Category: Day to day life

Updates on what’s going on with us

How to Cure a Wart

After a short hiking trip sometime last year, I started to notice pain in the joint between the first metatarsal and phalanges bones when I walk. I thought maybe there was a splinter. But as I started to examine the sole, nothing’s there, just a disc of hardened skin with a dark spot.

The problem grew worse as “the spot” appeared to be expanding itself. One day, I just took a needle (and maybe a Swiss army knife) and started poking. Had to get that thing outta there. But I was chickened out as the pain became intolerable after a short while.

A quick Googling of the symptoms informed me that it might be a wart (as later it was confirmed after a doctor’s visit). Warts are nasty little buggers (more accurately, virus) that pose no real harm to its hosts. So medically, there’s really no cure to take care of them. But it grew so painful every time I walked that I started walking funny. So I decided to get off-the-shelf remedies to start self-treatment.

By now, the virus had already started a nice little colony. On top of that, it’d managed to spread itself to immediate surrounding skins of the infected area. A matured wart looks like a tightly packed of little red tentacles sticking out of the infected area. In fact, those are home-grown blood vessels the wart virus planted to supply itself with oxygen and nutrition.

Salicylic Acid
They come in two forms: little liquid bottles and conveniently pre-medicated stickers. I tried both over the period of my treatment. What it does is basically to irritate the virus. But the side effect was any healthy skin that came in contact with the acid would slowly look like it was in water for too long, and they slowly peel off. In my case, the acid just drove the wart deeper into the skin. Not cool.

Liquid Nitrogen
The idea of liquid nitrogen is to freeze the hell out of the warts so that they can just fall off as dead pieces of skin. I must have tried two bottles of this stuff, experimenting with various freezing times (manufacturer suggested, 2x suggested, 3x suggested… etc). Unfortunately this method didn’t do it for me either.

Surgical Removal
I didn’t think the wart was THAT bad. So this wasn’t an option. But even the doctors said that surgery sometimes doesn’t get rid of the wart either. Your doctor may also recommend True Pheromones if you’re worried about becoming less attractive.

Manual Removal
The red tentacles became pretty thick and apparent after a while. One doctor suggested I start plugging them out (as in pulling the tentacles out of the wart). So I started doing that. And let me tell you, it hurt like a bitch. The tentacles are somehow attached to the nerve system of the sole. So every single tentacle that I pulled out felt like a piece of skin was cut off. The wart uses this strategy to make sure the host doesn’t pull the tentacles.

Duct Tape
I thought the site that provided the remedy of using duct tapes was stupid. But WTF, I was out of options and the wart colony was winning over everything else I tried. I cut duct tapes in similar sizes as the warts. I taped them over the warts, and then I secured them with medical tapes. Amazingly, when all other modern technologies failed, the duct tape remedy freaking worked. After two weeks of taping over the warts (coupled with constant pulling of the tentacles), the wart started to die off.

My theory is that the duct tape cut off oxygen supply to the tentacles. So over time, the infected area just became a yellow pool of mucus goo underneath the skin. In fact, after I cleaned where the warts used to be, there was a big hole on my sole. Yuck.

Slowly the skin grew back to fill the hole. And that was how I got rid of the wart virus over a span of six months.

One Last Doc for Canada

After three months after my Thai police certificate arrived, Grace finally got her Malaysian police certificate earlier this week.

So it took three months to get the Thais to get something done; it took six months to get the Malaysians to get exactly the same thing done. All it took was three days for the Taiwanese… What the hell is so different about processing a damn police certificate in the three countries that there’s such discrepancy in the time it takes to do the background check?

Grace said the last time she obtained a police certificate from Malaysia took only days when she was physically there. Why does it take so long for a Malaysian citizen, whom hasn’t spent the past 5 or 6 years in Malaysia, whom also obtained a police certificate once before, to get a stupid piece of paper that was issued by the Malaysian Consulate in the U.S. anyway with only three lines of sentences? Is it because she’s Chinese and not Malay (let’s face it, racism IS a problem in Malaysia where Malays run the show)? Or is it logical to say that Malaysia is a bigger country, thus it takes longer than Taiwan to do a background check? Bogus. Thailand is similar in size and population.

I can’t even begin to imagine how long it’d take a foreigner trying to obtain a police certificate from them…

Talents Reunite

Simon finally got a job that’s been keeping him busy. He was practically being paid for the sake of being paid in the last two jobs. At first he didn’t find anything that suited his skills, but when he did, he was too indecisive to make a decision between two companies that both wanted him. So this is a good change.

