Shali and I were just visiting Cunningham park today and it turned out the park was playing host to the 11th annual Korean Children Festival! I tried to google for some reference to the festival online, but found none. The festival should really do a better job of marketing itself, it seems really fun for the kids!

Anyway, I had my Canon Rebel XT with me today, so I took a few pictures.

A general picture of the festival.

First Birthday Celebration (Tol). The one year old baby is presented with a table of items. Depending on what item the baby picks up, the baby’s future is said to be foretold. Read more about the tradition here.

Shali playing with a Gong.

Kids sumo-wrestling each other?

You can see all the pictures here.

I started going to Starbucks regularly in the last two year and have begun to notice an increasing number of people lounging around in the back surfing the web. When I first encountered this phenomenon, I was extremely irritated at all these bums who just won’t give up their seats… sometimes for the whole afternoon. It turns out this phenomenon actually has a name, coworking.

Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.

Apparently, many of those surfing the web not only have jobs, but are in fact working! There are quite a few bloggers and .com executives who use cafes exclusively as their offices. Now that I travel pretty extensively, I am completely sold on the idea of co-working as well. Cafes are so homely and yet usually bustling with activity it’s really quite motivating. It’s also really difficult to beat the convenience factor. I can pull up to any city’s wireless enabled cafe, grab a coffee and immediately get to work.

Heck, I’m typing this blog entry from Baltimore’s One World Cafe! (BTW, it’s chocolate chai is really quite good.).

As some of you might have noticed, I have been a fairly delinquent blogger as of late. A fair bit has happened since my last post and I’ll just make a quick update now.

I have often been accused of having a lack of focus, and I’d be hard pressed to argue that myself. So for the past few weeks, I have been thinking hard about who I really want to become in 3 years and the steps that need to be taken for me to get there. It took some time but I believe I have finally figured it out. Roughly speaking, I will be focusing on:

• Re-engaging myself in Entrepeneurship
• Re-engaging myself in Education
• Detaching myself from all other responsibilities

I have a few exciting projects in the works right now and i’ll blog about them as they officially launch!

I spent a few hours today reading Next by Michael Crichton.  Though Next was not particularly well written, it is remarkably thought-provoking.  Under the guise of a novel, Crichton attempts to show the potentially disasterous consequences of current US policies on the future of biomedical research.  The Author’s notes highlight broadly the five issues that he tackles:

• Patent on Genes
• Use of Human Tissues
• Availability of Gene Testing Data
• Government interference on research
• The Bayh-Dole Act

With one of his other works Prey, I became very excited about Cellular Automata and its potential ability to explain many of nature’s greatest mysteries.  With Next, on the other hand, I became genuinely scared and disturbed with the future of biotechnology.  The increasingly commercialized atmosphere (i.e. greed) that now pervades all the major research institutions in the US is especially troubling.  The large majority of engineers and medical scientists now finish their training without having taken a single course in ethics.  Yet, these same institutions are racing to combine the all-mighty MBA with all forms of other degrees.

I have always believed very strongly in the concept of social responsibility.  Every entity, ranging from the individual to global corporations has an obligation to contribute positively towards society.  However, with so many of tomorrow’s potential leaders oblivious about the potential repurcussions of their actions, how can we expect them to guide us?

Since I don’t have a secretary, I use a whole host of computer applications to help me increase my productivity. I’ve decided to list them all here for others to peruse. If you have a favorite efficiency application that I don’t actually use, tell me about it!

• File Management
• Amarok (Linux) - A full featured music application with full support of podcasts and bi-directional music transfers on Ipods.
• Anapod Explorer (Windows)- A bi-directional music organizer for Ipods.
• Ex Falso (Linux) - A mp3 tagger.
• Hellanzb (Linux) - It downloads from newsgroups, checks the parity files, and then extracts the files for you. What else can you ask for?
• Organizer
• FlexWallet (Windows Mobile) - Allows me to leave most of my (credit || membership || rewards) cards at home.
• Gaim (Linux) - allows me to sign on to MSN / AIM / Jabber all at the same time.
• Lextionary (Windows Mobile) - full featured on-the-go dictionary.
• Maildrop (Linux) - automatically sorts and filters my email based on my personal scale of “importance”.
• MythTV (Linux) - acts as my digital video recorder (DVR) and my video organizer. The setup was a bit torturous, but it has made up for it in all the ads I no longer have to watch (without paying a monthly fee)!
• Outlook (Windows [Mobile]) - keeps my calendar and contacts on both my laptop and my phone.
  
• Papyrus (Windows Mobile) - keeps my day to day organizer on my DASH.
• Planetplanet (Web) - aggregates all the non-private RSS streams of blogs I read and publishes it on one clean page.
• Sitebar (Web) - synchronized bookmarks wherever I go.
• Trillian (Windows) - The windows equivalent of Gaim.
• Server Management
• Amavis (Linux) - Gets rid of virus-infested / spam emails from the mail server. It is now stopping more than 1000 spams a day!
• Gallery (Web) - In my opinion, there is simply no better way to organize your photos.
• Horde (Web) - I mainly use the email portion of this “groupware”, and apparently so does a lot of universities.
• Phpmyadmin (Web) - you didn’t expect me to manage my databases all using command prompt did you?
• Phpldapadmin (Web) - Sometime last year, I thought it would be a great idea to switch my backend to ldap. Thank god for this app.
• Samba (Linux) - Allows windows and Linux computers to talk to each other in an admin-sane fashion.
• Webmin (Web) - Graphical interface for systems administration.
• Wordpress (Web) - Most of my websites now run entirely off of Wordpress (though a severely hacked version). If I still had to manage a loose collection of pages, I would seriously kill myself.