Trust

“No treachery is worse than betrayal by a family member or friend.” Especially during the darkest and most challenging period in one’s life, a stab in the back in the most humiliating and davestating way possible will crush any tiny bit of morale, hope and the last breathe to fight for survival. Just when one thinks he’s finally pulling it off despite of all the hardship, he’s crippled once again with perhaps the worst kind of defeat possible.

Maybe there is no light at the end of the tunnel after all.

Thesis Draft Completed

After having dragged my MFA thesis for five fricking years, I finally completed the core writing part of the paper today. Even though it only took me a few hours to set up the structure and layout of the paper, the writing took a lot longer because too much has been going on in the past month and a half. It took me about a day to write the first 1/3 of the paper, the rest kept getting dragged on because I had to figure out what I needed to do with the project itself. And once the project requirements took shape, the rest was just a matter of putting ink to the paper (so to speak).

The most trouble I had with the paper was locating some of the resources I needed. Just the MLA format alone was hard to pin down because each website I Googled has a slightly different way of doing certain things. Jason said that’s because MLA changes its format slightly with every edition it publishes.

My tolerance for MLA is about to rip.

But regardless of the formats, I found a pretty awesome website that generates all the appropriate structures and in-text citings for you, provided you give them the right information — EasyBib (short for “easy bibliography” I think; there’s no fee for generating bibliographies; but not free for more advanced stuff). The next best thing is DianaHacker.com. It has a very complete documentation of how each type of structure should be used in different types of papers. But it is still confusing when I find things that easybib.com and dianahacker.com don’t agree on…

Now that the thesis is almost done, maybe I should try to book a ticket to Savannah just so that I can take care of the rest of the paperwork in person. The winter quarter ends on March 9th. I am cutting it pretty close having to revise the paper and the project, get everything signed by everyone on the thesis committee, get everything to the library for archival and make sure nothign slips through…

I can’t wait to taste the sweet joy of getting that Master of Fine Arts diploma and never have to hear my mom nag about it again… FOREVER!

I sent the paper for everyone on the thesis committee to go over. Now I can spend the weekend reviewing for my accounting exam for next Wednesday… I am so screwed in that class… Stupid accounting…

MLA Style Rant

Whoever came up with the MLA Style is an idiot. There are so many different ways of citing different sources that it requires a fricking handbook to write a paper. As if writing the paper is not enough labor, the institutions all buy into the worst form of cource citing and bibliography using the MLA Style. Shouldn’t source citing be more intuitive and uses common sense than having to master the MLA Style itself as an art form?

Argh! Stupid MLA Style…

Veggie Rant

The taste of meat products bothers me ever since “the incident“. I had to get a turkey sandwich the other day out in the wilderness of Valleyjo and experienced the disgust I had towards meat for the first time after having eaten only vegetarian food for the past few days. Last night I got a salad from Wendy’s with small chunks of chicken — the smell of chicken made me sick. I had to give the chicken pieces away to Wawa (who gladly accepted my generosity after Grace chopped them into finer pieces).

Then I realized how difficult it is to be a vegetarian in the United States. Every single fast food chain serves almost exclusively only meat products for main meals. Salads, in most cases, are simply side dishes. Not enough to fill someone like me (or Jason, for that matter). Wendy’s has some pretty mean salads, but all of them come with some kind of meat. And here’s what I don’t get… how come vegetables cost more than meat? I mean, seriously… A bowl of mixed greens cost about the same, or in most cases, more than meat! In fancy restaurants, I used to notice, some salads cost more than some of the entries! WTF? Doesn’t it cost more to raise all those warm-blooded living mammals? All the electricity it takes to keep them warm, the land to occupy them, the medicines to keep them from dying (not necessarily to make them feel better), the processes it takes to slaughter them, the care it takes to keep their corpses bacteria-free, the kind of storage it takes to keep them from rotting in transit… etc. I mean, com’on, the economy of mass market demand aside, it CAN’T cost that much more to grow the vegetables, maintain them, harvest them and keep them fresh. Can it? Or maybe it’s just the economy of supply and demand.

I digress.

Seeing that the fridge is stocked with mostly meat products at home, I had to do some veggie shopping spree. Thank god it was relatively easy to find vegetarian stuff in Chinese markets. And since there are lots of vegetarians from Taiwan (and that Taiwan makes delicious vegetarian products), it was relatively easy to get a cart load of veggie food. But I had to call Jason up to see what goes into a vegetarian Sushi since all I came up with were cucumber and avacado.

I made five rolls of Sushi today with the ingredians Jason suggested. I think I will experiment with some Chinese vegetarian stuffing I got tonight for the next batch.

Being a vegetarian in a mass meat-consuming market is tough. But knowing the alternatives (animal corpses), I am sticking to vegetables (maybe occassionally some seafood), thank you very much.

Accounting

I am taking an accounting class this quarter at UCSC. It made me realize one thing within the first 40 minutes of the class — ACCOUNTING SUCKS.

Jesus Christ… accounting is possibly the single most boring class I have ever taken in my life (maybe Algebra Trig in high school too… but that was because the teacher was boring; and I hated math). The instructor tried to make the class fun by staying lively and throwing a few lame jokes from time to time. And by repeating the same information over and over again (“Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity” ), some things actually stuck to my head… But my goodness, I thought I was going to die from mental dehydration sitting in that class (a full house)…. And the fact that I was still recovering from food poisoning probably didn’t help either.

