Category Archives: rants

Women and Science

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“Did you know if you push the button on one of the barbie dolls, she will say ‘Math is hard! Let’s go shopping!’ That’s why we don’t have many women in the field of computer science.” – Ted Neward said at the nofluff open discussion and the crowd bursted into laughter. I looked around and noticed there were about 10% women in the audience.

But how true is that? Yesterday I discussed this topic with a female coworker. Even in today’s age, another guy in the field of computer science openly discussed how he will raise his daughters to be stay at home moms because he believes men in general are genetically built with stronger logical thinking skills. Seriously?

The only thing that’s preventing more women to be successful in the field of science is the mindset of that belief. And this belief is so deep rooted in all cultures.

I recently finished a historical fiction Peony in Love. The most amazing fact I learned from this book is there was a period during seventeenth-century China, women published books and those books were popular. Although after the policitical chaos, the reprint of those books were banned. But it’s wonderful to know such historical moments existed as early as seventeenth-century.

Why is this significant? Before Mao’s revolution in China, women were oppressed. Women were taught to strictly follow the three obedience four virtues (三从四德) from Confucianism. Emperors throughout Chinese history gave men absolute power to enforce these. Basically they were allowed to execute any women in their household for disobeying these rules. From Baidu:

The three obediences are “obey her father before marriage, her husband when married, and her sons in widowhood” and the four virtues are morality, proper speech, modest manner and diligent work. These are spiritual fetters of wifely submission and virtue imposed on women in feudal society.

In ancient China, women were caught to read and write so they may appear educated as a part of an elite family. However, they were not allowed to THINK. At least they had to keep their thoughts to themselves or behind the closed doors of their bed chambers. Even under these conditions, the fact women were still able to leave their writings behind was a great historical moment. Even though most of these publications were later banned from reprints once the emperors found out. It proves just because women were traditionally oppressed does not mean they had inferior logical thinking skills than men.

For the most parts, I’m not a Maoist and I think he brought much sufferings to China and led the country into great poverty and turmoil. But I have to give him credit for women’s liberation in China.

The Marriage Law passed by the People’s Republic in 1950 prohibited forced marriage and marriage of young girls, bride prices, domestic abuse, and gave women the right of divorce.

Women were given more power than they ever had in China during Mao’s era and this revolution was a huge step of bringing China into the modern times. When I grew up in China, I still heard stories about how in the coutry side boys were cherished more than girls and later I heard plenty of talk on the abortions of female babies in China. That is probably still true in China because the industrial revolution never happened for farming and it still has not happened. Plenty of farmers in China still farm by hand using the most inefficient/ancient farming practices. And the Chinese government has no established crop insurance programs like the US to help them out. When your family business is so heavily relied on physical labor, I can understand why you’d cherish males over females. In addition, the Chinese are still heavily influenced by their history to believe sons are meant to remain as a part of the family while daughters are married OUT. This belief however is much heavier in the rural areas than the cities. To tell you the truth, growing up in the biggest city in China, Shanghai, I never felt discrimination against me because I am female. My mom did not have to change her last name because she married my father. I think women’s place in the Chinese society at least in the cities is equal to men.

So why exactly in the US, a country that is supposedly THE LEADER of the world, still exist people who have such — hmm I can use the nice word “traditional” or “backwards” for not nice — beliefs? This makes me ponder…

Some things to consider:

First time watching the Olympics as a U.S. citizen

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Citizenship vs. Nationality

Nationality:

Membership of a nation in the sense of ethnic group (a group of people who share a common ethnic identity, language, culture, descent, history, and so forth). This meaning of nationality is not defined by political borders or passport ownership.

Citizenship:

Citizenship is determined by jus soli, jus sanguinis, or naturalization, which affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state. The most common distinguishing feature of citizenship is that citizens have the right to participate in the political life of the state, such as by voting or standing for election.

