Category: Everyday Life

Ones I'm watching anyway:

• Green for All
• Energy Innovations
• Nanosolar
• SolarCity

While we're here, The Green Home Guide and their retrofit checklist.  And Green Buildings in San Francisco, includes Mitch's building and Adobe's building.

It's ok if I pull stuff down off my web site because it's my web site and it's for my personal use. If you want to follow along that's your problem. But you can't pull stuff down off the net if you're a company, Asian Week. Once it's up, it's up.

Anyway for my records, the two articles from Ken Eng, Why I Hate Blacks and Why I Hate Asians. He has one about white people too. I'll post my thoughts on race next time.

This is per SFGate's coverage of the AsianWeek story and backlash.

**UPDATE** Comments for this post are now off. Thanks.

—-

Why I Hate Blacks

Kenneth Eng, Feb 23, 2007

Here is a list of reasons why we should discriminate against blacks, starting from the most obvious down to the least obvious:

• Blacks hate us. Every Asian who has ever come across them knows that they take almost every opportunity to hurl racist remarks at us.

In my experience, I would say about 90 percent of blacks I have met, regardless of age or environment, poke fun at the very sight of an Asian. Furthermore, their activity in the media proves their hatred: Rush Hour, Exit Wounds, Hot 97, etc.

• Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years. It's unbelievable that it took them that long to fight back.

On the other hand, we slaughtered the Russians in the Japanese-Russo War.

• Blacks are easy to coerce. This is proven by the fact that so many of them, including Reverend Al Sharpton, tend to be Christians.

Yet, at the same time, they spend much of their time whining about how much they hate "the whites that oppressed them."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Christianity the religion that the whites forced upon them?

• Blacks don't get it. I know it's a blunt and crass comment, but it's true. When I was in high school, I recall a class debate in which one half of the class was chosen to defend black slavery and the other half was chosen to defend liberation.

Disturbingly, blacks on the prior side viciously defended slavery as well as Christianity. They say if you don't study history, you're condemned to repeat it.

In high school, I only remember one black student ever attending any of my honors and AP courses. And that student was caught cheating.

It is rather troubling that they are treated as heroes, but then again, whites will do anything to defend them.

—–

Why I Hate Asians

Kenneth Eng, Jan 12, 2007

It seems like an odd title for an article written by an Asian Supremacist, but there are very good reasons why I hate many of my own kind.

The first thing I hate about Asians in America is how so many of them want to suck up to whites. I have had fistfights and verbal altercations with many who discriminated against me and my people. Sadly, however, the Asians who witness or hear about these battles often hate me for being "hypocritical," and tell me that "two wrongs don’t make a right." Do these sycophants think it’s "cool" to mindlessly side with whites and blacks? Is it not enough that we have to fight against discrimination? Now we have to fight amongst ourselves as well?

The second thing I hate about Asians is how little pride most of them have. This may be the result of societal brainwashing, but whatever the cause, it must stop. I am repulsed when I see Asian guys speak with British accents in an attempt to sound sophisticated. British people can’t be all that sophisticated if they don’t yet understand the concept of dental hygiene. I am also sickened when I hear Asian people imitate Negro slang in an endeavor to sound "ghetto." Am I supposed to be impressed that such a person emulates the attitude of a supposed slum resident? More importantly, whatever happened to being yourself?

The third thing I hate about Asians is how apathetic many of them are in terms of honor these days. If I saw an Asian being stereotyped in a movie theater, I would immediately stand up and shout incessantly at the screen so that none of the white audience members could enjoy the film. When I saw a white man yelling at an old Asian woman a few months ago, I walked up to him and hollered slurs right back in his Aryan face. But most other Asians, I am disappointed to say, would rather just chuckle at their own stereotypes on screen and ignore the problems of their brethren. At the risk of sounding corny, whatever happened to the days of the samurai? When honor meant more than life? Whatever happened to the age of Sun Tzu when we used to kick ass?

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Asian race, but every race has its inferiors.

*ignore*

My resolutions:

1. Enjoy life more. Read more.
2. Give more.
3. Get Browser Garage off the ground and ship product. Shake things up.
4. Focus on creating more versus consuming.
5. Good showing at Ironman Canada (and Arizona) and retire.
6. No red meat/little meat, no/little dairy, limit bread intake, no sugar/sweets/candy.
7. Be hungry and more frugal.

my favorite photo from this year, top of Haleakala in Maui

more photos from 2006

General Happenings

• Sadly, we're still in Iraq. One of the longest wars the US has been in.
• Dems become majority in Congress.
• Dow hits all time high, past 1200.
• MySpace and YouTube get bought up. Demonstrates the importance of community, the ability to build a brand quickly, and how crazy people are from the people who put up content, to the buyers of these companies.
• Google breaks $400 nears $500.

