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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.

When taken with a broader definition, “toy” can mean a lot of things — gadgets for geeks, frivolous and over-priced show-off transporations, relationship between two people, or, simply, just something to play with.

Adults seem to have no problems treating ourselves with “toys” of all kinds. Of course, all justifiable in the name of productivity, utility and convenience (but seriously, when can a Rolax do that a $50 Swatch can’t?). We are also compulsive buyers who crave for the latest and the greatest model of everything. But what it comes down to is this: We are no more childish than the kid standing next to us, sobbing from the cold rejection of his parent for that Pokemon “toy” he really wanted. The only difference between us and him? Cold, hard cash and a parent standing in the way. We are no more clear-headed than he, nor are we more logical or reasonable than he.

I think males have a worse tendency in this than the female species, too. Just think about that for a moment. (Though ladies do have a tick for different types of things).

So I wonder why adults subject the double standards on kids when they themselves can’t control what kind of “toys” they think they ought to have and sometimes for unexplanable reasons. Raising kids takes a lot of responsibility. And everytime when I see a parent dragging his/her child away from a toy with unqualified reasons, I can’t help but wonder what kind of lessons s/he is teaching the child — that it is OK for me to impose this on you even though I can’t really tell you why.

When implied in a social order, this kind of subjective non-reasoning can take a toll on how we solve problems socially and politically. When a whole generation of kids growing up thinking it’s OK to have double standards, as long as it’s enforced top-down, we are going to have problems in the society. I guess I could argue that the same thing goes to raising children in general. But that’s a whole other topic altogether.

Murdza and I had a chat this morning. I’d forgotten how fast people from the Northeastern part of the U.S. talk. I misheard him say “I got an external RAID” when, in fact, he said “I got a Xserve RAID“. It’s all geek talk, I know… But the difference in the two statements are so profound (to us geeks) that I almost fell off of my chair when I finally figured out it was the Apple Xserve RAID he got!

But then, Jason and Alicia lived in NY for a while, they don’t talk quite nearly as fast… Maybe it’s just Murdza with his self-diagnosed ADHD where he ahs to get the thoughts out of his head really fast or else something else will pop up in his head and he’d forget what he was going to say just a second ago…

But it’s all good. I have been in California for too long, watching Chinese new channels* and eating Chinese food… It’s almost like I never left Taiwan! Hah! You gotta love it — America, a little piece of every country.

*The Chinese news channel actually lasts an entire hour which covers news from all over the world — unlike local news channels (or even national ones like CNN!) in 99.999% of the United States where their 4PM, 5PM, 6PM and 11PM news stories are almost all identical and cover only local and U.S.-related national news. If you want to know what happens somewhere else in the world, good luck. Unless the U.S. is in a war with them or is threatening to have one, they’d be luck to get even 1 full minute of coverage (case in point, when the President of Taiwan got shot during presidential election, our local news station in San Jose only gave it an ONE-sentence coverage and then moved on to some other petty and trivial local news).

I guess the title of this entry is a little misleading. So let me explain.

I don’t mean that Pixar’s latest movie is a flop or that the fact that now it’s in the fold of Disney, it will seize to be the greatest animation studio that ever was…

Oh… wait, I did mean the second half of what I just said…

Here’s how I figured Pixar is going to be Pixar no more. Shortly before the Pixar “merge up” to Disney, I started noticing something that Pixar has never done before, advertising partnership with Yahoo! SBC (now Yahoo! AT&T). While I was shopping for deals for my DSL renewal, Pixar’s Cars characters were all over the Yahoo! SBC DSL site. I didn’t think much of it then.

But then just last week I started seeing even more Cars characters showing up on TV commercials, most noticeably promoting State Farm for auto insurance. Well, sure, Cars promoting auto insurance — very cute and fitting. This is very uncharacteristic of Pixar since I have never once seen Woody or Space Ranger selling anything else but Toy Story movies and merchandizes.

And of course, it’s only business, right? It never occurred to me that when Pixar was independent, it never really “prostituted” its characters until Disney took over. And now millions of adults and kids will be bombarded with Pixar’s creations until its pristine brand becomes moldy and Disney’s corporate types weasel into dictating how stories should be told — hence the end of Pixar.

Now truly, everything is a commodity, even cartoon characters that once were just part of a well-told and superbly-animated story.

I wrote about FreeCycle earlier this month. So far the experience has been mostly positive. But I thought I’d share some insights I have over our experience with FreeCycle.

The thought of taking and getting “free” stuff almost invariably triggers the idea of “greed”. Brian and I debated over the nature of human a while ago. My position being that the world would probably go into chaos if there was no law imposed upon us. Human greed for power and money alone will probably swallow us whole. And I thought this FreeCycle thing couldn’t idealistically exist in a world of material needs.

I guess I underestimated human nature (or maybe it’s just when the sample size is so small, it skews the objectivity). It turns out that people do give away free and wonderful stuff that they truly don’t need. And as for us, we only take what we truly need and find use in. I mean, what am I going to do with that free book shelf or that free closet… or that free weight bench with weights… etc. if I don’t need them or don’t have a place for them? And I also found out that there’s a moral code of ethics in this FreeCycle community as well — if you were going to sell what you take, you’d have to be upfront about it to the giver so that s/he can decide if you can have it. I guess apparently people do follow that code (as far as we know anyway).

So my conclusion is: when anything and everything is free, maybe the society will be better off. My reasoning is that, because there’s no reason to take more of exactly what you need in the exact amount, there’s no reason to waste anything and there’s no reason to rob, steal or kill over resources. And because you got everything free in the first place, there’s no reason NOT to share whatever you don’t use with others for free! With petty pathetic issues out of the way, maybe then mankind will be able to solve real issues like hunger and poverty (because then there’d be no hunger OR poverty). And because you can’t really sell or buy anything, the “greed” factor just goes away. But of course there’s always the economics of supply and demand… But now I am beginning to think “economics” is actually quite evil because it effectively promotes (and celebrates) greed and unnecessary needs.

This reminds me of one of the StarTrek movies where one modern, naive Earthling asked a Trekkie: “How could you ever afford to build a spaceship like this?” (or something to that effect) The reply was: “In the future, the concept of money doesn’t exist. Everybody works towards the common good of the humanity.” (or sosmething like that). Maybe it’s that kind of idealism that keeps Trekkies like Murdza in the loop of StarTreks.

We are beginning to think that Bryan is a “talker”…. maybe it’s from all the phone excited phone conversations she had when she had Bryan that he picked up his exceptional skills with words. He can now comprehend and “speak” quite a few of the words that matter to him (“milk”, “mama”, “wua-wua” [one of the cats], and “mumum” [I want to eat whatever you are eating]). But there’s one word that he probably invented that we haven’t been able to figure out what it meant… maybe some of you parent-readers know what it is… “ah-boo-tchee”…

It’s been studied that babies who know of no spoken language can indeed communicate with each other with their seemingly innocent and meaningless talks.

Maybe the adult langauge is the stupid stuff. Maybe the baby langage is so much more supreme that we are actually dumbing them down to our tedious, boundary-driven and rules based languages.

While driving to my consulting gig today, NPR aired an interesting piece on how the composition of the U.S. military personnel today has affected how the military and its engagements around the world are reported, portrayed and politicized.

The thesis of the book the program was based on is that everyone should serve in the public services to really fully be a citizen of a country, but the authors of the book happened to choose the military service because of their personal ties to it and using it as a magnifier to put a few interesting ideas in perspective. One of the examples used was the contrast of the number of students from Princeton enrolled in the military 20-30 years ago (about 50% of all undergrads) v.s. today (exactly 10). The premise of the argument: Should the United States keep a military? If yes, who should serve?

It turns out that back in WWI and WWII, the Rich and the Powerful and their children were drafted to serve in the military for those wars. And as such, those who were in control, namely the politicians and other stakeholders of a war, were very careful on what to do with military deployment, precisely because they had someone very close serving in the military. Even the media reported wars differently because of own personal ties. And as a whole, the society took it personally when the nation waged wars.

While the book does not try to bash the Republicans or the Bush administration*, it points out that because today’s political and economic leaders don’t have a personal stakes and connections to the military (the example was that 70% of the Senate members 50 years ago were veterns v.s. only a handful or so today), when they wage a war or deploy troops to protect U.S. political or economic interests, they tend not to take it personally the human consequences of such actions.

I remember there’s a scene in Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore was going around the Capital Hills trying to enlist children of the Senators and Congressmen, but nobody dared to so much as to talk about the subject. The underlying message was clear: we need a military to protect our interests as long as it’s somone else’s children doing it.

One caller mentioned a book, “Starship Troopers” (which was made into a 3rd rated movie in the 90s), where the social structure only allowed a person to become a “full citizen” after s/he has engaged in some kind of public service. I thought that idea is pretty interesting and intriguing. It’d force each individual to partake in the business of the society, not just selfishly minding one’s own business from birth to death. That kind of experience would make someone more conscious about grander social issues than pathetic personal problems (boo-hoo, Jane broke up with John).

Sometimes I wish I can just keep driving to enjoy the road and listening to NPR when they have interesting programs on….

* One of the authors is a Democrat while the other is a Republican, but both have someone they are close to serving in the military

Grace has been getting sick along with Bryan in the past couple of months. But a problem with her left eye never got any better despite having gone to an eye doctor just two weeks ago (she was told the red-eye was caused by a cold virus that’d been going around). But the problem got worse as she started to have headaches.

Without health insurance, Grace had to pay pretty money to see a medical doctor whom spent an hour using various eye drops and precision equipment (I assume they are pretty “precise” ) examing her eyes. He concluded that it was a pretty serious infection which had now spreaded to her other eye. He proceeded to give Grace a prescription for a couple of different eye drops for treatment and announced that it’d take at least a couple of months to cure.

Thanks to Fiona for taking Grace to the doctor while I was in classes though… It just shows how impossible it is to have only ONE car living in the United States…

Rude people suck. That’s a fact.

But some people are rude in suttle ways. Take for example, the Asian chick sitting next to me in m PERL class. She has so many fricking stupid problems with her PERL codes that she almost never stops raising her hands for help during lab time. If the instructor didn’t know any better, she’d have monopolized the instructor. But worse, she fricking picks up her cell phone during class AND whispers into her phone as if nobody’d be distracted if she did that! And she does it like multiple times a day. What an idiot.

But I do have to say that she knows her way around vi pretty well.

I think the instructor is partly to blame for not telling her to stop doing it. Some instructors get pissed at even the ring tones…

Other than that, PERL really is cool. But the instructor kept on saying how PERL on Windows is different… etc. I wish Windows could just go away so that everything can work more harmoniously together — coding, browsing, working, playing… Ok, maybe not playing… There ARE a lot of games for Windows.

After having successsfully upgraded my spared Dell box to Fedora Core 5, I messed up the boot partition and had to do it all over again. So I decided I might as well document it here since the processs wasn’t quite as smooth as one’d hope.

UPGRADING FEDORA CORE 4 TO CORE 5 USING YUM
1. First, make sure yum is up to date. If you are going to upgrade your system with it, you might as well make sure the tool is up to pars.

me@localhost$ yum -y upgrade yum

This is going to download a bunch of other stuff other than yum. So be patient.

2a. Next, make sure sure your kernel is up to date as well. Or else when you upgrade to FC5, it will throw a bunch of errors like this:

Error: Package initscripts needs kernel < 2.6.12, this is not available.
Error: Package kudzu needs kernel < 2.6.13, this is not available.

So here we go:

me@localhost$ yum -y upgrade kernel

For multi-CPU systems, do the following instead:
me@localhost$ yum -y upgrade kernel-smp

2b. Just to be on the safe side, some packages may need to be removed before upgrading. This script should tell you what needs to go:

me@localhost$ perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if ((/Error: Missing Dependency:.*is needed by package (.*)$/) || (/Error: Package (.*?) needs.*, this is not available./))' /tmp/yum_upgrade | sort | uniq

3. Reboot. Make sure you boot into the latest kernel or else you are going to have the same problems as I mentioned before.

4a. Now delete any old kernels you have still on your system. First, let's see what's there:

me@localhost$ rpm -q kernel kernel-smp kernel-devel kernel-smp-devel | sort

4b. Delete old kernels:

me@localhost$ rpm -e kernel-version-number

I read somewhere that you should delete kernels by using rpm since it also tidies up your bootloader file for you.

Optional: Update rpm packages:

me@localhost$ rpm --rebuilddb

5. Now we are ready to get the FC5 upgrade package:

me@localhost$ rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora
.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os
/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm (this code wraps for cosmetic reasons. But you should copy/paste this as if it's one unbroken line.)

6. Finally. Show time. Let's upgrade this puppy...

me@localhost$ yum -y upgrade

Now sit tight and wait. This could take a while depending on your Internet connection. It took me roughly 5-7 hours on a moderately fast DSL.

7. Once everything is downloaded and installed, reboot.

8. It's probably a good idea to keep your old kernels. But I deleted my FC4 kernels.

INSTALLING VMWARE 5.5.1.x
Nothing is EVER easy on Linux. The same assumption (and proof) goes to updating VMWare after the FC5 upgrade. VMWare complained about not being able to find "the directory of C header files". To resolve this problem, you must download the vmware-any-any-update101.tar.gz and run it. Everything will hum just fine after this update is applied to VMWare.

Much thanks to: brandonhutchinson.com and LinuxSky.com (Simplified Chinese only)

Murdza sent me a link to a few friendly advice on fatherhood. Some of the items on the list are pretty damn funny (but how true!).

On the way back from lunch to class today, NPR had an interesting program about how infants/children often imitate adults in what they do and pattern their own behaviors after the adults. The program was interesting except this one caller kept on going with her story and her experiences… etc. I mean, often these call-ins are interesting. But I really HATE it when a caller just monopolizes the show by talking and talking and talking… Idiots!… I hated it so much that I stopped listening the program and started reading a book instead.

In other news, the PERL class I am taking is pretty kick-ass. I don’t think I can learn quite as much on my own in a 2-day period. I like these short and intensive classes where we blast through a whole quarter’s worth of material in 4 days! We’ll be covering Regular Expressions this afternoon… which is something I’d been dying to master… and now I have a chance to…