Random Brain Dump

We dressed the girls in their traditional Chinese outfits and took them to the lunar New Year parade in downtown San Jose this past weekend. It was the girls’ first time watching a parade. Despite the cold & gray morning, the girls seemed to enjoy it. The lions & dragons came up right next to the girls! Katelyn & Allison even got to pet a few of them.

There were a lot of photographers there, some of them pro’s wielding very impressive equipment around. I definitely felt inadequate. 🙂 But here are some of my snapshots. Interestingly, I encountered more Nikon than Canon users…

Katelyn had a little party at The Little Gym to celebrate her 5^th birthday, this past weekend. The kids had a blast doing kiddie gymnastic activities. Katelyn definitely seemed to enjoy the extra attention. Even Allison, who’s normally a bit shy, participated in all activities whole-heartedly. Here some snapshots from the party.

I was happy celebrating Katelyn’s birthday. She’s making great strides this year- constantly surprises & impresses me with things she learns and does. She likes to sing, loves to color and teaches me the names of all sorts of dinosaurs (most of them I really didn’t even know)! She’s getting more inquisitive and can be thoughtful at times. She’s always very active and plays rough sometime. I see a bit of tomboy-ness in her. She can write words phonetically and do simple math. Not as crazy about Dora as last few years, but definitely still way into Disney princesses. Still likes pink but shuns Barbie because she knows I don’t like her getting into Barbie. Still a picky eater, but she’s at least trying new things; she even eats brocolie now. Her best friend is her cousin Malia, who she loves sleeping over with. She’s starting to help out little bit around the house- her biggest responsibilities being setting up the table at dinner time and feeding the fishes. Her face is usually the 1^st thing I see when I come home from work, she’d run to be the first to open the door for me.

But the best thing I saw in Katelyn this year is the little glimpses of her trying on the role a big sister: helping, encouraging and protecting Allison at certain times. I simply cannot be any prouder when I see that…

Unbelievable to me that Katelyn turned 5. At the same time, it seems forever that she’s part of our lives though. I can barely remember the bk era- before Katelyn. 🙂

Happy birthday kiddo…

I customize my Bash shell with colorful prompts. But while, in a normal xterm, my prompt is displayed nicely, it looks like crap within Emacs. All the escaped color attributes get displayed as garbage characters. I finally got off my lazy butt and spent sometime looking into fixing it.

It turns out to be pretty straightforward, basically the way I fix it is to turn on ANSI colors in the shell. I add the following to my .emacs file to turn it on as part of a hook to the shell mode.

; enable ANSI color in shell mode
(add-hook ‘shell-mode-hook ‘ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)

I was watching The Kid the other day with my girls. Bruce Willis plays a spin-meister whose job is damage control for ill-behaving famous figures. Well, it seems to me there’s a trend of damage control in real life of late…

First, rep. Mark Foley and Mel Gibson blamed alcoholism and entered rehab. Then Michael Richards, Mike Tyson & Isiah Washington both entered rehab for “psychological counseling” for whatever blame I don’t even understand. Now SF Mayor Gavin Newsom blames his affair on alcoholism and enters rehab. How convenient…

The first thing these guys do is announcing something like “I take full responsibility…” and then follow up with “I have a problem and I will seek help by checking myself into a rehab.” Makes you think if they’re all using the same image consultant. You can’t help but chuckle every time this same old tactic is employed by somebody famous.

These are desperate attempts to drum up public sympathy. I for one do not have any for these characters. They cannot be excused of their behavior just because they “acknowledge” they have a problem. There’s virtually no courage in this kind of “acknowledgment.” The majority of them are not even “owning” up to their problems– they got caught, for Pete’s sake! Plus, owning up to one’s behavior does not automatically means sympathy. They are adults, not kids…

Furthermore, using “going to get treatments” shifts the emphasis on the behavior from a character flaw issue. To a degree, these are attempts of distancing oneself from one’s own demons– a behavior is more treat-able than a character flaw. So ironically, this “taking responsibility and getting treatment” tactic actually removes the responsibility of the act itself in my opinion. Ultimately in the above cases, rehabs were used by these individuals to get a handle on their images and avoid the consequences.

Psychological counseling may help with behaviors, but how does it or anything else help with something inherent as a character flaw? Is that possible? Treatment is a way of getting help, not a convenient excuse for bad behaviors or character flaws!