I am exploring again. This time, with Thumblr. It’s simple to setup, no maintenance, established community that I can readily follow and find out more interesting people and posts, and allow posting different types of content. So I am debating whether it makes sense to move my blog entirely to Tumblr…

Except one thing. Just like Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and another other free social websites out there that host content for you, YOU DON’T OWN THE CONTENT!   They have the power to remove your posts, or your account entirely, if they decide to.  Not to mention they probably won’t even notify you when they delete your stuff either accidentally or intentionally.  Your well-phrased smart quotes just disappear in the thin air one day/night.  Poof.  And when you want to get rid of your account, you are at their mercy to do so promptly and cleanly, which there is no guarantee that they will.

It’s really a pity that there are so many wonderful, colorful, useful free services out there but you can’t entirely rely/trust them.  Everything feels like rental, or borrowed.

I guess I am sticking to my WordPress when it’s about freedom of speech.  Or that I am just a control freak and want to *own* my words and be able to backup whenever I want (and just blame myself for not backing it up when disasters happen.)

It’s Friday nearly 6pm.  60% to 70% of the folks already left work to enjoy early start of the weekend. I am still in office, battling with tool limitations and various manual steps of compiling/deploying/testing.  It’s a life of a developer who’s starting to get behind schedule.  Yup.  That’s me.

I was washing cups in the break room when a family of 3 walked in.  A dad, mom, and a little boy who’s probably 3 or 4 years old.  Dad said, “Wait, I am getting a water bottle”.  Mom repeated, “Daddy is getting you a water bottle.”

We have the vending machine type of soda dispenser, with brightly lit and larger than palm size buttons to push for selection.  People use it daily, pushing with their palms, a couple fingers, elbows, robotic like.  When the water bottle drops down, it makes a bit of rumbling noise, like a drunk person walking down the stairs I imagined, then the bottle gets to the bottom opening.

Suddenly I heard this chuckle turning to laughter.   The boy probably thought it was a magic, or a big toy.  It was loud and clear and heart-felt.   The mom looked at me with a smile, a little embarrassed I assumed.  While they were walking out, I thought of how happy that boy was, with the magic of the big vending machine 10 times of his size.

His happiness is so simple, laughter so true.  Oh, how I envy him.

That’s the part I don’t get growing older, why we just lose it.   It becomes inappropriate to be simply happy of little things around us.  When we say we are happy about something, it usually is something big, like getting married, buying a new car, new job, promotion, vacation, etc.  Why can’t we just say just because the flower bloomed, the sky is beautiful today, the trees putting on new colors, the peacefulness of a night?  Nobody talks about those any more.  And fewer and fewer people are noticing them.

To me, everyday, surrounded by people demanding and disagreeing, machines fighting against, stress from deadlines, tired.  But when I share food and goodies with friends, I sometimes find a little simple happiness in me.  Smoothness and richness of the dark chocolate, the smell of expresso, the after taste of green tea, the wonderful texture of mochi.  Oh, they are enough to make me smile for a while, until I am surrounded again by the busy schedule, broken AC, strange errors…

I don’t know what tomorrow is going to be like.

I don’t know what I will be like tomorrow.

Will I be the insane weird girl? Or would I start to behave and be just normal? Will I choose to quit everything and start over? Will I have the courage to change?

Will I be able to wake up tomorrow and know it’s reality not just a dream?

I know the priorities that I should be concentrating at the current moment, yet I am not enforcing them.

Is it the lack of planning, determination, or simply laziness? I have not questioned myself for quite some time when the days have been so very merry and filled with much joy. I need to finish my never-ending resume editing, need to have a healthier sleeping schedule, need to exercise self-control to be just me, not a funny comical weirdo in everybody’s eyes. I should read more… I just found some old writings I had from high school time. I could not believe that I was a better writer back then than right now by ten times. What exactly happened these years, I wondered…

I am sitting in the last day of the design patterns class. In merely four classes, we have learned 19-23 object oriented design patterns.

The textbook is a classic, many say. But it is definitely as dry as an over-toasted bread. It contains a lot of concepts that are difficult to be associated with real life examples if we do not happen to use them at work. And some of them simply invoke my reaction of “that is a design pattern?!!”

For example, we already have Iterator interface in Java, but I would never have thought that it was derived from a design pattern. I guess it is true, C++ didn’t have it.

Interpreter is basically a way to parse formal grammar. It is difficult to find any real life example besides pattern matching or for developing compilers. What else do we need to use it for?

Proxy is a well-known solution. It is also a design pattern? And object pools is widely used today as the basis for connection pooling. I never knew that connetion pooling is also an implementation of singleton, where all requests to connections go through a single point of entrance.

