Cow’s Life - Thinking Outside Of The Barn

Any bloggers who are about to shoot themselves should check this one out.! Best written Blogger Depression “report” I have ever seen. It’s hilarious!

Same rules apply to depression caused by any type of obsessions (boyfriend, girlfriend, cats, birds, elephants, noodle, toilet seats…) :

• Understand the facts - Hey! No one puts a gun on your head
• Recognize the symptoms - sick and tired of thinking about it all the time?
• Know when to fold’em - Hey! If it is not good for you, call it quits, let it go, no shame in that
• Go outside - You are not getting any younger, so get some fresh air and do something more important

Just don’t shoot yourself…

It was early summer, 1994. I was finishing up my third year at Vanderbilt and searching for a graduate school program. My buddy Anderson, a chemistry Ph.D student from Stanford hooked me up with a Computer Science professor. After finals, I took a flight to Palo Alto, CA for an interview. After touring the campus, Anderson took me to his lab and showed me this webpage:

www.stanford.edu/~yahoo/???.html (I forgot if it was home.html or index.html)

“Anything you want on the Web, here it is. Jerry and David from EE department made the list a few months ago” He said. At that time, it was only a link widely used by the Stanford community. If I had known Yahoo went public the following year, I would definitely take a snap shot of that screen and auction it on eBay. I would call it “The Birth Certificate Of Yahoo”. Think I can get 10 bucks?

Yahoo isn’t the only one that is born out of a simple idea. Mosaic (later became Netscape), if anybody still remembers, is the very first graphical web browser. I started surfing Internet since 1991. But everything was text based until Marc Andreessen put Mosaic together in 1993 to display both static images and text. I remember the guys from my lab were so excited about viewing playboy for free.

A year after Yang and Filo put the Yahoo directory list together, two young Stanford students, Page and Brin got together trying to find a way to track backlinks to the webpage. And there was the birth of Google. Google hit such a fast run it eventually crashed Stanford’s network in 1996.

As brilliant as these young graduate students are, neither of them was prepared nor had the knowledge to run monster size companies. Yahoo was a mess in 2001 before Terry Semel took over. Netscape lost the browser war to Bill Gates and got bought out by AOL in 1998. Even a firm Netscape believer myself abandoned Netscape in late 90’s and became IE’s bitch. As far as Page and Brin, they took the back seats and recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell to be the leading man.

Oh, on the side note, Sergey Brin is still a Ph.D student at Stanford. Thus, his student profile and his Google research papers are still there on Stanford’s server until his term expires. I am saving it as the “Google Birth Certificate”. I am not making the same mistake twice.

It sucks that I am on a 48 hour on-call shift this weekend again. I have been chained by my PC since Friday midnight and I won’t be done until Sunday midnight.

This afternoon between phone calls and pages, I worked on my gaming section of the site. While I was loading a few game maps my friends and I made a couple of years ago, I started to dream about my dream job again… What if I can ditch my current job and start making these maps all day long? But reality soon pulls me back from the day dream. What about my paycheck? What if I have to leave Colorado? Didn’t I try really hard already and never succeeded in the past?

I did try really hard in the past by obtaining a master degree in computer graphics and sending out who knows how many resumes. After hearing nothing from the entertainment industry, I took the juicy offer from my current employer and started the business consulting career. A perfect example of “a dream crushed by the hard currency”.

One of my climbing buddies Mountaincurmudgeon (alias used) was once in the same industry flying first class across the nation and consulting for the big ass corporate America. He finally ditched the job, grew his hair long, moved into the mountains and became a hippy climber. He now works for a non profit organization. Using his own words,

“…Everyone has their own take on that one. For me, I gave up the money, and have never regretted it. “

My hat’s off to Mr. Mountaincurmudgeon. He did what I couldn’t do. Every time when the job was eating my life away, I looked at my handsome paycheck and decided to suck it up.

This is never an easy choice for anyone. I am sure I am not the only one who is stuck in a situation like this. We wish we could leave the office and never come back; but reality kicks in when we start to think about the bills, food and shelters. If you have children and spouse to worry about, it is even a harder decision to make.

Some people can really bite the bullet, let go of everything in exchange of what they dream of. I guess I am not as tough as those people. But I will for sure walk out of the door if I have had an “Exit Plan”. I now regret that I have never done anything in the past to give myself an option. Sitting my butt tight by the pagers and blogging my days away won’t solve this problem.

