Category: Day to day life

Updates on what’s going on with us

No More Schools

It looks like I am not the kind of material for a Ph.D. After checking out some of the philosophy Ph.D programs around the country (which is the next level up from MFA without gong into Art History), it seems like almost every program is looking for genius-like candidates. Just the language requirement along shuts me out of the door (usually fluency in French or German is a prerequisite). And besides, most programs want you to already have a MA in philosophy plus A LOT of spare time doing dissertation (unless you get accepted into one of the “good” programs, then they pay for everything so that you can focus on the research).

And also, looks like the “ambition” in getting a Ph.D in philosophy is to get tenure in an university and remain in the academics… not much use in the rest of the job market per se. But maybe that is a good thing.

Hope-less

To stop my mom from nagging about one less thing about the immigration issue, we went to San Francisco yesterday to visit the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO). She was counting on the fact that she’s friends with an official in charge of issuing passports of TECO office might put my case in a “special circumstances” pile and get special privileges. But of course, no such luck. First the “connection” whom her friend is good friends with is no longer on the post (perhaps she granted one too many favors?). The new head person is tough as a nut.

After the TECO official and my mom had a small chat about the background of my situation, here’s an over-simplification of how the rest of the conversation went:

Mom: Isn’t there anyway around renewing my son’s passport?
TECO Official: No.
Mom: But our situation is really very special.
TECO Official: So is everyone else’s.
Mom: Then this puts my son in a really bad position…
TECO Official: Yes.
Mom: Can’t you turn one eye blind on just this case? (While she’s saying this, there are OTHER people in the room as well.)
TECO Official: No. I can’t do any favors outside of the law.
Mom: But…
TECO Official: No. (Proceeded to walk away slowly… )
Mom: But there must…
TECO Official: No. (Proceeded to open the door as she inched her way to the door… )

So much for a promissory note pending a Canadian Green Card.

But we did learn something “new” in the short 5-minute conversation with the official — they’d still be willing to grant me a three-year passport if I am enrolled in a PhD program before I turn 33.

Holy Christ… More schooling?
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On the way back to San Jose, Bryan was exhausted. So he cried a lot in the car until he cried himself to sleep.

A new strategy will have to be examined if we were to get that Green Card for Canada now that all hope on Taiwan is lost.

Mom Arrives

My mom arrived last night, just days ahead of Bryan’s birthday on August 1st. We have a feeling she doesn’t want to miss her first grandson’s first birthday!

Last year she arrived just ONE day before Grace gave birth to Bryan… She thought she was really lucky to be able to be in the middle of that wonderful event.

But Bryan was too tired last night on the way home… So he cried during most of the car ride home. But my mom was pretty psyched about seeing him again.

Tomorrow my brother arrives from Los Angeles as well (with his portable A.C.!)…

Let the party begin!

(Now I just gotta finish my Macroeconomics paper, prepare for mid-term exam, finish reading 3 more chapters for my “C programming” class plus related assignments and finish 2 freelance projects ALL before the end of next week… Ah, life of a 31-year-old unemployed foreigner/student-wannabe in America… )

Canada

We finally heard something back from Canadian immigration. The consulate has scheduled an interview with us in October in Los Angeles… That’s a pretty practical and good excuse for us to get out of town for a road trip… But We are not very sure how Bryan will take the long car rides…

I am actually a bit worried about the interview. I already know why they want to interview me… It’s because of my seemingly suspicious expired (and useless) passport. I will have to go into the long story of why it’s expired and how that problem can be fixed. But it’s a catch 22 kind of deal… Canada most likely won’t issue me a Green Card unless I have a valid passport (as stated in the Interview letter); but I can’t get a valid passport unless I have Green Card from another country (long story)! So I am stuck.

The strategy is, as I thought about it, to have the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (or TECO for short, it’s the closest thing Taiwan has to an embassy in a country with no “formal” diplomatic relations with Taiwan) issue a promissory note to grant me a new passport if Canada can promise to issue me a Green Card… Notice both are just promises on paper — So basically, I get Taiwan to promise a new passport to show the Canadians that I am no criminal so that the Canadians will, in turn, issue a promise to give me Green Card as long as I can obtain a valid passport from Taiwan (based on the assumption that no Green Card can be issued without a valid passport).

But it’s too early to tell what will happen at this stage. Canada might feel it’s too much of a hassle and think that this whole deal is too “fishy” to go through. But then again, I read everywhere that Canada IS short on young talent in various industries… Maybe I will say enough of the right things to make them want me enough to go out of the way just a little bit to help me out…

We are scheduled to go to a “pre-interview” training with the agency we are applying the Canadian Green Card though next week. Hopefully they will reveal some good tips on how to score some cookie points with the Extended Americans… I mean, Canadians.