This is the first time for me to watch the Olympics since becoming an Amercian citizen in 2009. This allows me to view the Olympics from prespectives I never had before. I simply realized that citizenship DOES NOT equal nationality. The decision to become an U.S. citizen was really a practical one for me. I was a greencard holder/permanent resident alien prior to becoming a citizen. For me, the biggest reasons to become a citizen instead of a permanent resident are:

  • I do not wish to pay the U.S. government a significant amount of money to renew my greencard every ten years.
  • I do not wish to pay the Chinese government money to renew my Chinese passport every five years.
  • I do wish to vote in the U.S.

I never really thought much about nationality. The truth is obvious since I started to watch the Olympics that just because I’m technically an American citizen doesn’t mean I feel 100% like a natural born American. After I heard much bad news regarding the Chinese men’s gymnastic team’s qualification round performance, I felt disappointed and was not expecting them to do well in the final round. However, after I found out they won the gold medal, I was EXCITED to watch their performance on the premiere time NBC programming. I told my husband who’s a naturally born American that I was excited about the Chinese winning the gold, he asked how did the Amercians do. Truthfully I did not pay attention. I said I don’t know and he remarked “Did you want to change your citizenship back?” I was hurt by the comment.  I dug deeper as why I felt that way. I guess it’s because he was suggesting that I was disloyal to the country of my citizenship. Then I suddenly realized why people as famous as Maria Sharapova never changed their citizenship. None of the practical reasons for me (maybe except the last) to become a U.S. citizenship is really applicable in Maria’s case. She wants to align her citizenship with her nationality so she wouldn’t feel split when it comes to matches where she represents more than just herself.

This however doesn’t mean I’m not proud of Americans. It’s when the Chinese and Americans go head to head, my heart still goes to the Chinese. Will this feeling ever change naturally? Only time will tell.

Medal Count Rant

So much of the medal count competition is purely political. China claims the rest of the world except U.S. order medals by number of gold, silver and then bronze. This may have some truth as I see that’s how they were ordered on google. I can tell U.S. is getting some pressure regarding this since Bob Costas has to mention the comparison in the number of golds as well as the total now.  Although it would not mean a difference how you order the medals this year, either way U.S. is #1 in medal counts. It’s the 2008 Olympics where this was a huge debate.

Badminton Drama

Eight women were disqualified from the doubles tournament in this Olympics.

Why did this happen? From a technical perspective the Chinese wanted to maximize their chance of winning both the gold and silver medals. The way Badminton works in the Olympics is that you’d play earlier rounds to decide your seeding in the knockout stages.  The knockout stages start with quaterfinals. You get one shot and you are out. Each country may only enter two teams for each badminton event. This rule was added recently as more or less an anti-China affirmative action rule. China has traditionally dominated this sport since it became official in the Olympics so in order to give other countries a fair chance of medaling, each country may now only enter two teams. In the group stage of this year’s women’s double, one of the Chinese teams unexpected lost. This lowered their seeding so instead of meeting the other Chinese team in the finals, they would have met each other in the semifinal. In order to maintain the seeding to allow the two teams to meet in the final, the other team must also lose a match.  I did not look deep into the Korean team’s motivation for also wanting to lose that match. It’s possible that the Koreans just did not want the Chinese to get what they want. I really don’t know. But the result was both teams made it EXTREMELY obvious that they both tried to lose the match.

I was furious and disgraced when I watched the throw away match.  Even after I learned its motivation, I still believe it was fundamentally wrong.  But I want to entertain different perspectives in this story.

First, is there nothing wrong with the badminton tournament system that would encourage such match losing “strategy”? Should we question the design of the system as how & why would anyone GAIN from losing?

Second, are the players purely to blame for such acts of disgrace?  To tell you the truth, I find it extremely hard to believe that the players WANTED to lose a match they trained all of their career to win. I researched by reading many Chinese online articles on this topic.  The articles complained that it’s the Chinese coach 李永波’s “tradition” to execute such game losing strategies. Because he wants to show that he is the medal winning coach. Many badminton players previously had left the team due to the fact they were told to lose matches on purpose to work the system.  From a political point of view, China will never admit that they were trying to gain advantage by working the system.  If they actually do get political pressure for such acts, I can see them firing the coach and using him as a scapegoat.  So the players may be doing the losing for two major reasons.  They may have  truly believed they were being patriotic. They did it to help China to win the gold and silver medals in the event. Such brainwashing in China is quite commonplace and easy to understand.   On the other hand, they may have done it in the hope to expose such “corruption” in the system and coach to help putting it to an end.

Gymnastics (China’s torture)

Someone on my facebook friends list recently shared a photoshoped photo from this article from a facebook group titled “Some Amazing Facts”. The author of “Some Amazing Facts” photoshoped three of the worst photos from that article and then that photoshoped version spread all over facebook. People who don’t bother reading the original article would comment stuff like “China should be stripped out of all of its gymnastics medals for such torture!” Well, I went a little above and beyond the average facebook users and did some critial thinking. First we start with 1+1=2. Let’s examine the origin of these photos. They came from The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is a CONSERVATIVE, British daily middle-market TABLOID newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. Oh you mean those publications with gigantic ugly celebrity photos on the newsstands you try to ignore while waiting at a grocery store checkout line? But HOLY SHIT! Once the source photos are photoshoped into one and shared under a facebook group titled “Some Amazing Facts”, how can you question its authenticity? So now we know these photos are at best questionable but knowing China, I would not be surprised if the photos are authentic. The truth is the parents of these children are well aware of the amount of discipline it takes for their children to succeed and are willing to go through the scarifice. Just because no American/Western culture will understand or accept this doesn’t mean it’s TORTURE. Discipline is a part of China’s thousands year old culture. Right? Wrong? This is purely a question to the civilization. Slavery was socially accepted until the civil rights movements, right? Read the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to get more extreme examples. A basic example of discipline would be that all Chinese students have summer homework and they actually DO THEM. There are many other photos of happy children in that article which were completely unshown on the facebook group because the facebook group is basically promoting a campaign. They are showing ads for the message “China is unworthy of medals! Look at all of the tortured kids!” which reminds me of the anti-abortion campaign “Abortion is bad! Look at all of the mangled fetuses!”

Table Tennis

Table tennis is definitely one of the sports I miss dearly after moving to the U.S. To be able to watch it on a world stage is a great treat. While watching these matches, I’ve noticed something obvious. A lot of smaller countries seem to have Chinese “export” players to represent their countries. While I was watching the women’s quarter final between China’s Li Xiaoxia and Netherlands’ Li Jiao, I noticed during the breaks the conversation between the coaches and players on BOTH SIDES were in Chinese. I found that rather ironic. I suppose from a business prespective it makes sense. Why bother raising a table tennis player from scratch when it’s easier economically to allow an older Chinese player to be an immigrant to represent your country? I do not know if any money has been exchanged in such immigration process. I’m sure it’s attractive to many Chinese table tennis players to go through such immigrations. After all, you are constantly being replaced by younger and better players in China. The “career” in the sport of ping pong in China must be pretty short. So if you want to remain a ping pong player all of your life, I can see the better alternative is to go to a different country. That’s why often the Chinese players representing other coutries are older. That being said, I highly question the alignment of patriotism in these older players. Even if their skills allow them, do they really want to win and hinder their mother country’s chance of getting the medals? I wonder…

The worst flying experience in my life so far: United Airlines

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When we got to Denver international airport last night to return to Iowa, we found our flight was delayed from 8:50pm to 10:50pm. First of all, when there is no weather problems, you just don’t expect flights to be delayed. As disappointing as it was at first, we viewed it as somewhat a norm.

When we boarded the plane close to 11:15pm, the first thing you noticed was that there was no air. Everyone was hot and we waited in a complete stuffy enclosed space for at least 20 minutes before the announcement:
This is your friendly flight attendant _insert name_. I just want you to know that we are aware the air is not working on the plane. We have some technicians looking at this issue. Your pilot just left the plane and I was not told what’s going on. I have no clue and as soon as I know, I will let you know.
10 minutes later:
This is your captain. I was just told the blah blah on the plane is broken. It’s impossible to fly this plane without it. At this point, we need you to all get off the plane. We are going to try our best to find another plane.