Tech

• Apple switches all of it's product line to Intel chips.
• IE 7 and Firefox 2 ship in Q4.
• Tesla cars are launched.
• Zune, PS III, Wii are launched.
• Blogging, user-generated content (yuck) become more prominent.

Sports

• Steelers win Super Bowl. Vince Young and Texas wins BCS bowl.
• Miami Heat win NBA Finals
• St. Louis Cardinals win World Series. Oakland A's win a play off series.
• Floyd Landis wins Tour de France but w/ doping controversy.
• Agassi retires from Tennis.

Obits

• Ed Bradley, James Kim, James Brown, Coretta Scott King, Saddam Hussein, Gerald Ford

Personal

• Lots of vacations, Hawaii 2x, Disneyland, Kirkwood trips, Canada. :)
• Lots of house fixing, pipes, porch, landscaping, insulation, painting, just about everything.
• Ironman Canada number 3 complete.
• Leave Mozilla, create Browser Garage start-up (scary).
• Too much pretentious food talk. Did enjoy Gary Danko, Lalimes, French Laundry, that Sushi place in SF, and Kirala this year.

I didn't like 2006 very much.  I did like the fact that I got some rest though.  That's about it.

[I was asked by Robin to respond to a couple questions regarding the election for the public radio show Open Source. I guess they had read a post of mine a while back but I don't remember it. I guess they have a new question this time.]

Bang, bang, bang! It happened about 6am, a couple months ago, in the morning directly across the street the day before we were to go on our Hawaiian vacation. A drive by, three shots and a peel out, no one died, a teenage girl grazed by a bullet, no newspaper stories, and the people who got shot at weren't even going to report it. The next door neighbor reported it, they just moved in and paid over $500k for a 3 bedroom house in Oakland, 128 homicides and counting. This was across the street.

Bang, bang, bang! It's late this election night. What is that? Whoa, it's a cane knocking against a fence as I peer out the window. It's Ms. Mary, our 65 year old neighbor, that woman knows everything going on in this neighborhood. I put on my slippers and run to the fence, open the gate, and I find Ms. Mary sitting on the ground not able to get up. She slipped as she was putting her garbage away, it's garbage night tonight. I help Ms. Mary up and tell her good night. That was next door.

Bang, bang, bang! Is that the sound or is it rat-tat-tat of continuous gunfire in Iraq? I've established I'm not a very good citizen. I don't know what's happening in Iraq at all until one day I decided to look it up on Wikipedia. 2,900 people died on 9/11. 2,800 US soldiers have died in Iraq. We've been fighting since March of 2003? 43,000 Iraqi citizens are estimated to have died? Really? How far away is Iraq? It's not next door and it's not across the street.

Bang, bang, bang! I wish that sound is me knocking on the door of all those people who won in today's election — Barbara Lee, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Arnold Schwarzenegger and everyone else. Congratulations on winning your election, now can you do something about all this banging.

*draft 2*

The Web is unlike television, watching movies, reading a book, or writing content — with each there's a definite start, stop, and length. The Web isn't as clear and it has multiple concepts of time, various content with different time requirements (text, images, videos) and time concepts abound and are unpredictable.

Here's an attempt to categorize the different time concepts and possible solutions for attempting to make more sense around time. There's potential to surface these different concepts within a browser to make users aware of the concepts of time for various applications and services.

We'll look at: Real Time, Day Parting, Temp, Archives, Time Zones.

—

Real-Time aka Right Now

There are certain applications that are real time:

• content notifiers: stock tickers, live scoreboard
• music and video streaming
• eBay, stock and other bank transactions, purchasing transactions
• instant messaging

Notes:
The use of meta-refresh was a method to establish "real-time" but it's also a method to boost page views. Users don't like their pages being refreshed automatically unless it's for a very good reason e.g. live scoreboards.
Real-time apps used to be premium applications but some still are. Depending on the app, probably could get away with charging for the service.
One of the metrics around real-time apps is simultaneous usage measured by concurrent users.

Users expect applications to be real time and for transactions to post real time. If an application is not real time, the application provider will or should note the length of time e.g. updates every 15 minutes.

