Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

Gee.. I can’t believe that I haven’t checked my own site for more than a month!! I am even surprised myself… But with all the stuff happened lately, including the incident that caused me to pull down Yuna’s Village, I feel a bit reluctant to post personal thoughts on the wide open Internet. If I just gossip about other stuff happening around the world, I would lose a sense of being a real blogger….

I finally took a look at both of my sites today and saw Kris’s and Liz’s comments. I miss blogging and I miss my audiences/friends too. I had so much fun blogging my ass off before. I really don’t want to give it all up even though I was advised not to talk too much on the Internet to avoid conflicts. Believe it or not, I wrote quite a lot of posts in the past month, but never posted them online. It’s a real tough dilemma to deal with – freedom of speech vs. peace of life. There are always consequences when a person opens up and starts talking out loud. The death of Yuna’s Village is one example.

So….I don’t know… Let my sites die in exchange of peace or keep opening my big mouth and cause troubles… Freedom of speech is always relevant. I haven’t figured it out yet…

A proposal submitted a while ago from the porn industry to request for a designated .xxx domain name which could be free of use by any adult sites got rejected yesterday.

According to the Wired News:

Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography websites, the internet’s key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the internet….The decision from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers reverses its preliminary approval last June to create a “.xxx” domain name for voluntary use by the adult entertainment industry.

I am actually not too happy about this decision. If they want to keep those porn sites under control, the best way to do it is to house them together… So instead of me writing filtering rules to ban sites containing words like “hot babe” “toys 4 you” and other thousands of babe toy combo words , I can simply write one line of code and ban everything with .xxx domain. How easy is that!

However, if 2 out of 5 web surfers visit adult sites, it doesn’t really matter what they call it. whether it’s .com, .xxx, .orgs or .multiorgs, one way or another, they will be surfed.

I was looking all over the place for my car key this morning. Well, finally I found it in my car ignition. GREAT! This was the second time I have done a stupid thing like that… Last time, I let my rental running all night in a hotel parking lot in Texas. The security guard found it in the morning, shut the engine off and returned my key to the front desk.

I have lost and refound so many stuff that if I put them together, it may take a whole closet space. A credit card was refound in my washier after I canceled it; $10, $5, and countless $1 bills in all sorts of pockets and mugs; a lost sweater that had been sitting in my trunck for the whole winter… Hmm.. I wonder if I ever have a dog, what’s gonna happen… ?

Thanks to Paco for the picture..

Oh, did I mention that I lost my beloved video iPod on an airplane? It really hurts after just owning it for a couple of months. No, I didn’t misplaced it like that dog owner. I am still hoping that one day I would get a phone call from the Dallas Airport’s Lost and Found after I left them with dozen messages…. Bummer…..

There is much debate going on whether our cellphone’s radio frequency (RF) energy will damage our health or not. Nobody can really draw a definite scientific conclusion (or maybe we just don’t know about it so they can keep selling these phones to us). But there is one fact that might get your attention: For a phone to pass FCC certification, the phone’s max SAR level (specific absorbed RF level by the body) is 1.6W/kg in US and 2W/kg in Europe.

Ok, that at least tells you something about the danger of RF energy. Otherwise, why do they go through such an extend to cap a limit and test every single phone?

Anyway, here are the 10 models that carry the highest SAR:

And here are the 10 lowest.

I have a Sanyo PM-8200 with 1.01 SAR. I guess I am more than half way to be brain dead if 1.6 is the max.

To find out whether your model does any harm to you, click on the following manufacturer:

Audiovox/UTStarcom

Other Manufacturers

Thanks to RJ for the Links

If you think Mac is a better safer operating system, check out the following story and let me know if you still think the same way…

On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer’s security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications.
Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck.
Within hours of going live, the “rm-my-mac” competition was over. The challenger posted this message on his Web site: “This sucks. 6 hours later this poor little Mac was owned and this page got defaced”.
The hacker that won the challenge, who asked ZDNet Australia to identify him only as “gwerdna”, said he gained root control of the Mac in less than 30 minutes.
“It probably took about 20 or 30 minutes to get root on the box. Initially I tried looking around the box for certain mis-configurations and other obvious things but then I decided to use some unpublished exploits — of which there are a lot for Mac OS X,” gwerdna told ZDNet Australia .

We all got the illusions that Mac is safer than PC ‘cause nobody is hacking it. Exactly! Nobody was hacking it until Apple made such a star of itself and invited all the attentions. Now, as Mac starts to gain shares in household computing market, the little Mac might be a whole lot worse than PC systems.

The other reason why I dropped nearly $1700 beginning of this year on a Mac system was because of its relatively stable performance. At least that’s what I heard, read and believed. Turns out, my little Mac froze every now and then and there is no damn “Control –Alt –Delete” to bring up the task manager to kill the hung process …Incompatibility is another issue. Although there are many Mac compatible software out there, there are tons don’t make for Mac users. For instance, none of the software I use for work supports Mac. I have to have a PC to get into my company’s intranet to check emails on Lotus Notes, book flights and do my expenses. Uggrrrr… I am glad I didn’t buy the iMac, instead, I spent half of my money on the ass kicking cinema display, which will very likely be hooked to a PC some day.

I was real excited to learn that my 4.5 hour Denver to Boston flight which departed at 4:21pm last Sunday had meal service. “Finally.. “ I said to myself, “I am on a long enough flight to get something to eat.” Turns out, it wasn’t exactly what I hoped for. I was given a box of junk food from cockie, crackers to chips after paying 5 bucks!