Everyone took their stuff and exited the plane.

After about 30 minutes, United informed us they found another plane to take us to Iowa and please go to gate _insert a number_. Everyone was excited. We walked to the new gate.

They boarded us to the new plane. This plane was a little bit bigger and the air was working. YAY! The plane backed out 10 feet and stopped. We waited for another 30 minutes before the announcement:
This is your captain _insert name_. Well, folks you just are not going to believe it. There is a major issue with this plane as well. We were on the phone with the maintenance support in San Francisco. However, they are too busy to talk to us because they are trying to keep another aircraft in the air. At this rate, we cannot take off. Please get off the plane.
The plane moved back 10 feet. Again, everyone took their belongings and exited the plane.

As you’d imagine, no one’s too happy at this point. United couldn’t tell us when we were exiting if the flight was now canceled. They just told us to walk to the other end of the terminal to go their customer service.

While everyone was waiting in line at the customer service, some fat dude spoke to the intercom: Well, we think we can get the plane to take off but we have no idea when. It may be about 2 hours. Why don’t you just stay put and we will inform you when we know for sure.

“That’s complete crap!” – most of the crowd yelled.

5 minutes later, the lady in front of us in the line said the customer service representative she spoke with was unaware of the announcement that they just informed us that there is a possibility they can still take off even though this customer service representative was standing there with all of us when the fat dude made the announcement. After utter confusion for another 20 minutes, the same fat dude spoke to the intercom again: I’m sorry but I’m now told your flight is officially canceled.

The five of us finally got to a customer service representative. The first available flight going to Iowa with seats departs the following 8:50pm with the first plane we were on that was broken. HA HA HA! NO THANKS! The best alternative we decided was to take the 7:51am flight to Kansas City and then rent a car to Iowa. Once we decided, the “senior” customer representative causally typed with his one finger and started booking us on the Kansas City flight. It took literally 50 minutes to book us. Plus they couldn’t provide us boarding passes. The “senior” customer representative told us to stop by 6am at the same customer service counter to get our boarding passes. Our luggage will be transported for us to Iowa on the next flight. They should beat us to Iowa. And what do we get for all of this trouble? A $150 non-transferable credit toward an United airline ticket (not enough to buy a single round-trip ticket) and $10 breakfast voucher to use at the airport. WOOT!!!

The airport provided some “beds” for us to start our adult sleepover at the airport. It was the first time for me to see these folding beds that look like tailgate folding chairs with bags. If you are unaware, I have major sleeping issues. I pretty much cannot usually sleep without medication and I didn’t have mine with me. Without question, I knew I wouldn’t sleep. But I did lie down and tried to rest. The waiting area was extremely bright. People walked by us all night. Some other passengers also had major challenges putting together their beds. It seemed the two aluminium rods to be inserted at the ends of the bed were dropped on the floor all night to make loud noises.

It was the first time I ever slept at an airport. When my flight canceled at Tokyo due to typhoon in Shanghai, they took all of us in a bus to a local hotel.

After a long night we lined up at 6am at the customer service. No one showed up. One of my coworkers talked to an United employee walking by, she informed us that the customer service didn’t start until 6:30am. After 6:30am, still no one was there. During the wait, we tried all of their automated systems. None of them could give us boarding passes. The “direct phone line” to United reservation services had a 25 minute wait time.

A lady behind us got her boarding pass to work via the automated system. When it printed her connecting flight boarding pass, she exclaimed “you are kidding me!” Apparently her connecting flight departs prior to the arrival of her first flight. AWESOME! We wished her the best of luck.

My coworker chased down another United employee walking by. That employee informed us the customer service pretty much show up whenever they want to. Finally after 6:45am, a few customer representatives showed up and helped us with our boarding passes.

The flight to Kansas City was thankfully smooth. Our drive back to Iowa was also not too bad. When we showed up at the Iowa airport, our luggage was there waiting. That was the BEST thing in the entire experience. Another lady who took the exact same alternative route we did couldn’t find her luggage at the Iowa airport however. We were just LUCKY!

So my conclusion? I’m never flying United the rest of my life. I’d rather choose non direct flights with another airline if I have to. The good news? Southwest is coming to our airport!

Daily wtf Watson story: Active Directory

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A coworker of my husband’s, let’s call him Watson, has some interesting ways of dealing with situations. As a system administrator, he has unique powers.

Two days ago my husband received a support ticket regarding a temporary employee unable to log into her machine. My husband updated her password and verified and he could log in and closed the ticket. A day later, the ticket was reopened with the same issue. This time my husband tried her login on a different machine and true enough, he got the invalid username or password error. He searched Active Directory looking for the temporary employee’s login and found nothing. It appeared someone had deleted the employee’s account.

My husband scratched his head and inquired Watson:

“Watson, did you do anything with Mary’s account?”

Watson: “Yes, the manager requested that I delete her account.”

My husband got the manager on the phone and asked about the situation. The manager confirmed that he created a ticket to have Mary removed from a certain mailing list. As my husband was on the phone with the manager, Watson was listening and became rather irritated and printed the ticket and showed it to my husband. The ticket titled “Remove Mary from mailing list ABC”. My husband said to Watson:

“Watson, the ticket requested her removed from a mailing list, you deleted her entire Active Directory account!”

Watson: “How else was I supposed to get her off that mailing list?”

My husband: “Remove her from the mailing list?”

Watson barked: “Yes! I could have done that!” and stormed off and did not say anything else.

My father’s Gui Lin experience

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Gui Lin (Chinese: 桂林; pinyin: Guìlín;) is a prefecture-level city in China, situated in the northeast of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on the west bank of the Li River. Its name means “forest of Sweet Osmanthus”, owing to the large number of fragrant Sweet Osmanthus trees located in the city. The city has long been renowned for its unique scenery.

My father and his girlfriend’s family visited Gui Lin about a month ago.

Although the scenery was exceptional like you’d expect but his experience was far from it. Gui Lin is a cyclone for tourist traps. He shared some of his bad experience and they were so jaw dropping, I have to blog about them.

The Taxi
There is no meter on any of the taxi in that city. You bargain the price prior to your ride with the taxi driver and then s/he takes you to your destination. See a problem with this particular arrangement or lack of governmental enforcement of honesty? Well, he’s experienced it.

On the way back from a previous trip, my father inquired the average cab fare from his hotel to the dock for his next day’s cruise. The driver indicated around 60 rmb. The next morning, a different taxi driver wanted 80 rmb for the ride. My father did not give in since he thought the fare should be 60 rmb. The taxi driver instead of not agreeing to the ride, took the 60 rmb and dropped them off at a different dock than their actual desired destination. It took them a while to figure out they were at the WRONG dock since they were unfamiliar with the area. They were late for their cruise and had to spend additional fare in order to travel to the correct dock.

The Bamboo Raft Ride
A bamboo raft takes you down the stream of the river slowly by its current. My father had arranged a taxi to pick them up at the end of the trip. Although the price of the ride was advertised to include food, they provided inedible dishes on the raft so they could market other dishes for extra cost. There were various vendors who stationed at different locations down the stream. Some claimed the fish dishes were prepared with fish freshly caught in the river earlier in the morning. They charged a lot for them. My father and his girlfriend’s family did not purchase any. They were later dropped off at a dock in which they thought was the end of the trip. However, after a half hour wait for the taxi, my father called the taxi driver he paid for. The taxi driver informed my dad that he was dropped at the wrong location. The raft people dropped them off way prior to the end of the trip. My father was once more duped for exercising his right of not purchasing overpriced marketed tourist goods.

Gui Lin has been on my list of must visit places for a long time. Based on my dad’s accounts, I think I’m going to wait a little longer for that wish.

Grails: I will not use you

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After the cijug presentation on Grails, I’ve decided I will not use it.

