I bumped into this pretty interesting presentation from this year’s SIGGRAPH (to which I wish I’d gone). The idea is basically to allow resizing of digital images based on its content. Pretty cool technology if it ever makes to next gen of image editing programs!
via [Utata]
Ever since our neighbor turned nuts, we’ve been trying very hard to ignore her and her intentional verbal attacks, especially on Grace (and sometimes in the presence of Bryan). Today she did it again by picking a verbal fight with Grace and made a bunch of vulgar and racial slurs. Grace got fed up and called the cops on the neighbor (with the blessing from the landlord as well)*.
Being that San Jose is supposedly one of the fastest cities of its size in America, the police came swiftly to understand the situation. It appears that what the neighbor has been doing qualifies as “harassment” and has to be stopped. So they took statements from both Grace and the neighbor and made an official complaint of the incident. On a related note, one of the officers mentioned that our neighbor even made some racial comments in front of them as they were taking statements from her. That should clear any doubts whether she did any of those things had there been any disputes.
So now our neighbor’s supposed to stop talking to us or do anything that resembles any form of harassment or else the cops will have her kicked out in three days — something the landlord didn’t want to see happen but probably wouldn’t mind at this point. Our landlord dreaded on kicking a tenant out because of all the potential legal actions she could be dragged into should the tenant decide to take matters to the court. But with this latest incident, our neighbor had simply lost any and all possible legal foot to stand on.
Right now as I am writing this, our neighbor’s angrily slamming every door she can find in the apartment. In fact, she’s been doing that for the past two hours or so. We just might have to call the cops again for “disturbance”… But man, we just hate to spend tax dollars on stupid stuff like this! Our neighbor is probably in her 60s or 70s — I guess some people just never truly grew up.
* Backtracking things a little here: A couple of weeks ago, as Grace was taking Bryan to pre-school in the morning, our neighbor decided to confront Grace about why we are trying to have her kicked out… etc. She did that in a physically imposing and “threatening” way and kept following Grace to the car and even as Grace reversed the car in the drive way. We were going to call the cops then, but then we decided to call the landlord and have the landlord tell our neighbor to stop doing that.
We went out to have some In-N-Out burgers today since we hadn’t had any after I’ve gone vegetarian. I was surprised to find that they actually serve veggie burgers that taste pretty darn good!
While we were there, Bryan pretty much finished 3/4th of a berger all by himself (yes, it’s fast food, but In-N-Out is as healthy as fast food goes; and we only eat them once in a blue moon). So on the way back, just out of the blue, he blurbed out, “I am so full!”
We all just broke out laughing pretty hard.
We love it when Bryan says the most unexpected things at this least expected times. He’s one funny guy.
I never paid much attention to how photos appear on the web until recently I’ve decided that I need to diversify my income sources by branching out into photography, which has been an old love affair of mine. Over the span of a week or so, I’ve soaked up so much information on just the idea of presentation of colors that it really sickens me how Apple’s Safari (and browsers based on its rendering engine, such as OmniWeb, Shiira among others) is the only browser that gets color renditions correctly according to the artists’ intent. Nine years after the initial dot-com boom and six years after its bust, I can’t believe only ONE technology company gets web-based photography presentation right!
Without getting into too much details, basically the chief complaint is, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer are only capable of displaying a very narrow set of colors that are capable of being displayed by modern monitors. This was done in the old days to insure compatibility of color display between various makes of monitors and applications via which images were rendered. But the “old days” have long gone, and browsers are still stuck in the 1990’s.
Now I understood why my images appeared muddy on Flickr. But since there are way too many of them to fix and re-upload, I’ve gone to hell and back trying everything to make sure the richness of colors captured by my camera is properly displayed on the web. But I think I am only half way there in finding an acceptable work flow that works for me.
So anyway, this is just a rant on one of those tech things….
Flickr, as with any publicly viewable photo services, is filled with surprises and wonderful images. A couple of days ago I was looking for inspirations on images of toddlers, I discovered Rachel Devine‘s collection of images of her daughter, Gemma. Grace and I just fell in love with Rachel’s beautiful and striking images. The downside is (what, there’s always a downside), they make my images look, well…, inadequate. I am glad I am not doing photography for a living (yet). But man, I REALLY wish I can. Come to think of it, I think I made a mistake changing my major from photography to computer art.
