ATPM 13.07

Issue 13.07 of the online magazine ATPM has been out, at last. I took on a bigger role with this issue by trying to come up with a cover image but things didn't work as I expected. Originally, I used 3D Maker to try to make a flapping flag with the word ATPM on the flag. It didn't quite work, not to mention the end result was a QuickTime movie, which was difficult to incorporate into the magazine. I went to plan B and, still going with the flag theme, this time it was the U.S.A. flag with stars replaced by the ATPM blue apple. On the foreground, I superimposed the word ATPM as a running sparkler - actually an animgif made from PersonalPaint. I like to make use of old technology where possible and thought this would be a perfect chance to use PersonalPaint on the Amiga, or rather in Amiga emulation mode on the Windoze PC. Alas, PersonalPaint's bitmapped technology didn't translate well into the modern world. The animgif may be fine but the still image was too jaggied for the ATPM editors to tolerate. There's so much PersonalPaint could do, or rather there was only so much time I could devote to exploring it. I couldn't find a way to anti-alias the jaggies and kerning had to be done manually. To make the letters more prominent, I would have to enlarge the image and doing so would exacerbate the issue with the jaggies. In the end, Lee Bennett, one of the Photoshop experts in the ATPM staff, re-did the cover image completely in Photoshop. I still got the credit for the concept but it was Lee and his friend who saved the day. It was mere days before the publication date, but thanks to delay to include iPhone coverage, Lee had a few extra hours to do his magic.

iWait

Last Friday, after dropping off my son at his music class, I walked about half a mile from Chinatown to SoHo to take a few shots of the iPhone frenzy outside the Apple Store. Lately, I've developed an interest in producing panoramas without the hardware, i.e. without a panoramic camera or lens. The picture above was made from four separate photos. I've learned that panoramas can be made more easily and more convincing if the individuals photos don't have objects in perspective. I actually took a total of six pictures but couldn't use the first two as they wouldn't blend well. Because of the building entrance (near the center of the photo), the long line of prospective iPhone owners was broken up shortly it rounded the corner. I got too easily discouraged and didn't snap more pictures. Perhaps I'll make up for it by capturing the Leopard release in October. Instead of my measly camera phone, I'll bring along a bona fide digital camera.

The panorama was put together using Photoshop Element's Photomerge feature. It did a pretty decent job, even if I had to manually place two photos. I tried other dedicated panoramic software, namely HuginOSX (open source) and DoubleTake (shareware), but didn't quite get it. HuginOSX looks totally incomprehensible to me, while DoubleTake, although raved about by a few bloggers, didn't work well with the set of photos I threw at it. It could be because of my photos.

Berhala Revisited

I showed my son the drawing I made of Berhala and told him that it was a beautiful island, with beach, palm trees, and so on. He mistakenly thought we were there for vacation and said he wanted to visit it some day. I had to elaborate and explained that we were there as refugees, with little food to eat and lacking many basic needs, like electricity and running water.

The drawing was made on a dry erase board so eventually I had to wiped it away. That's why I scanned it into the computer. The digital copy will be THE original. J decided to reproduce my handiwork on paper. He did a decent job, too. I did tell him about a doctor who for some reason built his own little cave on the mountain. He remembered that piece of detail and showed the house on the mountain on the left. He even made sure the two public toilets were there. He went further and added a rowboat with the oars outside. I am glad to know he has inherited his drawing skill from me.

Google Docs Redux

I originally played around with Google Docs just to see if it can really someday replace Microsoft Office. I'm among those who love to see Microsoft's monopoly be broken to bring them down. I hoped that Google Docs would succeed one day, but didn't see how that would come about.

Recently, I have the idea of trying to collaborate with my siblings on documenting our journey from Viet Nam to the U.S. Lots of time when we get together, the talk would gravitate to how we managed to survive the boat trip out of Viet Nam, the living condition on the various Indonesian islands served as refugee camps, and our early days in America. Naturally, as we got older the details got murkier. So, before we all become senile, we decided that we should write it all down. Easy said than done. Surely, I can type up something, and I believe I did write it in my PDA. But then one of my sisters live in another state and can only visit us once a year at most. We need a mean for us to collaborate over the Internet and Google Docs is the answer.

My out-of-state sister already has a Google account so it was easy to send her an invitation to our Great American Novel that I've started. I'll just have to help my other sister and my brother open a Google account and then it's all up to them to contribute to the project.

The project will have details like exact dates, or as exact as we can recall, and other personal info, so it's highly unlikely I'll ever publish it for the general public to see. It'll remain a personal project for the four of us to read/edit. No need to give all those crooks on the Internet additional info.

However, from time to time, I'll share some snippets like the one below. Refer to the picture above for the physical features of Berhala Island as described in the text.

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Of all the Indonesian islands that we stayed at, to me Berhala is probably the most memorable. It was the first island that we had a place to call home. We were lucky to bump into Grandaunt Luck, whose family was scheduled to be moved to Galang. Instead of selling the hut that they've built for themselves, they let us have it for free. It wasn't much of a home, but there was a front yard with a well to draw water from, a wooden bed for us to sleep on, a shower, and a kitchen area. Everything was made of some forms of woods and coconut leaves covered the roof and the "walls".

The hut was in a dead end street. A few times native Indonesians who wandered into the cul-de-sac would pretend to be visiting and stand around and engage us in broken English. Broken English on both sides, of course, because we ourselves only had a year of English before leaving Viet Nam.

Not too far from us was a stretch of sandy beach that, on the left (if you face the ocean), led back to the boat landing area. Unlike the neighboring Letung Island, Berhala was too small and insignificant to have its own dock. Rowboats would just beach themselves to let the passengers off, then the rower would push the boat back into the water and hop on the boat as the boat reached deeper water. To the right of the beach is one of the two mountains on the island. One time, along with a few other kids of the same age, I went all around both mountains. The mountain nearer to our hut, in whose shadow we lived, ended at the public toilet facing the Tulai Island. I'll arbitrarily call this toilet #2. There's a smaller stretch of beach there, but with the public toilet right there, I doubt if anyone ever bother to wade into the water. The second mountain started where the short beach ended and ended at the other public toilet, the one that faced Letung Island. Again, I arbitrarily assign the #1 designation to this toilet. Somewhere between the toilet #1 and the boat landing was an underwater walkway. On low tide, adults and teenagers could walk from Berhala to Letung. At the deepest point, the water was up to my chest. Back then I had to be already at least five feet tall. I used that walkway at least once. The island's natural beauty was pretty much intact and I was able to see the coral underwater in many places along the walk.

Crossword Express

It's been more than a week already and I still don't have the offer for the File & Print job. I guess I'll just have to wait for the bureaucrats to do their bureaucratic business.

So a few months ago, I had a renewed interest in doing crossword puzzles. Naturally, I wanted to make them myself. It's one thing to do them and it's quite another to make them. Years ago when I first started playing the puzzle and wanted to make them, I found it to be very difficult. Making the classroom puzzles, in which the shape of the puzzle is not a square and words are not continuous, with one-letter boxes with no definitions allowed, is easy. Making newspaper style where there's a symmetry to the puzzle, with the shortest word length of three, is much harder. I recall buying a DOS crossword maker on 5.25" floppy disk. I even filled out some form, wrote a paper check, mailed the whole thing in, and waited a few weeks for the ware to arrive. I do not recall ever trying the software seriously. I don't know what happened then, I was a single guy with an undemanding job, with no family and few other responsibilities.

Flash forward to the year 2007. This time around I need a Mac program to make the puzzle. There are not that many choices, really. Again, to make classroom puzzles there are a few choices, but I can even use online program like http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/CrissCrossSetupForm.html , no need to spend any money. My search ended with Crossword Express OS X (cwe OS X). While the interface is somewhat awkward and not pretty, it's a strong program that allows for customized dictionaries in addition to standard ones. Choose an existing grid or make your own, plug in some words that you want to be included with their definitions, then cwe OS X will fill in the rest for you. For my purpose, I needed to make a puzzle that includes words about my office life, the CNA exam, and computing in general. I entered the relevant terms and definitions into three separate dictionaries, then used cwe OS X's Construct Special Interest Puzzles feature to make the puzzle. I chose my three custom dictionaries as three sources for the program to draw words from, then whatever open is filled with words drawn from the English dictionary. cwe OS X actually can handle up to four custom dictionaries. If I had more time, I would have created a dictionary just for words related to the Mac.

