Great things; sucky things; boring things; stupid things…
I found this via digg and felt glad that I, among a few of my friends, am not the only one noticing this.
It’s frustrating to know that the majority of American news stations are feeding garbage news to the people of the most powerful country in the world, the same people who put an idiot like George W. Bush in power, twice…
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.
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.
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.
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 ”
1 | /*fix for stupid IE*/ |
“, or ”
1 | /*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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
Talking to Brian always works up my brain cells. We had a good three-hour chat on Skype tonight. Technology is a good thing.
While we were having some casual talk about religion and childraring practices, he brought up a practice by some parents from a book called Babywise. It literally broke my heart when he told me that someone he knows is following the teachings of that book, a book that instructs parents to treat babies as if they are mind-manipulating bastards, a book that goes against EVERYTHING modern science and research has told us NOT to do to a baby. It broke my heart not because the book exists, but rahter, that I kept on having an image in my head of a baby being treated the way the book instructs parents to treat him/her — how can any parent have the heart to do those things to an newborn infant!? It’s so distrubing on so many levels. And I wish there was something I can do for those poor babies.
People are blind when it comes to inaccurate information published in books — if it’s in print, it must be true. Or, is it?