Month: November 2005

Late Night Rumbling

These couple of months seem extraordinarily long. Most of my classes at UCSC finally came to a close. As for my “Human Centered Design” online class at SCAD, next week is the finals; and finals at SCAD is always hell. Fortunately I invested a lot of time on the project in the past couple of assignments, everything is on schedule to be completed.

On a different note, Bryan finally “discovered” his hands a couple of weeks ago as well. Sometimes when one of his hands gets in his field of view, he freezes the hand and analyzes it carefully with his eyes wide open. At about the same time, he also realized his fingers were better than the pacifier. With his newfound soothing object in his mouth, pacifiers are no longer good enough for him.

Another interesting development about Bryan is that he has developed the ability to giggle out loud. We found out last week when I pretended to sneeze. He just laughed and laughed. Apparently it doesn’t take much to amuse an infant. Nor does it take much to keep an infant occupied for half an hour with the same mobile on top of his crib for the past three months.

Busy baby lives.

Science and Honesty

Stephen Hawking is said to be one of the most influential scientists in modern physics. He delivered a speech on Thursday about the prospects of physics ad its implications on science.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

When asked about his thoughts on President Bush’s proposal to put a man on Mars within 10 years, Hawking simply replied: “Stupid”.

Hawking answered one question with more seriousness than others–that concerning his feelings about the U.S. government’s policy on stem-cell research.

In Britain, he said, stem-cell research is seen as a great opportunity.

“America will be left behind if it doesn’t change its policy,” he said.

Bush’s fuzzy science seems to be everywhere.

Risk on Google Maps Plus Other Mac Games

Have you ever played the board game Risk? Some dude created one using Google Maps. Slashdot reports that a multi-player version is in the works…

Risk on Google Maps

I remember playing my very first games of Risk on a dinky Macintosh SE (the original all-in-one Mac), running System 4 with only 1MB of RAM.

Mac original OS
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Later I graduated to playing the first version of Prince of Persia when it became available. And let’s not forget the original Oregon Trail, apparently an educational title for social studies (but what did I care; it was a GAME!).

Prince of Persia
Image courtesy of Prince of Persia Unofficial Website

Oregon Trail
Image courtesy of Answers.com

via [Slashdot]

Free Video for All

Everyone seems to be on a hurry to make video sharing the trendy thing to do, making photo sharing the thing of the past. Revver has a huge library of videos that makes killing time a much easier task on lazy Friday afternoons.

Revver’s competitor, YouTube offers a similar service. Both companies received millions of dollars from venture capitals for making video sharing the new “Flickr” (now a Yahoo company).

There are a number of other smaller operations doing exactly the same thing. OurMedia, vimeo and DailyMotion are all part of this online video “revolution”.

Of course, what’s a revolution without the bloggers taking on the multi-million dollar seeded companies. Blip.tv is a blog that features tons of videos. Even more interesting, VlogMap shows a geographic map of where various different vlogs are using Google Maps.

Speaking of Google, the monster search machine recently debuted its video search feature. And a search war is never complete without Yahoo video search and MSN Video. One word on MSN Video: damn Microsoft has to make an online app that requires a Windows-only plugin to be installed. Get with the party, Microsoft.

While researching on various video search and sharing sites, I found an independent cable network “Current.tv“. Apparently Google has a hand in the venture since the network broadcasts “Google Current” as part of its programming. Former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore chairs this hip start up.

It’s interesting to note that not only is Google dominating the online battle, the company is diversifying into chatting, broadcast programming and a supporter of the open source movement.

Friends

After more than 15 email correspondence between the Malaysian/Indonesian gang, everybody finally settled on meeting at Michelle’s apartment on Friday night for hot pot. Bryan behaved exceptionally well, sleeping through most of the night, while the adults dined and wined.

We talked a lot about the troubles Chee-hoi and Widodo went through with “cat problems” around their houses. They complained that neighborhood cats refuse to stay away from their yards with occasional acts of retaliation, especially with Chee-hoi’s back yard. Then Widodo proudlly shared his money-saving tricks on his pool (one of the only TWO in the entire neighborhood, according to Google Earth). I never knew pools can take so much to maintain! Kind of takes the romance of owning a pool knowing all that insider knowledge.

On Saturday, Yi-sheng, an old friend from high school called to see what we were doing. So we decided to get out of the house and show him this Thai noodle place in San Francisco we love so much. We just love Thai food!