The puzzle below, printed to poster size, is the current occupant of the whiteboard I usually decorated with my cartoons. I had much fun making up the definitions. For example, "You should get yours up-to-date" is the clue for RESUME. I'm not sure if the acronym PODS made it in, but I know I define it as "It's supposed to help you plan your career, if you are still here a year from now." PODS is the web-based tool to carry out performance review, which in my opinion is just a waste of time. Ideally, the puzzle should be about 21x21 in size and not have one-letter, undefined "word". Unfortunately, such puzzle would contain very few references to the three custom dictionaries. If I have more time, I would define more terms for the custom dictionaries, perhaps then 21x21 puzzle would be better. For now, I have to be content with this Huge gride and the many one-letter undefined words.

For security purpose, I've Photoshopped the picture that represents the puzzle and clues to not have some references to corporate info.

Ten-Point Rubber Band Star

top-of-the-arch

When I made my first million through Blogger and Google AdSense, my eldest sister wants to get into the act, too. Her blog is at http://top-of-the-arch.blogspot.com , has been raking in tons of money ever since. I simply don't know how she does it...

Seriously, no one I know has become millionaires with Blogger and AdSense. However, it is true my sister has a blog at the link mentioned. Her jumping on the blogging wagon was indeed influenced by my blog. She was already writing regularly for the local media and was thinking of having her own web site to promote her writing, so blogging, for free via Blogger, was the sensible next step.

Whereas my blog entries are not long but more frequent, sis' are long and entered weekly, but very detailed. Armed with Wikipedia and other meatspace reference materials, her entries give her adoring fans exact names and dates, background info etc. Especially when it comes to contact sports. Sis loves football and hockey, plus a dozen other sports. Once in a while, she also sprinkles in a story or two about our early days in the U.S., so if you don't get enough about my early days on U.S. soil, you can get the same story from a different perspective. There were stories that I didn't know at all, whereas there were others that I had an idea of. I suppose if I am her younger sister, we could have a heart-to-heart sister-to-sister chat, but such as the case, I'll just get the story a nugget at a time through her blog.

Do visit top-of-the-arch and click on those context sensitive ads to help finance my sister's goal of seeing the home games of all thirty NHL teams. It'll be a treat if you share her passion for sports, but I'm sure there are other stories you may find interesting.

Google Street View

I love maps. It might had started when I took English class in Viet Nam, in preparation for our eventual departure from Viet Nam as boat people. The English class was actually just the living room of a neighbor. There was a big table in the center but perhaps because there were too many students I found myself most of the time seated at a desk in the same room. Under a clear sheet of glass on the desk was a world map. When I was bored or didn't feel like following the class, I would read the map. The one year of English class we had really helped us later on as we settled in the U.S., but for me I also learned a lot about world geography.

I've used Google Maps from time to time, either online in a web browser or from the Mac app (Google Earth). Google Maps was recently improved with the introduction of Street View. Let's say you plan to travel to some city and want to have a view of the place at street level. With Street View, you can pick the location and have a 360-degree view of the location, as if you are standing there. Not 100% like being there, as the views are usually from the middle of the block and at the intersections, but it's still good. Right now, Street View doesn't cover every street there are, but I suppose that will change. In my neighborhood, so many family houses have been razed to make room for condos. It would be nice to have the old views saved via Street Views for posterity.

Street View is an issue for privacy advocates. In the news, it was mentioned that some pictures in Street View showed a man picking his nose, protests at abortion clinic, homeless people, etc. For me, as a dweller of a big city, that's just the typical street scene, but I can imagine it can be a big deal for people from smaller towns. Google does offer an easy way to report any offending pictures. I wonder if Google already has an army of Photoshop experts to doctor the images to remove the offending elements. Or would they just have the photographers re-visit the locations?

The Tooth, The Whole Tooth, Nothing But The Tooth

My son lost his first baby tooth while we were on vacation in China this past April. It came out relatively painlessly. J is very afraid of pain so after many days after the baby tooth got loose, he still didn't want to force it out. Then the adult tooth reared its head and it was time for the baby tooth to go. J came up with a plan himself - eat an apple while watching a movie. We just picked up in Guang Zhou a whole season of Ultraman Dyna on VCD, so that was the movie of choice. I had to play around with our relative's Windoze XP PC to have the movie play just right. So J enjoyed his movie and nibbled on the apple every now and then... and poof, it actually happened. The tooth came out, stuck to the apple. J bled a little bit but otherwise there was no problem. Whew! That night he put the baby tooth under his pillow and I got to play tooth fairy. I slipped him $20 U.S., which he gave to Mommy for his college fund.

This week a second baby tooth broke off, but it took a lot more effort. The first apple didn't work, neither did the second apple. It was so loose that it could be bent at a 90-degree angle. I let J use a dental floss but that only made the gum bleed. I joked with J about using more drastic measures, like tying one end of the string to the tooth with the other end to a window then slam the window down, but it only got him upset. This kid has no sense of humor when it comes to his physical pain. Finally, during some activities at Boy Scouts on Friday, the tooth came out by itself. J saved it in his shirt pocket and again slipped it under his pillow at night. I happened to have only a $5 bill on me so that was all he got. The next morning, he found the fiver and remarked, "Hey, only $5, but not bad." What a joy to be a kid...

Rolling Hill?

Tech Reviewer?

In Vietnamese, there's a saying that goes something like "When you are full, others invite you to dinner." Over the past few months, I have been actively involved with ATPM.com as copy editor and software reviewer. There is no money to be made, but I do it as a way to support the Mac platform, but I've learned a few things new about the Mac, too. A few days ago, through ATPM I got a lead on a job opening with a book publisher. The publisher is coming out with a Mac book and needs someone to review it for technical accuracy. The position's title is Tech Reviewer and while the money may not be that much, it's definitely something I would enjoy doing. One thing may lead to another and this gig may be a way into other technical writing/reviewing jobs.

Ever since college, I've discovered that I enjoy writing technical documents. At my various jobs since then, I was usually the technical writer for the place. Especially with the current job, my Knowledge Base in Lotus Notes is the source of tips and tricks for many colleagues. The great thing with Lotus Notes is that it's easy to send a link to the knowledge base entry, or if whole article is needed, all it takes is a Forward. When I first started my job search a few months ago, one of the first job I applied to was a Technical Writer job with Google, right here in NYC. Unfortunately, my resume didn't catch the hiring manager's attention. Perhaps with more experience with this publisher, and hopefully others, I'll have a better chance when Google has another job opening for a technical writer.

While I may not get this technical reviewer position because there are others in ATPM who may be vying for it, combined with my prospective job in the File and Print department at my current job, it's all good news.

183 - Omega Up

It's pretty obvious that our jobs as Network Account Administrators will not last long. All around us group by group lost their jobs to either MomBye or Columbus. As people in our group bail out early for greener pasture elsewhere, their vacancies are not filled. Naturally, we have to put in overtime yet upper managers have to ask our manager why there has been so much overtime hours in the past few weeks. Doh!

The story inspired me to imagine the scenario in this cartoon. It sort of harks back to my school days, Engineering School to be exact. We learned lots of formulas and equations. I made this one up about work accomplished in the office. To make the formula look more authentic, engineering-like, I used some Greek letters, ß (beta) instead of B and Ω (omega) instead of O. O can be easily misread as zero anyway.

Way back when I first started drawing cartoons at work, I drew one in the style of The Far Side. It's been a while and it's time to re-visit The Far Side. The characters didn't all turn out like what I envisioned, but I think the kid with the hand raised and the woman look genuine enough.

CNA Cold Feet

I had a third study session with my CNA buddies and even though it was somewhat better, I don't think I am ready for the big day. Originally, I scheduled an exam date of May 25 only because I thought I would have to take it before May 31. It turned out that there was no such deadline. The exam that we took the course for, #677, was scheduled to be retired May 31 and it's not offered any more any way. We are allowed to take exam #686 and that one expires in August. Still in the immediate future, but not as close as May 31. So, with mandatory OT and other things going on, I sure can use two extra weeks to prepare for the exam. I already re-scheduled the exam for June 8.

In other career-related news, a server admin in the File and Print group recently submitted his resignation. He is a good friend of mine and had recommended me as a possible replacement. This is the third time someone in another department quit and told me about the opening. I cannot remember what happened with the first instance, but with the second chance, even though the departing person thought I could hack it, in the end the manager just hired some consultant for the job. This time around, the manager in the other department actually asked for my resume then told me the job posting number. He even said, "We still have to go through the process." Does that mean that had there been no process, I would have gotten the job already? The idea of moving to another department and doing server work is exciting. It'll definitely look good on my resume. No doubt about it, even if I get the job, there's no guarantee MomBye will leave me alone. They can always put some guy in MomBye to remotely administer the servers in the U.S. Hopefully, there'll be a salary increase and I will get to keep my hours, which is not 9-5 or M-F.

Where's Waldo?

