Why what Will Smith did at the Oscars 2022?

The firs "regular" Oscars after the Pandemic is a hit. 

It is not because Dune brought back 6 Academy Awards or CODA is the best picture. The only thing everyone's talking about is the "Will Smith-Chris Tucker" incident. 

 It so happened that I was watching it live and saw Will Smith walked up to the stage and took a swing at Chris Tucker. It looked like a pre-scripted scene as part of Tucker's joke sequence. Then, the video froze for a few seconds, then there's no audio. Everyone on screen seemed to be confused while everyone watching on TV wished they can lip reading like in CODA.  

Will Smith was talking without audio.  It didn't look funny now. 

 It turns out that Tucker made a joke about Jada (Smith's wife)'s hair problem, which was a result of an autoimmune disease. Smith was not happy about it and decided to take a swing at Tucker. A little background. Jada Smith had an autoimmune disease that led her shaving her head. It is a devastating issue for anyone but particularly hard for actresses who may have direct career implications. She was very open about talking about the disease and raising awareness of it. 

 This is a great woman. And it is a bad tasted joke. 

 It might likely become an after party story but Will Smith acted on it. He went up and hit Chris Tucker. 20 minutes later, an emotional Will Smith gave a tearful acceptance speech for his Best Actor Oscar (apparently his publicist's prep talk worked). He apologized to the Academy and the fellow nominees but not Tucker. He cited the character King Richard in the film that he is a man who protects his family. His speech received a standing ovation. 

Is this the end of the story? Hell no. This became the talk of the day/week. Where's Ukraine? Who cares? 

Will Smith is one of my most favorite actors, up to last night. Although many, me included, may thought Tucker deserves a punch, it is wrong in so many levels. 

First, and foremost, one should resort to violence to solve such problems.  We are experiencing exactly the same thing in Ukraine right now. 

Second, nobody should physically attack a comedian because their jokes.  This is particularly true for Will Smith who is an entertainer himself.  Does this mean anyone who doesn't like anything he said on screen can just go punch him?  Even Will Smith doesn't mind, I do.  

In the end of the day, Jada was there as an actress herself, not just Will Smith's wife. She chose to be a public figure and be able to handle jokes is part of the job.  If she doesn't like it, Will Smith can help to have her heard.  There're plenty of opportunities to do that.  In fact, I wish that was Will Smith's acceptance speech.  Not the BS he pulled last night. 

Additionally, it's shocking that the Oscars organizers didn't kick Smith out immediately and let him using the platform to justify his actions: that was not an apology at all!  If I was Chris Tucker, I'd sue the Oscars for $100m in damages. 

Windows 10 high CPU usage problems

In the past a few weeks, my 4-year old Thinkpad X1 started to have very high CPU use with the cooling fan running very nosise. I have been keeping it on or in sleep mode. Restarting it does fixed the problem for a short period of time but it will go back to the same problem. The Task manager shows that two process: Cisco WebEx took 50+% of the CPU usage and WMI Host service took up about 25% constantly. First, I manually stopped the WebEx but it came back in a few hours. I have been using WebEx for years as the main video conference service up till early 2020 when Teams and Zoom took over. We even stopped renew its license this year. Guess Cisco really dropped the ball this time. I only used it less than a handful of times this year, considering having 10+ video meetings every work day. Anyway, decided to uninstalled it for now. Can always reinstall hwen needed. That took care of the 50% of the CPU usage. The WMI Host Service or Windows Management Instruments Service is an essential service for Windows. Even stopping it would be a problem. Based on the advice here: https://appuals.com/wmi-provider-host-wmiprvse-exe-high-cpu-usage-on-windows-10/ the problem can be solved by manually restarted from Services. I did and it was gone. Not bad. Maybe can still use the laptop for some time before considering a new one.

Microsoft Exchange Server Logon problem

This is a problem happened before.  After over two weeks of back and forth with IT, it was resolved by deleting the Outlook client profile and start setting up the mail account again.

It came up again two weeks ago.  I removed the profile on two computers and it fixed the problem right away.  However, it came back occasionally. 

Symptom:
Outlook client log on error and asking for password again even though the originally saved password is correct.  Entering the correct password again won't work. 

This only happened on one computer while other computers with Outlook or other e-mail clients (e.g. iOS) worked fine.  However, this problem will eventually cycle through other devices as well.  In most times, it will go away after cancel the logon box. 

