The mercury has plunged to drastically low levels lately. Winter is finally here! I can wear my trench coat again, haha. My sister is already having fun with her first winter and has been quite taken with her new “kinky boots.” (Peace, Lai!) Winter is definitely one of the best seasons to be fashionable. How I wish I could also wear kinky boots to work (yeah right).

Winter clothes have relatively high price tags, though. Not unless you buy them sometime in February, because that would be the time when the stores are desperately trying to get rid of their old stocks in time for the new spring collection. But oh, wouldn’t it be so cool to pull off a Trinity look-alike, inspired by the movie, The Matrix? How many times a year can you do that, anyway? 😛

At home, we are trying our best to keep warm. Lucky for us, we have a propane gas heater that’s really quite efficient in heating up a large room like ours. Unfortunately, we don’t have any heaters installed in the bathroom area, so every time we get out of the shower, it’s like entering the freakin’ frigid zone.

I call this the V-cut futon! Hehehe.

As for the bedroom, well, there’s the usual futon – quite efficient in keeping the warmth in, but is also quite bulky. And don’t you just hate it when the cold air manages to creep into those areas where it doesn’t quite bend around the contours of your neck? Some futons actually have extra flaps which are thin enough to bend and thus “close the gap.” And then there’s the V-shape futon, which has a cut in the middle, allowing you to expose your head in between. It really looks funny, but I bet it does a good job in keeping you warm in bed. Here’s the site which sells one of those. They even have a name for it, “Attaka-boa.” Attaka = short for atatakai, or warm. Boa = bore? boa (as in boa constrictor)? boar? I couldn’t figure it out. Somebody enlighten me please. Another word for synthetic wool, perhaps?

And if that still won’t do the trick, well, I’m afraid your only other strategy is to snuggle up to a heat source (read: another human being). Keep warm! 8)

Someone asked me recently, “So what do you do in your free time?”

I responded, “Well, we do the laundry, we go to the supermarket for groceries…”

“So it’s not free time after all,” the person replied.

“Well, it’s free in the sense that it’s not spent for work,” I hastily added. No sooner had the words left my mouth did I realize how funny it sounded. When we say free time, do we only mean that we’re not at work? But household work is still work, isn’t it?

After talking about this a bit, we both agreed that sometimes we really tend to be more tired during the weekends than during weekdays because of the tonloads of household chores that we have to do. In our case, for example, we never really get to do our laundry except for weekends, and even if there’s just three of us, that usually means a gigantic pile of stinking laundry by Friday. And that’s why you can find me cursing during the weekends when the weather is not cooperating. How else can I get the laundry to dry? That means more piles the following weekend. Ugh.

And it’s not just the laundry, mind you. Weekends also mean cleaning the house, cleaning up our toddler’s mess, sorting through the mails, going out for groceries, running for errands, and what-have-you. There is just so much to do; more often than not we wonder just where the heck our weekend goes. Unlike in the Philippines, we don’t have household help or relatives we can holler to for help. Sometimes I do envy my sister back home, who has a household helper and a nanny who looks after her own toddler. She also works full-time. Ah, the perks of living in the third world. Here, I join the ranks of women who epitomize the “working mother” – the work never ends even when I get home. There is no one else I can turn to for help, no one else to clean up after our mess (unless of course my Mom is visiting hehe). And like them, I have to make compromises, too. The house won’t always be clean, the dirty laundry basket won’t always be empty, and sometimes the mess will not be cleaned up for several days at a time. It just can’t be done, given the limited time. And admittedly, sometimes I would rather just blog here than bother with a few messy areas in the house. I can live with that; a little mess never hurt anybody. 🙂

Last weekend, the sun was out in full force, it really just seemed so cruel if we didn’t go out and at least enjoy it while it lasts (nowadays it gets pretty dark by 5 pm, what a bummer). So we just dropped everything that we were doing, packed the previous night’s leftover adobo into our lunch boxes, packed Aya’s bike into the car’s trunk, and headed off to the park. There, we brought out our hastily prepared picnic food, lounged lazily under the sun, enjoyed the cool afternoon breeze and watched the leaves from the trees fall. Aya rode her bike, and showed off how fast her little bike can go. Father and daughter frolicked on the grass like pups out in the sun for the first time. I stretched out my legs and closed my eyes, thought of how wonderful it is to just spend time without any hurries or any particular purpose in mind. When I opened my eyes, the sky was a little bluer, the sun a little bit brighter, and I swear that I felt a renewed vigor for everything that lies ahead (mga labada humanda kayo!).

