Youtube is hiring engineer

Today, I came across this on youtube home page and I just had to take a screen shot of this (and added the caption).

what kind of behavior would qualify one as a douche bag?

Initially, my friend and I were discussing how people dress at work. We talked about how a certain someone who wears shorts all the time, someone who wears t-shirt and jeans, checker shirt and dickies worker pants, someone who dress in between punk rock and goth, and lastly a douche bag who just wears anything from the banana republic/j.crew catalog. So, we moved on to a more in-depth discussion on.. what should a douche bag wears to be recognized as a douche bag. 

My friend's take was a guy who wears abercrombie shirt, cargo shorts, surfer jewelry, and flip-flops. I agreed with him since I was able to picture a person who would be a douche bag wearing the above mentioned clothing. Now, I have a slightly more to add onto this douche bag discussion. 

So what are some of the known quality of a douche bag? The dude probably scored numerous chicks in some party, which is the first and the most important requirement to make the vast majority of guys despise him. Secondly, the guy must be well off. I mean.. who would consider ANY poor man douche bag? and it certainly is not difficult to make yourself a douche bag if you are rich. Last but not least, I think the last set of quality a douche bag would posses should be the way he speaks. You see, we would never consider a guy douche bag if we never hear anything from him. 

Lets dive deeper into the topic of how you can speak like a douche bag. The way a douche bag speaks must be of ignorance. Ignoring any opinions coming from the others and in the end trying to force and deceive everyone into thinking that his idea is indeed the best without convincing argument. The guy must be competitive in nature. Douche bags are always better than everybody else. If there are something that he cannot do, it is usually because of lack/waste of time or it is just simply not challenging enough for him. That leads to my third and final point, the guy must be so full of himself that he would take credits for the work that the others have done. I mean.. if you ever talk to someone who you would consider as a.. you know a publicly recognized douche bag, you would notice that he has accomplished many things... and of course without mentioning any help he has ever received from anybody.

I put in some examples as I was writing this entry. I cut them out for the sake of preventing this entry from turning into a "I fucking hate that guy" post. This is very distasteful..  I know I know..  oh well, who cares.

A change of mind set

I have stepped away from blogging for a while.. This last year has been the darkest time in my life. I had the realization of how my life has not turned out to be.. exactly what I had in mind when I was much younger. 

For one instance, my coding mentality has transformed to.. who cares about the person who will be reading my code? I had to bump around to figure out stuff all the time without being considered either.

Same mentality also surfaced in this one incident when I was installing media tomb on my kuro box. A while ago, I installed debian on my kuro box in hopes of apt-get install would ease some pain in my life. Well, I thought installing media tomb would just be apt-get install mediatomb, until I found out the fact that there is no ppc compiled binary in the repository... So, there went another night of linux dependency chasing... consists of: 

1. ./configure

2. get something else

3. repeat step 1 & 2 for however many times needed.

4. ./make which took about close to 30 minutes since the hardware is so weak.

5. finally ./make install

now.. it complains that the sqlite db tables for media tomb was not set up correctly.

then after some amount of googling.. I was finally able to reconstruct the tables.

The next day at work, I mentioned this to Luke. His response was "why don't you put up that ppc binary up to save some folks from the same process?". Good point. Did I do it? Nope.. Nah.. Too much trouble for meee. 

I am just glad that not everyone on the internet is like me.

(edited: photo removed)

This photo is taken from my dell mini 9 netbook with photobooth effect.

GRE Verbal Studying

I am currently preparing myself to take another round of GRE in hope of proving I am somewhat English literate. I bought this GRE Verbal flash card set thinking that this would get me motivated on memorizing vocabs once again.

As I go through many so called high GRE frequency words starting with the letter A, I find myself capable of breaking words into roots and suffixes/prefixes, which makes guessing of the meaning easier. I tried breaking up aberrant: ab + errant = differ from ordinary/norm. Acidulous= acid + dulous= sour something => sour in taste or manner. So I was thinking.. if I am capable of knowing many roots, I can make really good educative guesses.

Then, I came across this word: Analgesia. SO.. HERE WE GO... Anal + gesia => Anal+ geisha => Anal (pain) + geisha => reducing pain without losing consciousness. Makes total sense right?

I don't think I will ever forget this word.

Learning a new language

A co-worker of mine is recently learning how to write in hanja/kanji/Chinese however you might call it. And that gets me thinking.. how can I learn a new language without having to be in a different country where the language is spoken?

