Vitamins

My mom left to visit relatives in Asia a few weeks ago. Before she left, we went to Costco, dutifully buying bottles of vitamins to bring back. Vitamin B-12, E, C, "One-A-Day" pills, etc. This was requested by my relatives back in Asia. And my relatives are not unique. Almost every Asian I know, when they go back to Asia for a visit, would have vitamins in their suitcases.
Why is this?

First of all, I guess vitamins are one of the few things that are still labelled "Made in USA". Most consumer goods are now imported from Asia, so it seems silly to take those back to Asia as gifts.
The main reason, I think, is the believe that vitamins from US is "real". Less chance of it being some fake vitamins. Since China is so famous for pirating CD/DVD, people are afraid that they would do so for vitamins too. And I tend to agree with that sentiment, just because the regulations are more strict in US and the government is less corrupt.

Now, if people are so afraid that they're being cheated, that seems to me that the effect of vitamins are not very obvious. You could be taking the "fake" stuff for years and won't know it. Which also means that when you are taking the real stuff, you probably don't know the difference either.

I try to take Vitamin C every day, although that rarely happens. Maybe when I'm feeling sick I would remember taking it. I guess I don't really "believe" in its effects.

If you're wonder what the different Vitamins are for, you can read the reviews on this website: linky

DD-WRT

I just discovered that my old & trusty Buffalo Technologies WBR2-G54 router is one of the supported routers for the opensource DD-WRT firmware.
Why should I upgrade?
Well, there are TONS of features that DD-WRT has that my router doesn't have. But the only thing I really care about is the fact that it does Static-DHCP (I provide the MAC addresss and the router will provide the same IP everytime) and DDNS (so I can access my site even though my WAN IP address is always changing).
My Buffalo currently has the Static-DHCP feature, which is essential for people with multiple ReplayTVs like me. ReplayTV (or more accurately, VxWorks) has a bug where it would request multiple IPs. By having Static-DHCP, it will consistently get the same IP address and won't confuse other ReplayTVs on the network.

Flashing my router with the firmware was easy enough. But the problems came afterwards. First, I couldn't logged into the router with the default root/admin password. Telneting to the device resulted in the same behavior. I finally had to flashed it with OpenWRT firmware, set the password there and then reflashed it with the DD-WRT firmware. Now it's all well.

There is one minor feature that I *miss* from the original Buffalo firmware. That is the ability to configure what the gateway IP address the DHCP server gives away. By default it's the router's IP address, but if the router is not the end hop of this subnet, this is an extra wasteful hop that I would like to eliminate. Nobody in DD-WRT forum seems to know anything about it. But since it's minor, I guess I can live with it.

Links for the instructions:
General install
Buffalo specific