—

Day Parting

Many web sites are implementing day parting even "week parting" (which isn't a term). Day parting is splitting up the content for the day for example news in the morning, leisure type programming in the afternoon or evenings. For "week parting" it's programming for the week for example, Yahoo!'s Tech Tuesdays or their Friday programming getting people ready for the weekend. Sites that use day parting are AOL homepage, Yahoo! homepage, c|Net
Why day parting is used:

• Give users an anchor to establish a general time e.g. it's morning or afternoon
• Generate different ad opportunities by splitting a specific page by time/theme
• Attempt to train users to come back later or a certain day
• To match the overall time curve on the web where 9amEST – 1pm EST is peak, somewhat of an attempt to normalize the time curve so that it's all peak usage
• To match and attempt to normalize the week curve where Tues – Thurs is peak usage and Fri – Sun is a major drop-off

Notes:
Day parting is based on Eastern (Daylight) Standard Time and not based on individual time zones, in other words not custom tailored to your time zone.

Day parting is usually driven by an editorial/programming team. Sites like digg.com and Google News may get day parted automatically given the content that's available on the Web.

Unless it's published or clear e.g. a Tech Tuesday, users will not recognize day parting.

—

Temp or For this Session

There are many times when
—

Archives aka Always and Forever

Web archives. Articles, permanent links. When will a web page/site disappear completely. How do you purge the Web of obsolete content e.g. my Bed and Breakfast went out of business purge me from the Web, I no longer exist

—

Timezone Effects

The Netscape.com story with announcing Survivor winners to a late timezone.

Expectations

Alerts and when you expect people to respond to email. When will people update their web sites (immediately? the next morning? the next week?) How do you program people to keep coming. Newsletters.
The Concept of a "Browser Session"
Authentication, browser sessions.

*draft*

I don't know if "content parts" is right but wanted to identify what a web browser (or Firefox) handles. Each "part" is distinct and they're all slightly handled differently in Firefox. There's opportunity to unify how the different parts are handled or managed, and opportunity to specialize? (optimize) the different parts to take full advantage of why they're different in the first place.

——-

Web Content
Description: html, rss, images
Examples:

Web Applications
Description:
authentication, account, storage of data,

Examples: E*Trade, Google Calendar, Yahoo!Mail, SmugMug, WordPress

Plug-ins (and Helper Applications)
Description: images, video, sounds, other document formats

Plug-in is "in browser" interaction. Helper application is "outside browser" interaction.

Handled by blah, blah

Examples: Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat, Java Plug-in, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, Apple QuickTime

Extensions/Add-ons
Description:

Handled by Add-ons Manager

Examples:

——-
Opportunities to Unify

Opportunities to Optimize

We've got a logo. Thanks to the incomparable graphicsguru.

The name browser garage is a company/working name as in browser garage LLC, but possibly will turn into a project/.org name or maybe it sticks for the long haul. It comes from the two things that have made the Web tick, the Web browser and "garage"-type innovation. The name also is a nod to a company Netscape acquired, Web Site Garage who I sat next to at Netscape. It's also a nod to Marcia's Firefox and Thunderbird Garage book, Guy's Garage.com, the famous HP Garage, West Coast Customs (Pimp My Ride), and my Dad's garage which is just full of stuff.

The logo is a garage, of course, and sticking out is a little Mozilla tail. browser garage will only be working on Mozilla technology so nothing for Internet Explorer, sorry. We're like an automotive garage that only wants to work on custom and exotic cars versus fixing up beat up Hondas.

We do have a web site, and we're working on making that pretty. We also have a blog set up there. Pretty takes time.

Waikoa Pond (or Venus Pool) is at mile marker 48 on the Hana highway in Maui. You have to break the rules a little bit and go past a barb wire fence, follow a trail, past an old stone oven(?), down a bit, and then you're there.

Apparently in old Hawaii, this swimming hole was reserved for royalty. You can totally see why. It's pretty cool and there were only a handful of people with us hanging out, swimming, and diving. The pool is at least 15 feet deep and it's very calm. There's some fish swimming about as well. Beyond the pool is the ocean full of grey sharks and fairly rough water.

I'm glad I brought my MacBook and that we had really good Web access over in Hana, otherwise, I never would've found this place. It'll probably be the highlight of our trip, it's a pretty neat watering hole — the water is calm and swimmable, there's a black sand beach on the other end, lots of rocks to dive off of, and you're just surrounded by cool scenery of bright green against black lava rocks. The best parts though are there's not that many people around, certainly no one in the water, and few will ever find this place.

Did I say mile marker 48? I meant mile marker 38. Yeah, that's it.