April Fools 2008

Happy April Fools! I indulged myself in it the past two years - one was an Orgy Invite to friends, and another was a Sperm Donation Drive to save the three-toed sloths.

This year, it was midnight and I was tired, but I felt obligated as I had a reputation to maintain. So I drove to work, spent what seemed like forever switching the fridge hinge to the other side. It required taking about 15 screws and three hinges off, taking condiments off the door, and lots of careful lifting of the doors - but it was worth it.

We have two floors and two fridges. I wanted to do the same for the fridge on the 4th floor, but there was one screw I just couldn't get to.

I hope no one breaks the fridge today.


The prank was successful. I heard that pretty much everyone on the 12th floor was fooled, and that one corner of the fridge was pulled out quite a bit from all that forceful prying.

Shame we didn't have a webcam in the kitchen. BUT, these action shots of John caught by Lamont made my day:

Groovy 1.5.4 on Ubuntu

I installed Groovy the other day. It should've been a piece of cake, but it wasn't! When I tried to run the groovy console from command line, I got this error:

java.lang.SecurityException: Prohibited package name: java.lang

Looks like Groovy found Java classes in its classpath and didn't like them.

Edit the startGroovy script. (same dir as groovyConsole, e.g. /usr/share/groovy/bin/)

Comment out the lines where it sets the classpath with the value of your environment variable CLASSPATH:

#if [ -n "$CP" ] ; then
# CP="$CP":.
#elif [ -n "$CLASSPATH" ] ; then
# CP="$CLASSPATH":.
#else
# CP=.
#fi

That's all I did to make it work. The problem seems to happen in Mac OS X also, which has a similar fix.

ToastMasters Experience

I joined ToastMasters last July. The first time I visited a club, it was a bit daunting. There was just so much friendliness and applauding going on. I felt like I was in a cult.

Yet, the people were great - not too great to the point of being pretentious. They genuinely wanted to help one another out, because they have been helped and greeted the same way when they were shy and when they stuttered.

So after a few visits to a couple clubs among the 60 in Vancouver, I became a member. As I learned more about the club and about speaking, I decided that, if there was ever a cult religion I would take on, the closest would be the ToastMasters!

There's a lot of positivity in all ToastMasters clubs, and if you find a club with a mix of members who are funny and proficient in public speaking, every meeting will be like going to a comedy club or attending an inspiring public talk.

I've done four speeches so far, and I feel like posting some of my speeches. I have yet to learn to move away from memorizing my speech, because once I wrote it down in full, I tend to stick to the words. So hopefully after these speeches I'll have no more speeches to post, because I'll be using nothing but one cue card!

The speeches are:
#1 Made in Taiwan, Calibrated in Canada (Ice Breaker)
#2 Cougarlicious (Oragnize Your Speech)
#3 Food & Wine Pairing 101 (slides) (Get to the Point)
#4 Reincarnation, Yay or Nay (Vocal Variety)

Improv Everywhere

Gill sent me this and I thought it was just brilliant. It's like the movie Enchanted, in real life! If I were rich I would probably hire people to surprise me and make my day this way.



If they do anything in Vancouver (and if it doesn't require me to sing, because I can't sing) then I'd so sign up!

ToastMasters Speech #4: Reincarnation, Yay or Nay

Who here has ever reincarnated? Would you like to?

If the whole world gets a chance to reincarnate, would you say Yay, or Nay?

Reincarnation is definitely something our ancestors have thought about. It exists in many Indian religions, ancient Greek philosophy, and several Christian denominations. What does this mean? It means there are many different flavours of reincarnation!

Tonight, I'm going to address three questions that you should definitely ask, to find out what flavour of reincarnation you're getting into - before signing off your life to reincarnation, or no reincarnation.

The three very important questions you should ask, are: 1. Does it rely on karma? 2. Do I get to choose who or what I reincarnate as? 3. Will I remember my past lives?

So the first question – Does it rely on karma?

In other words, if I'm kind and loving and do everything with good intentions, would I be rewarded with a great next life? Perhaps a popular popstar, or maybe a blissful bunny rabbit.

If I were a remorseless criminal, would I reincarnate as something awful? Maybe a hideous mole rat, with six legs, suffering perpetual migraines.

In a world of karma, people will strive to be kind, crime rate will drop, and politicians - will be altruistic. The world will be Heaven on Earth!

Or will it? What if good karma cancels out bad karma? Then will some of us choose to earn our karma in one life, and use it up in the next, as though we have earned "immunity" on a reality show?

So it's important to find out what karma system you're getting into.

Question 2. Do I get to choose who or what I reincarnate as?

Well if we all get to choose, then the miserable deep sea creatures and hyenas will probably go extinct.

If we all get to choose, then many of us will want to be born into families of wealth and fame and kindness. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will be having quadruplets every year!

