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People just like to watch

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I was watching a youtube video of how to make bonzai today. And I was think about how to make my own bonzai better. And I felt that it’s just too much work to make it better. I’m content with just having it the way it is now. I realized that I don’t enjoy shaping up my bonzai, not even owning the bonzai is that attractive for me. I probably just want to watch other people making bonzai and want nothing to do with myself. I’m perfect happy with just watching.

I don’t think it’s a unique feeling, because there are so many channels on Youtube about watching other people playing games. Heck, the whole sports industry is watching other people play a game.

So I decided, maybe I will just make videos about me making programming projects. One, I actually like to build project with code. Two, other people might not want to spend the time coding, but enjoy other people building a project.

So look forward to my video, talking about a computer programming projects I will make.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Server failed to boot after power loss

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So my ubuntu server failed to boot after a power outages. It just went into the boot menu. But no matter what I press, it have some error related to “need to load kernel first”. I went around with the error message, but none of the suggestions worked. Even using all the tools with boot-repair. Finally went back to this post. https://askubuntu.com/questions/397485/what-to-do-when-i-get-an-attempt-to-read-or-write-outside-of-disk-hd0-error

Most of the suggestions are correct, except this part ->

Grub> initrd /initrd.img

It happened that I don’t have /initrd.img. It maybe got removed somehow. But if I do initrd /boot/initrd.img* then I was able to boot. I will see if I have any more errors related to this.

by yangliu3456
Misc

Generosity and raising children

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Things started tonight, when I was kind of ignoring my son to play with him. My wife immediately complained that I didn’t spend enough with my son, and said I should be more generous with my son. From my point of the view, I spend a lot of time and much more willing to make sacrifices with my wife, because I know I’m going to spend the rest of my life with her. And there are plenty of “return” with my “investment”. But with my son, I know all the time I have with him is 18 years, and then I expect nothing in return from my son. That is, if I did my job correctly. I fully acknowledge that I don’t want to invest as much in my son as in my wife.

She also mentioned that she often don’t realize that she was being extra nice to someone until she noticed she wants something from that person. And I confirmed that we all have a fixed amount of will power, and we choose to spend that will power on the things we value. I rather spend that will power on learning than lavishly praise another person, maybe just for browny points. And I understand that there are people who choose to praise everybody, even though they won’t get anything in return. Perhaps that satisfactions of praising someone is the reward on its own for them.

I always know my father is stingy, beyond frugal. I always thought I’m not stingy, because I spend money on my wife and son much more than I spend money on myself. But perhaps being stingy is not all about money. I value my time on this world more than money. And spending time with people is not necessarily something I prefer. It may not be a bad thing to do, but it’s a lifestyle choice I made consciously.

But back to raising children. My wife asked if I could imagine seeing my son being successful in life is a good enough reward for me to spend time with him. That by being extra generous with my son, my wife is really invested in his future, without asking for anything in return. I don’t know if I can do that. Being trained in biology, I considered whether it’s a genetic thing. That by being a male, I tend to be less invested in one offspring, because I have the opportunity to spread my seed in multiple fields. Whereas for my wife, being a female, is more invested in a single offspring, because moms are evolutionarily the primary care giver for the offspring.

Just as always, the situations started out with I think I have a point, ended up being my wife is right, and I need to commit more family time to play with my son. And as she rightfully point out, even though I may still have 10 years to live with my son, he will soon realize that he doesn’t want to be around me any more. Probably wise to spend more time with him, until it’s too late. Or do I want one more of these devils. Ha ha ha …

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Chinese translation of western countries makes the Chinese love them more

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Back in the 1980s, there was a huge rise in the number of educated Chinese wants to immigrate to western countries. I think it’s partially due to how Chinese translations of some of the western countries. Even though the names have little to do with the countries or culture, it created a fantasized version of the country in the hearts of many Chinese people.

For example, the United States is translated as the “beautiful country”. France is translated as the “lawful country”. Germany is translated as the “honor country”. England is translated as the “handsome country”. Italy is translated as the “meaningful country”. Canada is translated as the “plus country”. Sweden is translated as the “intelligent country”. Ireland is translated as the “love country”. Czech is translated as the “fast country”. Of course, I romanticized a little bit here and added some of my personal touches, but the idea is not far from what people thought.

There are some that’s more on the quirky side. Like Span is translated as the “west country”, and Portugal is translated as the “grape country”.

These translations are due to the fact that Chinese characters have different tones for each pronunciation. Although differentiable by a native Chinese speaker, each tone does sound rather similar. And for each tone, there are many characters that sound exactly the same. For example, in English, the word “beat” can mean both sound rhythm or hit something. But you can expect upwards of tens of words that sound exactly the same in Chinese. So if you see a Chinese person with the same first or last name, you can probably expect tens of variations in Chinese, even though the Romanized spelling is the same.

Because of translation is mostly done by sound and each sound in Chinese could mean many different things, people often choose the word with the best meaning for translation. So the resulting country names are often carry well intentioned meaning. Because these western countries are the first contacted Chinese culture, their country name translations often took the best translations. Compare to African countries or Latin America countries, there are rarely any well meaning translations. They often just trying to stay on the non-offensive side.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Supreme Court decision on church gathering

Reading Time: 2 minutes

U.S. Supreme Court made the decision today on allowing non-essential church gatherings during this Covid19 pandemic, ruling against New York State Governor Cuomo. This is the first case after Justice Amy Coney Barrett becomes the deciding factor in a 5:4 vote. It also correctly reflect what I believe is the overall sentiment of US citizens. In the US people value freedom more than lives. In other words, people rather have the freedom to decide what they want to do, despite the high chance of death or permanent health damage.

I do think that the freedom to let people gather infringed the right of other people who want to live. If this is not an infectious disease that can easily spread to other people and cause death, then people can exercise their freedom as much as they want. They can commit suicide as many times as they wish. But because it is an infectious disease, the action of exercising their freedom potentially takes away other people’s freedom to live. Just because other people did not actively choose to gather, it does not take away their rights to live amongst society. At a minimum, the people who choose not to gather have to stay at home for longer periods of time and are prevented from going out and interact socially. And it does hurt society as a whole from the mid to long term, even for the people that want to gather, at least before an effective vaccine is available. I’m going to ignore the people who don’t believe in vaccines. Thankfully, they are still a minority of the US population.

I still remember the first time I saw New Hampshire’s state motto, “live free or die”. This reminds me of some of the things I was taught when I was little. Rather than falling on the conservative side in the US, it was taught by people more on the liberal side in China. So I think things on the extreme ends are rather similar, no matter where they are.

I personally value lives more than beliefs, but I understand why people values believe more than lives. Believes keep the human race advancing to the next stage because people believe there is always a better tomorrow. This belief comes at a cost though, so keeping the balance between beliefs and lives is the key. I’m more of a person that learns the rule than bend the rule. It is an easier option. But I do envy the people that at least attempt to bend the rule. That is why I think diversity is important. Not just race, gender, age, etc, but also in mindset and beliefs.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Thoughts on US election (system vs personality)

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I had some thoughts on the US election as I woke up this morning. From the conversation I had with some coworkers and what the people on Live streams are saying, I think that people in the US believe in the system of the US government enough, that despite the fact they don’t like the president as a person, they still think the policies will be carried out according to their plan.

After many years of living in the US, I think people believe strongly in the system rather than the person who is making the decisions. Because the system is putting up enough barriers to direct whoever is in charge to make the correct decisions, the personality of the person in charge does not matter.

This is a strong contrast to the Chinese government for example, in which people believe that a good leader can direct the country to a much better place. And there are many old stories and historical comments that show strong favor of a leader that is compassionate and listen to the people.

But my question is that do we want to leave up to chance that we have a good person in the leading position. Would it better to have a system that makes sure the leader does not waver from the people’s interests, no matter how deranged they might be?

Being trained from a scientific background, I believe in the system of discovery. That we should experiment using systematic approaches, rather than design experiments depending on how we feel it should be. And we should collectively build a system that essentially guarantees things do not fail. And we should consider the said system to be our grand achievement for the government and society, not celebrating the individual who makes great decisions for us.

As I can think of it, nobody is perfect. And we certainly should not rely on the hope that any leader will be perfect.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Random thoughts

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As it happens, sometimes I get into these rabbit holes to watch a specific type of Youtube videos. As of last weekend, I got into this type of video about a specific person with provocative views. The views they made are rather appalling, but if I listen to his explanations more and more, I don’t see a flaw in their reasoning. The reason that I feel these views are appalling is that they are different than the values I believe, at least on the surface. Yet it is also amazing that I arrive at the same conclusion if I listen to their reasoning.

It is not uncommon to feel this because I was listening to a math lecture and some guy proved that the sum of all positive integer is -1/12. The result is absurd and obviously wrong, but I cannot find where the equations went wrong. (I didn’t found out why later). So I listened to other people who have opposing views than them, and they were able to disarm all of the opposing views with ease. I understand that it is also possible that all the videos I saw purposely constructed in a way to prove they are right, further leading me to their side. After all, Youtube is famous for providing the videos that their customers like. There is a possibility though, that these views are correct. It doesn’t serve me right if I just completely ignore them because they are different than my views.

I recognize that these views are mostly on how to navigate the existing world. It’s more about the old rules that govern the world. So it’s self-serving that save these rules is correct because we have been operating under these rules for centuries. Sometimes, to have a better life, we need to break the currently working rules and create new rules. And because change is always hard, they are going to feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean the old rules don’t work, it only means there may be a better world we can strive for.

I don’t think that just because the current political world is more polarizing than ever, we should forget about extreme views and try to bring more things to the center. I think we should keep having discussion about the extreme views, evaluate why they are not a good idea, and potentially develop on some ideas that seem extreme, but actually build a better world. Although sadly to say, I’m still going to stay in the center for my personal actions. Maybe because that’s deeply ingrained on my personality already.

by yangliu3456
AI, Journal, Misc

OpenVPN

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I made an attempt to install OpenVPN using linuxserver.io‘s docker image. I tried Docker compose version but hit this error:

You can configure manually using the /usr/local/openvpn_as/bin/ovpn-init tool.
/var/lib/dpkg/info/openvpn-as.postinst: line 72: systemctl: command not found

After a little digging in the log file, it said:

Error: Could not execute 'systemctl enable openvpnas' to enable startup/shutdown scripts

I tried to search some error and github page said they are working on it. I then went to this page and there seems to be a solution by changing the config.json file.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/79012-support-linuxserverio-openvpn-as/page/71/

But I tried that by execute into the docker container, execute this:

/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key "vpn.server.daemon.enable" --value "false" ConfigPut
/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key "vpn.daemon.0.listen.protocol" --value "tcp" ConfigPut
/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli --key "vpn.server.port_share.enable" --value "true" ConfigPut
/usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/sacli start

This however didn’t work either. There seems to be other tutorials using straight docker and get to the admin page. So I can only say it’s the mentioned multiprocessing problem, and I will have to wait to a working update.

by yangliu3456
Journal, Misc

Family symbol

Reading Time: < 1 minute

So I was searching for some designed for family banner, sigil, coat-of-arms, or whatever you call it. My family name is “Liu”. Then I found this one.

link to the picture

I read the description and thought it was interesting. It looks and feels like old Chinese characters, but there is still a good chance that it’s just an attempt to duplicate what was before.

by yangliu3456
Misc

Covid-19

Reading Time: 5 minutes

There is no escape as this virus has dominated everybody’s life this year. I will write my personal journey here. And if in the future I get to look at it again, it may be a reminder for if I fall into similar situations again.

I first heard of the virus on Wechat, a Chinese social app, when a group of people at Wuhan thought SARS came back. There was some news about possible new cases of SARS, but it soon got quiet and nobody was mentioning it. I never gave much thought about it since similar rumors are quite often on social platforms. This was around mid-December of 2019. About two weeks before the Chinese New Year 2020, a bunch of people in China got tested positive for some new disease that’s similar to SARS. And there were some cases of death. It seems that things were starting to get serious. Then just before the Chinese New Year celebration, the government started to be open about the disease, and the New Year celebration TV show was filled with the topic. It was around how medical personnel was pulled from other areas of China to support Wuhan. My parents in law told me about how their activities were being limited. My brother-in-law and his wife found some surgical mask for my parents-in-law and send it to them back in China. It’s all-around Chinese social media now. This was just the end of January 2020.

