Topic of the day: alcohol, so what?

This is another story related to "moral police" and Olympics, after the foul language incident I wrote about last week: the Canadian women hockey team beat US in the gold medal game yesterday. Afterwards, they came back to the ice to celebrate with champagne, beer and cigar. They were criticized for disrespect to their country and the Olympic spirit. Take it easy, people! Let's not blow things way out of proportion. The only issue I have with this incident is that Marie-Philip Poulin, who scored both goals for Canada, doesn't turn 19 -- legal drinking age in British Columbia -- until next month. And she was seen with beer in her hand. Well, the legal drinking age is 18 at Alberta, where the team trains. Maybe she's not aware of the higher age limit in B.C.

Music of the day: O mio babbino caro

I know playing opera tunes on violin sounds kinda cheesy. Well, Joshua Bell did it (on his Romance of the Violin album) too so it feels a bit more justified. I gotta admit I like it a lot when I heard it on the radio yesterday. I've got the sheet music and this will be the song I practice next!

Animal of the day: Komodo dragon

My son taught me something new today: Komodo dragon is the biggest and heaviest lizard in the world.

Sports highlights: Super 14 Rugby, Winter Olympics plus more

My weekend began with Super 14 Rugby on Friday night. Saturday morning, Man U vs Everton was on ESPN. Then Inter Milan vs Samdoria. NASCAR Nationwide Series (yes, I watched because of Danica) UFC (What a quick knockout) NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. And winter olympics (curling and hockey) of course!

Life is not bad after super bowl.

Topic of the day: foul language, so what?

Nowadays media is ruled by moral police. There are so many things you can't say on TV, as if TV is the only place people could hear foul language.

So it is a rarity to see a piece from mainstream media (Yahoo) that is brave enough to go against this. Here is the story: NBC showed Shaun White, who won a gold in Winter Olympic's halfpipe competition, chatting with his coach. And the conversation involved lots of foul language. The writer of that piece said that it's not wrong for White and his coach to have that conversation. It's NBC's fault for showing it. I couldn't agree more.

Tech of the day: Windows Server 2008 and WiFi

I played with a Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) laptop today. It is totally vanilla without any driver installed (not even Ethernet!) So I got my hands full. The first thing to do is, of course, google "windows server 2008 wifi driver" And I found 2 useful links:

1) Convert your Windows Server 2008 to a Workstation
It introduced to me a useful shareware Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition This tool was able to tell me which Wireless Controller I have. And I just googled and downloaded its driver for Vista 64 bit.

This link also showed me how to open up Server Manager (and then Device Manager) to pick the Network Controller device and install its driver from the previously downloaded file.

2) Windows Server 2008 and WIFI
This showed how to open Server Manager and "Add Features" to add the "Wireless LAN Service"

After that, viola, the familiar WiFi connection icon magically appears!

Topic of the day: teleprompter vs handprompter

Republican superstar Sarah Palin criticized President Obama for using teleprompter before. Now we all know why. She uses the more environment friendly handprompter instead! Please check out the picture in this link.

Topic of the day: Pac 12

Just read an article about the possibility of expanding the Pac 10 conference to 12 teams (i.e., Pac 12) The 2 ideal additions would be Utah and BYU. I guess it would be a good move for them as well as the stronger teams in Pac 10. They all could get more high quality opponents, at least for football. I would welcome our local TV showing Stanford vs. Utah and California vs. BYU!

Topic of the day: Boredom can kill you

Literally! It's not a joke, according to this study. Even if your life is full of mundane chores and you barely have any time left for yourself, there are still plenty of possibilities, for example, take an online class from your nearest college. Or it could be as simple as reading a book from a famous author you have never read. Don't let boredom kill you.

Topic of the day: Facebook and Hong Kong politics

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) is a Communist China leaning political party in Hong Kong. A Facebook group named 《我相信可以召集１００，０００ 個厭惡民建聯的人！》(which means I should be able to find 100000 people who dislike DAB) was established in July 2008 to condemn the questionable practices of this party. Facebook removed this group this morning, when the group has over 84k members and inching closer to the 100k goal.

