Death to Bunnies

The new CARD Act has been in place since 2/22/2010, how do you like it so far? I haven’t notice anything yet but I will be sure to check my credit card statement this month. Hopefully mint.com can help me out with that. I was blown away by the fact that even though the card act can help out a lot of people, it ultimately made the credit card business worse for everybody. The credit card company used this new law and gave them a lot more ways to charge their customers. It’s not sad anymore, it’s becoming a hilarious joke.

I always had a question about the contract that the credit card company send you. In that pamphlet, in those tiny text, you see a sentence that sounds like this, “credit card company can change any of it’s contract with their customer anytime they want as long as they send out a letter fifteen days before the changes happens.” These were the real cash cows for the credit card companies but now the CARD Act totally changed it or should I say they are being replaced.

The credit card company may charge for paper statement, inactive card, card membership, and god knows how many other tricks they have in their sleeves. So basically we solved a long lasting issue and it breeds a whole new can of new issues. I got love this free market stuff.

Anyway, to better prepare for for the future, I recommend these articles from Billshrink and Consumerist.

Maybe I should just do what my friend did, cancel all the credit card and be done with it.

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As I was destroying the good old English language on my blog, I have never worried that people might found out who I am and start laugh out loud at me. Like my friend Nick, the creator of Dread and Alive, Hitless, FlashTV and maybe other great project; he basically told me that he liked my link on Facebook, but he had no idea what I was talking about. There, enough proof that I have been destroying this language but I really don’t care because I don’t know most of the vistors that came to this site and the people I do know knows I am a crappy writer. I got nothing to lose. But am I really anonymous on the internet?

Maybe, when it was 10 years ago. My life is so tangled up in social networking sites that you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquares, Linkedin, and even World of Warcraft related websites. I kind of established my identity on the internet through my profile picture. The red round laughing head which I proudly taken from one of the artist from deviantART.com. So people can easily find me, send direct message at me, or follow me. It is really easy to pin point my location through Twitter, and Foursquares before and now I’ve joined BUZZ. Yeah, my read round laughing head popping up on google map. Just like the pleaserobme.com shows, people can use twitter or buzz to track one’s whereabouts, use yelp and foursquares to study that person’s shopping and entertainment habbit. It really isn’t hard to compile a list of gold mine. All people have to do is go in and take the prizes. How cool is that?

This isn’t new, according to consumerist.com, buglers was using answering machine and funeral notices as early as 1977 to rob people. The invention of twitter, foursquares, and other social networking sites just made buglers’ job a lot more easier. Well, I am all for it because it is also a lot harder for them to get away with their loots as geo location enable devices are becoming the norm. Like these good laptop thieft prevention tools.

Last week, Google’s Eric Schmidt defended the Buzz privacy issue at launch with “I think it was our fault that we did not communicate that fact very well, but the important thing is that no really bad stuff happens in the sense that nobody’s personal information was disclosed.”, full article at The Register. People were furious about over his statement but personally, I think he’s right. Think about it, gmail is free, even if your email address had been published by google on the buzz, just get a new one. People shouldn’t be really mad at a free product. In the end, it’s people’s own responsibility to  safeguard their own information. If you don’t want to leak anything out on the web, don’t put it on the web. That’s how it is. So for the next couple of days, you’ll be seeing me checking in and out of gun shop quite often. Muhahahahahaha

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Little Acrons by The White Strips

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It is so true that problem is easier if it is broken apart and taken care separately. Just like what we do in WOW, slice and dice.

I have one personality issue that is not working so well with me when I want to solve a problem; whenever I want to do something, it takes me forever to get started because I want all the pieces filled in before I start.

It really sucks because it took me a very long time to get started on any project. For example, I’ve been wanting to setup a home dev environment since June last year and I still have been able to do it. I’ve read all the tutorials, I’ve learned all the tricks and I’ve memorized all the warnings. I however doesn’t have a good desktop PC and I haven’t had the time to shop for parts and put them together yet. And it can’t be just any parts, it has to be cheap and good parts that I like. So I’ve been spending a lot of time doing the hardware research since last June but the way the hardware industry works is that it advances every few months. So I’ve been doing research over and over because the price is never low enough for me to actually start the purchases.

But this song, it really enlightened me. It helped me to see things in a different perspective. I find that I don’t need to wait to get started. I can start with a bumpy beginning and try to patch it up. I can always start from scratch again if I don’t like this patching process. Maybe, just maybe, I can get a lot more things done. Like the song, I break my habit and get things moving.

I decided to write this post is another example of my new perspective in life. I’ve been really slacking off since I started this blog because I wanted it to be thoughtful, witty, and unique. So I do a lot of researches before I write anything and I find pictures, videos to try to enrich my content. Today, I decided no matter what happens, I am going to write an entry per day. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be anything but a piece of writing.

