Murdza sent me a link to a few friendly advice on fatherhood. Some of the items on the list are pretty damn funny (but how true!).
Category: Day to day life
Updates on what’s going on with us
Daily Rant
On the way back from lunch to class today, NPR had an interesting program about how infants/children often imitate adults in what they do and pattern their own behaviors after the adults. The program was interesting except this one caller kept on going with her story and her experiences… etc. I mean, often these call-ins are interesting. But I really HATE it when a caller just monopolizes the show by talking and talking and talking… Idiots!… I hated it so much that I stopped listening the program and started reading a book instead.
In other news, the PERL class I am taking is pretty kick-ass. I don’t think I can learn quite as much on my own in a 2-day period. I like these short and intensive classes where we blast through a whole quarter’s worth of material in 4 days! We’ll be covering Regular Expressions this afternoon… which is something I’d been dying to master… and now I have a chance to…
Artsy Past
After having putting off reorganizing my CD binders for months, I finally decided to go ahead and consolidate all my data CDs, separating all the PC discs from my Mac disks. But while I was going through THAT, I realized I actually had more than half a dozen backup CDs of my art and design works from back in college. So then I decided I might as well consolidate all of THAT as well… Ah~ how I miss creating art.
So I threw away a bunch of discs, made DVDs where I could to save space. But I was saddened that one of my Houdini project backup CDs was corrupted (damn cheap CDRs). So on my DVDR, I decided to make 2 copies of the consolidated backup files. Murdza once told me he actually made backups, and then backups of backups, and then backups of backups of backups…. He kept one copy in his fire-proof safe and another at the bank (or so I remember)…. I should probably revisit those files every couple of years and reburn them just in case…
FreeCycle
One of Grace’s mommy friends told her about an interesting online (but yet local!) community called FreeCycle. The free service is basically a collection of local residents in your area who are part of a larger collective “recycling” community. The idea is to recycle what you don’t want and give them to someone else who may find good use for them. Almost every major city in the world has a FreeCycle group (yes, even Freehold, NJ, Murdza!).
I thought this is better than Craigslist in that when you join this group (more than 5000 members for San Jose), you know what you give/get would be free in the spirit of recycling and sharing. Grace got a saucer and a doorway jumper for Bryan when someone was giving them away. I also posted a “wanted” entry for a keyboard tray for my desk, and immediately someone offered me one for free! But it turned out that the tray is kind of heavy (all metal!) for my cheap IKEA desk…. 🙁
All in all, it’s a pretty cool community of folks… And I am glad, for once, this is not a corporate commercial venture (something I can see eBay doing). The website relies on ads and donations to keep going.
Goner
So… We “got rid” of our Infiniti on Monday. I guess the guy is a mechanic who’s going to be fixing it up and resale the car.
Now comes the impossible task of finding a reliable car that will fit a budget on a string, literally… not to mention the hassles of having to deal with low-life car salesmen… I wonder why car salesmen have to be suck pricks and jackasses, like most of the police officers I have dealt with — that’s not to say all of them are jerks… but clearly pricks outnumber the non-pricks for most people I know to dislike them…
Anyway… Grace found some interesting possibilities… Maybe we’ll deal with Internet car sales people this time… geek-to-geek talks… Plus we are not going to spend hours haggling with the sales people anymore… We’ll go right before the dealership closes (we’ll see how late they can play the good-cop/bad-cop game). Also, we have Bryan on our side this time…. Anytime we smell something fishy, we’ll use him as an excuse to get out of the dealership, pronto…
The Blast from the Past
Being in the web development business, it’s plain impossible to develop sites without having to check your work in Internet Explorer for bugs (not that my code is buggy, but that Internet Explorer rendering engines are simply not compliant to standards). So I finally broke down, booted up my Fedora Core 4 Linux on my 6-year-old Dell (running dual Pentium 3 @ 450Mhz!), fussed with VMWare and finally managed to install Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Oh, how I dreaded having to touch Windows again having stayed away from it for almost a year and a half. Just the installation of Windows 2000 felt like playing with Mac OS 9 again… So primitive and ancient. I especially “loved” the restarts after each service pack, patches to service packs and then hotfixes to the patches that were originally released to fix the service packs… etc. I wasted an entire evening just installing and patching Windows in VMWare. Nothing says “I love my life” like wasting time installing Windows OS!
The upside, though, is that I can perhaps install Internet Explorer 7 beta to see what the fuss is all about (yoohoo! Tabbed browsing… only 2 years late!)…. And then maybe if I feel adventurous enough, I’ll even download Windows Vista Public Beta and try to install it in VMWare (which I doubt will even install given that both the host and guest hardware are pretty damn old… even if by some miracle Vista installs, it’d probably take a few hours just to boot up… ha!).
I hope this is the last time I’ll have to deal with installing Windows ever again…
Car, Sans Transmission, For Sale
I went down to Car Clinic today to take some pictures of our J30t and collected our personal belongings from the car. It seems that the only sensible thing to do is to stop investing anymore money into the car and look forward to something more “long lasting.”
I thought Tibor was going to charge me labor and time for checking out what went wrong this time. But he told me I didn’t owe him anything — he didn’t want to charge me for the same problem twice even though he’d already taken the time and effort to examine the transmission and explained to me exactly what went wrong. Nice! Any other mechanic would have told me it’d cost me time and labor.
