Three weeks ago my Dad had congestive heart failure from pneumonia and diabetes (a real bad combination).  If his neighbors haven't checked up on him, broke into his place and called 911, he would have died.  He spent 11 days in the Kaiser hospital in Roseville.  My brother and I drove up to attend a class to test Dad's blood sugar  and inject him with insulin, checked him out of the hospital, and took him back to my place in San Jose to stay for a while.  I hope this is a temporary situation but it looks like he will be staying with me for a long time.

The moment we got out of hospital, he tried to assert his independence and insisted on driving to San Jose in his truck.  That was a scary ride with him straddling the lanes and nearly hitting some cars in a zero visibility rain storm.  My brother and I forced him to give up the keys at a gas station in Fairfield.  Only later when I went through the medication that he's taking did I discovered that he was driving under the influence.

I drove his truck back.  A big Dodge Ram with a Hemi engine that my Dad was reluctant to let me drive.  I have never driven a truck before and never a vehicle with an engine that powerful.  However, I did followed my brother all the way back without incident and Dad fell asleep because I'm a careful driver.  My brother is the one who routinely gets tickets for speeding and tossing his cigarette butts out on the highway.  I went into computers and he went into cars, which I have to constantly remind Dad about when he thinks I'm driving too carefully.

He's been getting better since I'm taking care of him now.  I used to take care of a roommate for four years who died from Lou Gerhig's Disease.  All the old habits of denying myself to take care of someone else kicked back in.  Although I'm squeamish about needles, I got used to injecting Dad with insulin four times a day.  The swelling in his legs has gone down and the sores on his feet are healing.  A home nurse visits us once or twice a week and we been to Kaiser in Santa Clara for doctor appointments.

While I been driving Dad around in his truck to doctor appointments at Kaiser in Santa Clara, my own car ended up in the shop.  For the last two months, the engine been stalling out in idle every two weeks in the parking lot at my apartment complex.  Then it started happening more frequently at intersections and once on the highway.  When I drove back from seeing Alice in Wonderland at Oakridge Mall last Saturday night, I noticed the battery light flickering on the dashboard and told my friend that the engine would stall out a moment before it did at my apartment complex.  I went over to Kragen to have the battery tested and it appeared that the alternator was overcharging the battery.  I took the car over to the John's Bascom Auto for troubleshooting and the mechanics couldn't figured out the problem.

Then Dad mentioned a loose ground cable may be the cause.

My car used to be his car.  Unless I'm having a problem with the car, he never tells me what problems he had.  (After having the car for two years now, everything should be fixed.)  When I informed the mechanics, they fixed two ground faults, replaced a vacuum hose to the brake booster and installed a brand new battery.  Seems like I'm driving a completely different car and the brakes are no longer stiff.  I'm taking the old battery back to Kragen to exchange under warranty.  The mechanics said they would buy back their battery if I got mine replaced.  Dad is paying for the repairs since I been fixing all the problems that he had worked around to avoid fixing.

How is this affecting me as a writer?  A lot.  My dedicated office space was cut in half to make room for another twin bed.  Since Dad has the TV running 24 hours a day, he's been respecting my privacy to work on writing after dinner.  I had submitted my short story collection to the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes contest last weekend after spending months editing the 28 short stories that I written over the last three years.  This week I'm finalizing my vampire novella to submit to an ebook publisher.  I had reviewed two-third of the current draft today while in a waiting room at Kaiser today.  Next week I start editing my first novel in earnest for the next nine months.  Plus being in a hospital environment is giving me a lot of useful medical information for future stories.  If Dad is going to stay with me for a while, writing is the only escape I have from the TV and his snoring.

A sprawling water-themed 32- to 64-player death match level for Quake 2 that was started in 1997 and still remains unfinished and unplayable.  May Will get finished in 2010.  If so, before Duke Nukem Forever comes out—if that ever gets done. (Updated 2010/02/19)

This week I closed out my savings account at Wells Fargo Bank after it dwindled to nothing from being unemployed and living on unemployment benefits for nearly a year.  I didn't have enough cash for the minimum balance to avoid the $3/month service fee and the savings account paid next to nothing in interest rates.  (Business Week reported today that the banking industry made $52 billion from paying less interest on deposits, an indirect gift from the federal government to rescue the banks from bad loans while soaking savers.)  The situation with plain old savings account is so bad that putting money into the stock market is the next best thing.

That's exactly what I did with the savings that I'm rebuilding.

I opened a new stock trading account at ShareBuilders and pay a $4/month fee to invest my savings deposit into shares of iShares Barclays Treasury Inflation Protected Securities Bond Fund (TIP).  If I'm going to pay a monthly service fee for saving money, I might as well get my money worth.

Unlike a regular savings account, I'm extremely reluctant to move money out of a stock brokerage account.  A transfer usually takes three or four days to be processed and figuring out the capital gains for tax purposes takes that long too.  The quarterly dividend payment will be more than what I get in interest from the bank and is automatically reinvested into the fund.  A bond index fund avoids the complications that comes from directly investing in Series I savings bonds and safeguard my money from deflation and inflation.  Based on all the information that I read in recent months, I suspect inflation will be an issue in the future.

This works as long as the stock market doesn't go belly up.  Unlike plain old savings account, there's no insurance protecting a stock brokerage account.  If everyone cashed out their chips at the same time, my entire savings will disappear.  Considering that federal government had bailed out Wall Street once already, and the bankers are still gambling that the federal government will rescue them again, a total economic collapse seems unlikely.