“Do you have any sandwich type of food?” It was dinner time on a Sunday and all I wanted was a damn turkey sandwich… The flight attendant smiled and directed me to the “in-flight” meal page on the Hemisphere magazine. After scanning through bunch of big words like “Newman’s Own Organic raisins” and “Fino Selections Gouda cheese slice”, I gave up the thoughts of biting a turkey sandwich.

Once upon a time in those good old days, we had hot pasta, salad and desert even in the economy class. Now I have to dream about a lousy turkey sandwich on a cross country flight during the dinner time.

United isn’t the only one selling so-called meals now on long haul flights. Pretty much all major airlines have started this trend. But to keep the cost down, they try to stick with easy packaged food such as my lousy “minimeal” box.

I won’t be surprised that a year from now, I will have to pay for the soda and the pretzel too. Till this day, I still can’t figure out why the airlines keep going bankrupted while the airports are busy as hell… Obviously, we are still flying. So where did the money go?

Ok, this might come a bit of shocking. Just a few months ago, I was SO TRILLED to work with the brightest bloggers I admire and joined b5media blogging network. Now, I don’t even have time or energy to read the posts from my favorite blog sites such as Darren’s Problogger.net.

A few of my loyal readers/friends also emailed me and hinted me that my posts don’t read the same anymore.

Well, they ARE NOT the same anymore. When I am spread thin across a few blog sites instead of just one while working on a full time job, things have to be different. A blogger has to have fun to be able to run a successful site with quality posts … I haven’t had that kind of fun lately. Everyday, I am reminding myself, “Christine, you gotta blog now. It’s time to write a few more posts. Christine, you are behind on schedule…”

So, in order to get my blogging spirit back, I have to cut down on the quantity. And in no means that I would give up my beloved Yuna’s Village. So here I am, just wrote my second resignation letter in 2006… It was a painful one because I really love this network and the people in it… I wish b5 the best of luck. Finally, I will have time to keep up with all Liz’s and Darren’s posts again.. Hew…

The slavery is finally over! After pulling 12 - 17 hours a day on the job, I walked out of the consulting career for good last Friday. I had been long curious about how I would feel when this moment finally came. I pictured it as the most relieving or the most exciting moment of my life. Well… let’s just put it that way… when I walked out of the office building, I was actually frightened that someone would chase me down and ask me to do more work. It actually took me about a day to gain a sense of excitement and finally feel the relief.

You can catch the story “My Last 5 Days On the Consulting Job” on my professional blog site.

It’s Monday afternoon. I am sipping a cup of coffee in my family owned store in Nashville, chatting with my mother and … finally blogging!!

I scanned through my blog and saw only 6 posts this year! What a slacker! Hehehe…:-)
With all the time I have now, I am sure you guys will see a lot of nerdy talks, photo updates, climbing journals, 5 More Reasons Why Thongs Must Die… you know.. the usual stuff..

Thanks to all of my friends and families from all over the places for helping me to go through this difficult time! Boy! I am so glad that I am finally back after a long absence!

Now, I have to clean up my yunasville email inbox.. 717 emails??? Wow! What did I miss??

Jason, my good friend and my loyal reader dropped a note today asking if I were still alive. I feel that I own a short post just to explain what’s going on lately. Actually, if you read the posts I did on my professional blog, you may already figure it out.

The project I am working on recently has taken its toll on me. I can rarely find time to breathe, sleep or eat. Maybe I forgot how to say No again. Maybe I am no longer the 20 some year old who can think 15 hours non stop. Maybe I am just too tired to keep going with this job. I am absolutely feeling frightened when I’ve learned that I have to work overtime at night and on weekend again. I started to make critical mistakes on the job which resulted in serious consequences and caused my company some damages.

I have sold my soul to this company in the last 10 years by working overtime year after year. I was ill for 2 years; I lost half of my right eye’s sight; and I lost my family because of this job. I kept going because this is all I know and I like my manager who gives me big bucks.

I finally decided that it’s time for me to retire from the consulting life, retire from the travel job and start to focus on having a normal life. I am 32, yet, I am still trying to figure out where my home is. That’s just plain sad.

I do feel being defeated and I do feel that I am sort of kind of running away from my problems by quitting what I do. But I know one thing though: my current job is the source of my unhappiness and I gotta do something to get my life back.

Stay tuned…

You’d think that with all the bad lucks I had, things could go a bit better. No, not really.

Despite the difficulty to locate new machines for me during the holiday, IBM managed to send out one loaner earlier this week and one replacement 2 days after.

The loaner that was supposed to arrive in Nashville 2 days ago was lost in DHL’s Nashville handling center. They told me the package couldn’t be found anymore. No further explanation.

So what about my new replacement today? It was held in US Custom since it was coming from Canada. Somebody didn’t finish the paperwork on time to ensure the “Next Day” service. I was just informed that it won’t arrive until Tuesday. Great! I am leaving on Monday.

Ok, forget about the crappy carrier’s service for a second. But what are the odds to lose 2 computers and screw up every shipment in one week? It almost seems that some mighty power is making sure that I am NOT going to get a laptop.

Alright! Alright! I am not supposed to complain. Let’s turn my crappy bad luck experiences into “Lesson Learned” again. I also made my first “New Year Resolution” list, inspired by my crashed digital world. You can read both lists on my pro blog site: http://www.blogfabulous.com/when-digital-world-crashes/