Category: General

It looks like it’s that time again…time to replace my computer monitor. The 17" ViewSonic has served me well for the past 4 years or so, but has started doing the shrinking, squiggling picture thing which is generally cured by a good hand slap on the side of the monitor (Earth technology).

Well I’m not one to spend money without a good reason, so I began to Google about for additional information that might allow me to get some more use out of the monitor. Imagine my surprise when entering the terms "monitor replacement symptoms" returned a bunch of articles about menopause and hormonal replacement therapy! Huh, I suppose the hot flashes my monitor has been having might be considered its own sort of menopause, hyuk hyuk hyuk…

It’s about three days late, but a big happy birthday to Pauline, wherever she is… Last I heard, she was a pediatrician out in California. Pauline was the first friend I made in college, and unfortunately the first one I lost. It was mostly if not all my fault, I was young, stupid about women and people in general and totally screwed up. Still, she’ll always be special to me and since her birthday comes around Thanksgiving, it’s pretty easy to be thinking of her this time of the year.

On the plus side I learned a lot from the experience. One the most important things I learned though is there are some things that cannot be fixed.

Yesterday my lunch time walk took me to my favorite Borders. I had some coupons so I wanted to see if there was anything in that I wanted like a new installment of one of the way too many manga I’ve been reading. I didn’t find anything compelling so I headed upstairs to see if there were any interesting DVDs on the 3rd level.

Upon reaching the escalator to the DVD section, I was confronted and blocked by two youngish guys in dark suits. They informed me that Martha Stewart was doing a book signing, but they did not have room for any more people to join the event. I stupidly asked them if she was really up there even after just being told that she was, duh. One of them offered to get any DVD I wanted to buy, but since I was just browsing, I declined. Since I didn’t actually get to see Martha Stewart, I suppose that technically this isn’t a brush with fame, but heck, I just wanted to write something. Is that so wrong?

Often I feel a bit like Forest Gump. Like him, I seem to find myself in the vicinity of famous people or events with a greater frequency than average. Today on my lunch time walk, I happened to pass right by newscaster and journalist Carol Marin, who is best known in the Chicago area as the longtime anchor for NBC’s WMAQ TV station. She and co-anchor Ron Magers resigned in protest when then station management planned to add Jerry Springer as a regular commentator. This led to a station shake up and ratings tumbled that I don’t feel like they ever recovered from.

Anyway, Carol still looks pretty good! She was wearing a short skirt and these really nice boots. One thing that surprised me was how short she is. On TV she looked much taller. Her old co-anchor (who I’ve also passed on the street) isn’t much taller. As always, I kept quiet, looking just long enough to convey the message that I recognized her, but was not going to bug her. I figure that famous people have enough problems with fans, so when I encounter them like this, I don’t bother them. I guess you could say I’m a fan of Ms. Marin’s work and I guess of her too! <3

Yesterday I celebrated my 14th wedding anniversary by enjoying some great dim sum with my Mrs. in Chinatown. The day before that I had spent some time looking for a nice gift for her. I found a nice card and ultimately opted for a Borders gift card because I thought she might enjoy choosing something herself this year. The day was good.

This morning I woke up all bummed out because in all of fun of yesterday, she had not given me a card or present at all. As hard as I tried to suppress the emotion, I totally failed and things just blew up. I felt like Wilma Flintstone in one of those episodes where Fred has forgotten all about their anniversary in order to play golf or something. What a strange role reversal indeed.

In the end, we had lunch again today and I got some really cool books from Virgin, including Kaiju Big Battel! But I think I’m gonna be Wilma for a long time, but that’s okay I guess, since I like redheads too! XD

Now that Bush has nominated someone qualified for the Supreme Court, the real fight is on. Judge Alito has shown himself to be firmly on the right and a backer of government power over individual freedom. Obviously the Democrats will fight this, but I say don’t fight too hard and go ahead and confirm the guy. People never understand what freedom is until someone takes it away from them.

If Alito tips the court to the right and Roe v. Wade is reversed and other freedoms, such as the right to privacy and 1st Amendment rights are chipped away, then maybe the country will finally wake up and realize what kind of fools they keep electing. Conservative law makers will no longer be able to write and pass anti-abortion laws safe in the knowledge that the Supreme Court will  over turn them. The fight will finally be a real one, and if the polls are any indication, most Americans do not want restrictive anti-abortion laws. If the Democrats get their act together and run as the champions of freedom, they should clean up very nicely.