I know Grails is hot and cool but I don’t like it. It’s probably just a personal preference.

Why don’t I want to use Grails

  • It’s built on spring and hibernate, so why not just use them directly?
  • It’s just adding another layer of complexity. Now if something goes wrong, you need to know grails (groovy) plus all of the frameworks it uses underneath.
  • The generation bit is nice but personally I want control over all of the magic. You will need to modify them anyway. So why not just write them from scratch and LEARN YOUR HTML? This reminds me of the old Microsoft FrontPage HTML generation that always bit my ass when I first started creating web pages. But it probably wouldn’t be as bad since Microsoft was targeting their own browsers with the HTML generated.
  • The URL mapping is stupid. Spring’s innate annotation style mapping is so much easier.
  • I’m not a fan of the taglib. Why do I ever want to write HTML in Java? It makes me feel dirty. Plus it’s harder to debug. Personally the only “taglib” I like is facelets’ version. It felt more like writing HTML.

The only thing I really liked about Grails based on the presentation is the orm custom mapping. I prefer that over hibernate’s innate xml or annotation.

class Person {
  String firstName
  static mapping = {
      table 'people'
      firstName column:'First_Name'
  }
}

But that’s hardly worth a complete switch.

During the whole presentation I was thinking of a pyramid:

I remember not too long ago Spring and Hibernate are the newest and coolest kids on the block. Now we are just piling it on. What will we add next? I mean do you still need know Java any more to support applications? You really just need tons and tons of framework knowledge. Where do you get these knowledge from school? They are not going to teach them in college.

jQuery UI even though you disappointed me, I still figured you out

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So I upgraded to jQuery UI version 1.8.2 at work and thought that I should instead of using the autocomplete plugin which is deprecated, switch over to use the jQuery UI build-in autocomplete widget.

jQuery UI autocomplete widget is NOTHING like the original jQuery autocomplete plugin!!!

At least by jQuery UI version 1.8.2 it’s not.

The jQuery UI autocomplete widget is crap just like I remembered when it first came out.

Things I found that annoyed the heck out of me:

  • Highlight doesn’t work. Use this hack instead.
  • Must match doesn’t work. More info available here.
    I ended up using a separate javascript function I wrote.

    function jQueryUIAutoCompleteMustMatch(input) {
	var found = 0;
	
	var matcher = new RegExp( "^" + $.ui.autocomplete.escapeRegex( jQuery.trim($(input).val()) ) + "$", "i" );
	
	jQuery.each($('.ui-autocomplete li'), function(i, val) {
		if(jQuery.trim( $(val).text() ).match( matcher ) ) {
			found = 1;
		}
	});
	
	if (found) {
		return true;
	} else {
		$(input).val('');
		return false;
	}
}

    inside of your autocomplete setup, do

    change: function(event, ui) {jQueryUIAutoCompleteMustMatch($(this));}
  • To mimic the scrollHeight property on the autocomplete plugin, you will need to use css overrides. More info here (Example).

    .ui-autocomplete {
	max-height: 220px;
	overflow-y: auto;
	/* prevent horizontal scrollbar */
	overflow-x: hidden;
	/* add padding to account for vertical scrollbar */
	padding-right: 20px;
}
/* IE 6 doesn't support max-height
 * we use height instead, but this forces the menu to always be this tall
 */
* html .ui-autocomplete {
	height: 220px;
}
  • To mimic the behavior of the option formatResult in the original plugin, you may do something like:

    $( "#tags" ).autocomplete({
	source: availableTags,
	minLength: 0,
	delay: 0,
	close: function(event, ui) {
		var numberOnly = $(this).val().match(/\d+/);
		$(this).val(numberOnly);
	}
})
;

    Above is to format the result as number only.

