Finding nursing home

Youngster don't think about future much.  They forgot about yesterday and don't much much about tomorrow.  All that matters to them is now: where to go to have fun, what is available now to have fun and "that chick/dude looked b***able."

And that's why I know for sure that I am old.  I constantly think about what I can do now in order to get a chance of having fun tomorrow.  And the older I get, I more I tended to shift away from "having fun tomorrow" to "surviving tomorrow".

And that's also why I am starting to research on nursing home for myself.  This is kind of a detour of my original plan, which was dying on or before age 40.  I know I missed my deadline, but can't catch up with it because of legal reason and religious constrain.  Until they finally legalized assistance suicide, I need to prepare for plan B.  I also know that I will die alone because my huge ego and arrogant character.  It's just so much easier to be my enemy than being my lover, and up until now, all of my enemies are too lazy or too cheap to hire assistant to kill me, or they are probably smart enough to realizing that keeping me alive gives me more pain and finishing it right away.  To that I say bravo to you mother ****ing evil mind.

Oddly enough, I googled for a while and couldn't find any information about nursing home in Houston.  So if you come across anything about the nursing home.  Let me know.  I would like to do a price comparison. 

Dropbox

Dropbox was being block at the office location I worked at, but at least they are NOT blocking it when I was at home, so I can still sync my work between multiple places.

Best photo storage for iPad

My iPad2 has only 16Gb, but then I have 3G service, so anything allows me to off load data to the cloud would be a great news to me.  Recently I found out that I have 2 needs regarding to photos.

• I need to find a place to store a lot of cute dogs and cats photo, and then browse them on my iPad 2 at ease.
• Once I find the cute photo I like, I want to use the photo as wallpaper on my iPad 2.

To accomplish the task, not only I need to find a place to put content on the cloud, but I also need an iPad app that makes it easy to navigate the photo, select, and use the photo as wallpaper.

After some research, I found 2 storage and 2 corresponding apps.  Both iPad apps are paid app, but with less than US$2, I found them worthy.

Solution 1: Facebook + Cinq photo (Free, $2.99 to remove Ad)
Uploading photo to Facebook site is relatively straight forward.  For quality, I chose "High Quality", and take took quite a while.  Then I navaigate the photos on Cinq app.  It worked OK, but somehow I can't choose the photo and use it as wallpaper.  Maybe there's other app that does a better job on loading Facebook photo, so let me know if it find one.

Solution 2: Flickr + FlickStackr ($1.99)
I've been using FlickStackr for a while and very satisfy with it's feature.   Combine it with a free Flickr account, and I was able to do exactly what I planned on.  My only complain is that there's a 300Mb monthly limitation on how much how can upload.  But then, nothing is stopping me from opening multiple Flickr account.

Office and morons

It's normal to have some morons, or even tons of morons, in workplace.  But when there's not even a single smart people exist in the office, it's definitely time to quit, because stupidity is highly contagious.

Extract audio from YouTube video, Round 2

Almost everytime when I was invited to play drum set at Sunday service, the worship leader would send out the corresponding YouTube links for the songs that we were going to play, so that we could get used to the arrangement.  This is particular important to me as a drummer.  Unlike other parts that has score or tabs written on paper , I didn't have any drum score, so I relied on what I heard from the audio of the YouTube videos.

Up until now I was using Firefox and Downloadhelper to download those YouTube video into flv files, and then extract out the audio part (usually in mp3 format) using FLVExtract.  That workflow needs to be changed as I just found out that the video downloaded by Downloadhelper are all mp4 instead of Flv.

NO problem though, as I found need tool to deal with the problem.  There's a open source freeware called Yamb that act as the extraction front end, and then there is MP4Box as the extraction engine.  Once I set everything up, I can extract the aac files from the video, and continue listen to the audio part while I am driving.  Problem once again solved.

Blogpress, please fix it

I just found out that I cannot rely on BlogPress to save my local draft. Everytime I do that the app crash, and I have to uninstall and reinstall the app again. That really piss me off because I reallY want this app to work, not to mention that I just paid for the app. Ahhhhhhhh....

從良

因為iPad 2不能用老翻軟件，所以這幾天買了很多自己用了很久但沒有付款的軟件。算做改過自身了吧 。其實加起來少過二十美元，但令我生活更方便，物有所值，應該早一對從良才對。

Location:De Moss Dr,Houston,United States

Air Video I love you

I wasn't too thrilled a few days ago when I brought Air Video (my favorite video streaming software for iPad) and found that it didn't work on my iPad 2 with iOS 5.  But today I found that they released a new update, and now Air Video works flawlessly on my iPad 2.  Super awesome.  Sometimes I actually enjoy watching on my iPad more than on my HDTV just because everything is so instant on and the interface is so easy to use.

Critical Plan B

It's always important to have plan B, because there's a chance that plan A can fail, it will fail, and then you need to plan B.

For instance, some apps just keep crashing on the iOS5 Beta, so I always download multiple version of the same kind of app, so that if I failed, I can use the other.  Like I was reading the sample of the book "the Girl who kicked the hornet's nest" on Nook, and it kept crashing when I tried to get the definition of words.  So I switched to the Amazon app, download the sample book, and found it worked nicely.  Once again, plan B wins.