Being said, it is time for me to move my lazy ass by putting together a new resume and a “job hunting action plan”! According to the turtle thoery , even the smallest step can get us to the destination… yeah?

The deeper I got myself into the Blogosphere, the more I realize that a lot of bloggers are into this thing for the money. I read a report somewhere that indicates 1/3 of the blog authors love writing and the rest hate it. The only reason they are still blogging is because of the reward. They draw some traffic to the site, get a decent page ranking and then run Ads on the site. Every click is money. Bloggers can also win awards, get listed on “Top x00 List”, get famous in the community or even become celebrities. No wonder more than 55% of the blog sites went “dead” after just a few months. It’s business again.

Yes, I am having a lot of trouble reading this figure. If you read the blog history, it was originally created as online journals to capture and spread information. I guess our wonderful society is capable of turning anything into profitable businesses nowadays, so I am not surprised.

I read Seth’s blog quite a bit lately. It’s a very popular blog site, or, should I say, a very HIGH RANKING blog site. The guy publishes books, thus, it is only nature for people to question his motivation of blogging as a way to promote his books. He claimed in his recent post,

“I don’t blog to make money. I don’t run ads on my site. I don’t even blog to win awards. I blog because it pleases me to see my ideas spread. I like it when I see people talking about one of my ideas–without even mentioning where the idea came from. That means it’s the idea that spread, not my brand. Which is the whole point.”

Think the guy is bullshitting? I believe him.

It is a real fun experience if people are getting something out of your posts and writing. A laugh, a relaxing moment, or even better, some kind of inspirations. A few days ago, I received an email from a reader I have never met (yes, a lot of readers are my friends…). The email reads,

“just wanted to let you know how much I enjoy reading about your rock
climbing ventures. I am just a gumby myself (I’m just starting to
crawl up 5.8 routes). Keep up the great work and please continue
posting your climbing progress on your blog - it’s inspirational.”

That marks my happiest day in my not-so-long blogging history.

Will I run GoooooooAds on the site? Not until we move to Mars. If people can find a few laugh here and there and occasionally get something positive out of the posts, the site serves its purpose.

Link to original Article

Hotlines: Coke’s Calorie-Burning Enviga Slated for 2006 Debut

NEW YORK Coca-Cola is planning to launch Enviga, a soda that is said to burn 50 to 100 calories just by drinking a 12-oz. serving, next year, per one executive.

Enviga, a green tea-based, caffeinated, carbonated drink, is in clinical testing and is said to speed up the user’s metabolism. The beverage will target active lifestyle consumers. A Coke rep said, “Some [of our projects] may find their way to market and some may not.” Studies have shown that drinking green tea may promote weight loss by stimulating the body to burn calories.

The Japanese are trying very hard to make our future visits a little easier. Check out today’s Photoblog. If you missed the earlier article “Lost In Translation” and how Star Wars III got butchered, read on!

Yesterday, I went for my first lead climbing training. For those of you who don’t care for the rock climbing terms, it is a type of climb that you will have to take the rope up instead of climbing with a tight rope. The difference? If you slip, lead climb can cause you to fall at least a few feet instead of a few inches.

My instructor Matt was teaching all the rookies how to take a fall. As part of the training, everybody has to go to the top and take a 5,6 feet fall to have a feel of what it is like. So I went for it too. I was the last one up, so everybody was paying attention to Matt on the ground when he was explaining to my belayer how to do a dynamic catch (a correct way to catch a falling climber). So I stood on the top for a while waiting for them to finish the conversation and forgot to clip in my rope to the last draw and the top bolt. Nobody noticed it. “Ok, Christine, Let it go… “ Matt shouted. “Ok.. here we go… “ I let go of both my hands and feet. WHAM! The next thing I knew, I was free falling through half of the wall and lifted my roockie belayer in the air. I had to kick the wall so I wouldn’t slam my body into it and hurt my ankle a little bit.

I know I will take a fall sometime down the road if I start to lead climb. But I never anticipated falling 20 feet on my first 5.7 lead. Not to mention shooting my belayer into the air. But it is all good experience. After taking that fall, I wasn’t scared of falling anymore and got my first 5.8 lead climb. Yep! A 5.8 lead without falling!

My ankle may not be happy, but I am glad that I got the first hand experience in the early phase. I did learn something important though. If you ever going to start lead climbing, PICK A GOOD LEAD BELAYER and CLIP IN YOUR ROPE! Lead belaying is much harder than climbing itself. The guy has to know exactly how much rope he is giving to you and how to catch you properly to keep you off the ground or taking hard falls. I fell that much also because my belayer gave me way too much rope than I needed. And practice, practice and practice. I don’t think I will ever lead belay anybody without a top roper or auto belaying device until I get REAL GOOD at it.

Have you ever met a woman that would complaint about her diamond engagement ring being too big? Probably not eh?

Well, the ever more popular Hollywood Socialite/TV celebrity/Billion $ Trust Fund Baby is in the news recently for complaining about her brand spanking 24-carrat diamond engagement ring. Apparently, the ring is so heavy and causes her so much pain, that her man had to get her a Cartier platinum band for everyday wear. Boy what a terrible dilemma for her (chuckle chuckle).

On a side note, the need of a diamond engagement ring was not common practice until late 1930’s when the South African De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd in corporation with advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Son set out on one of most successful and profitable marketing campaign to strengthen the association of diamonds with romance. Their initial targets were actually young men. By 1947, the slogan “A Diamond is Forever” was forever etched into our romantic traditions. Here’s the complete history -= Forever Diamonds =-.

My friend rebutted me once when I commented on her obsessions with shiny small rocks, “Why are you guys so obsessed with your gadgets and cars then?”

She’s got a point there…

HAPPY ONE MONTH ANNIVERSARY YUNASVILLE!

I launched www.yunasville.com on June 27, 2005, which technically marks today as Yunasville’s one month anniversary. Ok, let’s take a look at what happened in one month:

• I finally figured out that “blogger” is a legitimate word and stopped changing “blogger” to “logger” when MS Word complains about it. Oh… blogger isn’t a lumberjack… I got it…
• I went from 2 visits on yunasville’s birthday to 80+ visits/2500 hits per day in a month. And the site attracted quite a few folks who were searching for “yuna’s hot photos”, “yuna’s ass” and “yuna’s butt conversation”. Sorry, no asses and butts on yunasville.com… except for this one….
• I Lost averagely 3.1123452 hours of sleep per day in the last 30 days.
• I posted 37 articles in 30 days. I beat my June’s heavywinter record. Boy, Mike is right, I do have a lot on my mind…
• I wrote my first “regular expression” program that looks like this:
  

  RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]+)/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /WordPress/index.php?p=$1&page=$2 [QSA,L]

  Ok, I don’t see how this can be a “regular expression”… It took me good two days to figure out what the hell those pluses and minuses mean. Whoever invented that programming language should either get a Noble prize or get shot.(For those who really want to know, all it does is to change a web address from, say, www.yunasville.com/WordPress/index.php?p=68 to www.yunasville.com/archives/68)

• On the last note, I want to thank Cyco Miko for spending many hours and staying up a few nights to get the PHP code working for the site. Do you see how nice the title flower picture with cool big green menu buttons blend with the whole site? Yup, that’s his work! Thanks man!

And thanks to all the dear readers for stopping by. I hope ya’ll had a few laugh and some kind of fun.

#3 The Magic Ball
Have a question and searching for some answers? No worries. Just turn to the Magic8Ball. I asked “him”, “Are you full of shit?” The ball answered, “You must be willing to seek harder for an answer.” Want some magic answers? Knock yourself out

#2 Cosmopolitan
Curious about where men’s secret happy spots are? Turn to Cosmo’s advice!… Oh, wait.. don’t you have a perfect man laying there right beside you ready to be your “lab rat”???

#1 Winner!!! Britney Spear
Want some world travel advice? Britney Spear knows it all! I am glad that she realizes that Canada belongs to the “oversea” category.

Ok, enough of Brew-Ha-Ha’s. On the serious side, Seth, a well respected blogger wrote an article titled “where Do You Get Your Advice?” It cracks me up that someone actually asked him for his stock picks. He wrote,

“When I appear on the Motley Fool radio show, they ask me for my stock picks. Hey! I don’t own any stocks. And even if I did, what could I possibly have to say that would matter?”

Are we mad about celebrities or what! Anyway, let me get a little bit more serious here. When it comes to seeking advice, I still think close friends, family and yourself are the best bets. Among all three choices, our own intuition is probably the best adviser which we normally neglect to listen to. Deep down we all know what is right for us, yeah? I am no neuroscientist here so I don’t know the details of how the electron stimulation works inside of our brains. But most of the time, it is not a bad idea to go with the guts feeling…