This is interesting. Thinks it yields more space but less seating, tho.

Page F30: Seoul to start experimenting with subway cars with seats in the middle instead of next to the window.

While I should be studying for the GRE, I keep thinking about how technology has come to be–there’s an ever battle between Microsoft and Google, also often used as a favorite topic for journalists to spin because after all, nothing attracts attention like a fight during a lunch break or a rare catfight between girls. I remember back in the 1990s, when you wanted to play PC games, you’d need to buy a PC and with Windows under it and play Freecell. So, that was cool till AOL came out, all of the sudden, people were buying PCs like crazy to be on AOL. Windows was underneath these, ofc. But now? you buy them to be on the Internet to show yourself on Facebook, to tweet away, or to Google for information.

Sometimes, I do wonder if there will be a completely new technology that will not require http because pretty much everything is transmitted through http right now. And if you wonder why http? it goes through a protocol called TCP/IP that allows every imaginable device to communicate to one another–from your PC to your pager and even a printer operates on it. Google has foreseen this and made a massive engineering to copy/store everything that’s ever existed on the web and make the information highly relevant and monetize them. Now, Google has recently announced they are going to develop a new kind of OS that will supposedly squeeze everything in between so that you can get on the web as soon as you press on the power button and then go explore on the web like a crazy monkey. Although there are people who spend their days fantasizing about Microsoft going down like the ship Titanic. I’m sorry to disappoint you but that’s not going to happen. Microsoft will remain to do business, largely in thanks to millions of users who play games like WoW, Starcraft, Quake, Counter-Strike, pokers and ofc, their beloved Microsoft Doc. My mom loves to play Freecell on Windows and that’s all it matters to her. It has no annoying pop-up ads, she said.

Once everything’s been said and done, I do have this imagination that the world will end up like the movie, A.I., where there’s not a trace of a human being left and that the only proof of us is to be found on countless hard drives from Google or maybe more like the Wall-E movie that people have long abandoned Earth because of the excessive mess they left and couldn’t be managed.

Actually, I think getting wiped by a gigantic asteroid that’s as big as the sun will more likely happen than I just describe above. Because that’s what happened to dinosaurs.

I just purchased a one way plane ticket to Seoul, Korea and that’s a little over a month from now when I will have stepped my foot over there for one more time.

Like one of my friends’ favorite maxims, “No replacement for displacement.” He’s a big fan of the LS series engine with those big V8 cylinders. At the beginning, I’d argue with him and reasoned that a 4 cylinders engine could keep up with the best of them while being efficient on fuel. He said that’s cool but when it comes down to raw power and torque, nothing can replace displacement. Yep. When you want a go in your car, you just tap your foot on the pedal and a V8 engine will gladly rev up for you without too much effort. Not quite so on a i4 engine, you’d have to bring the rpm up high, get VTEC to kick in to experience some substantial power output. To put it succinctly, he said the Corvette is the closest thing next to a Ferrari that is mass-produced and affordable. Well said, friend.

Well, as luck would have it, I will be returning to the country where I was born in but was “displaced” at the age of three. In the last few years, I have given a lot of thoughts about going back to the country especially after having discovered my family and learned that my sister is deaf too. As I thought about my life and what I’d like to do with it, I realize that I cannot, in my good conscience, leave both my sister (and her husband and my niece) and my brother behind and pretend they are a figment of my imagination. They did not have the same fortune of living in the land of opportunity, America, and get a college education. Sometimes, I wonder what really went through my biological father’s mind when he made a decision to give me up for adoption? He must have made an insight that had I stayed in Korea, I wouldn’t have had same opportunities that I was able to experience. It’d be nice to inquire him about that a bit more but it was hard to communicate with him since we had nothing in common except for the blood and Korea has such a manner that parents do not reveal much to their children.

