**warning** this is gonna be a bunch of geek talk that will consist of such words like cfdisk, emerge, mount, grub and other countless similar words so please do not read any further if you don’t want to hear yourself saying, “wtf?” or a big “huh”. You have been warned.

This is going to be a temporary journal as I share my experience installing Gentoo Linux onto my Shuttle XPC computer. I developed an itch to play with Linux again after one of my friends told me about it. He works at Google and they use Linux to power all of their approx. 250,000 servers to run the search engine. The last time I played with Linux was a Redhat 6.0 distro a while back in college when I was taking system administration class at RIT and one on my computer. Then I got into web development, designing websites with CSS, PHP and MySQL, then I worked with Microsoft Access and Excel in my internships (they were for government and they’re ruled by Bill Gates and Michael Dell), so I slowly forgot about Linux and I needed more disk space to store mp3 songs, movies, and games. Another reason, during that time, it wasn’t exactly eye-catching or something to impress your friends and I hate that damn squarish boxes in Linux.

Since then, new steps has been made in the Linux development and by now, there are more than 100 different Linux distros. Linux has really grown since I “abandoned” them. Being a visual guy, I need something that will blow me away and then I see this screenshot, and this mac-like flavor. That’s more than enough to convince myself and my turn to make my friends jealous. :-) And I’ve quit playing games on computer, especially CS, as I’ve had enough of getting splattered constantly. Besides, I already have a hacked xbox where I can rip off games (just don’t tell Microsoft). Time to devote my time to the Linux World!

Last night, I was in a hurry mood, although I was aware that this type of installation can take a long time especially if you fall into “unexpected events” and you’re struggling to find what’s causing it. I was itching to get it up and running, seeing Gentoo in action. I downloaded a distribution copy of Gentoo and burn it to a CD as a boot CD plus installation. Then, I opened up Partition Magic 8 software to make room for Linux and I have one primary partition plus two logical drives in an extended partition. I decided to reduce the size of the primary partition, leaving the logical drives intact. As per instruction online, I created a new Linux boot partition, swap, and root partition. What appeared to be all good, I let the program made changes to the HD, although I have a queasy feeling that something would go wrong. The change made is done and time to reboot. Then I got this error message in the boot-up screen, “Missing Operating System.” Oh shoot, the program has altered the Master Boot Partition and is now missing an operating system. So, I went into cfdisk off a gentoo boot cd and ahh, I see no boot asterisk next to /dev/hda1 NTFS, so I put the asterisk on that, then reboot.

You think I’d be out of the jungle and save my ass but not so quite. Now, I can see the Windows Professional boot screen and that dots moving right, then all of a sudden, it said “autochk.exe not found”, then I get the infamous blue screen of death with code that said Session Manager is fucked up, something like that. “Ohh f**king great.” I’m in a big trouble and that’s what u get for not taking the time and doing research before you start the installation process. Problems began to mount and I don’t have a laptop to google for problems/solutions and I need to ask my roommate if I could borrow his laptop but he’s gone out somewhere with his new girlfriend. So, I f**ked it, called it a night, plopped on my bed, watched some NBA playoffs game (Go Miami, Houston Rockets, and the Spurs) and got some sleep.

While in my sleep, “worse to worse, and you are hanging on the cliff on your fingertips somewhere in the Grand Canyon, luckily, you still have two logical drives, which mean you can boot into Windows Recovery Console and copy important files (mostly porno movies actually) over to the logical drives, and then do a clean wipe and reinstall Windows XP. At least you’ll be free of porno pop-up ads that you can’t seem to get rid of, even after you used Ad-aware, Spybot, etc. Or you go to work tomorrow and to kill some time, look for solutions online, write notes, print out papers, then you go home and try out the solutions to fix the blue screen of death. If not, clean wipe it and save your porno.”

Today, I made plans with my friend to go to a driving range to “warm up” for a Deaf golf league tomorrow. He told me that the driving range has unlimited buckets, like a buffet, hit all you like. I thought he was kidding me because I never heard of unlimited buckets unless I’m Tiger Woods. When we got there, sure enough, they did have unlimited balls, for $14 dollars, sweet. Also, one of the Deaf league members told me that I gotta score better than 100 to become a member. O_o, pressure. Heh, my friend and I hit the balls like damn crazy muthafuckers. When it got a little boring after hitting like 100 balls in a row, we decided to play a little game. Ofc, one of them was a driving contest—that I won with my TaylorMade R5 driver, :-), played some accuracy games like who can hit the ball closest to the pin or putting the ball between flags as if they’re a fairway. I’m getting pretty confident about my irons but a bit unpredictable with my driver cuz I tend to force it a bit too much. We ended up hitting balls for 3 hours at the driving range and we probably hit more than 500 balls each, heh. Despite all those balls hit, it’s my short game that I’m most concerned with, as I’m not that delicate with putting and chipping. Wish me a good luck at the league game tomorrow. :-)

