Fruits from the Tree

What happens if you throw a party and no one came? That's how I feel with regards to the extended family tree I've been building. I don't know how some people decided to do it, but there are family trees out there on the web with personal info like birth dates and names for the world to see.

After about a month seriously collecting info and photos, I now have over 400 people in the tree. It is time to pick the fruits off the family tree, which in this case means printing out some charts. Not everyone is completely accounted for, as I have people I only know exists/existed and a factoid or two about them but nothing else, not even a name. So I have cousins simply referred to as Twin #1 and Twin #2, who are children of a certain aunt on the father's side, plus one of the twin, don't know which one, died of drowning. Still, the tree is very usable and I would love to post it up some web site so people I know can easily access the info, but that is not possible. Too much information for all the cyber bad guys out there.

The most I could do was to print out certain branches of the tree and either showed them in person or send the chart via conventional mail. So far I printed one for my in-laws - just the Wife's paternal grandfather plus his descendants. It was not so bad assembling nine pages of paper. Actually, I made it a game for some nieces to put together and she even taped the pages for me. The bigger challenge was when I printed for my far, far away sister all her relatives. On my mother's side, one uncle had 13 children and another has 10. On my father's side, the grandfather had two wives, one wife produced seven children while the other gave birth to three. I know, that uncle on the mother side beat my paternal grandpa even with just one wife. Imagine how many he could have sired if he had two wives!

If the relatives were limited to just the immediate uncles, aunts, etc. the chart would not be so bad. However, the chart also included people who were related to me going back a few generations. On my mother's side, in Bà Lan, we are close, in terms of relationship, to a family who is related to us via my grandpa. Not even blood brothers, more like cousins. The chart came out to 54 pages long, 6 pages wide by 9 pages high, and was really unwieldy to put together. Fortunately, Reunion 9 wisely supports printing of page numbers. The relationship lines also helped a lot.

Next I plan to send a simpler chart to an uncle living in Queens, New York. He helped me get started with father's side so it's time to show him some appreciation. I didn't even get to the cousin level on my father side, as I was not close to them, but hopefully this uncle in Queens can add provide more info.

A Blast From The Past

Years before I took on the QaptainQwerty moniker, I was known in some small circle as Chesse. Chesse came from the English name Jesse, which I at time thought of using as my English name, and the game chess, which I like to play. It is pronounced like Chess-see, but naturally many people spelled it as cheese. Me no mouse!

In my college years, as Chesse I drew a bunch of op-ed cartoons for the school newspaper on whatever topic on my mind at the moment. I never got any feedback if people understood them but as long as the newspaper kept publishing them I kept drawing them every month.

This particular cartoon was about my feeling toward the U.S. education system. At that time I probably just read in some survey how pathetic the typical U.S. student performed against the world in math and science. At the time, the late 80s, multimedia CD-ROMs were all the rage. The 20-MB floppy diskette was also pretty hot, for a while anyway. I never own such a drive and totally forgot to even mention in the Memory Lane entry. The 5.25" floppy diskette was still in limited use even if it was on the way out.

The amazing thing with this cartoon is that I drew it all on the computer, probably a lowly 16-MHz Amiga 3000, using, gasp, the mouse. The Wife got me a stylus and tablet some years ago as a Xmas present but I never got used to it. Yet years earlier I was comfortable enough with the mouse to draw an entire cartoon. It was done in Deluxe Paint, no fancy layers whatsoever like today's Photoshop. Amazing how much one can accomplish given lots of time.

I Spy A... Ton of Floppies!

You've had the walk down memory lane, how about playing a little HideNSeek game, too?

As both frequent visitors to this site know, I've created ViquaGames HideNSeek games before. Up to now they had been rated very low, if at all, by ViquaGames players. I really don't like to blend objects into the background completely so most of my creation so far are pretty easy to play, not challenging at all. I think the trick to the game genre is to have lots and lots of things in the photo to start with then throw in the hidden objects. The photo for the Memory Lane blog entry makes a perfect backdrop. So far the new puzzle has been received very well. I plan to make more along the same line. The nice thing is because I use the same puzzle as a cover for my Qaptain Qwerty 2009 Qalendar, I couldn't cover any objects with another.

Most likely I'll make more HideNSeek puzzles using my Son's massive toy collection. There will be puzzles titled "How Happy Was Your Meal?", "Wheally Hot Wheels," and "Lights! Camera! Action Figures!" It will be fun!

Memory Lane

Aaaah, removable media. Is it not the ultimate storage device? Fill up one unit, pop it out and pop a new unit into the drive, then keep collecting more stuff. When I started computing in the early 1980s, 5.25" floppy diskettes, like that black one on the foreground, were still in use. They may have been 360K in size, but with some mutilation can go up to 720K. High density version was available, too, with a whopping size of 1.2 MB! Still the HD 5.25" couldn't fight off the rising star of the time, the 3.5" diskette, with a top size of 1.4 MB. Soon 1.4 MB was not enough and we saw the arrival of the Iomega Bernoulli and SyQuest cartridges. One regret I have about cleaning up my junk collection is a 10-MB Bernoulli cartridge. It was the size of a college notebook! I threw it out when I moved from one house to another years ago. I cannot remember the size of the Bernoulli that was battling with the SyQuest. Knowing it that competing products usually outdo their competitor just slightly, I am sure it was probably somewhere less than 88 MB. I know for a fact Bernoulli came out with a 150-MB 3.5" cartridge at one point in time.

Almost out of nowhere, Iomega upped the ante with the Zip drive, at 100 MB and in the 3.5" form factor. It was wildly successful and rang the death knell for SyQuest. In the picture, laying atop a SyQuest 88 case and in front of the Jaz cartridge is a 135-MB 3.5" SyQuest cartridge. It's a case of being late to the market. Iomega even has the 1-GB Jaz, later upgraded to 2 GB. For my Wall Street PowerBook, I got an Imation SuperDisk with capacity of 120 MB. Remember what I said about edging out the competition just a little? 120 MB, just 20 MB over the popular Zip 100. The SuperDisk drive could also read 3.5" floppy disk, but again Imation was late to the booming removable hard drive scene and joined other companies as losers to Iomega.

The problem with removable hard drive is that you need the drives to use them. You need some other physical device that has to be hooked up to the computer(s) in order to use the cartridges/disc/disk. I used to have to carry an Iomega USB drive back and forth between the office and home. Some time I would remember to bring everything, other times I would forget the power cable for the drive, or the USB cable for the device. Too much hassle!

Nowadays, the de facto removable media is the flash drive. Some are shown in the picture: the blue Fuji 128 MB thumb drive in the upper right corner; the white Kingston 2-GB drive on the left (on top of the Zip 250), and some black x-MB drive that someone gave my wife a bunch of songs on. Yup, the price has come down so much, people treat these things as disposable. I probably paid $50 for the 128-MB thumb drive way back when. These days you can buy a spindle of blank DVDs and get a 512-MB flash drive for free!

Also included in the photos, all atop the 3M box, are a bunch of memory cards. From my older Kodak camera we have the 128-MB SanDisk CompactFlash. Lying in its white plastic case is the 2-GB SD card for my newer Kodak camera. Last but not least, is the tiny 2-GB Kingston microSD card for my son's Nintendo DS.

Money probably cannot buy you happiness, but it sure can get you lots of removable storage.

Y Obama? I am a boy!

In case you are wondering, "What the hey was that about?", as you looked over the Am A Boy cartoon, here is the answer. Nothing much, really, the sole purpose of the cartoon is to support the palindrome, which is also the punch line in the joke. The phrase "Y Obama? I am a boy!" spells the same from left to right and right to left, with punctuations and spaces removed, of course. In this age of text-messaging and instant messaging, we all know that y can be interpreted as why, yes? That's all, just to whip out a palindrome, no political statement, really. Palindromes are like that, they are usually contrived and need the situation built around them.

I did get a little inspiration from an article in The Onion (that good satirical weekly magazine!) some time ago about Bill Clinton looking forward to being First Husband. That was when Hilary Clinton was competing with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. The article featured a doctored picture of Bill Clinton eying himself in the mirror, trying to decide if the dress would look good on him. With all the news about how Mr. Bill sometimes like to steal the spotlight from his now more famous wife, it can be easy to see that he may some day even dresses up as her to steal power from her. Of course, in the end, Obama got the nomination and went on to win the Presidency. Alas, my little palindrome and its companion cartoon would never the light of day. Luckily, Hilary is in the news again, this time as a Secretary of State. So, enjoy the cartoon/palindrome while it is still relevant. I know, the likeness is not very strong, but it has to do for now.

Am A Boy

Genealogy = Hard Work

There are different kinds of genealogy works. One kind involves tracing your root all the way back to the beginning, like what our friend The Lone Gunman did with 23andme etc. You would learn that your ancestors came from certain region of the world, maybe that you are remotely related to some famous/infamous historical figure. I am not into that kind of genealogy work at all. What I am after is to be prepared to answer some kid's question, "How am I related to Person X?"

You would think in this Information Age, researching about your relatives is a piece of cake. But that is not the case when most of your relatives are in Viet Nam. While I am ambitious in that I want to establish a placeholder for every person I know about, all I need for those holders are birth year, death year (if applicable), a name, a Chinese or Vietnamese name, or both, and a face. I take photos often so my iPhoto library is a good place to start. I am also lucky that my mother brought from Viet Nam a few really old photos. I am equipped with the speedy and very portable Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M, so photo positives faze me not. One cousin has a large photo collection with KodakGallery as well as in Facebook, so her side of the family is well-covered. This time around I'm also reaching out to cousins, distant and close, via email, although so far my success rate is zero.

Still, it is hard work to go through all the info I have at my disposal. Unlike my mother with her neatly organized photo albums, most of my photos are in those small albums that the photo shop gave us. At least back when we used to develop films. Nowadays, they are in iPhoto amd most are named like 100_2497.JPG or DCP_2997.JPG, totally useless for iPhoto's Search function. I've been going through the physical photos and scan people in whenever I find someone I need to add to the extended tree. Of course iPhoto's digital takes preferences, but there are some people who were never captured on digital "film", so the ScanSnap has been busy. As I add or go through iPhoto, I also rename the files or add names to the Description field. I also borrowed a few photos from my mother's collection. I even scanned the back of some photos as they contain invaluable info about the people in the photos. I plan to ask my mother lots of questions, about the people in the photos and the relationship. It is a lot of hard work but I also enjoy the detective work very much.

Reunion With Reunion

When I came back to NYC from my recent trip to Toronto to attend an uncle's funeral, one of the first thing I did was to re-visit Reunion, the Mac genealogy software. During the trip I spent some time with relatives who I didn't keep in touch regularly and learned all about the different names and relationship then wanted to have a way to track them

I used MacFamilyTree (MFT) to maintain an extensive family tree but got sidetracked and haven't updated the tree in a while. Since then Reunion came out with a new version, #9, while MacFamilyTree evolved into #5 under a new company. MacFamilyTree 5's new interface is just too different for my taste. Before I went the MFT way, I did use Reunion and was totally frustrated by its lack of support for Unicode. Being ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, many of my relatives, alive and dead, have either a Vietnamese name, a Chinese name, or both. Equally ridiculous was the fact that Reunion 8 couldn't sort siblings by their year of birth, but instead sort by some internal ID assigned by the program as people are added. Genealogy work is intensive and one does not always have all the info. Once in a blue moon you would have all the names of all the people in a family and their birth order in the family. If I at least know that someone has a sibling then I would create the sibling with some placeholder year of birth. Most of the time the siblings are entered in random order, so using the internal ID to sort the siblings rarely works. MFT was smart enough to use the birth date to sort siblings and also supports Unicode so I went with it. One thorny issue with both MFT and Reunion was printing. Neither was able to properly handle page breaks and people's faces would often than not be split on two pages. As I used MFT more often, I was also annoyed by its printing of people's names on their faces in a certain tree view. Weird how these things not excluded in the final product. So I was OK with MFT but I always wished there would be something else.

When Reunion 9 first came out, I downloaded the demo but never gave it try. Recently, I put it through its pace and really liked it. Unicode is now included so all the Chinese and Vietnamese names can be entered as aliases. Both MFT and Reunion support aliases, but only with Reunion can I customize a tree view to show the aliases. With MFT, I had to include the aliases as part of the last names for them to be included in the tree view, quite a contrite workaround. Sibling sorting in Reunion 9 is now possible, although it's a manual process - not a show-breaker. The nicest thing with Reunion 9 is the Move Boxes Off Page Break option. What intelligence! I have it on by default and no boxes would ever be split across pages. While my printed trees are not on one sheet of plotter paper but instead spread across multiple 8.5" x 11" pages, it is easy to tape them together and nobody's face is ever cut in half. Within a day of testing, I upgraded my Reunion 8 to version 9. I was worried that I didn't have the serial number for Reunion 8 but it turned out it was not needed. The upgrade version simply looked for the installed app for 8 or the original CD, which I had.

Because of privacy issue, I cannot post the real tree here but perhaps I'll make one for the Solo and Skywalker families. Time to make good use of the Star Wars The New Essential Guide To Characters, I suppose.

Học Một Sàng Khôn?

There is a saying in Vietnamese that goes "Đi một ngày đàng, học một sàng khôn". The almost literal translation is "Spend a day on the road and you learn an amount of smart knowledge," or a better translation would be "By traveling one learns about the world". I surely learned a thing or two on my recent weekend getaway to Toronto to attend an uncle's funeral.

I have attended a few funerals, for people my in-laws know, for people I know, and of course my own late father's. At all those funerals, people would donate money to help cover the cost of the funeral. Nothing, yet, can bring a dead person back to life, and a funeral costs money, lots of money, so it is practical to donate money to help with the funeral. I am not rich and most people I know are not rich either so I have yet to attend any funerals where money was not accepted. On this recent trip, I learned that some people would not take the money, even if they can very well use it, purely because doing so would bring debt to the dead person. Supposedly his soul would then be burdened by this debt and won't go where souls are supposed to go.

Interestingly, many Vietnamese believe that when people die they will reincarnate into some other lives. Supposedly, it would be better to be reborn into wealthy family. Conversely, it would be bad to be reborn as an animal, as animals are either made to perform manual labors or are eaten for their meat. I am no Buddhist scholar, but I know that it is not true that it is good to have a better life in your second life. The goal is to have no life at all! Really. Living inside a body of flesh and blood is simply awful, regardless whether you are the pampered prince of a wealthy family or you are the hard-working farmer who wakes up at 3 A.M. with the water buffalo. The goal is to leave your flesh and become free, kinda like Obi-Wan Kenobi melding with the Force.

Another thing I learned was that if a person died before the parents, it is considered a sin, something disrespectful to the parents. In Vietnamese funeral, the grieving parties wear white bands around the head. In the case of a disrespectful child, at the wake, the dead child, lying in the coffin, would have to have a white band placed near his head, supposedly to symbolize the dead person wearing for his parents. Superstition defies logic, as wouldn't some elderly people object to that as a signal to hasten their demise, trù ẻo or bad wishes? Whatever, tradition also dictates that the parents should whip the coffins three times to punish the child for "going" ahead of them.

The Vietnamese word khôn in the title means smart or intelligent. I would not say the two things I learned above make me smarter or more intelligent. I'm a computer geek and am aware that knowledge is power, although their usefulness can be doubtful. In case I come across similar scenarios, I can act accordingly and avoid being treated like an ignoramus. As an atheist who believes "chết là hết", or "Death is the end of all", none of this means much to me.

Walter Walter Everywhere!

Here's my latest ViquaGames HideNSeek game. I got a kick out of overlaying the word Walter, in various shapes and colors, onto a photo of the cascade at St. Anne Canyon in Quebec, from a vacation a few years ago. In case you don't know, Walter Wick is the photographer who made all those beautiful photos in the I Spy book series. Jean Marzolo supplied the riddles that accompanied the puzzles. At some point the pair went their separate ways and Wick continued with a new series called Can You See What I See?

I resisted the temptation of making the objects totally blend into the background. I find it very annoying when I play games people make that way. I consider it cheating. It is one thing to make the objects hard to find, but it is something else when the object is totally invisible because its color totally matches that of the background.

Enjoy!

Veteran's Day 2008

Every year I hear in the news how few people turn out for Veteran's Day Parade. I was going to just call a Vietnam vet friend but then happened to see on 1010WINS that the parade would run until 3 PM. I had to wait for my son to do his homework and have lunch so we got there around 2 PM. Sure enough, unlike the Thanksgiving Parade where people pack the parade route, you can see that there were not that many people. Maybe there was a bigger audience early in the day. How about making a note to yourself to be at your local parade next year?

ViquaGames' HideNSeek Games

My Son loves the I Spy game genre. He has all the I Spy hardcover books as well as the Can You See What I See? series. With me being a computer geek, he naturally also gets to play the I Spy software. While Scholastic is slow in churning out the computer games, many other companies fill the void. Son has games from the Travelogue 360 series, Little Shop, Hidden Object Game Show, and a few others.

One of the old Scholastic title has a puzzle-maker built in but it runs in Mac Classic mode and can only be used off the computer and not shared on the web. Come on now, we have Web 2.0 for a while now, you would think there's a website out where you can upload your own background then sprinkle it with your own objects. Unfortunately, it seems ViquaGames.com's HideNSeek Creator is the closest thing. You can load your own background alright, but the objects are canned. I must admit it is no easy task to cut the objects out of their original backgrounds. I am pretty sure plug-ins like AKVIS Chameleon can be of great help. It would be great to be able to use one's own pictures for the object. Perhaps ViquaGames can offer the service, for a fee, to do the hard work of cutting the objects out the user-submitted photos. I am sure some pet owners would love to see their own pets blended into the background, instead of some canned chihuahua. I ran the idea by ViquaGames, maybe some day they'll implement it.

Son and I put together this second HideNSeek I created under the username qqwerty. Enjoy!

HOG

OverDrive Video Optimizer Sucks

Some time ago I saw a flyer at a branch of the New York Public Library touting an online library where one can borrow movies and more. I knew not to expect to find the latest Hollywood blockbusters available, but I do watch really old, classic movies from time to time. I never found the time to actually try to borrow any movies, until recently when my son became interested in the classic Short Circuit. It's been 22 years since the movie came out, it should be old enough to be in any library's online collection. It is indeed, but the only hurdle is that the required software runs on Windoze only. Fine, that's what I got Parallel for. I have enough of Windoze at work and don't want any at home, but the sad truth is that there are software out there that only runs on Windoze.

First I had to download the OverDrive Media Console software. Because I don't use Windoze much on the Mac via Parallel, I also had to download Windows Media Player. Through the Brooklyn Public Library's eMedia site, I downloaded some .ODM file that is supposed to lead me to the movie Short Circuit. Although the web site said that it's over 500 MB, it downloaded very quickly. Turned out it's kinda like those BitTorrent file.

Since I installed Windows Media Player after OverDrive, I automatically thought WMP would be used for opening the ODM file. To make matter worse, WMP did not flat out refuse to load the file but instead offer to try it anyway. Of course, it failed. Next, I managed to open the ODM file with OverDrive but then it complained about some WMP security being outdated. The error message did say that I would have to do something under the Tools menu of OverDrive, but because the outdated security was with WMP, I went to WMP and naturally couldn't find any options to update the security setting. To make things worse, the default fancy skin for WMP didn't readily show a Tools menu, you would have to switch to Classic skin first. It would be so nice to have the Check For Updates menu option like all Mac apps. Finally, I got OverDrive to update WMP's security, and the only hurdle was to download the large file for viewing. Yup, when I loaded the ODM file and clicked Play, it didn't automatically go ahead and download the file then play, but instead had to present an error window. Why can't the software just do whatever necessary to get the movie to be played?

What a painful experience that was. Compared that to the typical purchasin experience with the iTunes Music Store and I can see why the iTMS is popular. I have no idea how many use the eMedia service, but if it can be streamlined a lot more more people will make use of the resource.