What if we get to choose from a selection instead? We can collect karma points like we collect air miles. When the time comes, you get a catalogue. “Brilliant Public Speaker – 12,000,000 points" – shucks!

Question 3. Will I remember my past lives?

Imagine the amount of knowledge, experience, and skills we will accumulate if we remember our past lives!

Imagine how fast technology will advance, if Einstein keeps coming back! We'll be traveling across galaxies in no time. (Or at least, at the speed of light!)

There will be no racism, no sexism, no discrimination of any kind, if we remember our past lives. Why? Because we'll all have been black, white, yellow, male, female. Been there, done that. We'll all have a better understanding of each other.

On the other hand, Facebook can get complicated. It'll have to keep track of reincarnations. Our friends list can get dreadfully long.

Psychology will be an even more interesting field than it is now. Many of us are messed up because of our childhoods. Now imagine having memory of all ten of them!

Compared to our ancestors, we now live two to three times longer. We travel many times further, around the world. We are exposed to multifarious ideas and cultures.

So as we change careers, as we relocate, we can see them as a form of reincarnation. So think about karma, think about who you are developing into, and make use of all that you have experienced - whether you say Yay, or Nay, to Reincarnation!

TamagoBerry

I took the suggestion of blogging this. It might only be funny if you have experienced it. I hope my boss doesn't feel that I'm starting a riot.

At work, we are on a rotation for being on-call. We carry a BlackBerry which alerts us of problems with servers - connection timeouts, email queue build-up, database issues, etc etc. A quiet night allows a full night's sleep, but there are also times where one's sleep is completely disrupted because of a few late night alerts. We are in the process of training more people for the on-call shifts, but it's a hard sell. So while I was up late last night (yes, due to the alert), I wrote down a promotional scheme, involving wrapping the infamous on-call BlackBerry in a cute little Tamagotchi skin. If you remember this invention from the late 90s, Tamagotchi was a craze! Really, I'm not kidding. Even guys carried this digital pet (chicken in an egg-shaped device) around, trying to keep their chicks alive by feeding them, playing with them, and tucking them in bed.

~~*~~ ~~*~~ ~~*~~ ~~*~~

In order to make the task of carrying the on-call pager more appealing, we've come up with a solution by adding a level of indirection.

The wild and exciting (and pink) TamagoBerry will bring you joy as you experience simulated love and parenthood, and have you looking forward to your next on-call shift!

Upon receiving the TamagoBerry, your Tamagotchi egg starts incubating. It will hatch in 1 minute and grow up during the next few days of your shift. You'll have to take good care of it or its health meter will drop!

An alert will be a little (or big) chirp, depending on the setting.

There are three buttons on the Tamagotchi - Hug, Pat, and Scold. All of which are equivalent to "Acknowledge" the alert.

Alert messages will be displayed along with cute icons.

Here are the translations for some of the alert messages:

"Tamagotchi wants to play!" = "xxx Server1 is CRITICAL"

"Tamagotchi needs to use the restroom." = "xxx/load is CRITICAL"

"Tamagotchi has a toothache!" = "xxx is CRITICAL - connection refused"

"Tamagotchi wants a midnight snack!" = "mailxxx Queue is CRITICAL"

"Tamagotchi wants a 3am snack!" = "xxx/DISK WARNING - 5% free space"

By the end of your shift, you may experience attachment and unwillingness to relinquish the TamagoBerry. This is very normal. Unfortunately, we all take turns, so you'll just have to be patient. Soon enough, it'll be your turn again to play and take care of the TamagoBerry!

Procrastinated Doodle

I bought the Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet something like 2 years ago. I never really used it.

Finally I decided to configure it properly the other day. Now the screen maps to my monitor and pressure-sensitive works in the Gimp. In Photoshop7 though, the stylus is reversed. The pen erases and the eraser draws. Ugh. I was really hoping to use Photoshop in Ubuntu.

A brief blurb on how to configure Wacom graphics tablets in Linux:

1. Download drivers. If you are in Ubuntu, just download the latest using Synaptic Package manager.

2. Find your input:
Go to /dev/input, and use xxd to see where your input is coming from. If input is detected, xxd will output to standard out:
So for example type:
sudo xxd wacom
And draw on your tablet.

If nothing happens, that's not your input. Try:
sudo xxd event0
And so on.

3. Edit configuration
In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, under Section "InputDevice", Identifier "stylus", "eraser", and "cursor", change the Option "Device" to what you've found in step 1. For me it was "/dev/input/wacom".

4. Restart X
Log out or reboot, cross fingers and toes!

Anyhow, I did some doodling to see how well the tablet works. It was quite a bit better than before, with no pressure sensitivity. The drawings look a lot smoother.