Last night, just as I was getting ready to go to bed early after fighting off the urge to take a nap after work (my blood sugar level alway seems to plummet after I leave work, causing me to be really sleepy, dunno why). I checked my usual necessities—sidekick, wallet (so I could buy foods, :-) ), and keys. Except that I couldn’t find my f**king keys. I looked everywhere in the house and I couldn’t afford to lose it again because I did lose it last fall and I’m hanging on my only car key because it costs over $200 to order a new key due to some stupid security code inside the key to activate the ignition in my car. I remember I left it somewhere on the arms of the couch, so it probably had slipped into the cushions, so I looked everywhere into that damn couch. I thought about ripping up that cheap couch because there was a small crease underneath where my keys might have crawled into there but my roommate said no, it’s impossible for my keys to go through it. Well, hello, do you see my keys around? If you don’t see it, maybe it’s in there, eh? but I realize he might be right. So I spent a good hour looking for my keys and it occurred to me that my keys may not be even in the house. And my roommate’s friend was here recently, so I gave up on my pathetic search and told my roommate to ask him if he mistook my keys. So, I went to bed, exhausted, and only six hours of sleep. Grr.

The following morning, I got up for work as usual, tried to look for keys for a few more minutes but nothing. Walked, getting metroed to work. Then my roommate paged me saying that his friend indeed has my keys. Oh that gotta be the best news of the day. Appparently, he was too stoned that he thought my keys were his. Phffth. But I can’t put all the blame on him cuz I shouldn’t have left the keys on the couch in the first place.

Now, I’m thinking if I should shell out two hundred bucks for second key in case I lost my keys again….

I decided to change a bit to my website, moving the “clickadelicious” section to the bigger left column to give it more room and increase its clickability. I realize I spend a good part on finding good links. It’s like finding treasures in the sand with my metal detector. So that’s my worthless reason to move the section.

I’m working on adding a “Flickr”-like photo gallery and as soon as I populate the folder with pics, I’ll post it up and you can start making fun of my amateurish photos. I have pics from the Washington DC Korean Meetup where I met an unofficial Hangul tutor. It was fun and I got to eat cow intestines and drank five shots of Soju. More on that later.

I realize I’m not writing as often as I should, or at least this rule of thumb says so. It said that if you want to attract more visitors, you should write not once but twice a day, so that your readers will know you have something new when they click onto your website or blog. Eh…

The weather here sure is playing a game with us. Last week, it was well over 80’s for most of the week and I began seeing real serious legs flip-flopping on sidewalks as I cruised down the streets with my sunroof open. Ah, spring time! But this week, the temperature went down below 60s and I had to step outside first to see if it’s warm enough to wear shorts. Otherwise, I go back inside and put on pants.

My friends are hooking me to diss work early and go play disc golf with them. I’ll do my best to sneak out of cubicle. :-)

An old friend of mine found this pic and emailed me the link. So I clicked on it and it showed the pic of me when I was a freshman at Gallaudet University before I transferred to RIT the following year and graduated from there. I looked at the old picture and couldn’t believe how different I look now, so I look at my recent pics and decide to make a “before/after” picture like you’d see in weight loss or plastic surgery informericals. So, that’s what four years of college, spring breaks, and plenty of kegs can happen to you. :-)

Zoom zoom! Bye-bye, mazda and everyone else too! :-)

Squander that beer! It’s a big 32 oz jug

Who could have thought that in one day, closed captioning would “power” Google’s search engine as the source for searching through videos? Google recently introduced Google Video as a means to search through tv programming and used closed captioning (CC) for indexing. What? Google uses closed captioning!? This may appear insignificant to you who don’t have to set on CC to understand the shows, but ever since TV was created, deaf people were all but stuck to watch tv as if people were puppets behind the glass and they had to rely on their imagination to assume what was going on in the shows. Finally in 1971, the closed captioning was finally born behind the glass in line 21 of the vertical blinking interval (VBI) and required a special decoder since hearing people didn’t want to be bothered with the “annoying” black/white lines invading precious space on their televisions. In parternship between ABC and NBC, they gave a preview to deaf audience by captioning “The Mob Squad.” Since it was only a preview, it cost them money to provide such a service, and the Federal Government (Dept. of Education and FCC) realized they had to get involved; otherwise, this project would be dead. So, they gave a push to this project and this “experiment” was finally done. Who knew how many petitions and letters had to be done to get the CC into the tvs?

