Dad and MOM

Happy Father's Day
May day not interrupted
Please no MOM Alerts

To all the mothers out there, I am not putting you down because it is almost Father's Day. The MOM in the above haiku is short for Microsoft Operations Manager. It's some kind of monitoring tool, produced by Microsoft, to send alerts when a server reaches a certain state, e.g. low disk space or high temperature. At least I think that's what it does. In my relatively new role in the so-called server management department, I hear "MOM alert" a lot but I am not involved in any of it.

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there, especially those in the digital trenches, fighting the digital evildoers everyday to keep your network humming.

186 - 19-Year Itch

New York is baking! The cool weather finally let go of its grip and the heat wave moved in right away.

In the 1950s movie The Seven Year Itch, the story centers around the fact that back in those days, during the hot summer months in Manhattan, men would send their wives and kids up the river to some cooler summer homes. I thought it was a tradition that is no longer practiced, given the wide availability of air conditioners. I was surprised to learn from a colleague that he still does that and they have been together for nineteen years.

The Seven Year in the movie's title refers to the span of time into a marriage that the partners start thinking of infidelity. In the move, Marilyn Monroe played the role of The Girl, who moved into the floor above the main male character's apartment shortly after he bid adieu to his family for the summer. He had fantasies and felt tempted but in the end rushed upstate to meet his wife. I suppose absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Optimus Prime, NOT!

I am good at math, computer, history, and words, but finance is something that I don't have a strong grasp of. I work in a financial firm as a network administrator and everyday I would come across phrases like investment bank, fixed income, and primer brokerage. To me they are just network resources to have permissions set for or data to copy from point A to point B. All the talk about the subprime crisis in the news got me interested, somewhat, in finances.

I listened to This American Life podcast #355, The Giant Pool of Money, then happened to read the article Mortgages and Madness in the June 2, 2008 issue of Newsweek. I now know a little more about the whole mess. So there was this giant pool of money that is the sum of all the money the world put away and it needed a place to invest to grow. One "new" area for it to go into was the mortgage market. In the beginning, it was standard practice for the lenders to verify the borrowers' incomes and so on, then the rules got relaxed so that more people would qualify for the loans, and someone got more commissions. It did not matter that some borrowers, or actually, many, could no way be able to re-pay the loans. New home owners lost their homes, Wall Street got too many houses to unload, houses' values drop, etc.

It is amazing that the whole thing actually happened. That after all these years there are no checks and balances to prevent the mess to even start. On one side you have the borrowers who should know better not to take on debts they cannot possibly pay back. Perhaps some of these people regularly rack up large credit card bills and pay the minimum amount because the money appeared to be free at the time of the purchases. On the other side you have Wall Street not caring who got the loan as long as there was a place for the available credit to be spent on. What a mess...

Sink Or Swim

I have to believe my Son more when he tells me things. He has not learned to lie or accustomed to lying, which I am sure is a good thing. He recently told me that he could swim unassisted by any flotation devices. Just a week ago he finally made a big leap at swimming lesson, literally. For weeks he would come home from swimming lesson looking downcast because he did not make the jump. His cousins, boy and girls, jumped into the pool but he didn't. Not being the typical Asian parent who push their kids hard, I just told him to try again next time and not to feel bad about it. Again and again he would not make the jump. Then one day he did it. He even said that the first few did not count because the instructors pushed him into the water. I later learned that the instructors did do that. It took two of them, probably because, at 100 pounds, he was too heavy for any one of them. He looked very pitiful, I was told, caught between his fear of making the plunge and at the same time also afraid of being tossed again. Somehow he went through with it and on a recent stay at a hotel, I witnessed him as a swimmer. Just last month when we went on vacation west of Poconos, he was swimming around with a noodle float. He let go of the noodle every now and then to submerge then came out of the water to grab for the float, but never swam without the noodle. This time he was a totally different person in the pool. He jumped in a few times, at first sort of just walked off the edge of the pool but near the end literally jumped in. He even reached for the bottom of the pool. He could swim on his stomach or lie on his back and paddle backward, for the entire length of the pool. I am so happy for him.

Growing up as a city kid, I did not know how to swim. I can sort of swim, but only briefly, at most the length of the pool. I learned how to swim from my cousins, on mother's side, during summer vacations in maternal grandmother's countryside village. There was a canal in the front yard of the fruit orchard where I stayed. I know I started with an inner tube but cannot remember when I started to swim freely unassisted. All my cousins already knew how to swim when they were little. They lived near the river and there were houses right on the waterfront, literally on the water. Not your fancy American version of waterfront, mind you. Garbage and such would go right out the window, and other orifices, into the water, but the country kids would start to learn how to swim by going from one column to another, right underneath these houses.

I will try to get my Wife sign up for some swimming lessons. I myself can use some proper training. It is a great form of exercise and a useful skill to have.

Go Yankees Go!

The title of this blog entry is just to goad any nearby Bostonians to give me a dirty look, or worse. I'm in the lobby of the Sheraton in Downtown Boston. Supposed to be a vacation but it's really just visit friends and distant relatives with the in-laws. Not much fun expected, but at least I got 2 hours of free parking in Chinatown and now 45 minutes of free 'Net time courtesy of Sheraton. Woohoo!

Toto, We Are Not In Kansas Any More

So my colleague Lone Gunman became a Mac owner for the first time. He's been living with Windoze for the longest time and naturally there are differences to be felt when he made the switch. At least he said it's just different, nothing bad.

Here goes another entry that I can refer my current and future Mac converts to:

• The Start button is no more. Back in 1984 when the first Mac came out, there was already an Apple menu to reach "special" things, like Recent Items and Control Panels. A new Mac convert may think of the Apple "button" as the equivalent of the Start button, but in reality it's really the Dock. To me, the Start button is where you mostly go to to launch apps, whether from Programs or some shortcuts above that. The Dock is where shortcuts to apps are supposed to live in.
• No more C: or any of its alphabet brethren. The hard drive is whatever you call it, on the desktop and everywhere else. I stressed that fact because in Windoze, on the desktop you may have My Computer but if you go to some Windows Explorer open window you may see it as C: drive, in addition to being My Computer. The nice thing with not using the alphabet for your drives is that you are not limited to the 20 or so letters of the alphabet. I know of a company that uses a letter of the alphabet for many network resources and is constantly out of drive letters or has drive conflicts. I wish I have the pleasure of working in a large Mac network but I can guess that it is not an issue. Whatever network resource to be connected to would be referred to through its name and would appear as such, like MP3 Collection, not as F: drive to some and Z: drive to others.
• No right mouse button. Many people complain about the lack of a right mouse button on the standard Mac. The key word here is "standard". I think it's a good thing not to have right mouse button by default. I cannot recall the many times I have to tell Windoze users to press the left mouse button and not the right mouse button. There will always be more inexperienced computer users to the less they have to learn the better. If the mouse has only one button, how hard can it be to press it, instead of having to even think about which button to press? There's only one button! Months or years later, the beginner becomes an expert and by then he can move on to some fancy programmable mouse or trackball.
• No DOS box. So you are an intermediate computer user and occasionally go into the belly of the beast to compute purely via the command line, i.e. you have to type exactly what you want or get the dreaded "Bad command or filename" or whatever the error message is these days. Mac OS X, being based on Unix, has the Terminal to handle your archaic desire to type. ls is your DIR equivalent, cat is TYPE's cousin, and grep is synonymous to FINDSTR. Note that I listed the Unix commands as lowercase because case matters. At some jobs I once had, I spent a little time on the Unix workstation customizing the command line to suit my DOS-oriented brain. dir (upper or lower) would automatically translate to ls with some switch, etc. On the Mac, I rarely find the need to go into the Terminal. On some rare occasions, certain apps would require doing tweaking some config file, but chances are those apps don't deserve to be used. On the Mac, that is.
  

eHarmony?

Macs Cannot Do...

Much as I love my Macs, there are certain things that the Macs just cannot do. As a Mac evangelist, I do tell people that I preach to about the sad fact. This is more like a list in case I need it. I don't do false advertisement.

• Can You See What I See? - Scholastics published many I Spy games for both Macs and Windows. The latest in the series, not necessarily from Scholastics, so far is available for Windoze only. Although my Son already has a few hidden object games, the I Spy series is still his favorite, especially in CYSWIS Seymour plays a bigger role. Or so it seems.
• Platypus 2 - I played Platypus 2 on a Windoze machine and really like all the extra weapons and the three-player mode. On the Mac with the original Platypus, I can get only so far so I hope that with three players against the computer, I may get further.
• Citrix - One option to connect to the office is to go to some web site and connect via a Citrix connection. Unfortunately, you need more than the Citrix client to work. Whatever behind the scene requires ActiveX and the site specifically declares that it does not support Macs. I verified by installing a Citrix client on my Mac and failed utterly. Oh well, might as well keep work and fun separated.
• Hap Hazard - My Son play many games at miniclips.com but some games, such as Hap Hazard, does not work on the Mac. Windoze with Internet Explorer only, supposedly. I even tried to use it on my lowly Win XP PC but there too it failed to run. Whatever. Luckily, so far Son has not asked about it any more.
• Cantonese data entry - The built-in Chinese keyboard method works fine, but I can only use its pinyin method. You need to know Mandarin in order to use pinyin. I know the Cantonese dialect better than Mandarin so this does not help me. On Windoze, I used to use UnionWay for Chinese data entry and it does support Cantonese. Lately I have almost no need for writing Chinese so, while it would be nice to be able to write with Cantonese sound, no major loss there.
  

On a good note, I distinctly recall Cartoon Network's videos of recently aired shows used to be unavailable to Macheads but I just checked and it worked fine. Maybe someone at CN realized that there is a sizable Mac audience out there to cater to.

Also, I used to wish Vietnamese keyboard method on the Mac could have more option. On my old PowerBook G4, there is only one choice, but I see that with Leopard, on the Wife's laptop, there are many choices, including VNI, with the diacritical marks at keys 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. It has been a while, but I think it's sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, nặng.

So, if you can live without certain Windoze apps or web sites, make the switch and enjoy computing without all that baggage Windoze brings!

Computing Without Piracy, Mac Version

This blog entry is for my colleague The Lone Gunman of Dallas. LG recently became a Mac owner and has been busy with importing videos into his iMac. LG also wants to know if there's any office suite software for the Mac. I already told him about NeoOffice but here goes the whole enchilada, specifically all about free software for the Mac.

• NeoOffice - A competitor to Microsoft Office, NeoOffice gets the job done. I have Office Mac X but it cannot handle Chinese characters so I use NeoOffice for all my writing and spreadsheet needs. Neo can read and write in MS Office file format (doc, xls, maybe even ppt, but I don't do much presentation so I don't know for sure), in addition to its own format. I have a template in NeoOffice Writer for my monthly ATPM review. Writer has the usual spell check and web linking, etc. I am sure it does not have every feature that MS Word does, but so far it met my needs. Likewise, NeoOffice Calc, the Excel counterpart, with support for SUM and other functions, does just fine for me. NeoOffice is updated regularly and you are usually asked to donate a few dollars from the update web site. You do not have to give but it would be nice to do so. Other than that, the whole shebang is totally free. Hooray for Open Source!
• Audacity - Another of my favorite open source software is Audacity. It somewhat works on sound files as Photoshop to images. Let's say you somehow record music and other sound sources into the Mac. With Audacity, you can increase or decrease the volume, make it fade out or in, play faster or slower, etc. With the free LAME library installed, you can export your handiwork to other formats, such as MP3.
• Phoenix Slides - Most likely you have your digital photos collected by iPhoto. Sure you can have fancy slide show from within iPhoto, what with Jesus Joy of Man's Desire as the background music, but what if somebody hands you a CD full of photos. You may not necessarily want to import those photos into your iPhoto library but you do want to see the pictures. Enters Phoenix Slides. As the name implies, Phoenix is little more than a slideshow software. Just point it at some folder with lots of pictures and voila you get a whole bunch of thumbnails to see. You can do some manipulation of the images and file maintenance, like deleting, but showing you what a bunch of photos look like is Phoenix's forte.
• Frozen Bubbles - You have to take a break sometimes from all the hard work. The open source Frozen Bubbles is somewhat a clone of Bust-A-Move, one of those games where you line up 3 or more bubbles of the same color to bust them. The Mac version does not support full-screen game play and is still at version 1.0, but it is still a good way to waste some time.
• MacOSaiX - As the contrived name suggests, the software is used for making mosaic, or photomosaic to be exact. You can use your own photo library or randomly grab photos off Google. This is the software that I used to make the mosaic of my ex-colleague Monika as she left the I.T. industry for the nursing field, http://www.flickr.com/photos/qaptainqwerty/55847224/

These are just a few programs I use regularly, or at least would like to use them more often, like MacOSaiX, that happen to be free. There are certainly a few web sites out there that list hundreds of free Mac programs, free as in free to use forever, not just free to download, but I like to give personal touches whenever possible. A long list can be overwhelming, whereas a short list with more info has some warmth to it.

Most likely whatever you need the Mac to do you can find the software to do it, free or otherwise. It is true that some apps are not available for the Mac platform, but it is a small price to pay. I will probably make a future blog entry called... Things The Mac Can Not Do (and How To Go Around It, If Applicable).

185 - Citrix and Kids

I love Citrix. Working in an environment supporting different networks and having to have different network accounts, with Citrix I can go into all those other networks with the proper accounts to do my job. In the ideal world, one network account can access the entire corporate network, but one side effects of all those mergers the firm had is that some networks are accessible only to accounts in those networks. For the casual user, Citrix provides a lightweight connection to the corporate network from outside. You may have your home drive and a few essential apps like email or office suite, which suffices most of the time. On days that I work from home, I usually have one Citrix connection to do data transfer when needed. I have the choice of using some Terminal Service connection but there are only 2 TS sessions per server so sometimes they get used up. Citrix is the better way to go most of the time.

I recently noticed a colleague, JB in the Citrix Admin group, using a white board as a writing surface. Or to catch peanut shells. What a waste of a good asset. He knew about my drawing skill as I gave him a Qaptain Qwerty qalendar this year. I offered to trade him something for the white board. He was reluctant at first, but then another colleague somehow convinced him to at least loan it to me.

It makes a big difference to have a board right then and there when the idea strikes. I made 184 - Text Twirl using a hand board then added text via Comic Life and Photoshop. The outcome is good but it did take a few hours. With JB's board on my desk, I was able to complete the drawing in minutes. JB himself thought it is a pretty good approximation of his appearance. The ponytail is his trademark.

Ever since I started using Citrix I had wanted to make a pun with Citrix and the Trix commercial. FYI, ica is the extension for Citrix files. Double-click on such files and you are prompted to log into the other network, all while still running apps with your native login.

184 - Text Twirl

Some months ago someone, a relative or friend I cannot remember, invited me to join Facebook. I joined the social network and did not think much of it. OK, so there's a blog-like thingy called Notes, a bunch of groups you can join, a bunch of other apps. As a matter of fact, it seemed there were too many apps to go through. I figured I would try it out for a few weeks and perhaps it would become abandoned like thoseGeocities web sites I setup in the early days of the web.

One day I decided to check out the word games in Facebook. Perhaps I read about the Scrabulous lawsuit and wanted to see what other word games are out there. I played Scrabbles before and found it not that great as a vocabulary-builder. You can have be a crossword wizard but if you don't know the handful of Q words without U you may not make it far with Scrabbles. I enjoyed playing Super Text Twist before so naturally I gave Text Twirl a twirl. Then my good friendTello challenged me to a game or two of Text Twirl as well. Not just Text Twirl, as it seemed Tello spends most of his living minutes checking out Facebook apps. We played Scramble, Word Twist, and of course Scrabulous. I even started playing Text Twirl against non-friend Facebook players. In short, I became addicted without knowing it.

Here is one positive thing to come out of the addiction - a cartoon from me after a brief hiatus. It is true - each game takes only 2 or 3 minutes to complete, but together they all add up. Like any addiction, once you are hooked on Facebook word games, your productivity is sucked into the void.

The Thirtieth of April

Today, April 30th, or ba mươi tây tháng tư in Vietnamese, meaning the thirtieth of April, is a historical day in Vietnam. April 30, 1975 was the day that the Vietnam War was over. There was no more South Vietnam and North Vietnam, just one unified Vietnam. Sounds nice, but it wasn't. On the surface, all Vietnamese were brothers and sisters again, but I heard stories of revenge, which were more likely the case when a government is overthrown by another. But seriously, I didn't have any personal experiences on that day. I was just a mere teenager tucked away in the countryside, away from all the actions.

This year's April 30 turned out to be an important day in my life, too. My old department, LAN Account Admin or LAA for short, finally got the official word from HR that their job is, for all practical purposes, done with. All LAA functions in the Northeast and Mid-West will be transferred to Tampa and Houston. I suppose they will have the chance to move to those cities to keep their jobs, but I doubt that many people will move. People have roots where they live and it is a major change. From the firm's point of view, of course, change is good, that everyone should embrace it.

Some consultants already got their fateful phone calls. They only have 30-day notices, versus employee's 60. Some time in the third quarter the employees will get their notice. That put their last day of work, at most, around September 1. For sure I'll come out to Jersey City to visit them for some farewell dinner before then. I will miss them.

Qaption Qontest

Photo captioning is one of the feature I usually look at in AM New York, one of NYC's free daily newspaper. (AM's crossword puzzle is usually easier to solve, too, which to me is a plus.) Through a link in JoCo's web site, I came across http://jawboneradio.blogspot.com . One of the regular entry on Jawbone is Caption This. So here it is, for all my adoring fans (all five of them), here's some interactivity for you to have. Use Blogger's Commenting feature to provide a caption for the photo. Please keep it family-oriented clean, OK?

For now, all I can say is that the photo was take while I was on vacation. More later!

Middle of Nowhere

I just came back from vacation in what can be referred to as "in the middle of nowhere", cyberspace-wise at least.

It was not the first time I went on vacation while with the new server admin department. I did go on vacation about a month after joining the new group. I didn't know enough to have my absence felt. This time around, I was involved in many critical projects. To make things more complicated, the other admin who is my usual backup, my "partner" so to speak, also wanted the same week off. Such is life when you have kids in school, you only have vacation when school is out, such as summer or spring break. My manager was kind enough to let both of us go, so I thought I would return the favor by lugging my company laptop along. I figured it's 2008 already so that any decent resort would have broadband access, even if it is not free. Ten dollars per day would be fair enough for me.

The first thing I did when we arrived at the resort was to turn on the Wife's MacBook Black, or BlackBook for short. It is 3 years younger than my PowerBook and boots up faster, with better battery health. There was some hotspot but I couldn't join it. OK, maybe I would have to ask the resort people for some info to configure the connection. The Wife said that she read somewhere that the resort definitely has free Internet access, but none of the literature I found in the room mentioned that. I went ahead and started looking for an RJ-45 (Ethernet) wall jack. I can live with wired access. I even brought an old 4-port 10-Mbit hub to share the access with the 3 laptops that I brought along. Bummer, no RJ-45 ports anywhere.

A nephew made the gruesome discovery. Right there on the kitchen phone was the label, "PC hookup on side". Sure enough there were 2 RJ-11, regular phone/modem jacks, on the side. My laptop cases have many things that can come in handy on the road - Ethernet cable, USB cable, flash drives, lock, etc. But I wasn't prepared to face the lowly 56K modem again. There was no RJ-11 cable in any of my bags, but even if I had one, I would still need to know what number to call. I still have a dial-up account, earlier in the year used by my sister before she finally got broadband via cable. She used the service via some local NYC number. I might have had some numbers in my PDA, but calling from Drums, PA would incur long distance charges. Who knows what the resort would charge, too, for using their precious phone. I still remember the $5 or so Holiday Inn charged me for a local call the night of my wedding banquet.

As a last-ditch effort, I put my cell phone into modem mode and hooked it up to my PowerBook via the USB cable. Can't say I came unprepared, if you can overlook the lack of the RJ-11 cable. I thought the Razr2 would be smart enough to automatically connect the Mac to the 'Net. I know the data charge would be significant, but I really want to push technology's envelope. Alas, contrary to my unreasonable expectation, the Razr2 just behaved like a regular modem and nothing more. Sure the Mac instantly recognized the Razr2 as a modem, but I would still have to dial some modem number. Even if the cell phone can send faster than 56k, whatever answers the call would be the bottleneck at 56k and less.

I blame Twitter for my desire to be connected. Maybe Blogger, too. At least with Twitter, I was able to send a text message, even though I didn't see the post until I got back home.

DS I Love You

Nintendo sure has the gaming market in a good grip. In the console area, there's the Nintendo Wii, not enough to go around after all these times being on the market. I've heard about the handheld device Nintendo DS but recently actually used one, albeit just for chatting. All four young nephew and nieces living near me have one, my Son is the only one not having. I thought he would make a big fuss about it, 人有我有, or "People have it and I have it, too" in Chinese, but so far he hasn't bugged us constantly about it. The Wife and I promised Son that he would get his own Nintendo DS for his birthday, if he behaves that is. Poor kid was so miserable when we went on a bus ride to Atlantic City to a musical concert. His cousins ignored his constant pleading for a long time. Kids sure can be cruel sometimes.

Out of the box the DS can find each other and the device owners can chat and share drawings over WiFi. Neat! There are multi-player games that seem to open up to all nearby devices, at least it seemed to me. Some of the kids already have some memory cards that are loaded with "free" games. Apparently there is no copy protection on these games. When my Son got his DS, maybe I'll look into how all that works.

Robber Bank?

I have to go through my snail mail more often. The other day the Wife had a day off and went through the pile. She found a letter from my bank that read something like this:

Dear schmuck,

We have noticed that your CD account is dormant. You have 21 days from the date of this letter to re-certify it. If not, we will turn the $4,321 to the government. It's a state law, you nincompoop!

Really, other than the name-callings I inserted, that's the gist of it. My first reaction was, "Great, this must be some convenient offshoot of some anti-terrorism or anti-laundering law." I immediately checked with the bank and they showed me that the CD account was under no threat of being forfeited, even though it was a few past the 21-day deadline. Good for them, because I was going to wage a mini-war on the bank by closing all my accounts and make this as big a stink as possible.

The CD account was opened when my Son was born and I've been letting it auto-renew every time it matured. Isn't that enough of activity? Some months ago my savings account was frozen for inactivity but I don't recall any difficulty unfreezing it. Some services the banks do for their customers these days. Before any of these actions were to happen, they should not just do so without any feedbacks from the customer. One lousy letter isn't enough. They must call or maybe even visit the poor customer. Our state government doesn't seem to be of much help here. Don't I pay enough taxes already? I might as well keep them doughs under the mattress.

Postmen in the Mountains

Yesterday I finished watching the Chinese movie Postmen in the Mountains. I try to watch Chinese movies every now and then to learn a word or two. In Chinese, the movie name is "那山那人那狗", literally meaning "That Mountain, That Man, That Dog". To me, that sounds more like a palindrome than a heartfelt movie. A palindrome is a word or sentence that spells the same backward or forward, with punctuations and spaces ignored, such as BOB or "Wonton? Not now." One of the long palindrome I know is "A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama."

The mountain in the title refers to the mountainous route that a mailman makes. His faithful shepherd dog accompanied him on the route. The man had retired and his young son took over his work. For one last time, he delivered mail and showed his son the different aspects of the job. The work involved long trips on foot, over many days, through the various villages in the mountains. Along the way, father and son developed a better relationship.

It is a good father-and-son movie. I cannot help thought about my own relationship with my father, then between me and my Son. In one scene, as the pair passed a road with a bus moving on it, the son remarked that it was so unnecessary to go on foot. He could have paid for that section of the trip. The father disagreed vehemently and told the son to stick to his route. Ah, the younger generation, always looking for the newer, better things. I used to think my father didn't know enough. There is a tennis center near my house. In warm weather it is not covered, but during the winter it's covered up. I thought my father wouldn't recognize the covered court and asked him about it. He was upset that I had to even ask him and correctly pointed out that it was just the tennis court covered up.

In the movie, the older postman didn't spend enough time with his son. He wasn't even home when the son was born. He would buy his son gifts on his return trips, but then he would disappear for days, walking the mail route through all those mountain villages. In the end, his son understood his father's job, and the man, better. I think love can be a supply/demand thing like economics. If there's too much of it, it's taken for granted. I know some nieces and nephews whose fathers don't spend that much time with them. Yet, they seem to love their fathers more. Whenever the fathers are home, the kids would try to spend time with them. In my case, I think I spend more than enough time with my Son already. He doesn't seem to appreciate me as much as I think he should. If there's a light-hearted "fight" between me and Mommy, he would side with Mommy. Some nights he would beg to sleep with Mommy. Just my random ruminations, really, as I still want to spend lots of time with my Son.

Painless Transition

The title of this blog entry is not about the transition from Eliot Spitzer to David Paterson. I am sure the World has heard enough about political sex scandals. Instead, the transition I have in mind is that from a G4 Mac PowerBook to an Intel MacBook, Black, no less!

As my Wife tries to put more efforts into her side business, the details of which shall remain unmentioned, she wants to have her own laptop (LT) computer to conduct business, perhaps at meetings and so forth. Luckily, she agreed to get a Mac so a few weeks later she has her Mac laptop. Maybe just to be easily distinguished from my silver color LT, she wants the Black MacBook.

I was unpleasantly surprised that the LT came with Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). Hello? It's been a year since Leopard was released, why isn't it pre-installed? Luckily, a Leopard DVD was included in the package and installation went without a hitch.

The exact painless transition I have in mind is the migration of accounts, data, and apps from the old LT to the new one. What a beautiful process! One unique thing with Mac computers is that they can be easily turned into a hard drive, external to another Mac. While booting up, just hold down the letter T, short for target, and the Mac will become, in this day and age, just another FireWire device. Hook up a FireWire cable from the target Mac to another, and you can transfer stuff over to the other Mac. I know in the old SCSI days, the same thing can be done, whether it was another letter on the keyboard I am not sure.

Apple's Migration Assistant worked well for me. On the new LT, I just had to delete the new account I created for my Wife then the Assistant imported her old account and its data. I also brought over everything in the Applications folder. I should do the same for my account. Even though I won't be using her LT regularly, I can think of the new toy, uh, work device, as an extra backup.