Yesterday I got my son J interested again in the Where's Waldo? book series. For those who are not familiar with the series, each book feature several scenes with many people with Waldo and his friends somewhere in the scenes. Waldo, Wenda, Wizard, and Waldo's inverse Odlaw are usually half-hidden in the pictures. Waldo's dog, Woof, is always mostly hidden and only his red-and-white striped tail is visible. It's a fun game for the child to explore the different scenes (beach, mall, street, zoo, etc) and even different time periods, as Waldo travels through time and space. J needed to write a paragraph about a day at the beach and one of the Waldo books had just the scene.

J was originally very interested in the Waldo books and I bought him a few in the series. One day I stumbled across a Waldo puzzle on the web and thought J would like it. Big mistake. The web Waldo puzzle was a still picture in which one would have to find the usual characters. However, after a few minutes, the still picture was replaced by a picture of a monster, accompanied by a scream. J was so scared he immediately covered his faces with the palms of his hand and remained still for several minutes. He declared he would never play Waldo on the web anymore and even stayed away from the books. Some sicko's idea of fun ruined my child's budding interest in Waldo. I won't give the jerk the credit by giving out his/her link, if it's still out there. The moral of the story is that the web is no place for a child to visit alone. I am careful enough to be with him all the times when he surfs the web. I made sure his Google preferences is set to have the strongest filter on, so even a mistyped word is less likely to become an obscene word. But I was not careful enough to test out the game before letting J play with it. Doh!

Actually, J doesn't yet know how to use the built-in Google search box in Firefox. He always type in the full URL, e.g. www.cartoonnetwork.com. However,
I did see my niece got to the wrong search page by mistyping words with Google.

Taking The Plunge

Today, I had my first CNA study session with my colleagues at work. We went over the first thirty questions of a practice exam. Not surprisingly, topics that I am not familiar with, simply because my job function doesn't relate to them, I failed miserably. For instance, as a lowly network account admin, I do not handle server works, like adding a new server to an existing network. One of the test question was "What's the command to type to update a network to include a NetWare 6.5 server?" Doh! I picked SYS:\SYSTEM\DEPLOY.EXE but in fact the correct answer was NWDEPLOY.EXE, located at the root of the NetWare 6.5 operating system CD. Either you know it or you don't, or if you are lucky, on a multiple-choice question you have a 25% chance of stumbling upon the correct answer. I'll just have to cram for the exam! But then there were the tricky questions that is sort of like a shaggy dog joke. FYI, a shaggy dog joke is a joke that tells you too much information, lots of details that have nothing to do with the punch line. In the case of the practice exam I just tried out, one of the question was about the minimum amount of space required on the DOS partition as required by NetWare 6.5. The answer is 500 MB, but instead of just asking straight out what the minimum space requirement is, the question informed me that the server had 1024 MB of memory. That confused me into thinking that, "Hmm, didn't I read somewhere that the optimal space a DOS partition should have is x MB plus the amount of memory?" The thing is they only want to know what's the minimum amount, not the optimal amount. Tricky, yes, but that's what studying is for. Better make them mistakes now instead of on the real exam.

Shortly after the study session, I took the plunge and called up Prometric to schedule my exam. It is all said and done - I'm scheduled for a 10 AM exam next Friday at New Horizons. The voucher number that I lost and re-obtained went into the scheduling program fine, there was some confusion about which exam I should take, but everything worked out, I just have to show up for the exam and pass it. Better get busy cramming!

Flying Hammock

Wham! Bam!! Exam Cram!!!

True to my world, I went out and bought an Exam Cram 2 book for the CNA Certification. I thought among the materials I picked up from the NetWare class last November had a practice exam, but none was found. There were some DVDs featuring the course on video but I'm in no mood to learn by watching TV. The practice exam that I was sure the instructor sent to me prior to the class, in PDF no less, thought to be surely on my Mac, was nowhere to be found either. I hate it when even my digital life becomes messy like my meatspace life. Just because you collected the info in digital format doesn't necessarily mean you have it. You still have to know something about it to find it. In this case, I thought it was an Acrobat file (PDF), but alas I was wrong.

I like to study by reading books and since both my NetWare books were old (NetWare versions 5 and 4.1!), I had to get a new book. Having a 25% off coupon from Border's helped soften the blow to my wallet.

The book Novell NetWare 6.5 CNA Exam 050-686 from the Cram Exam 2 series was written by Warren E. Wyrostek. It's not one of those monstrous volume that covers the history of computing, but just the gist of the CNA exam. It includes two practice exams in the book and a CD with a drill program and the book in PDF. The practice exams are in multiple choice format so I thought I could easily print them out from the PDF on the CD. I very much don't want to write in my book and the chance of using scrap paper was too good to pass. Not so faster, buster! The PDF is password-protected. On a Windoze machine, the Print menu option is even ghosted out. On the Mac, it's available but selecting it and you are prompted for the password. I guess they don't want the PDF to float around the Internet and fall into the hands of people who didn't pay for the book. I still managed to print out one practice exam by using the Mac's window capture keyboard shortcut. The exam came out to like fifteen pages or fifteen pictures. Import the pictures into iPhoto, select them all and print them out to a new PDF file, and voila I have a PDF of the exam again. It's true that the resulting pictures are not sharp, but the words are perfectly readable. I did have to adjust Preview's view option to make its window minimalist so that only the window outline and the window's content were captured. Us geeks just love to overcome technical barriers. Actually, if I were geekier, I would have written a program to force feed password to the print dialog box until it's accepted, but I'm not trying to take a hacking certificate here, just the CNA for now.

CNA Or Bust

"Gần mực thì đen, gần đèn thì sáng," so goes the Vietnamese proverb. Translated word for word into English, it means if you are near the ink, you'll be blackened, but if you are close to the light, you'll be bright. The somewhat equivalent English saying is "Tell me the company you keep, I'll tell you what you are."

In the office, some of my colleagues have been getting together to do group study for the CISSP exam. The sample questions that they discuss bore me to sleep, but such is the case with certification exams. A bunch of useless info to be memorized, perhaps never to be used in the future. However, seeing them diligently convening for their weekly meetings has inspired me to make an effort at rallying my other colleagues to study for the Certified NetWare Administrator (CNA). A bunch of us took the prep course in November 2006. The instructor had kindly walked us through the process of applying for a test voucher and our manager gladly approved us all. We had all the materials to study for the cert exam... only if we had the time and the will. Ideally, we should have taken the exam within thirty days of completing the class. The voucher is good for one year, but it turns out the exam itself will be retired on May 31. Supposedly, some newer exam will take its place, perhaps with more questions reflecting the current NetWare state-of-the-art. So, with less than a month to go, I finally made the call to the testing center and obtain a registration number. Next, I plan to study at work during lunch hour over a few days, take the few practice exams that I should have. I will even buy a book just to get a practice exam if I turn out not to have any. I was sure the instructor sent me something before the actual start of the class, I even thought I detached the PDF and kept it on my Mac, because I was aware that my work email is purged every ninety days, except for messages specifically marked as exception. No luck, I searched my Mac hard drive and few flash drives, but the practice exam was nowhere to be found. Oh well, I've written to the instructor just in case he still has the exam. I am also counting on some colleague to still have it.

For now, I've arranged the first group study for next Tuesday. The next one will be Thursday, then so on into a second week. I plan to take the exam on Friday, May 25. It's an ambitious plan, given all regular work, overtime hours to be expected, a review for ATPM.com, and other fun things I do, but I just have to do something about my status. I know that I know much about computers but without any certification, I'm all just talk.

CNA Or Bust!

Pump Up The Water Volume

182 - Last One Out

I just had my first vacation for the year. My rule of thumb for vacation days is use them as vacation days and not exchange them for money. When the vacation day is taken, you can do whatever you want the whole day, it's all yours. When you get money for it, Uncle Sam will take a chunk out of it. So, in case I get axed later in the year, I want to make sure all my vacation days already used by then.

It is now time to actively search for another job. In a somewhat of a surprising move, a colleague who one time was my group's manager, but have since moved to another department, found a job elsewhere. In the same week, a handful of people finally had their 60-day notice caught up with them. There were long farewells here and there, luncheon, drinks after work, the usual thing. The sad thing is there will be more of those.

Because of the rotten egg phrase, I decided to portray the hapless office workers as eggs being pursued by a steam roller. I thought of Catbert the Evil HR Director as being behind the steering wheel of the roller. Some eggs already got caught by the Mumbai job loss, or Mumbified (just a word I made up), while other with many years with the firm just sitting tight to wait for the generous severance. The two eggs on the foregrounds are looking for jobs, one still shooting out resumes while the other one agreed to take up a janitor job.

I've contacted a few headhunters and signed up with one job site. I need to re-visit my dormant profiles in Monster.com and HotJobs.com to update them. I keep seeing ads for Dice.com so that might be worth a visit. My backup contact keeps telling me that he doesn't want to carry my load if I leave before him. Too bad, may the best man win. I would love to stay at this job longer, but with impending doom and gloom, on top of my salary freeze, there is no future for me here. Let the race begin and the last one out of here is a rotten egg!