Box.Net works great on HTML5 web browser

I really love Box.Net on web browser.  This is by far the best cloud drive management interface on web browser I've seen so far.  All you need is an OK decent new web browser, like Chrome 11, and you can then enjoy all the UI feature that you expected from any file management tool, like right click, drag and drop and so on.

Box.Net as the cloud drive for iPad

I am starting to use Box.Net as the cloud drive for my iPad.  Dropbox is fine but it force you to have only one client on your machine, and that means I can have only at most 2Gb to play with.  Since Box.Net use web browser drag and drop to send file from your local machine to the cloud drive, so technically I can have as many drives as I want by simply creating another account.

There is always a catch in free service, though, and Box.Net is no different.  For instance, the file you upload can only be smaller than 25Mb.  That makes it impossible for me to use Box.Net as my manga repository since many of the files are bigger than 25Mb.  It can, however, be a small repository for photos and eBooks.

How to set up Google Calendar and Contact list on your iPhone and iPad

I always found it odd that the way to make calendar and contact list work with iPhone/iPad is by use Exchange setting and not the Gmail setting.  Oh well, as long as it works.  Here's the steps I went through:

• First you need to make sure that NO OTHER account setting are syncing Gmail Calendar and Contact with your gmail account.
• Next, in Setting of your iPhone/iPad, under "Mail, Contacts, Calendar", set a new account.
• For type, choose Exchange
• For domain, leave it blank.  For email, enter the full Email address (something@gmail.com), and same for the Username (something@gmail.com).  For password, just enter your gmail account password.
• Then you will be prompted to enter the server name.  Enter "m.google.com".
• I set to use SSL.

And that should be it.

Redeeming Credit Card Reward points

I was trying to figure out what item should I spent my Chase credit card reward points on, and eventually found out that the best value is on getting Amazon gift card.  After all, I frequently buy stuff from Amazon.com.  If I choose any item, like speaker or Apple TV, the value is always lower than the corresponding Amazon Gift card value.

Just got a new iPad 2

From those Mac fanatic's perspective, my current Apple ecosystem is probably the hippest:  I have a iPad 2 3G with iOS 5 installed and I have a MacMini running the MacOSX Lion Preview 4 and the latest XCode installed for development for iOS5.  But then, you can also think of it as living among time bomb with bucks waiting to blow up any given time.

It took me 2 hours just to set up all the accounts on all the apps i need to use on my iPad.  So far the effort is worthy.

So far I enjoy iOS 5.  The new notification system is definitely essential from now forward.  In fact, just by using it for a day, I don't know how I can live without it anymore.

The machine is definitely faster compare with my old iPad 1.  Now longer do like feel like things are lagging or always have than 1 to 2 seconds of waiting.  When I press a soft button on screen, it recognized my tap and does thing for me right a way.  It's a joyful experience.

Since it's a developer preview of the OS, I had problem authorize and set up the machine right out of the box.  I had to wait until I got home and setup everything with XCode before I could use it.  The online activation didn't work ... yet.  I don't think the activation server for iOS5 is even up and running, but hopefully the out of the box setup experience will really be PC Free once they release the final version this fall.

Here's the downside: the iOS5 beta is REALLY in beta.  I have found the machine crashed and hanged up a few times just this morning.  I'll continue document this funky journey.

Nintendo Zone at BestBuy: Almost fail ... except ...

I read about Nintendo setting something called Nintendo Zone at Best Buy stores a month ago.  I wasn't like having some major hope, but still wonder how kind of "exclusive service" they would provide at store.

I tried 30 minutes ago, and it was lame.

All it does is providing web browser capability specifically for Nintendo 3DS, and then provide those game video and screenshot downloading that you can download with eShop app on 3DS with your own WiFi connection.  The trip was mostly waste of my time ....

... except that I was tempted and eventually put down $43.29 to buy a 3DS game Dead or Alive Dimensions.  So while the Nintendo Zone does nothing to me, it helped Nintendo made a sale that wouldn't have been if I were not at the store.  Good job Nintendo.

Not that many people, which is good

Somehow I was really enjoying this sitting aside observing people and overhearing people thing that I am doing now. Really don't understand why people watch reality show. This is way better. For one, everything around me are in ultimate resolution. Screw 1080p.

Also I like doing this on Sunday morning instead of during other busy hours. I hate it when there is too many people around. This 3 person per 10 seconds is the right kind of frequency.

So that's how the homeless people thinks

I think I heard someone telling me not to sleep on the bench along the bridge between hotels. I did not confirm it, but went ahead changed my pose from laying down to sitting up.

I was sitting semi-under-the-sun (cause technical I am still within indoor environment) for almost 2 hours just keep wiring and writing and wiring. A lot of people walking by, each mind their own business in their own way. It's like seeing hundreds of 15 seconds story walk by. Depends on my mood, I might feel lonely, pity, curious, enjoying, indifferent or a messy mix of all these.

As for now, I feel like a bump. I feel likes, I guess that's what homeless people see every single day. I guess they feel like they are like total outsider, and people who walked by are their version of Situation, Snooky and lady gaga, watching one after another freak show walk up.

Good enough

It's not like total freedom in America, but for the amount of stuff that I can do, it's good enough. And after living in this worth for this many years, I'll say it's pretty darn good to have "good enough."

Packing

Every time I pack my stuff before a strip, it always reminds me how so many devices I rely on to conduct my life: iPad, mobile phone, Nintendo 3DS, digital camera, headphone, bluetooth keyboard  ....  I already considered that traveling light.