We went through the entire exercise of using T-Accounts to figure out the proper way of “crediting” and “debiting” (and it’s not the same as debit/credit cards!), generate general journal entries, posting journal entries to general ledger, then do a trial balance, and finally generate the four financial statements (income statement, statement of retained earnings, balance sheet and finally statement of cash flow).

I don’t know how I am going to survive the next nine classes (at 4 hours each). But I have a feeling merely having enough sleep prior to the class isn’t going to do the trick… And oh, she has three fricking exams! Argh…

It All Started with A Bad Slice of Costco Pizza

It started with a couple of slices of bad pizza from Costco.

My body woke up way before it should have in the wee morning hours. It was restless about something. It could be because my brain was still solving programming hurdles I encountered at 4AM. Regardless of the reason, my fingers and toes kept twitching, and the twitching kept me conscious and awake.

About 20 minutes later, with my flushed face buried in the toilet, pieces of pepperoni, mushroom, some of which already in liquid form, were violently pouring out of my throat along with some of that tomato sauce. I thought, “Is this what morning sickness is like for pregnant mothers?” This sucks.

I flushed the toilet, rinsed my mouth and went for a big glass of water.

Water has never tasted so awful prior to this incident. Somehow my taste buds objected to the idea of forcing myself drink two big glassful of water. But I had to so that I could keep puking to get rid of whatever my stomach was so adamant about trying to get rid of. Moto told me a story of his horror about similar experience. And his words became ever so vivid in my head…

About 15 minutes later, diarrhea set in. And then 10 minutes after that, another horrible episode of puking, except this time my stomach was so upset with the food that it literally tried to throw itself up because it ran out of stuff to get rid of (the strangest feeling in the world — throwing up with an absolutely empty stomach).

I probably shouldn’t eat any more meat while my body is still emotional about food just in general.

My Issues with Volusion’s Import Feature

After spending a few days fiddling with Volusion’s cumbersome interface, I took Skip’s advice and exported the “products” csv file into Microsoft Excel on my Mac. Mass editing 700+ products with a dozen of fields for each product using Excel is way faster than Volusion’s cluttered interface.

I wanted to be sure that once I edited the products, I could upload the csv back to Volusion’s server properly (with special charaters, return characters, double quotes and other unknowns, I just had to be sure). So I started testing with just one product (having deleted all the other products in the spreadsheet). But I kept on getting the same error (the kind of error message that doesn’t explain anything):

An error has occurred.
Please try your request again, or contact customer service for
assistance. Thank you.
Advanced Error Details:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error ‘800a0005’

Invalid procedure call or argument: ‘Left’

D:\DOMAINS\32670\WWWROOT\ADMIN\../../../ecommerce/
_v_3_1/admin/incfiles/db_import.asp, line 1515

Volusion's meaningless error message

I kept trying by editing the csv file with variations of changes in the fields. But it kept on failing! So I emailed the Volusion tech support (they do have a very responsive email support team!). After three emails of standard answers (try this; try that; go watch the import/export tutorial… etc.) with absolutely no trouble-shooting questions (browser type, version, Excel version, how was the file saved, operating system type… etc), I decided they were not gong to be much help since all they were doing was spoon feeding me scripts from a “support manual” they must have internally.

I started to look for answers. It turns out that Volusion does have a not-so-obvious fact about csv files — Macs not welcomed. Here’s the fine print from their manual:

2) [The CSV] File must be generated on a PC, Macintosh is not supported. The reason is that Macintosh uses a different set of characters for line breaks than a PC.

OUCH! (And notice the bad grammar… run-on sentence.)

It turns out the Mac uses a different return character that their script doesn’t recognize. They should put that fine print up front at the actual import/export pages. Or maybe their tech support should have known to ask what OS I was using! Argh!

But no worries, Microsoft Excel for the Mac has a “save as” feature that allows the user to save csv files for Windows (hence creating the right return characters). Why can’t Volusion include this information on their site rather than saying “Macs not welcome. Period.”? That shows their tech support team is either ignorant or just plain lazy to find the right solutions for clients (or both).

Saving CSV files on Mac for Windows

Once that’s done, everything works pretty flawlessly.

From this, I think Volusion has a few more things they need to improve upon:

  • This kind of OS-specific failure is pretty obvious. A warning should be posted for Mac users on the import/export pages.
  • Tech supports should be more proactive in asking questions to pinpoint problems rather than to assume what the client must be using. If the first tech support had asked me what OS I was using, even if he was just a manual-reading robot, he’d have given me the answer in that first reply.
  • They need to provide more meaningful feedbacks on error messages. Many systems do. Why can’t they?
  • Make their online manuals more useful. It’s been less than useful a lot of times when I tried to find something.
  • Don’t be lazy. Find solutions for your clients, even if they are just Mac users.

UPDATE 12/20/2007: After a friendly email exchange with Volusion’s marketing specialist, Michelle Greer, it appears that Volusion has updated their documentation to include the fix I’ve provided here. All in all, I believe Volusion has been very proactive in listening to customer feedbacks and resolving their shortcomings in the years I’ve used them. Kudos to the Volusion team.