why dogs are better than cats

when you get bit by a house cat, read this instead of going to the doctor. i'll tell you what the doctor told me.

so my landlord owns a cat. i pet it sometimes but usually i'm too lazy. i decided to pet it today, and all was going ok,until i touched it's claw/paw. then it bit me.

i googled cat bites and found that they were much more dangerous than dog bites due to some kind of bacteria in their saliva. it then occurred to me that there are many reasons why dogs are better than cats:

• it's hard for an average non-cat owner to tell if a cat is happy or not (wagging its tail actually means it's mad)
• cats think they're the center of the universe. dogs think you're the center of their universe.
• some dogs can actually defend against intruders. cats just get owned.
• getting bit by a cat is a greater hassle than getting bit by a dog. cat saliva is basically poisonous
• cats can't play catch
• if you're going bald, you can't use rogaine around cats, because cats die upon contact with rogaine

anyway, i fortunately had kaiser health insurance through work, i thought i might as well use it. so i went to the emergency room. maybe it's because my issue wasn't urgent, but i had to wait about an hour and a half until i finally saw a doctor. yay, go kaiser.

once i finally did see the doctor and told him my story, the doctor said cats are more likely to have rabies than dogs, and that cats bites are more likely to get infected (as google said.) but he didn't want to vaccinate and treat me for rabies yet, because i probably don't have rabies. and also because it's an intense process where i get 1 shot, come back 1 day later to get another shot, 3 days later for the next shot, 7 days later for the next. instead he told to keep an eye on the cat for the next two weeks (keep it indoors). to see if the cat will develop symptoms of rabies first. then once that happens, i'll know i'm screwed. The doctor said rabies symptoms might not show up in humans until it's too late, so that's why you gotta watch the cat instead. he also recommended a tetanus shot but since i had one 2 years ago, i didn't need another one.

anyway, i was prescribed amoxicillin / potassium clavu tablets 875mg for $5. 1 tablet orally 2 times a day for 7 days. you can't lie down for 30min after eating it or else it would just sit in your stomach and not be effective. you also need to take it after a meal, otherwise it might cause heartburn, but it'd still be effective.

i left the house for the ER at 1:13am. got back at 3:30. i wasted about 2hrs 17min of my life. but during the drive back, NPR (national public radio) was talking about facebook's IPO (started an hour ago), and  it said IPO's are not a good buy. because during those first few days of trading, many shareholders (early employees, early investors etc) are not allowed to sell their shares. this creates even more demand for the stock in those first few days, which might bubble the prices even higher. then when those people do sell, the price might drop. also, facebook only made a billion dollars last year. but it's valued at 104 billion. it'll take about 100 years for it to earn it's worth. and that's a little too long...

btw kaiser charged me $75 for the ER visit. i wasn't expecting that, or else i wouldn't have gone. that's outrageous to me because i already have kaiser insurance and i specifically drove farther to get to a kaiser ER (that's one major bad thing about kaiser - you can't just got o any ER or else you'd go bankrupt before you die from your wounds). now it all makes sense where the doctors' $300,000/yr salaries come from. if i was a doctor who went to school for 8 years, have a quarter of a million dollars in loans, of course i'd want a salary of $300,000/yr (50% is taxes anyways). i think perhaps what's messed up is our education system that costs so much to train doctors. insurance companies are messed up too, of course.

biggest advertiser: AT&T. Oh, and fuck thomas edison

i just read that "GM, which ranks behind Procter & Gamble Co and AT&T Inc in advertising spending, spent $1.1 billion on U.S. ads last year, according to ad-tracking firm Kantar Media."
and this site ranks at&t as second to proctor & gamble: http://www.cnbc.com/id/24186387?photo=1. so that pretty much confirms at&t really is the US's largest advertiser.

wow, this just makes me hate at&t even more.

in other news, my friend posted this link about tesla and how thomas edison pretty much stole tesla's ideas and screwed tesla's life over. more digging revealed that thomas edison actually hired people to do alot of the inventing. edison also advertised his stuff really heavily and bashed tesla alot. in fact he electrocuted an elephant to show that his version of electricity (DC) was superior to tesla's (AC). googling "fuck thomas edison" also returned 5,430 pages. so it must be true that thomas edison really was a terrible person.

oh, almost forget to say this: fuck at&t!

i just looked at my bill. monthly service charge of $21. plus $10 for long distance. our home phone usage was 12 minutes for the whole past month. $31 for that?
there's this little option called "change plan", but when i click through it to try to get rid of my long distance service, it tells me i gotta call. good thing their call center is pretty much only open when i'm at work.

also, their website always gives me this error: "SVC04: We apologize for the inconvenience. The information you requested is currently unavailable." why can't they get their website to work. they're the biggest advertiser in the US. i get mad at at&t every month.

why can't helen keller drive?

...because she's a woman.
We've all known this fact since childhood, but here's the science behind it.

Males have faster reaction time than females:

"in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006). The last study is remarkable because it included over 7400 subjects. Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females)."

Reaction times dictate how quickly you hit the brakes:

"Traditionally, mental processing time, or reaction time, time for a normal driver under good conditions is considered to be about 0.75 seconds....A car traveling at 65 mph will travel over 70 feet during the estimated 0.75 seconds of processing time. It takes about 0.3 seconds to apply the brake, during which time the car will travel another 28 feet, and actually stopping the car requires another 188 feet with good tires on dry roads. This means that under the best conditions, an alert driver can avoid hitting any obstacle that he perceives when it is at less than 300 feet away. With a brain reaction time of one and a half seconds, the stopping distance increases to over 350 feet. And if reaction time lengthens to two seconds, what some believe is a reasonable estimate of how long it takes for someone to interpret brake lights or turn signals when distracted, the stopping distance increases to over 400 feet. This means that a distracted driver can cause an accident even if following at a responsible 2-second distance (about 200 feet at 65 mph)."

Therefore females are bad drivers.


By the way, "Navy Top Gun fighter pilots typically score between 200 and 225 milliseconds".

on a side note, why i hate my life:
my average reaction time found from one of the sites below is 278ms. that site had collected millions of samples (other visitors to the site), and my reaction time was very far below the mean. my dreams of being a fighter pilot, race car driver, riding a motorcycle, driving in the fast lane, all basically go down the drain. the more i fight against my fate, the faster i try to drive, the more accidents i get into. most things that seem interesting, exciting, exhilarating, all involve fast reaction times - snowboarding (avoiding trees), racing in track and field (taking off at the sound of the gun), to even basketball (catching fast passes), and frisbee (closing your hands quickly enough to catch the disc). those things were and are still my passions. and for 10 years of my childhood, and i actually did want to become a fighter pilot.

i'm constantly amazed at this video




sources:
http://www.chaikinandsherman.com/brain-reaction-time-traffic-accidents.html
http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm
http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/1999/sepreleases/reaction.html
very cool site about reaction times, with alot of stats:
http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/stats.php

resume present tense

i got confused about how to deal with tense when writing a resume. especially when trying to describe one's current job. from hours of googling, here's what i found about using present tense in resumes

usage of past or present tense:

...the tense of verbs in your bullet lists should be past tense for previous jobs: Ran point of sales register. Verbs should be present tense for jobs you currently hold: Run point of sales register. An exception to this is using a verb for something that happened in the past at your current job (from the example above: Won “Employee of the Month” May 2006, April 2008).

avoid gerunds (a gerund is a verbal that ends in -ing and functions as a noun) :

Gerunds are words that you want to avoid when writing a job description on your résumé. Having quite a few gerunds on a your résumé can make it seem like a boring and long list of duties. That’s not what your résumé is supposed to be. Make your résumé come to life by LIMITING the usage of gerunds.

I found several sites saying don't start off a bullet point with an "ing" verb, but they didn't explain why. If it's to describe a current project, it makes more sense to me to write "developing unix shell script to reduce data collection time" rather than "develop unix shell script to...", and i certainly can't use "developed" in this situation because it hasn't been developed yet.

I found additional information about using "ing" verbs, but it's not very conclusive:

Many people advise keeping verbs in the continuous present tense, using "ing" verbs such as "saying," "leading," "developing," "motivating," and "coordinating." Although "ing" verbs may sound more dynamic, other resume professionals argue that it is clearer to imagine an "I" in front of each verb, writing, for instance, "(I) lead," "(I) develop," "(I) motivate," or "(I) coordinate," if the job is current. If the job was held in the past, as most will have been, they suggest putting the verbs in simple past tense, as in "(I) led," "(I) developed," "(I) motivated," or "(I) coordinated." Either way, always remember to keep verb tense consistent throughout your entire resume.

Use action words to describe your job skills and make each job description specific and efficient. Especially if you favor the present tense in your descriptions, you might prefer using the “-ing” form of active verbs (“performing” rather than “perform”).

so in conclusion, who cares.

sources:

-http://vppa.tumblr.com/post/7111116906/job-description-gerunds-better-resume
-http://owl.english.purdue.edu/engagement/index.php?category_id=34&sub_category_id=40&article_id=117
-http://www.pongoresume.com/blogPosts/425/should-i-write-my-resume-in-past-or-present-tense-.cfm?CFID=13419746&CFTOKEN=2639a1708dc7a091-DCA45F9C-5056-8D3D-6629A7D136331F7F&jsessionid=ec302552aed2429e6b8a356164d55b1735b1
-http://www.lawcrossing.com/article/2081/Words-Words-Words/#
-https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/c8_p2.html

note to self: imap and pop3 don't send email

only smtp does.
imap and pop3 are ways of reading email. the difference being pop3 deletes the email from the server after downloading it from the server to your computer, while imap doesn't.

neither pop3 nor imap is used to send email. for that you use smtp.
here are 2 articles:
http://2.0webtutorials.com/web-tutorials/pop-vs-imap-vs-smtp-vs-forwarding-emails/
http://luxsci.com/blog/sending-outbound-email-via-imap.html

stuff dreams are made of

I was working on a grad school statement of purpose and wanted to use the term "the stuff dreams are made of". So i decided to google that term. I came upon this rather informative website: http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/we-such-stuff-dreams-made   

Apparently, the phrase might have come from Shakespeare's the Tempest:

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

I had no idea what this meant. But the explanation floored me. Basically the quote was saying all the parties, skyscrappers, all that we inherit, the earth itself, and everything in it, will all fade away, as if it were a dream  (btw revels=parties). from dust we came and to dust we will return.

james 4:14 - What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes

Why blog?

I blog because I want your views, comments, likes, respect, and approval,
because it makes me feel better about myself,
because I want all the glory and attention,
because I live and seek thunderous applause from other human beings,
because I am insecure about life, about myself, and about my self worth,
and perhaps, because I have an idea to share, and I genuinely think it's a good idea that can improve the lives of those who read it.