Author: shun

MacGyver and Me

My brother wrote an blog entry about MacGyver. Ahh~ What fond memories I have of that show.

Back in the days (80s), almost all the cousins would be visiting my grandparents, and Saturday at 8PM, we would all gather around the TV and tuned in to MacGyver religiously. Right after it was “The A Team“, which wasn’t quite as good ad MacGyver, but we were kids; we didn’t know any better. I think our parents didn’t mind us watching MacGyver mostly because of the show’s non-violence approach towards solving conflicts. But all we knew was, that guy was wicked cool.

MacGyver

I got so into that show I even spent my Chinese New Year money on a similar wallet that MacGyver was using in the show, and one year, I took out all the money (around NT$2,000… about USD$50 at the time) and bought a watch just like his (I had a picture to compare it with!). But shortly after I got that watch, the show revealed something about his watch which mine didn’t have. I felt cheated by the guy who sold me the watch. I bet that was the easiest $50 he ever made. Crazy days. Gosh I was such a dork.

My brother reminded me about trying to watch MacGyver after we moved to Thailand. The Thai cable aired the show in Thai (of course). I can’t remember how I found out that while the show was being aired, they also broadcasted the English dialogues over the radio!! Holy cow… that was one happy day. I mean, it was ghetto as hell, but we were happy. One time I taped the show on video tape (and on cassette tape). But the playback speeds on video and cassettes are different, so we had a lag on the cassette every 10 minutes or so… What a life…

Come to think of it, me insisted having everyone calling me “Chu” may have something to do with that show… If you haven’t made the connection already, I will not be available for comments when you see me in person.

In 1994, the year I came to the U.S. for college, I stayed with my cousins in Seattle for a month or so. I missed a two-hour MacGyver special for Thanksgiving (or was it Christmas?)… Until this day, I still kick myself for forgetting to watch that. Chu’s stupid memory (lack thereof).

Years later, I read/heard somewhere that the show had actually be discontinued for a couple of years in the U.S., but due to its enormous popularity in Asia, the producers made two more seasons just for the fans in Asia. Come to think of it, that was probably a rumor.

Image shamelessly taken from rdanderson.com (not related to Richard Dean Anderson) without permission.

Postpartum Practices — the Chinese Way

A writer at BBC documented her journey after giving birth to her Chinese-English son in England. Being half-Scottish herself, her experience with the Chinese “superstitions” in dealing with a woman’s body after child birthing has brought her surprises.

When my mom visited after Bryan’s birth, she also softly imposed (she said they were just “suggestions” ) some of very same “superstitions” on Grace during the first month immediately following birth giving. Grace thinks most of those “rule” were just what they are, superstitions. But upon talking to Chinese women from an older generation, almost everyone swears by the importance of following those practices, including wearing socks at all times, close take hot showers with windows closed (even in summer), avoid drinking cold drinks… etc. They swear that the reason Westerners age so rapidly after giving birth is because they don’t take care of their bodies.

According to traditional medical practices, a woman’s body is at her weakest having lost all her Chi (“life force”, or “energy” ) to the child birthing process. With all her pressure ponits opened (they had to be opened to allow the birthing process to go smoothly), the woman’s body is most vunerable to “bad energy”… Thus the need to keep the woman’s body all wrapped up to protect those pressure points.

Like the author of the BBC article, Grace also suffered some consequences from not following a couple of the strict rules. My conclusion is, what my mom said may be superstitions, but they’ve been around for thousands of years, and there’s a good reason why generations after generations of women obey those practices religiously. Simply ignoring the tradition is to ignore thousands of years of collective wisdom, even if that means there’s no immediate scientific proof for any of those things yet.

For more information, check out the following sites:

A Blog from Malaysia

It seemed like Alicia’s found some cool sites by clicking the “Next blog” button on the top right hand corner of Jason’s blog. I tried a couple of times and found a blog written in Chinese by a Malaysian Chinese guy… He’s actually got some pretty interesting entries…

I am sure Grace will be proud of her fellow Malaysian national…

Sweet.

