Mildly Hurtful Sarcasm

Meaningless ranting, just like everybody else.

Monday, September 29, 2008

A crook and an idiot

McCain is against big government, big spending. Woo, why should we help the poor, why should we subsidise medical expenses of the uninsured. But yeah, even he himself admits when it comes to helping Wall Street to continue their business? No problem, big government's gonna spend as much as it is needed.

And Obama? He just cares about attacking the Republican whatever which chance he has. Greedy CEOs have been taking too much risks? Right on. Lowered purchasing power of ordinary families are contributing to the crisis? Now why didn't that happen to all other countries (and there are plenty of them) who has a even lower purchasing power than the US? Gum'on, he's blaming everybody now?

Here is the justification given: no government bailout = banks can't loan money to business who can't stock their inventory and thus lead to layoffs... What?? There are plenty of perfectly good banks around the world these businesses can borrow from. If not, they can borrow from me and the many others who'd rather that than having someone else take money from us through taxes.

A crook and an idiot are running for president, no wonder they all end their speeches with "God bless America".

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

My plants - blue potato bushes

It sucks living in my backyard.

I admit I don't take good care of my plants. It is alot of work to trim and dump yard waste. When my best buddy Victor stayed at my house for the weekend in 2000, all he could say was "the plants are mostly dead". In reality that was really a (lame) strategy, I let nature take its course. After a few years of neglect, the weak would have perished. What surived, probably didn't require much of attention. That included my two blue potato bushes.

My two blue potato bushes were planted two months after we've moved into our brand new house. At first there were other plants in that spot. But the neighbor reported a water leak from the base of the wooden fense and had contractors come in to tear down the whole thing, broke the sprinkler pipes and made a mess to rebuild it. We lost our privacy for weeks but after the fense were put back up, the super came in and planted these two bushes there as a good gesture (well, we asked him to).

Most blue potato bushes are kept as short trees. The super put ours in front of a trellis hoping it would climb. They didn't, they have minds of their own. Within a year they sprouted from two little shrubs into some monstrous growth, stretching left, right and upwards to two shadow casting giants. We bought gardening tapes to try to tie the branches together, of course that didn't work out.

It's time to trim it down, my mother had decided, so we went and got ourselves a 32" lopper from Home Hepot, the kind buglarers use to cut pad locks, you know. At first I thought she was just going to prune off the edges. She didn't, she carved them back down to the size when they were first planted - most of the leaves were gone at the end. When I got home from work and saw the carnage, I would have cried mama if it wasn't my mama who did it.

I thought they were just going to wither away, but surprisingly the trimming worked. The leaves grew back bigger and more dense. Summer came and they burgeoned with hundreds of little purple blossoms. So abundant I clipped off some banches and stuck them in a vase for in-door decoration. It's not that kind of plant however; the buds would normally fall off within a day after.

Every year from spring to late fall these two bushes would don themselves with these beautiful little flowers. The spring of 2006 was unseasonally rainy in the bay area. Add the California sun and you've got the almost perfect weather for vegetations. That April the hills at Fremont were as green as they have never been. With my dad bored out of his mind doing nothing much except watching Mexican futball on TV and pampering the plants in the backyard, my two bushes flourished.

The end of the same year saw a harsh winter. Starting the beginning of 2007 leaves fell off in mass, not just in my yard, that happened to many trees in the streets too. My dad tried to rescue my bushes by trimming them down more than usual; that didn't work. By the time my dad left my house in February they were just bare branches with no leaves at all. He thought we had killed them. I assured him I knew my plants, they are tough and they pull through anything. That was the last time my dad stayed at my house, he never returned to see my two bushes again.


No doubt they survived that winter. In fact by spring, their once bare branches were again covered lushly with green and purple dots, attracting many bees and other buzzing pollenators alike. Today, my two blue potato bushes thrive. When I water them while their branches wave in the wind I would think about how they have really been like family members living in the same house with me for all these years, all the good memories of me spending time doing yard work with my parents, and how after staying in this house for more than 9 years, I am finally starting to think of this place as my home.

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Volume 3: Villains

The producers of Heroes seem to have gone back to the basic formula from season 1: parallel plots for each character (with the comical line taken care of by Hiro), a sneak peek into the future, setting up the tone and mystery for the season.

It is also good too see that past characters such as Claire's mom finally make a difference in the development of events, and they don't any need introduction now.

What's missing is still the visual story telling I so loved from the first season. There was still too much verbal explanation done by Peter about the future. The Petrelli mom's dream was a good clue, but it probably wasn't significant to the story line.

Hiro had stopped talking in his baby voice, that seems to be a big production oversight.


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Monday, September 22, 2008

Emmy this year, not so good

It's the 60th Emmy primetime award show, shouldn't it be a bit more special? Instead it wasn't as good as previous years. It wasn't a disaster, it was still okay, but not as good as previous ones.

I don't know what they were thinking when they wrote the nothing bit at the beginning. Howie Mandel is a comedian, he should know better. It was boring and Seinfeld had used that already.

Then there is this microphone malfunction for Vanessa Willaims, you just can't embarrasse these prima donas.

And the rush at the end? The noticable fast foward of nomimation list, the speechless award presenters?

