Author: shun

Leave It to the Republicans

Four days after Katrina left a disastrous trail, Federal aid finally arrived in Louisiana and Mississippi. President Bush took a tour of the area (god knows how much trouble local officials went through to secure THAT trip) and was apparently caught with his pants down when a journalist asked him why the aid arrived so late. To that, he answered, “I am satisfied with the speed of response. But I am not satisfied with the results.” Jack ass comment.

Kanye West's surprise comments
Download the video clip (3.2MB)

Kanye West said it best regarding the media coverage:

“I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. See a white family, it says they’re looking for food.”

That comment took Mike Myers, standing right next to him, by surprised a little. But what really shocked Myers was this one-line comment by West:

” George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Leave it to the Republicans to take care of crisis of any kind, man- or nature-caused. The worst crisis of both types took place under the watch of the same Republican White House. The first crisis (911) took this nation to wars despite lack of evidence (and reliable reports planning for the wars even before 911) . The second crisis, Katrina, left thousands of people dead and dying with federal help arriving too little, too late.

I am willing to bet that if exactly the same thing happened to a rich white, Republican neighborhood in Texas or Florida, federal aid would have arrived within hours. Damn it, I am sick of that jack ass in the White House.

WordPress Plugin — “Subscribe to Comments”

Carl requested to receive emails for people leaving comments on a thread he’d left comments on. I thought maybe others would also find that feature useful. So I did some digging and found Subscribe to Comments plugin for WordPress. Alright!

1. Fetched and unzipped the plugin.
2. Move

1
subscribe-to-comments.php

to

1
/wp-contents/_theme_of_choice/plugins/

.
3. Move

1
wp-subscription-manager.php

to the root of the WordPress directory.
4. Activate the plugin in the admin panel. Done!

Now users can optionally opt-in to receive notifications when someone else leaves a comment on entries where they’d posted comments at. Cool.

On Hurricane Katrina

Katrina has been a mess on many different levels.

CNN (in the United States at least) has been reporting it nonstop as if there’s no other news in the world, adhering to the true CNN reporting fashion (and American mass media in general). Every single report after another has been about the aftermath and other related news of Katrina and very little of anything else (on BOTH of CNN’s channels). MSNBC and Fox News are not any better.

It’s f*cked up to see how New Orleans is literally under water, which could have been prevented had not been Bush Administration’s budget cut on flood prevention plans for the city. And like Mark said, the gas prices are now in ridiculous levels. Worst yet, some businesses are totally taking advantage of the situation with price gouging practices (six-dollar-a-gallon gas, $200-motel rooms… etc). Jack asses.

Images of people looting, dying (or just plain dead) and being homeless are disturbing (and the mass media is not shy of showing them repeatedly). To think that this level of lawlessness and the disorganization of the rescue efforts can happen in the United States is hard to stomach. The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, was on the WWL Radio expressing his frustrations, probably the only politician who’s not afraid to question the slowness of rescue deployment to New Orleans. More and more people are beginning to wonder why rescue has been slow in coming. My humble conspiracy theory tells me that a Republican White House most likely doesn’t really give a rat’s ass to a city where majority of the population is African American.

Coming back to the gas prices, Bloomberg has reported:

Heating oil for September delivery climbed 7.64 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $1.913 a gallon. Futures surged to $2.0137, the highest in 27 years of trading on the exchange. Heating oil is 67 percent higher than a year ago.

The profit margin for turning a barrel of crude oil into heating oil and gasoline is $14.79, based on futures prices in New York. That is up 24 percent from Aug. 26 and more than double a year ago.

Hello? Higher profit margins during the time of disaster and war? By any stretch of imagination in the definition of the word “gouging”, the practice by the oil companies and refineries should easily fit within it.

UPDATE: As I was putting Bryan to bed and about to go to sleep (at 4AM!), I caught a section of a CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien grilling a FEMA official as to why people in New Orleans are dying of hunger and lack of medication several days into the disaster when victims of the Southeast Asian Tsunami received air drops of food within two days of the disaster. Kudos to Soledad for asking tough questions.

My favorite quote from that interview:

Do you look at the situation at New Orleans now and say to yourself, “I am proud of what is being done”? Or do you say to yourself, “There’s a lot of room for improvement here”?

That guy is never speaking to the press ever again.

Ajax It

Everybody is talking about AJAX (more explanation here) these days. It’s a combination of JavaScripting, css and XML and/or any text data. To find the most obvious demonstration of the technology, look no further than Google Maps. The advantage of implementing AJAX is that the user doesn’t have to refresh the web page to see the information he requested being fetched. Good stuff.

I found a site with some interesting sample codes for all you AJAX-programmer-wannabes.

What’s in a Name

I have been going by “Chu” for the longest time since high school. Quite frankly, I don’t remember why I did it. But I think it had something to do with a constant reminder for myself not to bring shame to the family name for which I represent. There’s been a few confusions every now and then when people weren’t sure what my first name was, and consequently, the most common joke about my name is, “So your name is Chu Chu?” Hah, real creative.

Then there are the clever Americans who try to make a joke out of my name. Here’s a few:
1. Sneezing: Ah Chu!!
2. Object: Hey, Shoe!
3. Automotive: Chu Chu Train!
4. Star Wars: Chu-bacca (followed by grunt)
5. Latino: Chuy
6. Action: Chewy, or simply, Chew
7. Cartoon: Picca-chu

Real respectful, jerks… But then it beats having my name spelled wrong altogether (Brian complains having his name often misspelled as “b-r-a-i-n”… not cool…).

I also have had a couple of nicknames as a result:
1. Chuy (or Chewy?)
2. Chu Chu (most common)

Being called “Chu” has been great when I am the one and only “Chu” in the entire school (or among the circle of friends). It’s unique and easy to remember. But ever since moving out to California, it’s a little awkward being called “Chu”. The primary reason is that my mother-in-law’s maiden name is “Chu” as well. And most of Grace’s relatives on her mother’s side live in California. My cousin, Jennifer, also lives here. When there are so many “Chus” around, to be called THE Chu is a bit selfish I guess. At my wedding, there were quite a few Chus there. It must’ve been weird and confusing for all our relatives to hear my friends calling me “Hey, Chu, drink up!”…

To remedy the situation, I have started introducing myself to new friends here in California as “Sean” (yeah, as in Sean Connery, Kyung). Sean Chu, Shun Chu… sound similar. I can live with that.

The funny thing is, a friend I know from college also started calling himself “Chu” although he did have an English name before (Robert), and he originally started having call him “Piccachu” and even bought domain name along with it. So the joke is on him now. Piccachu.

Digital Photo Prints

Costco has probably the cheapest printing service for digital photo. But instead of going to Costco, upload pictures there, and then possibly having to make a second trip to pick the pictures up, they offer an online upload option for pickup later.

Costco Mac plugin

It’s nice to see that Costco (via Snapfish) has a Mac compatible browser plugin for batch upload (beats manual one-by-one upload any day). Sony’s very own ImageStation also has similar features for Mac.

Speaking of pictures, I tried using PictureSync to see if it can make photo sharing any easier on a Mac. Unfortunately, the application is not free among its supported services. So I didn’t bother.

Too bad iPhoto has a really poor “export to web” feature. As of now, my favorite photo export app is PhotoSite TimeSaviour. Not only is it free, the software is also packed with feature that puts iPhoto’s export feature to shame. The only downside is that its GUI can be a bit complicated to figure out. And it seems like the author has stopped developing it. The upside is, once you get the settings figured out, you can save the settings for future use. Excellent~~ (in the tone of George Burns).

UPDATE: I wrote the author of PhotoSite TimeSaviour about future developments of the software. He replied and said:

…I’ve been short of time lately, but I have plans on updating it (with among other things proper CSS-based styling). – Karl B

Sweet. I like the app so much that I even made a Paypal donation. I could really use that css-based styling.

Super Powers

During the first couple weeks of Bryan coming home, some of his senses weren’t really fully developed. But as weeks go by, he’s developed some super senses. As close sighted as he is, he now gets excited with the mobile above his head (which didn’t happen before). His hearing is also more sensitive now. Sometimes he wakes up from hearing the slightest cracking sound from our old wooden floor. That’s why I tiptoe around the house sometimes when he’s asleep.

It’s very interesting to see Bryan’s development on a weekly basis. It makes me appreciate my unemployment (until the bank is completely dried up). I get to observe everything that’s going on with him.

On diapering, we have also learned that he will almost always pee as soon as we open his diaper. So now we just wait for a few moments before we completely remove his diaper for a fresh one. Also, his poops are getting chunkier. I fear the day when his poop outgrows his diaper… Yuck!

Murdza and Geekdom

Part of my dream last night was about Murdza’s geekdom. So this entry is about him.

The part in the dream about Murdza had him sitting in front of a Mac, using just the keyboard navigating fluently around the GUI and various applications. His boss, standing next to him, with a hint of proudness, seemed pleased. I remember back in the days of Mac OS9, he was the one showing me how virtually everything can be done with just the keyboard. Seeing him doing his tricks on a Mac makes one think being a geek is cool.

I inherited most of my cable “wiring” techniques and ethics from Murdza as well (five words: “wire ties are your friends”). After having worked with him for a year, it’s very tough to stand messy and unorganized wiring now. Hey, thanks, Murdza…