Be All You Can Be

I have finally started my search for a new job. One headhunter contact already told me that he rarely got positions for LAN Account Admins, so there is little hope with him. Another hunter I got in touch through my sister V is not in the I.T. field, but she had graciously put me in touch with three others in the area. Hope something will come to fruition.

I signed up with NYCJobZone.com through a banner ad on NY1.com. I'm not ready to leave New York City, much as I hate its crowded streets I might as well limit my scope to the city. Strangely, the first email notice I got from NYCJobZone.com is all about... the U.S. Army! The first position was titled musician, the second was Security Position, third was Officer, and the last was... SOLDIER! Perhaps because I mentioned network security in my resume, NYCJobZone got it mixed up with physical security. I don't think the Army wants someone in their late 30s standing guard of an ammo dump or other sensitive locations. I'm in no shape for boot camp or to become a killing machine. Oh well, let me just, uh, soldier on with my job search...

Big Big World

America the Green

Just in time for Earth Day, I recently subscribed to America the Green (ATG) podcast, with Carolyn Parrs, Irv Weinberg, and John Biethan. I figured I can't claim to be environmentally concerned without being regularly informed myself. The mainstream media can only cover so much environmental issues. I need to know more about the green issues and podcasts, for me, is the best way to go.

The first podcast of ATG I happened to listen, Saying I Do To A Green Wedding, was interesting but doesn't apply to me. It was educational and interesting nevertheless, with topics about farm raised seafood, conflict-free diamonds, biodiesel transportation, etc. Yet the second podcast that I came across, Rethinking Recycling with Justin Stockdale, was where I learned something both disheartening and fascinating. Mr. Stockdale told the listeners that landfills are made to ensure their contents don't decompose. The trash in the landfill is kept dry so that they don't decompose much. No decomposition means no liquid coming out of the trash, no chance of leakage into the landfill's surrounding. Likewise, less smell comes out of the landfills as a result of no decomposition. Supposedly, there was a case of a newspaper found in a landfill that's still readable. So much for bio-degradable diapers, too. If those Pampers end up in a landfill, the sh!t won't go anywhere!

Ubuntu and BitTorrent

As a Mac user, I see no reason to mess with Linux other than to see what's all the fuss there is. I am not interested in hosting my own web server or mail server, so Linux server is out of the question. Linux on the desktop still has years to catch up with Mac OS X's beautiful GUI, supposedly, so there's no attraction there either. However, with all the Intel-based computers I rescued off the street, some with hard drive, memory, CD-RW drives, etc. intact, I'm tempted to turn one of them into a Linux desktop. With broadband access, I can just download some distro as an ISO image file, burn the file to a CD, then stick it into the host PC, and, oh, some hours later I'll have a Linux desktop. Of course I haven't gotten around to doing all that because while the whole process can be put into one sentence, actually doing it takes much more time. Or, as mentioned in Every OS Sucks, a comedy song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, even though the fun is in the technical details, I have a girlfriend and things to do, or to be exact in my case, I have a family and things to do.

From what little I heard, Ubuntu seems to be the easiest-to-use Linux distro out there. Just boot it up and it'll automatically detect everything for you. I've thought of giving Ubuntu a shot and the recent roll-out of a new Ubuntu, nicknamed Feisty Fawn, seemed to be just the ticket. Alas, demand for Feisty was high and all the mirror sites were overwhelmed. However, I was able to download a torrent file and got the new distro via the BitTorrent client Azureus. Recall that the last time I checked out BitTorrent technology, I concluded that there was nothing to it other than for pirating movies. Well, here's a perfectly legit use of BitTorrent. After getting my own copy of Ubuntu Desktop for i386, I became another distribution channel of what I just downloaded, or in torrent lingo, I help seed the resource. Well, it seemed easy to become a seeder, but it took much mucking around to really become a useful seeder. Supposedly my NAT (network address translation) was not setup correctly such that people couldn't get to what I offer. I had to read the Azureus FAQ over and over, trying to fully understand a whole slew of seemingly foreign terms like seed, peer, leech, snub, tracker, etc. In the end, it was a matter of configuring my DSL router to allow incoming traffic to a port Azureus expects to make data available to. I have been doing my part in making the data available to the public since three days ago. I plan to maybe keep up the service for about a month. I'm not too keen on keeping my computer up too long as it wastes electricity that way. The file itself is about 600 MB but according to Azureus I've uploaded more than 5 GB of data. Now, only if I have the time to actually make use of the file...

Watch The Two Closing Doors

Down With Smoking

One aspect of my recent trip to China that was negative, beside the initial monotony, was second-hand smoke. I've been living in health-conscious New York City for so long that it is a given that eating out automatically means it should be a smoke-free experience. Not so in China, or any other places that still think it's perfectly fine to light up anywhere smokers feel like. I think Asians such as Chinese and Vietnamese simply love smoking. Maybe it's only because I know more Asians than people of other races, but most Asian men I know are smokers, especially outside of the U.S. It didn't help at all that our host, Uncle P, was a heavy smoker. I cannot recall if he smoked much back in 1994, perhaps because it was a shorter stay and we didn't have dinner with many people. He sure did during my second visit. He lit up before the meal, during the meal, after the meal, in the bus, off the bus, around children or with no children around, so on and so on. He may be excused because he lives in China, where such behavior is perfectly acceptable, sad but true. What was extra disappointing was that in our big group was an uncle on my wife's side. He lives in NYC all these times and must know the rule. Whether he followed them in NYC or not I didn't know, but he sure enjoyed his smoke very much during this visit, lighting them up almost everywhere. Whatever restraint he might have regarding smoking while in NYC simply went out the window. Of course 9 out of 10 men who went to the various dinners that I attended were smokers, but again, they were Chinese in China, where smoking is still allowed in public places. Nothing ruins a good meal like a whiff of second-smoke in the face. I tried my best to avoid the smoke but I am sure my lung blackened much during the visit. About the only place that prohibited smoking was McDonald's. I'd rather die from heart disease or whatever Mickey D's food bring, at least it's my choice, whereas with second-hand smoke it's someone else's bad decision and rude behavior that do the harm.

Luckily, Hong Kong's new smoking ban just took effect Jan 1st of this year, so my HK visit was extra pleasant. When the smokers in the group had to fill their needs, they had to step outside just like back in NYC.

Recycling in China

Every now and then, the news would have a story about some environmental problem in China as the country catches up to Western standard. The Yellow River is overused for some industry, sand storm blasting Beijing because of destruction of trees, you name it. So it was comforting during my recent visit to see most of the public trash receptacles having separate containers for recyclables and non-recyclables, such as shown in this photo, taken at the San Ya Nan Shan Cultural Tourism Zone in San Ya, Hai Nan Island. In some other places, I spotted plastic containers set aside just for the purpose of collecting used batteries. Of course, it's one thing for the government to make available the recycle bins and it's something else for the average person to be aware of them. Even in my office in the U.S. of A., the recycle bins often have non-recyclables in them.

Just as some U.S. states have bottle-recycling laws, whereby empty soda cans and bottles are worth a nickel or more each, in China, there's a market for plastic, glass, and paper. Bottles for drinking water had some value, as I saw old ladies here and there collecting them. In Tai Cheng, I noticed many people wandering on bicycles, with a wagon behind them, picking up recyclable items. They usually have a glass bottle mounted on the bike's handle bars, on which they would tap periodically to draw attention to themselves. Perhaps they pay a small price for the materials, or got them for free, what I know for sure is that their wagons usually had things in them.

Well, Well, Well

The Rough Ride Home

The long oblication finally came to an end this morning. Technically, it happened yesterday, as it is now 11:15 a.m. on Monday, 16 April 2007. Thanks to the time difference, we "gained" twelve hours by the time we landed - it was already 2 a.m. 4/16 in Hong Kong but we set our clock back to 2 p.m. 4/15. Some kind of Time Travel, eh?

It was a rough ride at times. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, when the plane was shaking from collision with jet streams, I was thinking that I wouldn't make it home to post another blog entry. Or be in the office the next day to whip up some more KiX scripts. By the time we reach JFK, the weather was bad and the plane had to circle the airport a few times before actually landing. Sounds of people throwing up could be heard here and there in the cabin. I normally have no problems with motion sickness, but during the wait to land I was starting to develop a headache. Perhaps the sum of the rough landing, the run in the rain to get the car, and jet lag was too much for me. I had a nasty headache but it went away after a few hours of sleep, sans dinner.

Still, it's good to be home.

What's New in Hong Kong

At the hotel I stay at, Harbourview Horizon, the club house is open until only 9 p.m. I got back at 8:30 and quickly whisked away the kids to the club house for them to enjoy a few precious minutes in the playground. These same kids were complaining about sore feet from walking all day, but now had the energy to slide, run, and crawl. Kids!

I didn't expect Hong Kong to change much since my visit in 1994. After all, how much more advanced can it be? Well, it can and it is.

I already mentioned about the subway's glass partition, but another obvious change is the use of RFID tickets. Back in 1994, entering or leaving the train platform requires feeding the ticket to the turnstile. For us tourists who buy single-trip tickets, this still holds true, but for the locals the Octopus card is the way to go. Without even taking the Octopus card out of their wallet/purse, most people simply put it atop the card reader and off they go. It is similar to the system in use in some office buildings. How I wish the NYC subway would evolve to the next level and use the same method. It is very frustrating to slide the dang MetroCard too fast or too slow.

Victoria Peak is probably to Hong Kong as the Statue of Liberty is to NYC - you have to go there when you are in HK. For me, another reason was for my Son to enjoy yet another train ride. He loves train very much. I remember the Peak that I visited in 1994 only had a few telescopes to look around. There was a path to walk about, perhaps lined with local artists hawking their wares. The Peak that I visited yesterday was a multi-story mall. There was a post office, a video game parlor, Madame Tussaude Wax Museum, souvenir shops, fast food restaurants, etc. Sadly, another change is the higher level of pollution noticeable from the Peak. I don't know if I have any 1994 photos taken from the Peak, but supposedly if I do, I would be able to see the difference. All the building tops are now covered in smog. One entrepreneur on the Peak viewing platform claimed that he can "clean up" the smog in the photo. I suppose he would take pictures of the tourist and then digitally add them to a clean HK skyline.

During my 1994 visit, I stayed briefly at the apartment of my future wife's Uncle on her mother side. Near the apartment was the "new" Dragon Center mall. What made the indoor mall special was that it had a working rollercoaster. Supposedly, for safety reason, the coaster is no longer used, but the tracks are still there. I tried to photograph the tracks but for whatever reason a security guard didn't let me. I don't see why. Even with 911 and threats of attacks to the NYC subway, no law has yet been passed to ban photographing in the NYC subway. Maybe the guard just liked to pick on us tourists. Other new additions to Dragon Center are the ice skating rink and arcade zone.

Hong Kong Subway

I've just had my full day in Hong Kong. As someone who loves mass transit, I was amazed anew by the Hong Kong subway. They now have added glass screens to separate the people waiting on platforms. Only when trains arrive in the station do the doors on the glass screens open up to admit and discharge passengers. Amazing! No need to worry about someone having seizure or some drunks falling onto the track.

Hello From Hong Hom

On Thursday, in the afternoon, we took a train from Guang Zhou to Kowloon, Hong Kong. The trip completed the transportation modes we used on this vacation - airplane from JFK to HK International on Lantau Island, bus from Hong Kong to Guang Zhou, short boat ride during a theme park visit in Hainan, and now train. We even had a cable car, like a ski lift, when we visited Monkey Island, prior to checking into the Waika Hotel. The last night we were in Taishan, my Son and a cousin also got a moped ride around rural China, thanks to Uncle P.

It feels almost like home while in Hong Kong, just that people drive on the "wrong" side of the road. We arrived in Tsim Sha Tsui, a tourist area, at night and neon signs were everywhere. The sky two floors up in almost all directions were just neon signs of stores trying to grab our attention. We decided to eat Vietnamese but it took a few queries with the local to find one. Even then, the small store had to have an employee walk us two blocks to the bigger store to accommodate our group of twelve.

BTW, the China Firewall isn't in use in Hong Kong. I can finally write new entries and see them exactly as how the world sees them.

Vacation Day From The Vacation

Yesterday, some time during the long wait for the pantyhose shopping spree to end, I decided that I would regain from the herd some control of my day. I decided that I won't be leaving the hotel the next day, i.e. Wedn. April 11. The Wife and her family etc can go anywhere they want, I just won't be a part of the herd, at least for the day. The Wife reassured me that they would visit some local tourist spot and there won't be a shopping event, but I stood my ground. I feel guilty about not being with my Son but there were many adults in the group, someone better be a responsible adult and not just go ga-ga at the sight of a SALE sign or be in deep conversation about the good old days and pay no attention to the kids.

I started the day with dim sum with the Wife's old classmates. Well, it was really she and her chums eating and talking at one table while Son and I ate at another table in the same room. I can take that. It's something to do for the Wife, not for some distant relative's fifth cousin. After the Wife left the hotel with the Son, I took a nap, watched TV, read a sci-fi paperback, and listened to a This Week In Tech podcast on my iPod, with a nap or two here and there. Then I had lunch in the Western restaurant in the hotel lobby - porkchop and Coke. Originally, I wanted seafood pizza, but just because it was on the menu didn't mean the chef on hand could make it. After lunch, I plunked down another 15 yuan, or about $2, for another hour of Internet time.

So much with complaining. I did enjoy a few moments here and there. Borrowing a page from my sister's blog, below is a list of differences I noticed between this China visit and that from my first visit back in 1994. It may not be 1994, it may be 1993, but for argument's sake, I'll assume it was 1994.

• Water. Back in 1994, at the home of Uncle P, where I stayed at, water had to be obtained from a hand pump. That was better than going to the public well, but still it was an inconvenience. On this trip, I learned that indoor plumbing has arrived to this part of rural China, even though the pipes are outside the walls, not inside them. Only in newer buildings would one find indoor plumbing with the pipes out of sight. In older houses, it would be too much troubles to knock down the walls to hide the pipes, would it not?
• Paved Roads. One night during my 1994 visit, Uncle P and I had to ferry the Wife's maternal grandma home on bicycles. There were some large pieces of kitchen equipments, maybe a wok or a rice pot, and they were tied to the bicycle I rode on. Uncle P took care of carrying grandma on his bike. The distance wasn't that great, but the trip was difficult because the road consisted of dirt and rocks, with puddles here and there. It was nighttime and we had perhaps only a flashlight, the moon, and the stars. Our two bikes were the only traffic on the road. More than 10 years later, the road is now paved and lit. Traffic consists of many trucks, mopeds, and even some cars.
• Telephone. I recall that prior to the visit, while in Hong Kong I had to go the post office to send a telegram to Uncle P. Then after we arrived, I had to walk the narrow path across some rice paddie to the village post office to send a letter to the U.S. I don't remember if the USPS had started using self-adhesive stamps back in 1994, but at the time in the village the village post office had a jar of rice glue on the front counter for attaching the stamp to the letters. Nowadays, many families in the village have telephone and many people walk around with mobile phone, some even with those Borg-like Bluetooth headsets. I noticed that many houses' outside walls have phone numbers scribbled by hand. Uncle P's daughter said the writings are advertisements for some services.
• Internet Access. Back in 1994, even NYC didn't have wide adoption of broadband Internet access and the village probably had zilch. Now the Net is reachable via DSL, which is understandable since DSL works over phone lines. I don't know about the big cities, but I can see that cable TV is not yet available in the village. The phone had become a necessity so DSL adoption is natural, but watching movies and TV shows on cable TV is still a luxury. I borrowed Uncle P's PC one day and access was so-so. At the Waika Hotel in northern Hainan Island, my Son tried to play some game on PBSKids.org and it took forever to load. In general, anything half the world away took time to load. Not surprisingly, I haven't seen a single Mac computer. It's so much easier to cobble together a motherboard and some adapter cards to make a PeeCee running on Windoze. BTW, at 15 yuans/hour, my Internet time at this hotel, the Sunrise Hot Spring in Taishan, is the cheapest I found on this trip. At Waika it was 20 yuan/half-hour and at Holiday Inn Resort in Sanyan (south Hainan) it was 30 yuan/half-hour.

My one-hour computer time is almost up. I do have photos further supporting some of my findings listed above, but even though I have the necessary hardware to transfer the photos to this computer, I don't want to risk messing up the PC. It's a Windoze PeeCee after all, who knows what kinds of problem I may introduce into it by just connecting it to a digital camera. Speaking of PC problems, a few days after I first used Uncle P's PC, his daughter had to rebuild the machine from scratch because it crashed. Piece of Crap.

Taishan, Second Stay

I am on my second stay in Taishan, or some rural area of it to be exact. I had the false hope that on the first stay I did my part in visiting the in-laws' relatives, neighbors, and friends, but no... Today we visited a friend of my father-in-law, but the worst part came when the women in the group descended upon some store that sells pantyhose and bras at very good price. I don't know how much money they saved, but I was bored to tears after the many hours waiting for them to finish their shopping. Marriage, schmarriage, what a compromise...

