Origin XT Blog

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2006/07/24/afx2898783.html

BEIJING (XFN-ASIA) - The death toll in China from Tropical Storm Bilis has risen to 612 with another 208 people missing, Xinhua news agency said, citing the nation’s disaster relief commission.

Local officials were quoted by state media today as saying the fast-rising death toll could be because authorities were initially focused on disaster relief rather than counting bodies.

The commission said a total of 3.07 mln people have had to be relocated due to the storm.

Hurricane Katrina got international attention last year, and garnered the sympathies and good wishes of those around the world. Foreign donations for the hurricane last year amounted to over 3.5 billion dollars from individuals alone. Britain even offered to donate pre-packaged food for all those whose livelihoods were affected (this was rejected because Bush feared British beef, an undiplomatic gesture in response to a highly diplomatic offer).

And yet, I don’t see a second of attention to this disaster in China of a larger magnitude, displacing over 3 million people and killing at least about 2/3rds of a thousand. I see Forbes cares — perhaps it is because the region pounded by the storm is China’s most economically vibrant region, and Forbes thinks this will have a significant economic & financial effect.

I don’t see a cent flow into the relief of those affected by the storm. I don’t even know any charities that accept donations for this purpose, as opposed to for Katrina, when basically all charitable organizations accepted money for the relief of katrina victims.

People have complained that the casualty stats for Katrina reflect racism in the South, how 8x more of those who drowned were African-American than white. But I say that is flawed, because 10x more of the residents of the same regions were African-American. In proportion to those who live there, more whites died.

You think that’s racism? That’s just jumping to an irrational and unmathematical conclusion.

This is racism, not caring a CENT (yes, cent) about the disaster in a country half a world away, when it cared about the disaster in your country a year ago. I’ve talked to many people about this issue, but everyone seemed to respond to this with: “Great, there are too many of them anyway.” The insensitivity to the suffering of others is unbearable and disgusting. When your relatives all live in a country heavily devastated by a natural disaster (not to mention tropical storms cause 20 billion dollars of economic damage every year…), you start to worry.

Poor Hainan.

You scored as XIX: The Sun. This is the happiest card in the deck. It is full of joy and optimism, everything is right with the world. We are as innocent children playing in the fields without care. The Sun brings success, well-being and happiness in all spheres - material, emotional, spiritual -wherever our desires lay.When this card appears in a Tarot spread it indicates success, joy and happiness. Obstacles will be overcome, goals achieved.When badly aspected, it can indicate a stagnation through over-indulgence, too much of a good thing. XIX: The Sun — 94% IV - The Emperor — 81% II - The High Priestess — 69% VIII - Strength — 69% VI: The Lovers — 69% XI: Justice — 63% XVI: The Tower — 63% XV: The Devil — 56% I - Magician — 56% 0 - The Fool — 50% XIII: Death — 50% X - Wheel of Fortune — 50% III - The Empress — 50%

That’s some pretty untidy and congested HTML code it produced… Sun? Emperor? High priestess? (wtf) Sounds so majestic

Boy, that’s a lot of 69s. Ironic how “VI: The lovers” was 69%

So what the heck was this thing anyway? I saw it on Katherine’s xanga, and I decided to see what I’ll get.

For lack of better things (things people may actually respond to) I will just do this

69 Questions to Start the Summer

1. Are you in a relationship?
Inverse… direct… “…jointly related?” Or something with nothing to do with math? Let’s see, I am related my genus with the local chimp in the zoo, I am related by species with the poorest person in Africa, I am related by race to Chinese President Hu Jintao (which sounds by Jinghao by the way :P), I am related by gender with… that same guy too, and I am related by blood with my … relatives.

2. If no, would you like to be? If yes, would you like not to be?
Not applicable

3. How often do you visit your MySpace profile?
I don’t have one. If I do, then I’m not aware I made one

4. What is your favorite candy bar?
Do twinkies count?

5. What are your favorite shoes?
The ones I’m wearing now

6. Have you ever tripped going up steps?
Yes

7. Do you have a vacation planned for this summer yet?
De Anza & summer reading

8. Would you bungee jump?
Eh, considering people up to 450 pounds have bungee jumped I don’t think it would be too dangerous for me, right?