The membership of this group has been growing steadily since it was established and it grew rapidly from 30k to 84k since last October because of the hi-speed rail controversy.

A lot of Hong Kong netizens are wondering why Facebook did this. It would be absurd if it was pressured by the party itself or even the Chinese government.

A new group has been formed as a replacement.

Stars of the day: 2010 NFL Pro bowler

A lot of fans complained that it is dumb to have pro bowl a week before the super bowl because the players from the super bowl teams won't be playing.

Well, I have no complaint. In fact, I think I'll enjoy this pro bowl a lot because both Vince Young and Tony Romo will be playing! They were both selected to replace other injured QBs.

Topic of the day: Dictionary = book banned in school

And it happens in (Southern) California! The Menifee Union School District has pulled the Merriam-Webster's 10th edition dictionary from school shelves because it includes the term "oral sex" and a parent complained about it. What's wrong with you SoCal folks?

五千年文明古國?

無意之中見到一篇質疑中國為五千年文明古國的文章，是對是錯，我對中史認識不足以判斷，不過讀讀也無壞。

Topic of the day: Personal finance advices

Normally I don't read these type of articles. There are tons of "Top 10 things you should avoid to save money" articles flying around. Usually the no.1 has to do with not buying coffee from American's favourite coffee shop and make your own at the office instead (I don't even drink coffee myself. I just own their stock)

And I have just read the worst ever this morning, a Top 6 this time. Two of them are just plain obvious: avoid withdrawing from ATM that would charge you a fee and cancel your credit card that charges you annual fee. Come on! Who doesn't know that? Another "advice" is not ordering soda when eating out with your family. Assuming a family of 4, that amounts to $624 per year and I quote:

If you invest $624 at the market average of 9% a year every year, you would have almost $32,000 at the end of 20 years.

If your investment returns 9% a year every year, why bother about the cost of soda?

Topic of the day: Earthquake at Haiti

It is sickening that someone try to blame the disaster on the local people! Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson claimed the Haitians had made a pact with the Devil to drive out the French who occupied the country in 1791 and thus cursed. The earthquake was the result of the curse. This article gives more details on what happened back then and why Robertson's claim actually made his Christian god looks bad.

This is actually the third pieces of negative news related to Christian I read this week. It has been reported that World Vision, a highly regarded Christian charitable organization, discriminates against non-Christian job applicants but it receives $250 million grant from US government and thus different from other religious entities like churches. Finally, Vatican criticized the blockbuster hit movie Avatar for promoting human's love of the nature. To be honest, it really doesn't make much sense. Even for those believe in the Christian God, shouldn't they also love the nature, which is supposedly their God's creation?

50後阻住60後上位

最近常常聽見香港人談論50後阻住80後上位，新一代沒有機會云云。其實這個不是甚麼新鮮事，在位的如果坐得太舒服，又怎肯離開座位？美國電視界剛剛就有一單：話說NBC的老牌深夜清談節目The Tonight Show，自92年起由50後棟篤笑藝人Jay Leno主持，04年他和NBC續約五年，NBC當時已安排Leno約滿後該節目由60後的Conan O'Brien接任。09年六月，該節目按協定換人。滿以為Leno會退休或轉到另一個電視台，原來NBC已安排他主持一個較早時段性質相近的節目，並於九月啟播。不過三個月後，謠傳公司將再安排他重掌The Tonight Show。

坦白講，誰人主持和我關係不大，皆因我甚少看該節目。雖然以前Leno主持時期我會偶爾一看，但從不少網民的評價看來，Conan實在做得不錯。上位的機會得而復失，我想很多人會替他不值。

新晉小提琴家Ann Marie Calhoun

這位可能是繼Vanessa Mae後另一位將會紅起來擁有亞裔血統的女小提琴家。她有份參與荷里活大製作福爾摩斯的配樂，亦是Yanni及Steve Vai樂隊的成員。

