Tiger Would Do The Same

Naruto

"Three days, fifty hours, one hundred episodes," my Son muttered when I asked him "Naruto again?" Son was referring to the marathon that Cartoon Networks had going for Naruto fans. Up to recently, I had thought of the anime series as "that cartoon show with the kid who looks like a cat," because the main character, Naruto Uzumaki, has what appears to be whiskers on his cheeks. Of course, Son had been watching the show more intently and words like jitsu, chunin, hokage, and chakra flowed out of his mouth with ease. He sure knew what the words mean, or at least in what context to use them. I realized that I haven't watched much TV with him lately. I think I used to watch many Japanese animes with him, on VCDs and translated into Cantonese. Maybe I wasn't as busy with work back then. It's nice when I can quip jokes related to his favorite shows or act out with him scenes from the shows.

To catch up with Naruto, I recently spent a few hours watching the marathon with Son. It's actually quite an interesting story. Naruto appears to have whiskers perhaps because his father, the Fourth Hokage, sealed the spirit of a Nine-Tailed Fox demon in him, at least that's what I think. Most of the fighting in the show involve magic, not the typical ninja martial arts. I detected some resemblance to Harry Potter, as one of evil character was able to put himself into various bodily shell to make him harder to eradicate.

I supplemented the info gaps with Wikipedia and library books. I tried to get Son to read more and watch less by borrowing a Naruto graphic novel for him. He didn't read much but I ended up reading the whole book myself.

Perhaps subconsciously I tried to do for my son what my father did for me. To get me know more Chinese, for years my father got me my weekly supply of Oriental Heroes graphic novels. The book series was actually called 龍虎門, which is nothing close to Oriental Heroes, just something that's lost in translation. Reading 龍虎門 helped me learn a lot of Chinese. Although the story is mostly understood just by looking at the pictures, there are times knowing the key words help, so I actually looked them up in Chinese-English dictionaries.

In case you are curious, here are the meanings of the Japanese words I mentioned:

• jitsu - magical art
• chunin - some kind of exams ninjas take to advance to the next level
• hokage - village leader
• chakra - perhaps what the Chinese call qi (氣), some kind of internal energy that when properly channeled, can come outside as a ball of energy... hey it's a fantasy cartoon, don't forget.

Polls

Call me Going-Ga-Ga-Over-Google if you will, I just love Google, not least of which are the gadgets that can be easily added to a homepage or blog. I recently convinced my sister to update her Blogger template and now she can easily add things to her blog's sidebar. The old way of mucking with the innards of the HTML code is very difficult and introduces plenty of room for errors.

I just updated my sidebar to have a poll. Tell me what you want to write more about! I don't know what my adoring fans, all four of them, enjoy reading if I don't have their feedback.

Seriously, don't take it too seriously. Blog writing is something to be done with one's heart in it, at least for me. I usually sit down with a topic already planned out. Mind you, I don't have every sentences thought ahead. I try not to do too much web-surfing checking for details. Such action usually derails my train of thought. Writing "some guy did this and that" suffices, but looking up the guy's exact name may cost me precious minutes and makes me veer in another direction.

So, I write whatever on my mind at the time, or whatever I already planned to. It must be something I feel strongly about, or something I enjoy doing tremendously. Something to gush over, to rant and rave about. I am a quiet person in life but when it comes to writing I like to make a splash out of it.

Deluge

I have a colleague who is based in India. He recently wrote that the weather there had been bad, that transportation will be affected so he would be working from home. The scenario matched the general belief that India, for all its computer talents, is hampered by an inadequate infrastructure. Ironically, a few days later, New York City was hit by a rain storm and its mass transportation also came to a grinding halt. I wish some people would stop calling New York the greatest city in the world. Its subway system is horribly below par. The public announcement system is a horrible joke. I seriously hope no terrorist attacks will ever happen inside the subway tunnel. If it happens, hapless riders will be "guided" by announcement like "{grumble} {grumble} {blah} {bleah} to the exit {aarggh} ..." My cartoon at right is about some dumb terrorists breaking the P.A. system, something that I believe is already broken. It doesn't help that the speaker sometimes have some heavy Brooklyn or some other accent. I am all for computerized announcements. When I first started riding the PATH trains, I thought its P.A. was decent, but lately it has deteriorated as well. Maybe the same computer that wired the NYC P.A. is now in charge of the PATH also.

