UltraCrepidate

For those of you who are not aware. Bell Canada started throttling their users and resellers without any prior announcement. This is the first time that any ISP ever pissed me off enough for me to actually take action. I decided to send a letter to the Council of Canadians. Here’s the letter that I decided to send and I am also in the process of finding out whom I can cc in Bell to get the point across.

Minister Prentice,

I am against Bell Canada’s internet traffic throttling official starting April 7.

I’ve been an avid user of the Internet for 17 years now and have never been bothered by any policies that my ISP implemented. I’ve always tried to pick the right ISP that suits my need before I sign up so as to avoid headaches later on. Which is why when Bell Canada announced that they are throttling my TekSavvy connection I became enraged.

Not only is it a breach of whatever agreement they have with their resellers, it is also a classical “bait and switch” from the business stand point. If they don’t want the competition and extra usage from 3rd parties, why did they lease out their lines to resellers in the first place? Shouldn’t someone file a class action lawsuit?

In any case, this is the last line. If nothing is done about this, not only will I stop using bell, I will personally make sure that I spread the word on why nobody should use Bell. In my circle, people respect me as an Engineer and listen to my technical recommendations because they trust my understanding in technology. I will personally make sure that all my co-workers (who happens to be engineers in high tech companies and are the most savvy users of Internet), all my Internet acquaintances as well as future recommendations all steer clear of Bell. No, not just Bell Canada, but all of Bell.

It might just be the silver bullet to solve your network congestion problems. If enough people stop using your services, wouldn’t the traffic be freed up for everyone who stayed? Think about that and factor in the future loss of businesses from me and others like me. I am pissed off, not because of losing the ability to download anything fast, not because of intermittent connections. I have survived the good ol’ 28800 baud rate modems which makes me a very patient man. No, I am pissed off because you “bait and switched” and tried to blame your end users.

I am probably the least affected of your throttling. I use the net only for blogging and surfing with the occasional gaming throw in the line. I do enjoy a high speed connection for those just in case scenarios. For that, I pay a price. Your ideal customer. You are losing an ideal customer get it? Now, normally, when anyone pull this on me, I’d just stop doing business and do a clean cut, however, your sneaky tactic ensures that the loss of my business will actually hurt my current ISP: Teksavvy. This is the only reason why I am hesitating about what to do and that is also your fault since you anticipated it.

I am outraged that Canada does not have a policy to protect my ability to communicate and access information freely on the Internet and urge you to take action on this matter immediately.

Sincerely,

“How does one succeed in public speaking? Why, by bullshitting of course.” ~Project partner, final year.

I spent 6 months working on my final year engineering project. Pulled an all nighter before the formal presentation and survive on nothing but 3 hours of sleep each day for the week before that. Double, triple and quadruple checked the power point presentation before heading off to the auditorium with nothing but adrenaline and caffeine to keep me awake.

It didn’t matter that only 2 out of the 6 people in the group pulled their weight and hauled ass. It didn’t matter that before that day, I was an unshaven mess who’ve been holed up with the robot for the previous 2 months. I shaved, greased up the straws on my head, slapped on some wrinkled suit and tied the geeky tie. I went on stage that day, knowing my stuff inside out, in order to bitch slap that presentation to ashes and I did exactly what I set out to do. I was happy and I slept for almost 24 hours afterwards.

Mind you, it wasn’t a smooth ride. No, not at all. The TA’s laptop couldn’t read our 100MB large power point presentation back then (We were using Pentium 900Mhz if I remember correctly, so the laptop must’ve been some 200Mhz variety) and we were scheduled to present first. When we brought this problem to the professor he simply said: “This is a real world problem and the project tests you in real world scenarios. You either deal with it, or you lose your time slot.”

So, me being me, I decided to use Plan B. (Being an engineer, I always have 3 fail safes for important events.) I reshuffled our presentation order so I can go first while the rest of the group struggle with our TA’s sucky laptop in order to fix it. I happened to have a small working version of my part and some neat Javascript demo of how our robot will go through the obstacle course. Since the team members couldn’t fix the laptop in time, I then spread paper copies of our 100 page slides to the key people and continued. Like I said, nothing is going to stop me from doing what I set out to do that day.

