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Bryan finally got the idea of taking the initiatives to go to potty on his own. He’s a bit late among his friends, but we felt that he’d do it when he felt ready for it… And indeed he did. It was a milestone event for all 3 of us to hear him insist on going to his potty chair and actually “holding” for it.

Another milestone reached this week was his readiness to sleep alone. This couldn’t have come at a better time as Bryan’s sister is due in about a month. Last night he kicked me out of the bed because he wanted to sleep by himself, with light off and the door closed! And without a fuss or complaint, he went to sleep.

Sometimes I wished he wasn’t growing so fast so that I can rock him to sleep just for a little longer. (Now he won’t even let me hold him like a baby, let alone rocking him.) But soon enough, he’d be his own man and making choices all on his own without requiring my input at all. Life with children goes by way too fast. And some days I wish we’d stay in “today” just for a little longer…

My blog had been breached once before with the same attack. But it’s happened again even though the WordPress version being attacked the 2nd time was definitely newer than that previous attack. I hadn’t been on my own blog for weeks. And the only reason I found out was because I installed Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Grace’s machine, and the new Firefox (working with Google) has this new feature that can detect “bad ware” like that.

Basically someone “somehow” inserted a line of Javascript code into a couple of my blog entries and pretended to be “statistics” code. But in reality, it’s a script that behaves as trojans, presumably for Internet Explorers…

After some troubleshooting and searching, I removed all the codes and requested my site to be reviewed by Google in order to be considered safe again in its database…

Continuing my following of Firefox’s beta graphics, here’s another for Firefox 3 Beta 5.

It can be seen here.

Grace’s mom was visiting over the weekend. Her mom’s boyfriend rarely agrees on anything with me. But he started a conversation with me on the American presidential race anyway.

As predicted, this 70-something white male from the Mid-West (who now lives in L.A.) is a hardcore Republican. He’s as far Right as they come. This Bush-loving guy asked what I thought about the candidates and who I preferred. So I let him have it — Obama all the way. And then the Republican rainwashing machine commended.

• Obama hates Jews.
• Obama is the most Liberal senator in the Senate.
• Obama admits his own grandmother feared Black people.
• Obama will increase taxes by 50%.
• Obama’s winning will cause a war between the races.
• Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves; he was a Republican (never mind that was hundreds of years ago).
• Civil Rights movement was actually backed by the Republicans.
• Al Gore Sr. opposed Civil Rights movement; in fact, the Democrats tried to make sure that bill didn’t become a law.
• The average voting age is 60 (or something like that) in America. You think all those old folks will let a Black man become the president?

Added on Apr. 8, 2008

• Being gay/lesbian is a choice (though he claims he has nothing against them; right).
• Hilary Clinton is a lesbian (which he explains why Old Billy had to cheat because he wasn’t getting any from Hilary).
• Black people are lazy. Hence social welfare makes people lazy.
• Socialism makes people lazy.

Gulp.

For the first time in my life, I tasted what it felt like to have my words twisted in a family political wrestling match in order for one side to win an argument. The worst part was, what was said didn’t even come out of my mouth! It infuriated me, but at the same time, it saddened me that they had to resort to lying to make a stance in light of my father’s passing.

Ever since my father died, the secondary issue that everybody gossips about now is how the overall combined “Chu” family wealth was to be redistributed. You see, my father had many siblings; and when it comes to money, of course, for many people the idea of “integrity” is just a recommended trait to have whilist fighting for what they think is their “fair share”… I am sure all this is making the ancestorial spirits groovy about the whole ordeal.

Family politics is fun when watching from afar. Now that I got dragged into it for a lie someone (whose name shall remane anonymous) made up, the real “fun” is yet to come.

Oh, why must “lies” and “politics” always go hand-in-hand?

