The Mozmonkey Blog

I’m the type of person who loves to learn and experience new and different things whenever I can. My Parents have always shown me how exposure and experiences can enrich your life, and often times the more awkward or uncomfortable it is, the more you get out of it.

For example, recently I had a few days where I was going through some real depression; the cause of which is another story which I’m sure I’ll write about in the near future. Having depression felt odd since I’ve never really experienced depression before and have always been good at regulating my emotional state. This is how my mind processed the experience:

“Hmmm, this is a new feeling. Kind of different.”
“I think it’s depression…yup, I’m entirely sure it’s depression.”
“It’s an odd new feeling.”
“I have decided I don’t like it much.”
“Okay, I know how to deal with this, I will now decide to be happy!”
“Hmmm, I’m still feeling depressed, that didn’t work very well.”

Simply deciding to be happy didn’t help as much as it usually does, but instead, I eventually went for a hike where I meditated and later enlisted the support of friends. I let the feelings wash over me and they were gone in a couple of days.

Being depressed made me feel completely tired, sad and the need to be around people but somehow despised the thought of being around people. The contradiction alone was enough to keep my mind busy for awhile to sort it out.

After the fact, I find it funny that I was so intrigued by this new feeling and experience.

The Death Experience

A couple years ago the thought of death became my greatest fascination — and fear. It was brought on by some very bizarre dreams I had, where in them, I died. At first it was disturbing, and then it became something of a mental obsession.

I am a spiritual person and was raised Catholic (although, not currently practicing), so I posed this question to myself: “What if there is no after life? What happens? What’s it like?” That became a riddle for me to unwind; similar to asking about the meaning of life. The vision of nothingness appeared to me like an empty black void. “What is is like to not exist?”

That’s a hard question to answer because, well, existing is practically all I do.

The other part of the question was, “What is it like to die instantly?” The thought of being alive one moment and not the next without being aware of it, scared me. But why? It’s not like it’ll matter much after I’m dead. I wont know that I’m dead, so why should it matter that I know I’m about to go?

Sometimes I pose this question to friends and they usually say they would rather not know and just die instantly or in their sleep. This still bothers me.

I finally realized why — I want to know what it’s like to die. I want to be able to embrace that final life experience before I head off into the great unknown. (as ironic as that is) Somehow I feel that if I miss it, then I have missed one of life’s greatest, and last, experiences. Some of you reading this probably think that’s pretty sick. I’m okay with that.

Conclusion

For those of you who are afraid this is the prologue to a suicide letter, fear not. There are still too many experience I have not had to end this ride short. I expect to live my life long and full until I die at a very old age.

Maybe I’ll be that old guy who interrupts your conversation at the coffee shop to bore you with off color Irish jokes (”What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake?”) or tails of grand things I [never] did. Yes I’m sure I’ll be that guy. Oh the stories I will tell.

At MixerMixer we’ve created a Facebook application but cannot submit it to the Facebook application directory because the app must “have at least 5 users” before it can be submitted. Okay. So I try to share the app with friends, but they don’t get the message because the app is not in the application directory yet! It’s a catch-fucking-22.

All the Facebook documentation says is “It must have at least 5 users”, but nowhere does it explain how to get 5 users to install an app that is not published yet. Damnit Facebook, complete your documentation!

Perhaps I shouldn’t have had a few drinks before attempting to complete the process.

I’ll update this post when I figure out how to get those 5 elusive users.

In a few hours (5.5 to be exact) I’m jumping on a plane to travel from San Francisco to Chennai, India. PayPal is sending me to do the JavaScript training for the Web Development team there.

My plane leaves tonight at 12:05a and lands in Singapore for an 8 hour layover. I expect to leave the airport of a few hours of sight seeing and sampling the local food. Then I jump back on the plain to hop over to India.

I’ll be in India for 2 weeks and doing the “Intro to JavaScript and DOM Scripting” class for half the team each week. Over the weekend my boss, Kimberly Blessing, and I will be traveling up to Agra to see the amazing Taj Mahal. I’ll be taking lots of pictures and posting them on Flickr along the way. I love how every time I tell someone I’m going to India their eyes light up and they instantly have stories and advice for places to go and things to do — it’s fantastic! (and yes I’ve had my shots, pills and will avoid the water)

OK, off to finish packing now. Wish me luck!

Finally, the Simpsons Movie is almost here (7/27/07).

I’ve been in a love/hate relationship with the television show “Lost” since it started. I do enjoy some of the plot twists and the character flashback that, over time, show how all the characters relate. The whole story is an interesting concept, and Ben is the perfect villain. But, since the beginning I’ve hated the countless plot twists without any answers (do the producers even know where it’s going), the number filler episodes that draw out 5 minutes of content over an entire hour — for example: Boone dieing, Lock’s obsession with the hatch and Paulo and what’s-her-name dying (they weren’t even part of the show).