That Syncing Feeling

I took another step toward replacing my PDA. Out will be the Visor Deluxe and In will be the iPod touch. Apple's iSync software has been around for a long time but I never bothered to use it. I finally gave it a try. After a few adjustments here and there, I can sync the Visor's Address Book etc. to Apple's Address Book on the Mac. From there I would use iTunes to sync the Address Book to the iPod touch, along with the usual music and photos. Back when I first had the touch, I imported my Contact List from my Yahoo!Mail account. Combining three sources of info - Visor Address Book, Apple Address Book, and Yahoo!Mail Contact List - into one no doubt yielded many duplicates. I now have to slowly clean up the big list. To make things more interesting, I am also going through an old cell phone to make sure whatever I have there is transferred into the touch. The cell phone is too beat-up to donate at Staples but I plan to recycle it someday, better not to have any contacts info left in it.

As I go through the contacts list, I occasionally come across names that totally elude my memory. It is amazing how the brain totally loses things. All these names-numbers pair don't have anything else, so I have no idea who those people are. It would be fun if I call them up and try to rekindle the relationship. Maybe I will Google those people first...

Demand Jonathan Coulton

Even though I don't like every single song by Jonathan Coulton, I thought of seeing him perform live! That's unusual for me, as I normally cannot stand crowds and noisy places. I rarely go to concerts. I went to a few by Hong Kong superstars but I don't recall anything memorable about them. The long trip to Atlantic City, sitting too close to the stage, maybe the odd hours. But here I am, trying to find out when Brooklyn's own musical prodigal son will perform at home. I guess I get into the game too late. JoCo used to do shows with John Hodgman (of the Get A Mac commercial) in Williamsburg. That's Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the area where you are in if you take the Williamsburg Bridge from Delancey Street into Brooklyn, with all the Hasidic Jews. I am not done reading all of JoCo's blog entries, but I wouldn't be surprised if he used to perform at some small venues in NYC. I just added the Eventful Demand JoCo to the sidebar. If you like his music, Demand JoCo for your city!

Jonathan Coulton

Code Monkey. Brain-eating zombie colleague. Murderous A.I. with a wry sense of humor. That Jonathan Coulton sure has some great songs on topics some people can identify with.

I first discovered Jonathan Coulton, or JoCo for short, on TWIT (This Week In Tech) podcast #133. I learned that JoCo was a successful niche marketer on the Internet. Leo Laporte mentioned Code Monkey as one of the more famous JoCo song. At the end, Leo put on the song Still Alive, which is sung at the end of the game Portal. It was a very nice tune and I decided to check out JoCo.

I finally went to JonathanCouton.com and what a treat that is. All his songs can be listened to online and there are many ways to buy them. As suspected, Code Monkey is about a computer programmer and what a sweet story it is, as he was infatuated with some girl in the office. Next, I smiled a few times as I listened to Re: Your Brain. Ah, just another day in cubicle-ville, with all the office lingo, except the need here is of one zombie colleague wanting to eat the brain of another. I already bought Code Monkey, Re: Your Brain and its French version, Re: Vos Cerveaux, and probably end up also buying A Laptop Like You ("I forgive your strange one-button mouse"... Hmm, which laptop has a one-button mouse?) and The Presidents (I love history.) I don't like the "cover" songs that JoCo made, especially when they are not as powerful as the original. Still he sure has some great tunes written for the cubicle-dwelling crowd and the geeky population out there. He even mentioned my favorite snack (Frito) and my favorite drink (Mountain Dew). Last but not least, he lives in Brooklyn! I'll keep an eye out for him on the subway from now on.

The Good Apple

When I paid for the January 2008 software update for the iPod touch through iTunes, it didn't work as expected. Usually when I bought songs and such through the iTunes music store, I can see almost instantly that the items are downloaded. With the software update, nothing seemed to happen and I was put back at the beginning. Unwittingly, I clicked the button to kick off the software update again, and this time, it seemed, the update started to happen. I was afraid that I would get charged twice. When I received confirmation email from Apple, the two references to the software update had the same reference number. I figured some human being caught the double-charge and corrected the dumb computer program.

When my credit card bill arrived, lo and behold I was indeed charged twice. I dreaded calling customer service, whether for the credit card company or Apple. I decided to contact Apple by email first. I explained that I was not happy that I got charged for the software update even though I just got the touch in December. Naturally, I was doubly upset that I got charged twice. Adding insult to injury, no? Fortunately, an Apple rep wrote back informing me that not only she gave me credit for the extra charge, she also gave me five free songs on the online music store. Whoopee! It is my first instance of dealing with Apple customer service and they sure did the right thing for me. I blew all five song credits on "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Ringtones Ring True

I've been playing around with the ringtones on my Razr. Unlike the iPhone, I don't have to pay extra to use any songs on the phone as ringtones. I was lazy and didn't trim the songs to have just the pertinent lines, but here goes...

• general incoming call: Call Me, by Blondie. Of course! It has to be!
  
• voice mail: Message In A Bottle, by The Police.
• calendar alarm: There's Always Something There To Remind Me, by Naked Eyes.
• text message alert: I've Gotta Get A Message To You, by The Bee Gees. Granted this Bee Gees tune can be used for voice mail too, but I don't get that much text message so best to have this tune for it. The idea of death isn't something to be reminded of too often.
  
• calls from my Mom: Mamma Mia, by ABBA. Mother by The Police may be a better choice, but it's one of the few Police songs that I hate, so no thanks.
• calls from home: 那裡是吾家? (Where Is Home?), by Sam Hui (許冠傑). Maybe in a few months I will change it to Homeward Bound by Simon & Garfunkel...
  
• calls from my boss: Trap (Platypus Boss 1), by Ben Daglish. Not that my boss has anything to do with traps, just that the tune is played in the game Platypus at the end of Level 1, where you have to defeat the boss to advance further. In video games, the boss level is where you have to defeat some character who can take more than the usual one or two shots to succumb.
• calls from the Wife: Life Made Simple, by Jessica Hsuan and Roger Kwok. The song is the theme song of the Chinese soap opera by the same name, or 阿旺新傳 in Chinese. The show is about a mentally retarded man who thinks his childhood female playmate is his wife, or something like that. Sometimes my Wife must think I am crazy not to be dishonest whenever the chances appear.

Some day when my Son has his own cell phone, I will no doubt have John Lennon's Beautiful Boy as his ringtone. Aah, let's hope that day won't arrive any time soon. The teenage years, I get a headache just thinking about them...

Berhala Hut

My sister CH visited my family a few days after Tết. Mother made a big meal and we talked afterward about many topics. Eventually we gravitated toward our refugee experience again. The question was, "How long were we at the various islands?" There was no calendar to tell the day, the weather was always hot, and there was no TV to watch our favorite show to make reference to a particular event. Hmm, remember one night some drunk set his hut on fire? Luckily his neighbors quickly put out the fire, lest it spread to their huts too. It was a Thursday because I was watching Naruto Shippuuden on the PowerBook. Yeah, right.

With the need to record more of this memory before it is all forgotten, I am resuming my "memoir" of the experience. It also helped that I received a positive feedback for my entry earlier about my refugee experience.

The drawing above is what I remember of my home on Berhala Island. As you may recall, my family was lucky enough to meet Grandaunt "Luck" to inherit the hut from her. Granny's family were scheduled to leave Berhala for Galang Camp when we arrived. They were among the first on Berhala Island and they did a great job of putting the hut together.

The view in the drawing is that from outside the "window". It's just a big, rectangular opening in the wall. Next to the window, there was a pair of chairs with a table in the middle. I don't know for sure if we had a teapot and cups on that table. There were two openings to get into the hut - to the left of the big column in the picture and to the right of the "window". The left "door" would be for getting to the street while the right one would be for entering the yard. Taking up a big portion of the hut was the bed. I don't recall us having pillows. I made believe we stuff some luggage bags with clothes for use as pillows. At night, my two sisters and I would share the bed. My parents and brother would sleep on the floor, on some tarp, to the right, while my uncle lie along the space between the bed and the tea table. In the right corner, we had our own shower room complete with a door that swung to the right. Water was stored in a metal drum and a scooper would float on top of the water. There was probably some long groove in the ground to drain water to the ditch in the back of the hut. We had our own well to draw water from, Granny Luck really made it easy for themselves and then us. The "kitchen" consisted of a hole in the ground with three bricks. There was plenty of trees on the island to supply fuel for the kitchen. I drew the "range" deeper into the hut, but in reality it was much closer to the "wall" of the hut, in the foreground and not shown. I think there was a sheet of metal to keep the occasional long tongue of the flame from setting the wall on fire. There was a shelf against the right wall and is not shown in the picture. We probably kept kitchen stuff like pots and pans, ceramic bowls and plates, spoons, chopsticks, etc. I drew those things near the kitchen, as if they were ready for washing, but in reality they would be cleaned in the yard. The ground was just dirt and the walls, as well as the roof, were fronds, perhaps from the many coconuts trees on the island. Other than the metallic barrel (thùng phi) in the shower room to hold water and the nails to hold the furnitures together, we were living in the Wooden Age.