Some of the design patterns are driving me nuts; my mind is like a swirling sundae. Bridge and adapter. Bridge and visitor. State and strategy. God. They look like twins to me! If I just look at the class diagrams, they look very very VERY similar! Yet they are designed to solve different problems? What is the next higher level up of abstraction? Can’t we have another abstract solution for all these similar problems?

Leave me alone, please. After this class, I shall stop thinking like the nerds here in class for a while. Then I need to pick up the book again to review everything, re-do all homework to refresh memory, and redraw all class diagrams to help me understand the similarities and differences of all of them. Probably then I will blog about each design pattern to drive my readers nuts, like me right now. =) You will know what I mean by “my mind is like a sundae” then.

How many times I thought that I just had the perfect business idea, only to find out that either it has already been implemented, or that something similar is launched in a few months after I thought of it?

Well, this time I am more “hurt” than ever, almost felt that I was cheated.

http://www.411song.com/

This site offers the service that you can call in and play a tune for 15 seconds, and it will be able to identify the song for you.

My idea originally, is to be able to send in any type of analog signal, then the service will provide you with song information, and all artists who have played/sang it. It will be a nice feature for finding song’s original singers and backgrounds.

This time, just like the numberless times in the past year, that my idea is implemented by somebody else, more or less similar to what I had in mind. The thing that made me the saddest, is not that somebody gets to make money out of it while I cannot. It is that even if I have a better “solution” or “service” in the future, those people who came up with the simpler solutions would have already patented it, making my idea less original and profitable.

This is really lame.

I just realized how far I have drifted away from Microsoft stuff.

I used to looove Microsoft products, no matter it was productivity software or development. I used to like C++ much better than Java. I used to dream about working for Microsoft and I was absolutely thrilled of working there as an intern. Those precious memories.

What about now? I am a part-time Java/Servlet developer. Why part time? Because I have to split that 40-hour work week on Java/SQL/Unix scripting/COBOL. And for the rest of my time, I spend on playing with my servers, different programs, learning PHP/CSS, and reading blogs…

Still not quite far from Microsoft products, no? Then listen to this:

I use PHP/MySQL on Apache Server. I have Tomcat installed on my laptop so I could write Servlet/JSP codes. I use Eclipse (Java-based open source) for development. At work I use Unix platform and vi for coding. My job also includes WebSphere Application Server configuration… No Microsoft.

Ah.. I love Firefox; I was almost going to completely abandon IE if it weren’t for testing. I use Google as home page, actually, Google Suggest. I use Google Desktop Search. I use Google Map. I use Gmail as primary email. I read Google blog…

Hm.. I have shifted my love to Google? O_O”

But I do like Microsoft’s MSN Spaces and their beta search’s query result organization. I guess undying love does not apply to technology, then.

I’ve been buying a lot of stuff lately. Most of them are electronic devices or their accessories. I usually do not feel bad about buying them, because I only buy them on sale. For a power supply that I got for $55, I got another one the following week because it was on sale, for $5 after rebate.

Prices keep dropping for electronic devices. Compact flash cards used to be so hot and expensive, now there is nobody selling used ones on eBay–even brand new ones are only a few bucks a piece. Really, who would buy anything with original prices now?

I did a little inventory for just the last three months of my purchasing. Quite astonishing indeed.

• Power supply. Original price $55, on sale for $5
• Wireless PCI network card, $40 rebate
• CF card, $40 rebate
• Laptop RAM, $40 rebate
• Laptop, $200 rebate
• LCD monitor, 15% discount and coupone, plus 3% cashback
• New cell phone plan, $300 rebate
• Contact lens, $40 rebate
• …

Is it just me or the way the companies do business has changed? When have we started buying everything at full or above full price, and only buy them at such high price because after rebate price is a “good deal”? We end up having all these things that we get for cheap (if we get the rebates) and nobody is willing to buy used ones. Just not long ago my friends are still talking about how there are all kinds of stuff being sold on eBay for ridiculously high prices, and now nobody is selling or buying used CF cards? Even 512mb ones!!

Something is wrong with people’s mentality in purchasing… I am fed up with filling up rebate paper and keeping track of 15 rebates at the same time. I think I still have $400 worth of rebates that I am waiting for. That means, I had spent more than twice as much as $400 on some junk that I would not be able to sell later!

I gotta stop buying things with rebates. It is killing me and my wallet.

But sometimes, I think I really do not have a choice. For example, the same brand of contact lens that I have been using for the past few years now introduces the rebate marketing scheme, too. I have to use contact lens, so I have to buy them at above full price, and get the rebates later.

It gotta stop.