The obvious solution would be: go take a damn class. Yes! This is definitely the best way to start, however, it may not provide the degree of efficiency always. Internet becomes an essential source in this digital age for learning a new language. Yahoo is available in pretty much every languages and you can search and read many articles and blogs in any language.

Okay, now I got ways to learn how to read and write.. how about conversation? Luckily, California is the most diverse state in America (or is it New York?). You can make friends easily with a person to exchange your language learning experience.

To share my personal experience for a bit here.. English is my second language, I can speak English fluently (sort of) now all thanks to the help of my secret weapon...

POKEMON!!

I am not kidding you. I started learning English around the time when Pokemon first got popular here in U.S. It has been roughly 10 years ago.. Hard to imagine that Pokemon has been popular all this time. I attended E.S.L. courses in school during the day and after school it is pokemon all the way for me. At the time, it is a cartoon with interesting storyline. The series uses simple English since the targeted audience is mainly kids. Voice actors spoke at a decent speed which helped training my listening skill and throws me a few new vocabularies occasionally. I think real reason why pokemon works for me is just simply the fact that it is interesting to me. If you are learning a new language, finding something interesting that has association to the language you wish to learn would benefit your learning experience greatly.

So, I decide to pick a familiar face this time around.

Lean Dizon

She is a Eurasian model who started off as a racing model and became really popular over the years. Here is some more of her work.

[Once again, the photo is removed. Sorry Luke.]

Sony Ericsson FTW

YES! I got my Sony Ericsson K660 finally last Friday. The phone is shipped from Hong Kong and I got the phone within 2 days. I also went to Death Valley during the weekend to appreciate the wonder of mother nature and also live the weekend without any internet connection. (believe me, it's not easy.) Before I headed for Death Valley, many people asked me what is there to see in Death Valley? Isn't it just desert? Well, visiting the nation's largest national park, I would say yes, it is desert. However, desert has its own "spectacularity" as well.

Recently, I had to write a couple of short scripts in Perl having to do with single letter option. While doing doing some quick research, I found that there is a module that would make single letter option like cake... wait.. moar liek c0k3! It is called Getopt::Std. This module provides two subroutines getopt and getopts (to me, you can just one of the two.. they are pretty much the same.) This is how you use it:

for example, you are writing a program that takes in the 2 options: -v for verbose and -u for update. e.g. ./krazyScript.pl -uv. All you have to do is following.

getopt('vu'); #yes this is it.

This subroutine will create set $opt_v and $opt_u both to value 1 if the letter is specified. There are actually other usages for the getopt() and you can read more from here.

Speaking of which (I am not sure what this which refers to), after watching several Japanese drama a while ago, I decide to select this cute Japanese actress as my girl of the day. Her name is Maki Horikita. She played the role of main female character in many well known drama such as "Nobuta wo produce" (wild boar makeover would be like the Japanese translation) and "Kurosaki." (black crow). Both shows are wonderful, especially Nobuta! Definitely worth watching.

Billie Jean

I "am" purchasing a brand new Sony Ericsson K660 cellular phone since my old samsung D600's battery is about to reach its end. I have had the same samsung phone for more than 2 years now and I cannot say I am too happy with it because of its crappy battery life. It is certainly one of the first phone to offer a 2 megapixel camera and its function is definitely more than I asked for, however, I "resent" (yes! it is the word that I want to use) charging my phone everyday.

Recently I have been asked how often I change my phone. Some people change their phone every 6 months or so, some use the same phone for over 5-6 years. I have had 6 cellular phones in my life thus far since the nokia 3390 era. A simple math calculation everyone can do would derive the conclusion that cell phone is not an negligible environmental threat. I have done a number of research papers on technological gadgets waste in my bachelor social and computing course and there is still not a widely spread solution to remedy/reduce this issue in the U.S. I did a quick google news search and I found this. As part of my daily routine, I browed to dannychoo.com (one of my favorite otaku hobbie site. Not that I am into anime girl model and stuff :P) and it points me to this article. It is an article about these cellular phone recycle bin and how it is being distributed across 6 electronics chain stores. To me, that may not be an effective solution but I agree it is an important initiative that we may want to take (an actualized plan that is convenient). I may be biased on how far we have achieved in the U.S. since I have not been following this issue continuously but I just decide to write my P.O.V. on here.

Anywayz, just to get some eye candy in.

Her name is Rui Kiriyama and you can go to her blog here to read up more about her.

[photo removed for the sake of my life safety]