和另一位小提琴家Samvel Yervinyan比試：


為搖滾結他大師Steve Vai的live performance伴奏：

Book of the year: The Rescue Artist

To be more precise, it's my book of 2009. It was not the best book I read last year but I spent almost the whole year to finish it! The subject itself is very interesting: it's about the theft of the famous modern painting "The Scream" Still, to fill up a whole book, the author had to pull in a lot of related and not-quite-related stories. The ones about the personalities/anecdotes of the detective who recovered it could get boring some times. On the other hand, the ones about other famous paintings that have been stolen before were mostly interesting. For example, I learned about Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by its worker named Vincenzo. The theft itself was not as interesting as the scam related to it! Allegedly, an Argentinean con artist named Eduardo de Valfierno convinced Vincenzo to steal the Mona Lisa. According to Wikipedia, Valfierno commissioned the French art forger Yves Chaudron to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original! He actually made more money by doing this than selling the stolen piece. If you are interested in other famoust art theft, check out this link. Of course, you could also read this book :P

I just dug out my original post that I wrote when I bought the book a year ago. It's the 2nd and also the last book I bought from Stacey's. Can't believe this iconic bookstore has been closed for about a year! It will be missed.

Tech of the day: Windows 7 Upgrade

This is another rant about computer/technology (3 posts in a row!) My Toshiba Satellite P505 is qualified for a free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. (I would not have bought it without the free upgrade!) I went through the registration process online and finally received my Windows 7 Upgrade disc. So I thought everything I need for the upgrade would be contained in the disc. Wrong! The first step, which is running a program on the disc from within Vista, simply brought me to a web page, where I need to download an Upgrade Advisor from Microsoft as well as an Upgrade Assistant from Toshiba! After I ran the them in this order, the latter downloaded a further couple hundred MB of Toshiba drivers/software/patches required for upgrade! I guess anyone without a broadband connection should forget about upgrading. With my slow broadband, it took almost an hour to complete downloading. That was 11:30pm already. The next step was to uninstall a bunch of drivers/software that are incompatible with Windows 7 (these were the ones that were supposed to be replaced by the downloaded bits) This was again a lengthy step that took almost another hour. Fortunately the uninstallation was kinda smooth (uninstall of Toshiba HDD protection hung and I had to stop and restarted it. I googled and saw people mentioned much worse experience. For example, some users went through the uninstall but the subsequent reinstall failed and they were left with unusable laptops. After all, who would like to use a laptop without a working wireless driver?) Finally the actual upgrade started. And that's when I fell asleep. I woke up a few times to check on the progress and saw the prompt to enter license key at 2:30am. With Windows 7's bits in place, the upgrade assistant proceeded to re-install the downloaded stuff, which rebooted the computer a few times (and required me to enter my password) It's after 3am when everything was done.

Some critics argued that Windows 7 is more like a patch on top on Vista. I can't say I disagree but I do welcome the UI enhancement (in fact, I also liked the UI enhancements M$ made in Vista over XP)

Tech of the day: Mounting Windows shared drive on Ubuntu

As I mentioned in my previous post, Ubuntu 9.10 didn't work on my Toshiba Satellite P505 "out-of-the-box" but there are fixes available. I've tried it and it worked like a charm. All ACPI related functions, battery indicator, suspend, even the volume buttons, are working!

Even though I'm using too many Windows-only application too often, I do still boot into Ubuntu from time to time (for burning CDs, ripping DVD, for example) It will be useful to mount my shared drive from my Windows server. I thought my prior (2 year old) knowledge of using SMBFS/Samba would be applicable. Wrong! The latest technology for this is CIFS. And the synaptic package that contains CIFS is actually "smbfs"! (containing both SMBFS and CIFS) However, I still needed additional component (winbind) and followed these steps so that CIFS could resolve my Windows hostname. Again, it's not that hard to figure out but I still felt I have better use of my time.