Prior to the Berhala hut, our home was a top-floor condo with indoor plumbing and electricity. The floor was tiled and the walls were solid. The kitchen, interestingly, used firewoods, too, so that part of our life wasn't too different from the refugee experience. It was a big change for the worse to go from the condo to the hut, but I still consider ourselves lucky. We didn't have to spend any money to get the hut. We got food from some relief agency periodically, but we still had to provide for other expenses. I think we got by mostly from the jewelries that my mother sold, one by one.

Without electricity, cell phone service, or iPod, how did I spend my days on Berhala Island? That is a topic for another drawing on another day.

N.Wii.P.L.

I have been a regular user of public library ever since I found out about it. Living in Brooklyn, by default I frequent the local branches of the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL). When I started to work at home every week, I visit the library even more often, sometimes three times a week, if not to pick up reserved items then just to get out of the house for a while.

Since I started taking my Son to music class in Chinatown, I also go to the New York Public Library (NYPL) branches in the area. The materials available for borrowing are not too different from the BPL's. There are books, DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, graphic novels, Wi-Fi Internet access, etc. just like in Brooklyn. The difference is that NYPL, I don't know since when, has console games. While it's true that NYPL has always had CD-ROMs for Windows PCs, I never had any interests in them. They are mostly kiddie games and, besides, I don't use PCs much at home unless I am working. But now that I have a Nintendo Wii, I am very interested in what the library has to offer.

The first time I saw console games in an NYPL branch it was in the Chatham Branch. Chatham is in the heart of Chinatown and is always crowded, so it was no surprise that there were only one Wii game available. There were some Xbox and Sega games, too. A few weeks later I visited the relatively new Mulberry Branch, further north near Houston Street. I picked up Super Mario Galaxy and The Bee Movie games, two being the limit per library card. Alas, when I tried to return the games, I picked up my own game, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic! Oh well, I will have to return it late on Monday. The good thing is I got the Hot Wheels Wii game. It is one of the games my Son wants, but I am pretty sure he would never get too far with the game. Borrowing from the library is the best way to go. Only if my Son gets really far with the library's copy will I buy the game.

tennai-denai-jutsu

Ever since I became a Naruto fan, I have thought of incorporating Naruto into one of my cartoon. No such cartoon has been made yet, but today I found an interesting store sign that I just had to snap. Right here in beautiful Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, there is a place where you can get your 1040 or 1099 tax form completed AND learn a new jutsu or two! I heard that the new tennai-denai-jutsu is pretty powerful and can make money grow on trees.

In the Naruto universe, chakra is the life energy that can be used for almost anything, such as making illusion, creating clones of oneself, or transporting objects to another dimension! Personally, I am not that much interested in balancing my chakras. I much prefer collect it into a ball to throw at my opponent.

Of course, if you do a quick research in Wikipedia, you would learn that, outside of the Naruto universe, chakra is more popularly linked to holistic health. I am sure this is what the CPA offers here, in addition to ledger-balancing.

All I Really Need To Know

...I Learned While Playing Yahoo!Games Daily Crosswords.

Well, it is far from the truth. I just couldn't help making reference to one of my favorite book, Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. I did learn a few new things of late primarily from playing crosswords.

• Eero Saarinen was the architect responsible for the St. Louis Arch. Sure I was there twice and maybe even read his name on some plaque but now that it took me a few seconds to look him up in Wikipedia, the name will stick better in my memory. The clue wisely read Young Saarinen because Eero's father Eliel was the designer who influenced him in sculpture and furniture design. Eero, a name any crosswords makers must love. Chances are my sister in St. Louis knows all about him already.
  
• Eider is a type of seaduck. Supposedly, the quack is famous for its down (feather).
• A hasp is the metal plate, one end hinged, the other end usually rounded at the corners, and slotted in the middle for the thingamajig to pass through, through which a padlock's whatamacallit would then go through. The clue simply read padlock adjunct. I didn't solve it directly but rather through the connecting words. I had to look it up in the dictionary afterward.
• Ides, not to be thought of as the plural form of ide (whatever id is), is the middle of the month, in the Roman calendar, i.e. the 15th day for some month and some other day on shorter or longer months.
• for the nonce means for the time being. Never heard of that phrase before. Maybe I should go out more often. Of course, it could be just things that only happen in crosswords, such as some words in Scrabble. For the life of me, I can never fully understand the word qua or when to use it. I think the teachers in Snoopy movies say it all the time, usually five in a row.
  

Yahoo!Games Daily Crosswords

It is interesting how one's opinion on a subject can be changed after one actually becomes more familiar with the subject. Some time ago when I was looking for software on the Mac to create crossword puzzles, in no time I came across online crosswords. I thought, "Why would anyone want to play crosswords online?" I thought of crosswords as something one do while waiting for the train or while commuting, just to while away the time. Usually you would not have a computer with you, so the idea of playing crosswords online just did not appeal to me.

Just a few weeks ago, the release of Flip Words 2 got me interested in computer word games all over again. At the end of the 60-minute demo, I wanted to play more word games. One game after another, I ended up at Yahoo!Games Daily Crosswords. It's just like your everyday newspaper puzzle that is not too hard. I play the standard level and the answers are just clicks away. Of course it is no fun if you use it too much, but there are times when, while doing the physical newspaper puzzle, I simply couldn't get it right. One disadvantage of not working in the office five days a week like most office grunts is that I don't get to pick up AM New York newspaper everyday. The Wife picks them up from time to time, but not always. Thus, a few times I would do most of the puzzle but simply did not know the very last answer because I would not have the next day's papers. With the online game, all that is history.

One thing I like about playing the daily game is that even if you are really hooked on it, there is only one game you can play per day. Getting hooked on other computer games may mean hours wasted trying to go past a certain level. Not so with the Yahoo! Daily Games. Of course, if I find myself waiting for the clock to strike midnight just to play a new game, then I will seek counseling right away...

Lost-and-Found Works

Lost-and-Found centers really works, believe it! If you ever lose something and suspect or know where you lost it, go back to the place and ask. Just the other day, after visiting the public library in Chinatown, out on the street I felt the strong wind blowing over my uncovered head. I was sure I had a hat with me getting out of the house, but I also thought I left the hat at the music studio where Son was taking his gu-zheng lesson. Still, I went back to the library and traced my way but no dice. Back at the studio, there was no hat to be found, so back to the library I went. I asked the library person at the return counter and he asked around. They had this paper box for the various items people lost in the library. Sure enough, the lady who checked the materials out for me earlier knew where it was. It was not a brand new hat but it had the flaps for the ears. Talk about "Seek and Ye Shall Find"!

Some weeks ago Son lost two sweaters. Somehow one of his friends had the sweater. The other one I found after rummaging through the school's Lost-and-Found box. Interestingly, the Lost-and-Found box used to be in the school's main office, but perhaps because there were too many items, the two boxes were re-located to the cafeteria. When I was going through them, there were even uneaten sandwiches and a fruit or two.

Son managed to also lose a glove shortly afterward and I told him to look for it in the L-n-F. He attends an after-school program and spends some time in the cafeteria. He never bothered to look. One Friday after dropping him at the Boy Scouts meeting, which is also at the same school, I took a quick look through the L-n-F. Sure enough, the lone single glove was there.

Lost-and-Found works, believe it!

Fleeced

When Apple started selling the package of apps for the iPod touch, my rationalization was that, "Hey, I got the thing for Christmas, it is OK to spend some of my own money for it." I regret I bought it. It was one of the few time I bought something impulsively instead of waiting for reviews.

I was itching for a note-taking app so I jumped at the chance when the January Software Package was offered. Nice-looking as it is, Notes is a disappointment. Since I plan to replace my aging Visor Deluxe with the touch, I inevitably compare the apps on the touch to that found in the Visor. For starter, the lowly 8-MB Visor comes with the Memo List, free of charge. You write memos on the thing and next time the device syncs, you have a copy on the computer. From there you can highlight the text and copy it to elsewhere. I've written a few blog entries or ATPM software reviews in that fashion. The same cannot be done with the touch's current Notes app. No syncing of any kinds happens as far as Notes is concerned. The only way to get the text out of Notes is to send the whole thing as an email. It is a very incomplete "solution", if it can even be considered as such.

Mail is a decent email client, although I was already accessing my Gmail through the mobile Safari. Of course, writing and reading email via Mail instead of the web browser is a better experience. Yet I cannot shake it that I paid $20 for the package. Not taking the feeble Notes, I did not get something that I could not do before. It is nice that Mail can also pull my .Mac email and Yahoo!Mail but I don't use those two much nowadays. Yahoo!Mail account gets mostly spam and there are thousands of messages in the Inbox. Thanks to the Mail-enabled touch, I now can clean up those spam messages, if I ever in the mood to.

I don't play the stock market, don't need to know too much about the weather, and find the map program a bit weak, so the rest of the January Package is not that appealing either. If Apple had to charge for the package because of accounting practices, I think $5 or $10 would be more reasonable. Instead, the iPod company prefer to fleece their loyal customers for twenty bucks.

