Thought I’d write something on the topic while I wait for pics to finish uploading to a Jungle drive.

I just got back from Los Angeles to celebrate a good friend’s 30th birthday. It’s hard to believe that 5 years have passed since we were first acquainted and we had our own registered websites before the explosion of the Internet. Another reason I wanted to go down was to visit Koreatown and it was also the site of Robert Francis Kennedy’s unfortunate assassination. I’m an admirer of him, who he was and what he’s done for America. I also felt more in common with him than his elder brother, Jack, who ofc was President. He wasn’t very tall (175 cm tall, same height as me) but had a competitive drive, logic, focus, and carried no bs. Obviously, those traits made him into who he was–an attorney general to JFK, helped avert a potential major conflict with Cuba and Soviet Union over the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in spite of his brother’s assassination, he became a senator for New York, and would have gone to win the presidential election, had he not been assassinated. He actually lasted 26 hours after being shot in the back of his head, which showed his resilience but the wound was too great to survive through.

So, I was curious about the establishment and what’s it looked like. I didn’t really see anything special around the area except for some signs/billboards in Korean, some old architecture, and people were just going about their business. I was just like, “Wow, so this was where the whole scene happened?” Then I drove on the Willshire St, leading to the campus of UCLA, as my next stop. Also passed by Beverly Hills, with all those luxury shops, which I could care less. I had expected the campus to be large, considering the admissions number it enrolls at 55,000. but the campus was kinda small. I have a sense that even my alma mater, RIT, may be bigger than UCLA campus. Nevertheless, I’m impressed by UCLA’s history especially in athletics since the school has most national championships in all sports total. Stanford is second, USC third, all in California. I believe the Sun (about 300 sunny days a year) and good quality of agriculture contributes greatly to that–$36.6 billions to the state’s GDP.

Then, I cruised a bit around the downtown before pushing on the pedal on a highway back to a friend’s place eastward. I learned a bit about the greater Los Angeles area and the fact that its total population is about 17,600,000 but find it funny that it doesn’t have a NFL team (the Raiders moved to Oakland, the Rams to St. Louis). There is a big mountain right up there with snowcaps, which serves as a nice backdrop against those palm trees, tons of cars braking red lights on slabs of concrete freeways, plethora of burger joints, houses, and that is how you would define Los Angeles.

Just feel like writing something here. I realize that writing is simply thinking through our fingers. And that’s great because I myself love to type. I suppose I don’t have much choice because I’m deaf so this is pretty much the only mode I could communicate with hearing people. Unless they know sign language, of course. One friend of mine gave some wise words. She thinks it is actually our advantage that we could write in these circumstances because that means less distractions for us especially and use constraints in an advantageous way. Back to typing, I should mention that I’ve remapped the cap-locks key as a backspace, so whenever I mis-type, I use my left pinkie to do a backspace on the caps-lock key, not the normal backspace key that’s at the top right above the enter key. It’s helped with my typing speed and much more comfortable to reach as well. I should say it’s probably the same reason why I insisted upon working for an employer like Google because pretty much everyone at the company knows how to type and loves to chat on their computers, which puts someone like myself on an even field. Gmail, Gtalk, and now Google Wave. Cool. Writing also feels pretty natural to me that I can compose words like a picture and try to make some points and make sense of my own thinking through my fingers.

When I was younger, one of my fave games was SimCity on SNES (the original one). I remember I would play the game obsessively. I think I got started on it after getting bored with playing Street Fighters. Not quite sure of how I first heard about the game but I was fascinated by this video game genre called stimulation gaming.

As I first started on the game, I didn’t quite get what the game was all about (I think I was 9 years old) but found out that it’s about building housing/commercial zones, transportations and ultimately, growing in population, which was the whole point of this game. Before I knew it, I was completely hooked. I played obsessively, all night on it and ofc, my mom couldn’t understand the addiction when she was yelling at me to eat dinner or do something. One thing, though, was that I would run out of money and would have to wait for annual year to get taxes so I could use the money to build more zones. Having realized this, I looked up in my old Nintendo Power magazines (I have the first 12 subscriptions) and sure enough, it contains a cheat code where I could get 20k every time I ran out of money. Delightfully, I built new zones, destroyed not-so-developed zones, put in all trains (which lessened car pollution), built airports, stadiums, and fetched more money till I reached the metropolis level at the 500k population, which was the highest level you could achieve at this SimCity game. I remember how simple the game was and how neat the panning/zooming was, even on a SNES platform.

Then, there was a PC revolution, so I got on that wave, and there was a new game called the SimTower.  When I first saw the cover on the box in the Best Buy store, I knew I gotta have it and practically begged my parents to buy it.  Again, I got hooked on the game and kept adding floors and rooms till I got a 5 stars rating and over 100 floors built. It was a beautiful game and the graphics was decent too. Then, another game, the Sims, came out and I tried it out but didn’t find it as appealing as the other two because it wasn’t that progressive or rewarding (folks were even unpredictable in the game too!) to me and it was more of goofing around than learning, I suppose.

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Liked how this pic turned out.

I learned something about how much data we are generating everyday. I’d say it’s a fair guess that anyone who has access to the Internet has done some searches on Google. If you need to eliminate your data storing problems, an experienced vendor of Salesforce.com will manage your hardware and software.

Examples of the use of “petabyte” to describe data sizes in different fields are:

* History: According to Kevin Kelly in The New York Times, “the entire [written] works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages” would amount to 50 petabytes of data.[1]
* Computer hardware: Teradata Database 12 has a capacity of 50 petabytes of compressed data.[2][3]
* Telecoms: AT&T has about 16 petabytes of data transferred through their networks each day.[4]
* Archives: The Internet Archive contains about 3 petabytes of data, and is growing at the rate of about 100 terabytes per month as of March, 2009.[5][6]
* Internet: Google processes about 20 petabytes of data per day.[7]
* Physics: The 4 experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid.[8]
* P2P networks: As of October 2009, Isohunt has about 9.76 petabytes of files contained in torrents indexed globally.[9]
* Games: World of Warcraft utilizes 1.3 petabytes of storage to maintain its game.[10]

Petabyte – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Now that my trip to five countries (Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.) is completed, I’ve had a plenty of time to mull and I read ‘Outliers’ book by Malcolm Gladwell since it got out in the paperback version. Outliers was fascinating because basically, in order for people to be as successful as those mentioned in the book, they needed to be born at the right place at the right time. That was his major premise of the book. I thought about that deeply, and well, I thought I’d share a story of mine…on how I got adopted.

When it comes to adopting a child, you can be sure that there are lots of procedure/factors involved to have a successful adoption. One tiny misstep in the procedure could make adoptions go awry. I’ll give an example. My parents needed to get their fingers pressed for the application. The agency was able to get my dad’s fingerprints but not so for my mom. They were having a hard time getting a clean copy from my mom’s. Why? because my mom had worked 15 years at the Capitol Records (EMI Manufacturing) factory in Jacksonville, IL on checking the quality of cassette tapes. She had to make sure that tapes were properly packaged before they get inserted into plastic boxes. All of those checking had pretty much smeared my mom’s fingers. She also had to quit because the job was giving her carpal tunnel syndrome, in which she got a surgery on her both wrists. After unsuccessful prints, my parents had to drive up to Chicago and stop by a FBI office to meet with a FBI-trained officer and get fingerprints. They did manage to get them but barely. So if that didn’t happen, I won’t be here typing this post.

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