Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

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

12, 13 years ago at the dawn of the first Internet boom, we transformed the way we share and deliver information by moving them online, graphically. Now, we are moving human interactions, communities, and user contents into the Web space and the results have been phenomenal. There is even a name for it: Web 2.0

Newsweek has done an interesting article to talk about the new era of the Internet: The Living Web. . Check it out. A few of the biggest new kids on the block:
1. mySpace.com
2. Digg.com
3. Flickr

Along with the massively exploded numbers of blogs out there, we are really entering the era of the Living Web. If you have never played with any of these, you gotta ditch those reality shows and enter the 21st Century.

I signed up with digg.com a few months after the site was launched. I have never thought that in less than a year, Digg has joined other big boys and became part of the icon of the new Web 2.0.

I am really excited about this new stage of the Web development. I really think that we are at the early stage of this exciting new era and there are plenty of opportunities out there if we can come up with some great ideas. So where to look for these opportunities? It falls back to the good old golden rule: Supply and Demand. As a web user, what do I want? What do the people around us want from their Web experiences? Now we have ways to allow users to present their own contents and share with others, but how should we organize this massive amount of information? How can we utilize the new information that has never been available before? Seriously, if you think about the output from 30 million+ blogs, 60 million user profiles from mySpace, gazillions of pictures from Flick, great things can be done with these user generated contents which used to be only in the individual’s head. I have been thinking about these questions lately and got quite a few ideas. A simple example: the marketing research groups can filter mySpace and have a tons of information as what products are in demand, how to reach the potential customers and what are the most effective ways to market them. Because? These information are spelled out on these webpages. It’s matter of who is going to turn that information into useful data. GREAT! I just shared my million dollar idea with the public!

Some Silion Valley frontiers are already putting their ideas into actions. Check these guys out: (Who is Building The Next Web)

To those stock-pick lovers, keep your eyes open too because one of these new players could be tomorrow’s eBay and Google.

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 watching Animal Planet this afternoon and something caught my attention: The guy’s Y-Chromosome is shrinking and mutating rapidly. One day, this planet may not have men anymore.

It seems that once upon a time, the male DNA carried a Y-Chromosome as big as female’s X. After years of mutating (maybe you guys drank beer too much), the number of genes carried by Y-Chromosome shrunk to just 78, while the enormous X still carries 1500 genes. I finally understood why women are so much more sophisticated while guys don’t even know how to fake a few tears when the neighbor’s Fluffy dies.

The bad news is that boy’s Y-Chromosome keeps on shrinking and mutating. So after some hundreds of thousands years, the Y-Chromosome will run out of genes and poof, disappear in the thin air. And all the female people will have to fuck themselves like the wiggle tail lizards (One of the species that don’t have male counterparts).

Should I be happy that I was born in the era when the male DNA still got 78 genes to play with? Oh yeah, totally!! Imagine one day when Y-Chromosome got only one gene left… no matter what that’s gonna be, whether the “football gene”, “sex gene” or “laziness gene”, the world ain’t gonna be pretty…

So ladies, better have some fun right now while the supply of the male genes still lasts!

I took a leave of absence in Jan from my professional blog company b5media to deal with my real job. Finally, I was done with my slavery real job so I picked up my slack and started blogging for food again. Turns out, all of my proposals back in 2005 got approved so I now end up with 3 professional blogs to keep up with. That’s why I haven’t been able to do anything fun on my own site. I kind of regret that I am taking on too many blogs too soon…When I am under pressure to post on schedule, the used-to-be-fun blogging doesn’t seem so fun anymore. Well, let’s just see how this goes…

Here is a list of the posts I did on those sites in the last a few days. I am also introducing a new site I will be writing for: The Play Gadgets. It’s about video game gadgets. I am rewriting my template files to include these blogs on the side bars too. Hopefully you guys will still be enjoying reading my stuff …

Posted on Feb 22: Universal RF adapter/switch for all game consoles

Posted on Feb 22: Lazy guy’s gift guide
If you are one of these guys who is clueless about what to get for your lovely lady without breaking your bank, here is your guide.