I am curious if there will be quarterly, or more frequent, software packages for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Here's my wish list for improvements:

• A device-wide search function. Regardless whether it is an entry in Notes, Calendar, or Mail, etc. if I search with a keyword, all those apps' data should be looked into. The Visor has that years ago.
• A simple To-Do List that I can look in one screen and filter based on completion status, dates, etc. Again, it's something that the old Palm OS app has.
• A way to highlight text for copying and pasting. Data entry in any device should be kept to a minimum. Copying and pasting is a very basic computing requirement, how the iPhone platform cannot handle is perplexing.
• All these upgrades should be free!
  

Wardriving

Wardriving is the act of driving in a car looking for open wireless network. The "war" part of the word comes from the movie "War Game". Back when the movie was new, personal computers "talked" by calling each other over the modem via phone lines. Supposedly one can dial numbers a whole series of numbers, or wardialing, just to see which numbers end up connecting to a computer. In the movie, some kid somehow hooked up to a Pentagon computer and almost started a war.

I never cared about open wireless networks because I didn't have a mobile device. Sure, my laptop is wireless-capable, but it is still too big to carry around. Now that I have the iPod touch, that all changes.

I practice what is better known as warwalking, since I walk around with my iPod touch instead of driving around. It has been a while since my company blocked out access to web mail accounts like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, so the touch comes in handy, if it can sniffs out any wireless networks. Up until last week, on days that I work in the office, I would walk over to the Brooklyn Heights Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library system to use the free service. I already go to that library almost every week to borrow Shonen Jump magazines anyway so it's not a big deal. However, recently I stumbled upon the MetroTech Public WiFi service, available in the grove of trees known as The Commons, at the center of the MetroTech complex, between buildings #2 and #5 (which is part of Polytechnic University). Nice!

One thing I've discovered in my warwalking experience is that most people have their networks locked. Either people are now more tech-savvy or the default settings on the wireless access points come better protected. In my own neighborhood, I did stumble across a few open networks. Even in my own home, in certain parts of the house by default the device, either the iPod touch or the PowerBook, sometimes automatically connects to one of the neighbors' unrestricted wireless network. The signal is weak and after a minute or two I would notice how slow the web browser is and would switch back to my own network. Whether my neighbor is ignorant of the technology or is a nice person who shares out his 'Net access I wouldn't know.

ARROWOnline.org Re-launched

For years I was the webmeister for the green group Astoria Residents Reclaiming Our World, or ARROW for short. I know, it is an ambitious-sounding name. I was not the first webmeister but rather inherited the design from someone else. Over the years, I kept the site mostly up-to-date, reflecting a few changes with the Board Members and the occasional event announcements. Life changes took a toll on the Board Members and much as we wanted to do more for the environment, other responsibilities took higher priorities. Somehow, even with the convenience of email and the cell phone, I didn't get frequent enough updates to put on the web and for a long time the web site was idle. One day, my ARROW friend SR came across some MAWebCenter person. The software sounded promising, with the possibility that SR and others can just update the web site themselves. I didn't make any changes to the original web site design so it was about time the site got a face lift.

It is a few months later and the new www.arrowonline.org is up. For SR, the software isn't as easy to use as advertised, but I think the site looks pretty good. ARROWOnline's goal is to disseminate useful green news, be it recycling, re-using, or reducing, focused on local organizations. Check it out and learn a thing or two about the green movement!

Touched by the iPod... touch

For Christmas the Wife got me an iPod touch. I was in the market for a new iPod, since my 10-GB player is constantly low on space. Unfortunately, the highest capacity the touch product line has only 16 GB and that's what Wife got me. I wouldn't get it myself, as I wanted my next iPod to be a big leap in terms of capacity, perhaps like the 160-GB iPod Classic. Still, after a few days of using it, the iPod touch has grown on me.

Like most new iPods, the touch can handle, in addition to music, movies and photos. It is great to finally be able to carry around my cartoon collection to show them off when needed. Oh, and family photos, too. The iPod touch looks like an iPhone but it lacks the iPhone's camera, speaker, and of course, phone. The touch interface takes a little getting used to, but it has its merit. No more worrying about losing styluses. I had my share of losing a few when I actively used the Palm PDA.

Wi-Fi web surfing, albeit limited, comes in handy, as nowadays I often have to compete with my Son for the use of the PowerBook. One time I had him use the company Dµll laptop but he hated the control. The Dµll's touchpad leaves much to be desired, nowhere near as comfortable as the PowerBook's. With the iPod touch's Wi-Fi capability, I can now check my Gmail inbox with the touch while Son feeds or plays with his pets at ClubPenguin.com.

I already started to use the touch as a PDA and getting away from the Visor Deluxe. Lesser use of AAA batteries is one good reason. Still, the Visor has tons of apps for it while the touch has nothing other than what Apple provided. Since I don't like to install software hacks that most likely will be wiped out with the next Apple firmware upgrade, I'll just have to wait for official apps developed for the iPhone/iPod touch product line. Here's hoping the software development kit (SDK) promised for February 2008 will come through! Last but not least, I think it's misleading that Apple proclaims the web browser on the iPod touch "full". Lacking support for Javascript and Flash, it is far from being full. Many web pages don't work with the touch. Mobile Safari may be a fully-featured web browser if this is the 1990s. But it is already 2008 so the lack of support for JS and Flash, among others, makes this version of Safari fail to meet the average consumer's expectations. For now, I'll just have to make the most of it and again hope for software upgrade to cover the gap.

R€$0£UT10N$

Maybe it is a sign of old age creeping upon me, but this year I've decided to make a list of New Year Resolutions. Here they are in order of feasibility...

1. Draw at least one new cartoon every two weeks. The topic can be anything. If it's work-related, the usual audience can see it. If it's Mac-related, very possible ATPM can use it. Anything else can go into Flickr. Exposure in every way.
   
2. No staying up late past 11:30 p.m., unless it's some kind of work emergency or scheduled work.
3. Get up early to do exercise or better yet, to run 2K or more at the nearby park.
4. Lose 20 pounds. This is a tough one...
   
5. Go vegetarian one lunch per week. I've done it before for about one year and didn't particularly enjoyed it, but let's give it a second try.
6. Get handier with (physical) tools, to fix broken things around the house, to put up shelves, etc.
7. Keep in touch better with friends and family. Hopefully my handy iPod touch can help me in those moments I need to write a message and my Son is hogging the PowerBook.
   
8. Win the lotto jackpot so I can quit my day job and actually follow through the above items.

That is all, just eight items. I do not like to make up resolutions just to fill the list. Let's start by going to bed before 11:30 p.m. today!

Pay Your Water Bill

New York City was recently spared a raise in water rates. Instead of sticking the 18% rate hike to NYC residents, the government will track down water bill deadbeats and make them cough up the dough. The question that immediately came to my mind was, "Do you know anyone who refrain from paying for water use?" Every now and then someone would tell me that they have to leave the place where they are at to "go pay my water bill." Some Chinese I know even say the exact same thing in Chinese, namely, "去交水費". So how can there be water bill deadbeats if so many people I know always pay their water bills. Where did those people go when they said they went to pay their water bill?

It is a strange world ;-)

The Story Behind Platypus

I liked the game Platypus so much I started to Google for more info about it. I learned that there was a sequel called, uh, Platypus II, for Windows only for now. Then there was also a Platypus for Sony's PlayStation Personal. Eventually, I came across the web site for Squashy Software, Anthony Flack's company. It was there that I learned about the story behind the game.

There are two stories of note on the Squashy Software web site. The first, also discussed elsewhere on the web, was that Anthony was an up-and-coming game developer. Along came software publisher iDigicon offering Anthony a lump sum for the game Platypus. Like many people starting out, Anthony didn't have much money at the time and took the offer, signing away all intellectual property rights that would be associated to the game. As yet another item in the traditional brick-and-mortar stores, the game didn't fare well at first. Then Mike Boeh obtained the rights to distribute the software from iDigicon, made some improvements to it, and re-released it online as shareware/demoware. The game was a big hit, but unfortunately, all Anthony Flack got out of it was the original sum iDigicon offered him (plus the completion bonus). Well, for a short while, through arrangement with Mike Boeh, Anthony was able to offer the game from the Squashy Software web site, but then iDigicon canceled the deal with Boeh and the action nixed the Squashy link as well. That was Feb 2006, something might be different by now because Boeh's web site, www.retro64.com, does offer Platypus for download, but Squashy Software doesn't.

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame once wrote that to be successful in business you would need to be a business person. He attributed his success in the cartoon syndication not so much because of his drawing skill, but rather from some other business angle. The world can be a complicated place sometimes. I identify with Anthony because I am not business-savvy. I like drawing cartoons and hope someday to make a living out of it. I dread ending up like young Anthony Flack of yesteryear, taken advantage by some lop-sided business deal that, at the time, was better than nothing.