M.A. B.S. ?

Call me a skeptic if you would, but the more I read about Market America the more it stinks. Multi-level Marketing (MLM), pyramid scheme, Charles Ponzi story, Amway, the list goes on and on. I've got to read more and find out more about all these scams. So far, I've come across

http://www.boconline.com/bizopp-forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18
http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=2828

I'm sure there are others. My wife's attitude seems to be, "Well, let's try it out and see what happens." I wonder how much money she already spent. If it's in the thousands of dollars, that is a steep price to find out if something works or not. It's like, "Let's eat dirt and find out if it really tastes awful." She knows making money is through recruiting more people, but she doesn't seem to see any problems with that. I wonder how one would tell the future suckers. "Uh, you joined under me for x dollars then work your ass off to get two suckers under you then you can live a comfortable life." Of course that's just me, cannot tell lies so easily. These scams usually tell you that you can do the work in your spare time, but for me spare time means the hour or two I have on the computer. The commute is long, there's a child to take care of, hours of sleep to have to be in good health.

As someone wrote in one of the links above, just because the business has been around for years doesn't mean it's a good business. Enron was all well and good until the sh!t hit the fan...

Speaking of scam, every now and then my AdSense would have links to some gaudy web site claiming one can make thousands of dollars from blogging. Sadly, Googling about the chap all ended at web sites that rants about how great the system is, or advertises other similar "product". The "product" in this case I think is the book. At $50 or so, it seems expensive. I think that's how the thousands of dollars are made. Anyone found out otherwise about these blogging scam?

Home From Greensboro

After another long bus ride, I'm home again. The entire trip spanned five days, but about one and a half days were spent on the bus. Win some, lose some. At least with the bus, I was able to nap off and on and didn't have to constantly keep an eye on the road. I did have an inner fear occasionally when the bus crossed some bridge...

For the first full vacation day, I took my son to Downtown Greensboro. After a visit to the Children's Museum, there wasn't much else to do. Most of Downtown even closed down at 3 p.m. or 4 p.m., so after an early dinner, we headed back to the hotel for some pool time.

I was worried of what to do for the second day. Luckily, I came across an advertisement for the Friendly Center in the Relocation Guide magazine. Normally, when on vacation I abhor the idea of spending any time in a shopping mall, but in this case it was necessary to visit the mall. Sprawled over a wide outdoor area, the Friendly Center had Chuck E. Cheese's, Barnes & Noble bookstore, a movie theater, and McDonald's, plus the usual myriad of stores carrying women's clothes, shoes, jewelries, etc. A good time was had by me and my son. We had Chuck E. Cheese's all to ourselves for about an hour then the crowd started pouring in. After spending $10's worth of tokens, we walked over to the movie theater but it was too early. We doubled back to visit B&N, but alas there were no Mac magazines worth buying. I am a sucker for the British magazines if the cover CD/DVD has worthy free software, usually older version of some commercial app. Instead, J got yet another Thomas the Tank Engine toy. Finally, at the theater we saw Underdog. Afterward, we re-visited Chuck E. Cheese's and spent yet another $20 on tokens. Finally, we had lunch at Mickey D where J had some exercise in the playground area. Again, we took the taxi back to the hotel for some rest time. We wanted to go swimming in the hotel's tiny pool again, but it rained so we waited it out. For dinner, we walked to the nearest main road's buffet restaurant.