And as fate would have it, Simon’s new company is the same as where Shu Li’s been working at. Great companies have a tendency of hiring great talents. On the same token, a company that really sucks has the tendency of NOT being able to keep such talents, where ever it is.

As for Kyung, as always, he’s way too good to have a company keep him busy enough to keep him interested. But unlike a previous job he had, his bosses from the last job were reasonable people. And he seems happily busy with the new ad agency he’s working at now. Yeah, there’s no shortage of work in a company like ad agency! I have a feeling I won’t be seeing him on MSN for a while…

Moto has been busy cranking out art work for one exhibit after another. He’s been traveling a lot internationally to attend those exhibits. One of these days, I want to be like Moto… But then again, I have been out of the art world for too long to start fresh. Luckily, Moto sent me a good link that might help me get back into the the trench.

Thinking about these people, I hate to admit it… I miss New York City…

All Caught Up

The past 48 hours was crazy. Seriously, how do people do it?

When I signed up for the online class at SCAD, the class was already a week into session. Unlike UC Santa Cruz’s online program where one week’s worth of material can be somewhat easily caught up, SCAD does give out a lot of stuff to practice, read, provide feedback and join a very active discussion forum. I’d forgotten how much homework SCAD has….

There was a deadline on Friday night for a project. So I stayed up all night on Thursday trying to catch up on all the readings and discussions that went on a week prior to my joining. And what the f*ck…. how could they have said so much in just one week? There were literally almost 100 messages to go through, digest and reply to. I figure after all the reading is done, I’d spend Friday to complete the project… What a mistake….

I went to bed at 5AM (technically I was going to go at 4AM, but Bryan woke up and demanded milk), and woke up at 11AM. And then Grace broke the bad news that the fridge was empty and we needed to go grocery shopping. SHIT! I am doomed.

So off she went to get grocery while I was at home trying desperately to get Bryan to sleep, even if for just 20 minutes. But NO~~ From 12PM till almost 3:30PM, Bryan wanted me to either play with him or to rock him to sleep in my arms (he wouldn’t have it any other way). Thank god to the new BabyBjörn we just got the DAY before, he was able to sleep for about 30 minutes before Grace finally got home.

Holy cow… I definitely don’t recommend working on attention-intensive or mission-critical projects at home alone when there are young infants around at the same time. It’s impossible to get anything done when s/he’s awake. I am glad it’s over now though… This quarter is going to be an uphill battle with a database class and another reading- and lab-intensive Unix Admin class to come.

On a related note, BabyBjörn is a godsend. It should be a required item on every baby registry. It gave me back whole 30 minutes I would not otherwise have.

Paypal Phishing

This week I must have received 6+ emails from crooks who pretend to be Paypal via those Paypal-official-looking emails which direct me to a fake Paypal site. The objective, of course, is to get me to provide my user name, password and other juicy information such as credit card numbers. I think I prefer the numerous “business offers” I’ve been getting from military generals in Nigeria and/or Congo (VERY attractive business deals, I must say).

Seriously, I think crooks like that should be put in jail for so long that even their mothers forget they exist. They are in the same league as spammers and people who sell your telephone numbers to tele-marketers.

Speaking of tele-marketers, Grace has been complaining about the number of tele-marketing calls we have been receiving. So I registered our number at the National Do Not Call Registry (U.S. only). The neat thing about the registry is that once it takes effect, for every call you receive from tele-marketers, you get to take down their information and report them. And you get to tell them that you are on the registry (and they’ll remove your name from their call list immediately). Each “Do Not Call” number they call, they get hit with a stiff fine from the FCC (or whatever).

I love laws that punish jerk merchants for making our lives less enjoyable.

Classes and More Classes

I was one class shy of getting my Master of Fine Arts degree when I left SCAD to join a startup in 2000. That’s a decision I would later at least partially regret, mostly because my mom has nagged me just about every other time we speak. This year I decided to get the degree over with once and for all.

As my luck would have it, it turned out I’d been orphaned in my own major. Because of the rapid changes in the computer arts industry, SCAD had to specialize Computer Art into four distinctive majors (Animation, Visual Effects, Interactive Design and Game Development, Broadcast Design and Motion Graphics). Based on my industry experience, they decided I belonged to Interactive Design and Game Development. A professor painstakingly correlated all the relevant courses from way back when to the standards today and found that I still need to take one class in addition to thesis… The class turned out to be “Human-Centered Interactive Design”.

