Google Earthing

Finally got a hold of a beta version of Google Earth for Mac and found where I currently live… It doesn’t seem like much because the stupid tree (big one too) cast a shadow over the one-story house…

Google Earth image of my home

WICKED!

And this is my grandma’s home in Taipei up on the Mt. Yang-ming…
Google Earth image of my grandma's home

This was our last [tiny, dinky] apartment in NYC (where Jason and Alicia were among the few who have visited and actually spent the night at!)
Google Earth image of my grandma's home

One important lesson I learned out of using Google Earth was, it’s fricking tough to find places through the bird’s eye view. It was relatively easy to find places in the U.S. since everything is nicely correlated to addresses. But looking for my grandma’s house in Taiwan was very hard, even though I knew how to get there from various points ON THE GROUND. Literally flying around trying to locate the exact location from a different perspective totally screwed up my orientation. I ended up having to use longitude and latitude coordinates I found from another site to locate her relatively big house.

I have a new found respect for birds, pilots and Superman.

Death Penalty and Social Justice

I ranted on Jason’s blog about Tookie’s execution. I thought I might as well get into it while it’s still fresh on my mind…

Personally I think death penalty is an inefficient system of getting rid of people that the society is tired of dealing with. First of all, it takes years of waiting in line just to be executed because the death row is so backed up that a criminal would basically need take a number and wait. But partially it’s also because most people file for appeals to either get their sentences reduced, thrown out of court or just to buy more time. It’s not unusual to sit on the death row for 20 or even 30 years before someone on the death row is executed. And this is what I have trouble with: With all the time and resources spent on locking those prisoners up in maximum security prisons, why not spend that exact same amount to help them become better people? It’s alarming to see that prison constructions are being more aggressively funded than higher education these days… Not to mention that United States has the highest prison population in the world. Even more interestingly, some people have come up with the brilliant idea to make profit off of the prison system (more prisoners a private prison can lock up, more money the company gets from the government). What the hell? It’s turned into an industry of its own!!

A better solution to reduce crime and prison population is education. Invest on educating in early childhood education (many educators believe this is when personalities are developed); invest on educating the parents to take better care of the kids so that they don’t mistreat the kids and turn them into social f*uck ups; invest in facilitating individuals who are casted as “social misfits” and help them fit in!!

Again, NPR aired a fascinating insight on the topic with Sister Helen Prejean (author of “Dead Man Walking ) and Lawrence C. Marshall, an activist against the death penalty.

United State is a very Christian country. I mean, virtually all of its presidents are Christians of some kind. It’s so Christian that when President Kennedy, a Catholic (the Original Christians, I call them) was elected president, it was a big deal (WTF?!). The country is so Christian that the word God appears everywhere (or so it seems)… It’s in the Pledge of Allegiance (ver. 1.1, where the words “under GOD” were added in 1954), in currency (In God We Trust. God forbid that money is fake.), when one swears into court (put your hand on the Bible… blah blah… so will help you God. What if a Muslim wants to be sworn in on a Koran? Would they let him do it?), and when George W. Bush was elected twice into the White House under the pretense that he’s a reformed born-again Christian (what bull… more on him later).

For a Jesus and God loving nation, it sure as hell acts like one (the “hell” part). Would Jesus himself pull the electric switch?

The Bush family… ah~ what a lovely household:

Jeb and George W. Bush, among many others, have also expedited the appeals process, to execute as many prisoners in as short a period of time as possible, which increases the likelihood of error. As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush was the most active executioner in the nation, killing on average one prisoner every other week (The Nation, January 8-15, 2001).

Source: The Nation

I highly recommend listening to this broadcast hosted by KQED.

Calm Thyself to Sleep, Baby

We just witnessed an amazing achievement with Bryan today — he put himself to nap all on his own! Typically, Bryan’s sleeping routine requires someone to hold and cradle him with soothing classical music in the background (Jason, Alicia and Michelle can testify what they witnessed). And that’s been the regiment for the past two months or so. But today at around 2PM, the usual time for his afternoon nap, Grace started iTunes with some classical music as she prepared for a late lunch for both of us. Then Bryan started by playing with his hands and cooed. Slowly, the cooing disappeared, and he fell asleep!!