Another desire to go back to my country is to learn a bit more of the culture and what is culture without language? The language, Hangul, as I have learned, is a very effective language and is the only language to have a national holiday based on. I’ve always got a thing for languages in American Sign Language and English and thought it’d be cool to learn another language and become fluent at it. I often have a dream that I was able to converse in any of four languages. I realize that the image I have of myself has significantly changed after I visited Korea for the first time in 2002. It validated my existence, my identity and saw where I was truly from. Even at this point in today’s society and time, we have progressed enough not to use race as discrimination but our identity still remain important. So, going back to Korea will enrich my identity at the extent of who I am. There’s no replacement for displacement.

from here.

1951

Today

Thought I’d write a short movie review on The Graduate, acted by the young Dustin Hoffman.

The movie was made in 1967 and at the time, Dustin Hoffman was 30 years old but he acted like he’s 21 years old in the movie. For some reason, it also reminds me of another movie, Risky Business, with Tom Cruise, basically thinking abt what you wanna do after you’re done with college and a degree in your hand. While watching this movie, I had to remind myself that this was made in 1967, so the society was quite different back then, and clearly, everyone’s enjoying a rich, materialistic life in Los Angeles and the population was booming. Benjamin Braddock, main character, had his little red roadster revving around.

I’m thinking how I’d like to define this movie and one thing that strikes me is twenty-something syndrome. It’s that gap when you finish college and you need to decide what you want to do, often a situation enlarged if you’re trying to find a job. Benjamin was having that kind of syndrome as he ponders himself to his own thoughts, and his parents are zealous of his past accomplishments and prompting him to go to a graduate school. I’d say that the whole strength of this movie comes from Dustin Hoffman with his acting and have us bought in the story of the movie, though it gets pretty wacky.

The whole movie starts to kick off as one wife of a wealthy family named Mrs. Robinson (beautifully acted by Anne Bancroft) seduces Benjamin, which we learn that he’s a virgin, and well, he spends that entire summer doing pretty much one thing, other than driving his roadster and making himself well-known at the hotel.

As things start to get old, Benjamin realizes he cannot just keep doing this forever till he is persuaded by his parents to take out the daughter of the same family. Not really interested to do that but he was told by Mrs. Robinson that he cannot take her own daughter out (that, I’m not sure why but she probably knew he’d be enamored with her daughter if they went out.) Rather than discouraged, the competitive spirit kicks in Ben’s and he takes her daughter out. Ofc, he falls in love with her but things gets quite ugly when the daughter learns that he’s slept with her mother, now the holder of this slang, cougar. Things fall apart and the daughter resorts to study at University of Berkeley away from Los Angeles.

Back in that twenty-something syndrome mode, Ben thinks about what he wants to do, then he realizes he wanted to marry her and will do whatever it takes including driving back and forth between Los Angeles and Berkeley. In the end, his red roadster finally breaks down, and Ben is willing to use his sprints and energy to prevent the daughter from marrying another guy.

That twenty-something syndrome thing he was having in the beginning? Nah, that’s gone and happily married to a beautiful dirty blonde wholesome girl from Los Angeles, and an experienced one.

-nathan

I’ve been subscribing to Netflix. At first, I was leery of their mail distribution system as I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to send/receive DVDs quickly through mail but lately, it seems that Netflix has been improving their mail distribution where I’m satisfied with their service and time. I’d like to share one tip to make sure that you’re getting your Netflix DVDs quickly enough.

Netflix has two enclosures: one as a mail and another as a DVD cover. On the DVD cover, it has a bar code on it. It’s this bar code that you need to make sure that it gets inserted into mail the correct way so that Netflix can scan the bar code computationally through their assembly line when it receives mail.

One time I didn’t insert the cover into the mail correctly (I had already sealed the mail before I could re-open it), my mail turnaround was much longer, because it got thrown into a bin where staff would have to open mail by hand and scan it in.

It’s easy to measure timing because Netflix will send you an email notification when it receives your DVDs.

One thing I notice about Netflix is that they really do have a large movie selection from new releases to foreign movies. They are efficient enough to cater to any type of movie audience while offering attractive monthly fees, starting with $8.95 plus streaming.

Happy watching!