Ass-Backward Securities

I could not have drawn the Halloween 2008 cartoon without the help of This American Life. In episodes 355 (The Giant Pool of Money) and 365 (Another Frightening Show About the Economy), Ira Glass explained as simply as possible all the financial terms like asset-backed securities and default credit swaps. Working in a the computer support department of a financial firm, I come across these terms all the time. To me they are just a bunch of abstract terms. I think of them in terms of what resources on the network they use, not how they affect the lives of people. I know the asset-backed securities group was the first to migrate off those ailing qtrees, onto a share created at the volume, with 3 qtrees under the share. Default credit swaps still hasn't made their move, although I might have already Robocopied their data for them. Commercial paper? Those people are outside the Investment Bank umbrella and have their own, way better organized shared drives. Just a J: drive and at most an M: or K: drive, not the alphabet soup that the IB people drag around from legacy domain to strategic.

I still don't fully understand all the terms that Ira Glass mentioned, but I have a less vague idea of what they are. Give This American Life a try if you have never listened to it. For me it is hard to catch it on the radio so I subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Halloween 2008

Qwerty @ Plurk

Qwerty @ Wurk

Be Prepared - by The Lone Gunman

Remember The Lone Gunman? Today I have him as a guest blogger, writing on a topic close to his heart. I only made some minor changes here and there, nothing to diverge from LG's POV. Enjoy!

寧為太平犬,不做亂世人 - "It is better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period."

If you have been watching the news lately, you might have noticed the historical changes going on in the banking sector. We live in a very chaotic period and the odds you will be laid off or have your income reduced in some way is very high. If you are laid off how long will it take you to get a new job in this business climate? Probably longer than most times I believe. So it is time to take a good hard look at your life and ask yourself, "What would I do if I get fired?" Make those cuts now while you still have a job if you can and set aside some emergency supplies. You should have supplies on hand anyway in case of a natural disaster. How long was the power out in Houston after Hurricane Ike? Most people had no damage to their homes, but were without power for days, some weeks. How well would you live in times like that?

Water - I believe the recommended amount is at least one gallon per person per day. It is just a good idea to have some water on hand at all times in case of disaster.

Food - Stock up on what you already eat. If you are like me, it is easy to run to the store a few times a week to pick up this or that and supplement meals with take-out. What happens if you cannot go to the store for a week or so? Would you be able to feed your family? I have a few kids so I feel a greater responsibility to be prepared, instead of 2 boxes of spaghetti, I buy 10. Instead of 5 cans of beans, I will buy 20. This type of thing lasts a long time, most canned goods last 2-3 years easy, so it won't go to waste and will be eaten eventually if disaster doesn't strike. Make sure you check the expiration dates on products when you purchase them. I have found cans with a year difference on the same shelf.

Baby items - If you have an infant then you should stock up on formula, diapers wipes, etc. The whole Idea is to be as self-sufficient as possible if you are without an income or disaster strikes. One hundred years ago this type of thinking/preparedness was second nature. People had no one to go to for help when disaster struck.

Here are a few links to get you started, take and leave what you need for your personal situation.

http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm
http://tirec.mysite.com/rich_text_2.html
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/whatToDo/DeindustrialAge.htm

Ticket Agent?

Re-org, it is part of the corporate life. My server group just almost done with one. Much to my relief, I am being moved to another group inside the umbrella group. I will be up front tackling problem tickets. Supposedly I will regain my Netware admin rights, which I gave up when I moved into the current, Windows-only group. I am not worried that the Novell resources are being moved to ActiveDirectory, starting with the homes. For all the scripts I wrote for AD, I still prefer to work with Novell. I like the fact that a home folder is created automatically for Netware users as the accounts are created, whereas with Windows, especially when shares are involved, the home folders must be created separately after the fact.

Hopefully soon I will no longer be involved with the current migration project. I've been dealing almost exclusively with the project years ago since I was in the LAN Account Admin group. Since coming over to the server group, things only got worse. Sure I had some exposure to Robocopy scripting, but all the paperwork involved in requesting storage space, backup, change control, is just too much for my technical mind. The forms are probably among the most user-hostile in the world. You have to have a lot of prior knowledge to fill them out, just one illogical field in the hundreds and you are stuck.

It will be months before I will be free from this tedious project as I slowly transfer knowledge to other people in the group. It helps to have hope, to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel.