Author: shun

Risk on Google Maps Plus Other Mac Games

Have you ever played the board game Risk? Some dude created one using Google Maps. Slashdot reports that a multi-player version is in the works…

Risk on Google Maps

I remember playing my very first games of Risk on a dinky Macintosh SE (the original all-in-one Mac), running System 4 with only 1MB of RAM.

Mac original OS
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Later I graduated to playing the first version of Prince of Persia when it became available. And let’s not forget the original Oregon Trail, apparently an educational title for social studies (but what did I care; it was a GAME!).

Prince of Persia
Image courtesy of Prince of Persia Unofficial Website

Oregon Trail
Image courtesy of Answers.com

via [Slashdot]

Free Video for All

Everyone seems to be on a hurry to make video sharing the trendy thing to do, making photo sharing the thing of the past. Revver has a huge library of videos that makes killing time a much easier task on lazy Friday afternoons.

Revver’s competitor, YouTube offers a similar service. Both companies received millions of dollars from venture capitals for making video sharing the new “Flickr” (now a Yahoo company).

There are a number of other smaller operations doing exactly the same thing. OurMedia, vimeo and DailyMotion are all part of this online video “revolution”.

Of course, what’s a revolution without the bloggers taking on the multi-million dollar seeded companies. Blip.tv is a blog that features tons of videos. Even more interesting, VlogMap shows a geographic map of where various different vlogs are using Google Maps.

Speaking of Google, the monster search machine recently debuted its video search feature. And a search war is never complete without Yahoo video search and MSN Video. One word on MSN Video: damn Microsoft has to make an online app that requires a Windows-only plugin to be installed. Get with the party, Microsoft.

While researching on various video search and sharing sites, I found an independent cable network “Current.tv“. Apparently Google has a hand in the venture since the network broadcasts “Google Current” as part of its programming. Former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore chairs this hip start up.

It’s interesting to note that not only is Google dominating the online battle, the company is diversifying into chatting, broadcast programming and a supporter of the open source movement.

Friends

After more than 15 email correspondence between the Malaysian/Indonesian gang, everybody finally settled on meeting at Michelle’s apartment on Friday night for hot pot. Bryan behaved exceptionally well, sleeping through most of the night, while the adults dined and wined.

We talked a lot about the troubles Chee-hoi and Widodo went through with “cat problems” around their houses. They complained that neighborhood cats refuse to stay away from their yards with occasional acts of retaliation, especially with Chee-hoi’s back yard. Then Widodo proudlly shared his money-saving tricks on his pool (one of the only TWO in the entire neighborhood, according to Google Earth). I never knew pools can take so much to maintain! Kind of takes the romance of owning a pool knowing all that insider knowledge.

On Saturday, Yi-sheng, an old friend from high school called to see what we were doing. So we decided to get out of the house and show him this Thai noodle place in San Francisco we love so much. We just love Thai food!

Sunday afternoon, we went over to visit Jason and Alicia, good friends I met from college, over at Menlo Park. Jason made us some really nice home-made Japanese dishes. The visit also gave me a new insight to Jason and Alicia’s past through a series of albums (including a scrap book that Jason’s mom made of his baby years). According to Jason’s mom, he liked Kung-fu when he was four years old. Maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t really follow through with it. At over 6-ft tall, he could easily be a killing machine.

We also saw Jason and Alicia’s two cats (finally). It was amazing to see how their cats are so totally fine with having leash put on them when going out for a walk. It was also funny to see how cats just can’t tolerate baby cries (ours eventually got used to it after a couple of months). But Bryan did OK today. We went through three diapers and a bottle of formula during the visit. Jason blogged about our visit soon after we left. He has a couple of tight shots of Bryan. It was very nice to just talk to friends without other distractions in the way.

It was nice to be out of the house to get some fresh air.

Will Work for Housing

After having some troubles with Yahoo HotJob’s resume builder earlier last week, I finally got a more generic resume set up to bombard the newspaper ads. So on Thursday, I emailed about a dozen companies with positions I thought I am capable of doing well from local Chinese papers.

Next I combed through Craigs List for any computer administration or web design gigs I could find and inquired about them. But such as the nature of Craigs List: Everybody wants a lot for nothing.

So the job search continues. As 2005 draws to a close, Grace and I prepare to tighten our belts for a long winter. But even in the wake of our worst financial crisis, we still feel lucky everything else in our lives are in still in good order (relatively speaking).

Hit Me, Baby

Ever since I installed shortstat on my site, the concrete statistics I am seeing of my site are just amazing. I am averaging about 1000 hits on a daily basis (of which 200 are unique visitors).

A good majority of the visits were from referrals or searches of “Steve Jobs” and his speech at Stanford. I guess my site continues to rank pretty high for having that speech available. I knew I was getting a lot of traffice, but 1000 hits a day was beyond my expectation.

Another interesting fact I discovered was that visitors from Japan and Korea are on the very top of the “hit list” for Steve Jobs’ speech. It’s pretty embarrassing to know that Japanese and Koreans are more aware of Steve Jobs than the Taiwanese… They are probably just too busy dealing with all the political mess on the island.

Shortstat - hits

Shortstat -countries

The Great Wall of America

A Republican congressman plans to propose that the United States build a 2000-mile fence across its borders with Mexico.

Yeah, the Chinese tried that thousands of years ago. Didn’t quite work as hoped… Did it stop the invaders from trying to kick Chinese butt? No. In fact, the wall was breached quite often.

Yeah, expect illegal immigration to go way down once the wall is errected.

Are the Republicans trying to compensate for something by errecting such a giant wall?

The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang The death of Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking (more), came as a shocking news to me, especially considering she died almost a year ago.

I first came across Iris Chang’s book when I was doing research for a topic for my graduate thesis on the Nanking Massacre. I remember emailing her asking for sources of images used in her book on Oct. 16, 2004. Little did I know, in less than a month, she’d commit suicide due to depression. According to Paual Kamen in her eulogy for Iris Chang, Iris was getting very depressed from discoveries she found in her research for another book she was writing about American POWs in Southeast Asia during World War 2.

While much has been written about the Holocausts of the Jewish and Bosian people, little attention has been paid to the Nanking Massacre. Worst yet, nothing has been done about Japan’s official and public denial of the event. But how could they avoid such truth? The atrocities the Japanese committed in Nanking were so terrible that even Nazis couldn’t believe it happened (John Rabe, a Nazi stationed in China at the time, became the “Schindler” of China by rescuing thousands of Chinese from the massacre. Imagine that.)

She was widely credited for bringing the atrocities of the event by the Japanese to the Western World through her best selling book.

An interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with Iris Chang in 1997 can be found here. Her official home page is here.

Resume Woes

After a short chat with Simon about prospects of getting a job as a web developer in New York, I decided to give it a shot. So I happily logged on to my HotJobs account via Yahoo to start refurnishing an old IT Tech Support resume and transform it into one suitable for a web developer position.

About an hour and a half into editing the resume, 90% done, HotJobs’ database freaked and returned a completely rubbish resume.

I just wasted 1.5 hour of my life on HotJobs for a resume that I’ll never get to use.

This is yet another reason why I should stop using Yahoo all together. Interesting how something as stupid as losing a resume can make someone depressed… as if not having a job for almost a year (with Grace constantly making sure I remember that) is not bad enough; it was adding insult to the injury. Stupid HotJobs.

Chinese Emperor Has 1.5 Million Direct Descendants

Qing Emperor, GiocanggaNo wonder the Westerners get the Chinese people confused all the time insisting, “You Chinese all look alike; you related?” A research based on genetic evidence reported by BBC News identified about 1.5 million men from north-east part of China and Mongolia were direct decendants of a single Qing emperor.

The article credits this incredible phenomenon to the fact that it was not unusual for the royalties of the time to have several wives and concubines. One peom I used to memorize for school romanticized an emperor’s indulgence in 3,000 concubines during the Tang Dynasty.

“Research into an unusually high prevalence of a particular set of genes in China has suggested that 1.5 million Chinese men are direct descendants of Giocangga, the grandfather of the founder of the Qing dynasty.”

No wonder the Qing Dynasty was in such bad shape in the 1800s. The emperors were too busy womanizing and smoking opium. And considering how “productive” Chinese emperors were throughout history, maybe there’s some truth in such stereotypical comments from the Westerners. To make matters worse, emperors used to behead not only the entire family of certain criminals, but everyone who’s related to that family in anyway up to nine degrees of separation, which could have easily translated into thousands of people. The tactic was used to prevent revenge from close relatives of the criminal in question. Sometimes this meant an entire family tree of the same last name disappearing forever from the face of the earth, which in turn explains why certain last names only exist in history books today.

Image courtesy of BBC News.

Earth Browsing

I guess there’s a whole community of Google Earth enthusiasts out there sharing what they found with each other. Since the forum is hosted on Keyhole.com, the company that actually made the software that is now Google Earth, I guess it’s endorsed by Google in some fasion.

There’ll be a day when Google Earth is banned from some offices, much like chatting clients and personal emails in some companies are actively forbidden.

RHCE Links

As part of prepping my next “career move”, I was looking into getting a RedHat Certified Engineer certificate to match what my resume says I know. I found a site that has quite a number of useful links.

Having a fine art degree in computer art, worked in a (practically failed) education technology start up with a diversified (but not professional) knowledge in a bunch of stuff don’t really prepare me for any kind of position really. Everywhere I looked, people are looking for hardcore specialty expertise in one area or another, especially in Silicon Valley. Maybe our luck will soon run out as everything in the bank will be depleted in no time.

Everybody dreams of a beaufiful American Dream. But sometimes it’s holding on to the illusion of such dreams that’s hard to let go.