Author: shun

Bloody Nose

Bryan woke up a couple of times in the middle of the night crying. The ritual has been to rock him gently back to sleep in the dark– and that usually works. But this morning he cried a little harder for a little longer. At first we didn’t pay much attention, but the second time he woke up within 10 minutes, I turned the light on and found his nose covered with blood!

Although we found no cuts, bruises or any obvious signs of wound on any parts of his body, the amount of blood (enough to cover the entire upper lip and then some) worried us. I quickly cleaned him up to examine further but still found no open wounds. And he stopped complaining as soon as I cleaned up his nose.

Margaret said her daughter also had bloody nose once when the weather was really dry. Hopefully I will never see blood on him ever again! Poor kid…

What Does the Deaf Dream?

I asked myself that same question a while ago about dreams of the blind and deaf. Apparently the answer involves a lot more than I’d thought. The article links intellectual development to language development, which is an entirely interesting topic I’d never thought about.

One of these days I have to look into Noam Chomsky and the like and their theories on langauge and brain. This philosophy in conjunction with neuroscience is fascinating stuff!

Internet Explorer Woes

I probably wrote about this before… But I am going to rant about it again…

Microsoft Internet Explorer SUCKS ASS! And the engineers who came up with versions 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 should go to hell and stay there.

It’s probably not entirely their fault that IE has sucked ever since its inception. For what its’ worth, Netscape 4.x sucked so bad that it skipped 5.0 and went straight to 6.0, which help contributed the collapse of the once great Netscape empire.

That said, how much IE has sucked in the past 6 or 7 years since the fall of Netscape just goes to show that monopoly in any given technological field DOES harm innovation. Had Netscape stayed (or Firefox came out earlier), IE wouldn’t have stayed sucky for 3 versions straight with little to no improvements in each version.

On top of that, they are so broken that developing web interfaces for them is virtually impossible. I have had perfectly coded sites working with all other major browsers BUT IE! So that meant I have had to come up with hacks and work arounds just to make things work for IE, which is so damn non-compliant with standards in a very ugly way… And like I said, people who keep using IE to surf the web aren’t helping with the cause either… (why anyone would use IE to surf the web is beyond me… it’s so tied in with the operating system that any hacker going through IE, which is nortoriously known for its suckiness in security, can practically get the entire computer fried… figuratively speaking).

I had this beautifully written pure css sytle sheet design that worked perfectly in Firefox and Safari, but as soon as IE sees it, all hell broke lose. So now I gotta use stupid tables just so that I don’t have to waste time tweaking the css just for damn IE.

A lot of comments in codes I have read often include phrases like ”

1
/*fix for stupid IE*/

“, or ”

1
/*hack for stupid IE*/

“… With the intorduction of IE7 beta, which I have tried, things aren’t getting better. I hopte Firefox will just run IE over and Steve Ballmer can just run Microsoft to ground (at which he’s already doing a pretty good job) so that we will never have to deal with another inferior, buggy Microsoft product again, EVER!

God damn! Microsoft… Seriously… Go to hell with IE! Damn it…
.
.
.
.
There, I vented. I can’t stress just how pissed I can get working with Microsoft technology at times… Sometimes I wish I can just choke Steve Ballmer into fixing these damn problems in IE. I guess I should probably document some of the issues I have dealt with and solutions I found/discovered/made (thanks, solely, to Google… no thanks to MSN).

An interesting side note… while working with Murdza on a mass mail campaign, the project redered out perfectly in EVERYTHING but Hotmail… So I had to find fixes just for stupid Hotmail… It’s no accident that Hotmail is another inferior product of Microsoft’s that way too many ignorant people are still using as if it’s oxygen for their lungs… Fricking convert to Gmail or Yahoo Mail already… damn it…

Stupid Microsoft…

Scamming the Scammers

Remember all those money making emails you get from Africa (“I am the son of the late Price _______. I have a great proposition for you…” )? I have always wanted to reply them with a plan to scam them but never got the time to really think about how to do it. But apparently a group of people did.

It made me feel good reading it…

License to Raising Children

We live in a day and age (and specifically in Western Worlds, a society) where almost everything we do needs some kind of proof, certification or license to show that we are capable of doing what we say we can do.

Job hunting — diploma or relevant skills,
Driving — driver’s license (different license types for different vehicles!),
Teaching — teaching certificate for k-12,
Owning a pet — pet license,
Owning a gun — gun license (boo!),
Fishing — fishing and gaming license,
… etc.

So, if something as trivial as owning a pet needs licensing, I don’t understand why there isn’t a license for being parents?! If we need a license and proof to take care of someone else’s children (in the case of K-12 teachers), is it not important enough that we get a license that shows we know how to take care of our kids as well?