*I found a nice article on Netflix’s mail distribution. They have 58 warehouses across the nation.

So, I turn 29 years old today. It’s turned into a tradition that I’d write something on my birthday. Here’s the last five.

It’s hard to believe that I’d start a blog way back in the fall of 2004. More than five years have passed since. I haven’t been blogging much lately but have written a few notes on my Facebook, as pretty much everyone is using the Internet and I’m becoming more cautious of what I’m writing here as people seem to be nitpicking pretty much over anything. But I think I shouldn’t be concerned about that and just write for myself. So, I hope to be more forthcoming this year. :)

I seem to be accomplishing most of the goals that I listed last year, which was rather simple and that I want to take life at its face value, and ofc, keep contributing to my work at Google, which has been both productive and fulfilling, kept me busy for much of the time. Last year, I pondered about why we’re here and our purpose, leading my belief to the philosophy of existentialism. To extend that thought, I also thought about physics and realized that everything’s a reflection of light. Without light, we simply can’t see anything including ourselves. So, we’re in this visible light spectrum and since light is made of some electromagnetic properties (photons and quanta) that actually bend toward gravity (mass), that creates time and space. We’re all moving along on this timeline, and thanks to technology like the Internet and computers as a tool, we’re able to record events and express our thoughts through talking, videotaping, or writing. With those recorded media, we’re able to rewind and remember our timelines. All made possible by light.

I’m actually doing a lot of snowboarding (gone to Lake Tahoe and Colorado) and my skill has been improving steadily that I can do some air jumps and rotations. The highlight of 2009 was traveling to five different countries—Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong—and managed to meet a few deaf people along the way. We really do exist all over the world, though not as many as other group identities.

I believe in the next few years, we’ll be more connected than ever, thanks to social networking like Facebook and Twitter. With enough smart motivated minds, we will make some serious progress that will be unprecedented by any time in the past. Equal rights in marriage, better/more education, tools, networking, and transparency will lead to a better management of the economy. No one is going to fix the economy as if he has a magic wand but I think with enough information and assistance, we’ll better able to manage our money and take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.

My goals for this year is pretty much the same except I’d like to be more focused on a few certain things, to make efforts at, and bring my dreams closer to reality. Much of that will be improving my coding skill and outputting more like blogging and taking pictures. Shedding light on my timeline.

Finally, to close this birthday post, someone very important is turning 55 in two days. That’d be Steve Jobs. He was struggling with his health last year and got a liver transplant, and he’s said he’s feeling better. Great. This is written with a Macbook Pro. And iPad is just gonna rock. You just wait and see.

Lately, I haven’t been doing any much running. I’m not sure why but it’s probably the weather and I’ve been snowboarding as well but I think 3+ hrs drive one way to Lake Tahoe is kinda starting to get to me now. It wasn’t really that bad at first because I was pretty excited about being able to ride. If you also fell off track with excising you should consider getting a waist trainer for women that will help you stay fit even when you are not working out. There’s nothing like going down roughly 40 mph downhill on your board. My skill has been improving steadily as I now can switch on both stances and have been doing some decent jumps, though not huge air as to risk myself and my back.

Maybe it’s the Winter Olympics that has gotten me conscious about my own body and I’m starting to see some flab around my tummy, so I’m thinking about getting back into shape more seriously and running too. Out of all workouts, I’ve always felt that running is a tough workout and gives me a good cardiovascular exercise despite how simple it looks. On that thought, I remember the 12k race I ran in the 98th Annual ING Bay to Breakers event. It was pretty fun and my time wasn’t too bad at 1:07 and placed 474 out of 2,070 males between 20 and 29. One thing I remember from that day was that I didn’t just run 12k alone. I had to ran abt 3 miles from a friend’s place where I was sleeping over the night before and another 3 miles to meet my friend after the race was over. So, I ran a total of 13 miles on that day. I felt like I was just running all over the city and despite that, my legs still felt great and felt like I can run some more. I was in a good shape, I supposed. So yeah, I think it’s time to get back into shape.

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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