“I felt the same way today.”

It always feels a bit rough, like you have insomnia. The invisible stress wall created by the presentation day manifests its power over my life in subtle and destructive ways. Cleaning, grooming, organization, and sleep. All suffered under the desire for a perfect execution. But that is only because I wanted to be good at it, not because my boss wanted me to do it. This is the reasoning I use to justify spending personal off work hours at home to go through the power points and with imaginary audiences in my living room.

“I wondered if Steve Jobs still practices his presentations.”

Now that the ordeal is over with, I feel much relieved. I couldn’t motivate myself to do anything before the deadline, but found renewed energy to clean up afterwards. The 20 hours sleep I had must’ve helped as well. But most importantly of all, I feel the need to be with people. It seemed only yesterday that it was still February, in the blink of an eye, I’ve dedicated almost two months to it without knowing. Time is moving faster…

“MY MIND IS SLOWING DOWN”

“The first person you should feed your bread to is not your kids who are dying of hunger, but yourself. How else can you know if it’ll kill someone or not?” ~Imaginary baker

The path to secret dish #3 has been trying. Along the way lines the bodies of failed experiments. Some bread were complimented by people as good, but didn’t meet my expectation. Some… are just awful. The rest of this entry contains many pictures and their captions explains the different lessons I learned throughout so I suggest you actually visit the site and click on the images to read their captions.

The Plan

On average, I make and consume around one loaf of bread every other day and 1 kilogram of flour can produce about 5 loaf of bread. At $2.99 per kilo, we are looking at some serious reduction in groceries. I double checked my credit card statement and indeed, my weekly groceries spending went from $60 down to $40 weekly. The ramp down is part of my more aggressive tactics in saving up for the back packing trip as well as scale down in waste production. I know averages one large back of garbage every two weeks and one bin of recycled fliers every second week and I think it’s a good number. To go even longer without emptying my garbage would mean that I have to potentially endure the smells that reeks out of my garbage bag, which can only be rectified, if I managed to achieve a 100% consumption rate on all the food I buy before they spoil.

As my skill in cooking increases, I find myself going ever lower in the food chain for ingredients until eventually, I end up buying raw and unprocessed food in their natural forms. Surprisingly, raw food material (except for meat) are all cheaper than their processed counter parts. It was a pleasant to discover that the best bread flour (whole wheat stone ground organic flour) actually cost less than their machine created counter parts. On top of that, you don’t have to pay taxes for unprocessed food. With these added bonus, I should be able to reach a point where the weekly grocery bill is only $30. Environmental friendly, better tasting AND cheaper, why didn’t I do this before?

The Path

I still haven’t successfully reverse engineered the Focaccia bread that made me fell in love with baking, but I believe that I will eventually reach my goal. I first bought this bread at my local Loblaws and always check for its availability when I go shopping.

Failure #1: Techniques

I still remember making my first home made bread. It was messy, it took a long time and the bread didn’t rise because my hands are too weak to knead it properly. But I have improved since then. The mess is now gone by using my fingers during the initial mixing phase while a special flour pattern holds the water and ingredient in a confined space. Kneading is improved by applying massage techniques to the dough and intertwining the training of both massage and kneading techniques.

Failure #2: Rising

Immediately following the newbie mistakes is my failure to understand the chemistry of bread making. The fluffiness is caused by the air bubbles created by the yeast germs when they ferment. Elasticity is created at the same time when the bubbles grow bigger and stretches the gluten. There might be some technique to knead the dough so as to maximize the length of gluten. I also learned that the flavor is caused by the chemical reactions that the yeast germs make after encountering water and air. So the longer you let the bread rise, the more flavorful your bread becomes. Did you know that the germ in your hand interacts with the yeast germ and multiplies to create the scent as well? I certainly didn’t know that when I started.