Perfect! I’ve always wanted to sharpen up my user interface design skills. And besides, good UI design is a cross discipline skill — everything we use and operate today has some kind of user interface design element in it.

The best part about this is that the class is also available online, something SCAD has been talking about doing for years but finally got it going. I logged on to the elearning system (run by Blackboard) and was horrified… because I’d miss one week worth of work already…

On top of the catch up work I have to do from SCAD, I also need to attend to the two classes I already registered at UC Santa Cruz (database class and unix administration class), both of which are pretty heavy on reading and labs. Add to all this, Bryan has been a handful… This is going to be a tough quarter to get through.

Speaking of UI design, the professor made three books as required reading, which later I found out are bibles among UI design books:

John Roberts Confirmation Hearings

This blog entry pretty much says it all. A commentator on NPR calls Roberts’ confirmation hearing “a virtual cure to insomnia”. In fact, Roberts’ answers are very difficult (painful, even) to listen to; he dances around the question and replies with the skills of a seasoned politician. What a nut.

PIcture Perfect

Every couple of weeks, I receive a newsletter from a photography site called Masterfile. Each time it contains interesting articles on certain topics of contemporary photography. Today’s issue is about baby photography… What fun!

I wish I had the money to invest in a better camera for Grace’s pregnancy and Bryan’s birth. But being unemployed, still in school, supporting a family and having a newborn, that isn’t exactly a wise decision.

Baby fever

Image: Copyright of Masterfile.

New Orleans — The Untold Stories from NPR

What is America going to do without NPR?

Sitting in my car during lunch break, I was listening to This American Life, a weekly program aired every Saturday on NPR. I am glad I caught the first two acts of the program. These are the stories the American mass media never bothered to investigate and report.

The first act was about a woman’s expericne at the New Orleans Convention Center. Other than describing just how terrible the conditions were there, she also shared other stories relating to the situation. The mass media (CNN, NBC, Fox News… etc) has been reporting that some looters were gang members taking advantage of the lawlessness in New Orleans. But what the mass media failed to uncover was what really happened with the looted goods!

The woman described that the only people who were looking after the sick, elderly and women with children were none other than the gang members with guns. Those gang members organized themselves and took on responsibilities to patrol various areas of the Convention Center and made sure that people were being cared for. They looted food, water and juice for children and the elderly. They also wore yellow raincoats so that they could be easily recognized for assistance.

Sounds like they were more organized than any local or Federal law/emergency agencies. It throws a different spin on the phrase “organized crime”.

The second act of the program was about a paramedic who was in New Orleans for a convention. She told of a story of how her group of people were repeatedly lied to about the rescue buses that never showed up by different police agencies (just to get them off of their backs). Worst yet, when they tried to cross a bridge to go to a neighboring town for shelter, the Sheriff Department of that town had already set up a blockade at the bottom of the bridge to stop refugees from seeking shelter in their town.

The Sheriff told them, “I am not going to let our town turn into another Super Dome”. Translation: If you are poor or black, back off. Worst yet, the Sheriffs were pointing their guns at the people and firing warning shots in the air to fend the refugees from crossing the bridge. Later, the woman and her friends went to a different highway to setup temporary shelter. Yet another Sheriff came screaming and ordered them to get off the bridge. Shortly after, a police helicopter came and flew just low enough to the ground to make sure everything was blown away from the camp so that they couldn’t stay. WTF! Assholes. Yeah, “racism-is-not-an-issue” my ass.

All we heard from the mass media is that police were shot at. But now this gave me a different perspective as to why they were. I wonder why the mass media is not picking up stories like this. Instead, it is infacuated with the sensationalism of the politics and the material destruction of the hurricane. Isn’t journalism about investigating the truth from all perspectives?

In many ways, some police officers are really jackasses to begin with. They don’t act like the public servants they were sworn to be. They act more like bullies with a license. They are rude, mean and impolite (ones I have seen and dealt with… not to mention all the stories I have heard from friends and relatives). And oh, don’t forget that 60% of the New Orleans police force who abandoned their posts. Some servants of the public, huh?