9. Do you own a Fallout Boy CD?
No

10. Do you like amusement parks?
Yes

11. Do you ride rollercoasters?
Yes

12. What is your current favorite CD?
Virtual Chem Lab o_o

13. Can you touch your tongue to your nose?
No

14. When was the last time you were in the ocean?
Few days ago

15. Do you like beer?
No. Alcohol smells bad. Better used to fuel our cars

16. Would you kiss someone of the same sex?
No … but a couple million bucks might change anyone’s mind

17. What is the most embarrassing CD you own?
o_o I assume you mean music, so… none ’cause I don’t have many CDs.

18. Are you sarcastic?
When necessary to protect my interests

19. Is there anything you wait for every summer?
Swimming, food, classes where I can outsmart teachers (:P), more time to program, more reading time… etc

20. In your opinion, what is the best summer smell?
Void. The void of smell.

21. Socks and sandals?
Ew, like Greg Courville? Ew. No

22. Who was the last person to go to the movies with you?
o_o This was years ago. Joey, Jeff, Andy and the twins

23. What’s one thing you really hope to do this summer?
Finish summer reading and finish learning C & C++ (and figure out how to do Win32 applications). And get enough money with the ads to pay off Garlic (chris) and the domain for the next 2-5 years… Ok, the last one is kind of impossible

24. Do you like to go Mini-Golfing?
Yes

25. Are you moving this summer?
I move to De Anza every Mon-Th… and then move back

26. Are you going to be starting a new job this summer?
NEW job? Origin isn’t new, I suppose.

27. Have you ever slapped someone?
Yes.

28. Do you get poison ivy?
“get”? Is that an infectious disease? Poison oak? How’s that?

29. Do you plan on going camping this summer?
Already went

30. What was the last restaurant you ate at?
Some pretty nice chinese restaurant in Cupertino

31. Favorite pizza topping?
HAWAIIAN! I love pineapples.

32. Pants or shorts?
Shorts. I can’t bike in pants because my pants always get (pants always gets or get? o_O I never understood whether I should think of pants as plural or singular) trapped in the gears — and then I can’t move my legs, I can’t jump off, and I can’t stop without falling. Yeah, that sucks.

33. Do you play any sports?
Play? swimming and biking (and other individual “sports”) don’t count then. Hm, badminton and tennis I suppose.

34. Do you use Chapstick?
No. What the hell’s that?

35. What were the last 3 movies you watched?
I don’t remember.

36. Are you currently fighting with anyone?
All the people I’ve attempted contact by email: the guy from CompUSA, another Mercury News guy, some guy from NYT, an editor from LA Times, (I noticed “LA Times” looks like LATinos, a very large portion of the Southern California population o_O) and tech support from Comcast to explain why my internet is 95% worse than every other comcast user.

37. Are you too forgiving?
Depends. I usually forgive minor mistakes but breach of trust? That’s hard to forgive.

38. How many pets do you have?
o_o A turtle that died a few days ago but somehow came back to life after I buried it (it crawled out yesterday — creepy)

39. Do you own clothing from Hot Topic?
No.

40. What is your favorite breakfast?
Green beans

41. Where was the last place you drove?
De Anza

42. Have you ever thought you were in love?
Yes

43. Where will you be in 24 hours?
In my bedroom.

44. What did you do 3 nights ago?
Origin — figuring out the ads and stuff

45. When was the last time you went to a fancy restaurant?
All chinese restaurants are fancy

46. What was the last thing you bought?
A “Vistas” spanish textbook from the De Anza bookstore for 169 dollars. Insane.

47. Have you ever been in a foreign country?
Yeah. Many.

48. Anywhere you want to go?
Mexico o_o jk. I wanna go to Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Singapore.

49. What’s the farthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
Joey’s house if you go around the world the other way.