Failure #3: Flavoring

Flavoring the bread is quite tough. Salt kills the yeast and sugar feeds it. Spice kills the germs while too much impurity prevents the dough from rising. You really have to balance trade offs and time the addition each ingredient carefully. Too much and you got a flat dough, too little and you can’t taste the flavor at all.

Failure #4: Baking

Baking is another art of its own. Right off the bat, you have to decide how hard you want the crust to be and what kind of look you want it to have. Based on your decision, you can apply a mixture of butter, olive oil, flour, knife, water or steam techniques to the surface in order to create different texture and hardness.

Failure #5 #6: Flour

The type of flour dictates the base taste of each bread and the room temperature of rising dictates which chemicals get produced by the germs. These are the two most basic and prevailing taste of your bread. Master them well.

Conclusion

There you have it, my journey up to this point of bread making. Some have tasted my failed creation already with mixed results. I hope that one day, my friends will request my bread when they invite me over for dinner. It is certainly not the end as I still have a lot of ideas to try out. Hope you enjoyed reading about my journey as much as I did traversing it.

It started as a simple pleasure to please female guests during my frosh year in university. Jeff and I established a house rule that gives all female guests free breakfast in bed if they happened to sleep over. Sine then, I kept up the tradition and even expanded on the range of services I provide. Unfortunately, I discriminate against my fellow male brothers when it comes to the variety of services.

For woman

• Free Swedish massage
• Homemade dinner
• One of the 10 secret dishes
• Breakfast in bed
• Wii gaming
• Movies
• Palm reading
• Free dance

For man

• Homemade dinner
• Breakfast at the kitchen counter
• Wii gaming
• Movies

I want to set more realistic and beneficial goals than the ones I set last year which made this year’s goals a bit more on the conservative side. Sticking with the original format, I have two sections and five goals with the most important and easiest to achieve goal on top.

Primary goals:

•  6 packs stomach
• Bench press 160 lbs
• Achieve secret objective
• Win one photography contest with my Kodak P850
• One month backpacking through Africa

Secondary goals:

•  Double absolute unique visitors to 1000/month
• Learn to pick generic locks
• Finish furnishing my condo
• Research and create 10 secret dishes that I can cook
• Finish organizing all digital data

“Meetings are the bane of productivity.” ~Causalien

I guess I shouldn’t complain. Being busy and in demand means that my job is pretty secure. It doesn’t mean that I don’t look back at simpler times with envy though. A time where all that I have to do is my job description an nothing more. Nowadays only 1/3 of my time is dedicated to the job, while the other 2/3 are spent mostly in meetings or catching up on new technologies that I’ve just been assigned to.

It’s probably no coincidence that they happened to give me two of the new products we have in the pipeline. Knowing myself, I must’ve reeked “adaptation” all over my forehead when the boss first laid his eyes on me. No, correction. I thrive with the exotic.

I also hate meetings. I really do. Half of my days are spent in meetings and sometimes the whole day. It wouldn’t bother me if that’s all I need to do, but the reality of business is that you are still expected to perform your original function. It also seemed more and more likely that I will have to spend my off work hours catching up on work without getting compensated for it. With the deadline approaching, normal work piling up, more meetings scheduled than I have time. I wondered briefly if this is management’s chess play to force me into contributing my personal time.

Dear management,

Please dangle a carrot as a reward in front of me, so I can actually motivate myself into burning my own life force in an effort to cover all the shit that trickled down from upstairs. Otherwise, let me snooze.

Regards,

~Causalien

Every once a while, I’d catch a whiff of a very familiar scent. A scent that forever defines a country. A country where hills are greener than green, skies bluer than blue and the people nicer than nice: New Zealand. The color of nature (or of anything) in New Zealand is more vivid due to the extreme lack of industrial fume. It is especially so in the North Island where the geographical location is perfectly aligned with earth so that the temperature remained in the vicinity of 10 degree year round. Flowers and trees can’t help but bloom to in their brightest color under the reign of such well regulated climate.I haven’t written much about New Zealand because the time I spent there still felt like a dream. It was a place that was marked as the crossroad of my life in my very early memories. The place where I experienced my first cultural shock that led me into a deep depression, but at the same time, it also exists in my memory as the most beautiful country that I have ever lived in. Not to mention the nice people who live there and the principles that they abide by.