On the third day, it was Celebration Station for mini-golf and more indoor arcade games. I much prefer Chuck E. Cheese's All-Game-1-Token policy. Games at Celebration Stations all require different number of tokens, thus introduced an unwelcome break in the flow of enjoyment. Lunch took a long time to come, but I suppose that's the price you pay for having lunch when there was another party going on. Another taxi ride to another movie theater near the hotel to see Ratatouille. What a concept - rats, stinking sewer rats, cooking in a fancy French restaurant. Yuck! After the movie, J obediently walked back to the hotel with me. I've noticed that in the Greensboro area the taxi meter started at $1.80, so we probably saved at least $2 for that walk. It was good exercise after sitting in the dark at the movie theater. Yet another trip to the tiny pool, followed by a visit to the nearby Best Buy, and finally we took the taxi to the Sheraton Hotel to meet up with Mommy. While waiting for Wife to have a final meeting with her Market America cohorts, I plunked down $10 to use the Internet. Before the 'Net time expired, Wife was done with the meeting so we had to leave.

The trip home was less eventful than the trip out. We left the hotel together and spent a little time at Market America's Headquarter, just the outside as the line to get inside was long. Last stop in the area was the Coliseum again, this time to see the trade show. Expecting something the size of PC Expo, I was disappointed by the small size of the show. No revolutionary products here, just some household detergents here, some diet formulas there, telephony, vitamin supplements...

For the first half of the bus ride home, it was like watching infomercials on TV. Different people ranted about how great M.A. had been for them, how they joined and enjoyed the work. The whole thing is just too one-sided. I need to know more about M.A. from a third party. I think it boils down to being just a second job, with no benefits, so it's still work. Before making any money, it seems we have to take many training sessions and attend many conventions. I cannot help but think of it as some kind of pyramid scheme, where you have to drag more people in to push you up. Let's see what happens in a few years with the Wife.

Hello from Greensboro, NC

I'm having a mini-vacation in Greensboro, North Carolina. My wife has been enlisted by Market America and just in time for the annual convention in Greensboro. While she goes about with her convention, I figured I would explore Downtown Greensboro with my son.

The vacation started out on a bad note as I had insomnia the night before and slept so soundly and didn't hear the alarm at 4:30 a.m. Or perhaps the alarm was too low. We were supposed to be in Flushing at 6 a.m. but instead we woke up at 6 a.m., thanks to Mother. Of course, Mother would repeatedly chided me until I finally made it out the door at 6:20. Good thing I packed everything the night before, else there would be no way I could pack properly in the heat of battle. The only thing I didn't bring was info about Greensboro. While I couldn't sleep, I got up and copied-and-pasted some info from the web into my Palm Desktop and thought I would sync the next morning. Alas, I barely had time to grab the luggage to storm out the door. Luckily, we still made it to the bus, which left at 7:30. I had to trust my car to a girlfriend of someone in the Market America group to park in her driveway, but that was the best arrangement for the circumstance.

It took about 11 hours to get the Sheraton where Wife and her cohorts got their M.A. tickets. Alas, we were not going to stay there, but rather at some tiny hotel five minute's bus ride away. Choices of dinner weren't abundant and we settled for Papa John's Pizza while others bought Chinese takeouts to take back to the hotel. Having insufficient sleep, my anemic condition set in for the second half of the day and I was glad to turn in for the night early, around 10:30.

In the morning, I tagged along with the Wife et al to get to the Coliseum. There was a sign that said Downtown was 2 miles away. If it was just me, I probably would have made the hike. With my son, I took a taxi that happened to drop off some convention-goers. We got off in Downtown's Children's Museum for $9, including tip. J had a great time in the Museum. It had interactive scenes like supermarket, house under construction, restaurant, etc. In the afternoon, we went to the Depot, the transportation hub of Greensoboro. I expected something like NYC's Grand Central Terminal, with shops and such all over, but the Depot is really just a transportation hub. I read about the Carolina Model Railroaders, supposedly a place where one can see model trains. Alas, after the walk in the heat, the Railroaders was closed. We went to the City Center Park to walk under the arch of shooting water to cool off, then went into the Culture Center. It was rather quiet, too. Too hot to walk around, we went to the Central Library, just across from the Children's Museum. I wouldn't mind paying for Internet access at some cafe, but none was to be found and the Library gives it out free. By the way, hanging out with my son having not much to do is still better than waiting for the ladies to eventually ending their shopping spree...

Son is already bored after an hour playing on the computer. Some local kid hang out with him and they seemed to have a good time playing Curious George on the PC. I had to sshhh them a few times.

Wandering the street of Greensboro with my son, I couldn't help think about the movie Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. Of course, my "plight" is nothing compared to Smith's character in the movie, with no home to live and a tough job to cling on.

Dinner is supposed to be at the best buffet place in the city. I'll have to catch a taxi back to the convention center to meet the gang. The taxi driver had wisely given him his business card and told me to ask for his number, #20, so most likely I'll call him then.

Face the Book

I signed up with Facebook recently. I'm still exploring it, to see if I really need it. The last thing I need to spend time on is something made for teens or singles looking for fun. It seems to be overwhelming. Kinda like Blogger, it has tons of apps one can add to the homepage. Perhaps too many. It has a great way to look up people you know and infect them with Facebook. Uh, I mean "invite them to Facebook." Perhaps more later...

Titan Attacks

Help! I'm addicted to Titan Attacks!

Well, it's not that bad, but I do have a weak side when it comes to video games. It all started with the console game Space Invaders. I first got exposed to it when I first came to the U.S. as a teen. As a new immigrant and a kid, with little money to spare, I played it only a few times, possibly at the arcade place near Mott St. and Bowery in Chinatown. Years later when I owned the Amiga computer, I played a lot with the clone called Amoeba Invaders. Unfortunately, in later Amiga computers, the game no longer worked, possibly because of different chip architecture. As a Mac owner, my search for a clone of Space Invaders has gotten nowhere until when I stumbled upon Titan Attacks.

The initial waves in Titan Attacks resemble Space Invaders but after a few waves the game is mostly different. Other than avoiding enemies' bullets, you should collect goodies as they fall from the sky. Some power-ups are immune to your bullets but other you must be careful not to blast them apart. At the end of each wave, you get the chance to buy shield, gun power, extra bullets, etc., depending on how much money you've gotten.

At $20 I think the game is a great investment. Going for a retro feel, the game doesn't have eye-popping graphics or heart-pumping rock music, but you get a lot out of the game. As long as you have enough shield, you can survive many enemy blasts. With the original Space Invaders, one blast and your current live is gone. I'm not that good a player and yet so far I've made it to level 30 something out of 100. My favorite power-up so far is add-on, a laser gun to go with your blaster, although it cost 2000 monetary units. I've learned that as long as I don't overspend on shield or other power-ups, I can save enough to get the laser add-on.

I cannot help but compare Titan Attacks to Jets 'N Guns. While JNG has great graphics and music, at $35 it's a waste as I never finish any levels other than the first one. What's the use of boasting x levels of beautiful graphics when I can never get past level one?

Titan Attacks is available in demo mode. Gameplay is the same as the real version, the only difference is that whenever you die, you are taken to the Puppy Games web site and prodded to buy the game. You can just close the web browser and start a new game. I was tempted to keep playing the demo and use the "interference" as an intermission. In the end, I decided to support the small Mac developers by buying software that I enjoy. I can always go cold turkey if I feel I spend too much time on the game.

Family Camping

I had a unique experience last night. For whatever reason, my son loves to sleep in a tent or some kind of crude shelter. At home he would use sofa seats and cushions to build his own "club." He would barely have enough room in the club to sit upright and any movements would put him outside the club, but he enjoyed playing club very much. Finally, last night his wish of sleeping in a tent was realized.

My family joined a few other families in the Family Camping program offer by the NYC Urban Park Rangers. Everything was free, all it took was a phone call to the Rangers' phone system. The site was the Alley Pond Adventure Park in Queens, New York.

