Nonsequittal Rumblings

Jeff just called me into his office, and asked me if I’ve heard or read about the story on…
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/06/21/japan.blood.reut/

What a sick story. And to see that it happened in Japan…

Don’t think that this kind of punishment is acceptable in Japan. It’s just that teachers like to escalate the disciplinary action, and often too much that it becomes abuse.

Of course, the other thing we can see in this story is how the victim did not ask for any more disciplanary action taken to the teacher either. And the school is willing to put this teacher back to work in a few days. I really don’t see exactly whose fault it is. Is it the fault of the system who don’t take these things seriously enough, or the fault of the students who don’t stand up for their rights?

After a long wait, and extensive Beta testing and a series of Release Candidates, Mozilla 1.7 is out.
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/

As of late, I like how mozilla has adopted BitTorrent with their releases. Finally, this practical P2P is gaining acceptance. I wish FireFox would adopt BT soon too. I’m sure that many FireFox users have adopted BT as well.

Otherwise… you know, I don’t hold my breath too much for Mozilla releases. I am now very fond of FireFox. There are just enough differences between the two to really bother me to use Mozilla as my main browser any more. (Most notable is the different keyboard shortcuts.) I still use Mozilla while I’m doing testing etc. Alas, no BT at work…

As a person who likes to explore the ways to improve my programming life, one of the things I do from time to time is to look for new text editors. In fact, I’ve noted one of those I’ve tried in this blog once before.
I’ve finally come up with the one I’m extremely happy with. The program is called SciTE. I can only compare it with the programs I’m familiar with… There are things I really like about this editor. It has pretty good windows interface, unlike gvim for windows. It still has the extensive syntax highlighting like vim or Ultraedit. It’s pretty configurable like gvim, but not as heavy. The configuration is based on text config files, so it might not be for weak at heart. It has the text folding feature like Macromedia Homesite. It can save the file in UTF-8 unicode. Basically, it has a lot of the features I was looking for, without sacrificing any gimmicks.
It’s not like it’s perfect either. For the time being, I will be using both this and Textpad side by side. Textpad still has some other features I haven’t figured out in SciTE, such as macro, and easy font configuration, with which I can even edit Japanese text files (including Unicode).
Now, with this, editing PHP on windows is easier than ever. SciTE, WinSCP, and PHP.net, that’s about all I need.

When I do a lot of things, I go through the phases. Like dinner for instance, I go through the noodles phase, rice & stir fry phase, spaghetti phase, etc. Well, on the technical side, I’m going through the RSS phase. It started with a discovery of the convenience RSS brings. Find the RSS feed I like, and just drop it in the aggregator, and I’m done. Neato!
Then came the re-build stage. When certain aggregated announcement site took a plunge recently, I decided, I will make my own script, so 1) the stuff I create with Froth-Bite will be on our own feed; 2) to take the data displayed at another web site (baka-updates.com), and create my own feed. Both of them were pretty simple task, and the effect is great. I love doing the simple programming that simplify the life.

If you’ve ran any version of Windows, you’ve seen the message “Please reboot your PC” plenty of times. It happens mostly when you install a new software, or when you change some core windows settings. Windows XP requires fewer reboots, but you still get those. (On the other hand, Unix type of environment, you can make just about any changes to your system, and it won’t require a reboot. About the only time you need those are when you upgrade the kernel, or when you upgrade your hardware.) Or, when you call a tech support for your PC related stuff, I’m sure plenty of people got the same answer/question, “have you tried to reboot your PC?”
This morning, I had a bit of time to kill, and I decided to boot up my cell phone’s games. Lo and behold, I get the error message, “The application could not run.” ?!?!?!?! Why?! Well, I thought maybe these games were some shareware, and I had to register them somehow? So, I called Emily, who has the same phone, and got it at virtually in the same time period…. “It’s working fine for me.” …weird.
4 hours later, it just hit me. Maybe I need to reboot my phone. So I did. I turned it off, then turned it back on. Then tried the game. Well, what do you know, it’s working again. So, indeed, the modern cell phones are toned down computers. Scary… One of these days, we’ll receive a message “Fatal Error – phone unoperational” even while we’re just talking on the phone. Or even worse, blue screen of death on the cell phone…

Especially today, I believe that everyone is cursed one way or another. Have you ever screamed in frustration, “this ALWAYS happens to me!”? Yup, that’s what I’m talking about. We all have stuff that always goes wrong, and the history repeats itself within our own lives. Lovely, huh?
So, today’s story… My car broke down yesterday. Gary’s work PC broken down today. And… yup, we both have had these problems numerous times within the 3 years I’ve worked here.
Whenever Gary, my fellow programmer at my work, gets a new PC, we always hope that it would survive longer than last time. Sometimes it works. Hell, once, he fried his PC in 3 weeks. If the next PC doesn’t outlast that one, he’s really got issues with bad karma with new PCs at work. This time around, it wasn’t as severe. He received this PC in February of 2003, so it lasted whooping 13 months. Now, either harddrive had a really bad crash, or the BIOS can’t recognize the harddrive, and the PC just won’t boot. Ironically, he just brought his 512MB compact flash card today, so he can make some back ups of important files on his harddrive. Yup, he was 1 day too late. So, his lesson of the day: make back ups more frequently.
My problem with cars… it runs just as bad as his luck with the work PCs. Since I started working at Cessna, I’ve had Dodge Omni, Ford Aspire, Ford Tempo, and Saturn SL1. Yup, that’s way too many cars in 3 years. They just die one way or the other. I mean… This time around, I bought a 3-year-old used Saturn from a local Saturn dealer. The car only had less than 8000 miles on it! I thought I finally got a dependable car. Yes, it has been running dependablly until the day before yesterday. Now the transmission problem… it just won’t engage. I revv it up to 4000RPM, and it’d be running at 25 MPH. Damn automatic transmission. Damn General Motors. I swear, the next car I buy will be Japanese made. And if my bad-car luck still lingers, then I might just give up, and never get a new car, or sell the car before the warrenty expires. Thank goodness, I have a warrenty with this car, it should cover this repair.
At least I’ve learned the lesson a while back: some form of insurance is a good idea. In my case, it’s not the actual auto insurance. It’s things like buying extended warrenty with this car, and having AAA membership. Man, if I were to tow this car from my house to my dealer at the regular cost, it would have costed… who knows. I wouldn’t be surprised to see bills of over $100. But with AAA, tows up to 5 miles is free, and after that, it’s $1.50 per mile. I just gave the tow truck driver $6, and called it good. That’s cheap compared to $100. Yup, I love having this kind of insurance. And I’ve used these free towing service, etc, that AAA offers so many times that it more than made up for the membership fees I’ve been paying.

I love idiots. Corporate idiots are the best of the breed. They ensure my job security. They think they’re smart. They believe they’re doing a lot of constructive thinking. When they make the programming request, they think they’re making clear, thought-through request. Not so! They don’t know what they’re talking about. They are only submerged in the view points that they know of. They’re just…. argh.

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I think trying to write these entries while I’m at work is just putting more and more negative thoughts all the time. I see too much negative side of the stuff. At least I have a safe haven now. When I go home, I know there is at least one person who is not idiotic. She understands me. She understands my needs. She understands my language. Without her, I wonder what my life would have been by now…

1) I woke up this morning just a bit later than I really should have. 2) I hate meetings thare are scheduled before 9:00 AM on Mondays.
So, those 2 things combined… I left home a little rushed this morning. I did come into work on time, so that wasn’t too big of a deal. (A bit more on this matter later.) Because I was in rush, I forgot something: I forgot to grab the cell phone when I left home. That means I couldn’t talk with Emily all morning. Well, things happens sometimes, and it’s not toooooo big of a deal. I did call her once this morning using my work phone. I kept it short, and it’s all fine and dandy.
Problem arose when I went home for lunch. I told Emily that I came home, so I could talk to her. Which is the truth and all. Well, actually, I had 2 more reasons, but those are just side effects – One, I wanted to check on the status of file transfers I initiated this morning; two, I wanted to start seeding files on bittorrent.
So what did I do? I actually didn’t really get talk to her until the end of the lunch hour – I called her as I was leaving home again. Ack! Shame on me! I really should have called her earlier! I’m sorry, Emily!

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Back to the meeting…
This guy called a meeting. He sent out the meeting details over e-mail. A standard practice. All fine and dandy… except he didn’t specify the meeting location. He just said “TBD.” To be decided, right? So I just waited all last week for the update on the info, so I’d know where this meeting would be.
The update never came. The reason I came in to work slightly early this morning is so I could check my e-mail to see if he sent the update at the last minute… Nope. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch… I woke up early, rushed to leave home, forgot my cell phone, and all that stuff… for nothing?! *sigh*

For the first time in almost 3 months, I finally was able to bring my daughter, Evan, to my apartment. The last time I had her was the weekend after Thanksgiving. Phew. It was good to be able to spend a whole weekend with her, instead of just spending half a day with her, which is what I did during January. Things just didn’t work out in December, and I got sick in February. Meh.
I took her to the Exploration Place on Saturday. Evan gave me the annual membership for it as Christmas gift this year. I was hoping it would be lots of fun… We just couldn’t find ourselves with the kind of fun we were expecting. I just don’t know what went wrong… Hrm.
The return trip to take Evan back to her mom was interesting… we hit a few hail storms while we were on the turnpike. Riiight… it had to happen today. Sure. But it wasn’t too bad this time. The last time we hit the hail storm, the car actually got a few hail damages. Not this time. The hail never got really big. No bid deal. It was just a bit loud sometimes. That’s all…
Good news: she loves Emily!

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On the fansub side of my life… Yay! We had a Feb 29 release! We only get to do this once every 4 years. So that actually felt pretty cool. The new tracker is working good for us. Yup, I like hosting our own tracker. I can make tweaks and stuff to my stats page, etc. Yup. I like tweaking things.

The IRC portion of mIRC-X network was shut down 3 days ago.
Now their BitTorrent tracker is not accepting any more new torrents.
Hrm… They sure are falling off of their glory fast.