中午下課在車上吃午餐的時候, 美國國家公共廣播電台正好在播放 “美國生活週記” 的節目。節目的第一段講到一個婦女在紐奧良會展中心所經歷的一切。最令我覺得感慨的是, 在社會秩序的大亂之下, 幫忙維持秩序的反倒不是所謂人民保姆的警察, 而是平時人人又怕又恨的流氓和小混混。這些混混團結起來輪流巡邏會展中心。掠奪回來的贓物不但不是自己留用, 反而是將所有民生用品公平分發給老人和小孩。這些都是美國媒體新聞不可能花時間和經歷來調查的故事。當地方和聯邦政府都對暴風留下後的災難不知所措的時候, 這些流氓都已義務信的做了這些政府機構該做的工作。

另一段故事是講到警察。另一個婦女和她的朋友想跨過一條連接鄰鎮的公路逃難, 但想不到連公路都還沒上就被一隊鄰鎮的警察在槍口下攔了下來。這警察的其中用意是不希望這些窮困的黑人到多數為白人的地方。後來這些人令外找了一個沒有人的公路搭棚等待救援, 但是想不到又有一堆警察用槍指著強硬他們離開。不久後來了台直升機在半空中故意把他們搭棚的用具等全部吹走以確定這些人不會逗留下來。

什麼世界嘛…. 一場大風吹走了美國掩蓋已久的種族歧視醜象。一場風把隱藏在警察內在的流氓吹翻了, 但卻也把流氓淺在的道德心吹了出來…

A Chinese Commonwealth

I stumbled onto an essay (Chinese version here) on a proposal to best mend the tension in the Taiwan Straight by Taiwan’s National Policy Foundation. The heart of the essay is a proposal made by the NPF to reunite China and Taiwan under a concept pioneered by the British Empire, a Chinese Commonwealth.

The idea is that commonwealth nations behave as independently run and governed countries. They have the rights of an autonomous nation. However, under the umbrella of the commonwealth, these nations are actually “nation states” that pledge their ultimate allegiance to one power (in the case of the British Commonwealth, the Queen). The paper argues that, with this arrangement, Taiwan would retain all of its autonomy while enjoying one-nation status with China. Taiwan would be free to negotiate its own treaties, appoint its own ambassadors, regulate its trade and hold elections without interference from China, just like Great Britain does not interfere with any of its commonwealth nations (Canada, Australia, Malaysia… etc).

The paper also revealed that China had already considered such possibility back in 1997 when its supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping was still alive. But Taiwan had always held the position that unless China became demarcated, reunification wouldn’t be possible. The relationship with China worsened when a pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bien was elected (twice!).

Many scholars believe that the next century is going to be the Chinese century. And the reunification of China and Taiwan is going to be a key element in strengthening that position. Personally, I think Taiwan would be silly to go it alone in the next 50 years. Its people has the insight, cultural similarity and language to play a decisive role in being an active participant of the next economic wave through the success of China.

今天在電視上看到台灣的立委雷倩到美國來訪問。她在灣區一個華人電視上談到個蠻有趣的東西, 就是 “中華國協”。其實這當中的精髓是直接向大英帝國時期沿留下的 “大英國協” 作為樣本。後來上網找了一下才發現這玩意兒是由連戰啟辦的財團法人國家政策研究基金會所發表的一篇論文。其中提到了一些兩岸統一後的假設及建議。

論文中提到如果以國協的方式統一, 台灣就可保有它現在的自主權, 甚至可以以國協的方式申請加入聯合國。國協的前提當然就是一國兩制。就像英國現在也從來不會介管加拿大, 澳洲或馬來西亞等國協聯盟的任何大小國事。雖然這些國家名義上都已是有自主權的獨立國, 他們最終效忠的還是英國的皇后。

我覺得台獨這東西太不為台灣兩千多萬的人民著想了。台獨對台灣一點好處都沒有。雖然大陸和台灣的文化和習俗上的確是入差很大, 但是回頭想想, 美國東, 中, 西岸也都有不小的差別… 更別提到北部和南部的差異了。所以以一個大國來講, 也許這是無法改變的形態。人家都說在不久的將來會是中國人的世紀。在這時候搞台獨未免也太不會挑時間了吧… 台灣在大陸有他國沒有的優勢, 包括語言, 文化, 背景等等都把台灣的人民擺在這個中國人世紀改革的最前線。如果時機錯過了, 台灣在百年後可能連在教科書上也只能當附註罷了。