Sunday afternoon, we went over to visit Jason and Alicia, good friends I met from college, over at Menlo Park. Jason made us some really nice home-made Japanese dishes. The visit also gave me a new insight to Jason and Alicia’s past through a series of albums (including a scrap book that Jason’s mom made of his baby years). According to Jason’s mom, he liked Kung-fu when he was four years old. Maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t really follow through with it. At over 6-ft tall, he could easily be a killing machine.

We also saw Jason and Alicia’s two cats (finally). It was amazing to see how their cats are so totally fine with having leash put on them when going out for a walk. It was also funny to see how cats just can’t tolerate baby cries (ours eventually got used to it after a couple of months). But Bryan did OK today. We went through three diapers and a bottle of formula during the visit. Jason blogged about our visit soon after we left. He has a couple of tight shots of Bryan. It was very nice to just talk to friends without other distractions in the way.

It was nice to be out of the house to get some fresh air.

Will Work for Housing

After having some troubles with Yahoo HotJob’s resume builder earlier last week, I finally got a more generic resume set up to bombard the newspaper ads. So on Thursday, I emailed about a dozen companies with positions I thought I am capable of doing well from local Chinese papers.

Next I combed through Craigs List for any computer administration or web design gigs I could find and inquired about them. But such as the nature of Craigs List: Everybody wants a lot for nothing.

So the job search continues. As 2005 draws to a close, Grace and I prepare to tighten our belts for a long winter. But even in the wake of our worst financial crisis, we still feel lucky everything else in our lives are in still in good order (relatively speaking).

Hit Me, Baby

Ever since I installed shortstat on my site, the concrete statistics I am seeing of my site are just amazing. I am averaging about 1000 hits on a daily basis (of which 200 are unique visitors).

A good majority of the visits were from referrals or searches of “Steve Jobs” and his speech at Stanford. I guess my site continues to rank pretty high for having that speech available. I knew I was getting a lot of traffice, but 1000 hits a day was beyond my expectation.

Another interesting fact I discovered was that visitors from Japan and Korea are on the very top of the “hit list” for Steve Jobs’ speech. It’s pretty embarrassing to know that Japanese and Koreans are more aware of Steve Jobs than the Taiwanese… They are probably just too busy dealing with all the political mess on the island.

Shortstat - hits

Shortstat -countries

The Great Wall of America

A Republican congressman plans to propose that the United States build a 2000-mile fence across its borders with Mexico.

Yeah, the Chinese tried that thousands of years ago. Didn’t quite work as hoped… Did it stop the invaders from trying to kick Chinese butt? No. In fact, the wall was breached quite often.

Yeah, expect illegal immigration to go way down once the wall is errected.

Are the Republicans trying to compensate for something by errecting such a giant wall?

The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang The death of Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking (more), came as a shocking news to me, especially considering she died almost a year ago.

I first came across Iris Chang’s book when I was doing research for a topic for my graduate thesis on the Nanking Massacre. I remember emailing her asking for sources of images used in her book on Oct. 16, 2004. Little did I know, in less than a month, she’d commit suicide due to depression. According to Paual Kamen in her eulogy for Iris Chang, Iris was getting very depressed from discoveries she found in her research for another book she was writing about American POWs in Southeast Asia during World War 2.

While much has been written about the Holocausts of the Jewish and Bosian people, little attention has been paid to the Nanking Massacre. Worst yet, nothing has been done about Japan’s official and public denial of the event. But how could they avoid such truth? The atrocities the Japanese committed in Nanking were so terrible that even Nazis couldn’t believe it happened (John Rabe, a Nazi stationed in China at the time, became the “Schindler” of China by rescuing thousands of Chinese from the massacre. Imagine that.)

She was widely credited for bringing the atrocities of the event by the Japanese to the Western World through her best selling book.

An interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with Iris Chang in 1997 can be found here. Her official home page is here.

Resume Woes

After a short chat with Simon about prospects of getting a job as a web developer in New York, I decided to give it a shot. So I happily logged on to my HotJobs account via Yahoo to start refurnishing an old IT Tech Support resume and transform it into one suitable for a web developer position.

About an hour and a half into editing the resume, 90% done, HotJobs’ database freaked and returned a completely rubbish resume.

I just wasted 1.5 hour of my life on HotJobs for a resume that I’ll never get to use.

This is yet another reason why I should stop using Yahoo all together. Interesting how something as stupid as losing a resume can make someone depressed… as if not having a job for almost a year (with Grace constantly making sure I remember that) is not bad enough; it was adding insult to the injury. Stupid HotJobs.