The first and most significant shock that I received is their golden rule: “Full belief in whatever you say the first time.” The fact that they can trust a stranger completely until they found a lie was beyond my comprehension. Imagine the turmoil within from a boy who grew up in a culture where we are constantly reminded in the art of deception and deceit. This attitude was so refreshing and alien that I immediately begin formulating ways of ripping people off (I am glad I didn’t.) . Because this shock was so extreme that it manifested itself later in my dealings with people as the truth method.

If a word can be associated with this smell, it will be “Truth”. A bold and strong smell, yet devoid of any intricate intertwining or complexity. It embodies truth. And like truth, it is simple yet you never get tired of it and it never overwhelms your senses, instead it replenishes your energy.

The reason why this smell was so deeply etched in my memory is because back then, my nose was also going through a cultural shock. Unlike Taiwan, New Zealand is devoid of any strong smells in normal indoor or outdoor settings. As such, it took my nose a long time to readjust its sensitivity to be able to smell New Zealand. This fact alone isn’t enough to make me notice it though, it was the bold smell and the combination from the shock in seeing the first mall in my lifetime that forever engraved it in my memory. Yes, I caught the scent while shopping with my mom at the supermarket.

That was 17 years ago and I have tried following the scent whenever I happen to catch a whiff in the air. The closest I’ve come to isolating it is when I stepped into an artisan bread shop. The journey didn’t end there because I couldn’t figure out which bread or which ingredient specifically. There are too many type of bread for me to be able to single it out. The whole shop was permeated by that smell.

The smell of New Zealand brings me back to a fond memory. Even though it is filled with tears and grief, it is warm.

“Caffeine is the only drug that is not considered a drug.” ~Some random dude on the web

The topic of addiction always sends me back to a trip down memory lane. The numerous conversations I had with Miss Z are at the same time nostalgic and sentimental. One day, I innocently asked how she managed to finally quit her addiction. To which, she replied with: “I replaced it with another addiction: coffee.”

Miss Z was had always been a paradox to me. Even though younger in age, she was, in every which way you decided to look, the more mature person between the two of us. Her solutions to life’s problems bored the mark of adulthood from an inchoate sense of sadness that exists because of life’s true lessons. In contrast I was still a young man who thought of the world as black and white. That is why I am quite amused by the fact that I actually took after her advices and replaced my coffee addiction with tea. Something needs to be consumed when I think and if that something cannot be coffee, another substance needs to be found.

(more…)

“I mean, why should I live? What’s the point of continuing existing if there’s no point at all?”

I haven’t participated in one of these philosophical debates at work. Mostly because I know that the point is moot so long as I cannot defeat the infinite theory that is both self proving and disproving. So, I simply threw this at him, hoping to get out of the tricky situation where we both spiral into a soul searching session.

“That’s because you still haven’t figured out the perfect reason why you shouldn’t die.“

The ideal

I decided to improve upon my most original layout (UltraZen I) and spawn off version two in its name. UltraZen II continues the minimalist ideal that I held in mind when I designed the first original layout of this site. It uses unfinished lines to imply the text’s boundaries, letting our imagination fly while keeping the presentation neat and uncluttered. This choice is a reflection of my chaotic nature, where constraints serves to accentuate my raw nature. Take a look at the comparison between Ultra Zen I and Ultra Zen II. See the similarity in the usage of lines?

Layout

Several changes are made in the layout department. As you’ve probably noticed, the thumbnails are bigger, but just big enough so that I can still fit two of them side by side per row. It always irks me that the default thumbnail size is so small that I can barely tell what’s being shown. But at the same time, I don’t want a full blown image that will take over the whole page. So the compromise is what you see here. Half half. Since I don’t post pictures often, I can afford to have bigger thumbnails that hogs bandwidth.