The other point I find interesting is how having a backup offsite makes all the difference. While young Anthony was working on putting out Platypus, a fire in his building consumed everything he possessed except the clothes on his back. Luckily, he had a backup of the game stored outside the apartment. Wow. It is not only important to have backups, but the backup must be offsite, physically away from the original. Anthony had a hard time finding plasticine to continue making clay models, but at least he had the backup to continue the work.

Anthony Flack has been working on the next game, Cletus Clay, for a while. There is much anticipation in the indie game developer community, but Anthony doesn't have enough time to devote to it. Let's wait and see.

BTW, I learned today at http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=34737 that Michael Reitzenstein did the conversion for the Mac platform for Platypus.

Besides the story posted on www.squashysoftware.com, you can also get info about Anthony Flack from an interview he granted to Indie Game Developer's Podcast:

http://www.indiegamepod.com/2006/10/squashy-software-interview-part-i.html
http://www.indiegamepod.com/2006/11/squashy-software-interview-part-ii.html

Platypus

I am on the mailing list of a few game publishers, both to keep up with the news and for the occasional freebies. Recently, Macgamestore.com gave away the game Platypus to its subscribers. At first, I thought, great, a shoot-em-up game. In recent memory, I bought the game Jets 'N Guns, also of the shoot-em-up genre, because of its great music and impressive graphics, but the game is so hard I never got beyond level 2. I've been looking for
another game in the shoot-em-up category. Platypus is just what I want.

The game is relatively easy to play. I was able to get past a few levels the first time I played it. Work with a second player and you can advance even faster. (In the screenshot, Player 1 (yellow) hasn't re-materialized yet after being blasted into smithereens earlier.) I am currently stuck at Level 2, Area 2, so it is not that easy that I can finish in one seating. The music by Chris Abbot is nice, too. I wasn't into computer during the Commodore 64's heyday so I didn't readily recognize Abbot's music, but there is some similarities to the music I heard in some Commodore Amiga games. Unlike Jets 'N Guns, there is no need to buy and sell stuff to arm your spaceship. Just blast a wave of enemies and they become stars for you to collect. Shoot the stars a few times more and the power-up changes - wide-shooter, autofire, sonic wave, rocket, and lightning.

What really sets Platypus apart from many of the games out there is its claymation-based graphic. I think there are some game building packages out there that are used by the people who supply games to publishers like Game House and Big Fish Games. It's probably the same people using the same artists, such that they all look similar. The way the games are played maybe different, but still they do look the same. It's like cartoons from Pixar or Dreamworks. Impressive and beautiful as they are, the look in all those cartoons are the same. Not so with Platypus, because its creator, Anthony Flack, had meticulously made everything from clay and animated them. Think Nick Park, Creature Comfort, and Wallace and Grommit. Even though I am good at drawing, animation, computer-assisted or not, is just too tedious for me. My hat goes off to Anthony for the great work. The clay appearance simply gives the game a unique look that I haven't seen in any games.

Next time: The sad story behind the game.

Him, Him, Him!

I just bought Rupert Holmes' Partners In Crime album from the iTunes Music Store. I didn't buy it for The Pina Colada Song or because I like the plays that he wrote - not that they are bad or anything. In my little corner of the world, Holmes' song Him holds special significance.

It was the early 1980's when I first settled down in the U.S., a mere lad in a family of six. We just arrived from the refugee camp and started adjusting to the new life. I had about one year of private English school but it wasn't enough to carry out fluent conversation. Someone, whether my late father or a cousin I cannot remember, said that when my English was good enough, I would be able to comprehend what was said or sung on the radio. Sure enough, whatever on the radio sounded so fast I couldn't understand much. Still, as I explored American music I discovered that, unlike Vietnamese music, there was much repetition as far as the lyric went. Even though I didn't understand all the words of a song, there was always certain phrases or words that were repeated over and over. As we didn't have a TV and I didn't read the newspaper, there was no way to confirm it but I was sure I knew the names of certain songs, simply based on the repeated words or phrase. One of the songs I like in those early days on American soil was Holmes' Him.

I didn't catch the lyric enough to know the entire story, but just hearing "Him! Him! Him!" and "It's me or it's him" I could interpret that it was about some guy telling his gal to choose one guy or the other. Love songs are usually about pain and suffering, universally.

I knew there was some reference to the window in the first line. I don't recall knowing back then what do without someone means, so even if I caught the phrase She's gonna have to do without him, I doubt I would know what it meant. Especially the gonna part, as it was a while before I learned the slang words.

Back to the present, I now can easily pick up the whole lyric for Him. I can even detect wrong lyric on some web site. I could have bought the song on CD elsewhere on the Internet but buying through the iTunes Music Store and have the song synchronized to the iPod has special significance. It's amazing how much technology changed over almost thirty years. Years ago I first listened to the song on some low-quality radio, now I have the song on an MP3 player the size of a pack of playing cards, along with many other songs.

My First Thanksgiving Parade

After living in New York City for so long but still haven't gone to a single Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, I agreed wholeheartedly when Wife suggested that we go this year. The weather was great, not raining and not cold. There was only one problem - time. We didn't bother to get up early and got to Columbus Circle around 10 a.m. The video above pretty tells the story. Layers and layers of people lining the streets, even the side streets. Sure you can see the big balloons quasi-floating in the air, but there were much other things to see on the floats, too. Some people, perhaps living near the parade route, brought 2-step ladders to get themselves above the wall of people. Good move, I will consider lugging one along all the way from Brooklyn the next time I go, if I ever go again.

I thought the Border's Bookstore in the New York Coliseum, uh, Time-Warner Center, would be open, so last night I told my Son that we would visit the store after we were done with the parade. Son re-prioritized the whole thing and was a nag the whole time, complained that the parade was boring and that we should go to the bookstore instead. After running south a few streets in hoping of catching a better glimpse of the parade, I gave up and broke from the group (Wife and In-Laws), and went to Border's with Son. The store was closed, it was Thanksgiving Day after all, what was I thinking? Not giving up, I trekked uptown to the Barnes & Noble just outside Lincoln Center, only to discover that it too was closed. The only stores that seemed to open were the ten (I exaggerated) Starbucks I came across during the trip from Columbus Circle (around 57th Street) to Lincoln Center (around 65th Street). Not to waste a nice chance to be alone with my Son, with no other kids to fight with him, I bought tickets to see a 12:45 p.m. show of The Bee Movie. We had about two hours to kill so I took Son over to Central Park and let him roam the two playgrounds at West 67th Street (Adventure Playground and the unimaginatively named W. 67th Street Playground). With about 45 minutes until show time, we each had a hot dog for lunch, eaten on the bench just opposite the hot dog stand. Not only Son enjoyed Bee Movie, I too had a few good giggles as it has many jokes for adults, like a mosquito that ended up being a lawyer said it was an easy move for him because he was already a bloodsucking parasite in the first place.

It was a great day to spend with my Son, but there was one big issue. In the morning, fearing my weak bladder would cause troubles while watching the parade, I skipped both my OPC-3 drink and, more importantly coffee. I was supposed to pick one up at a Starbuck's later on, but didn't. Combined with a dubious egg-filled pastry piece for breakfast and just the hot dog for lunch, topped with the stale air in the movie room in the basement, the lack of coffee gave me a nasty headache by the time the movie ended. I spent the rest of the day feeling awful and sickish, but otherwise it was a great day, parade or not.

Lanyard, I'll Tumble For Ya!

With my new cell phone, I made a change to the way I carry the device. Up to now, I have been carrying phones on the hip. Now I use a lanyard to dangle the phone from my neck. For me, the hip is the worst place to carry a cell phone, pager, or PDA. So many times I suddenly discovered that the phone was no longer clipped onto the belt and had to scramble about finding it. I have been lucky so far and always found the cell phone either in the car or at home in some places that I recently knelt down, perhaps to tie shoelaces. I still remember the time the nice $50 PDA Skins flew off the belt, the clip completely ripped off, when I squeezed through a conference desk and an arm chair too fast. Then there was the time the PDA, in some belt-clipped case, fell from the belt unnoticed. I discovered it absence shortly afterward, but only after I ran over it with my own car!

Hopefully with the lanyard such disaster will not happen. I do have to be careful not to swing the Razr² against some hard object. For now, with the cold weather, I can ensure that won't happen by nesting the phone between the layers of clothes I wear.

I like the fact that the lanyard sports a breakaway connector. It is a safety feature involving a mechanism that when pressed releases the device from the lanyard. Good thing to have, in case one's device get stuck between a subway car's closing doors. Better lose the gadget than your life, no?

One thing I am tempted to use is a Bluetooth headset. When the lanyard is used together with a wired headset, the two tends to tangle up. A Bluetooth headset would solve the problem easily. I vow not to become one of those annoying lunatic talking on their Bluetooth headsets in public. I think those people should be made to wear a sandwich board that declares, "I am on the phone, I am not talking to you" whenever they use the headsets, so that passersby can safely ignore them instead of responding to them out of courtesy, only to be embarrassed.