Free time is not what’s left over after all our chores are done; it’s the time we simply have to make for ourselves, before anything else.

Baggy, that is. We’re not going with him. He actually didn’t think that he would be needed in this particular trip, not until late last month. One of those last-minute trips. Besides that, we had visited Singapore just last year, so this is a trip that we can pass off. Now why don’t they just organize meetings somewhere in Hawaii or Bali, for a change? Heck, why not even Boracay? We could use a free ticket home. 😛

Seriously, we’ll be missing the Christmas celebration in Pinas this year. We have decided to put off our homecoming until sometime early next year, just so we can avoid the travel season and the sky-high expenses that inevitably go with it. Sometimes it just seems too extravagant to go home in December, when the fares are more than twice their usual prices during off-season. I know, I wrote before that you can’t really put a price tag on spending vacation with your family and loved ones. But hey, I am not saying that we’re skipping on going home entirely. Hopefully we can go home sometime in March or April, right, Sister? 🙂

So when did I/we start blogging? Well, the truth is that I started blogging as early as 2001, when I became pregnant with Aya. Only at that time, blogging wasn’t as hot as it is nowadays. You can still access my pregnancy blogs in our website. We didn’t have a domain name then, and we were not even familiar with blogging softwares yet. The original entries were posted at geocities.com – and this was prior to Geocities being acquired by Yahoo! When we finally had our own domain and website hosting sometime in 2004, we created a subdomain for Aya and posted the pregnancy blogs there.

Ok, so that was then. After Aya was born, I found myself inevitably thrusted into the juggling act of caring for a baby and getting back to the treadmill of work, so I just became too busy to blog anymore. After about three years, though, I found my way back to blogging after my Dad died. Now that I think of it, it does seem as if personal circumstances have profoundly influenced my blogging activity!

My blog entries then were sporadic. I only wrote when I felt like writing. I would write maybe two or three entries a month. Sometimes even fewer. And then, just recently, after some accidental (or maybe fateful?) visits to some blogging sites, I found my inspiration again. I didn’t realize until now that whilst I was taking my blogging for granted, other people are blogging like crazy addicts. Some blog for profit, others for the mere fun of it, others for sharing their interests and connecting with other people who share the same interests – well, all sorts of reasons for blogging.

I got hooked. And maybe some of you have noticed the recent regularity of our entries. We have also found ways of increasing the exposure of our site to fellow bloggers, mostly Filipinos. Slowly but surely, we are establishing our connections in the blogosphere. It is such a thrill. I’ve even convinced Baggy to start contributing to this joint blog online. We both realized, much to our chagrin, that our writing skills have become poor because we haven’t had enough practice in years. Too busy learning Japanese, our English has stagnated! Sure, we write technical papers all the time, but it is still different from creative writing. Blogging, for us, has therefore become a tool to help us hone our writing skills once more, as well as to force us to think and reflect on life and other issues besides our research. And I tell you, it is so refreshing and liberating to write about things not related to work!

And so for now, this blogging binge will continue. We just hope that you guys would find something useful and thought-provoking among these posts. And thanks a lot for dropping by and posting your comments! 🙂

This is the title of an article I came across at CNNMoney.com written by Geoffrey Colvin, Fortune Magazine’s senior editor-at-large. According to the article, hard work and not natural talent is what will propel you to great success! "Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work," proclaims the summary.

It is good to be reminded that greatness is not something endowed at birth or reserved to a preordained few but something you can earn if you have the will. For an "ordinary" researcher like me, it’s encouraging to know that I don’t have to be an Einstein to become a great scientist. I only need to work hard, really hard, and do more "deliberate practice." In research, this translates to several extra hours in the lab, working on a challenging and important research problem, and publishing more quality scientific papers. Publish or perish, as Kathy wrote once. Although recently, it is shifting to "patents and profits." But this will be in another entry.

