memoryloot

*EDIT 11/06/2007: More pictures from Peuv’s camera.

This weekend was our 5th Annual Halloween Costume Party held at Boston restaurant in Long Beach. This year’s theme was A Child’s Tale. I was the The Man with The Yellow Hat from the popular Curious George children book. I took the Best Male Costume award while my dear San took the Best Female Costume. She was the adorable Gingerbread Man. She hand-made her costume. This year’s party included the following characters:

• Ursula from the Little Mermaid (also hand-made)
• Little Red Riding Hood (partially hand-made)
• The surviving little pig
• Count Dracula (yes he was a folklore character)
• Tinkerbell from Peter Pan
• Jack & Jill
• Dorothy & Scarecrow of The Wizard of Oz
• Rumplestiltskin
• Waldo from Where’s Waldo books
• Snow White of the Seven Dwarves
• Cruela Devil from 101 Dalmations
• Jack of All Trades (Jack be Nimble, Jack and the Bean Stock, and Jack of Jack & Jill)

Thanks to Peuv for organizing and setting up another successful outing. Next year’s theme will be Heroes & Villians.

On another note, I was also honored last week for a Volunteer Recognition Award for my company. People were congratulating me. In a way I felt guilty because I didn’t think what I did was that great compared to what others do. I mean on my off time I’m helping the non-profit Asian Pacific Women’s Center redo their website and improve anything IT related for them. I actually enjoyed doing that kind of stuff and it was more fun than work to me. But I suppose I should just accept what they gave me and not be unappreciative. Man I’m still on this weird winning streak for the year.

So I was surfing around the 123MacMini site and found a reference relating to a software called Synergy. I was in the photo gallery for Mac Mini Setup and came across a person’s setup. Apparently there is a way to control multiple computers with multiple monitors using one set of keyboard and mouse. Further investigation yield an article from from LifeHacker describing on how to do this. You basically use the network connectivity between all your machines and setup a client-server with Synergy. You can also copy and paste clipboard items in between each system.

This is going to be perfect for work! I have a Dell Dimension and a Mac Mini at work with 2 huge monitors. One CRT 21” and one Apple cinema display. I’m using 2 keyboards and 2 mice. The PC is strictly for work while the mini is for personal and when I need to do Internet research. According to the people who replied on LifeHacker, it has improved the productivity to those who used this software. Exciting stuff to say the least. This will be the first thing I’ll do when I get in tomorrow. What a good start to a Monday morning.

*10/23/2007: Synergy worked like a charm. I am now using 1 keyboard and mouse across 2 machines. This is so cool!

So I find on the Internet that Apple recently released a video tour of the next Mac OSX operating system, Leopard. I have to tell ya. Seeing someone using some of those features makes me want that new operating system much sooner than the October 26th release date. Don’t know what it is. It’s like being brain-washed by the company. I can’t wait to use features like “Time-Machine” for back-ups and “Spaces” for desktop management (similar to many Linux GUI interface).

I found myself perusing their website for more of these videos and saw one for iLife. OMG, this was a good one. I was almost going to dismiss the entire iLife application to be something cool and may one day use it. But after watching this video, I wanted to jump on and begin managing my pictures better with iPhoto. The video showed the basics of using the application and got me up and running. So tonight I spent my time importing all my pictures into iPhoto. I have to say the software is very well thought out. I mean I imported an entire folder of albums and it knew that each folder was an album for a particular event and automatically created “Events” for each sets of folders. Amazing to say the least. I think I’m finally getting why Apple products are such fan favorites. For example, things like knowing when to turn on and off when you insert and remove your headphones on your iPod is awesome! They really thought about their products before they even begin building it. That attention to details and making everything so damn easy to use, really wins over demanding users like myself. It’s so hard to not want to use an Apple system now. I find myself missing things like Expose when I’m on the PC. Damn you Apple for brain-washing me!

If there was one book that you must read this year make sure it is Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I recently “read” this book on CD. This was a great listen! Kept me captivated from beginning to end. It basically went through the life of a guy who is hired by a private company which works really close to the government such as Bechtel and Halliburton.

This guy is sent out as an economist to third world countries to promote the modernization of their society. He would run estimates which favorably show how bringing modern technology will help a country prosper. The countries sign on and only a few get rich while the rest of the country is worse off than before. These countries end up being in debt to the US for billions and billions of dollars. So instead of paying the US back they return the favor in the form of giving US access to oil or other natural resources and sometimes UN votes. If a country refuses the deals from the US, they send what Perkins call “Jackals” in to do some convincing. If that doesn’t work, the US uses the military to pursuade them. That’s basically what happened in Iraq.