Posted on Feb 21: Men And Calendars
Why men hate Valentine’s Day and why women have to have gifts on those dates.

Posted on Feb 16: Worst Pickup lines you can ever think of
This is my usual brew-ha-ha of the day…

Posted on Feb 15: Housework and Sex
Why neat home can lead to better sex life for the couple.

Posted on Feb 22: Why Women Make Less Than Men
Well, simple. ‘Cause we don’t ask for it the way men do

Posted from Feb 14 through Feb 21: Lessons learned after qutting my consulting career
Lesson 1: Learn to say “I can’t do it”
Lesson 2: Break that Agreement
Lesson 3: Learn to believe it is not my fault
Final Lesson: Make Changes Today

One of my peers in Raleigh, NC set up a blog site to track his journey and progress to achieve financial freedom by reaching 2 million dollar net worth mark. (Thanks to Matt for the link). He has currently accumulated $216K and he is only 29 years old. Impressive, yeah?

Here is his Jan tracking chart of his wealth. (ESPP is our employee stock purchase plan)

I just had some time to read his stories. I must say that his example is definitely inspiring which I can relate quite a lot.

I personally believe in saving and investing by living under my means and paying attention to personal financial educations. Thanks to my mother and The Richest Man In Babylon, I started saving and investing when I was still in college. I must say that another reason why I was able to walk out of my job was because of my financial capability. Even if I couldn’t find a job for a long while, I know I am taken care of and I will not worry about money.

2million (he didn’t use his real name of course) also started out as a broke student and able to accumulate this much wealth. I am sure every one of us can do the same but the key is to start RIGHT NOW.

I strongly encourage you to read his site. Here is the URL : http://2million.blogspot.com/ I also copied his financial history story here for your amusement:

I graduated with a BS degree in Computer Science in December 1998. I was just like any other college student, broke, but I was blessed enough to have the support of my parents to pay for my tuition and basic living expenses while I worked to get my degree.

Rather than entering the workforce like most of my graduating peers, I opted to stay and get a MS degree in Engineering. I was luckily offered an assistantship at the university which gave me free tuition and a stipend (roughly $12,000 a year). I was again blessed to have my parents agree to continue to pay my health insurance premiums during this time.

While in graduate school, I purchased my first car, a newly used Nissan Sentra. I put $5,000 down (my life’s savings) and I received a loan from my parents to pay for the remaining amount (roughly $7,000).

In addition, while I was in graduate school, I started a dot com business with my brother. We spent several years and roughly invested $8k of my savings in the business which we finally shutdown and sold off most of our assets in 2004 for a sizable loss.

In August 2001, I finally entered the real world and have been working at IBM ever since. I began paying close attention to my finances after reading The Millionaire Next Door given to me by a professor towards the end of my grad school career. As I entered the workforce I realized my limited financial means at the time would limit my choices in the future and I wanted to do something about it.

Since 2001, I have made steady progress in my increasing my net worth. I paid off the car loan from my parents and purchased my 1st house in 2002. In 2005, I rented out my house and I am currently looking for a new home.

I left graduate school with a signing bonus and moving allowance that accounted for the majority of my $14k net worth in July 2001. As you can see I have been steadily improving this number to a more reasonable $216k net worth today. Hopefully this streak will continue for many more years.

I watched a few movies on my new video iPod and wasn’t impressed until I viewed the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children (see images below) last night. Initially, I was really worried about the tiny screen with tiny English subtitle. It gotta be no more than font size 2. How the hell can I read it?!

I ripped a high resolution version and surprisingly, I could read every letter! The graphical detail is so impressive even with the screens filled with all dark gray lines. The resolution and contrast are good enough for the human eyes to differentiate objects in super dark scenes.