  • If you want the pop up search results as soon as the user has the focus on the input without entering anything, you will need to bind the search call on the focus event of the input. More info here.
    I ended up with

    $(input).autocomplete({
		source: list
	})
	.focus(function() {
		$(this).autocomplete("search");
	})
	;
  • I finally recognized that the jQuery UI autocomplete widget has far fewer options you may set. For example, by version 1.8.2, below are the only options
    • disabled
    • appendTo
    • autoFocus
    • delay
    • minLength
    • position
    • source

    If you wish to get your autocomplete working the same as your old one, chances are you will need to add a lot more additional code/hack.

This is the biggest disappointment for me since I started using jQuery.

>>> My Example with everything configured the way I want <<<

AT&T rethink possible…to still use your service

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Tried to add a new line with AT&T was almost impossible.

Got the new phone today and trying to activate it was unusually painful.

  • Their online activation gave the error: ACT015: We cannot process your request at this moment due to insufficient data. Please contact Customer Care at 1-800-331-0500.
  • On the phone with the first customer service representative for 20 minutes. The representative insisted he could not activate the phone because we did not agree to their terms and services. We never got the email regarding the terms and services in order to AGREE to it. He didn’t consider a recorded verbal agreement was enough. In addition, we’ve been with AT&T for over 6 years and we figured we probably have agreed to their terms or services some prior time. The representative gave us another 866 number to call.
  • On the phone with the 866 customer service representative for over 40 minutes. 39 minutes of the 40 on hold. She repeated she was working with their account management to activate the new line. Finally she hang up on us.
  • Tried the online activate again and got the same error.
  • Tried to forget about it for three hours.

  • Just tried the new phone again, the SIM card registration error magically went away.

Hosting Drama

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Obviously I am nowhere near as actively on the whole personal web world as I used to be. Most of my sites are shut down. The only somewhat active site is this one. Amazingly I still get so much traffic that makes this site top the resource usage sites on the server.

Today I got the following email from my web host hostquack.com:

Hello,

Your account has been suspended due to consuming high resources on our shared server. I would recommend you to optimize your database and php pages in order to utilize server resources properly to see if it works. If this won’t help, I would highly recommend you to have a vps or dedicated server.

Let me know your comment.

Here’s my dilemma: I want to keep using pure-essence.net because well I had it since I met Andy. I do not wish to give up my domain name. But obviously after 10 years, this name gets known and some of my posts get popular. I no longer use it that frequently but I seem to have to pay the price for its popularity. No shared hosting can handle it well any more. I really DO NOT wish to have to spend money on a VPS or dedicated server.

My temporary solution was to optimize my site. I found this wordpress performance enhancement post and followed its suggestions. I turned on WP build-in object cache and installed and activate wp-super-cache plugin. My host agreed to monitor how my site is doing after the tweaks. Fingers crossed.

I spend most of my non-working hours on the pet society game nowadays. It’s a mindless game but trading items make it well addictive.

IE input background image issue

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IE strikes AGAIN!

Just when I thought I was 100% done with the revamp of New Millennium, I noticed an UI issue in IE. I’m surprised I didn’t notice this before. It shouldn’t be anything new. I did some google research but didn’t find anyone mentioning it either.

Applying background image to input tags should be nothing new. You see the little search icons for search inputs all over the web now but did anyone notice in IE if you have a background image set to no-repeat and someone puts some very LONG text in the input field, the background image SCROLLS with the text? This causes very odd behavior.

Here’s my input background-image. I pick this one so I can do background image affect on hover by manipulating background-position.
background image
CSS:

input.formInput {
	width: 255px;
	background: #a99787 url(formInput.gif) left top no-repeat;
	border: 0;
	padding: 3px;
	height: 22px;
	color: #302721;
}
input.formInput:hover,
input.formInput:focus {
	background-position: -261px top;
}

In Firefox, it looks great but in IE if you start putting very looooooooooooooooong text in the input, it will look like crap.
background image looks like crap in IE

Try it out yourself

So does anyone have a good solution for this issue?

If I were to do it, I’d wrap the input in a container and put the background image on the container and hopefully by applying the hover affect on the container, it would get the desirable effect. Of course I will need to test out my theory. But it’s past midnight so I should get some sleep for now.

AND it does work. check it out.

Man, I just love IE.