50. What have you done today?
Wake up, eat breakfast

51. Do you own something from a sex shop?
No. Shop? Like they sell sex? I did see a sex shop while walking down the main avenue in Quebec, Canada last year (Go figure :P)

52. Are you thinking of someone right now?
Not till you asked…

53. Have you ever thrown something out of a moving car?
Paper airplane

54. Do you smoke cigarettes?
No.

55. would you date someone who smoked cigarettes?
No.

56. Are you happy with your life right now?
Yes, except my tendency to procrastinate by doing stuff like programming o_o…

57. What’s the last thing you ate?
Bread

58. What’s the next place you have to go?
Class

59. How many hours do you usually sleep per night?
8 hours

60. What’s the next important date on your calendar?
All

61. Who last called you?
I think Lucy or Amy called for the economics thing, but I was too sleepy to remember

62. McDonald’s or Burger King?
I like monopolies. McD

63. who last IM’d you?
Duke

64. Are you closer to your mother or father?
Depends on at what time. When my mom’s cooking she just yells commands and stuff, and tells me I can’t do anything right.

65. Do you like to quote things?
Yes.

66. Are you afraid of the dark?
Only if I can’t see where I am going. I hate tripping, stepping on things, or crashing into things because of the dark.

67. Do you exercise regularly?
I bike, swim, etc but to little avail o_o

68. What is the most expensive thing you ever bought?
I usually don’t have money so that’s kinda off. But I think my 40 dollar compound bow was the most expensive.

69. What should you be doing right now?
Reading assignment for english. Darn it, Jews, Chinese people, [dys]topia … and I still haven’t gotten Candide yet.

Is anyone besides me using them? I didn’t think I needed to program a subscription feature similar to Xanga’s because I expected RSS readers to be ubiquitous already in this day and age.

First off — do you know what RSS feeds are? There are two feeds you can subscribe to (post & comment), both of which can be located at the bottom navigation box on the right side.

Your download speed: 314kbps or 39.3 KB/sec.
That is 94.7% worse than an average user on comcast.net

Why is my connection barely 5% that of an average comcast user’s? They advertise 6 MPBs for the connection my dad “paid” for (his company gives him a full write-off though :P). I get 39 KB.

314 kbps. Nice number. 100 x pi!

What the hell is this? 16 comments in my post about AP scores and none basically everywhere else?

And you guys say I talk about nothing but grades. Maybe it’s the only thing that’ll elicit a response (except maybe this).

Google can’t do transparent banners. D’oh!

I downloaded and burned the ISO for Win XP Pro x64 (64-bit) (trial — for 120 days) yesterday, and installed it and the accompanying drivers today on a second partition on my laptop (I used Partition Magic 8 ). I just couldn’t stand using a 64-bit capable laptop and a 32-bit OS at the same time. What a waste of money, I thought.

I can access the files from the other OS regardless of whether I am in 64 or 32 bit mode, so I don’t need to reinstall programs.

Anyway, this just means if I disappear from the net for a few days I bombed my computer.

After arriving at home my dad showed me my AP scores, seemingly dissatisfied: “Why did you get a 4? Why didn’t you get all 5s? Your mom and I didn’t bring you to the US to fail! We brought you here to succeed! Do not disappoint us again.”

I realized that my scores aren’t that bad when I had a look at them. 5s all across the board except English AP — I certainly did not do any worse than I predicted. (I predicted a 4 on Eng AP and hoped for a 5) But getting a 4 on Eng AP is somewhat surprising because of the narrow band for a 4 (less than 10% I think) compared to the huge band for a 5 (greater than 25%) and a 3 (greater than 15%).

So anyway, counting the “Calculus AB Subscore” I got five 5s and one 4 I did surprisingly get a 5 on the AP Physics C exam, although all the knowledge I had was from Monsees — I suppose whatever I didn’t learn from Monsees (probably 85% of the AP test) I figured out with my awesome Calc BC skills (Sadly I think I learned more physics in Calculus than I did in Physics Hon — and most of my colleagues who have taken those classes can attest to that). 5 on BC and Chem was no-brainer. 5 on USHAP was a bit of luck (Who knew I knew women that much? :P) 4 on English was I guess expected.