I believe important research findings do not just popup from nowhere. They are products of persevering minds working even at sleep, and relentless and passionate laboratory works. I read somewhere that Einstein started thinking about the effect of traveling close to the speed of light at 14 and was able to complete his theory of relativity only after several years. Edison tested thousands and thousands of different materials to improve the filament of his incandescent electric light bulb before he could make the filament’s life span last longer. As his famous saying goes, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." This has been my favorite quotation since high school and it still inspires me until now. 

When it comes to lessons on hard work, I don’t have to look very far. My father used to tell us to study very hard, give our best, and strive to excel. For him, education is the only way out of our difficulties and the only "wealth" he could leave behind. As I came to realize, education is indeed a treasure worth more than any material things on earth.

Still on greatness, Kathy shared with me once an advice she got from someone she admires. According to this person, "If you want to be great, don’t settle for the number 2 position. Either you are number one or you are nobody!"

For me, I have a Nobel prize to win! 🙂  What about you? 

I just want to share with you an article written by my sister, Karen. In this article she shares her moving story, with the hope that others who are going through difficult ordeals in their lives may find strength and inspiration.

Losing Dana

by Karen Develos-Sacdalan, M.A.

August 3, 2006 at 11:45pm, my husband John handed over an envelope; a piece of paper that seemed so innocuous but in truth contained a devastating content that drastically altered our lives forever…

Early March 2006, I learned that I was almost 8 weeks pregnant. Admittedly, I couldn’t readily welcome the idea of another pregnancy because I was unprepared for it. I cried for several nights thinking of those long-haul adjustments in practically all facets of my life—physical, emotional, psychological, and mental. My first daughter, Ria, just turned one year old, and I have barely begun weaning her. The thought of devoting 24/7 to another equally demanding, helpless infant was simply nerve-wracking to say the least. On top of all these, just a month before I had started to work in a new field of church-based ministry on a full-time basis.

I’m certainly unlike other mothers who are lucky enough to breeze through their pregnancies like it was the most natural thing in the world; I guess, it just isn’t in my natural makeup. From early on my pregnancy was beset by problems. For instance, I was compelled to go on bed rest for 15 days because of a threatened abortion. This was something I had gone through before, and I dreaded the thought of being helpless and practically incapacitated again in bed, but I didn’t have a choice but go through it to ensure that the baby will not be harmed in any way. In spite of my earlier misgivings, I had come to accept the reality that I would soon be a mother of two, and I was now responsible for the life of another human being.

As my pregnancy term progressed, my anxiety gradually disappeared. In fact, it was replaced by delight and grand expectations of the new life bulging slowly inside me. Alongside, we had some major lifestyle adjustments—purposely to prepare for our growing family. We moved into a new house which had bigger space and was strategically located nearest to my workplace. We had carefully taken serious consideration of how well we could best care for the welfare of our soon-to-be newborn.

Late June 2006, we were overjoyed to learn that we were having another baby girl. This was another definite blessing, and I could barely contain my happiness at having another girl (my preference actually). By then I was sailing through a relatively easy pregnancy experience. “Been there, done that—so this one will come in easy,” as I put it.

We gave her a name — Danella, meaning ‘wise,’ which we got from a baby book of names. We also gave her a nickname, “Dana,” after Dana Reeves, wife of Christopher Reeves, who recently died after a bout with lung cancer. Dana fought courageously alongside her quadriplegic husband until his untimely demise; she herself fought valiantly against the ravages of her own body and has been a source of inspiration to citizens across the globe. We wanted Dana to grow up knowing that she had been named after a great, courageous woman.

July 20, 2006, on my 31st week, I woke up feeling unwell. My body felt very heavy and bloated. I forced myself not to dwell on the pain and managed to report to work thinking that it was just one of those early morning sickness symptoms. However, my body kept sending me whipping episodes of pain and I finally decided to pay my OB a visit.