The evening started with a BBQ dinner (hot dogs, burgers, and soda/water.) Each family was assigned a tent. I thought the tent would require driving short metal stakes into the grass and making fancy knots with the ropes. Fortunately, it was much easier than that. Two flexible rods served as the spine for the tent. Fit the rods' ends to pre-set holes attached to each of the four corners and the tension in the rods had the tent free-standing in no time. After all the tents were setup, we were treated to a campfire on the grill. (Park regulation prohibited making fire on the ground.) We were provided graham crackers, marshmallows, and slabs of chocolates to make our own s'mores. Making the perfectly toasted marshmallow had to be an art achieved with practice, as most of the marshmallow either caught fire or became blackened. At around ten we headed out on the hike. It was indeed a special opportunity as the park was closed. It was probably not safe to wander alone at night in the forest. Harms can come either naturally or from criminal elements. J had always been afraid of the dark, so he had his flashlight on all the time during the hike. We didn't see any night creatures because of the flashlights in the group. The ground wasn't always even, so it was better to miss the chance to see nocturnal creatures instead of tripping over some root. At the end of the hike, the Rangers wanted to give us a chance to gaze at the night sky through a movable telescope, but it was a new scope and they didn't know how to assemble it. Instead, we went to sleep a little earlier. For our family of three, we only had two sleeping bags, so I slept on a piece of foam cushion. Thanks to the years of living in Viet Nam and the months of living in the refugee camp in Indonesia, sleeping in a tent on the ground wasn't that bad for me. I had cramps in the feet some hour in the night, but that could have come from having my son pinning the feet with his body. According to my wife, most of the time J rolled onto her side of the tent, maybe because of the slope in the campground. Throughout the night, Rangers park employees in pair took turn staying up to be on guard while we enjoyed our sleep. What service!

The next morning I got up around 6:30 because I thought that was when we had to get up. It turned out 7:30 would have been OK. Supposedly, we had to be out of there at 8. Breakfast of yogurt and OJ was served, but we missed it when we came back from brushing our teeth. Again, I didn't mind the odor in the park's public restroom, but the others in my camping party did and brushed outside the bathroom.

The experience is probably not much of a big deal for someone who camped out for real in the wild. Throughout the night, I could here airplanes flying overhead and cars zooming on the nearby Grand Central Parkway. For me, however, it was a great experience. I did go camping with a Vietnamese youth group before, but I think I slept in the car. To have employees of the City cook for us, lend us tent, provide materials for s'mores, lead us on hike, and so on, it made me feel better paying my taxes. Had we camped on Friday night, in the morning (Saturday), we could even join a demonstration of wall and rope climbing, although I doubt I am in good shape to do either.

The only minor quibble I have with the camping program was the lack of info on the web about it. The Department of Parks only said that it was held in Zone 1 of the park and provided a general map of the place. I had the wrong idea that the Adventure Park was near the Alley Pond Environmental Center, but in fact the two are separated by three exits on the Cross Island Expressway. The entrance to the park is right underneath the Grand Central Parkway and looks more like an entrance ramp to the Parkway. Most people may thought so and keep going past it. When we visited the Rangers in their office to say farewell and thank-you, we got some brochures and flyers about the program. Those literatures have the proper driving directions etc., but the web site seriously need to provide better info.

Board Games in Playground

I recently visited the house of a cousin on the wife's side, in New Jersey. As typical of the suburban Jersey homes, the house has a big backyard. Even better, Cousin left the yard unfenced so that the kids in the adjacent houses were free to roam about the combined yards. It was nice and left me again thinking of someday moving out of crowded Brooklyn. However, lately something I saw on Fridays at Columbus Park in Chinatown made me feel better about living in the big city.

