The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Saturday, March 29, 2003
.:9:59:47 PM:.
Has the world gone crazy?
This came to me by e-mail:
"You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the American Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war!"
And yet there are so many things wrong with that statement...
.:9:01:13 PM:.
String Manipulators
So I'm programming away on my assignment. One of the questions was to print the ASCII values of characters (along with their hex, octal, and decimal). Simple enough, so I did the following:
for loop
cout << hex << index << oct << index << char(index) << endl;
and thought that was the end of the story. It wasn't though, the weird thing is that sometimes it printed out the characters and hex values and sometimes it didn't (it printed out all characters for each of the field). A little bit of searching and then I saw that for some reason you needed to put in the stream format state flag ios::showbase. so then it looks something like this:
cout.setf(setios::showbase)
for loop
cout << hex << index << oct << index << char(index) << endl;
Well duh... whoops :)
.:3:26:19 PM:.
What if world leaders were to chat...
hooo boy, if only I had thought of this d'oh!!!
Ahh well so from here somehow I got to this, this, this, AND this, oh and we can't forget this.
.:2:59:24 PM:.
Model Minority
Just recently I saw on PBS "Becoming American:The Chinese Experience" it was kind of interesting. I thought it was neat how they contrasted two chinese women, one who followed her family's wishes in going to medical school and becoming a success and one who dropped out and started to become a writer. Although we'd like to think (or at least I would) that Chinese and asian people are a part of the whole culture in fact it still isn't. With one of the girls something really did hit me when she said (to the effect of) 'your personal successes are the successes of your family, your failures are the failures of your family and the culture'. Its that pressure to succeed, and not only succeed but to excel and drive towards the top because, personally, I feel that my family is on the line. I have a personal responsibility to do well to do my family well. To repay the sacrifices my parents have put in to enable me to be where I am today. To some that might seem like a load of tripe, and there are those who think that 'yeah, true, but its still your choice' but it is my choice. I'm not some automaton blindly doing something but I understand what was put in and there's this obligation, no duty, to perform well and drive to the top. I think that's what defines my search. Not just to do well, but excel at anything, and everything because it sometimes feel like everything was given up just so that I could do that.
Friday, March 28, 2003
.:1:04:28 AM:.
Wing's is back with a vengeance
Up until last September my brother and I got our haircuts/styling/whatever done by this guy in Chinatown called Wing. Wing is a pretty nifty hair cutter, by nifty I mean awesome, and by awesome, I mean incredible. He could cut your hair faster than a hypochondriac reaching for their pocket thermometer. He was just that fast-fifteen minutes for a great hair cut. Suddenly, he closed his old shop leaving my bro and I sans Wing what were we to do?
We tried to go to different places but found out that not only were they more expensive (like twice... and we found out that was low), but also they were crazy-slow. Like forty-five minutes slow. In the same time, Wing would have made five or six times that amount of money. We wanted to check around but no one could come near Wing. Then just as suddenly as he had closed shop, Wing opened a new shop about four blocks north from where he had. Happily my bro and I went today to get it done. Just as I was getting settled in my chair I suddenly hear "done, let's go wash your hair" MADNESS! was all I could think. Wing just did it all in like under fifteen minutes! Crazy!! So now, I'm sporting a new "do", feeling happy that my speedy-gonzales hair cutter is back and the world can go back to normal... well as normal as it can get.
Monday, March 24, 2003
.:5:41:30 PM:.
Some more opinions about the war
This kind of surprised me a bit, I was expecting that I would find anti-war statements. I think I need to clarify a bit, I am not saying that Saddam Huessein is a good leader, he is in fact, a horrible leader who has tortured, attacked, suppressed, oppressed his own citizens. He has developped chemical weapons, and his country lives under a reign of fear. That being said, I came across two (related) links from 'Back to the Bible' on the war with Iraq written a month before this whole ordeal started.
.:4:30:28 PM:.
Firewall router ftp thing fixed
Finally!! Yes! Its fixed! I took a deep breath on Saturday and resetted my Linksys BEFR router/firewall to factory defaults. All of a sudden the internet connection died (oh no), contacts on Trillian were dropping faster than Nortel's stock price (well... not that fast, but fast enough!) and then silence...
After waiting a bit, I started fooling around with the router's setting. Its strange that the internet connection died because I had inserted the MAC address into Telus's OCA (Online Customer Administration) page. It should have worked... but it didn't. Then I cloned the MAC address of the router onto the router and a couple seconds later I was back on top. Now the only thing left was to figure out the ftp server. After a couple settings on the port forwarding section everything now works-yay! I now can get access to my files from school (woohoo!) Now if only I could get my bro's MSN Messenger to send/receive files...
.:12:43:55 AM:.
Beware the power of Plaque.... and Calculus(?)
I dislike going for any sort of dental checkup, it's not because of the dentists, in fact I feel sorry for the dentists who have to work on my teeth. You have my deepest apologies. It isn't my fault that my teeth are like a plaque magnets; I've cut down on the Oolong tea-switched to Japanese Green Tea, I don't drink coffee-I would never smoke (unless it were salmon:P ). Its not like I have horrible teeth, its just that if you were to say dental care was a race car sport, then no matter how fast my pit-crew would go I'd still go the same speed as a pinto.... carrying a grand piano.
They had to use this ultrasound-laser-guided-water thing to blast the tough little buggers off my teeth before they could even bring in the pick... ahh yes the pick... the evil device whereby you reef on the handle to break apart the calculus (what plaque turns into over time). And how do I know much more about plaque and calculus than I've ever known before? Well in the final process, during the polishing, this very kind and nice dental asssistant patiently explained to me all the details and horrors of plaque. I didn't know there was so much. For example, they (the dentists) were not really concerned about the plaque buildup on the front of the teeth because it naturally falls off like Michael Jackson on the "normal wagon". The stuff they're concerned about is the plaque build-up on the base of the tooth, this changes to this tough substance called calculus (my kind of word ;) which then causes your gum to receded but the only way your gum recedes is for your bones to shrink back-that ain't good. So over a period of like twenty minutes, Danielle patiently told me about plaque while working away and now I know more about plaque than I ever did before-Thanks Danielle, excuse me I have to go brush my teeth.