It wasn’t till 8 years later before the first closed captioning was finally broadcast across the U.S. and that was on The ABC Sunday Night Movie, The Wonderful World of Disney (NBC), and Masterpiece Theatre (PBS). Remember the decoders I just mentioned above? Till 1992, only about 400,000 decoders were sold and the gigantic TV networks saw no reason to keep captioning their shows. Without the government’s intervention, CC would have simply gone extinct and we deaf people would be back to watching Tom & Jerry than Law & Order ‘cuz it’d give a better comprehension. So, in 1996, the Congress passed the law to require CC be available on all televisions. (By then, the CC decoder had shrunk to the size of a chip and it didn’t cost the manufactuers much to install the decoder chip inside the tvs.) Even to this day, not everything is captioned but we have come far since only 15 hours a week were captioned in 1980 and several close encounters with the death of CC due to money talks.

There you have it, a short bit of history on the closed captioning and you can see why somebody like me is very delighted to see something like Google is indexing CC as the source for TV information. All of a sudden, it’s not so insignificant anymore and it’s accessible to the millions of people around the world who watch TV, not to deaf people only. Now, TV networks see a reason to keep captioning their shows ‘cuz they know that people will be searching through Google Video, and the more captioning there is, the more likely those people will be led back to the network that provides the captioning. That is a good thing for TV networks. Finally, after 25 years since the first captioning, we may see 100% captioning on all shows and you can say thanks to Google.

Got this from http://readthisforfun.blogspot.com/

Lol, so true…

1) IN PRISON – you spend the majority of your time in an8X10 cell.

AT WORK – you spend the majority of your time in a 6X8 cubicle.

2) IN PRISON – you get three meals a day.

AT WORK – you only get a break for one meal and you pay for it.

3) IN PRISON – you get time off for good behavior.

AT WORK – you get more work for good behavior.

4) IN PRISON – the guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you.

AT WORK – you must carry around a security card and open all the doors for

yourself.

5) IN PRISON – you can watch TV and play games.

AT WORK – you get fired for watching TV and playing games.

6) IN PRISON – you get your own toilet.

AT WORK – you have to share with some idiot who pees on the seat.

7) IN PRISON – they allow your family and friends to visit.

AT WORK – you can’t even speak to your family.

8) IN PRISON – the taxpayers pay all expenses with no work required.

AT WORK – you get to pay all the expenses to go to work and then they

deduct taxes from your salary to pay for Prisoners.

9) IN PRISON – you spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out.

AT WORK – you spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside

bars.

10) IN PRISON – you must deal with sadistic wardens.

AT WORK – they are called managers.

“To the computer users around the world, you’ve been blessed.”

And my ?? name is ?, ??.

*You would need to install East Asian language to make this post readable, :-)

I’ve memorized nearly all of the characters and know that I would need to continually learn the language before it’s permanently rooted into my brain. Now, I’m working on my ?? vocabulary words.

When the year turned 2005, someone asked me what’s my new year resolution. I thought about it and I realized that it’s nearly the same as every last year—get into a better shape, read more books, eat healthier foods, stay in touch with my parents more often, don’t go to bed too late, don’t oversleep, and so on. I realize they were not exactly very inspirational so I looked around other people’ blogs to see what they say about theirs. One actually read a book every week and blogged about it. Someone actually ran at least a mile everyday. Someone else wants to watch Oprah and Dr. Phil shows everyday. There were many good ideas but I’m not that ambitious or have no desire to do that kind of thing. Fast-forward to April 6th, 2005, I found my new year resolution and that’s to learn Korean language, Hangul. My textbook arrived yesterday, so I begin my self-education now.

After flipping through the textbook, I realize something. There is no way am I gonna learn this all by my own. To keep my motivation high, I need to find someone or a group to share it with, someone who can help guide me and recognize my mistakes. It is fruitless to learn a new language if you don’t have someone to chat. It’s like learning a new magic trick and you don’t have anyone to show to. Again, I go to the web and to my surprise, I found some good websites. korea.banoffeepie.com. Actually, their tagline is “Korean-related weblogs written in English.” Simple. This website is like a webring that contains the list of blogs that relate to Korea. I just submitted my blog there but it has to be approved first before it goes into the list. Next one I found was the meetup here in DC. I joined the group and hope to meet some of them!

Like being a teacher, I have to make a lesson plan. First week – memorize the 21 vowels and 19 consonants. Make index cards as flash cards. I feel so like a kid in elementary school!

That’s right. I got a little surprise for you…for visiting my website. :-) I found this $50 dollars coupon off a $100 purchase at Guess. If you don’t care how you look or don’t bother try to look good, you can fuggedaboutit!

Go to the www.guess.com. Add items to the cart that totals 100 dollars or higher. Then check out and use this coupon – SHPCRD – copy and paste into the promotion code to get your 50 dollars off. It expires on April 17th, 2005 and items are running out fast. Happy shopping!

*update* – thought I’d add a little graphical action to this post, :-)

I just found a perfect way to make a good use of my overrated Sony digital camera. I found this website where bloggers choose a theme, then submit a photo that matches the theme every week. There are really many good photos and I find it very fascinating to see how a theme is portrayed by a photo as there are so many different ways to capture the theme. I suggest you to check it out especially if you want to take your camera out more often!