I was escorted to the Delivery Room, had an internal examination and underwent cardio reading of our baby’s heartbeat. They also performed tocolysis, a diagnosis and treatment of premature labor contractions. I felt my body and mind fighting against these contractions; with every heave of pain I kept thinking, I want to keep my baby. I stayed focused and determined that I would be just as fine. I reminded myself over and over, all of this is ‘in His hands.’

A few minutes later, the laboratory test results came out and eased my worries away. My baby and I got an 8/8 positive biophysical ultrasound results, which is equivalent to a grade of A, had we taken an academic exam. After an overnight stay in the hospital, I was discharged. I was told to go on bed rest for another week to regain strength and to keep our baby in the best position possible.

I stayed in bed as instructed; hoping all will be well eventually. I managed to keep away for any stress-related elements and at the same time kept my mind away from idleness. I read several books, those I had promised myself to finish whenever I had more time—and I did. Even the newspapers that hardly contained anything encouraging didn’t get spared. So it seemed that everything was well again except for my roller coaster emotional battle. Oftentimes I would find myself in such distraught conditions. Maybe I was being hormonal and all that but I slowly felt so insecure, and unconfident about a lot of things. Surely, the worst part of being into bed rest is dealing with the emotional pitfalls.

August 2, 2006, the second onslaught of contractions came and this time they were more intense and agonizingly painful. Around 5:00 pm the pain became even more intense, and so I sent a text message to my husband John to hurry back home. I waited until he came home at 9:00pm —four agonizing hours of waiting seemed forever! I was rushed to the hospital and the medical staff immediately performed what I now presume to be their SOP when someone in labor is cursing the world already.

They took me to the cardio machine to hear the baby’s heartbeat. They tried to listen for about 15 minutes. Three resident doctors took turns trying to locate the heartbeat but they all failed to hear any. As they waited for my OB, who was also the chairman of the hospital, I was simply asked to wait—lying flat on my back with the stillness of waiting compounded by the excruciating pain of the frequent contractions. At that moment, the pain that was draining my energy away was coupled with fear and confusion. Why aren’t there any heartbeats? I feared the worst, but hung on to the very last tinge of hope I could find in my heart. When my OB came, he tried to explain the whole situation I was undergoing. I had to go a belly ultrasound.

Rattled, tensed, panicky, with a heaving, enormous belly anxious to be examined. While they were going about the examination, I mustered enough courage to inquire about my baby’s condition. I was in terrible pain and I deserved some clear explanation. But all that my OB could say was—“Mamaya, usap tayo.” (‘We will talk later’). My heart sunk. I somehow understood it. I tried to grasp the reality that was unfolding before me.

John was waiting outside; I suspected that he must have already been informed of the results. I prayed in my heart that I would be spared from the inevitable moment of truth—yet at the same time, I was anxious to hear the exact words.

And then the dreadful words came—“I am so sorry, but your baby is GONE. From the ultrasound results I can estimate that she’s been DEAD for almost 2 to 3 days…”

I stared numbly at him and blurted out, “Are you sure?! You said she was ok last week!” and I began crying violently while trying to understand, trying to seek the answers to my millions of ‘whys’. My OB couldn’t give me any outright answers at that moment as to why this thing happened. He could only give me the answers until after he examined the dead fetus. DEAD. The words hung in the air, but I couldn’t seem to grasp their meaning.

My OB continued to explain that based on the ultrasound findings my baby’s parietal skull bones had collapsed already and her size indicated a 27-week old reading as opposed to the 34-week old reading that she’s supposed to have.

They took me back to the Delivery Room where there were three other pregnant mothers strapped with cardio machines which seem to happily sing out their baby’s healthy heartbeats. To me every sound was like a dagger that ripped through my heart and rendered it to pieces. At that moment, those heartbeats were the most poignant sounds I could hear, similar to the sounds I heard from my own baby. My baby.

I felt insulted. I was overcome with envy and the maddening heartbeats stung my ears. I cried. It was all I could do.

Dazed. Bitter. Angry. Confused. I was swimming in all these emotions. I never thought life could give and take so fast.

The rest of the medical procedure was immediately put in order and John stayed with me the whole time, still bewildered yet encouraging in every way. We remembered our Lamaze discipline; we used our breathing techniques to ease the painful contractions. I was given labor-inducing medicines and was told to prepare for a vaginal delivery (my first daughter was delivered via Caesarian section).

We became oblivious of the passing time and it seemed, of our own existence and attendance to this horrible event. We felt removed and seemed to view things numbly as if from a distance. The intensive care unit room seemed too cold, dark and taunting too.

More agonizing hours of waiting before I heard and felt my water bag popping out with warm fluid gushing out in torrents. I panicked and held back the tears. “Stay with me… ready… one… two… (inhaling and exhaling)…” John comforted me by squeezing my hand as he helplessly watched me turn pale.

I was quickly moved to the Delivery Room where we waited for more intense labor. My OB came in to explain that the amniotic fluid they examined was termed, “tobacco stain.” It was the color of the final stage which indicated that the baby had been dead much longer than they had initially suspected. In fact, that color told them that the baby had been dead for a week already.

My last glance at the clock of the Delivery Room told me that it was already around 7:00am of August 3, 2006. I was crying out loud due to labor pains. I passed out. When I woke up, I was in the recovery room with a bag of ice placed on my belly.

My body recovered fairly well after my delivery, but inside I was wrecked. I was discharged from the hospital three days after.

It all seemed like a dream, or maybe I just wanted everything to be just a dream. The true horrors of the aborted motherhood came back to haunt me further when I finally got home. I began lactating. My chest hurt so badly and I felt feverish since I had stone-hard breasts filled with milk — nature’s way of sustaining a new life — supposedly new life. But there was just none.

It was a double-edged sword – apart from the physical pain that I have tolerate because of the inevitable lactation, I had to cope with the emotional wounds that came with the horrific reality. Each drop reminded me that there was no baby. I succumbed to painkillers and medicine to restrict the lactation and each day I struggled wondering… “Why? What happened? Who’s at fault?” As my OB tried to explain by uttering those words of consolation — “It’s nobody’s fault, it was bound to happen. It was pathological. The best way to look at it is that you survived…” By thought, I could only submit to God’s sustaining power, but by heart, it all seemed impossible to experience comfort.

And so that very night, I opened the enveloped with a small airtight plastic containing the ashes and death certificate of our baby Dana. We had her cremated on the evening of the day of our hospital discharge. With trembling fingers I examined the papers — it said that the cause of her death was IUFD (In Utero Fetal Demise) due to umbilical cord complications secondary to cord knot. John and I found ourselves cuddling and crying — trying to comfort each other and trying to make sense of all that happened. Then, out of the gloom we realized two certain things: Baby Dana loved us so much that she left us with no threatening complications whatsoever. And most of all, God’s love carried us through; the Lord truly was in charge. His love will calm the storms inside us. We have our Ria. To us, those were enough reasons to hang on.

I remember what Corrie Ten Boom wrote in her book, The Hiding Place: “Perhaps only when human effort has done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.” I was miraculously spared from blood poisoning! A near-death experience, but I have survived by God’s grace.

My sister Kathy she wrote, on the occasion of the death anniversary of our beloved Dad: “There is only one way to live again – and that is to know, to affirm, and to live with the assurance that in spite of the temporal things here on earth, there exists the ultimate hope of the life beyond. While death necessarily punctuates our existence here on earth, there is something that death cannot conquer.”

As human beings, we are not spared from sufferings, tragedies, and yes, the certainty of death. I myself have witnessed firsthand the deaths of two loved ones – my father’s and Dana’s. But does this mean that we have to stop embracing life? Does this mean that must live in dread of what the future holds? I believe that the answer is a resounding NO. This will be the lesson that I will tell my daughter and prayerfully, to the rest of my children, when the right time comes.*

About the Author

Karen Develos-Sacdalan is the Human Resources Head of Greenhills Christian Fellowship South Metro, an evangelical church whose aim is to know Christ and make Him known (see www.gcf.org.ph and www.gcfsouth.com). She is also a part-time lecturer at Mapua Institute of Technology under the Graduate School of Engineering Management where she teaches Human Resources Management subject. She finished both Bachelor of Science and Masters of Arts in Psychology major in Industrial Psychology. She also writes for career advices in www.career-pathways.net.