Today begins a new and probably short era. My wife, the lovely WillowBrow, has left her job and for now at least is playing the role of housewife while looking for new opportunities. I don’t think it will take her long to do this, but I kind of wonder how long it will be before the very different world of stay at home moms drives her nuts.

No offense to stay at home moms, but it really is a different world from all I’ve seen of it. We’ve talked about the differences on numerous occasions, but it is only now that it occurs to me that there’s no reason that those in the world of office work should completely understand those in the world of "house work" or vice versa. They’re different worlds with different rules and customs.

Okay, so now that I’ve written enough to be royally flamed, I’ll stop now!

Well actually, it was actor George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu on Star Trek, who revealed in an interview that he is gay. As far as I know, Mr. Sulu is straight. Now that said, let’s go off on a fun tangent!

In the original series episode, "Mirror Mirror", Captain Kirk and the landing party find themselves in an alternate universe due to a transporter malfunction. In this mirror universe, their counterparts are essentially barbaric opposites to our peace loving, noble crew. The mirror universe Sulu is particularly aggressive and in one scene leaves no doubt that he’d like to get busy with the very fine Lt. Uhura, right on the bridge…yow!

So, maybe there was more to this that meets the eye. If the mirror universe Sulu was aggressively straight, then maybe our Sulu actually is, wait for it….Nah, too easy, never mind. Besides, how would you explain Captain Kirk?

Anyhow, I must say that I am neither shocked nor surprised by this announcement because I never really thought about it. George Takei was the first Star Trek cast member I ever saw in person and one of my favorites. He’s just a really cool guy. And most recently I’ve greatly enjoyed the voice work he’s done in animated productions such as Mulan, Avatar: The Last Air Bender, and others. So I hope that his announcement won’t cause too much trouble for him. I can only imagine how painful it must have been to keep such a secret for so long. Human beings seem to have an inherent need to express themselves to each other. Denying that can only bring suffering to the soul.

While my honeymoon with Ubuntu Linux may be over, the love continues after nearly a month of use. Let me just say right up front that while Ubuntu is great on the desktop, this is still not the OS for your grandma! No offense to grandma or Ubuntu, but there are still a number of things that are easier to do in Windows or a Mac. The biggest problem is with multimedia. I still can’t get DVDs to play and setting up sound and screen resolution was more of a pain than it should have been. This isn’t a big problem for me because I actually like the challenge of solving these problems, but the average consumer won’t be so amused.

Still, I really really like Ubuntu! With the strength of Debian behind it, updates are a breeze. And heck, if I ever get some time maybe I can write some stuff that will address some of the shortcomings I mentioned above. I think though that one of the best things about Ubuntu for me is that when I’m using it, I feel like I’ve got control of my computer again! Just last night I was able to get the Cisco VPN client to work with some help from a poster in the German Ubuntu Forum. I don’t read German, but it was almost too easy and a bit ironic since I had been unable to get this to work using Knoppix a release or two ago. Knoppix is a popular German (though it is available in English too) Debian based distribution, probably best known for popularizing live CDs to demonstrate and test Linux. Knoppix is pretty good and got me hooked on Debian, but Ubuntu has really sealed the deal for me! Now if I can just get these pesky DVDs to play…

The new Celebrate! Chicago Christian Woman Magazine has just launched and my lovely wife (aka WillowBrow) is one of the cover ladies for the web site! She’s the Chinese woman in the black chongsam holding flowers in her hands. w00t! My babe’s a star!

Okay, maybe I’m overblowing that star stuff a bit, but seriously, this looks like a pretty good magazine for the modern Christian woman, or any woman who believes there is a spiritual dimension to life that must also be nurtured. The magazine market is pretty brutal though, so I hope this one will be around for a while.

When I started working in downtown Chicago my office just happened to be in the same building that serves as the corporate headquarters for Playboy Enterprises. The weird thing about all of this is that for the first few months I didn’t even realize this because I always used the building’s west entrance. It was only when I came in on the south side that I was greeted by a couple of� plaques and inside an enormous Playboy banner that left no doubt. It was a “Doh!” moment to say the least.

I was in that building for about a year, and during that time I may have seen models in the lobby maybe once, and Mr. Hefner never. So when I heard about the Triple Platinum autograph session at the Virgin Megastore featuring Hugh Hefner and 3 blonde bombshells (also promoting a reality show they star in on E!), I bought a copy of the November issue the day before and got in line for the signing yesterday.

There was quite a mix of people there, mostly young men with maybe a third women. The odd thing for me was the fact that I really hadn’t read the magazine regularly for at least 10 years. I was there mainly to meet Mr. Hefner and get his autograph. It was pretty cool, the guy’s in pretty good shape for 79. The models were nice too, but I have to admit that I don’t really go for blondes all that much, even though I play one in FFXI most of the time. All in all it was one of those pop culture events that was well worth the time. Here’s a photo of my bounty which may be worth something on eBay some day.

You’re soaking in it! This post is being written from Ubuntu Linux which I installed on a new hard drive last night. I’d been getting more and more fed up with my Windows XP setup. With my Windows setup I just could never be sure whether it was clean or not and wouldn’t crap out on me without a moment’s notice. So after the realization that most of what I do on my home PC doesn’t require Windows, I decided to give Ubuntu a try. This decision was aided in part by a really good sale on 80GB hard drives at Best Buy. And a few months earlier I had tried the Ubuntu Live CD on this box, so I knew it would work on this hardware. And I liked the aesthetic and overall Ubuntu philosophy of a Linux for human beings. The install was pretty straight forward. The only thing I had to wrestle with a little was the video setup for X, but I’ve done that before and the Ubuntu Wiki was incredibly helpful too.

I’m running the Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger preview right now, and  for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can use my computer with some confidence!

Sunday WillowBrow returned from visiting her family in Hong Kong and the people rejoiced. No really, we did indeed rejoice as I’m sure the kids are much happier now that mommy is back. I can fill in a bit, but am no substitute. My cooking is adequate at best and my empathy is probably best described as algorithmic. They are good algorithms, but algorithms nonetheless! And even with a house full of kids, I was a bit lonely without her.

From what she’s told me, she had a good time reuniting with family and friends, but being back in Hong Kong also brought back some bad memories too along with the usual issues that only one’s parents and family can dredge up. For one thing, my wife is bigger than the average Chinese woman. She’s not fat, but at a little under 5’7" (170.18 cm) she towers over most of the women in Hong Kong. And she has a beautiful golden complexion which is darker than most Chinese people. She really is quite a babe, but her features fall outside of what she tells me is the Chinese standard for beauty (pale skin, tiny body), never mind that she’s been turning heads in Hong Kong since she was a 12 year old schoolgirl. In Hong Kong there is a lot of pressure to comform, perhaps more than in other parts of China. So she feels very very self conscious about her appearance and says that one of the reasons she left Hong Kong was so that she could be her own person without being judged. She’s such a smart and beautiful person, but even with that, it seems that you can never escape the judgement of one’s parents. I wish they could see her the way that I do. Perhaps they do, deep inside, but just don’t express it very well.

Can’t we all just get along? I was reading about the new GTA Trilogy and the article had an ad for the new Quattro Power razor from Schick. Obviously this is just a response to the M3 powered razor from Gillette. This is vacuous marketing at its finest because there is no undisputed evidence that battery powered vibrating razors work any better than their nonvibrating versions. Indeed, it also isn’t clear that the Quattro’s 4 blades are any better than the M3’s 3 blades, which  by the way Gillette spent millions of dollars developing. Ironically, Schick’s parent company, Energizer Holdings Inc., requested and got an injunction against Gillette’s claims that the M3 power razor’s vibrating lifted whiskers up away from the face.

So while the Cold War is over, the battle for razor supremacy continues.

Yesterday I used a gift card I got for my birthday (thanks Virginia!) to buy a USB wireless network adapter for my TiVo. I did this so that I could play the music on my computer on the TiVo which can play through the home stereo system. This was easier said than done because the current version of the TiVo Desktop for Windows doesn’t integrate with iTunes for Windows at all. So after setup I could get to and play the MP3s in my library, but I couldn’t use the existing iTunes playlists. And the TiVo didn’t recognize the export iTunes playlist export formats, text or XML. Needless to say this was not the experience I was hoping for, so I started Googling for an answer.

What I found out was that TiVo does recognize WinAmp’s M3U playlist format. A little more digging revealed Phil’s iTunes Songlist To M3U Converter that converts the iTunes playlists exported in the text format into the M3U format. So I converted the playlists into playlistname.m3u files and placed them in the directory I setup for shared music in TiVo Desktop. Now the playlists show up in the TiVo menu available for use. Yay! Thanks Phil!

The only trouble I ran into was with songlists containing songs from albums with Asian characters (Chinese and Japanese in my case) in the names. These wouldn’t show up in the converted list or at least the TiVo couldn’t deal with them. So I had to give those albums names in Romaji ASCII characters and reconvert the lists, just a minor issue. And of course, right now TiVo cannot play anything I bought via the iTunes Music Store, but since most of my collection consists of MP3s, this isn’t a big issue yet and I expect this limitation to change in the future.