"Back to the Mac" event is coming soon & complain for apple care

Well, the "Back to the Mac" will come after several hours, but I am a little bit tired to watch the show.
It is because that the event is at midnight in Taiwan and too late for me to enjoy it.
The other reason why I don't want to watch the event is that I am not happy with the apple care in Taiwan.
Comparing with other countries, such as Japan and American, we spend more money to buy a Mac and wait for another month to buy a new apple device.
However, we are not treated with the same right.
If some parts of our Mac device is damaged, such like the motherboard or speaker, we need send the device to the repair center and wait for half a month.
What!!! a half month!!
It is true, really true.
People in Taiwan should wait for a week to a month to get back their repaired Mac.
Why??
Because there is no apple store in Taiwan, and all device and component are from Singapore, we need to wait for the slow ship or the plane.
If you are not that lucky, your component is broken while shipping.
Well, you need to wait for another week.
That is the reason why it costs you several weeks or a month to repair your Mac.

And I am the lucky one, I only wait for 2 weeks to get my Macbook air back.
I do love the product made by Apple, but if they could setup an apple store in Taiwan, I would love it more than before.


Steve Jobs had said, "we're not perfect and we love our users."
If Jobs really love the users, how about build an apple store in Taiwan.
I believe that people in Taiwan will very happy to hear this news.

It is really a bad day for me.

This is a poor day for me. My loudspeaker, Altec Lansing FX4021, and my Macbook air built-in speaker die at the same day. Suddenly, I lose all my ears and can not hear any voice at all. Well, I admit that the condition is not so bad, but it is really terrible for me to lose these two devices today. Now, the only thing I can do is to use the earphones provided with iphone 3GS. Actually, the FX4021 is already 4 years old, so I believe that it almost reaches its life-span. However,it can not happen to the Macbook air, which is only 9 month old device, with such poor built-in speaker. Fortunately, my Macbook air is so young that it can be repaired without any charge. Well, it is a good chance to check if the apple care is still working. By the way, it is also a good reminder for me to buy apple care in case the MBA has something wrong in the following two years. Maybe some other day I will write a story about how to send broken MBA to apple repair center in Taiwan.

Why should I record this? It is because that we don't have apple store in Taiwan. We can not directly feedback our opinion to Apple. The only thing we can do is just wait for the response from apple asia. Well, it always takes a lot of time to wait for the product in Taiwan. But I will wait for the great product as long as it is worthy to wait. If someday we have apple store in Taiwan, the world will be getting better.

P.S Don's take this diary too serious, it is just a English writing practice.

WSN & Robotics

Last year I stayed in UC Berkeley for a short-term study for four months, and the topic I focused on was the security issue on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, I used to major in Robotics which is a little bit different from WSNs. The common point between them is that there are lots of sensors inside the hardware. Therefore, some crazy idea comes into my mind and brings me a good start. Since I had studied on WSNs over a past half year, I start to think about how to combine the WSN with robotics. The ideas are as followed:

1. Location for the robot (such like wheel-robot) via WSNs
   
2. Robot network by applying WSNs
3. Applying both Robotics and WSNs on health care system
4. Fire alarm and rescue system by utilizing Robotics and WSNs
5. Secure issue between Robotics and WSNs
   

I believe that the topics stated above maybe have done by someone else, but there must be some point needed to be improved. It is a good time to start to survey the paper to check if there is anyone interesting about these researches right away. Let the game begins!!!

I am in Canada right now!!

I am in canada right now!
Actually, it is my first time to go abroad.
Also, it had been a long time for me to get here by plane.
It almost costs me 18 hours to get to Ottawa.
But it does not affect my happy mood.
The weather here is cool, just like the fall of Taiwan.

加拿大渥太華

FREE wireless broadband service!!

WoW, with Google TiSP you can use free wireless broadband service!
As long as you have the TiSP self-installation kit, you can surf the internet by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
The flowchart is shown below.
What amazing thing it is!
I want to take it, too!!

For more information, just google it!!

Reference:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/project-teaspoon.html
http://www.google.com/tisp/
http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html

Official Google Blog: Project Teaspoon

Wine in Laptop

Wine in laptop!! What a terrible thing it is. But in case someday this could happen to me, i need to prepare for it. Below is a link that teaches us how to deal with such condition. Keep it in mind, it makes things better.

1. You need to disconnect all power sources to not make things worse
2. Time is not your friend.

http://www.grynx.com/projects/wine-in-laptop/

Useful Things to Know About Ph. D. Thesis Research

This article was written by H.T. Kung.(Prepared for "What is Research" Immigration Course, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 14 October 1987)

link:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~htk/thesis.htm

There are several interesting topic in this article. In the subject 4 he presented 4 stages for a Ph.D student. And these stages are most important processes for student.

• Knowing everything stage
  • Student: "I have designed a supercomputer even before graduate school."
  • Faculty: speechless
• Totally beaten up stage
  • Student: speechless
  • Faculty: smiling at the student's progress so communication is possible now.
• Confidence buildup stage
  • Student: "I am not stupid after all." (student thinks)
  • Faculty: "Uh oh, she is ready to argue." (faculty think)
• Calling the shot stage
  • Faculty: "I am going to design an n-processor supercomputer."
  • Student: "You are crazy, because ..."

Maybe it is a good idea to translate it into Chinese some other day.