Bias

I used to think this whole Middle Eastern thing was too complicated to get into and thus tried to stay as neutral on the issues as possible. But the recent crisis between Lebanon and Israel made one thing clear in my mind: The United States is clearly biased towards the militarily superior (thanks to the U.S.) Israel, a Jewish State, than the rest of the region (mostly Arabs). I wish I don’t have to sound so anti-semitic. But it appears that every policy U.S. has had in the Middle East favors Israel!

Not that i have anything against the Israelis, Jews or even the United States in this case. But I thought a Superpower probably shouldn’t play favorites in a sensitive region on sensitive issues (what’s being projected as Arabs v.s. Jews, or Muslims v.s. Christians/Jewish)… Take for example, nuclear weapons: Why is it that Israel can have it but not Iran? To me, Israel looks more like a terrorist state than any of its surrounding neighbors. If Saddam was taken down for suspicion of having Weapons of Mass Destruction, why not North Korea? I mean, it was clear that UN couldn’t find any WMD in Iraq even prior to U.S. invasion. But it’s now obvious that North Korean HAS WMD. So what’s the argument for not taking it down?

Anyway… enough of this stupid rant. It must be the heat getting to me… The apartment is so hot that the thermostat is confused again.

Coffee

Of all the years I have been in school and at work, I have never had to use coffee or any kind of stimuli to keep me awake, no matter how little I’d slept the night before. Part of the reason was probably I found out rather early in my life that coffee doesn’t really work for me… Or, rather, caffeine doesn’t work for me (Mt. Dew, Coke, tea… etc).

But this week I have had to wake up pretty early everyday for classes. And this middle-aged body isn’t quite as strong as it used to be… So I tried some free coffee at the UC campus to see if it’d do me any good to keep me awake during long Perl lectures… What I found was that… coffee makes my body feel agitated… It just felt weird. I tried it for 3 days and found no good reason to continue.

That was a stupid experiment.

Or maybe that was some cheap coffee that didn’t do sh*t.

Where Are the Sex Offenders?

While watching the news, the reporter mentioned something about FamilyWatchDog.us as a good resource to see if there are any sex offenders around any neighborhood in the U.S. The result for my neighborhood was a little alarming…

Sex offender map

The red dots are offenders against children, yellow for rape, blue for sexual battery, and green for other offenses. The pattern is also very interesting — It seems like some neighborhoods are possibly more “tolerant” of certain types of sex offenders than others. I did a couple more searches on some friends’ residences, the results were slightly better; but it seems like they are just EVERYWHERE!

The map is supposed to be able to tell you where they work as well as where they live. But I failed to find any dots representing their work address…

When I first moved to California, I also found another map that tells you where all the latest crimes are happening in your neighborhood. Internet is truly a great resource for things… I wish the government could spend more money on solving domestic issues instead of spending billions a month in the name of solving someone else’s problems. But hey, what do I know. I am not even American! 🙁

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 ”

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/*fix for stupid IE*/

“, or ”

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/*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…
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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…

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.

Blinding Eye

Grace has been getting sick along with Bryan in the past couple of months. But a problem with her left eye never got any better despite having gone to an eye doctor just two weeks ago (she was told the red-eye was caused by a cold virus that’d been going around). But the problem got worse as she started to have headaches.

Without health insurance, Grace had to pay pretty money to see a medical doctor whom spent an hour using various eye drops and precision equipment (I assume they are pretty “precise” ) examing her eyes. He concluded that it was a pretty serious infection which had now spreaded to her other eye. He proceeded to give Grace a prescription for a couple of different eye drops for treatment and announced that it’d take at least a couple of months to cure.

Thanks to Fiona for taking Grace to the doctor while I was in classes though… It just shows how impossible it is to have only ONE car living in the United States…

Rude People

Rude people suck. That’s a fact.

But some people are rude in suttle ways. Take for example, the Asian chick sitting next to me in m PERL class. She has so many fricking stupid problems with her PERL codes that she almost never stops raising her hands for help during lab time. If the instructor didn’t know any better, she’d have monopolized the instructor. But worse, she fricking picks up her cell phone during class AND whispers into her phone as if nobody’d be distracted if she did that! And she does it like multiple times a day. What an idiot.

But I do have to say that she knows her way around vi pretty well.

I think the instructor is partly to blame for not telling her to stop doing it. Some instructors get pissed at even the ring tones…

Other than that, PERL really is cool. But the instructor kept on saying how PERL on Windows is different… etc. I wish Windows could just go away so that everything can work more harmoniously together — coding, browsing, working, playing… Ok, maybe not playing… There ARE a lot of games for Windows.