Ricky Gervais's act was kind of scary cause for a second I thought he was for real. I am glad they preserved Jimmy Kimmel's segment, it was funny. And I've never noticed it's called Outstanding Drama series award instead of Best Drama Series award.



All in all it's a little disappointing, cause most of the winning shows are on cable, and my cable doesn't have those channels.

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Monday, September 15, 2008

Smart & Final grand opening in Fremont

I wanted to check out the new Smart & Final location here at Fremont... and only until then when I figure the city planners of Pleasanton and Fremont must be real good buddies.

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Friday, September 12, 2008

Bush doctrine? What Bush doctrine?

I am not biased, I am an indifferent spectator on the side bench. But if I am biased, which I am not, I'd think I am more biased towards the McCain camp in this election.

That said, what a monstrous disaster for Sarah Palin and the McCain camp on that interview.



I the indifferent spectator knew about the questionable right of preemptive strike notion of the Bush doctrine. As a politician, she should have; as a governor, she better had; as a candidate running for high office, there's no excuse not to. Her campaign's relationship with the Bush's administration, its unpopular policies and the many catastrophic mistakes should have been one of the top subject matters for her to read up on. Cause sooner or later she'll have to debate that gray hair guy. Her aids could have coached her; if not, McCain's aids could have beaten her into shape. But what the?? It's not the lack of some specific piece of knowledge (a fairly common one in fact) that disqualifies her, it's her decision to not brush up on such topics (or her inability to absorb all of it?) that should send voters the other way.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

A day in the footsteps of Mr. Lee

Follow Mr. Lee on his adventure.

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Saturday, September 06, 2008

Google Chrome browser

Google wanted a piece of the cell phone pie, hence android. And you need a web browser for any mobile device nowadays, hence the Chrome browser.

It is advertised as lightweight, easy to install and fast. People I know who've tried agreed. I naturally was skeptical. Having in mind that this is still in beta, I navigated around with it a bit, and here are the thoughts.

Speed: Google has become such a popular page people naturally test any browser with google.com. It loads fast on Chrome but in reality, it loads fast on any browser. Objective comparison on a slow machine with Firefox3 (with no plug-ins) and Chrome shows that there are no difference. Personally I think there's a little bit of a super market taste test thing going on here. You try a little piece with in front of a suggestive voice, it's always good.

Look and feel: The design of the GUI is nothing but clever. It looks thin, I think that's where people get the lightweight feelings from. It does away with the status bar and menu bar, giving you more viewable space, that's a plus, but you can actually do similar things in Firefox, if you so desire. However, the fact that it is not skinnable alone will stop me from switching.

No Java?: Only JRE 6 with update 10 RC is supported. Many people in this world are stuck with older Java versions for their existing apps. Not Chrome's fault but this is a practical downside to using this browser. Besides, I expected to be able to click on the area and be brought to the corresponding Java download site, that didn't happen.



Status message: Both the connecting and downloading indicators show inconspicuously at the lower left corner, some how that's inexplicably appealing to me.


... and now comes my more than layman evaluation...

Incognito mode: If I were the product manager I won't promote this feature as shamelessly as it had been. The banner says: Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Which apparently gives the user a false sense of security because it goes on to explain: Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however. What does that mean? That means there will be traces of the flash videos you have viewed, etc. because cache created by third party browser add-ons will not be wiped clean. In fact, plenty of other browsers have made such attempt already, like browzar, torpark (which does a better job and routes your traffic through the onion router to hide traffic patterns), etc. Chrome is disappointingly un-novel and ineffective. The false advertisement makes it downright annoying.

Certificate management: Chrome got it right by using the system's certificate stores, making it easier for administrators to manage certificates. Alot of times certificates are used to identify a property (for example a laptop) or a host (for example a web server), it certainly makes sense for it to be a system feature. Besides, it doesn't make sense to get your trusted root certificates from the internet anyway.



Certificate warning: I am thoroughly disappointed with the lack of prominent invalid certificate warning, it adds to insecurity of internet transactions. It is simply unacceptable.


Accessibility: I wrote about how Firefox2 lacked the page scale feature and how Firefox3 corrected the problem. Chrome simply falls short in accessibility. While it does honor system wide font size settings and does scale pages according to font size, it is done on a per page basis and has to be done every time a page is viewed. There is no way to override page specified font size, unlike Firefox (see below).


Scam: Forget about how Chrome helps prevent scams like IE7's phishing alerts. Chrome itself is a scam. An update service is run without the user knowing, and it stays there even after the browser has been uninstalled.



Verdict: Chrome may be arguably lightweight, but it lacks too many essential features in accessibility, customization, etc. I don't know the plan but I suspect once those features are in place, it will be as heavy as everybody else and be just another uninteresting competing browser in the market.

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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Olympic torch relay in Hong Kong

This is kind of lame cause the Olympics has ended... but I was in Hong Kong while the torch stopped by. My buddy Tony took me to the mall on the relay route and I snapped these pictures with my cell phone camera.

It was too bright outside so I didn't really capture the entire motorcade but you can see the lead police truck. It was alot of police motorbikes.





The flame was later carried across the harbor by boat. You can see a helicopter and a sprinkly fireboat escort in the middle.



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