So this is what I am going to do.

I was enlightened by a movie as well. I’ve finally finished A Serious Man 2 weeks ago. It was hard to swallow this movie and the main character also faces many problems that concentrated into one massive fucked up catastrophe. If he only know about Little Acorns and break the problem into pieces, he could be happy too.

In the end, this world is a survive for the fittest. Little problem is easy pray. Ain’t that a bitch.

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Avatar has been the center of everything in the past couple of months. People praise it. Pope dispute it. Why is it getting so many attentions?

I think it is safe to say that James Cameron is difinitely a factor. The whole thing about he has been planning this movie his whole life. He basically has been lobbying the whole film industry to build the right atmosphere for his movie. He went to Sony to persuade them to change the brand new motion camera so he can use the gigantic thing on the go. And of course, the best blockbuster of all time can’t be ignored either. Then the movie got the Fox’s financial backing. Finally slap the staggering price tag to make this film on top of this whole pile of stuff. It means it’s going to be great.

For me, the most amazing part of the movie is the planet Pandora. It’s probably the first virtual world that has been created for any movie. You can argue that there are a lot of movies take place in the other planets but none of them has created a new world based on the movie. The stunning night scene of Pandora captures my eye from the beginning to the end. The Eywa’s ability to absorb the dead people’s spirit so they may live on and the amazing bio-networking concepts are all fascinating! The Na’vi language is my second favorite part of the movies. It seems like it is becoming the third fully developed fictional language after Klingon and Quenya. This is major because with language, you can establish a new civilization and that’s what Avatar has done.

The thing that brings up all the hypes is how the characters are generated. Basically you have an actor with these cameras attached to him/her while they are performing. It captures their emotions and facial expression so in the film, it doesn’t feel awkward when you see these Na’vi people when they laugh, cry, angry, or sad. It don’t look fake or artificial because it’s the real emotions that has been transfered onto the alien body.

Other than the three things I mentioned above, the movie is just an mediocre film. It’s up-lifting, it talks about protecting the environment, it talks about love and race. In summary, the usual Hollywood plot: One bad guy turned good and ultimately saved the very thing he/she was set out to destroy. There’s betrayal, there’s redemption, and there’s forgiveness. And part of it was even cheesy because Neytiri forgive Jake so easily. And the whole movies reminds me of a lot of other movies: Battle for Terra, Dance with the Wolfs. The floating mountains, the home tree, the flying mount, all resembles the elements from another fictional universe. Even the ceremony to acquire a flying mount is similar to another TV series on Syfy channel which I happen to forgot the name of it. So I think the film without the three reason I listed above is just another mediocre movie.

Now, it is not all that bad. For me, Avatar is a stepping stone to make the best film of all time, the World of Warcraft movie! For WOW community, what this film did was to opened up a door for this future project. Now that production and publishing companies know a whole virtual world can be build for a movie and people will loved it. The Warcraft universe has long to be a feature rich, background rich, character rich world. There has been at least nine books, a Wikipedia dedicated to everything that is World of Warcraft. There has been four games that related to this universe and the story is everywhere in these games. The fire breathing brood mother Onyxia, the cunning Nefarious, the betrayer Illidan, and the ultimate foe Arthas. The land of Azeroth has had it’s fair share of history. From the old gods to the Titans; the corruption of Sargeras to the fallen of the dragonflights. The magnificent Nagrand, the chilling, Northerend.

Now that spider 4 is dead. Sam can finally focus on WOW movie and I’m excited.

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I was working on a new bug today. From the title you should know it is an IE6 related bug. And yes, it is. The problem is with the select tag and the tooltip JavaScript. It seems that IE6 will not let anything show above the selection input box. In IE6’s eye, selection box is the king, the absolute to layer element. I’m m not sure if his is correct or not, but it seems that way to me.

So anyway, I was researching this issue on the web and I found out that there are a lot of people that had similar issue. And some of them offered solutions, but they don’t actually help me with my bug. However, they do offer some ideas for me to try out.

Since the issue was a jquery based tooltip skinned by CSS so the most obvious thing for me to try was to add the z-index to the tooltip pop-up. The attempt failed and I believe it was because the select tags are on a higher heritage than the div of the pop-up. So my next logical action is to make sure that they are on the same level and assign a position property for the select Tate’s div. That didn’t work. Finally, I tried to add a shell division around the select division so that it is one level below the pop-up div. And no change there either.

All three methods did not break the code in other browsers so my gut tells me they are not in correct.

My test resullts confirmed my hypothesis that in IE6, select is considered above all layers.

So how can I fix the bug? Very simple, the tooltip pops up above the linked text but below the selection box. What I did was move the linked text above the selection box. Not ideal, but it is the best solution I can come up now. Until somebody can help me out with it I guess.

