Dean (Zhuiyang) Chen

Barack Obama is full of shit, the New York Times in full of shit, Jon Stewart is full of shit, and the entire Democratic Party is full of shit.

Now let me explain why...(note: this post doesn't contain any sarcasm, if you are already offended by either the title or the previous statement, it is better for the both of us if you just closed this window and act like the past 30 seconds of your life didn't exist)

Let me start with the New York Times, which is perhaps the biggest piece of shit among all the other aforementioned pieces of shits; which is saying a lot. And no, neither the crossword puzzle(I fucking hate crossword puzzles) nor the fact New York Time columnist Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize changes this fact.

So what do I have against the New York Times? Plenty, like the fact that people treat it like an legitimate and unbiased news source when it is obviously not. For those who thinks otherwise, I'll give you another chance to close this window since it is going to be like finding out that Santa Clause isn't real all over again.

The fact that the Wikipedia article on the New York Times simply states that the Times has only been "accused" of having a liberal bias shows that it isn't a plainly established fact as it should be. The public editor of the Times, Daniel Okrent, freely admitted that the Times is a liberal newspaper. If you believe that either Okrent is full of bullshit(which I don't blame you for since most articles from the Times is full of bullshit) or that the Times suddenly changed in the past four years, try the following experiment.

Go to the biography page of Obama and Biden in the times and then go to the biography page of McCain and Palin. Notice a pattern? Obama's picture looks like it's from a fucking photo shoot and Biden's picture makes him looks professional and experiences while McCain's picture portrays him as pale, sickly and pissed off and Palin's picture is taken from the most unflattering angle possible. And if you need proof try searching for Obama on the Times website and compare it with the results to articles pertaining to McCain. One would have to be high not to notice the glaring bias towards these two candidates. Most Time columnists bend over to suck Obama's dick, defending him from the "Republican Attack Machine", citing extremist views such as Obama being a terrorist or Muslim and making claims about about how Obama will save the world from Bush who seems to be sole member of the Republican party and John McCain's twin.

Guess what, the Obama's campaign has been just as negative, citing John McCain's age as a reason not to vote for him, implying that he'll die in office. McCain's mother is still going strong and McCain is in perfect health making that a moot point. And the criticisms on Sarah Palin has been absolutely appalling by Obama supporters with the Daily Show perpetuating these attacks. They've attacked her Alaskan culture, accent, family, wardrobe, supporters, intelligence and the most random shit ranging from whales to bears. The Democratic Party and it's supporters has been just as ridiculous in their attacks, so I don't know why they are crying and bitching about counter attacks by the Republicans.

Obama lied about his ties to ACORN, supported the FISA bill that he initially firmly opposed, opposed the successful surge of troops in Iraq that greatly stabilized the region allowing for a more immediate withdrawal and like every other politician but to a much greater extent dubiously claiming that he'll lower taxes for almost everyone while increasing social welfare.

I don't understand how he's different from any other politician and I don't understand how he's fit to be the President of the United States with almost no executive experience. The hope and non-partisan claim is complete crap. Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate and has not done anything significant for America. There will be no hope for half of Americans if the most liberal senator is elected president at a time when there is already a Democratic majority in the House and a potentially filibuster proof majority in the Senate.

I couldn't help but notice that AP scores are out as everyone is bragging about them on facebook. For those of you who aren't with the program(such as myself) you can call (888) 308-0013 to get your grades(or just wait three more weeks for it to arrive it in the mail like a cool person would). Have your AP number OR social security number, birthday(if you don't know that you don't deserve to get your score), and a credit card number with the expiration date ready. It's all automated, designed for those of you who are antisocial, so no worries. It will charge $8 to the credit card you provided(less than a dollar per test, great deal for me :D). The process was painless for me, the computer read through my score one by one and waits for you to press nine after each score so you don't have to scramble to copy your scores down.

