Random Brain Dump

A rarity: we started this past Saturday morning earlier than usual. It was a nice brisk winter morning, wasn’t very cold. After a hearty breakfast at Hobee’s, we headed out to the Children’s Museum in downtown San Jose. It was nice being early birds for once, there wasn’t the usual crowd to fight through. A few minutes into it however, Suzanne began feeling ill. She felt bad enough that we had to abruptly pack up & leave for home.

Later that afternoon, the weather worsened but we braved the rain back to the museum with the mom resting at home. The girls had a blast with all the exhibits, especially with the ever-popular bubble display and face painting. They were well-behaved so I didn’t have troubles without their mommy’s help. We stayed until closing time and by this time, the rain got even heavier and made me regret for parking a bit further away to save a $5 parking fee.

As we got off 280 on Stevens Creek, we came across a man holding a “Homeless, Need Help” sign. I felt bad for the guy for having to brave the cold rain. He looked particularly pathetic and he reminded me of a Cowboy Junkies’ song called “Cause Cheap Is How I Feel”:

“And when a bum asks you for a quarter, you give a dollar. If he’s out tonight, he must be truly down.”

I pulled a few bucks out of my wallet, handed to the guy and told him to take care. As I pulled away, Katelyn was puzzled as to what I was doing and asked me who the guy was and why I gave him money. I explained to her that unlike us, he probably doesn’t have a place to come home to and that he’s probably hungry. I explained that I felt bad that he’s out in the rain and the cold, that I gave him the money so he can buy food for himself.

Through the rear-view mirror, I saw Katelyn was listening intently and occasionally sat up & looked back at the guy. She remained quiet for a while and was obviously thoughtful. As I turned into our neighborhood, she said quietly:

“Daddy, I think you’re very nice.”

I’m normally up with the kids in the morning, and so I usually get the task of getting the kids ready. When it comes to doing their hair, they usually tell me how to do their hair– be it just brushing, a simple pony tail or “funny hair” as Katelyn calls it (pig-tails). My aunt who takes care of the kids sometime braid their hair for school.

So as of late, Allison prefers her hair braided. This is a problem for me because Allison’s hair is very thin (as is everything else with her). Last but not least, braiding is always challenging for my big fat fingers. My attempts always end up looking a bit weird. 🙁

Yesterday morning, again Allison asked her hair to be braided. Uh oh… I tried to talk her out of it. “Are you sure Allison? Wouldn’t you like funny hair?” I asked, hoping for a nod. But no luck– she insisted braiding. So I finally pleaded to her: “sorry Allison, Daddy is not good at braiding your hair. I can’t do it.”

To that, Allison replied:

“But daddy, you try your best okay?”

Ouch, “use that one back at me won’t you” I thought. Can’t say no to that! So Allison patiently waited as my fat fingers going through her hair. When I was done, sure enough, her braid looked weird as pictured above! But Allison didn’t care, she happily trotted off to show off her braided hair to her sister and her mom.

Recognizing I need help, I google’d around for instructions. Here’s illustrated instructions I you’re braiding-challenged like me.

Earlier this year, the city of Tuttle in Oklahoma became the laughing stock when its city manager wrongly threatened a software engineer for “hacking.”

City manager Jerry Taylor, pictured here, claims to be a computer expert with “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.” This so-called expert logged onto the city web site one day and saw a boilerplate configuration page from Apache on CentOS (a Linux operating system) instead of the usual city website. He panicked & assumed it was hacked and fired a threatening email to CentOS:

“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else form accessing it??? Please remove your software immediately before i report it to government officials!!”

To which, the engineer from CentOS replied

“I feel sorry for your city…”

He followed up with helpful information which Taylor ignored and instead threatened to report the alleged hacking to the FBI . So emails flew back & forth. In the end, the developer figures out that it was the server had crashed and somebody reinstalled CentOS, hence the default test page. When everything was straightened out, Taylor finally apologized but still stubbornly pointed out that the whole situation could’ve been avoided had the developer informed him the problem in the beginning.