A more conservative option would be to open an Orange savings account that pays better interest rates and doesn't charge a monthly service fee.  I have a small savings account with them for leftover gas money from my budget to cover car expenses and save up for a new used car.  I could've opened another account with them.  That wouldn't removed the temptation from periodically raiding the account.  A stock brokerage account forces me to consider the costs of moving my money around.

When Apple announced the iPad this week, I was watching Twitter and bouncing around the different websites providing live updates of the announcement.  By the time the announcement was done, and enduring the onslaughts of bad menstrual jokes from iPad for women to iPad for men (I liked the iSlate name much better as a nod to writing cuneiform script on clay tablets),  I've decided to get the 16GB with 3G version by the end of summer.  I don't think I'll need 3G for Internet access on the road; but if I change my mind later, I can sign up up for it.  I still need to get a new job so I can actually afford to buy one.

The initial impression that I gathered from my Twitter feed of writers and webcomic artists was using the iPad for presenting content.  Most writers saw the iPad and the iBookstore as an ebook competitor and what it means for publishing as a whole.  Most webcomic artists saw the iPad as a platform to present their archives or put together 24-page comics at near full-size and in color.  I'm looking at the iPad as a portable writing device and a programming platform.

What I need the most was a mobile replacement for my aging Mac mini (PPC) that has grown long in the tooth since the hard drive was killed last summer by killer dust bunnies after nearly five years of continuous use.  I need Pages (wordprocessing) from iWork for writing.  Check.  I need a virtual and physical keyboard support.  Check.  The price had to be less than a replacement Mac mini (Intel).  Check.

Ding-ding-ding! We got a winner!

As a writer, I can load up the iPad with my files and go anywhere to work with my manuscripts. Maybe the iPad will wean me away from yellow notepads and pens to finally embrace the paperless office.  Or someone will introduced a yellow notepad app with superb handwriting recognition.  Or, if the iPad ends up like my iPod Touch, it'll make a great paperweight Kindle reader.

I'm also looking for a new programming platform.  If I had the time, money and motivation when the iPhone first came out, I might've gotten in early on the app store craze and become an instant millionaire.  I haven't been enchanted by either the iPhone or Touch to jump on the bandwagon since then.  The one thing that I learned about being successful at anything is finding a niche that no one else wants and run with it.  I see opportunities to make to create applications that take advantage of the new iPad features.

I recently started reviewing the C programming language and plan to learn Objective-C programming language and the iPhone/iPad SDK.  My first applications will be similar to the Joomla! modules that I have done to pull pictures from various Twitter-based picture sharing websites.  If you look at Apple app store, you will find plenty of applications to upload pictures to these websites.  None, however, will pull pictures from those websites, present them in a slide show, and enable a user to set a picture as the wallpaper.

A more ambitious application is a kid-friendly turtle graphics with the LOGO programming language.  Why resurrect a near dead programming language on the iPad?

• There's nothing like that available in the Apple app store.
• The perfect opportunity to create a virtual version of Big Trak programmable tank that I loved as a kid, which, unbeknown to me at the time, was a physical version of the LOGO turtle.  (When Big Trak is reintroduced this year, I'm planning to get one and may casually steal the keypad interface for my own application.)
• The Berkeley LOGO (UCBLOGO) is a freeware interpreter with C source code that I can use in my own application without having to reinvent the wheel.
• The iPad is the perfect platform for an application of this nature.

When I get this application done, there are several more ideas I would like to pursue.  Once upon a time, I wanted to be a game programmer.  The iPad might be my ticket — especially if I become an instant millionaire.

I read over the weekend that Rockstar Games employees are badly overworked in an open letter from their wives.  This is the same development studio that made Grand Theft Auto into a $1 billion franchise.  They apparently have no extra cash to change the work environment for the employees working in the trenches by giving them raises, hiring more employees to reduce grueling work hours and letting them have vacations.  The situation is so bad that employees are exhibiting suicidal tendencies, their marriages are on the rocks, and the future of the studio is in jeopardy.  (Working for a drug-addled rock band would be easier in comparison.)  The executive management team, of course, blew off the open letter as "the opinions of a few anonymous posters on message boards[.]"

If you're familiar with the video game industry, this won't surprise you at all.  The trend over the last ten years is for the executive management team to emulate the Wall Street corporate model: squeezing the blood out of the workers in the trenches, boosting the short-term profits to keep the markets happy, and kicking the money upstairs as bonuses.  (This model replaced the Hollywood "content is king" strategy that failed miseribly after most of the development studios relocated to Southern California.)  Employees are "resources" to be used, abused and fired at will.  If this process ruins the lives of employees and destroys the studio, the executive management team can always bail out to find another studio to ruin.

The video game industry has become the sweatshop of the 21^st century.

What did surprise me was that the Sony Playstation Network has a reality game show, The Tester, where the contestants compete for a video game testing position.  That's pure fantasy.  The sofas are long gone to put in more cubicles in any studio that has embraced Wall Street.  Contrary to public perceptions about working in the video game industry, being a tester stops being fun and games after the first six weeks and becomes pure hell when crunch time is all the time.  The recent Penny Arcade webcomic reveals the stark reality for the potential winner: long hours of being in the same dim cube for days on end, testing an unplayable video game that no one likes, and eating a "nutrient-rich sludge" every eight hours (i.e., the roach coach or Taco Bell).

After having spent six years as a tester and lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple identity crises) that went from a family-owned company to a corporate hellhole, I'm using that experience as the basis for my first novel to reveal the truth about the video game industry and convey all the funny stories that I have witnessed, heard about or been involved in.  (More romans à clef than kiss and tell.)  The only major difference with reality is that my novel has a pissed off ghost with homicidal tendencies.  Considering some of the things that I went through, a homicidal ghost would've been a blessing.