Razr2 v8

The pleasant surprises in life, I love them. This past weekend I went through the bi-annual ritual of selecting a different cell phone plan and upgrading the device. I am aware of the unnecessary amount of trash generated by cell phones that got discarded simply because they lack certain whiz-bang features. I plan to eventually donate my old phone via Staples. For details, visit http://www.collectivegood.com/donate_phone_Staples.asp

I would rather keep using the old cell phone, even with a cracked outside screen a few weeks after I had it. Napping on the couch with a cell phone clipped to the belt is not a wise thing to do, trust me. But then some of the number keys were falling off, the antenna came off a few times and had to put back with Crazy Glue. Worst of all, the device had so little memory. For a while, I was using it as a personal digital assistant (PDA), entering notes, reminders, alerts, etc. but the phone quickly ran out of memory. With the new Razr2 v8's 2 gigabytes of memory, I am sure I will finally have a decent PDA to us one-handed while riding the subway or waiting on the platform. I still keep the Handspring Deluxe for other PDA tasks, but for simple tasks likes reminders, I would rather save on AAA batteries by using the cell phone's rechargeable battery.

The last time I changed cell phone, I didn't care too much about cell phones and regarded them just as tools, something to get a job done, i.e. stay connected. The iTune Phone was just out and the phone rep suckered me into getting a rip-off phone, from Motorola but not the real thing. There was some problem with it, besides the inability to easily load and play music, and I traded in for a Nokia phone. It served its goal, albeit I could use more, lots more, memory space.

Two years later, the iPhone, the real McKoy, is out and much as I love it I am not too keen on paying the premium it demands. A couple hundred dollars for the phone, stuck with AT&T possibly forever, limited number of apps, plus the costly monthly fee. This time next year maybe there will be more apps to make the device more useful, but for now I am not ready for it. I just wanted a cell phone with lots of memory to store my notes and calendar entries. The rep suggested the Motorola Razr2. I heard about the Razr before but never researched about it.

Ten hours after the phone was charged I started to play with it. It has one port mini-USB port for everything, from power to headset to data transmission. At 2 megapixel, the camera is pretty decent. My first digital camera was 2.2 MP. The nice thing is iPhoto readily recognized the phone's camera. With my old phone, I had to email myself photos taken with the phone camera, incurring whatever cents that do accumulate over time. The best feature I like so far is the ability to play music on the device. Bluetooth provides a somewhat painless way to send the music files over the air. I probably will explore the possibility of using the USB cable to send tons of files to fill up the 2 GB of memory quickly, but for now I don't mind sending songs one at a time. I get a peek at how iTunes categorize my music by digging into the its folder structure.

I especially like the Razr's ability to use any music files as ringtones or alarm sound. In these dark days of Digital Rights Management, it is probably illegal to do so, but at least there is no technical hurdle to overcome. With the iPhone, one needs to shell out $1 for the song then another dollar to convert it to a ringtone. Or rely on hacks and fight a game of cat-and-mouse with Apple.

My goal for now is to load all the songs in my son's playlist on the iPod to the Razr. It is only about 200 MB so in between I also sneaked in some from my own list. Now only if the Razr came with some decent full games instead of the lame demos...

Bitten By the Twitter Bug

I have finally succumbed to the Twitter bug. Twitter's motto is "What are you doing?" and you are supposed to constantly update your Twitter home page with notes about, uh, what you are doing. You are limited to 140 characters, so this is not the time and place to rant and rave about something dear to your heart. AFAIK, text only, too, so no worries about picture file formats or lengthy videos. Ideally, you update the site from your iPhones or whatever Internet-capable device you carry around with you all day.

I don't expect to have any followers more than the Blogger site, but it is fun to use Twitter nevertheless. There are times when you simply don't have enough time to pour your heart out, like on Blogger, so Twitter fits in nicely. Sort of like a personal diary, just really short. Blogging for the lazy, I sometimes think of Twitter that way. I cheat every now and then and write about something that happened a few hours earlier, but hey, if someone posts "Taking a shower", does he not really meant he took the shower? Unless he has a waterproof laptop and cannot possibly do a very good job of cleaning himself if he has to type and shower at the same time.

I cannot help but think of the movie The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey. Carrey's character was the center of a reality TV show without him knowing it. Every moment of his life was recorded and aired for the show audience to enjoy. Except with Twitter's case, the writer has control on what to put out there.

Troubles In MeatSpace Part 2

Some months ago, I acquired an Amiga 500 computer, or A500 for short. In its heyday of late 1980's, the Amiga computer platform was touted as the best for desktop video. I dabbled a bit with video, but the one thing I learned from owning the Amiga computers was that command-line commands can be explicitly referred to. At the time, I subscribed to a disk-only magazine called JumpDisk. Each issue of JumpDisk featured programs, pictures, animation, music, etc. perhaps by readers and freelancers that the magazine paid. At one point, I happened to explore the scripts that came with the disks. Maybe to make sure the commands always work with the disk inserted, the scripts spelled out the full path of the commands and their arguments. For example, to load the picture Amiga500.iff in the folder called Pics using the Viewer program in the Tools folder, the command would be

JumpDisk13:/Tools/Viewer JumpDisk13:/Pics/Amiga500.iff

where the disk name is JumpDisk13. At the time, I was familiar with DOS commands and was aware of the PATH command, but it never occurred to me that there were other ways to issue commands. Using absolute paths, there was no need to CD (Change Directory) or to alter the PATH environment variable. But I digress.

The reason I acquired the A500 was that I had a few games on diskettes that I really like. I still have an Amiga 3000 but by default it boots from the hard drive. Most of the games were made for booting from the diskette drive. To do that with the A3000, I would have to hold down the mouse buttons at boot time then click a few buttons on the screen. After one game, if I forget to depress the two mouse buttons, I would have to reboot again after the A3000 completed booting up. And then there were other games that would not work at all with the A3000's newer architecture, compared to the A500, that is. To go around certain limitations, some games went directly to some hardware addresses. When the A3000 came out with changes in hardware design, those games stopped working.

So now I had the A500, games booted up from the diskettes easily - there are no hard drive anyway. It requires some patience to play the games, as it takes some time for the computer to read from the floppy drives. But the graphic and music are usually so great, even in these days and age, with faster computer and higher resolution graphics. The only problem is that now I have a bunch of floppy diskettes to juggle around. For starter, looking for the games that I like was a daunting tasks. It had been a while since I last needed to play Amiga games on diskettes. I somewhat knew where the disks were, but they had become very disorganized. A bunch here, a box there, all over. I managed to find most of the games I like. There were a few diskettes that I gave up on ever playing again and tossed them into a box for recycling - if I ever needed a diskette to be formatted. Luckily, the need never arose and I was able to rummage through the pile. I found Obliterator (platform game), Capone (shooting game), Pluto (vertical scrolling shoot-'em-up), etc. The only game I have not found is Menace, a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up game. It is one thing to own something, it is something else to be able to locate it, if it cannot be stored on a hard disk. This is where cyberspace needs meatspace. No physical diskette then no game.

Trouble In MeatSpace

My other sister once spoke derisively of those who are hooked on SimLife and similar games. She is not a computer geek like me and do not see what is the big deal with having a second, digital life. While I do not play Second Life or ever want to have a digital alter ego, there are times I wish that meatspace, that is, the non-digital, real version of life, can be more like cyberspace.

My friend Teary finds it hard to believe that I am not handy with tools like hammer, power drill, and soldering irons. I am good at drawing cartoons, am I not? I must have good hand-eye coordination, otherwise I would not be able to draw that well. On top of that, I have a bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering, too! Or so it seems. Perhaps because my parents did not let me do things on my own and then I got into the computer field, to this day I am very reluctant to take on physical projects. No putting up of shelves, no installing of flood light, or anything involving soldering. Plumbing problems like clogged drains I can handle, mostly with success. I can take pipes apart and send down the snake. With much sweating and sore arm muscles, so far I have always succeeded at clearing the pipes. One time I was too gungho and even took apart the pipe part that attached to the wall. I had to enlist my brother-in-law (on the Wife side) to help stop the leak afterward. For tasks that I cannot bring myself to do, I have to rely on contractors or my brother-in-law C (the real Mechanical Engineer), but he lives in St. Louis and can only visit every now and then.

In the perfect world that I sometimes wish I live in, everything would be re-bootable. Drilled a hole half an inch below where it should be? Reboot. Soldered a container shut then realized something is inside that you need? Reboot. Painted yourself into a corner? You guess it... reboot.

I recently had the displeasure of having to change the light bulbs for the master bedroom. The bulbs are those long, florescent tubes, not the kind that pops over cartoon characters' heads when ideas hit them. It was a drop ceiling and the light fixture was not attached to the real ceiling but instead hang from a socket via some strings. Aarrgh! It was simply impossible for one person to put the new tubes into the fixture. I had to have the Wife hold the dangling fixture. If I was in the digital world, I suppose I could have used some kind of select tool to surgically remove the dangling fixture and put in one that attaches firmly to the ceiling. I sure can use a digital Second Life.