I’ve learned a lot over the past couple of weeks about a few things — about my family, about my extended family, about myself, and even about the American culture*, but above all, about my father. The Dead can really facilitate a lot of changes for the Living.
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The progression of thoughts upon hearing the passing of my father went something like this:
WTF? –> What happened? –> How did it happen? –> When? –> Who was there? –> WTF?

And then various stages of grieving process start to take place: denial, anger… blah blah and then finally acceptance. While I had no reason to go through the “anger” stage per se, I’ve had to take the “acceptance” stage rather quickly for practical reasons**.

It’s probably not healthy, but I simply haven’t got the time to be completely depressed about what happened… I tried getting back to work right away, but I was always distracted with thoughts and regrets lingering in my head. A man simply can’t work like this.
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It seemed too early to think about what to do with my father’s belongings and assets he left behind in Indonesia where he worked, but my uncles had the foresight to think ahead and had already raised a few questions. My brother thought it’s ridiculous to think about that while we were still grieving. But such as the reality of death — inheritance (and the said taxes), legal battles on ownership claims of not-easily-documentable assets, people who owe him money, or allegedly loaned him money… etc.

I wish I could offer some help, but my pathetic immigration predicament has squarely put me in the “useless” column on their list. And that’s just how I’d been feeling — useless.
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Grace and I have been talking about our “exit strategy”. And I think we’ve reached a comfortable solution with a few wrinkles to be ironed out. While we don’t have any details to offer, at least we now have a more focused direction and practical steps to achieve our objectives (except for the wrinkles).
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My youngest uncle took a trip to Indonesia. He went there not only to tidy up some loose end, but also to investigate on what really caused my father’s heart attack, a condition novel in the Chu family tree. His quest brought back some very sad, as well as, some very bright stories about my father, the man and the Buddha that he was. He spent his life keeping many things to himself that others would have been very loud-mouth about (i.e. me!). We now wish he hadn’t been so quiet about all those wonderful (as well as crazy) things that was happening around him.

Maybe I’ll blog about those stories if I can find a way good to tell them without doing them injustice.
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I got some closure after having learned that an uncle-in-law recorded the funeral. He came last week and handed me the two discs of DVDs he made from the funeral (as well as a wedded that my dad attended). The moment he handed me the DVDs, I felt much better already (though to-date, I still haven’t the gut to pop them into my computer to watch them yet). But at least now I can feel like I was somehow there to share the pain and grief of everyone else who attended.

* I had no idea it’s an American custom to offer food to the family of the deceased as a way to show condolence. As soon as Grace’s mommy group learned the news, offers to bring food and other things started pouring in. After having spent fourteen years in America, it took an unfortunate event for me to learn this.

** The day that I learned the news, I found myself having to reply to a client with emails on this project they still owe me a lot of money for, the money I knew I’d need pretty soon. And I needed to reply those emails to get their asses moving on getting their part done so they can pay me. It’s been a couple of weeks, and I am still chasing after that money!

I thought pretty hard on what to write or even how to begin on a new blog entry following the last one. No topic seemed appropriate. And it felt too soon to start blogging again. But then I thought it’s probably better to start writing than to bottle things up inside like my father did.

While I didn’t have any gripes with my father when he passed away, I feel incredibly… helpless for not being able to “see him off” at the funeral. I feel useless for not being able to help out with all that has to be done for the funeral, the ceremonies, the legal dances and everything that supposedly marks one of the defining moment in a man’s life. I don’t have a closure.

Everyone tells me my father wouldn’t blame me for the situation… for not being able to be there and for not being able to help. He’d understand. But I still don’t feel that a closure is upon me anywhere or anytime soon.

I recall this is how one can be messed up for not getting a closure to something important in life. Well, I don’t see myself going crazy anytime soon. But I am still looking for a closure that I can’t have, a way to say goodbye to my father, a way to find peace in myself and accept that he’d have understood my circumstances. Something like this made me question the wisdom and logic of the decisions I’ve made in the past several years, and how all this would have been averted if I had just…

Yes. There were a lot of “what ifs”, “what might have beens”, and “what could have beens”…. But I am living with “what is”…. I live with facts that I can’t change.