Lost has been loosing much of it’s audience for exactly these reasons. Instead of the producers fixing the problem, they instead narrate a review episode, called “The Answers” where they explain all that we have learned throughout the series. The episode felt like they were trying to convince all of us that there have been answers — really — we must not have seen them. The problem is that the answers so far are either not directly part of the main plot line or open other questions.

The types of answers that don’t matter are things like how Locks’ Dad is the same person that conned Sawer’s parents. Or that Jack’s father is also Claire’s dad. Oh and Kate killed her father. Do the producers have “daddy” problems? How about how the girl Sawer conned helped Kate later on — that was really important, right? These things are interesting, but don’t give a whole lot to the story. They really aren’t answers.

Most of the other “answers” really didn’t answer anything but opened up more. For example, we thought that the others were part of the Dharma Initiative. Well, the show answered that question by…spoiler alert…telling us the “others” were rebels who murdered everyone in the Dharma Initiative with the help of Ben. Ok, then where did the rebels come from? Why are they at war the plane crash survivors? And who the f***k is Jacob?!?

This is why the audience feels like there haven’t been any answers, because the answers aren’t leading anywhere. They don’t really contribute, and I’m starting to get really pissed off. I’m considering tuning out until the last season. Because I’m reasonably sure not much will happen until then and the last few episodes will be a huge explosion of revelation.

If the producers want to keep their audience, they need to answer some big questions first: Why are the others at war with the survivors? Who is Jacob, why is he there and where did he come from? What’s with the black entity on the island? Give us real answers, then feel free to open a few more questions. We want to feel progress.

I’m not the type of guy that gets excited about new locomotives, but this is something cool that I caught while browsing through inhabitat.com.

The folks at General Electric have recently put together a series of informative, compelling, and visually stunning videos as part of their Ecomagination “commitment.” Here’s a video about their Evolution Series Locomotive, a lean mean high-performing machine which truly “defies the perception that greater efficiency means less power,” using 189,000 fewer gallons of fuel in its lifetime than its predecessors….

via inhabitat.com

The coolest thing was the numbers on the GE site (located from the video page at ‘Behind the Story’ > Facts):

• If every locomotive in North America were as clean as GE’s Evolution…[it] would be like removing 48 million cars from the road each year.
• If the largest railroad in North America switch half its locomotive fleet to the GE Evolution, annual carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by an amount equal to planting more than 31,000 acres of trees.
• Compared to locomotives built in 2004, a single Evolution locomotive will consume 315,000 fewer gallons of fuel in its lifetime…

I always love seeing innovations like these. We wont stop, or reverse, global warming with a single solution but many smaller steps until we reach the tipping point.

Last weekend I had some spare time, a picture and a bit of inspiration and decided to redesign my website. The reason it has taken me so long to create my own design is that, simply put, I’m not a designer. I usually don’t know where to begin and how to get the design to flow correctly. I mean, I know good design and can even sometimes spit out things that are viewable, but I’m no designer.

So where did I start? <Leans back in chair> It all started a couple weeks ago when my Dad and I decided to go hiking up at Sanborn Park. Originally we were going to go Jeeping, but it had just rained the night before and his Jeep doesn’t have a winch yet, so we went hiking instead. The conditions were perfect and I was able to snap a few pretty good pictures. Out of the set, I was really drawn to the misty trail image. I liked it so much I decided to play with it in GIMP and afterwards decided to design my entire site around it. Once I had the picture, the rest of the site practically designed itself.

So browse around and let me know how you like it. I’ve also added some cool new Web 2.0 features:

• All links have a new animated fading rollover effect pulled in from the CSS and animated with YUI.
  • This is part of an API I’m building in order to keep presentatin separate from the JavaScript.  More on this soon!
• The tagline text fades into view when the page loads. I plan to add more random statements over time — any suggestions?
• Comment submission is now done with XHR. I plan to make this more robust in the future.
• And of course, shiny title bars.

The fading effects and XHR comments were all built with the YUI libraries.

I’ve been getting loads of emails everyday from people requesting, or demanding in some cases, that I upgrade my extensions to be compatible for Firefox 2.0.  Be assured that I am working on this.  Right now I’m trying to get my server back up to 100% after it had been hacked twice.  I expect to be releasing updates next week — I appreciate your patients.

Last week this site was hacked into and brought down. I couldn’t access it through SSH or anything so I had to reboot it into safe-mode. The good news is none of the data was compromised and I was able to back everything up safely, the bad news is I had to reimage the server in case a root kit was installed. Now I have to go through the process of reinstalling EVERYTHING! As you can see I’ve gotten the blog back up but I still have to reinstall and configure SVN, ViewVC, Trac, Webmin among other things. Webmin and SVN are usually straight forward, but I remember the headaches I had trying to get ViewVC and Trac to work. Wish me luck and a lot of coffee.

Since Jimmy is transfering from the Sunnyvale Yahoo! office to the one in England, we had to send him off properly…get him drunk and take pictures of him dancing on the pole.  We met up at the Buddha Lounge in Mountain View at 6p, and the rest is best described in pictures: