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Apple today announced that Wi-Fi models of the iPad will go on sale in the United States on Saturday, April 3rd. 3G-capable models in the U.S., as well as both Wi-Fi and 3G models for a number of other countries, will be available in late April. U.S. preorders for all iPad models begin on March 12th.

Valve Software today officially announced that it is bringing its Steam game distribution platform, as well as its own library of games, to Mac OS X next month.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

Valve also confirmed reports that it will offer its forthcoming Portal 2 game as a simultaneous release for Mac and Windows.

While Apple announced that the iPad would go on sale at the end of March, we’ve yet to hear official details about the actual sale date and procedure.

We have heard whispers the Apple is planning on launching the iPad at retail stores on Friday, March 26th at 6 p.m. in similar fashion to the original iPhone launch.

A blog post from the Examiner now makes similar claims of a March 26th launch date with Apple store employees getting training on the device starting on March 10th. The author also claims that the commercials will begin airing on March 15th. Finally, those who camp out for the iPad will receive a “special gift”.

The 3G enabled version of the iPad will follow the Wi-Fi iPad launch by about 30 days, according to Apple.

Some of my poems

The Pelican

Flapping wings,

Long small body,

Huge beak,

Brown Coloring,

The bird stands out against the green jungle,

Then,

Turning,

He slowly picks up speed,

Using the long stretch of water as a runway

Turns its eyes up to the darkening sky

He makes a desperate leap up,

Giant wings beating the air,

Water falling from its feathers,

A white bird framed in the background,

Embraces the blue black of the sky.

As a little group on a boat gasps at the spectacle,

Nature moves on.

By Calvin Tong

Extended Metaphor Poems

Sunrise

Everyday the dragon of the world,

Wakes,

Breathes its ever-present fire in to the sky,

For all to see,

And all to remember.

Chainsaw

Roaring out with teeth of fire,

Heart thrumming,

Blood exploding,

Slowly arks down,

To cut up nature.

By Calvin Tong

What I didn’t know

I didn’t know I loved trees,

Green, swaying in the wind,

I didn’t know I loved fire,

Crackling, changing, bring orange,

I didn’t know I loved water,

Clear, rejuvenating, rippling, making waves,

I didn’t know I loved rain,

Pattering against the window in the early morning,

I didn’t know I loved winter,

As it makes the world freeze.

By Calvin Tong

Ode to pencil

Hark,

Pencil,

I thank you for these words,

Written with your dark center,

On a creamy white sheet of paper

Without you,

Life wouldn’t be the same.

You wouldn’t be there,

To aid in passing the time,

Or to help having fun,

You couldn’t spin fantastic tales,

An author without you is nothing,

With your light wooden body and gray graphite core,

You are as reliable as Old Betsy,

Unlike the new laptops

By Calvin Tong

What Do I Think About Writing Poetry?

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of forms of writing, from poetry to short stories. So far I think that I’ve liked poetry the most. I think this is because I never think to hard about an idea or an assignment. If I try to do that, its like I’m chasing a thought that is always on the horizon. Then I try just relaxing and some how I get an idea. After that I just like to sit relax and let my mind do all the work.

Another odd thing about poetry is that I prefer to write with a pen and paper. I usually like to use my computer because my handwriting stinks and I can’t read it. But when I’m writing a poem, typing doesn’t feel right. My poems always have bad flow when they are typed, but when I use a pen and paper they seem to flow better.

My favorite type of poetry to write, is any poem that paints a really good picture in your head because I like to visualize the scene in my head then try to describe what it feels like to be that person. Even so my favorite type of poetry to read is nonsense poetry because I like to have a good laugh some times.

Even though I have favorites I think that writing any kind of poem is more fun then regular writing because you are less encumbered by punctuation and form.

Demo Page

Metaphor: A direct comparison without the use of as if, was like E.C.T.

Ex. The Sea is a giant monster trying to swallow the ship

Simile: A comparison using as if, was like E.C.T.

Ex. He moved as if he was made glass.

Personification: giving some human traits to something not human not human

Ex. The orange tree danced in the wind.

Alliteration: repeating words with the same first sound

Ex. Bob’s Blue Buoyant Boat floated lazily on the water

Iambic Pentameter: A line that has a rhythm of -/-/-/-/-/ or unstressed stressed unstressed stressed E.C.T also the pentameter part means that there are five iambs in the line.

Ex. The woods did shake as if they were not full.

Rhyme Scheme: a pattern of rhyming through out the poem

One stanza Ex.

The bird isn’t flying,

I think it is dying,

As it plummets from the sky

I decide to cry

Hyperbole: an exaggeration that you would never do but it will help people get the picture

Eat the moon made of cheese

Poems we have read in class

Mother to Son by Langston Hughes

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with ne carpet on the floor –

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

‘Cause you finds it’s kinder herd.

Don’t you fall now –

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair

I like this poem because the whole thing is one great big metaphor about life. I think that it captures the whole life thing perfectly with that metaphor, because stairs come in many different shapes and sizes like people’s individual lives you also get tired climbing up them as you go.

I also like this poem because it has a nice rhythm that helps the poem along.

I Saw A Jolly Hunter

I saw a jolly hunter
With a jolly gun
Walking in the country
In the jolly sun.

In the jolly meadow
Sat a jolly hare.
Saw the jolly hunter.
Took jolly care.