I just read the following story from Inq7.net:

Toxic waste dumped in Bulacan; 60 hospitalized

By Carmela Reyes
Inquirer
Last updated 04:17am (Mla time) 11/29/2006

Published on Page A1 of the November 29, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

MARILAO, Bulacan — Farmer Carlos Clemente, 67, was awakened at 2 a.m. Tuesday by the rumbling of a truck leaving his farm. Minutes later, he and other residents of Barangay Prenza II and nearby villages were assailed by the stench of a chemical the truck had dumped in the area.

Some of them vomited, others almost fainted.

Before the morning was over, 60 people had been hospitalized, stricken with dizziness, nausea and chest pains, hundreds of others had fled their homes — and the driver of the 10-wheeler tanker and his two helpers were held in police custody.

Read the full story here.

This is horrifying. So many of those affected were children. What makes it more appaling is that it is really such a commonplace occurrence – how many times do we actually see garbage trucks dumping wastes, toxic and non-toxic, into our rivers? (FYI, I lived in Tondo for several years, so I definitely know what I’m talking about.)

Are we so out of touch, so backward, that we absolutely have no concern for environmental issues affecting this planet? Sure, let’s blame the truck drivers for their ignorance and stupidity, blame the middleman who supposedly instructed them to do it, heck, blame even the DENR; but most of all, let’s blame the source! It originated from the factory, and from my view, this incident shows its obvious lack of management concerning proper waste disposal. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is another glaring example of how Filipinos blatantly abuse nature for profit. Dumping wastes into the river is so much easier, so much cheaper than rigorously adhering to proper waste disposal techniques. Tapon nyo na lang dyan. Bahala na. When disaster strikes, the blame game begins. Do we hear anyone ever accepting responsibilities for disasters like these?

Towards the end of the article, it was written:

“…said a team from the Environmental Management Bureau of the DENR had taken samples of chemicals for tests and results would be available after three days.” (Italics are mine.)

That long? Now, wouldn’t it be faster if they just ask the management of the factory about the nature of those chemicals? Mahirap ba yun?

Love to simultaneously run any operating system – Windows, Linux, or Unix – on your PC? Then, virtual machine is for you. NO, I don’t mean the Java virtual machine which allows you to run Java applications on any operating system (OS). I mean virtual machines that can run unmodified operating systems on top of the existing one.

So what are virtual machines or VMs? According to VMware‘s website, “A virtual machine is a computer defined in a software. It is like running a PC on your PC.” For those who are interested, a more detailed definition and classification of VM can be found here.

Unlike “multibooting” (a process of installing multiple OSes on a PC and selecting the OS at startup), virtual machines let you switch between operating systems by simply tabbing between applications and without needing to reboot. Running VMs is just like running another application on your PC. In particular, you can just run the free downloadable VMware Player from VMware, which enables Windows and Linux users to run another OS (the guest OS) on top of the existing one (the host OS). What’s more, preconfigured virtual machines called virtual appliances are readily available. You can visit the virtual appliance maketplace  for a wide array of selection ranging from lightweight Linux distributions to full-pledge grid computing appliance. And a lot of stuffs are for free.

VMs are usually used by IT professionals to test applications or debug recently developed softwares. I for one am currently experimenting on the possible use of VM in deploying a program I had developed for the remote analysis of brain images obtained using magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. The program is written in the C programming language and currently runs only on Linux. Deploying the program requires some special configuration, which I think is not easy to setup for ordinary users. Moreover, most of the target users are only familiar with the Windows operating system and have very limited experience with Linux. Rewriting the program to run on Windows can make the deployment a lot easier. Unfortunately, some of the program’s components do not run under Windows. 🙁

My idea is to pre-install the program in a Linux-based virtual machine with all the needed optimization and configuration already setup. Then deploy this VM, instead of the original application, to potential Windows users. All the user needs to do is to install the VMware player. The user can then load my VM, and voila, an optimized working version of my application. Well, I have not yet successfully completed this process but there seems to be some promise :-).

