Loading ...Archive for November, 2003
turkey ramble
November 26th, 2003
how will you spend your turkey day? tomorrow we are going to andy’s step grandparents’ and then on saturday we will be at his mom’s. i will be stuffed! his mom prepared a 20lb turkey *faint*
I got a pair of toe socks! it’s carebear toe socks! aren’t they cute? i always want a pair coz i never had one. one time i saw andy’s sister wearing a pair i was eager to try one out. i finally got mine from Sears. it was $5.60 - yea a lot more expensive than regular socks but hey at least it’s rainbowy and unique. i didn’t like wearing them tho. i have tiny toes; the socks are way too big for them. oh well i still love staring at them.
i saw this story from pei. OMG… it can’t be real but it is. and miki helped me found new pink poo. don’t ever look at ice cream the same way again. and thank you leah for the beautiful gift! i really should make some gifts myself except i am busy eating summer sauage and crackers. now i have crumbs all over my lap. i love to see beautiful xhtml validated and tableless css layouts. great job sidney!
is this for real?
November 25th, 2003
OMG now they are advertising “mail processing” and “other easy jobs” at our college. i went downstairs to make a phone call and saw the advertisement of www.studentypay.com (if you go there, please protect yourself from popups. they don’t go away) i tore off one of the paper slips from the ad and it said Mailing/Other Easy Work, Can Fit Your Schedule, No Esp. Req. Up to $938/wk
i thought we already talked about that this is a scam. now they are attacking colleges?! and what the hell does “No Esp. Req” stand for? “No Especially Requirements” - you mean “No Special Requirements”?! this is so ridiculous arg..
dodo cheng & FFX-2
November 22nd, 2003
shellie informed me that my picture in this layout looks a lot like HK actress Dodo Cheng (Zheng Yuling). how amusing! i had no idea Zheng Yuling’s english name is Dodo Cheng and that she used to have bangs too. i loved her hi, cousin (biao jie, ni hao) movie. it was hilarious. she did a great job in her role.
we started FFX-2 last nite. boy isn’t it surprising that X-2 is now the most popular game at gamefaq. altho we didn’t get too far, i have some thoughts about FFX vs. FFX-2. *spoilers*
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my trick to fight spam
November 21st, 2003
i’ve changed my email again 
luck@regretless.com no longer works, please use this form to get my new updated email. altho constantly changing my email might be a bit of pain for those who like to send me emails, it is the best way i can come up with to fight spams. it’s not simply an email account change, i merely changed my forward. my old luck@regretless.com forwards to my REAL email account. by using forwards, i’m able to hide my REAL email address. my REAL email account offers this service called “personality” which allows you to REPLY with a fake email address ^_^ i’m totally in love with that feature because now even i reply emails people sent to me via the web email form, i can still hide my REAL email address. this is just a treat! no matter what kind of spam service you use, they can never block all the spams. sometimes they even block emails you need. with a forward, i can simply change it when i start getting too many spams. this is why i changed mine. fortunately i have a back up SPAM GETTING email at yahoo i changed my original luck@regretless.com to forward to my yahoo account which has its vacation message turned on. so now if people send emails to luck@regretless.com, they will get an auto response message telling them to use my web email form to contact me instead. so i don’t lose important emails sent to my old address. of course i have to on top of some important online accounts i used my old email address such as amazon, paypal, sitepoint etc.
honour killing
November 20th, 2003
so in today’s world, there are still “honour killings”. i’ve read about the abuse of women in my international policy book a while ago. but this story just blew my mind!!
*copied the story in case the link comes broken*
Another ‘honor’ victim: Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by mother
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Nov. 14, 2003 12:20 PM
ABU QASH, West Bank - Rofayda Qaoud - raped by her brothers and impregnated - refused to commit suicide, her mother recalls, even after she bought the unwed teenager a razor with which to slit her wrists. So Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud says she did what she believes any good Palestinian parent would: restored her family’s “honor” through murder.
Armed with a plastic bag, razor and wooden stick, Qaoud entered her sleeping daughter’s room last Jan. 27. “Tonight you die, Rofayda,” she told the girl, before wrapping the bag tightly around her head. Next, Qaoud sliced Rofayda’s wrists, ignoring her muffled pleas of “No, mother, no!” After her daughter went limp, Qaoud struck her in the head with the stick.
Killing her sixth-born child took 20 minutes, Qaoud tells a visitor through a stream of tears and cigarettes that she smokes in rapid succession. “She killed me before I killed her,” says the 43-year-old mother of nine. “I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family’s honor.”
The guilty brothers are in jail.
Qaoud’s confessed crime, for which she must appear before a three-judge panel on Dec. 3, is one repeated almost weekly among Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel. Female virtue and virginity define a family’s reputation in Arab cultures, so it’s women who are punished if that reputation is perceived as sullied.
Victims’ rights groups say the number of “honor crimes” appears to be climbing, but at the same time, getting little attention. Israelis and Palestinians are too busy with political and military issues to notice what they dismiss as domestic disputes, says Suad Abu-Dayyeh, who works for the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling in East Jerusalem.
Poverty and war have exacerbated the problem, says Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a social work and criminology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an expert on violence against women.
“Men do not have any power except over women,” she says.
Police in Israel investigated at least 18 honor killings in the past three years.
Palestinian police reported 31 cases in 2002 - up from five during the first half of 1999 - the last time such incidents were counted before the current Palestinian uprising began, according to the center’s study.
But the number of killings is likely higher, given that Palestinian police investigate only crimes that have been reported, said Yousef Tarifi, the Ramallah prosecutor assigned to Qaoud’s case. Shalhoub-Kevorkian says her past research showed the likely number to be 15 times higher than the number of reported cases.
Legal authority on the West Bank has been weakened by Israel’s military crackdown, and the growing influence of militant Islamic factions has led clans to dole out their own justice. “In this chaotic situation, every man who thinks he knows a little bit of the Quran thinks honor issues are supposed to be resolved by killing,” says Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who adds that leading Muslim clerics in Jerusalem and Jordan have denounced such killings.
Qaoud says her husband, Abdul Rahim, 52, told her the Quran forbade such killings. But neither his pleas nor those of Palestinian crisis counselors swayed her. “Why did she accept what happened to her?” Qaoud asks. “Even a wife can tell her husband ‘no.’ “
According to court records, Rofayda was raped by her brothers, Fahdi, 22, and Ali, 20, in a bedroom they shared in the family’s three-room house. On Nov. 26, 2002, doctors at a nearby hospital who were treating Rofayda for an injured leg discovered she was eight months pregnant.
Palestinian authorities whisked her off to a women’s shelter in Bethlehem, where she gave birth to a healthy boy on Dec. 23. He has since been adopted by another Palestinian family, court records show.
Rofayda, meanwhile, wanted to return to her parents in the Ramallah suburb of Abu Qash. Ramallah Gov. Mustafa Isa called a meeting with the family and village elders, demanding they pledge in writing not to harm the girl. “He asked me if everyone in the family and the village would promise not to bother this girl, but I told him I couldn’t give him a guarantee,” Abu Qash Mayor Faik Shalout says.
Rofayda returned home in late January without notifying the authorities.
The shame was unbearable, Qaoud said. Relatives and friends refused to speak to her family. Her elder daughters’ husbands wouldn’t allow them to visit because Rofayda had returned home.
On Jan. 27, Rofayda sent word that she was in danger to crisis counselors at Abu-Dayyeh’s center in East Jerusalem. They, in turn, called Palestinian police in Ramallah, who have jurisdiction over Abu Qash. The police said they couldn’t get to the Qaoud home because of Israeli checkpoints.
Qaoud, meanwhile, sent her husband, who suffers from heart disease, to a doctor in the nearby village of Bir Zeit. Her three youngest children went to a cousin’s house.
At 11:30 p.m. she killed Rofayda, court records show. Tarifi says he’s convinced Qaoud had an accomplice, but Qaoud insists she acted alone.
Qaoud turned herself in and, after four months in jail, was released pending the resolution of her case.
While honor killings committed in the heat of the moment - for example, by a husband who catches his wife in bed with another man - generally carry a six-month to one-year jail term, Qaoud will likely be sentenced to three to five years in prison, Tarifi says. The fact she is a mother who was trying to protect her family’s honor mitigates the crime of premeditated murder, which is punishable by death under Palestinian law, he adds.
The brothers are serving minimum 10-year sentences in a Palestinian jail in the West Bank city of Jericho for statutory rape of a relative, Tarifi says.
No trace of Rofayda or her brothers remains in the family home. Qaoud says she ripped up all of their photographs and burned their clothes. The bedroom in which she killed her daughter is now a storeroom.
Erasing the memories is harder, she admits. She eases her pain by doting on her three children still living at home, especially the youngest, Fatima, 9, whom she lavishes with kisses. The children say they’ve forgiven Qaoud and return her affection.
“My mother did this because she does not want us to be punished by people,” Fatima explains with a shy smile. Leaning into Qaoud’s arms, the little girl adds: “I love my mother much more now than before.”
xmas cards exchange
November 18th, 2003
is anyone interested in christmas cards exchange? i can not promise to get everyone unique cards. i have a few funny card sets i wish to use. it’s just nice to collect cards from different people and see different handwritings and personal messages. so if you think i know you and that you are interested, please drop me a note.
gamefaq said Final Fantasy X-2 is going to be released today. but i called Bestbuy and Wal-mart, it’s not going to be out until this Saturday! ARRRGG!
wtf?! growing sweater?!
November 16th, 2003
earlier today i was depressed because one of my favorite sweaters has GROWN SO BIG that i can no longer wear it!! ok physically i can still wear it but it looks ridiculous when it’s so FREAKING BIG. i’m NOT JOKING. i still don’t know why it grew but i was so heartbroken when i pulled it out of my drawer and put it on and then freaked out when i looked myself in the mirror.
this is the sweater
now the same sweater with a fitting shirt on top of it
you see how huge it has grown?!
the sweater has been sitting in the draw since last winter. i don’t remember how big it was last winter. i knew i’ve worn it and it must still be fitting. what can possibly make a sweater GROW!!!! the only thing i can think of is being washed in hot water or something. but andy (he’s the one who always does the laundary since we always take our laundary to his bro’s for free) swore he’s never washed it with hot water. i really don’t know ;_; later he tried cheer me up by saying the sweater must be jealous that i was too cute. so it grew so that i can no longer wear it. oh god. the worst is that it’s not the only one that grew, this pretty sweater i got earlier this year had grown too but not as much. WOAH!!!! SO NOT FAIR.. WHAT IS UP WITH ALL THAT! my poor clothes. i don’t have that many to begin with 
on a happier note, my dad’s back from china! i was excited to try out a few shirts he was going to bring me. the stupid airline misplaced one of his baggages! so only one arrived. all i got are these:
click to view the photo
not too sappy. still cheered me up. check it otu, the transparent bra straps have HELLOKITTY on it. haha i didn’t know hellokitty is also associated with bra straps production. talking about the peanut butter, here’s a traditional chinese dorky story for you. our family is addicted to shanghai leng mian and the peanut butter here has too much butter and it becomes extremely sticky when you mix it with cold noodle. since the leng mian i had eaten in shanghai never had this problem, i suggested my dad to look for some CHINESE PEANUT BUTTER. so he did. he went to the super market in china and grabbed “SKIPPY” peanut butter. he thought it looked good. but not til he came back here could he find out that’s AN AMERICAN BRAND. LMAO!!
2 truth 1 lie
November 14th, 2003
DNW 2 truth 1 lie service is intended to promote online friendship. You submit three general statements about yourself. Among them, 2 are facts about you while the other one is a lie. You post the answer to your submission on your OWN website. You then submit the EXACT url of your answer along with your other statements. After that, people browsing dnw or visiting other sites may come to your site to find out the answer of the 2 truth 1 lie you set up here. If they find the facts about you fun, maybe they will become your friends and visit your site more often. Doesn’t that sound lovely? Alright if you are ready to join the fun, please follow the steps.
Ready for mine?
1. I can not type without looking at the keyboard.
2. Our family used to raise chicken on our balcony.
3. When I was 3 month old, I almost died because of a lung disease.
java man head, sex blog etc.
November 12th, 2003
today’s entry is made possible with hunting through my daily list. i have to share the findings. first of all, read wang jian shuo’s blog about the sex blog causing major incident in blogchina. this girl muzimei posts chunks of her unpublished (i assume?) sex novels in her blog. because of the content, it generated HUGE TRAFFIC. her blog was shut down a while ago and had recently reopened and it killed its blogger provider (blogchina.com) due its traffic. check out blogchina’s stats. just look at the days in month section and look at the graph. BOO! haha.. the bandwidth jumped from 2.99 GB on Nov 10th to 11.59 GB on Nov 11th and to 25.49 GB on Nov 12th.
HOLY CRAP.. so blogchina has to shut its service off. i’m surprised that they actually did not shut down muzimei’s sex blog. is it because too many people are supporting her? and i still don’t quite understand why this whole thing got so big? she’s merely talking about it not even showing pictures or anything. too many sexually oppressed souls in china?! (what should i say?) i’m probably misunderstanding this situation. but it’s the truth that this sex blog caused blogchina to be shut down temporarily.
this test from kozzi is extremely amusing. in the photo i will post below, there is a head of a man. can you find it? *quoted from kozzi’s blog*
According to medical experiments:
If you can find the Man’s Head within 3 seconds, your right brain is more developed than normal people.
If you can find the Man’s Head within 1 minute, your right brain is developed normally.
If you can find the Man’s Head within 1-3 minutes, your right brain is slow in reacting, and you should eat more meat protein.
If you can’t find the Man’s Head in 3 minutes or more, your right brain is a disaster… extremely slow in reacting…eat way more protein, and try some Ginkgo Biloba.
Well i don’t know. i found it in about 1 minute coz i was looking at it the wrong way i think LOL. give it a try?
thru steph, i found brookelyn.org is back. amazing designs? i think luvliness, brookelyn, donaville fall into the same design style category. they are quite different from jenn’s design style. i admire them and don’t forget 26 things photo project for the month of November has started secret santa 2003 event seems to be fun except i don’t know how much i’d trust that everyone will buy the gift.
the min-height bug
November 11th, 2003
the newly released theme’s (read previous entry) tableless css layout has a bug. the layout doesn’t look the same under MSIE and Mozilla. The problem would be very easy to solve if i were to use a table. all i will have to do is set the height=”750″ in the table defintion. then if the content in the table is not long enough, it fills the rest of empty space. and if the content is too long, it stretches the table’s height. this maintains the minimum height of the table at 750px. we also take it for granted that this behavior is supported by all browsers. to accomplish the same task with pure css becomes a bit more interesting and esp. when you also want it to be supported by “all browsers” (meaning MSIE, mozilla & opera) ^_^ if you are interested in knowing how to do that in tableless css, read on.
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