Sometimes, don’t you wish ctrl-z worked in real life?

Image Source: railean.net

I have actually thought of the exact same thing, though such conversation occurred in a car and no one was stranded on a pole.


Haunting memories of OS came back for a second…

This reminds me of a joke on Kyph. haha.

What I have become…

I used vim.

Damn it’s 1000bytes this year.

eBay ftw! But I heard they are getting sued by brand name companies since there are too many auctions of fake products. I guess eBay ftl then!

Reminded me of Wall-E which I also saw yesterday. It was awesome. I demand you go see it too!

Lemoir, Ray, Zuka, next time we go for orange meat…

Lastly, while I read the comics some people create them in real life.

-> Chess Coaster

-> Wet Riffs

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March 10: Boy dies from mimicking sand ninjas in Naruto. He was buried head first in a sandbox by his friend. When the boy started thrashing around, his friends thought he was just joking around. When they realized he was in danger, it was pretty much too late. Boy was given CPR and flown to the hospital where he died 2 days later.

March 22: A 2-year-old boy who died with a fractured skull may have been accidentally crushed by a morbidly obese relative. The child was dropped off by his mother to spend the day at his relative when the woman accidentally fell on him.

March 25: Woman was pronounced dead after being shot in the chest with a .22-caliber handgun. Her husband was trying to install a satellite but when he failed to punch a hole through the exterior wall, he resorted to shooting the wall.

Sources:
SeattlePi.com [Boy, 10, buried in sandbox game, dies]
Yahoo! News [ Obese relative may have crushed toddler]
KHQA [Man shoots wife while installing satellite TV system]

Image: deviantART

I hear about bankruptcy often but what really happens when someone, some company files for one? Do the company close? Do they keep publishing the magazines? What’s going to happen to my podcast?! Well apparently, the podcast keeps coming since a new one just showed up today. The 1UP website is still running and the Ziff Davis website mentions nothing of its sort. At least not from the main page. I’m not about to sniff through their site to find out about their bankruptcy.

This calls for a Wikipedia moment. The US bankruptcy code has various chapters. Chapter 11, the one which Ziff Davis filed for, permits “reorganization under the bankruptcy laws”. While business ceases to operate under chapter 7, chapter 11 is “usually an attempt to stay in business while a bankruptcy court supervises the reorganization of the company’s contractual and debt obligations”.

Ah ha! In other words, I still get my podcasts.

Sources:
EGM Live [March 3rd Podcast]
Wired Game|Life [Ziff Davis Files For Bankruptcy]
Wikipedia [Chapter 11, Title 11, United States Code]

Moving on with life.. Well I was suppose to get some ideas, inspiration from this little trip of mine. That didn’t exactly happen entirely. I’ve taken an interest in mobile applications since I used a couple of handy ones in HK but nothing particularly concrete had formed in my mind. So.. what to do now? I was chatting with a friend of mine that had gone to teach English in Japan. In our conversation, I jokingly mentioned that maybe I should teach in Japan as well. (Definitely not happening as I can’t teach to save my life.) But my friend told me of an organization, SWAP, here that helps young people go on ‘working holidays’. Basically, SWAP helps you get a working visa in your destination country so you can work to finance your vacation wherever you go. It sounds like an interesting idea in and would work nicely in my somewhat ‘plan-less’ life at the moment. I browsed around the website and there are a number of destinations to choose from, covering all continents. I was particularly interested in Japan and thank god it wasn’t tie to teaching! Other places includes Britian, Ireland, Australia, US.

Next day, I chatted with another friend who’s in HK and told her about wanting to have a working holiday. It turns out that she had previously gone to a talk about such schemes in HK. It was for New Zealand. I half-jokingly asked her to quit her job and we’ll go to New Zealand together. She seemed to be rather displeased with her current job and agreed. I think it’ll be a great experience and quite an adventure. I’ll research more about it before making a final decision. I also briefly mentioned it to my parents last night over dinner and they don’t seem to have much of a reaction over it. Maybe I didn’t sound very serious?

Some pictures to show the kids (and camera / camcorder holding parents) density at the mall:

Yesterday, I was reading one of Wired articles which reminded me of my earlier intention to subscribe to this magazine. I thought what the heck. I can’t dwell on US prices being cheaper than Canadian forever. So, last night I went ahead and ordered a year of Wired magazine through buysub.com, which should arrive in 6 weeks. Today, I recalled that I also wanted the National Geographic Traveler. I went on their website and clicked subscribe. I was redirected to another buysub.com page, customized for the selected magazine. I clicked on the “Canadian and International Subscription” link. Filled out the order form and submitted. I was expecting a confirmation page, but my form came back with an error. Well first when I was filling out the form, my city which contains 15 characters didn’t fit in the City field. I had to be abbreviations for it. Then, the following error was shown.

Living in Canada, I obviously use postal code which was clearly entered. I thought maybe the form was a bit stupid and require something to be in the zip code text field as well. So I entered some random numbers and submitted again. Surprise! I got another error.