Hunter jolly eager-
Sight of jolly prey.
Forgot gun pointing
Wrong jolly way.

Jolly hunter jolly head
Over heels gone.
Jolly old safety catch
Not jolly on.

Bang went the jolly gun.
Hunter jolly dead.
Jolly hare got clean away.
Jolly good, I said.

Charles Causley

I like this poem because it is a nonsense poem and I really like to read those. I thought it was funny that the author decided to put jolly next to some things that you don’t really think of as jolly, like “Hunter Jolly Dead.” The jolly repetition helps a lot with the flow, rhythm and makes it hilarious. It was nice how the author used repetition of one word to make such a great poem!

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

When I first read this I didn’t think much of it, sure it had nice rhythm and sound ok but I didn’t think about it much. After I thought about it and we thought about it as a class I really liked it. I liked it because it had one great message told through all of those lines. The message is one that will benefit everyone it is that even if someone captures you or tortures you, they can’t control your thought or emotions.

This is a very inspirational poem that I think I will enjoy and think about every time I see it.

One Poem Written by a Peer

Art Project

It crouched

silently, eternally still, with

all 8 legs on the pale gravel floor

its pincers like pairs of sharpened

chopsticks, poised and

ready to strike

its slender, brown-plated

Body curled

Upward

And sharpened to a point at

The tip like a

Warped rapier

And then it

Leaped

Right out of the photo and off

The computer screen, landing

Onto my keyboard

Creating a string of letters

wdab jviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Then slowly turning? around

To face me, tiny eyes

Shining like jet-black marbles

And then

Suddenly, it

Pounced

8 Limbs ready to latch onto my face

Coiled tail ready to stab into my eye

I would’ve been dead

But I reflexively held

Up a sheet of tough

Watercolor paper

I cringed

And when I dared looked again

It had melted back

Into 2-d, trapped

On the paper

Its once-precise edges blotched,

Colors augmented, dimensions

peculiarly distorted

But that didn’t matter.

I handed it in

By Serena Xu

I really like this poem because it is an interesting idea; I know that an artist can make things really look real but having them jump onto the paper is really creative. I think that the whole thing is one big symbol of how a real artist can make something then imprison it in 2-D as she says.

I also like this because the rhythm isn’t very fast; the line breaks effectively slow it down so I can absorb the information. While I’m talking about the rhythm I want to say that she obviously paid attention to the punctuation and line breaks, they are in places that I wouldn’t have thought of.

Overall I like the concept and execution.

Mail is down at igncap.com because I reset the underlying site. I actually forgot that igncap.com is hosted here. Anyway if you need to set bluehost.com to a different mail system on applix.net here is how to do it:

1. Logon to bluehost.com and start cppanel
2. Search for the MX Entry in cpanel
3. Add the entry for domains as server1.inboundmx.com and server2.inboundmx.com

Well, used the Norton Antivirus that comes free with a Comcast subscription and found the Bloodhound 193 exploit in the Google Chrome cache, so that means my computer got infected that way and also that wp-view.php has the PHP Backdoor which explains how it got onto tongfamily.com.

So anyone who access tongfamily.com since 11 February 2010, should run antivirus right now and get rid of this. So sorry about this. Seems like what probably happened is that one of the Macs I use (which don’t have antivirus on them. duhh, because the advice is not to run that stuff on Macs as they can’t get locally infected got hit) and that caused a bad upload of PHP. I’m guessing, but that is around the time I updated tongfamily.com with a new WordPress. Normally I use autoupgrade, but it kept failing. I wonder if this was the problem.

So the tongfamily.com/art and the alodyinc.com and gracetong.com are coming down right now. No real content on any of them that isn’t somewhere else.

And got rid of all templates. Take that iframe virus!!!! And some cool new frames

Looks like this didn’t clean things out. Got another attack and blew away igncap.com. Now looks like an iframe insertion virus which gets in via a bad PHP script. Not hard to do. My site has literally everything I’ve put on the Internet in the last 15 years so lots of these bad scripts lying around. Spending hours deleting old (sniff!) MovableType, FrontPage and everything else. I have most of the content from about 2000, but most of the ancient 1994-1999 content is gone!

Site is now basically up with the iframe junk out, but I”m hoping I can find where the PHP is actually living.

Did your Wordpress Site get hacked is a good pointer to fixing things. It is pretty insidious what can happened:

1. Upgrade your Wordpress installation to the latest
2. Change your passwords on your site as they could have gotten in as administrators.
3. Change your FTP passwords.
4. Look at the permissions to see if they’ve been modified. You want 644 mainly.
5. Look through the databases to see if there are hidden plugins and users

Here is the new list

1. The simplest way is hiding their code in your php scripts. If your blog directory and files are writable by the webserver then a hacker has free reign to plant their code anywhere they like. wp-blog-header.php seems to be one place.
2. Make sure there are no backdoors or malicious code left on your system. This will be in the form of scripts left by the hacker, or modifications to existing files. Check your theme files too.
3. Edit your wp-config.php and change or create the SECRET_KEY definition. It should look like this, but do not use the same key or it won’t be very secret, will it? define(‘SECRET_KEY’, ‘1234567890′ );

Whatever did this apparently went through every file in the website and added an iframe that pointed to nsfer.com to the end of the html for every file ending in .html or named index.php so it got the themes files for wordpress. Not clear how it got in though.