For all my stalkers out there, you may be wondering what I received on my test. Since I'd still value my privacy yet would like to be remotely helpful, I'll share my grade distribution:

2 fives
2 fours
3 threes
2 twos(hint: E&M hint: AB)
NO ones(:D)

With the exceptions of the fact I didn't get ones it seems my AP score distribution fits the Collegeboard AP score distribution for individual tests perfectly, which is pretty crazy. The scores were also a clusterfuck, I got a five and a two that I definitely did not deserve and deserved better than a four and a three. Anyways, this puts my two year AP grand total to:

8 fives
3 fours
4 threes
2 twos


which translates to nine credits at Duke, although I can't actually transfer more than two. But it's all good since my Yale transcript covers and goes beyond the credits that matter(and also makes up for the fact that I got a 2 in Compsci AB) Although it also meant that I could have gotten 1's on all my exams and still be in the same place I am now... I still fucking hate APs.

By the way JBC stands for Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers(Registered Wendy's trademark) for the healthy readers out there.

Good evening everybody.

As I stood in front of our graduating class this morning, something hit me... I've never seen half of you before, and don't know the names of the remaining three quarters. That leaves the only 1/8th (for those of you who failed algebra) of our class, most of whom, I know and love. My first reaction was that my worst fears have been realized... that Scientology has infiltrated our graduating class in attempt to turn all of us, even the females, in to Tom Cruise. Thankfully, Mr. Finnochi assured me this was not the case and that you all belong here.

Understandably, I was in a pickle this afternoon as I was trying to write something that would appeal to the ENTIRE class, half of which I didn't know existed till a few hours ago. But soon it hit me, everybody has had problems at Cross these past four years, even me, the epitome of perfection, so perfect that I'm often asked that if I'm human or not. Most of these problems range from getting yelled at by Mrs. Sherban Cline for being in the hallway during class time, to getting suspended by Mrs. Sherban Cline after she found out that you don't have a pass. Note: I only had experience with the former and the SECOND part of the latter. On a more serious note, not that my previous statement wasn't serious, we've had a lot to deal with these past few years at Cross, especially this year, with college application and/or job hunting while making sure all your graduation requirements are met.You've no doubt also had to deal with problems at home involving angry parents, relatives, friends, and dead pets. I know your parents and teachers are proud of you for making it this far, and you should be proud of yourself, so you can give yourself a big hug at this moment if you wish....

Since you'll probably run in to another problem or two during the rest of the 59.8 years of your life(assuming that you're exactly 18 and the Centers for Disease Control did not lie to me) I think it will be appropriate to share how I have dealt with problems. But, since we were on the topic of angry dead pets I have an interesting story that I'd like to share first.

Many years ago, when my paternal instincts were still strong, I decided to adopt a grass hopper that I found on a trip one day. I fixed it in a comfy home, consisting of clear plastic floppy disk holder(remember those?), about the volume of two fists. At first it seemed to be very excited to be in its new home, frantically jumping about but hitting itself on the top and sides. Soon it wouldn't jump anymore, and I thought to myself, why would it need to remember how to jump now that I've provided it a safe and hospitable shelter? It can stay in my manmade box forever.  I would delicately pluck the finest blades of grass from my yard and slide it in to MY grasshopper's new home, and check on it every few hours, flicking the box to encourage it to move and do what grasshoppers do. But one fateful morning, not even a week after I undertook this great responsibility, when I woke up early to play with my grasshopper by flicking the side of the box, it did not move; I gave up on pets ever since.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed that story for what it was, because it wasn't an allusion or anything like that, nope...

Well, sorry for the digression, let's get back to the main objective of this speech. I don't claim to have the magic bullet to shoot problems with... but I have it, and it is simple, ask for help... and make it someone else's problem, after all, sharing is caring. But remember that every person in this world is human like you, including Mrs. Coggins and me. We get angry when you call us names, disappointed when you break promises and cry when a bunny dies, although Mr. Picket seems to be more resilient to this. He has been disrespected on many occasions, has dealt with many broken promises and has had many rabbits die in his presence, yet rarely responds in an overly emotional manner.

Anyways, I'd like to give credit to, a few, ok fine, a lot of adults, all of whom are the reason that I'm standing here today. So sit tight. There is no significant order in this list, just the most important to the least important.

I'd first like to thank Principle O'Connor, and Canneli because without their help and support I'd probably would have been enriching the lives of the students in the Hillhouse Class of 2008for the past four years, since I was originally assigned to attend Hillhouse. Mrs. Coggins also deserves a hand for running the school like a jail this year, although I do miss the fights...

I could not have made it through this year without my two favorite guidance counselors, Mr. Finnochi for helping me get in to college, which was considered by many to be impossible, and Mr. Calarco for beings there when I wanted to change classes to be with my friends, just kidding.  

I'd also like to thank all my teachers for sticking with me these four years, because you all know that I can be one bad student. More specifically, I'd like to thank Mrs. Kilburn for letting me do her job. Mrs. Powell for encouraging me to take every Advance Placement test the Collegeboard offers and along with Mrs. Townsend allow me to show up all the Yalie's who think they are so smart(Sorry Shira, nothing personal).  Mr. O'Connor for putting up with me for three years as a student and a member of the tennis team, although I do believe that he may have developed ulcers as a result. I'd also like to thank Mr. Kafoglis for being a coach, teacher, client and friend to me for more than four years, and similarly Mr. Pickett, or Matt for putting up with my shenanigans and being a pal even though he found me to be a disappointment. Mr. O'Shea and Mr. Sawchuck are further evidence that teachers can be quirky and fun when you get to know them. Mrs. I'd like to thank Mrs. Saddick Brown for showing me what tough love means, Ms. Rod and Ms. Bright for showing me what unconditional love means, by the way, I prefer the latter. I'd like to thank Mrs. Sasso for teaching me the invaluable lesson that procrastination is a B, although I don't think I'm quite ready to learn yet, evident in the fact that I finished writing this speech less than an hour ago. I'd also like to thank Mrs. G and Mrs. Fuorri for just being nice.

Coach Verderan and Miller have both my thanks and respect for leading the track and soccer team, keeping us working hard and motivated. Mr. Babbs and Mr. Jarvis also deserve thanks for supporting the soccer team, well Mr. Jarvis had to because he was the athletics director, but the fact that he was willing to drive me to East Haven from school in the rain for a game proves his dedication.

Second to last of all, I like to thank my parents, who let me live in their house, eat their food, spend their money and poop in their toilets.

Last of all, I'd like to thank you guys, for starting the lunch room fights to entertain me, pulling the fire alarms to get me out of class and keeping the school administration from implementing too many rules. So I want you to look to your left and right

If I'm missing anyone, please holler now and I'll make up something nice about you.

No one? Ok... Moving on...

I know you guys would like me to hear me talk through the night, but all good things have to come to an end. Therefore, I will leave you with the obligatory quote that you're going to forget tomorrow morning after the partying... I won't be offended. It was said by a very wise and respected man who shall not be named and goes as follows... "You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut". If it has brought George Bush this far, I'm sure it'll work wonders for you.

Congratulations on making the Wilbur Cross class of 2008, and I hope you will live happily and reproductively for the next 59.8 years.

Good evening students, parents, teachers and guests, I will be occupying the next 3-6 minutes of your life by speaking about scholarship.

I imagine a scholar to have been well privileged grey haired old man who spent the majority of his time in a dark, secluded, silent, fire-lit dungeon, surrounded by thousands of barely legible hand written documents in alphabetical order, painstakingly filtering through the potentially erroneous works of others.

The pursuit of scholarship is a much different experience for modern students. We sit in our messy, air conditioned rooms, with Sparknotes, Google search results, GMail and countless ringing AIM chat windows littered across our computer monitors, and iTunes blasting music to our stereo in the background, providing a symphony of sounds that would drive most adults crazy. Every weeknight was a journey, a journey filled with Shakespeare, LOLs, derivatives, OMGs, regression analysis, ROFLCopters, red blood cells and the realization that Sigmund Freud will just have to wait because it is too late in the night (or morning), or when everyone signed off of AIM and GMail.

Despite the extracurriculars and distractions, we are held to higher expectations than the idealized scholars of the past. We learn not for the simple enjoyment of the pursuit of knowledge, but to become more responsible, productive and charitable citizens. Scholarship is the corner stone to all three qualities that the National Honor Society emphasizes: service, leadership and character.

Tomorrow’s leaders and politicians will use the lessons taught by Shakespeare and Freud to score points with the ladies, or better understand human nature so that they improve their character and treatment towards others, so that they may better govern. Tomorrow’s engineers and architects will use derivatives to design the best potatoes cannon ever, or to construct marvels that will inspire awe for decades or centuries to come, leading the way for future feats of human accomplishment. Tomorrow’s scientists and economists will use regressions to figure out the likeliness of their team of winning the Super Bowl, or to find critical patterns to predict social and environmental disasters and help redistribute scarce resources in our society to improve the overall quality of life. And tomorrow’s biologists will use their knowledge of red blood cells to save the rabbit that their pet just attacked or provide cures for fatal illnesses and prolong the span of human life, making the world we live in a safer place.

I hope your induction in to the National Honor Society will encourage you to be more active in the pursuit of scholarship, leadership, service and character so that all of you will one day become a respectable and proud member of society, or at the least be someone fun to hang out with.

Thank you.

There has been much discussion about buyout of Bear Stearns by J.P. Morgan. CNBC has a video that pretty well sums up many people's perception that the Fed showed preferential treatment towards Wall Street over the individual citizens amid the economic crisis. The media has a knack for revving up emotions for the sake of their ratings and I find its focus on the Bear Stearns deal especially unnerving. The media wants you to believe that the Fed negotiated the BSC deal in order to cover Wall Street's ass, by using 30 billion dollars in your tax money to "bailout" BSC. When I see these reports I often find many small but significant details left out. First and foremost, BSC was initially sold to J.P. Morgan at $2 per share, at the urging of the Fed. J.P. Morgan officially announced today to raise the bid to $10 in order to make the transaction smoother by gaining some shareholder support. Even then the 6 month stock price chart gives you a pretty good idea of how cheap BSC is being sold at; the stock price hovered near the hundred. Bear Stearns, its executives and employees are losing a majority of their wealth by going through with this deal. About 30% of the BSC is owned by Bear Stearns employees and I'd bet that no employee is happy about their investments and savings taking the huge dive evident in the charts.

The discount at which BSC is purchased at is mind-boggling, the initial $2 per share offering summed up to just about 1/5th of the value of its headquarters on Madison Ave., sure, the $10 a share is no doubt more reasonable, but it still barely covers the values of its real estate let alone the billions of financial instruments that it holds and controls.

A piece of information that I've rarely seen mentioned is that the 30 billion dollars is being used not to pay the banks but the mortgages that it holds. And like any type of investments it can lose or GAIN in value, especially when the mortgage crisis is over. J.P. Morgan is also taking the hit on the first one billion dollars of losses if the mortgages do decrease in value, another piece of information that gets left out. The reason that Bear Stearns fell was not because its investments weren't worth anything, rather that it didn't have the funds and liquidity in its investments to continue doing business due to the lack of confidence in the bank, a problem that the Fed, which has the power to inject virtually unlimited credit, doesn't have.

The media also missed the big picture of this purchase or they would have realized that the Fed acted in the best interest of the average Joe. Hopefully it has now become clear that Wall Street will not benefit from this deal. This move by the Fed is to preserve the billions of dollars in mortgages and trillions of dollars in credit swaps that will go bad with if Bear Stearns did fall which was almost a certainty. During a time when the economy had been battered left and right, the fall of BSC along with the multitude financial instruments it holds could have very well been the K.O. for the economy. The stock market would have collapsed, sending the investments, pension funds and savings of Americans spiraling down. It would also not just cause decreases in jobs but further deteriorate the housing and credit crisis The hit that the stock market would have taken alone could have been very well beyond the measly 30 billion dollars to prevent this disaster.

My internet was down for the past few days because my cable modem died, which also meant that this site which is hosted on my home internet connection was down. The receive and on line light stopped flashing and it would not respond to PC activity. The same thing actually happened about a month ago but it magically came back to life. I was not so lucky this time and had to shell out $50 for a new one.

Like any of my purchases, I always do extensive research before I buy and the Motorola SB5101 seemed to be the best option for Comcast subscribers since it is compatible with PowerBoost, which is Comcasts way of making up for it's near monopoly of internet service in many regions(haha). Anyways, PowerBoost is pretty much a 10-15 second burst of super fast internet connection for when you want to download some files, extremely convenient at times; you want it, trust me. The modem is also less susceptible to dropped internet connection a problem that I was having awhile ago and still have a minor case of, going to run a few tests later to see if the new modem improves things a bit.

I attended my first computer class ever, CPSC 223b, this afternoon at Yale. It is the first class out of the four semesters of classes I've attended at Yale where I felt I truly belonged(Well to be fair, all of those classes were econ classes, and I have almost no background in the course material). Although we are using C in our class(I code mostly PHP), I knew exactly what the professor was going say word for word in many cases.  It's comforting to know that reading Slashdot daily or programming websites really does provide one with an intimate concept of computer science. Of course, the first few lectures are usually introductory and simple in nature it was really exhilarating to hear a Yale professor repeat what I've known for years. We are going to be using GCC and linux(Suse 9.1), so all those days I've sunk in to playing around with linux distributions are finally going to pay off.

Never have I been so enthusiastic about a class, looking forward to a great semester.
(I'm also taking Math 120 or multi-variable calculus, a lot less enthusiastic about that one but math is one thing it doesn't hurt to learn)

I was amazed at the ease of use and powerful features geared towards web design that Adobe integrated in to Fireworks CS3 when I introduced it to my girlfriend last night. The multitude of brushes themselves, including all types of color changing confetti and "alien paint", many of which respond to pressure from the pen for the Wacom Bamboo tablet I got her for Christmas, provides all the tools a design will need. I was so impressed that I had to check out those features for myself, and there is no better way to do test Fireworks potential than to produce a real world design.

Ironically the design itself is inspired from Fireworks' feature set. The grid background was inspired from the show grid feature available in Fireworks, and the glow for these boxes was inspired by an accidental click in the styles panel of Fireworks. I'm pretty satisfied with the new layout that I created in a few hours(would have taken 30 minutes if I knew exactly what I wanted). Fireworks makes applying styles extremely easily by providing a preset that takes only one click to apply and can be easily edited under the properties panel to match your needs. Although I didn't need it, the integration with other Adobe products such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash is definitely there. Fireworks has now replaced Photoshop for all my web design needs, I don't miss anything from Fireworks' reduced feature set.

However, it is not without its faults. It would run very sluggish in Windows Vista until I disabled in Aero interface, documented on Adobe's site after a quick google search. This is just unacceptable since the final version of Windows Vista was released prior to CS3 and the beta of Vista has been available for testing for years. I was also unable to take advantage of Fireworks' slice feature since it refuses to save in any format other than horribly compressed jpeg, that distorts the dotted lines and ruins the glow from boxes. I believe all the images on a site except for colorful images should be PNG, since jpeg sucks at compressing fancy designs with transparency and gradients. Fireworks also save flattened PNGs as PNG 8, which only saves a very small subset of the color spectrum of the file ruining any gradients. I didn't notice this until I had already made all the components to the design and realized how horrible the gradient from the blue glow looks.

It only took 5 minutes to implement the new design after I prepared the images(there are only three of them, one for the header, body and footer) since all that was required was small updates to less than a dozen lines in my CSS. If you are using Firefox just right click on the header body and footer too see how I implemented the design. You can checkout my old design here.

The next step is to clean up my left side nav and move some of it on to the header. By the way, I did all of this with a sprained and/or fractured right wrist, and I'm right handed, which shows how efficient Fireworks workflow is.

I've been experiencing some network issues for the past few weeks. The upload for my Comcast cable internet connection would turn unresponsive for a short period of time, ranging from 2-10 seconds, every few minutes or so. This turned from an annoyance in to a huge problem after a week or so. I use Skype as my primary home phone service, using the Netgear SPH200D. During the upload interruption every few minutes or so I can hear the caller's voice perfectly fine but they can't hear me for that 2-10 seconds, which is no doubt frustrating on both ends. It also meant that firefox would essentially freeze for the period of time my upload doesn't work, if I try to access a site when my upload is down. It is especially frustrating in Ubuntu since it grays out the entire firefox window till my upload is restored, since it thinks firefox has crashed.

I initially thought it was an issue with my ClarkConnect(Red Hat based) linux gateway that my network access to internet is routed through since it was experiencing some high loads due to squid trying cache too much resources. The server load returned to normal after disabling squid but the problem did not improve. I also suspected it was the network card since I popped in a new intel gigabit card around that time but was able to rule out the server completely and connecting my computer directly to the modem. Ping Plotter still showed constant interruptions where pings to google.com was completely unresponsive(red bars).

I read on the Vonage forum about someone who was having a similar problem and after 4-5 visits from Comcast techs, it turns out there was a problem with a network cable on his street and was fixed after Comcast replaced the cable. It actually turns out that this happens pretty often; the thread regarding this issue is a hundred pages long. But I didn't have the time to put up with the required 4-5 visits from Comcast before they can fix the issue and gave up for the time being.

I noticed that the coax cable to the modem was off a 1-to-3 splitter(1 for internet and the other 2 for TVs) and decided to bypass the splitter and plug the coax straight in to the modem. I expected it to alleviate the problem since the signal will no doubt improve but to my surprise, the problem was for the most part fixed. I was no longer receiving ping reports littered with red bars, but the ping plotter graph was still pretty jumpy with a occasionally upload downtime of a second or two which should not be very disruptive

To my surprise I found another splitter(1-to-2) hidden behind some boxes piled on some shelves  today and removed that from the path to the modem also and the situation further improved with the ping times stabilizing a bit more. The screen shot above shows the before and after of removing the 1-2 splitter with the big red bar representing the downtime from having to remove the splitter. With both splitters, all of the spikes in ping time would have been red bars.

However, the ping is still not as stable as I would like it to be and Ping Plotter is still showing some packet loss so I may still need to call Comcast to replace the aged coax cable running in to my apartment. I also recall a similar problem with my neighbor's internet connection that I helped call in. The tech spent an hour making sure all the coax cables were working correctly and the culprit ended up being a aged cable filter installed in a metal box a hundred feet away. There has also been reports of bad modems, although removing splitters will almost always help with your cable connection.

Some one obviously has too much money/time on their hands. According to the article in the Orlando Sentinel the light/house show is composed of 25,000 individual lights valued at more than $10,000, more money than most people spend in their lifetime for Christmas. To be fair he did borrow most of the equipment from his job as a light designer but setting up all those lights and syncing them to the music that is broadcasting FM to bypassing cars is no trivial task.

Anyways, press play on the Youtube video if you haven't already and prepare to be stunned(I'd hate to be this guy's neighbor).