Pets, Infants and Allergies

My mom’s been pestering me about raising Bryan while having two cats at home. Almost every time I talk to her on the phone, she never forgets to nag about it (on top of her 5-year nagging about my thesis). Rightfully, she worries that Bryan may grow up with respiratory problems and more prone to allergies like I have been. And she cites evidence from everyone she’s talked to about the subject. Of course, everyone has an opinion when it comes to childrearing practices.

While at dinner at Jason and Alicia’s, Alicia casually mentioned that a recent research concluded that having pets at home actually HELPS infant and young children build up their immune system to resist allergies when they grow older.

CBC News

The 10-year study showed children who were exposed to the furry pets during their first year of life were half as likely to develop common allergies by about age six than those living in petless homes.

CBS News

The bottom line is that maybe part of the reason we have so many children with allergies and asthma is we live too clean a life. When kids play with cats or dogs and the animals lick them, the transfer of bacteria may be changing the way the child’s immune system responds in a way that helps protect against allergies. Parents should not be concerned about having pets in the home with a new baby but the findings do not go far enough in allergy prevention to warrant the purchase of pets.

The fact is, the society today is super freaked out about being sterile and germ-free. Every cleaning agent you can buy in America sports a guarantee of “killing 99.99% of germs and bacteria” on contact. The same hysteria is driving people to use obscene amount of antibiotics to the extent that someday there will be a new species of superbugs that will be resistant to all antibiotics and kill off a significant portion of the human race. I bet those hardcore, conservative right wing Christians will somehow tie that into the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ the Savior, the only son of God, the one and the only salvation to eternal afterlife. So let’s not piss off God by using too much antibiotics and leave them germs and bacteria alone once in a while.

People, let’s relax. It’s perfectly natural and OK for kids to be dirty from time to time. It’s good for them.

As for my mom, I found similar report in Chinese and am planning on sending it to her, with key points highlighted, along with the latest video clips and printed pictures of Bryan.

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.

Blog Spammers

Boy, was I glad that I turned on the spam moderation feature that came with WordPress earlier this month. A couple of other morons kept posting more spam links to their sites. When I went to the WordPress control panel to see if any “potential” spam comments were awaiting for moderation, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw “96”. God damn it, spammers.

Blog Spammers

Internet Explorer Got No Style

Homework from my “Human-Centered Interactive Design” class at SCAD’s e-Learning program is killing me. I wonder how I ever survived being a full time student at SCAD before. I like the class and all, but the amount of work has been overwhelming on top of my classes from UC.

The main motivation behind this post is to complain about Microsoft (again). The latest project is to implement an interface I designed into a working flow of wireframes. That’s the easy part. But inevitably, it was so easy to take that extra step to style the template just a little nicer since I am using CSS for everything anyway. And boy, what a bitch Microsoft Internet Explorer is to style for. Elements/styles that work for other browsers just don’t work on stupid IE. I guess this is not news for anyone who’s worked with CSS for longer than a few hours. But it’s annoying as hell.

Since I was checking my homework via Windows IE, I also checked out my blog to see how everything looks since I did quite a few improvements. Sure enough, the announcement tag line for Bryan’s new pictures below the header was somehow under a white block. A trip to the stylesheet fixed that. But again, it’s annoying. I wish Microsoft can stop being so damn cocky and start conforming to the web standards already. Jackasses.

Made in Taiwan, with Oversized Ego

Taiwan contracted the world’s most ambitious “Build-Operate-Transfer” (BOT) jobs of its kind back in the late 1990’s to build a high speed bullet train project. The construction has been cursed with political scandals and corruptions ever since.

The total cost of the project has been estimated at about $2 trillion Taiwan dollars (or roughtly USD $61,538,461,000) by the time the construction is completed in late 2006. It will be 2 years late and billions of Taiwan dollars over budget — a laughing stock in the world of construction business.

The interesting thing about the scandal is, it’s an open secret of corruption and political favors. The Taiwanese media has repeatedly reported the details of the scandal. But yet nothing has been, and, with the way things are, ever will be, done about it because it involves both the sitting and previous presidents of Taiwan and their cabinets. It’s also clear the people of Taiwan fell asleep at the wheel having reelected the same morons who blindly passed the provisions of the project in the legislature. That’s why I think the South Koreans really got their shit together when they arrested, tried and convicted their former president for his criminal acts. As conflicts of interest continue to taint the construction, it’s not hard to see those elected morons will continue to gain the support of the businesses working on the project.

This sort of mirrors Enron’s ties to Bush Jr.. And it also echoes how Dickhead Cheney’s former company easily won the bids on the reconstruction projects in Iraq.

On a related issue, even though Taiwan has projected itself as a democratic and free society, the lawmakers in the parliament continue to demonstrate their shameless and childish ways of resolving political issues by literally brawling each other. I mean, if they truly care about their issues, I dare them to really challenge each other over a duel, like the good old days of America. That Alexandar Hamilton had some balls; in comparison, most of the Taiwanese legislators are a bunch of legalized criminals whose brains are the size of peanuts with no room for EQ.

Where’s Karl Rove?

Does anyone wonder what ever happened to the investigation of Karl Rove? It was a hot topic not too long ago. The White House has done an excellent job in deflecting bad news to its nonexistence. And of course, the American mass media has no choice but to go along.

Bless PBS. It’s probably the only news channel these days that still follows and updates the general public on news that really matter. PBS today revisited the progress of the Karl Rove investigation.

PBS also produced a FrontLine special on Rove and his rise to power as the puppet master behind the Bush Administration.

Panhandle This Attitude

I drove out to grab a quick bite when a mid-age lady walked up to me and asked if I could spare some bucks. I politely explained that I was laid off sometime ago and am struggling with money myself.

Her glance snared at my 10-year-old car and replied sarcastically: “At least you have a better life; I wish I had a car.”

WTF! Why do some of those panhandlers think the world owes them everything? U.S. still has better social services than a good majority of developing countries. Why don’t they take advantage of that? And for those who do, some of them just leech off of the system for whatever it’s worth.

Bastards.

I guess a government can do all kinds of social reforms and provide every possible safety net to catch those who happen to fall in the gaps (kind of like us). But there’s just no way to treat a social disease like something I experienced today. But then again, who am I to blame the system? I am not the one in her shoes.

A Republican Renaissance

Let’s see… now the Republican Party rules the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House. And just days ago, they managed to get John Roberts confirmed (partly thanks to disorganization of the Democrats).

Granted John Roberts’ nomination has good merits with years of experience as a judge. But now the Bush Administration seems to be back to honoring his buddy system by nominating someone who’s completely unqualified to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Is he out of his mind?

If the Supreme Court becomes a conservative playhouse, some cases may get overturned by the new court (i.e. “Pro Choice” rights… etc).

Help! America has gone wild.