© Rachel Devine
I hope Rachel doesn’t mind me “borrowing” one of her images to show case her creative talent. Rachel has a few links to her personal sites on her Flickr profile.
God knows I tried. But it was time to let go.
After almost three weeks of growing the patch, I finally decided to call it quits. Some people just weren’t built for facial hair… This was actually one of my several attempts to try to grow a goatee. All previous attempts failed because it just never grew thick enough. Even after having talked to a few people who’s grown them, I still think I wasn’t getting the thickness needed to have a good patch… So here’s the final goodbye and an image for those who never saw it.
Murdza and I met up last week when he was in town for a business trip — incidentally he’s now a big shot with formal dress code and all that good stuff. It was weird to see him all dressed up having been tech geeks all our lives. But it was a nice change. We had a good chat (and a good walk up/down Fisherman’s Wharf looking for Starbucks, which we actually didn’t find, for a change for my parking meter).
Sometimes I wonder if life with modern computers (as in after 2005) running Windows XP and Vista has gotten better over the years. I’ve known about PC vendors including trial wares on their boxes to earn a few bucks (which to me was incredibly annoying because as a systems administrator, I had to go through each box and uninstall each one of them every single time, which is really a waste of my time). But maybe, I told myself, it’s gotten better.
Another huge problem I had when supporting Windows running on PCs was drivers — often when I reinstalled Windows on any machine, the first thing I had to do was to go to the PC vendor’s site to download drivers. That was painful sometimes because they weren’t always clear on which drivers you had to use (yeah, part numbers and version numbers are really helpful… NOT).
Today I read a funny post on the experience of dealing with a Sony Vaio. Sony’s one of the computer vendors I absolutely hate to support for the reasons explained on Steve’s blog… but that was during 2000 and 2004. I can’t believe people are still stupid enough to keep buying computing crap from Sony as if they were really superior products. “Idiots!” I say.
I’ve told quite a few people that running Windows on my Mac has been a much pleasant experience than it is on an actual PC box designed with Windows in mind. Steve’s experience pretty much reflects that of my own (as do a few dozen comments left on that entry). Too bad BioShock is probably never coming to the Mac… But it’s good to know that at least Windows boxes are good for at least something other than doorstops.
I thought this Error 404 (page not found) page from iStockPhoto looks pretty cute:
But I still think this one from YouTube was more creative!
Almost every bank, credit card company and pretty much everything else is trying to get people convert to online banking and payment system nowadays. It makes a lot of sense because usually that means big savings for them having to process fewer paperwork manually (that’s what I think anyway). But sometimes they are just so badly implemented that doing anything online with some of these companies just cause me more headaches.
Take, for example, one of the credit card companies I have been using for quite sometime. One month, as if they’ve just decided they were going to make their online transactions more secured the night before, they implemented a popular feature: provide an answer to a secret question that only you’d know.
The only problem with that was, their questions didn’t make any god damn sense — one question asks for my mother’s maiden name — as if that’s so secret for Asians… Some countries simply do not adopt that practice and any friend of mine would know what my mother’s maiden name is. Another example is a series of stupid questions that even I don’t have the answers to:
1. My favorite sports team — hell, I do NOT have any! I don’t even like sports that much!
2. My favorite restaurant in college — WTF! I was a fu*king college student! I was lucky to have a warm meal, let alone a “favorite” restaurant!
3. My high school — and this is secure how?
After a couple of attempts, the system got thrown into an exception that the designers hadn’t designed it for…. It simply gave me a blank question expecting me to give an answer to… Seriously… WTF! Finally the system bumped me out and asked me to call them during “normal business hours”…. With all the crazy fees and interest rates they are charging people, they ought to have a 24×7 hotline…
And stupid stuff like this extends to stupid interface designs like the MSN Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Dell’s product site among others. With all the money they have, can’t they just hire some decent usability designers and testers? God damn it!
OK… I feel better now. Just a quick rant on thoughtless designs by idiots… If only they took half the time to do what Apple would have done…
Bryan had a good time this past Labor Day weekend. For two days straight, he hung out with some of his friends from pre-school. Good times.
I know the old Mac OS had troubles with computer virus. But I had no idea the whole thing all started on an Apple Computer!! According to the article, the first Mac virus even predated one on a Windows OS by a whopping four years! This is further proof that Apple is always ahead of Microsoft in everything (ahem, sarcasm at work here). 😉
Further reading here.