How did you guys do on the AP tests? Were your parents dissatisfied with the results of bringing you the “opportunity” of being educated here?

Immediately after camp was De Anza. After a failed attempt to get a student ID (I didn’t have any identification to begin with), I went to Spanish from 3 to 5:10 PM (Mondays through Thursdays every week), ate dinner (brought my own leftover lunch), registered at the lab, and went to C from 6-8:30 PM (Mondays and Wednesdays) (It’s supposed to go from 6 to 10, but the last half is for labs and I typically ditch them).

I have a spanish teacher from Venezuela who makes learning spanish much harder than it should be — it’s not the spanish I don’t understand now, it’s her damn English. Plus she’s forcing us to buy textbooks!

My C teacher (who is Indian) has been teaching programming for approximately 30 years, and yet does not know that memory allocation cannot be done implicitly, and that arrays must have a hardcoded size or be defined with malloc(). Sheesh. Intermediate C my ass. I got somewhat disappointed that 30% of our grade will be homework based. I got 100% in beginning C, but only because homework was exempt for me because of my “exceptional performance” on examinations (reminds me of chemistry with Mr Woo — honors and AP :P). I don’t think I set a good impression by telling my teacher that she is wrong on the array/memory ordeal.

The computers with flat-screen display panels in the CAOS/CIS lab are pretty nice.

Anyway, anyone else taking summerschool at De Anza?

I guess I am now under full obligation to make a post as I have not for a very long time. Anyway, early Sunday I left for the camp in some redwood forest. (I knew then and there that (conjunction) that (pronoun) was a bad idea) After two straight hours of winding, we arrived at the camp with my parents’ friends and their kids. Before I continue further, I must say that I vow to keep the size of this post to a minimum.

After taking some pictures at the entrance we went inside to our camps. We then unpacked our stuff and went on a hike to a “waterfall” (there was no water to speak of…). After arriving there I realized that I did not bring water, so I ran back (the air was nice, but the various things I tripped on weren’t) to get a lot of water (consumed and sprayed on me, for it was incredibly hot that day, even in the nice forest shade). It was quite fortunate the group was not far off when I came back.

Then we started a fire for a barbeque — we forgot marshmellows, but we did have pretty nice roast beef. I then ran off, but my parents’ friends’ kids followed me so I let one of them play my gameboy (which I brought, but only used when they forced me to take a turn — it only had Advance Wars put inside).

Sleeping was hell though. First of all, our tent was on a slope, so my sister kept sliding onto me — and I couldn’t sleep. Then there were mosquitoes at least 3x as large as the ones we have at home (and effectively produced itchy bumps 3x the size of normal bumps resulting from mosquito bites). The unexpectedly cold atmosphere also contributed to the uncomfortable environment. Plus, I had nothing but my sleeping bag in a slippery nylonish tent situated on a slope of 8 degree tilt, so I felt the ground quite well.

I don’t think I slept for any more than 3 consecutive hours, during which time I had probably one of the weirdest dreams — ever. (I usually have absurd dreams when I don’t sleep well) I was a chess piece (yes, the piece itself — I think a bishop (go figure)) toppling my opponent’s pieces one by one, and I woke up when I was captured.

To keep things short, I ate breakfast (a fairly typical one, consisting of bread, milk and cereal because we forgot everything else), hiked back to the camp HQ, took some pictures, and left. I’ve attached the only picture I was alone in. The tree sure is large, but my size doesn’t really help in exaggerating the size of the tree trunk. Anyway, enjoy.

Yes, I am holding two of the 11 mosquito bumps I got over the trip. (I hate them >_< I would love camping more if it wasn’t for the insects and bumpy slopes) Geh, enough about me ranting about insects. How is your summer being spent?