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The past few days in the Silicon Valley have been unbearable. Record high temperatures appear to be everywhere on the map. But of course, that’s no global warming, just the nature… The White House says so.

Bryan has been having trouble sleeping at night because it’s so hot and humid at night. So we have had to mobilize fans in the apartment — one to move cooler air into the apartment when the sun sets and another to cool Bryan off. The strategy is to give him a nice and cool bath before bed time and try to keep him cool with the two fans going… But last night was so exceptionally hot that we had to use THREE fans!

So now Bryan takes 3 cool baths a day to stay cool… Or else nobody gets any rest in the apartment…

Not that I am a Trekky at all…. but an episode on NPR about fan-made Trek series seemed like an interesting idea. And supposedly, even the studios are taking note of a growing movements in fan-made films/TV series (as long as, god forbid, they don’t don’t profit off of them, of course).

I thought Murdza might appreciate something like that… They are supposed to be pretty good quality productions similar to ones on Sci-fi channel. Some scripts are so good that even some of the original Star Trek actors/actresses have guest appeared in some of them!

Of all the years I have been in school and at work, I have never had to use coffee or any kind of stimuli to keep me awake, no matter how little I’d slept the night before. Part of the reason was probably I found out rather early in my life that coffee doesn’t really work for me… Or, rather, caffeine doesn’t work for me (Mt. Dew, Coke, tea… etc).

But this week I have had to wake up pretty early everyday for classes. And this middle-aged body isn’t quite as strong as it used to be… So I tried some free coffee at the UC campus to see if it’d do me any good to keep me awake during long Perl lectures… What I found was that… coffee makes my body feel agitated… It just felt weird. I tried it for 3 days and found no good reason to continue.

That was a stupid experiment.

Or maybe that was some cheap coffee that didn’t do sh*t.

Finally finished another intensive 4-day course in more advanced Perl this week. I have to say that Perl gets a little disappointing in the more advanced level. Making an object/class is kind of painful compared to more modern scripting language like PHP. And the CGI portion gets more ugly when it comes to having to edit multiple files in different directories…. or one can venture into using the dreadful CGI package. But luckily there’s Mason which runs on the server side and makes everything very PHP-like. Unfortunately it requires separate installation. And I am doubtful of its support on most web hosting services.

In any case, I am still glad I got to know as much Perl as I did. It’s another tool in my arsenal of scripting/programming languages for future gigs. Next on my list, C, C++, Java, Ruby on Rails, and hopefully someday, Objective-C/Cocoa!

Brian got me hooked on Ray Kurzweil a couple of months ago. Now I see his name everywhere.

On the way back from lunch today, NPR broadcasted an interview with him on Talk of the Nation. The interview was a response to an article he wrote earlier.

He sounded very enthusiastic and optimistic of what the future holds for mankind and what technology will ultimately do for us — cures of the worst diseases we experience today, super-smart “beings” that are part organic and part machine… etc. In light of how fast human genes are being patented for corporate profit today, I am not so sure just how quickly his vision can materialize even if technology progresses as quickly as he predicts. As long as there’s profit to be made out of anything from major corporations, these changes will be slow in manifestation. Why would a pharmaceutical company release a cure to cancer when it can milk billions more out of dying patients by slowly “upgrading” cancer therapies and treatments? Then again, maybe it’s just the drug companies that are evil. And he’s right about technologies being increasingly more affordable and accessible over time. Maybe in the future, we won’t be so caught up with the things we are so worried about today… Maybe it will be genetic terrorism, knowledge-based diseases and some other ingenious ideas future ultra-humans will come up with to kill off each other. But then again, according to Kurzweil, everyone’s supposed to know everything about everything… So it will be a battle of Spy v.s. Spy.

Anyway, Kurzweil’s interview is wicked cool.

Every single piece of mail disappeared from my Hotmail account one day. They were just gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Lost. Misssing. Vaporized…

After a few prompt emails with the Hotmail tech support girls (they were ALL women’s names…!!! Girl Power!), I decided there’s really no point in getting them to even try to retrieve them for me. After all, it IS free, and they ARE Microsoft, and they don’t really, in Kyung’s words, “give a rat’s ass” as to whether I continue to use Hotmail. And I am just way too lazy to post my correspondences with them here… which in themselves is pointless because I kept on getting replies based on exact the same template of wordings plus maybe 2 sentences that were actually typed (or maybe “intelligently” generated by she-bots. But who would know?).

So now I can finally cut clean with Hotmail, an account I have had for almost 10 years before Microsoft even knew what Internet was. But anyone who means anything to me knows my gazillion other alternative contact information anyway… So… whatever…

While watching the news, the reporter mentioned something about FamilyWatchDog.us as a good resource to see if there are any sex offenders around any neighborhood in the U.S. The result for my neighborhood was a little alarming…

The red dots are offenders against children, yellow for rape, blue for sexual battery, and green for other offenses. The pattern is also very interesting — It seems like some neighborhoods are possibly more “tolerant” of certain types of sex offenders than others. I did a couple more searches on some friends’ residences, the results were slightly better; but it seems like they are just EVERYWHERE!

The map is supposed to be able to tell you where they work as well as where they live. But I failed to find any dots representing their work address…

When I first moved to California, I also found another map that tells you where all the latest crimes are happening in your neighborhood. Internet is truly a great resource for things… I wish the government could spend more money on solving domestic issues instead of spending billions a month in the name of solving someone else’s problems. But hey, what do I know. I am not even American!

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…

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!

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 “/*fix for stupid IE*/“, or “/*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…

There, I said it.

But I am not alone. Two of the richest people in the world agreed.

So maybe economics, afterall, is not the answer to all problems as economists would like to belive it (does that include you, Mark?)

The first day of my economics class, the instructor promptly used variously examples to show that the essential purpose of economics is to solve basic problems of the world — food, shelter, clothing… etc. for people. But yet in a capitalistic system, it’s been theorized that 80% of the people would be poor if market were to determine everything.

A scary thought indeed.

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…