At the same time, Americans were not very worried. My coworkers were not talking about it as much. I tried to warn them, but I don’t think anybody was actually concerned. I had to take a company-wide meeting in the last week of January. I took some surgical masks with me on the flight but was too “scared” to use it because nobody else was using it. In the U.S. this is a sign that someone is really sick. I didn’t want to raise that flag, especially since I’m Asian looking. On the flight back, my transport from the airport to near my house was a bus ride. On the bus ride, there were two groups of Chinese travelers wearing masks. They mostly have surgical masks, and one guy even has an N-95 mask. Even the two children had masks on. I remember I was thinking that my son will never put a mask on. At that time, most people didn’t know that children under 12 are not heavily affected by the virus. I had some debate about whether I should have pulled the masks from my luggage, but it was under the bus already, and I didn’t want to ask the driver to get it for me. I intentionally shipped two rows of seats as I passed them. They weren’t coughing, so I wasn’t too worried. That may have not been a good thing, because we now know it can spread without symptoms, even if they had masks on.

After coming back from the business trip, there was no change in terms of public sentiment. There were no known cases in America except the Princess Diamond Cruise travelers. President Trump did close the border to China pretty early. But there was no mentioning of any country in Europe, and no known cases in Italy yet. I pretty much carried out the same at work. No masks or gloves. But every morning, I would ask Google Home to tell me about cases near my home. And see if there are cases. I checked the CDC website pretty regularly. The Sina Chinese site was keep tracking of cases by day. And there are more cases every day. No media other than CDC is covering this in America.

Right around the time my son had a break in February, there started to have cases around us because they went to Italy for vacation. There are more confirmed cases due to travel around my hometown. I was getting increasingly worried. We discussed as a family and thought about whether we should take my son out of school, even though he will be marked absent. We did not end up doing it. I just watched super closely. However, when California, Washington, and Massachusetts starting to have double triple-digit cases, I worked up the courage to ask my boss to let me work from home. My boss was of course super understanding about it. The funny thing was our CEO decided my whole company is going to work from home the next day. So all that was just for one day of working from home.

Once I started working from home, we were more worried about getting food and try to limit our trips to crowds. We started getting deliveries more and stocking up on rice, flours, and other non-perishable foods. Trips to grocery stores are getting more intense. We used masks and gloves even though no more than 10% of the public is doing that. My coworkers didn’t seem to be too worried about it. We were, of course, trying to get masks. But they would either be extremely expensive, like $20 each. Or simply not in stock for physical drug stores. All the big vendors were out. Since my wife is close to the healthcare system, she was still working. They are starting to lock PPE supplies at work. She had two 3 more weeks than me because she simply cannot work from home. When she no longer required to work, she was put on furlough. Unlike my company, her employer didn’t ever plan a similar situation, or have the funds to support her. She was told to apply for unemployment benefits.

Life post the big event is settling in place. We don’t go out. Try to get food delivered to us when we can. And only go out for groceries when it’s necessary. I can still work from home, so it’s somewhat regular. I have done online meetings before so I don’t think work is hugely affected. My son has to study and do homework for about 6 hours a day. All that time is managed by my wife, so she is getting stressed more than normal. We go out to run early in the morning to get some exercise. We live in a somewhat rural town, so it’s no difficult to avoid neighbors. We just say hi from far away. I don’t know when I will be going back to work physically as my son’s school is “home only” for the rest of the year. I don’t think we can manage my son’s school work with both my wife and I working the whole day without teachers. There are some talks already for people going back to work because some states have protested about it. And I think people area unrest because not everybody can make ends meet. A lot of people need to work to survive. And some people are willing to take the chance to fight for what they built with their whole life. They don’t want to see that go away because of the virus. For myself though, I think I will stay put for a while until there is a definite plan to return.

by yangliu3456
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