Happy Holidays!

Oops sorry, late on this, but happy holidays!

It's 2009! GOOOooooooooooooooooooo!

Remikz on Boing Boing!

Hmmm, this was a while back but boingboing.net wrote about the Kenguru Drive-In Car, and linked back here as its source!

Anyway, you can go here to check out the article on boingboing.net.

Flickr Deleted After Digging

So about 2 days ago, one of the photos in my flickr album was submitted to Digg and made front page. Shortly after, my entire flickr account was deactivated.

When I asked flickr as to why my account was deactivated, they replied with

Hello,
Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.
Flickr account "remixnzza" was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne Flickr reserves the right to terminate your account without warning at any time.
Regards,
Do

After visiting the guidelines page, they have a clause that says:

Here’s the deal: In most circumstances, we like to give second chances, so we’ll send you a warning if you step across any of the lines listed below. Subsequent violations can result in account termination without warning.

I received 0 warning, and my account was promptly deleted. I guess my photos were just so badass that they had to immediately delete them all without contacting me a single time.

Oh well, here's my 15 seconds of fame. The very last time I logged onto my flickr, that photo had 150,000+ views.

For now, please excuse all of the red X's on my site, I need to find a new host and update all the links.

Happy Belated Birthday Blog!

Oops, time sure flies. Missed my own blog's birthday! I launched the blog on 03.06.07, and now its just past 1 year old!

Prevent Cancer

This has nothing to do with my blog, but I'm posting this as a public service announcement.

I got this email forwarded to me from the GF about preventing cancer. I don't know how much of it is accurate, but it supposedly originated from Johns Hopkins. Also, my mom pretty much lives and dies by these rules, so not much of it is news to me, but it might be informative to some of you out there.

Cancer Update from John Hopkins:

1. Every person has cancer cells in the body. These cancer cells do not show up in the standard tests until they have multiplied to a few billion. When doctors tell cancer patients that there are no more cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect the cancer cells because they have not reached the detectable size.

2. Cancer cells occur between 6 to more than 10 times in a person's lifetime.

3. When the person's immune system is strong the cancer cells will be destroyed and prevented from multiplying and forming tumors.

4. When a person has cancer it indicates the person has multiple nutritional deficiencies. These could be due to genetic, environmental, food and lifestyle factors.

5. To overcome the multiple nutritional deficiencies, changing diet and including supplements will strengthen the immune system.

6. Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly-growing cancer cells and also destroys rapidly-growing healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastro-intestinal tract etc, and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc.

7. Radiation while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs.

8. Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation will often reduce tumor size. However prolonged use of chemotherapy and radiation do not result in more tumor destruction.

9. When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation the immune system is either compromised or destroyed, hence the person can succumb to various kinds of infections and complications.

10. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause cancer cells to mutate and become resistant and difficult to destroy. Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites.

11. An effective way to battle cancer is to starve the cancer cells by not feeding it with the foods it needs to multiply.

Cancer Cells Feed On:
a. Sugar is a cancer-feeder. By cutting off sugar it cuts off one important food supply to the cancer cells. Sugar substitutes like NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, etc are made with Aspartame and it is harmful. A better natural substitute would be Manuka honey or molasses but only in very small amounts. Table salt has a chemical added to make it white in color. Better alternative is Bragg's aminos or sea salt.

b. Milk causes the body to produce mucus, especially in the gastro-intestinal tract. Cancer feeds on mucus. By cutting off milk and substituting with unsweetened soy milk cancer cells are being starved.

c. Cancer cells thrive in an acid environment. A meat-based diet is acidic and it is best to eat fish, and a little chicken rather than beef or pork. Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer.

d. A diet made of 80% fresh vegetables and juice, whole grains, seeds, nuts and a little fruits help put the body into an alkaline environment. About 20% can be from cooked food including beans. Fresh vegetable juices provide live enzymes that are easily absorbed and reach down to cellular levels within 15 minutes to nourish and enhance growth of healthy cells. To obtain live enzymes for building healthy cells try and drink fresh vegetable juice (most vegetables including bean sprouts) and eat some raw vegetables 2 or 3 times a day. Enzymes are destroyed at temperatures of 104 degrees F (40 degrees C).

e. Avoid coffee, tea, and chocolate, which have high caffeine. Green tea is a better alternative and has cancer-fighting properties. Water-best to drink purified water, or filtered, to avoid known toxins and heavy metals in tap water. Distilled water is acidic, avoid it.

12. Meat protein is difficult to digest and requires a lot of digestive enzymes. Undigested meat remaining in the intestines become putrefied and leads to more toxic buildup.

13. Cancer cell walls have a tough protein covering. By refraining from or eating less meat it frees more enzymes to attack the protein walls of cancer cells and allows the body's killer cells to destroy the cancer cells.

14. Some supplements build up the immune system (IP6, Flor-ssence,Essiac, anti-oxidants, vitamins, minerals, EFAs etc.) to enable the body's own killer cells to destroy cancer cells. Other supplements like vitamin E are known to cause apoptosis, or programmed cell death, the body's normal method of disposing of damaged, unwanted, or unneeded cells.

15. Cancer is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. A proactive and positive spirit will help the cancer warrior be a survivor. Anger, unforgiveness and bitterness put the body into a stressful and acidic environment. Learn to have a loving and forgiving spirit. Learn to relax and enjoy life.

16. Cancer cells cannot thrive in an oxygenated environment. Exercising daily, and deep breathing help to get more oxygen down to the cellular level. Oxygen therapy is another means employed to destroy cancer cells.

Cancer Update From John Hopkins Hospital

1. No plastic containers in micro.

2. No water bottles in freezer.

3. No plastic wrap in microwave.

Johns Hopkins has recently sent this out in its newsletters. This information is being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as well.Dioxin chemicals cause cancer, especially breast cancer.

Dioxins are highly poisonous to the cells of our bodies.

Don't freeze your plastic bottles with water in them as this releases dioxins from the plastic.

Recently, Dr. Edward Fujimoto, Wellness Program Manager at Castle Hospital, was on a TV program to explain this health hazard. He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us.. He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave using plastic containers. This especially applies to foods that contain fat. He said that the combination of fat, high heat, and plastics releases dioxin into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body. Instead, he recommends using glass, such as Corning Ware, Pyrex or ceramic containers for heating food. You get the same results, only without the dioxin. So such things as TV dinners, instant ramen and soups, etc., should be removed from the container and heated in something else.

Paper isn't bad but you don't know what is in the paper. It's just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc. He reminded us that a while ago some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons.

Also, he pointed out that plastic wrap, such as Saran, is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be cooked in the microwave. As the food is nuked, the high heat causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food. Cover food with a paper towel instead.

Dear Blog

Hello! Time for another update. Yesterday, Kenny pointed out this post on Chitika, titled "Help me, my mom is my blog's only reader!" by Darren Rowse from Problogger.net. The title itself made me want to read the article, not to mention Darren Rowse makes six figures a year from his blog(s). Here's a quote from his article describing his personal experience:

When I first started blogging, I had romantic notions of an incoming rush of traffic hitting my blog. A couple of months in I began to realize that that wasn’t going to happen. I remember the light going on in my mind one day - the rush of traffic just wasn’t going to ‘appear’. Of course there was a trickle of traffic that did just ‘appear’ - but if I wanted traffic in large numbers I was going to have to find some way of going and getting it.

For those of you that have been following along with my blog, it is now almost 2 months old; I launched it initially on 03/06/07. Luckily, the recent traffic my blog has been receiving has not only fulfilled my "romantic notions," but has far exceeded them. Perhaps my "romantic notions" are not grand enough, but I was hoping to reach 1000 unique visitors in one day by the time my blog becomes 1 year old. However, this last week blew away that goal; currently I have an average of 1,500 visitors and 2,600 page views per day. My single best day received 5,000 visitors and 8,000 page views.