Aside from this, VMs can also be used in some other ways. For ordinary users, VM can be used for safe Internet browsing. In these times when a simple visit to a malicious site can compromise your PC, surfing using VM makes a lot of sense. The idea is to use the browser installed in the VM rather than the one installed directly on your PC. If you hit a malicious site, only your VM is compromised, not the host OS. You can just reset your VM and your problem is gone. Similarly, you can use this approach to setup a VM with a child-friendly browser installed to provide a safe browsing experience for your children.   

If you are a web developer/designer, VM is also for you. You can use VMs to see how your site looks like in another browser on another operating system. For instance, you may want to know how your site behaves for users using Internet Explorer or Firefox on Linux or Windows. Instead of buying another computer to host these OSes, you can just use VMs and run them from your PC.

I think VMs are also useful for Internet cafe operators. VM can provide some kind of protection to their PCs. By confining their Internet users to work only within the VM environment, they can isolate the host OS from any threats while their users surf the Internet. They can even allow their users to install applications to the VM, and thus provide a more flexible user experience. The VM can then be configured to discard any changes to its initial state when it terminates. 

Finally, let me end by noting that there are trade-offs when running VMs. One critical issue is the effect on the system’s performance. But if you are just running simple applications on your VM such as a browser, then I think this will not be an issue. Enjoy!

If I hadn’t become a scientist, I would surely have ended up as an artist. My dad was a painter, you see. He did all the paintings that are now on display in our house. As young children, he taught us how to draw, sketch, and paint. I never did quite as good in oil painting, but I did have some successes with watercolor and pastel. Daddy had quite a collection of art books, and it was with excitement and wonder that I perused through those pages containing various works of arts. I joined several poster-making contests and won some awards, too.

But alas, an artist I did not become. Still, I’m an art lover. I still wish that I could find the time to work on a few art projects. Someday, maybe. 🙂

While browsing through the Materials Research Society website, I found this very interesting page titled, "Science as Art," a competition held during the MRS meetings in 2005. You can find the link here. Science as art, why not? I’ve been viewing a lot of structures in my microscopy observations. I realized that I’ve been looking at similar fantastic images but never really thought of them as art. By the way, the image on the right, courtesy of MRS, is an artificially colored scanning electron micrograph of cadmium sulfide.

Well, the MRS competition gave me an idea. For starters, here is an atomic force microscopy (AFM) image of a YBCO (Y-Ba-Cu-O) superconducting film, deposited using pulsed laser deposition on CeO2-buffered sapphire substrate. In this image you can find whorls upon whorls of screw-dislocation-mediated growth islands (the one at the center actually shows a nice spiral outcrop). This image is 1 square micron in area. Each step is about one YBCO lattice unit cell height, which is about 1.2 nm. Color enhancements courtesy of Photoshop, of course. 🙂 Pretty isn’t it? The amazing things you can find on the nanometer scale!

I will never look at YBCO films in the same way again. After all, if you have the will to do it, you can find art virtually ANYWHERE you look.

An article from Nature. Being a woman is not the only issue here; how does being a foreigner affect my growth as a scientist in this country?

Japan and its women

Cultural obstacles and potential damage to one’s career present major challenges to women wanting to pursue science in Japan. Some changes have occurred, but too few, and too slowly.

Why do Japanese women scientists have such a hard time of it? In their country, it seems, one is expected to wait for change to happen, not to force it, and women are supposed to gaman, or endure. Improvements in such matters as equal opportunity are thought of as gifts to be bestowed by a leader.

Some say that the Japanese prefer harmony to conflict and mediation to open courtrooms, and so do not actively pursue change. It is debatable, and hotly debated in Japan, whether this reflects a widely held cultural value or whether such norms are the result of circumstances that make contention difficult, such as a prohibitively expensive and inaccessible legal system. Is this culture of ‘harmony’ merely a tool used by government leaders, management, or whoever else might find it handy in dealing with those who make a fuss?

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