to:
1. My favorite sports team — hell, I do NOT have any! I don’t even like sports that much!
2. My favorite restaurant in college — WTF! I was a fu*king college student! I was lucky to have a warm meal, let alone a “favorite” restaurant!
3. My high school — and this is secure how?

After a couple of attempts, the system got thrown into an exception that the designers hadn’t designed it for…. It simply gave me a blank question expecting me to give an answer to… Seriously… WTF! Finally the system bumped me out and asked me to call them during “normal business hours”…. With all the crazy fees and interest rates they are charging people, they ought to have a 24×7 hotline…

And stupid stuff like this extends to stupid interface designs like the MSN Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Dell’s product site among others. With all the money they have, can’t they just hire some decent usability designers and testers? God damn it!

OK… I feel better now. Just a quick rant on thoughtless designs by idiots… If only they took half the time to do what Apple would have done…

Our neighbor behind us has been leaving out food for stray cats ever since she moved in. We really didn’t care that all the cats in the neighborhood were getting all-you-can eat buffets until a skunk started frequenting the joint. Now more than a few kinds of critters have been spotted chowing down that free buffet, especially at night.

So we brought up the issue with the landlord and the neighbor, hoping that she can at least stop putting food out during the night so that we don’t have to run into one of those “wild” animals accidentally. And of course the buffet service continued 24×7.

Fast forward a few months to a few days ago. We heard some rumblings at our kitchen door. At first we thought they were squirrels. On went the kitchen light, and we saw a skunk strolling by the door, heading towards the 24-hour buffet. Left behind was its wonderful perfume that all animals enjoy so much. We thought a smelly car interior was bad (which thankfully is now gone), now the entire freaking house smelled like rotten eggs. Added to that was the hot, humid Californian summer, which meant we couldn’t just close the doors… Good thing that smell was all gone within a couple of days though.

This incident alone probably isn’t a big deal. But also consider that our neighbor has been lovingly utilizing the public servants by calling the San Jose Police Department for every incident that she can report on — this neighborhood has never seen police so frequently until she moved in. And adding fuel to the fire, she’s been trespassing other neighbors’ properties in order to track down other stray cats in an attempt to “rescue” them, and in the process, pissing off a lot of people in the neighborhood. What’s more, she told one of the neighbors to “get back to wherever they came from because America is only for the White people.” Once she even told Grace, “I don’t know what your people do in your country. But in America, animals have rights.” Um, hadn’t she noticed that we also have two freaking cats?

Anyway, basically the entire neighborhood is having an uprising against her, protesting to our landlord and begging her to take action. And as Californian housing law would have it, it’s extremely difficult to kick out tenants. But my hearty email did her in (using the “parenting” perspective that she knows so well… the angle was — wild animals have serious public health consequences, especially when a two-year-old is in the vicinity; by ignoring our repeated requests, she’s putting my child in danger — animals might have rights, but my son comes first and foremost).

So the entire neighborhood can rejoice once she’s kicked out in 90 days. She still threatens to come back and feed the critters if she has to. But we’ll let the cops deal with her when she trespasses (ironically, her son is also a cop).

Unfortunately now she’s one bitter bitch old lady. Every chance she gets, she’ll pounce on us by hiding behind the screen doors and try to engage us in a war of words. Though we find the act spooky and unsettling (almost to the point of stalking), mostly we just ignore her and walk on by. I also bought a bottle of animal repellent that should also help to keep animals from coming (though I think I bought the wrong type… we will see how effective this is).

So this is how our summer is going to end. Good times.

It used to be that when you send someone an email, you get a reply. But it seems like people are taking emails for granted more and more these days. I’d send someone an email and not hear from that person on the subject matter ever again — no replies, no thoughts on the subject, not even a quick one liner — as if the email has gone to the abyss of the Internet.

I haven’t decided what the proper etiquette is for replying emails (though one would think actually replying would be a good start). But now I’ve adopted the same etiquette for those who never reply — I simply read their emails and sit on them until inquired about. This may not be the best way to communicate. But I just don’t want to be the sucker who replies every time there’s a request for something while mine go unanswered. Sorry, jerks…

Something unthinkable happened this week…

Grace took Bryan to hang out with a couple of other mothers and their children earlier this week. Kids being kids (god, especially boys), they are bound to get rough with each other from time to time. And when they are as young as two, their lack of impulsive control simply overwhelms their feeble minds and their bodies sometimes muscle over their intentions.

So what happened? While having fun with a younger girl at the play date, Bryan bit her. When the girl screamed and started her flood of tears, Grace took her time and tried to find out what happened and attempted to pull Bryan aside to talk to him about this mischievous behavior. This was when the little girl’s mom swooped by Bryan’s side, yelled at him for being such a bully and heavily smacked Bryan by the arm — all without even finding out what happened or giving Grace a chance to take control of the situation.

Needless to say, Grace was really pissed. But she chose to hold back on the anger and came back to discuss the issue with me. And quite frankly, I was dumbfounded and shocked to hear that someone would go as far as overstepping another parent’s authority and spank someone else’s child like that.

We are very disappointed and frustrated with this individual and her lack of understanding of early childhood development (though she claims she knows a thing or two and brags about it [ahem, see my previous entry]). Does she have an EQ of a toddler or something? Brian offered the explanation that maybe she was overstressed and that was the tipping point for her. Brian argued that maybe she felt remorseful about what she’d done.

But later we found out that this woman has been announcing to everyone we know, well, basically about how Bryan, a two year-old child, is a prick and bullied her sweetest, most lovely, wonderful and adorable, sugar pie angel. Now, to be fair and to put things in perspective, with Bryan’s other regular play dates/play groups, Bryan’s considered the “calm” one — the one who gets picked on all the time. But let’s suppose Bryan was the “excitable” one, what gives the right to one parent spanking someone else’s child?

I wish her good luck with her own child with her involuntary spanking and frequent threats to spanking her (at barely one year old). And one can only hope that her daughter will never ever bite, scratch, kick or hit another child, EVER. And of course, constant threats to spanking and physical discipline always improves moral, self-confidence and repress violence. That’s why death penalties work so freaking well against crime, eh?

Before I got married, an uncle of mine taught me to categorize friends into a few distinct groups and weight their importance and influence in my life accordingly. The idea was to maximize my limited resources and don’t waste any time with those who aren’t meant to be my friends over the long haul and spend more time with those whom I care as much as they care about me. I thought the idea makes sense but never really thought much of it. In reality, everybody does that already anyway whether one likes it or even knows it or not.

We’ve come to know quite a few friends in the Bay Area in the four years we have been here. But there’s one type of friend I can’t help but noticed — the kind that has too much personality. It’s the kind of person who fills the room whenever s/he is around; the kind of person that dominates conversations, commends (and sometimes demands) attention and refuse to shut up about him/herself. Now, if that person was Bill Clinton or someone of significance and great charm, I probably wouldn’t mind so much. But when a self-centric person just blabs on and on about how wonderful him/herself is (or his/her child/ren are), it makes a very annoying party.

Sometimes I feel like telling them: “Wow, don’t ever stop. My pathetic life is just so uninteresting compared to your adventures. Do go on. Do make me admire you that much more.”

People like that obviously can’t stand each other. And I happen to know that these two acquaintances of ours also hate each other’s guts. Most people can take these type of personalities in small doses. Too much of it can cause headaches, diarrhea, involuntary vomiting, and an urge to tell them to shut the hell up.

This begs the question though… Would I rather gamble on a bag of Made-In-China potato chips or having a small party with one of those personalities? It’d be a double whammy if the person in question has a party and serves chips imported from China… D’oh!