My son still has music class on Fridays. With the extra daylight hours and no Boyscout meeting to rush home for, after music class I normally take him to Columbus Park to let him roam about. Lately, the Department of Parks has some program whereby they provide board games and other equipments for the kids to play with. There was Connect Four and a bunch of other board games to suit every kid's taste. For the artistic ones, there were paper and markers and such. It was nice to see my son mingle with other kids to explore the various playthings provided. On different Fridays, my son would play with different kids at the park. Only in the big city, with many people squeezed into apartments, would you find such programs to bring people together. I should also note that Cousin had to give up taking her kids into Manhattan for music class because it was too much of a hassle to drive into the city on weekends, but there was no qualified music teacher in Jersey.

Congestion Pricing and Telecommuting

It's good to be able to work from home. Up to now, I have been mostly apathetic about Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. The plan will charge extra money on drivers who enter Manhattan at certain hours below 86th Street. Proponents say that it will succeed because more people will consider taking mass transportation, but opponents claim that NYC's mass transit is already overtaxed. As I don't drive during the week, or actually rarely drive into Manhattan during the week, and my work hours is 10 to 7, I don't see too many people on the train, so either way it doesn't affect me directly. However, according to a recent Metro article (http://www.readmetro.com/show/en/NewYork/20070709/1/1), part of the congestion pricing plan will include expansion of telecommuting program. Purely from my techie point of view, telecommuting is the answer to all this urban congestion. Surely not everyone will be able to handle telecommuting, such as people who need physical contacts with clients or those who are technically-challenged. For the rest of us, we should be given the choice. I already enjoy the benefit of telecommuting and would love to see it used more widely, just because I think it's a great practice to have. Of course it's easy to abuse the privilege but let's handle that case by case. Too often advances in data transfer ends up costing U.S. workers their jobs. It's time to make use of technology to benefit the U.S. workers.

Russell Pedersen Playground Re-visit

It is nice to work from home. Yesterday, in the morning Wife took Son to Tae Kwon Do practice then to a friend's house. Then they decided to go to some playground and asked if I could come. Luckily, it was already late in the afternoon. I started the day early so it was almost time to go. About an hour later I was done with work, and already home. No commuting. No taking the PATH to Hoboken to wait around for a long time before the train would go toward 33rd Street. It's probably about five minutes in Hoboken, but altogether, from the time taking the train from Pavonia to Hoboken, sit there and wait, then finally head toward 33rd Street, it always feel like a long time. Of course, you would need to catch the train at the right time, otherwise you would have to wait another twenty minutes for the next train. With telecommuting, as soon as the computer shuts down, I'm done with work.

The place turned out to be Russell Pedersen Playground in Bayridge. I already took Son and cousins there last year. It has plenty of parking space, usable restroom, a set of bars and beams suitable for Olympic competition, and of course it shares the block with Fort Hamilton High School, so the track is nice. I actually ran 2 miles on the track, 1 mile followed by a rest then another mile. After a while, everyone was hungry so we all went to Eighth Avenue's Chinatown for dinner at some Malaysian place. If I had to work in the office, at most I would join the group late at the restaurant instead of having all that quality time outside.

iGoogle

Making so-called homepages out of the various services offered by a search engine is nothing news. Yahoo! may have been the first to offer the option. It's nice to have in one browser window all the links you normally access through various bookmarks, yet somehow I never bothered with it.

By chance, I came across Google's iGoogle service. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if the Gmail preview gadget can circumvent the firm's blockage of webmail. And indeed it can! It's still just a preview, as trying to open any messages would surely bring up the tsk-tsk message, "Thou shalt not read personal webmail at work". Still, it's nice to see what's in one's Gmail inbox. Theoretically, if there's a message that I really want to read, I can access it on my cell phone - no, it's not an iPhone, I wish. Not that I know for sure that would work. I sent email from my cell phone before but never bother with surfing the web with it. It probably costs a few bucks to squint at web sites on the little cell phone screen.

My iGoogle has a theme, nature, I believe, gas prices, news, calendar and time, joke-of-the-day, and weather. The contents are really just Google Gadgets so you have an almost endless source of things to populate your homepage with.

ATPM 13.07

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

iWait

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

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

Berhala Revisited

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

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

Google Docs Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crossword Express

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

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

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

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

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

Ten-Point Rubber Band Star