Solution:
It seems that the authentication encryption may be the cause:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/3032395/outlook-connection-issues-with-exchange-mailboxes-because-of-the-rpc-e

In my case, the encryption was already enabled.  I just changed the "logon network security option" from  "negotiate authentication" to "password authentication (NTLM)". 

Then it worked.  After checking the setting again, it went back to "negotiate authentication".  It seems that the change in this setting reset a faulty state. 

Google's Huawei problem

The Trump administration's recent move to limit Huawei's access to US technology may be an immediate problem for Huawei but it's a double edged sword that also cuts deep into US companies' bottom line including Google.  

Right after the announcement of putting Huawai on the "entity list", the initial response is Huawei's hardware, mostly advanced chips, suppliers would be affected.  Most of their stock prices tumbled last week.  This week's news is on the software side when Google followed by not allowing Huawei use the GMP suites.  In fact, the key item here is not GMail or Google maps but the Google Playstore, which essentially put Huawei out of the Android ecosystem.  Although Huawei's Chinese users won't be affected as they don't have access to Google services for almost over a decade, Huawei's international markets outside China (e.g. EU and beyond) is the main victim.  Currently, the international markets contribute to roughly 40% of Huawei's cell phone revenue. 

It may be death by a thousands cuts. For Huawei, this is a bit too late.  Since 60% of its cell phone sales are in China and not affected by this Android ban, Huawei will survive this, unlike Blackberry or Microsoft. Once again, it will approve that compartmentalized markets are resilient to globalization issues.  If anything, Trump just handed the Chinese government the best defense of it's ban on Google's services.  

Moreover, this Android problem is actually Google's.  The recent development just reminded every Android phone makers (Samsung and alike) that their survival is in a pair of hands controlled by a head with an orange hairdo.  First, all the Chinese phone manufactures will have no doubt joining Huawei continue to develop a complete Google-less mobile app ecosystem.  Now the soon to be release P30 Mate would be equipped with the ecosystem in the EU market.  Since Samsung and other cell phone makers have already joined this ecosystem in their Chinese market offerings, it won't be a surprise they expand the option to other markets.  

This is why it's a problem for Google, which is already in a tough position in Europe.  Comparing to hardware makers, it may be feasible to move its Android licensing location (maybe some support, but that's hard to avoid the US ban) to Europe.  However, the damage is done and it would just slowing down the new ecosystem's progress.  Mobile app revenue is small for Google, but the mobile user market is the largest user base for its bottom line: e.g. search, map, etc.  It will be interesting to see what Google would do.  

Okay, my view on Google was wrong 20 years ago, let's see how it turns out this time. 

WiFi problem

Since switched to a new ISP, I purchased a new DSL modem + WiFi router from TP-Link.  One reason to go with this route is that the UPS has one fewer device to support during a power outage hence would last longer.

The TD-W8961ND router looks quite nice and straight forward to set up.  However, it started to give problems at the very beginning.  There are a few devices in the house would connect then lost the connection randomly, mostly wouldn't be able to get an IP assigned.  Even with DHCP reservation table.  The only fix is assign a fixed IP from the client side.  This is not a convenient solution, as one of these devices is my main laptop.  When I go to other places, I can't use the fixed IP, so had to change it all the time.

Eventually, I fed up and called TP-Link.  It seems that after suggesting update firmware (done that, didn't work), the tech quickly decided it's a hardware problem.  In an hour or so I received the RMA.  What's annoying is that even under warranty, TP-Link would need the customers to mail the defective device back to them at the customers' expense.  Then a new (or refurbished) device would be sent back to the customer.  Besides the shipping cost, the time required to complete the process may be easily two weeks. For most users, they'd get a new router for the two weeks.

Luckily for me, TP-Link has a an office that is within 50 miles that I bite the bullet drove there and did a "manual" swap.  Although the tech support and RMA (including the swap) process was smooth, and everybody are pretty nice, in the future, I'd seriously think twice to buy anything critical from them.

So far, the new router/modem seems to be working flawless in the first a few hours. The hardware version of the old defective one is v3.1 and the new one is v3.2.  So they are not exactly the same.  The firmware is also different, while on their support website, they only differentiate v3 to v2 and v4.

Online ads targeting your Internet history?