Conspiracy or not, this book opened my eyes on the impact of our selfish ways are leading to the eventually downfall of our empire. It is no wonder why so many people outside the US hates us so much. We should really be ashamed for our consuming ways and the fact that we ignore other countries who are suffering from a level of poverty that nobody here can imagine. Instead we hide behind the false pretenses of helping a country modernize but in reality is looking to take advantage of their natural resources. Our government starts wars now for the sake of terrorism and to free the people from terrorists. But in reality they have a different agenda. In exchange for the lives of soldiers, we are relentlessly trying to gain control of a country and use up its natural resources.

I’m typically neutral when it comes to politics but this book has opened up my eyes. It is no wonder why the author had mentioned that writing and publishing this book was a dangerous thing. He basically revealed what most conspiracy theorists could only imagine.

I’ve been following 2 shows that’s been on for about 3 months now on channel 18 in the LA area. This is the “Asian” channel where depending on time of day various asian programming is shown here. My folks catch the prime time during the week for their Chinese soap and I watch the Korean soaps from 9:50 – 11:00 slot. The first series is called Coffee Prince’s Flagship Store and second one, Time Between Dog and Wolf. Yes funny names but very entertaining series!

The Coffee Prince’s Flagship Store is your typical Korean romance / comedy movies. The story is about a girl trying to work her way up at a Cafe and ends up falling in love with her boss. But the twist was that she hides the fact that she’s a girl and continues to work as a boy. Funny moments when she is constantly avoiding getting caught. This would be something you would call, “cute”. Way too much cheese. It finally ended this week on Monday.

The second movie Time Between Dog and Wolf was a combination of action, thriller, and romance. Basically its your typical love triangle. Throw in a few mob bosses, manipulating government agents, and revenge and there you have the movie. The acting is superb and not cheesy at all. Very action packed. Kinda reminded me of The Departed. I highly recommend catching this. I found some videos here. This show should end by next week. I’ve already finished the series tonight on my own.

I have to say, I’ve been watching alot of Korean drama the past year or so. Very good stuff!

My free time has been completely consumed with 3 things this week.

1. Radiohead’s In Rainbows album
2. My new Mac Mini
3. My new Uninterruptible Power Supply

I did get some Halo 3 in the mix but I must digress. In Rainbows has been playing non-stop on my work computers and my iPod. The more I listen to this album, the more I love it. Yes that’s right, love it! I find myself looking forward to Jigsaw Falling Into Places everytime the album loops around. I still haven’t decided if this is top 3 of my RH albums. It’s so hard because the more you listen to it, the more you enjoy an album. This happened to Amnesiac and Kid A. I didn’t like those album at first but when I started to listen to them more and more, it grew on me. In my opinion In Rainbows is another masterpiece.

I used the hell out of my Mac Mini this week. It’s been on 5 days straight. I’ve been making it my own by installing various freeware and testing out Parallels. I got my laptop’s WinXP loaded on my my Mac Mini. Only thing left is to get an activation key from Microsoft. My iTunes is setup similar to my PC but I don’t think I’m going to reformat my iPod with the Mac. The PC has all the interesting historical data like the star ratings and the times I’ve played a song. It’s so stupid how little things like that makes such a good experience in using an iPod. Moving it over to the Mac is a cumbersome task. My entire library is on my Linux fileserver.

I also had to replace my UPS this weekend. I got it setup but was interested in getting it to shutdown my server in the event of a power failure. The model I got was an APC BACK UPS XS 900. It came with software for Macs and PCs. Unfortunately none for Linux. I found out that there is an open-source solution called apcupsd. It basically are scripts that allows you to do shutdowns for APC branded UPS. I also found that people have used my UPS with this software solution successfully. I installed the source code and compiled it. Everything is working fine, I think. I’m in the middle of running various tests. So far it passed the few early tests. I need to simulate a complete power failure and see if it shuts down my server. May not sound fun to you but gobs of fun for a geek like me.

It’s official! Just picked up my first Apple system. I got myself a Mac Mini with a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor, 1Gb of memory, and 120Gb hard drive.

Finally did it after a couple months of contemplating. I’ve been actively using a mini at work but it’s an old G4. Now I need to get Windows XP running on it.

What an October this will be in terms of guilty-pleasure consumption. There are 3 things I’m looking forward to buying this month.

1. Radiohead’s highly anticipated 7th album, In Rainbows (October 10th)


2. An Apple system with the new Leopard operating system (In October)


3. NBA 2K8 Xbox 360 game (October 2nd)

I’ve already pre-ordered the game and will be placing my order for the Radiohead’s disc box set soon ($80). I am still debating about adding another computer system. It’ll probably be a little after the initial release of Leopard just so I can read about other people’s experience. It’ll be my first OSX system.