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I have been working on this bug for the past two days but seriously, Microsoft should just abandon their browser department and do something else that they are good at. IE6 was pre-mature, limited CSS support, slow, security issues, but it was wide spread everywhere; IE7 supports more CSS but it is still a pile of crap; IE8, Microsoft went from one extreme to the other. While IE8 supports a lot more stuff and Whatever effect that I was able to do in FF/GC/Safari can be reproduced in it, it is way strict on the code than anything I’ve ever seen.

People probably seen this error message before but it is the first time for me and I basically been dreaming about it for the past couple of days. On the MSDN site, I’ve read their documentation and I quote “This problem occurs because a child container HTML element contains script that tries to modify the parent container element of the child container. The script tries to modify the parent container element by using either the innerHTML method or the appendChild method.” Well, I do have such function available but since the page was generated dynamically, it should happen on all pages, but this is not the case. This only happened on one of them. So I keep dig deeper and deeper and finally found my solution – I have an open tag that wasn’t closed. Something like this:

<p>
Content
I am missing a close tag here.


Yep, that’s the only issue. It took me awhile to find this article so I figure it’ll be a good idea to rewrite another article so that It will be indexed on the internet and who know who will benefit from this. So here it is.

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So it is that time of the year ago, the stores are expecting their earning report to show black inks. And I am expecting good sale this because there are a lot of good deals coming out when I search the internet. One thing for sure, I will be buying a new 32 inch LCD TV. It will cost me about 300 dollar plus tax. I think the price can’t get any lower than that. However, I am waiting to see if there will be any significant discounts on desktop computers since I have been shopping around for quite a while now.

However, this might only work for me because I am not in a hurry in getting a new computer and I am really picky about the specs. My general advice to people who’s shopping for any electronic or computer is buy it when you need it, not because of the price because price will always drop as new things come out.

That being said, I think the below links will help a lot of people for their black friday shopping need. Enjoy.

Black Friday Ultimate Shopping List by Gizmodo:

List 1

List 2

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I think health care providers (doctors, nurse, bosses at insurance companies) are getting paid too much. I am not against paying well to the doctors and nurse but not every fucking single one of them.

Why do doctors and nurses become doctors and nurses? Not because they want to help people. It is because the money. I mean how low do you want to go to get money based on this shit? I think people wants to become a doctor or nurse is because they really want to help patients and want to make a difference in the world. Money should never ever occur on their mind. Sure they need to survive as well but the high pay should come from their skills, not because of it’s the industry standard. If a person only wants to make money, get a career somewhere other than the health care.

Same words goes to the lawyers. Only become one because helping people is the goal.

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My intention to working on such project as “I Don’t Know Nothing” was to try to figure out the relationship among nothingness, zero, and everything. As my research goes on, I found out that human has but fraction of whatever knowledge lies in the nothingness. One thing for sure, many religion fears the concept of zero, nothingness, or some call it the void.

The idea came from a quote that I read when I surfing the net. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”  – Socrates. The nothing interests me and made me think so this popup on my mind,” How can I show nothing on a video.” As Wikipedia describes, nothingness describes the absence of anything at all. So using this logic, nothingness is actual everything else other than anything. This became the foundation of my project.

It is because of the nature of the topic, there is no way for me to cover the whole subject in one project so I could a piece of it and went with it. I want to show something that can trigger the reaction of what is this? There is nothing there but in reality, a lot of thing is happening and that missing piece is the nothingness. I show nothingness by showing everything and then create that void for people to see nothingness. Sound is also presented in it, but it is something, yet it is nothing. It is there but it doesn’t represent anything, it doesn’t mean anything yet it does have meaning.

So here it is. My I Don’t Know Nothing.

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Real life has taken a toll on me so I’ve been lazy updating the blog. Anyway, a new blog.

I was trying to find a book to read while doing the can. I dug up my information art from when I was in the college. I scanned it and I’ve decided to read it all over again. It’s amazing how many how art and sciences are intertwined through out the history of mankind.

The project that I am in interested most from that short of period of time was call, “The Web Stalker” by I/O/D. It’s an web browser that not only let you view the website, it take the website apart and let you see the site under it’s skin. The project/program was written in 1997 and some of it’s function can be mimic by today’s advanced html/css/ajax programming. However, it was a remarkable piece of art. Back then, websites are dull, not visually appealing. They are much better in 2009 but it has become harder and harder to see a site by just it’s skeleton structure. People are hiding their assets, site projects, and tests on their websites that is not accessible by the general public. I personally have never tried this software before so I don’t know if this can display all these hidden elements but from what I’ve seen from the demo images, it is absolutely cool to see a website from a machine’s perspective.

Web Stalker truly is a stalker.

From reading all these cool projects. I think I am ready to get back into the game and start to work on my abandon projects.  First one up is the greenhouse emulator. Full journal and past research notes coming soon.

/bow

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