Now I will also have to learn to accept that maybe not everything has a closure. I’ll just have to live with my non-closure in peace — whenever I find it, the peace.

Grace: “So how long will it take Tibor to replace both break pads?”

Me: “He said two to three hours…”

Bryan: “Me talk first….”

Grace: “Bryan, please don’t interrupt. It’s impolite. It’s your turn when daddy and mommy are done talking.”

Home phone rings… Ignored.

Grace: “So to replace both breaks, it’d cost….”

Grace’s cell phone rings…

Grace: “Hello? Hi, Ma… Ok…. Hold on a second…”

Grace, wide-eyed, walks toward me extending her arm out to hand me the phone.

“It’s your mom. Your dad passed away.”
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The news came very unexpectedly. But then, any news bearing the death of a family member always does. It was like a 6-foot-3 guy throwing a punch in my stomach with his full weight behind him — shockingly painful, but at the same time, numbing.

How was I supposed to feel? The sound of my mom’s trembling, sobbing voice sent more shock waves through my empty mind than the news did. I simply had no idea what to make of all this.

Finally I concluded it was a mistake. Mom always jumped to conclusions.
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In the back of my mind, there was always a way to get out of this immigration hell hole I am in now, a way to finally resolve everything that’s stopping me from realizing my full potentials, a way to finally take good care of my parents like they did for me. I had an exit strategy — all planned; almost everything set in motion… all except for this immigration hell hole I am in.
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The heart attack swiftly robbed any chance of him ever seeing his grandchildren and denied him of seeing his other son and the only daughter getting married. He’d worked so hard all his life, but the only time he got to rest was when he took his last breathe. Fate has its ways to mock a man.
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So my exit strategy is probably flawed. It doesn’t account for emergency situations delicately, especially with the kind of shitty predicament that I am currently in. Maybe it’s time to revisit this again sometime. I’ll revisit this when I am in a better mood, or when there’s enough money in the bank, or when Taiwan has a new president, or maybe when… Whatever.
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It’s funny how time is conceived and measured in such precise terms. Scientists can measure almost anything relative to the time. And yet, to us humans, time is just an abstract concept that really doesn’t mean anything. And it’s relative only to the mind that perceives it. To Bryan, a two-and-a-half-year-old, having to wait for a minute to speak is like a life time — because a minute relative to his young life IS indeed a much bigger unit in proportion to his life than what a minute is to an adult. Time literally loses its meanings when human perceptions are thrown into the equation.

What I thought I had years to do and plan for turned out to be all garbage and fruitless idealistic dreams when the news of my dad’s death struck. It turned out that there was simply no time for all of that. It was either done or never to be done. The false hope that “time” will eventually take care of everything simply tramples any hope and opportunity that might have left to actually bag the issues in question.

With that, all plans will be re-assessed and re-valued in a more concise manner — especially with Grace’s pragmatic approaches, my dad’s legacy shall be to have brought us a new set of objectives, maybe a new direction, and maybe a new life. And that is our new exit strategy.

After having seen this and read this, it’s pretty stupid to imagine that Taiwan’s leaderships would ever entertain the idea of being united with China with its current records. The fact that the Olympics was even approved and awarded to China shows that the true spirit of the game was long gone (it was gone when Hitler was allow to host one in Germany!). And the fact that the world is “excited” about the Beijing games only makes everything sadder and more depressing…

Is the world blind?

Idiots.

Thanks to Cody for the stories.

I wrote about Firefox 3 Beta 2’s cool intro page upon first launching it. Now Beta 4 is ready with a new intro page (though I’ve been using the nightly builds for some time now). It’s table as hell. And it’s nappy as hell (almost as fast as Safari 3 now).

I honestly can’t find any bugs that are show stoppers. So head over to Oxymoronical and download the Firefox Nightly Tester Tool to help enable all your favorite plugins on this beta and start enjoying the new Firefox.

Here’s a list of improvements made in this version for you geeks out there…

On a similar note, sites I’ve built ever since Firefox 1.5 are still holding up perfectly in Firefox 3. But looking at the progression of Internet Explorer, what was built for IE5.5 almost always needed tweaks with each subsequent upgrade! Talk about poor forward planning on Microsoft’s side! Boo! And that’s what happens when a company makes piss poor browsers that doesn’t adhere to industry standards (and with its own internal standards changing all the time).

Bryan took a class trip out to Menlo Park last Thursday for a story time with his preschool at a local book store there. The entire class took the CalTrain to get there. The excitement in the kids’ eyes when they see a real train speeding by is unforgettable.

I’ve written Volusion a few times. The first time I used Volusion (version 4) it really sucked in terms of UI (though the commerce portion was pretty good). And many of the problems in V4 were addressed in V5. So kudos to Volusion for noticing what sucked and made improvements upon them.

The good on V5:

1. Much simplified templates. No more nested ASP codes that one may accidentally delete/alter and break the entire store. It’s now easier than ever for any designer types to make modifications to the store’s front page.
2. Way better administration console on the back end compared to V4. Cleaner UI with improved tool tips.
3. Great documentation now with video tutorials and an active community forum.
4. Ample email tech support.
5. Easy to copy/paste Div IDs that would ultimately to be replaced by generated codes. Volusion has good documentation on them too.

Now the bad on V5:

1. Templates are somewhat messy and limiting. For example, it’s hard to change the way the featured products are dynamically laid out on the homepage. There are tables upon tables upon tables nastily nested within each other with the generated codes — I’ve never seen a more ugly generated code with tables like that.
2. Web 2.0 functionalities need to apply (unless they were implemented by Volusion). It’s a little dubious that neither Prototype nor jQuery were allowed to run on Volusion because somehow it breaks the $ functions that make those Javascript libraries so beautiful and powerful to use.
3. It’s one thing to produce generated code, but it’s another to NOT give them good ID or class labels so that us designer/coder types can at least manipulate the look and feels more easily. It’s not unusual to target a table nested 3 or 4 layers down with CSS selectors trying to get something look just right.
4. Tables are evil, especially nested ones. At least have the sense of giving us the chance to alter/modify those templates that were generated from the ASP code (i.e. featured products). For example, give us the template that generates the output of each product. Even if they are just tables, show them to me and allow me to replace all those tables with nice and easy DIV tags!
5. About the only thing that someone can really customize is the homepage. Everything else is pretty much locked down (or at least I couldn’t find a way to modify the other product pages in any meaningful way). In other words, customization is limited only to the homepage (layout wise), everything else all you can do is font sizes, colors and what not (maybe some graphics)… that is if you know your CSS (Thank you, Firebug and Safari 3 Web Inspector)
6. Volusion claims that they have fixed the transparency problems with .png files. They lied. PNG files will show like a sore thumb in IE6 and earlier. And don’t bother to include one of those .htc fixes in the header or CSS either. Volusion doesn’t allow them.
7. Instead of using standard Prototype and other popular Javascript libraries, Volusion opts to use some commercial package that is 3rd rate at best in performance and generated output.
8. The pages are pretty slow to load. I’ll bet it’s because of all the nested tables. It’d be in Volusion’s best interest to cut down the load on CPUs on those nested tables per page so that its overall server performance can increase for everyone!
9. Email support is getting pretty slow in replying issues. It used to take mere hours, now the turn around is the next day.

I hope Volusion fixes at least the problems with Javascript libraries so that I can use Prototype and Scriptaculous to enable my clients’ sites to be more visually interesting (without constant page refreshes!). The next big deal would be to allow more flexibility with templates elsewhere.

Otherwise, I think Volusion is still a decent package. It’s just that many of the stuff they implemented are still stuck in 1998.