I'm not here to brag about my site stats. On the contrary, I'm here to express my gratitude to you, my readers. I'd also like to thank StumbleUpon for driving so much traffic to my blog. I had a couple of my posts "featured," which lead to massive spikes in my traffic. Without StumbleUpon, I would surely be amongst the rank of blogs where my mother would be my only reader. But what's worse is that my mom isn't too good with English, so I'm not sure that even my own mother would be reading my blog.

I know that a large portion of that traffic will probably only see my blog once in their lifetime, so I'm mostly here to address my returning visitors. Seeing all of these huge numbers only makes blogging that much more fun for me. Hopefully after visiting my blog, you'll have at least smiled once, laughed once, or learned something new. Once again, thank you for visiting my blog.

Sincerely,
Michael Hwang

P.S.
Comments are open for suggestions and criticism. Please do let me know what you would like to see more of, as well as what I can do to improve this site. Feel free to be mean, I don't cry easily. Q_Q
Oh, and if you've ever wanted to comment on a past post, you can do that here too. That's you Jodan.

Technorati Tags: blog, StumbleUpon

Spring Update

Hello everyone! It's been 3 weeks since I've launched this site, and it has been officially spring for a week. I was late on getting the new banner made and put up, but it was a bit more difficult than I'd imagined it would be. I'm fairly new at this sort of thing, so it may not look like much. Hopefully I'll get better as we go down the road. If anyone is interested, here is how I made it:

First off, I'd like to thank David Shao for lending me his services. He took the photo that is the basis of the banner. I believe he used a Canon digital SLR, along with several lenses. I don't know the exact specifics as to which lens he used, but if anyone is curious leave a comment or send me an email and I'll get in contact with him. The picture is of the tachometer on my 2005 Honda S2000 hitting redline, or at least close to it. Here's the original prior to modification, aside from a resize. This is 1/10 the size of the original, which was close to 10 megabytes.



I used Photoshop CS2, which was once again provided for by David, to create the banner. I cropped the tachometer and resized it to my liking, and placed it on a black background. The background was filled with a gradient, going vertically from black to gray. In order to produce the blurry and pastel-like texture on the tachometer, I used a filter effect called cutout.

Next, and perhaps the hardest part, was finding a font that fit the whole theme. I went through loads of different fonts, from handwritten calligraphy to graffiti type fonts. One website that I highly recommend for downloading free fonts is www.dafont.com. That is where I found Wolf Rain, the font that you see on my banner. I feel that it fits in quite nicely with the tachometer's font, and stands out from the usual everyday fonts.

With that said, please feel free to leave a comment as to how my blog is going. It's still very new and I've been making modifications to the layout nearly everyday, but once I'm satisfied with the layout, I will focus on writing original content. I've been averaging close to 100 unique visitors and over 200 page views a day. These numbers are a pleasant surprise, and I'd like to thank all of you that read my blog.

P.S. I hope everyone in school did well on their finals. Spring break is here!

Launch in 3 2 1 !

Hello here, I've finally finished coding this page, and I'll be making my first post today. The coding is still messy, and I haven't put everything that I want on here yet, but I really wanted to start this site due to the fact that winter is almost over! Once it's over, I'll have to make a new banner, and I didn't want to waste the one I already made. Technically, spring doesn't start until March 20th, according to wikipedia. So until then, it will be winter on this page.

Most of you probably already know me, so I won't introduce myself. For those of you who don't, stick around and maybe you will. Wow that sounded awkward.

Anyways, I'm making this site because I've been having a lot of free time on my hands lately. I used to spend all my time playing Guild Wars, and the occasional game of DOTA (Warcraft 3) but I've quit both. So here I am. I'll be posting about anything that I encounter worthy of being posted. I'm still messing around with the HTML, so don't be surprised if you see columns flying all over the place. I made this page using IE7 in 1280x800. I tried my best to make it compatible with Firefox and other resolutions, but if you see any errors please do leave a comment.

P.S. I'm still up for that occasional game of DOTA.

"i'm fancy" - wingsai cho