I’ve even tried a real zip code and the same error persists. I gave up on subscribing to National Geographic Traveler.

Using sleep as my search keyword, I was hit with various websites stating what is sleep, what goes on during sleep time, and lists of sleeping disorders. While being informative, it didn’t answer the question I had – was my sleeping schedule unhealthy? Clicking into several more sites, I came across the National Sleep Foundation site from the sleep entry in wikipedia. In the article “How much sleep do we really need?”, there was the mention of a teenager not wanting to sleep early due to the natural effects of circadian rhythms. In the next article I read, “Sleep-Wake Cycle: Its Physiology and Impact on Health“, it explained that sleep-wake cycle is controlled by a combination of sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms is basically the 24hr cycle of changes that occurs within the human body, which is driven by the ‘biological clock’. The biological clock is essentially a group of neurons in the brain that is synchronized to external physical environment. The most prominent signal it responds to is light and darkness, which results in the typical sleep time during the night.

Further researching into circadian rhythm and its relation to my ‘different-from-norm’ sleep habit, I found a page on wikipedia about circadian rhythm sleep disorder, which lead me to delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS). DSPS is a disorder of sleep timing, where people tend to fall asleep at very late times and also have difficulties waking up in the morning. Now, does that not sound like me?! DSPS is explained in details in the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Revised – Diagnostic and Coding Manual, page 129-133, where its characteristics, prevalence, diagnosis are included. Well, I am unable to conclude whether my sleeping pattern is of any harm to my health. The articles have only mention that such disorder is a disturbance to those who has more of a 9-5 life. Is it bad when I have my full 7-9hours of sleep daily that’s recommended for adults? I intend to look further into it and see if I can find the means to sleeping and waking a bit earlier as well.

Later in the afternoon, while I was exercising my multitasking skills in making a website, watching animes and chatting with friends, my parents and sister returned from the Japanese festival, bringing me some traditional pastry snack. Festivals seem to be a significant part of Japanese culture, judging from Japanese animes which is the source of over 90% of my Japanese knowledge. School festivals, new years festivals with traditional clothings being worn, or festivals involving Japanese holidays are frequent in many animes I’ve seen over the years. They seem to be such a great opportunity to gather with friends and just hang out. Unfortunately, I don’t have any friends here that would be interested in going and since the schedule didn’t feature anything anime related, my interest in sleeping outweighed the interest in the festival.

As I continued to work on my MCPV website, which is the site for the Maple Story guild I was once a member of, I notice that my Motorola cellphone was running low on battery. Since I have two active SIM cards right now, I have taken out my old phone to make use of them both. However, my charger was nowhere to be found. In the process of recovering the charger, I came across some cellphone accessories that I have never touch before. They came as gifts when I made my phone purchase. Thinking back, whenever I buy a phone, the list of items included were always an important factor to consider but half the things never make it out of the plastic wraps containing them. Is it really a ‘Chinese thing’, as a friend often put it, to be so focused on the freebies or deals that we are given?

The title of this book is pretty much the gist of it. It is about a man who had a job that many can only dream of and a life-style that many desire but decided to leave that all behind in order do charity works in third world countries where his deeds are more meaningful. I won’t bother to summarize the book since that can be found at its website. I was drawn to this book by the word ‘Microsoft’ in its title. Just recently graduated from a Software Engineering degree, I have consider applying for a job in Microsoft. Although the book and my work interests have no apparent link, I was somehow curious about why the author had left one of my top choice of employers.

I had mix feelings about LMCW after I completed it. While it was fairly inspirational, I wasn’t able to feel that it was something I could have done realistically. Maybe it’s because my life interests and experiences had been different. As a fresh graduate, my top priority is most certainly to find myself a stable job that has the potential to grow into a good career. Who was I to help others when I wasn’t even able to support myself? However, it does put the tech field in another prospective for me. The money coming from a tech job is satisfying. Most products of work is helpful to others in the sense that it makes users’ life more convenient but not particularly adding any meaningful values. These weren’t news to me. What was most surprising from the book was the brainstorming of regionwide charity initiatives, where PR personnels only provided ideas that would benefit the company – teaching seniors about computers, sending middle-class students to private schools with computers. As Wood put it, it seems that “corporate social responsibility was only relevant if it helped the business in the long term.” Is this field really all about the business?

I don’t think it is the author’s intention to put down the job he had at Microsoft and praise the meaningfulness of his new found charity organization. It was merely to share his experiences in making a life-changing decision, to share the joy and happiness he had gained in helping children of the third world countries to obtain an education through his non-profit organization Room to Read. The lesson I have learn from this book was not to stop looking for a computer job and start working for something more ‘meaningful’. Instead, I was taught that there are moments in life when there are things you want to do that is a complete contrast from your ‘normal’ life. However, there is nothing wrong with taking that path and pursuing what you desire. At those moments, I’ll have to hide my risk averseness and bring out the determination. It sounds slightly cliche, but with determination, many things are possible.