And then I asked if I could leave the car there for potential Craigslist buyers to come by and check out the car at his shop so that I don’t have to haul it. And he’s more than OK with that idea, too! Now I understand why a couple of online forums so highly recommend his shop… honest, friendly and pleasant to work with. I might have to give him a nice bottle of wine someday!
JASE, maybe you oughta bring the van to my mechanic for a 2nd opinon! 🙂
Immobilized
Professor Farnsworth: “Good news, everyone. Tibor called and said the car’s transmission is officially out of its misery. The bad news is the car isn’t worth much without a working transmission.”
Great. Three quarters’ tank of good gas is going to waste. Maybe there’s a way to “reclaim” some of that fresh gasoline for the loaner car from Michelle…
More Car Woes
As Professor Farnsworth would put it, “Good news, everyone. We are going to get a new car!”
After Tibor did the initial quick fix with the transmission, everything went well for a few days. Then yesterday the transmission decided it was going to work only in the 3rd gear and nothing else (not even 1st or 2nd gear). Literally. Even “neutral” and “reverse” gears simultaneously decided they were “park”. I almost got stuck in a parking lot and couldn’t get out because I had no “reverse”… As a result, I came to the conclusion that a car without “reverse” is pretty useless (unless it’s a tank or, similarly, a Humvee). It’s kind of like driving a car that can only turn left….
To make the long story short, I made it all the way from Hayward to Tibor’s shop in Mt. View…. in third gear. Imagine the massive amount of gas I wasted.
Maybe poor people aren’t meant to have cars. Maybe this is a sign that we should start getting used to the San Jose public transit system.
Temporary Fix
Tibor had my car ready the same afternoon I sent the car in on Tuesday. He said he cleaned the gears and fixed a wire which apparently was the culprit of the transmission incident. But Tibor said the gears are all pretty worn out that the tranny might go within a year (maybe sooner).
So the car runs like a champ again. And Tibor didn’t charge an arm and a leg for it. He even said if we decide to get the tranny replaced (an eventuality), he’ll give me a break on this job because he said this job was almost like a pre-requisite to diagnose any kind of transmission problem. And it doesn’t make sense for him to charge me twice for it. You can’t find an honest mechanic like Tibor anymore!
But we think we’ll have to replace the car with something a little more reliable soon. After our investment in fixing the engine, any additional pay outs for major fixes would make the car cost more than its worth. Plus now we have a baby, it makes sense that we get a car that we don’t have to worry about. So maybe we’ll do what Murdza did and get a certified pre-owned.
Car Woes
How much can you bear to spend on an used car before you ditch it for a newer one?
Our Inifiniti J30t broke down on my way home after my doctor’s appointment on Saturday, 2 hours before I was supposed to pick up my cousin from the airport. To make the story short, we ended up towing the car nearby the Car Clinic where we normally have Tibor to look into car problems.
So what happened to the car? Basically the transimission died in the middle the highway. Luckily I was the only passenger in the car. The situation would have gotten way more complicated if Bryan was also in the car. So for the sake of safety and peace of mind, perhaps we should be looking at something newer… That’s $$$ down the drain!
Argh!
Thanks to the long weekend, we won’t be able to do anything about it until Tuesday the earliest.
A Master, Finally
I got up early today for my micro-economics. And then I came home only to find out that Widodo and Hanny had invited us to their BBQ… Watched Spiderman 2 again… It was a pretty relaxing Saturday.
Tired, exhausted and eyes seriously itchy from the seasonal allergy, I came home to seeing a big, white envalope with a huge SCAD logo sticking out of the mailbox.
It could only be one thing… But… it couldn’t be. Katharine Harris told me she only sent out my diploma on May 18. How could it have arrived within 2 days all the way from the East Coast?
But sure enough, it was my Master of Fine Arts diploma for Interactive Design and Game Development.
Now only if I have a good/big enough body of work to land on one of those “interactive design” teaching positions…
Either way, I am pretty psyched about finally getting this damn degree after having started the program back 1998. Then in 2000, a startup came calling and subsequently occupied all of my attention when I was merely one class away from completing the degree (only this startup story didn’t end quite as “romantically” ).
Fast forward to 2005: After 5 years of nagging from my mom, laughters from Murdza and hundreds of “are you done with your thesis” inquiries, I finally re-enrolled in SCAD’s e-learning system (which, by the way, is far more superior copmared to UC System), took a make-up class and finally finished my thesis in Feburary, 2006.
SCAD could have been really nasty, greedy (as many people contend that it is) and made me take all kinds of classes to make up for the 5 years I was away from the program. But it turned out that SCAD’s support system worked extremely efficiently and took care of me and my degree. Most impressively, all this was done via correspondence through emails, phone calls and official documents from SCAD. This is the kind of stuff that makes me endorse SCAD and [most of] its staff/faculty without any inhibition*.
One Master down, what’s next?
* If anyone from SCAD’s administration is reading this, please get rid of Jeff Jones. He’s one useless scum who’s ruining SCAD’s reputation everytime he deals with another human being on behalf of SCAD. Seriously, ask any International student and get the true story.