China Trip

I finally found a few quiet moments to compose a second blog entry while on vacation. I see that there is one comment to the first entry, but viewing it is equivalent to previewing the blog, which is filtered out by the China Firewall. I'll just have to wait until I am outside the Firewall, or back in the U.S. of A. On second thought, I am able to see the comment as an email message in my Gmail inbox.

This trip so far is mostly an oblication, just a word I made up - a combination of obligation and vacation. The trip started out in the inlaw's home village and everything was for meeting all those relatives on the wife's side. No fun there, although I probably have some new faces for the extended family tree I maintain. Also, there's plenty of materials for future blog entries. In no particular orders, I can see future entries on the following topics:

• bullshit, the real type that comes out of the bull, not those found in politics or some corporate offices
• indoor plumbing with exposed pipes
• squat toilets
• Internet access
• rural landscape
• community life
• Hainan tourism
• homesickness

Testing The China Firewall

Can a blog entry be made on qaptainqwerty.blogspot.com while being inside China? The good news is Yes, but the bad news is that the finished entry, or probably the whole domain of blogspot.com, cannot be viewed.

Off To Vacation

I'm all packed and ready to go on my vacation. Out is the DVD player and the two discs - there is just no room for the player. Well, the kids just have to be creative and find other things to do. That video iPod sure looks attractive now...

I'm tempted to try to access Gmail via a mobile phone. Perhaps if that SIM card switcheroo works out on my device, I'll try it, if it doesn't cost so much. I've thought of giving moblog (mobile blogging) a try, but I haven't made a penny with AdSense so I don't see the point of spending extra money on maintaining this blog. Perhaps I'll update the blog via the computer at the home of the wife's relative. I even bring along the transfer cable for the digital camera, but don't count on it - it's Windoze after all, chances are I'll have to do twenty things to the PeeCee before it can recognize my camera and bring the photos in. I'm sure there are Internet cafes along the trip. It's a matter of finding the time to sit down for a few quiet minutes to compose my thought. There is a disadvantage in traveling in a big room, especially when it's your in-laws and they all think alike, which somehow makes all your decisions invalid...

Qaptain Qwerty out...

Fun Pack

I'm mostly packed for my trip. Actually, that should be "my wife already packed all the essential stuff, like clothes, hygiene items, and medicines." The things that I like to pack are what I call fun stuff. Things to keep the kids, perhaps myself, entertained during all the dead time, e.g. in flight, waiting at the mall for the women to go shopping, etc.

Cathay Pacific has personal TV in every seat, so that will help provide plenty of in-flight entertainment. Originally, I was going to buy an airline adapter to power my portable DVD player, but now that won't be necessary, I hope. Other things that I definitely will bring are:

• crayons
• markers for use on paper
  
• dry erase boards and markers
• paper for drawing
• iPod with Y-splitter and two sets of earphones
• novel - I swiped a thick novel off my colleague's personal sci-fi library in the office. I should send him a note...
• Flushed Away and Happy Feet DVDs, mostly to be used during some down time in China or HK. I keep the receipt in my wallet in case Chinese authorities suspect the discs are illegal copies...

Other things to bring:

• adapter to use China wall electrical sockets
• extension cable to convert one outlet to three - wonder if the voltage difference will matter...
  
• charger for iPod
• charge for cell phone - supposedly my cell phone won't work in China and at some steep roaming price in HK, but I heard that I can buy a SIM card in HK and swap mine out to make local calls. Interesting concept.
• dental floss
• extra AAA batteries for my ancient Handspring PDA
• digital camera with extra battery and memory card
• Besta Chinese electronic dictionary - hey, it might be useful in reading street signs somewhere in China or HK.

I'm sure there are other things I want to bring, but I am sure I'll think of them just as I head out the door...

China Vacation

In a few days, I'll be going on vacation with the in-laws to their home village, then to Hainan Islands and Hong Kong. Ho hum. Been there, done that. Granted it was more than ten years ago that I last visited China and Hong Kong, but I don't expect much difference. Originally, I was hoping I would go to Shanghai but in the end it turned out we won't have enough time. Hopefully, the trip will be an eye-opener for my son. It'll be his first trip to a non-Western world.

In my mind, China is still that Evil Empire communist country where the government crushes its citizens. Where corruption and bribery are standard fare. Where intellectual properties don't mean anything. Where ripoff and poor imitation of great designs are made. I guess despite what my late father's attempt in ingraining in our mind all the great things about being Chinese, I've spent too many years growing up in the U.S. to have any positive feelings toward China the country.

I don't look forward to the long flight half-way around the world, the constant bargaining charade to go through whenever we have to buy things on our own. To be fair, bargaining was required in most non-mall stores in Cancun, Mexico, too. Oh, well, I'll do it for the Kid.

World66.com

create your own visited country map

I like to use Blogger's Next Blog button to randomly visit other blogs. They have done a good job of cleansing blogosphere of splogs (fake blogs that are really spams web sites). One blog I happened upon showed a map of the world with the countries the blog writer had visited. The service came from World66.com, linked in the title of this blog. Just check the boxes corresponding to the countries you have visited and generate the map with the click of a button. There are also sections just for European countries, U.S. States, and Canadian provinces.

Not much of a world traveler, I visited only 12 countries or a meager 5% of the world. I did not counting Belgium and Japan, since I was in those two countries only for connecting flights. I was born in Vietnam so there's no surprise there. I left Vietnam for the open sea and spent a few months in refugee camp in Indonesia. It was no Club Med, but still it was an extensive stay. Then I was in Singapore for a few weeks to catch a flight to the U.S. of A. Some years later I visited Canada, China, and Hong Kong, on different occasions. Fast forward a few years, and I happened to work for a travel company as its sole techie person. I got to travel with the president of the company to London, England for a meeting, after which, on my own time, I took the train through the Chunnel to Paris, France. On another trip, we went to Milan, Italy and Frankfurt, Germany. A few months after that, another business-related trip followed but this time I got stuck in the underbelly of Chennai, India, aka Madras. I was supposed to check up on the progress, or the lack thereof, of some software house that was developing for said travel company. My world travel pretty much ended with honeymoon in Cancun, Mexico. Sure I went back to Canada, but as the saying goes, been there done that.

Dodge That Anvil!

For the past few nights, I've been busy writing for About This Particular Mac (ATPM) a review of the game Dodge That Anvil! (DTA!) from Rabidlab. As the name aptly describes, the goal of the game is to avoid being hit by anvils falling from the sky, while pulling carrots and such out of the ground. Well, it's just a computer game, something to while away the time.

I used to think it would be nice to work as a game tester. Supposedly Nintendo has employees whose sole responsibility is to test out the new games made for the consoles or handheld devices. How cool a job is that? Get paid to play. After finishing the review of DTA! I don't think it is that cool anymore. When there's a condition to doing what you think is enjoyable, it's not fun any more. I suppose those Nintendo testers at some point would rather be pushing paper or finding values with VLookup() in Excel. Too much play can make Jack a dull boy, too. While I like DTA! a lot for being relatively easy to play, at times I HAD to play it just to gather enough info about it for the review. Unlike traditional magazine, online mag like ATPM doesn't have the constrain of space. As long as the review doesn't turn into an encyclopedia entry, one can write as much as applicable. I started testing the game using the Toon challenge level, in which one cannot die, just to advance as fast as possible through the various levels the game offer. But then I HAD to try out the other challenge levels to see the differences. Also, even though I already had the full version of the game, I HAD to install a demo on a different computer to learn about the demo's limitation. When one HAS to do things, the end result ceases to be enjoyable. While I strongly believe in the great work ATPM does and really want to help further its goal of disseminating Mac info to the world, I didn't have as much fun playing DTA! as I thought I would.

Now that the review is done with, I'll allow a few weeks of zero DTA! then go back to it. I'll play the Toon level again and this time will go all the way to the final level.

Crosswords

Out of nowhere, I recently resumed my interest in doing crossword puzzles. When riding the subway, normally I have a paperback or my iPod with me, but one time last week I didn't have either. Maybe I had the iPod but its battery was depleted. It's one of the minor annoyance with the iPod. I would walk out the door and the battery meter would indicate the device had 75% power, but by the time I reached the train platform, a mere few minutes later, there would be nothing left. I think I have the 10-GB iPod for at least three years already. I suppose electronic devices are not supposed to be used this long.

I happened to have a copy of Metro New York, one of the free daily newspapers, with me at the time. I've been reading Metro almost everyday but never once bothered to try the crosswords. Perhaps there was an easy clue or two so I was able to populate some section of the puzzle. The more I read into it, the more I was able to solve the puzzle. Soon enough, I was going old piles of newspaper pulling the crossword pages. I will stick to the general theme in the newspaper instead of those specific to the magazines. For example, I used to do TV Guide puzzles and ended up only learning about TV stars or shows with short names. My goal with the crosswords is to learn real, useful English words.

Compared to Scrabbles, playing the crosswords is much better in terms of learning or using words. The shortest crosswords word must be at least three letters long, so I don't have to deal with those obscure two-letter Scrabbles craps. I discovered that I know a lot more words compared to back in high school days, which is, oh, only about twenty years ago. I still cannot solve entire puzzles - there are always some authors or celebrities who I don't know about. Sure, I know the Cambodian politician Pol Pot, but that's only because Cambodia is a neighbor country of Vietnam, so I only happen to know a little bit about it.

For those people that I don't know about, I plan to look them up on the web some day. I haven't resorted at all to Google and its ilk in this newly-re-discovered enthusiasm. Back in the old days, when I do the crossword puzzles, I would have stacks of books nearby. Almanacs were useful for looking up people's names or geographic info. Dictionaries are a must. Some words are so obscure only certain big fat dictionaries would have them. Barlett's Book of Quotations or some dictionary of American slang and idioms sometimes help. In extreme cases, I even made trips to the public library to look things up. Aaaah, such were the days before personal computer and the advent of the Internet.

Flash Flopped


// This script takes the user to Scene 2 when goScene_btn
// is released.
goScene_btn.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop("Scene 2", 1);
};

Good grief! All I wanted was to make a button for use on the web, that when clicked on does something, like revealing a picture behind it. But in Macromedia Flash it's not as simple as I think it should. The above "code" is needed just to go to Scene 2 of some movie clip. I sure had the wrong idea about Flash.

A long time ago, when there was a computer called the Commodore Amiga, bundled with the computer was an authoring program called AmigaVision. One could write multimedia applications with AmigaVision all from by dragging icons into places and setting up their various parameters. For example, you can have a movie clip loaded, then a music file played, then some text shown on the screen, and so on. AmigaVision was probably inspired by HyperCard, the grandfather of authoring software, from Apple Computer. Unfortunately, I never actually used AmigaVision, even though I had it with my Amiga 3000 computer. I just never had the need to use it.

I had the wrong idea that Flash would be something similar to HyperCard or AmigaVision. Just drag and drop icons representing the various actions then adjust the icons to perform the work. I have no problem with learning programming languages. However, I do plenty of that at work already, when I get home I just want to have some fun. The Flash language, I think it's called ActionScript, seems to be object-oriented, that is, everything is an object with properties and actions associated to them. The lousy goScene button above has an event called onRelease associated to it, relating to the event that button is released. The trouble with this is that you need to know the exact thing to type, or know what to look for. Integrated development environment like Visual Studio help by predicting or listing the various options available as you type the codes. But again, when I'm home I just want to do something on the creative side, not learning a new programming language and the various details needed. And definitely not while the trial expires every day...

I may download another Flash demo, this time for use with my Windows XP PC, but perhaps I'll fare better if I read more about Flash first. I'm sure there are some good Flash books at the public library.

Winter Fun

Every time it snows heavily, adults would groan about having to shovel the sidewalk and dig out the cars, but to the kids it's fun time! It snowed good last night and while there wasn't enough to make a snowman, I gathered enough snow to cover the backyard steps and turned it into a slide. Last time it snowed heavily, J enjoyed sliding on the saucer sled in the backyard ice "pond". My backyard is tiny and the horizontal skid was just a few feet in distance, but it was still very enjoyable to J. This time the slide provides enough momentum for a fun downhill ride of a few more feet. I made sure there was a small path on the side for J to go up. Then I instructed him to either crawl into the saucer sled or sit back into it, never stand on it. One of the few things I learned out of engineering school is that safety is a very important factor in many things. A few friends of J in the neighborhood joined the fun and cheered each other on as they took turn going down the ice ramp. I was about six feet from the foot of the ramp to deflect the sled to the side lest it collides with the shack. A good time was had by all!

Irish Heart

My mother is very good with making food. She occasionally would tell the story about her not knowing how to cook until after she got married and went to live my father's family.

She has a knack for learning about food making easily. If she sees something she likes, she would ask about it. Even if the person only shares the recipe in some vague terms, she still can come up with the product. Sometimes she would improvise and substitutes materials to come out with something better. I have never cooked in my life, unless your count cooking rice, so I cannot describe how she does her things. All I can say is I'm lucky to have her around to make all the delicious food. Even when she experiments with something new and the result isn't quite what it's supposed to be, I still wolf them down.

She saw some contest sponsored by Nestle that only requires the use of their condensed milk, supposedly from their subsidiary Carnation. Mother made the heart-shaped pudding above as one of the many items she will send pictures in.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

NYC Auxiliary Police

I don't recall ever mentioning news articles in my blog, but a recent event changes my style. All over the news this morning was the killing of two NYPD Auxiliary Police Officers in Greenwich Village. Some guy, supposedly angry over a friend's job termination at a restaurant, visited the restaurant and killed the bartender. When he was followed by the two auxiliary policeman, he turned around and killed them too.

I recall one time in high school, perhaps in the junior or senior year, I took Criminal Laws and the class had a visit from the local auxiliary police force. At that presentation, I learned that the auxiliary police are just unarmed volunteers. They even have to pay for their own uniforms. They may be trained in basic self-defense but mostly serve as eyes and ears for the regular force. The theory is that having a police presence, even unarmed, can deter crimes. They get to drive police cruisers and I don't know what else they get out of it, but they can certainly get killed in the line of duty, just like what happened yesterday. I love doing volunteer work, but I must say the auxiliary police must be volunteering in the extreme.

R.I.P., NYC Auxiliary Police Officers Eugene Marshalik and Nicholas Todd Pekearo.

Whose Line

I've been enjoying a few good laughs from watching on DVD the first season of the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? The show is basically improvised comedy. The host Drew Carey, with the help of the live audience, would throw at the four comedians situations for them to act out. The star comedians are Wayne Brady (the black singer), Colin Mochrie (the bald Canadian), Ryan Stiles (The Tall Guy from the Drew Carey Show), and a guest comedian. The situations can be as commonplace as a house party or a dating contest, but most of the time they are exotic/uncommon ones like an encounter between Dracula and his slayer or a love triangle. The situations are usually twisted by requiring the comedians be restrained in some way, like not able to move on their own but instead moved by volunteers from the audience, or acted out in some styles of songs, etc. Further complicating matters, the comedians are usually assigned some strange characters, on the spot, and they must rely on their knowledge and quick wit to come up with something funny. My favorite routine is the Hoedown, in which Drew Carey and three of the comedians make up a ditty to describe some topics. In these days of instant web search via Google and such, sometimes it's hard to tell the smart person from someone who just happened to know how to look things up quickly. With improvisations, you just have to know your stuff to carry out the tasks. I truly admire these resourceful comedians.

MADAM I'M ADAM

Reading about Steve Wozniak ("Woz") and the computer revolution he helped fuel, I couldn't help wishing I was more involved with the revolution. It's just wishful thinking. It was the early 1980s and I was just a high school lad. I have overcome the language barrier a few years earlier and was comfortable with the English language by then. The revolution was already under way and the computers of the time include the TRS-80 and the Commodore-128. Thanks to my high school buddies M and R, I was enrolled in some computer summer program at Jamaica High School. I learned BASIC on, I believe, the C-128, in glorious colors. Something that I learned back then is useful until this day - string manipulation. Strings in computer programs mean text, as opposed to numbers. One of the exercises that we did involved determining if a string is a palindrome. A palindrome is a phrase that is spelled the same backward and forward, disregarding space and punctuation marks such as comma and apostrophe. Take MADAM I'M ADAM, supposedly something the First Man, Adam, said to the First Woman, Eve, when they, well, first met. Not counting the apostrophe, it's M-A-D-A-M-I-M-A-D-A-M backward and forward. To determine if the phrase is a palindrome, we would have to spell the word backward, picking up one letter at a time from the end. I believe we had to use the MID function to pick up the letters. The syntax for MID is MID({text to extract out of}, {beginning position}, {number of characters to grab}.) For example, MID("Hello", 2, 1) equals to the letter e. A FOR..NEXT loop, with negative step, was needed to walk along the length of the phrase. For other exercises, we learned about the LEFT, RIGHT, LEN, and ASC functions, etc. Really simple stuff but applicable in many situations.

Forward to the year 2007, I have uses for these simple functions in my scripts to retrieve info from Netware eDirectory. Using NDAP programming, I was able to determine the full path of a given username. For example, user John Smith, SmithJ, is an accountant in the New York office, so his fully-qualified name is .SmithJ.Accountant.NYC.USA. Having the full path allows me to add the user to groups via scripts. The only problem is that the path returned via NDAP is the reverse, like NDS:\\Tree\USA\NYC\Accountant\SmithJ. To convert the result to the dot-limited format I had break down path to its components, where each component is separated by slash. Then I pieced the components back together, only I had to start with the last original piece and end with the first original piece. VBScript and NDAP are all modern technologies, but they share the common string functions, such as MID and LEFT, that I learned back in the 80's.

One fun side-effect I had with learning computer in those days was the game Artillery. It was a simple game of two players taking turns shooting projectiles at the other party. Players would enter a number to represent the strength of the projectile and another number for the angle of attack. Now on my PowerBook G4, I have the game Pocket Tank, a descendant of Artillery. Pocket Tank has nice graphic, sound effects, music, options of wind direction and terrains, but the basic idea of adjusting power and angle is still there.

How about a few more palindromes to close off this blog entry?

ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA
(Supposedly something Napoleon said before he was exiled to Elba Island.)

A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA!
(How the Panama Canal came into being?)

SEX AT NOON TAXES
(A special kind of taxes for certain activity at 12p.m.)


As you may suspect, palindromes are mostly very contrived, something made up and its existence justified afterward, not something that would occur naturally.

iWoz

I recently finished reading iWoz, the Steve Wozniak auto-biography. In case you don't know, Steve Wozniak is the other "Steve" of the two "Steves" who founded Apple Computer. Nowadays, Steve Jobs has almost all of the limelight with all the cool products to come out of Apple, so Steve Wozniak, or simply Woz, may not be a familiar name to some.

Being a Mac fan, I should have read all those books about Apple and the Mac, but somehow I never got around to it. From other non-book sources, I had a general idea of the founding of Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs' house. That the two Steves built a device to fool the phone companies to make free long distance phone calls. Plus that the Macintosh was an idea borrowed from Xerox's PARC lab. Reading the book filled in much of the gap in my Apple history.

The way Woz put it, all the computer design from the early days of Apple Computer was his. He was quite an engineer, someone who not only design things but made them himself. He actually designed a Breakout-type game all with hardware. Bill Gates' BASIC hasn't been around at the time so there was no way to write programs via software. Woz likes to mention every now and then what binary is and how important it is to computers, but I think it's just a waste of time, even for a techie like me. The two Steves are four years apart, such that when Woz was already done with college and designing the first personal computer, Jobs was a mere lad in high school. Woz did give credits to Jobs for being a smooth talker over the phone and succeeded at getting free computer chips from some salesman. He also mentioned that Jobs was good at building computers, but still it was Woz who revolutionized personal computing by introducing the first modern personal computer - a CPU, a keyboard, and a screen.

Someone once showed me some picture of a computer, the CPU being a wooden case. I thought it was just a joke, but in reality that was how the first Apple computer was. The upstart computer was literally working out a garage or a living room, so there was no manufacturing facility to mass produce plastic cases for the new device. Instead, Woz and company just went to some hardware store, bought a bunch of wooden sheets, saw them to size and somehow cobble them together. What a humble beginning!

One piece of misinformation I had about Apple related to VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program. I knew that VisiCalc was the first of its kind and helped sell many computers, but I mistakenly associated VisiCalc to the IBM PC. According to iWoz, it was on the Apple computer that VisiCalc took off.

Steve Jobs is a great businessman but I have no trust in businessmen. Those kinds of people are prone to exaggerate just to sell their products, or provide misleading info, or simply withhold info if such action is beneficial to them. Not surprisingly, in the early days when the two Steves collaborated, Jobs cheated Woz out of a few thousand dollars on a project. Jobs claimed that they were paid by Atari $800 so each of them got $400. Woz later learned that the total was actually a few thousand dollars. Woz valiantly dismissed Jobs' action as youthfulness' foolishness, he simply wrote, "We were just kids."

It must be great to be friends with Woz. When Apple Computer made it big time with the initial public offering (IPO), many Apple employees became millionaires. Woz ensured the wealth was shared by giving away his own shares or selling them cheap before the IPO. The way Woz spent money sometimes sounded crazy. He threw away $12 million of his own money, twice, to produce some concerts, but he said he didn't mind and that the important thing was that he had fun. Sheesh, he would give me just $1 million and I can have some fun with it, too.

Strangely, there was no mention of the Segway, that gyroscope-based electric scooter that was the talk of the town not too long ago. Maybe Woz only liked to talk about his own invention, not something that he helped finance. In the end, he wrote at length about a universal remote control that he invented, but compared to the Apple computer, the story about remote was very boring.

theartofquitting

Totally by coincidence, shortly after my Art of Extortion cartoon appeared in ATPM, I was contacted by a Rene from the theartofquitting.com project. He expressed interest in my Quitters Are Not Losers cartoon, which he saw on Flickr . The project tries to get people to quit smoking and makes an art out of it, by showing pictures about, well, people quitting smoking, or the dangers of smoking, or messages about quitting smoking, you get the idea. It sounds like a worthy cause. In my immediate family, fortunately nobody smokes, even my brother-in-law quitted after many years of smoking, but I still know others who smoke. Check it out quick, as Rene has new art submissions every day, so my cartoon drops lower and lower on the main page.

The Art of Extortion

As I was preparing the letters A through H for the blog entry about Art Text, an idea hit me. It was almost like those old-days kidnapper's note! Supposedly to conceal their handwriting, kidnappers of bygone days would clip letters from newspapers and magazines to spell out their ransom message. They would then wrap the note around a brick, drive by the kidnapped person's family, and toss the package through the window.

The cartoon marked my debut with ATPM.com as a contributor. Previously, I was only a proofreader, a good one at that, I might add. The March 2007 issue of ATPM.com has both the Art Text review and the cartoon. I asked for the cartoon and review to be separated by a few articles, so that the reader wouldn't be instantly make the connection between the two. However, it didn't work out that way and the cartoon appears right in front of the review. Hopefully, the combo is still a treat for the ATPM readers. The title of this blog entry is a link to issue 13.03 of ATPM.com.

In the office, I'm probably the most technical person in the department. I have a knack for learning technical matters quickly. Well, everybody probably claims that when they go to job interviews. I suppose only my colleagues can second my claim. One down side with knowing more than others is that when you yourself have questions, the likelihood of someone else having the answer is not that great. At home, I use the Mac most of the time and usually can solve my own technical issues, not that there's much to solve. Getting involved with ATPM is a great way to learn more about the Mac. As I ran Art Text through the torture tests to find its weak spots or just to break it, then proofread the entire beta version of the e-zine, I learned a few things about the Mac that I didn't know. For instance, when programs copy info the clipboard, they can provide multiple versions of the info. In the case of pictures, the different versions can translate to different formats, e.g. JPEG, PDF, or TIFF. Art Text only used PDF and subsequently what it puts into the clipboard wasn't available to other programs that don't paste from PDF. I also learned that because of the different magazine formats ATPM issues, e.g. PDF vs. web, different publishing processes were involved. Errors or typos can be found in one format but not in the other, just because the tools used in one process may be smarter in the other. The staff members of ATPM include Mac programmers and professional graphic designers. I am sure there's much to learn from them as I continue getting involved with ATPM.

Get Firefox

Are you using Firefox for your web surfing? Firefox is the up-and-coming web browser, perhaps someday replacing the monopolistic Microsoft Internet Explorer. There are many things to like about Firefox, other than that it's not from Microsoft. For me especially the list of Firefox features includes search suggestion, RSS, and cool plugins/extensions such as VideoDownloader.

Nowadays most web browsers have a built-in search field where you can enter what you want to find and press Enter. No more going to Google first. With Firefox 2.0, as soon as you type a few letters into the search field, Firefox lists some suggestions, and usually its first suggestion matches what I want. Amazing! It probably has something to do with how popular the search term is, but still interesting.

RSS is the ability to subscribe to a web site. You end up having a button, sort of like a Favorite or Bookmark, but when clicked on reveals a list of recent entries to the web site. I subscribe to my sister's blog and now finding out if she updated her site is just a click away.

I installed VideoDownloader extension some time ago but never had any use for it. I probably read in some list of 10 Firefox Extensions You Must Have. VideoDownloader makes it easy to save a copy of a video seen on the web, which these days are mostly in Flash format, thanks to YouTube. A friend told me that he liked some old cartoon show on YouTube and would like to have a copy of it on his hard drive but didn't know how to do it. I visited the cartoon clip, clicked on the button that VideoDownloader added to the Firefox window, and clicked on the Get Video button. One more click to confirm that download and off it went. Some time later, I had the entire 50+ MB of the video on my hard drive. Maybe there is something else out there for MS IE 7 to do what VideoDownloader does, but I sure like the way it's implemented in Firefox.

I've joined the marketing group for Firefox , SpreadFirefox.com . I added a Get Firefox button to the sidebar of this blog. If you decide to go with Firefox, use the button to download and I'll get some points with SpreadFirefox. Hopefully enough points will be accumulated to convert into prizes, whatever they are. Happy Firefox Web Surfing!