This is good stuff. Soon he’ll feed himself too! 🙂

Getting Ready for Tax Season

As the year draws to a close, I am also getting ready to get all my receipts in order for the year-end write offs. I spent the weekend entering everything my one-man company has for the past year into QuickBooks Pro 2006. I was relieved to have found a Mac version. Now I feel much better about myself having completed the company finances. Despite the fact that I started the weekend not knowing anything about QuickBooks and virtually nothing about accounting (let alone corporate accounting), I’d say I did okay with the help of QuickBooks Community. An accounting class is definitely in order though… I don’t want to waste time trying to figure out how to book a stupid PayPal sales refund using appropriate accounting practices AND learning QuickBooks at the same time.

Up next, personal finances with Quicken for Mac.

I do have to rant about QuickBooks for a brief moment though… The shipped-as-is version sucked big time. It’d crash for no reason in about every 10th thing I did… I’d be happily reconciling credit card charges, and POOF!!, the damn thing crashes… And I’d have to set up the whole environment again (that is if previously entered data was even saved). Thank god Intuit has an update file I can download to fix most of the crashes. But that’s modern commercial software sales for you… Get it out of the market with bugs first to get market share — fix the bugs with patches and updates later. Microsoft, more or less, perfected that method with Windows and its Office suites. Apple has been accused of similar charges when it first released Mac OSX… It had no DVD driver!!

Bloggers the Tech World’s New Elite?

A “Slashdotter” commented:

“Wall Street Journal tech columnist Lee Gomes says that the top tech blogs ‘aren’t part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world’s new elite (WiredAtom Editor’s note: Here’s a PDF version in case WSJ decides to make the article unavailable). Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'”

Suckas!

via [Slashdot]

Worst American President, EVER!

Yahoo is running an article on why some Americans (and historians) consider George W. Bush the worst American president EVER! Even worse than the previous worst president, James Buchanan, which some argue that is a very tough record to beat.

Some of the reasons why GWB is being considered the worst of the worst:

  • He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;
  • He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;
  • He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;
  • He has repeatedly “misled,” to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;
  • He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign ( Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);
  • He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;
  • He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;
  • He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic’s oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

The article ended in saying:

Besides, many of the historians note that however bad Bush seems, they have indeed since worse men around the White House. Some say Buchanan. Many say Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yeah, I am not sure about that dickhead, I mean, Dick. He’s one shady son of a biatch. Speaking of shady characters, the entire Bush cabinet is f*cked up (with the exception of Colin Powell whose legacy was ruined by lying on behalf of GWB in front of the United Nations to make the case for the war in Iraq. Let’s face it, GWB just wanted to make his dada proud by kicking an ass that his father couldn’t. Ah~ the Bush Dynasty… America’s very own monarchy in the making.

Speaking of Dumb and Dumber, U.S. Rejects New Talks on Climate Change.

I am shocked! Say it ain’t so…

Brian Rediscovered

After almost two months missing in action, Brian finally called today to catch up. We chatted for about an hour about all that has happened in the past two months. I also realized that about 1/4 of our conversation was about our kids! I mean, you would NOT find us talking about children back in the college days when we were hanging out at Gallery Expresso while playing a fine game of chess as Brian drank coffee and I indulged in my cup of hot cocoa. I mean, the topic of children would not even be close to near the vicinity of what we would be talking about. And yet today, we were all over the place about the education systems in Europe, America and Asia. How Brian and Birgit liked Laura’s preschool, and I shared with him that only 3% of all preschools and daycare centers in America are considered decent by NAEYC (National Association for Education of Young Children)… etc.

Dang it… time has changed. In a blink of an eye, so have we. Both Brian and I have transformed into parents who’s obsessed with our children’s success, much like our parents did with us.