Unhappy with the apology and feeling unappreciated for help resolving a problem he didn’t even cause for free, the engineer posted the entire email exchange on the web. The exchange took on a viral effect. Pretty soon, people all over the world started blogging about it, articles were created on wikipedia, a deluge of phone calls made & emails sent to the city manager. In a short period of time, the city & its manager became the laughing stock on the web. Taylor had this to say about the incident, which didn’t exactly helped his cause:

“This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don’t have anything better to do. When I came in to work Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on his hands.”

Looser with a capital L.

Here’s a TV news report, a Wikipedia entry, as well as the entire email exchange is posted here. This is one of the funniest thing I read in a long time.

Classic! 🙂

Okay, these are a bit geeky, but can’t argue that they are anything but uncool:

• Video of demo of a digital drawing board @ MIT.
• Here’s cool video of the inner workings of a hard drive. Amazing machinery.
• 3D bump desktop

Time takes a look the state of education with the cover article called “How To Build a Student For the 21st Century“. The article points to a report coming from a bi-partisan commission which concluded that we need to advance education into the 21st century. Right now, our education system has a low aim: traditional reading & math competency. The article suggest these additional skills are necessary also:

1. Knowing more about the world
2. Thinking outside the box.
3. Becoming smarter about new sources of information.
4. Developing good people skills

One thing I didn’t see addressed here is arts which is woefully lacking in public school these days. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy further worsens the support for the arts since it only put emphasis on academic studies. As a parent of 2 preschool girls, education is one of the biggest & most challenging concern I have.

Update: here’s an entry with links to bloggers discussing this article…

KTEH started running a pledge drive this past week. On Saturday evening, the station aired a concert by Celtic Woman, a group of 5 lovely Irish women artists with amazing talents. Suzanne tuned in and an unexpected thing happened. We left the TV on and when we returned a bit later we discovered Allison sat quietly on the couch intently watching the concert– I’ve never seen her watching with such concentration. When I tried to change the channel, she made me turned it right back. She told us that she liked the music.

Her favorite seemed to be Máiréad who’s petite (perhaps that’s why Allison took a liking?) & plays a fiddle.

USC, ranked #2, only needed to win their last game of the season over UCLA to advance to the championship game. Everybody thought the Trojans’ offense was going to roll over UCLA like last year’s game! The stage for an upset was there. And the upset happened. I tuned in the 4th quarter and couldn’t believe the score. In the end, USC was ruined by The Bruins. ‘SC’s offense & their championship run were ultimately stopped by UCLA’s defense. I loved it, what a way to end the season!

There’s a new worldwide poll going on right now for voting the modern 7 wonders of the world from a list of 21 sites. So very cool. Go vote!

I have yet to visit any of the 21 candidate sites, that sucks! Sigh… 🙁

When it comes to computer, I’m really finicky about little things. I do a lot of tweaks to get my computer works just the way I like it. Take the keyboard for example, I do a lot of key remapping. IT guys always think my machine is busted when Ctrl-Alt Delete combo doesn’t bring up the Windows logon dialog (I swap Capslock & Ctrl keys). IT guys don’t like me.

We use Putty here a alot @ Yahoo to logon to BSD development machines and it bugs me that the right Alt key doesn’t work as a Meta key. This is due to the fact Putty is a British app and those funny Brits use a different keyboard layout that maps the key to AltGr. Enough users complained such that this little gripe became a wish list feature.

Rather than waiting for the feature, I found a simple workaround with a nifty little open-source app. called Auto Hot Key. It enables macros & key remapping.
In this case, the workaround is to simply map the right Alt key to the left Alt key with the following entry in the script:

RAlt::LAlt

Like most open source products, the GUI is lacking and requires editing scripts. Usability aside, it’s pretty powerful though and is worthwhile checking it out.

Last several years, I got into a habit of upgrading my computer during the holiday season. The holiday season seems timely for such thing, and good prices on parts are plentiful. I look forward to it each year. Last year was an exception, I didn’t do it for some reason I don’t remember.

With Windows Vista coming in February, I definitely will do it this time. Since my nephew Andre wanted a computer of his own, it’ll be a full system build instead of just an upgrade. With Intel’s new dual core chips being all the rage, I expect to see a significant boost in performance this year. I don’t expect having to spend a lot of time researching for parts, thanks to [H]ardOCP’s new 2006 holiday PC build guide. Good content and very timely for me. Check it out…