When visiting some web sites, especially those newspaper sites in my case, the ads around the main content are very closely tailored to my previous Internet history. Although it is not embarrassing yet, I can see a scenario that an awkward ads showing up besides an article I try to show during a presentation (my of my rules on presentation is to only show screen shots, not the web sites directly).

Anyway, I finally decided to do something about it.  It turns out that most of these ads are somewhat linked to Google, who makes this a quite easy and painless process.  All you need is to go to Google's ads setting page, and opt out both Google ads and other web services who use Google's ads server.

You may also stop Google from tracking your web history (a separate process from the ads).

Thanks the following web sites for providing above tips:

Stop Google from tracking your search history

I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web

Why do ads follow me around the web?

Prevent chrome always go to other country's google site

Google is the homepage for Chrome and most other browsers on my devices.  It's simple, use little data, fast to load, and useful. 

An annoying problem started to show up while traveling outside the country and afterwards.  While traveling, Google automatically detected, likely through IP, that I'm in a different country, so the Google page and associated search results are tailored to that country. Since I disabled some of the cookie functions (don't know what, need to figure out late), it still used the other country setting for some time even after I returned. This becomes very annoying especially the country specific search is usually useless to me. 

A quick Google search landed me to this site: "How to always use Google.com and stop Google from sending you to country specific website [Tip]".  Basically, you just type www.google.com/ncr in the home page setting (or just in the URL).  The "ncr" part means "no country redirect", according to the source. 

It worked great! 

Windows Remote Desktop blackscreen issue

Remote desktop became a necessity in my daily work and it not only allows me working at home but also access a lot of information while on the road (e.g. for country specific resources).

Today when I really need to log in to my office PC, it showed a black screen AFTER logged in.  After some connect/disconnect/reconnect, I finally turned to Google.  Here's the solution:
Using Ctrl+Alt+Home to bring up the "lock screen" menu of the remote computer (in Win 7 that's lock screen, log off, task manager, etc.) Then choose "task manager".

Wow, the desktop is back. 

I'm not sure whether this is related to I locked the screen when left office.  Will give it a try tomorrow.

BTW, Ctrl+Alt+Del will bring up the local PC's lock screen menu.

iPhone microphone glitch

During vacation in Florida, my old new (will explain later) iPhone 4 become muted when making phone calls. Neither the regular microphone at the bottom of the phone nor the mic for the speaker on the top worked. Except for making phone calls, Skype, VOIP phone app, etc. worked fine for both microphones. I made an appointment at the local Apple store and the "Genius" there told me that it has to be replaced. Since the 90 day warranty (I recently paid $170 + tax to have it replaced due to a real hardware issue) just expired 3 days ago, I have to pay another $170 for a new iPhone 4.

At the same time, he did mention that this could be a software issue as the voice memo is working fine. Well the only way he suggested to clear that is to restore the iPhone as a new phone, which didn't help after spending quite a bit of time to resetting the phone and restoring it.

Luckily I brought my new Blackberry Z10 with me, so I did have a phone to use during vacation.  Once I got back home, a more thorough Google search turned up this post from MacRumors.  It referred to this blog post stating that this is a software glitch which disables the microphone for the native phone call App in iOS. The solution is to play the iPod app (or Music app in iOS 7).  Initially, this solution didn't work. However, I do have the impression that this problem happened when I was using the Microsoft Sync via Bluetooth on the rental car.

After connecting to my Bluetooth headset and playing music for a second then disconnecting it, the problem was solved.

What's surprising is that this seems to be a rather common problem based on the feedback/comments on the blog dated back to 2011.  Why on the world didn't Apple solve the problem or, even recognize it by the "Genius"?

Kenya West took in $3M for performing at the birthday party of Kazachstan President's grandson

Kenya West took in $3M for performing at the birthday party of Kazakhstan President's grandson!

This is at the top of the suggested Livejournal list in my Livejournal Homepage. 

Is this individualized or everybody gets the same?  I sure hope the latter as the correlation between my Live Journal (which is set as private for personal use) that type of news would make me worried.

On the positive side, I hope a large part of this income will be collected by the IRS.  Kenya West is sure in the top .01%.  I'd think he would pay the top income tax bracket.  Even it's directly counted as business income, at the end of the day, Kenya and Kim probably would take in most of it as personal income.