Random Brain Dump

We spent two nights at my sister in-law’s on a short trip to LA after Christmas. On the last night, Suzanne was out late seeing an old friend. I was putting the girls to bed when they asked for a story as they often do. At home, sometime instead of reading books I would tell them stories– some true accounts and some I make up. So, I was looking around at the new surrounding for things to work into my story (I usually make things up as I go) when I saw a ceiling fan. That gave me an idea.

So I made up this story of a boy who woke up and discovered himself all sweaty on a sweltering summer day. He got ready for school, but grew increasingly uncomfortable in the hot morning. He kept complaining about the heat to his mother and didn’t want to go to school. His endless whining throughout breakfast gave her an idea. She gave him a shoe box and told him that it was magic! This magical thing in the box will instantly make him cool and comfortable. But there’s one condition: he cannot open it until he gets to class. Otherwise, the magic will not work. The boy got excited, grabbed the box and sprinted out the house. Along the way, he bragged about the magic box that will make him cool to every friend he encountered.

By the time he got to school the entire class knew about the magic box. As the boy sat down in class, anticipation built and all eyes were on him. The boy excitedly put the magic box on his desk, took a deep breath, surveyed the entire class and then calmly removed the cover. His eye bugged out, mouth gasped as he reached in the magic box with his hand and grabed its magical content: a paper fan which his mother made and inscribed with crayons “I love you, mom!” The boy raised the fan to show all his friends in pure delight. The collective excitement of the students exploded in a thunderous applause.

The end…

Katelyn and Allison were cracking up as I finished the story– just the feedback I was looking for. Allison then excitedly jumped out of her bed, made a fist with her hand, put it on the middle of her forehead and excitedly said to me: “Daddy, when you were telling the story I see everything in my head!”

Well… with a response like that, I guess that story was magical to me too.

I was so disgusted by the months long fight over the name “Little Saigon” in San Jose city council. If you’re not a Silicon Valley local, you may not be familiar with the “controversy” over naming a business district “Little Saigon” that took months to resolve and involved world class drama that included disruptive protests, recalling an elected official and even a hunger strike by a well-known fanatic. As far as I know the city hadn’t solved the issues of crimes, corruption, homelessness etc… So, it made you stop and go WTF?

Now there are signs of political backlash against Vietnamese candidates. Gee, that’s a surprise… It’s funny now that everybody is blaming everyone else for their dismal showing in recent election. A recent Vietnamese candidate who gathered a mere 760 votes, blamed the council woman for her humiliating showing, how dignified! The ridiculous drama wasn’t just embarrassing to witness but also undid years of political advances of the local Asian communities.

I know I’ll never vote for these folks in the future, let alone folks outside of the Asian community. What idiots!

McCain surely is chuckling seeing how democrats are showing how dysfunctional their party is.

The Clintons are sore now even after DNC resolves the Florida & Michigan delegates with a compromise. The states’ votes will count , well half a count to be exact. The Clintons still haven’t learned to play by the rules, what a shame…

Man, what the hell with Floridians? They are always messing elections up for the rest of the country. Must be the blinding sun… May be we should just give the entire state to non-democratic nations like Cuba or Venezuela or something, since these folks just can’t deal with voting! 🙂

Oh my… This guy became the world first  rocketman, flying with homemade jet wings strapped on his back. this is so freakingly cool. Here’s a video of his flight.

I spent this past winter replacing all our light bulbs with energy efficient ones and doing minor insulation on doors and windows– just part of a personal effort to be a good environmental citizen of our precious Earth.

Happy Earth Day everyone…

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Mozilla project. I still was with Netscape that faithful day: March 31, 1998. I still remember the big engineering gathering announcing the move. Open source by a commercial software company was pretty much unheard of at the time. The decision to open source the browser code was both controversial. It was a difficult time for Netscape– Microsoft IE was cannibalizing Navigator’s market share and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. By some account, once mighty Navigator’s market share had perilously fallen to 20% at that time– an astounding decline no matter how one looked at it.

Giving away many man-years of commercial code seemed illogical even to me at that time. But an essay by Eric Raymond called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” became very instrumental in the push toward open source. Raymond’s main point was that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I remember, the client team had to spend months cleaning up the code. In particular, there were a lot of comments that the public might deem inappropriate. Many people expected the open source community will immediate embrace the code and push it to success. The reality was different. The move was a little too late in saving the company which got bought by AOL later that fall. The move was to salvage the browser. But when the open source community did not become an immediate driving force, some key folks like Jamie Zawinski began to leave the project. Underscoring complexity of the project, it took another 4 years before Mozilla 1.0 saw the light of day.

Ten years later, IE still dominates 80% of the browser market. Given Mozilla’s current market share at 17-18%, Mozilla barely recovers the market share lost it its lifetime. It speaks volume to Microsoft dominance and proves the difficulty of turning the tide. It took some time, Mozilla is emerging as a powerful, innovative and influential project. It relentlessly puts out version of Firefox with one innotive feature after another; by contrast IE has become stagnant. I for one can’t wait to see what the next 10 years Mozilla will bring to the users.

Wow… this couple had their 17th child (and wanting more). Equally amazing, all children’s names start with letter J!

Evidence that they’re running out of names: one of the children is named “Jinger.” 🙂

Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created in the ’60’s to ensure means for independent broadcasts. Now, the Bush administration is trying to eliminate the federal subsidy to CPB. This funding normally is distributed between the public TV stations and NPR. But in a vote of 357-72 last week, the House overwhelmingly rejected President Bush’s proposal. Here’s the official recorded tally.

The funding for public broadcasting has been threatened by conservatives the last few years. Unfavorable coverage and views on the Bush administration on many programs broadcasted on PBS & NPR have a lot to do with that, no doubt.

As frequent readers of this blog knows, I’m a big fan of public broadcasting. Say what you will of Congress, they did at least something right last week.

A New Zealander couple, expecting a baby, had an ultrasound. The experience must’ve had a high impact for the couple because they quickly decided on the baby’s name: “4real”.

Authorities is blocking the name citing that numerals are not allowed. 🙂

“Hey, why is my baby driving the space shuttle?” 🙂