Children are probably the single most important asset a society has for its own long-term survival. But yet we do everything we can to trivialize childrearing and children’s education. Ever since I took those Early Childhood Education classes, they’ve opened my eyes on just how typical parents (mis)treat their children in all kinds of circumstances.

That’s why I believe that before becoming a parent, everyone should attend compulsive but FREE government funded childrearing and education classes and pass a basic “parenthood competency exam” to receive a license. Having observed what some people do to their children, there has to be a comprehensive understanding on just WHAT children are and how to give them a healthy life. This kind of law will probably never fly, but if you think about it, the society as a whole will be a better place if one were implemented well.

Take, for example, abused children are more likely grown up to be abusers themselves. If the society can spend the initial dollars and initiatives to make sure these kinds of problems are fixed in the beginning, it wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars later trying to patch the problem — and the “problem”, of course, is what started as an innocient child. I think I wrote about this before.

I guess issuing licenses for the right to become parents is a little too extreme. And I guess that won’t stop idiots from getting licenses either — considering how many drunk driving violations there are every year despite driver’s licenses.

Toys

When taken with a broader definition, “toy” can mean a lot of things — gadgets for geeks, frivolous and over-priced show-off transporations, relationship between two people, or, simply, just something to play with.

Adults seem to have no problems treating ourselves with “toys” of all kinds. Of course, all justifiable in the name of productivity, utility and convenience (but seriously, when can a Rolax do that a $50 Swatch can’t?). We are also compulsive buyers who crave for the latest and the greatest model of everything. But what it comes down to is this: We are no more childish than the kid standing next to us, sobbing from the cold rejection of his parent for that Pokemon “toy” he really wanted. The only difference between us and him? Cold, hard cash and a parent standing in the way. We are no more clear-headed than he, nor are we more logical or reasonable than he.

I think males have a worse tendency in this than the female species, too. Just think about that for a moment. (Though ladies do have a tick for different types of things).

So I wonder why adults subject the double standards on kids when they themselves can’t control what kind of “toys” they think they ought to have and sometimes for unexplanable reasons. Raising kids takes a lot of responsibility. And everytime when I see a parent dragging his/her child away from a toy with unqualified reasons, I can’t help but wonder what kind of lessons s/he is teaching the child — that it is OK for me to impose this on you even though I can’t really tell you why.

When implied in a social order, this kind of subjective non-reasoning can take a toll on how we solve problems socially and politically. When a whole generation of kids growing up thinking it’s OK to have double standards, as long as it’s enforced top-down, we are going to have problems in the society. I guess I could argue that the same thing goes to raising children in general. But that’s a whole other topic altogether.

Fast Talker

Murdza and I had a chat this morning. I’d forgotten how fast people from the Northeastern part of the U.S. talk. I misheard him say “I got an external RAID” when, in fact, he said “I got a Xserve RAID“. It’s all geek talk, I know… But the difference in the two statements are so profound (to us geeks) that I almost fell off of my chair when I finally figured out it was the Apple Xserve RAID he got!

But then, Jason and Alicia lived in NY for a while, they don’t talk quite nearly as fast… Maybe it’s just Murdza with his self-diagnosed ADHD where he ahs to get the thoughts out of his head really fast or else something else will pop up in his head and he’d forget what he was going to say just a second ago…

But it’s all good. I have been in California for too long, watching Chinese new channels* and eating Chinese food… It’s almost like I never left Taiwan! Hah! You gotta love it — America, a little piece of every country.

*The Chinese news channel actually lasts an entire hour which covers news from all over the world — unlike local news channels (or even national ones like CNN!) in 99.999% of the United States where their 4PM, 5PM, 6PM and 11PM news stories are almost all identical and cover only local and U.S.-related national news. If you want to know what happens somewhere else in the world, good luck. Unless the U.S. is in a war with them or is threatening to have one, they’d be luck to get even 1 full minute of coverage (case in point, when the President of Taiwan got shot during presidential election, our local news station in San Jose only gave it an ONE-sentence coverage and then moved on to some other petty and trivial local news).

Baby Language

We are beginning to think that Bryan is a “talker”…. maybe it’s from all the phone excited phone conversations she had when she had Bryan that he picked up his exceptional skills with words. He can now comprehend and “speak” quite a few of the words that matter to him (“milk”, “mama”, “wua-wua” [one of the cats], and “mumum” [I want to eat whatever you are eating]). But there’s one word that he probably invented that we haven’t been able to figure out what it meant… maybe some of you parent-readers know what it is… “ah-boo-tchee”…

It’s been studied that babies who know of no spoken language can indeed communicate with each other with their seemingly innocent and meaningless talks.

Maybe the adult langauge is the stupid stuff. Maybe the baby langage is so much more supreme that we are actually dumbing them down to our tedious, boundary-driven and rules based languages.