The overall color scheme unfortunately, have to remain grayish for the moment. I still haven’t figured out how to correctly combine green, beige, brown, black and white in the right way to generate a sense of zen. A frank reminder of my deficiencies in color matching. The choice of dark gray is to help monitors save energy around the world. Sadly what started as a noble act ended up being tainted by stupidity. My researches in LCD technology work reveals that black requires more electricity than white. This is due to the fact that LCD’s back light is always on and black is  achieved by using electricity to give light a spin so that it became polarized and in the process blocked out by the polarizing filter. In its natural state (white) it doesn’t need the electricity to give light a spin.

Also note that the white color is used primarily on the side bar, header and footer while leaving the posts and contents with a darker and grayer counter part. This is done to create depth in an otherwise 2D screen. It makes the site looks like there’s a frame on top of the paper that’s sitting beneath. The positioning of the gray lines also coincides with the white lines to create a drop shadow effect.

Smaller changes overall from the font choice to color contrast and consistency of positioning across all pages. Overall, there’s more thoughts into everything.

(more…)

Truth has a funny way of throwing people off. It hurts, it is often politically incorrect and most importantly of all, it reflects back from another person in their ways of looking at the world. It is the principle with which I test others. I don’t plot, I don’t scheme and on top of that, I don’t lie. I believe in my truth, but even more crucial to that, I believe in the good intention behind it all. Once I accepted that fact, I am also able to live with the consequence of “My truths”.

Granted that this truth is constructed out of my own reality, but in the absence of an absolute truth, it is the only thing I have to test against the world. That is, your world. In the process of finding my own style, I discovered that the reaction from you to the revelation of truth by me gives me a good idea of who you are compared to me. The content of your reply doesn’t really matter much because during the time you are responding, I am merely observing your body language and the way you behave.

You can be uncomfortable, pissed off, offended, cracking up, defensive, superior, judgmental, evasive or you could be like me, firing back another truth and observe my reactions. Either way, the most important thing for me during a conversation, is to find out what you really stand for, whether or not you’ll agree to go with my idea and not to talk about who I am (That is the job of this blog and friends.).

I felt sadness when I looked into your deep blue eyes. A sense reluctance for what I am about to decide. Once again, I replayed the unwinding of events which will become your future. I am no seer or prophet, but the tone and story you’ve been telling me have already locked you in your own personal hell.

I cannot help you out. You will need to help yourself out once in your life. To prove to yourself that it is possible so that you are not constantly looking for others to help you. Genetically speaking, you are more perfect than I am. Situation wise, ours only diverged a few years ago. Yet here I am and there you are. The only thing you lack that I have is the belief in yourself.

I am sorry, but you are on your own now.

I am making a habit of cooking something different every weekend now. A hobby that I have come to enjoy and love. There are times when I failed miserably and have to admit complete defeat, then there are times when the failure actually creates a result completely unexpected. It is this unknown that drove me into experimenting with food in the first place. The fact that every recipe will come out differently when a different person makes it is amazing.

Even that complete failure gave me insight in making something new, just as this week’s baking failure has given me a completely different bread than I originally planned. My failure at making Secret dish #3: Focaccia bread because I did not let the dough rise a second time resulted in a type of bread that is crispy on the outside yet has a firm and spongy texture on the inside. That failure, along with greasing the pan with too much oil created a “semi-roasting” condition which is the cause of the crispy outside.

Baking is so much harder to control than normal cooking and it has proven to be a an intricate world that stimulates my mind indefinitely. A field that enlightens and calms my mind. I feel at peace with my Zen while I am cooking. My back doesn’t get as sore as it used to, my movements has gotten more efficients so I don’t spend more energy making the meal than the meal gave back. I’ve also moved low enough in the food chain that I started using fresh ingredients. Going fresh is more healthy and reduces the cost considerably (Although I am still guilty when I am going all out on making an expensive dish.)