Cloud with Tifa:

All computer graphcis images, baby!

This is by far the best iPod yet. Although it takes me about 2 hours to burn a movie, it is well worth the effort…

Mike from Heavywinter did a post discussing his traffic and stats. I figured I’d do the same for the “Documentary” purpose.

This picture actually says it all about the traffic (click to enlarge):

The stats software I use measures both unique visitors and unique visits. My guts feeling is that my regular readers should be a small subset of the 37000+ unique visitors.

I can pretty much explain the traffic surges from month to month (i.e. I got dugg by digg.com in Aug, etc..) except December. I had neither outstanding posts nor major external links coming in. All the sudden, I am getting tons of Google image search hits in Dec. As you can see in the following tow pictures, the Google image hits brought in major traffic in Dec and the traffic exploded this week with 800 to 900 unique visits per day from the image hunters. I can’t explain why all the sudden my PhotoBlog became so popular, especially the Thongs Must Die Album I came up by myself. I guess people dig original stuff? Or was it because “Bare Butt Sells”?

Dec traffic distribution (click to enlarge):

Jan 1 - Jan 4 daily traffic:

I am definitely feeling a bit lazy about blogging in the past a few weeks. I guess it’s a cycle every blogger has to go through. Once I pick up some more energy, I am going to co-author two more b5 blogs: I will be answering dating burning questions for the older and professional singles; and another one is a console game gadget blog.

Now, I must sleep…

I left my mother’s house this morning with a broken laptop, my only computer. The thought of not having connection for a week frightens me. As soon as I landed in Denver, I went directly to the Apple store and got those:

With wireless keyboard, mouse and a copy of Microsoft Office software, I paid $1600+ for this top line mini plus the 20 inch display. (Yes, my sweet smile got me nearly 200 dollar student + corporate discounts) Buying an Apple is on my New Year Resolution List. I am glad I get to scratch off an item on the list on the 2nd day!

Here I am, blogging at you from my brand new Apple system!

I owned an Apple back in 1993. It’s been so long and things have changed so much that I have no idea how to use this new Operating System. It took me a while to figure out how to create a new folder and download pictures from my digital camera. I still have no clue how Firefox got installed since all I did was clicking on the “Download” button while I was on Firefox’s website through Safari.

As Apple-dumb as I am right now, I can tell you one thing: Apple rocks! The setup and install procedures so far flow so smoothly. The bluetooth technology instantly recognized my wireless keyboard and mouse. As soon as I put in a DVD, the display turns into a LCD TV and starts playing the movie.

It’d be nice if my Apple-die-hard friend from Heavywinter can give me a Tiger crash course… Mike? Where are you?

I consider myself a fairly good engineer. I built-a..hmm… well… anyway, I must have built something meaningful in the past a few years. I just can’t remember now. Maybe my “software engineer” title is an exaggeration, ‘cause when I am looking at this picture, there is just no comparison between my type of “engineering” and THIS type of engineering:

A magnetically levitated train takes you from New York to London in 54 minutes! You will go 5000 mph through a 3100 mile long tunnel that was itself floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

About a year ago, I saw this on the Discovery Channel. The hour long program explained theoretically how this will work which I still clearly remember. The main idea is simple. We can’t achieve high speed because of friction. With the air friction and the contact between the rail and the train itself, today’s engineering can only achieve about 200 miles per hour speed. In order to achieve 5000 mph speed, friction has to go away, meaning that the train has to flow and the tunnel can’t have air. So, what’s gonna happen? Use magnetic field and suck all the air out of the tunnel.

Discover website just put this Trans-Atlantic Tunnel project into an interactive tool. It’s pretty cool to check out it’s “Extreme Engineering” design. I don’t know if any giant company is funding this project or not. But if this theory can really become reality, I’d be tempted to find out how my guts would feel while traveling 5000 miles per hour… Hehehe… \
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