A Day with the Harlows

Grace and I never really celebrated Christmas. But it was refreshing to have Jason and Alicia invite us over to help decorate their Christmas tree (which Jason insisted that he paid his left pinky for). To me, Christmas in America is just another opportunity for corporate America to push sales volume (through the roof!). CNN Money estimates:

The holiday shopping season is crucial for retailers, many of which chalk up 50 percent or more of their annual sales and profits in November and December.

Reference: The race for holiday bargains is on

Scary.

On Black Friday this past November, Hanny and Widodo told the story of them spending two hours in line just to pay for their purchases. And that was around mid-night when the stores decided they’d start the sales early. This whole thing got so heated that Target even started a wake-up call service to make sure people go shop at Target in the wee hours.

So anyway… I just thought this whole Christmas thing got too commercialized in the U.S. that it’s lost whatever the original meaning of the day was. The only thing associated to Christmas/Thanksgiving are sales figures, bargain discounts, food, and football. I am sure Jesus Christ the Savior of guilty souls of this earth will really appreciate that when (and IF) the Judgement Day comes (it seems to be coming every 100 years but never really did… Whoever actually wrote the Bible must be thinking “suckas!” ).

Dang it… I drifted off of the main topic too far again…

The whole “mini event” of Christmas tree decoration was actually interesting. I have never helped decorated a Christmas tree before. Grace couldn’t help because she had to make sure Bryan stayed asleep; he was extremely cranky today at their house. He’s only acted like this maybe a couple of times before. We think he was just too overwhelmed with the new environment, being out of his daily routine and was really tired. Without fail, playing some classical music fixed him right up and put him to snooze mode almost immediately. This in itself deserves its own blog entry…

After having some incredible home-made vegetarian pizza, we watched “Kung-fu Hustle” per Alicia’s request. For some reason, some scenes in that movie are funny everytime I watch it.

Then we chatted about children (adoption, foster homes, childrearing in general), some politics, how drugs/medicine are so fricking expensive in America, and a bunch of other things. One topic Alicia brought up I thought was particularly interesting was the advancement on the research of AIDS. Apparently a group of prostitutes in Kenya seem to be immuned to the AIDS virus according to the PBS special they watched. Looks like a vaccine is imminent.

We promised to get them out to Milpitas for vegetarian dim sum. Yum! Looks like my aspiration of becoming a vegetarian may not be so lonely if we just hang out with them more… In search for a vegetarian dim sum for them, I accidentally found GrubGirl, a pretty cool blog on restaurants and food. Speaking of food, I miss Manhattan… Food selection is quite limited in California compared to the varieties in NYC. That’s something no city can ever take away from New York City…

Hit Me Again and Again and Again…

WiredAtom has been a runaway success… It’s beyond my wildest dreams having started blogging just six months ago. I credit most of this popularity to my lucky break. That speech, a direct result of my camcorder’s break down, single handedly put this blog on the map. Steve Jobs, once again, changed my life (ok, that sounded lame….) demonstrated his reality distortion field in the cyberspace.

As a quick update from my last statistics monitoring, here’s what happened a month later… 27,000 hits and 8,000 unique visitors and counting…

Site statistics for 12/2005

Most visited countries for 12/2005

Life’s a Struggle

I came across a Taiwanese rapper last year (宋岳庭, Shawn Soong). He died at the prime age of 23 as his music was just beginning to take shape. I should also mention that his music was only discovered after he died of cancer. The lyrics are blunt, raw, dark and reveals a side of life that popular Taiwanese pop’s lack of sophistication can’t compare. The topics are so sophisticated that the rest of the Taiwanese music industry seem like a big joke compared to his most acclaimed single “Life’s a Struggle”.

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Foxposé — Exposé for Browsers

Carl finally showed me something I didn’t know anything about… Foxposé is a pretty awesome FireFox plugin that turns your opened tabs into minature thumbnails, creating an effect similar to Mac OSX’s Exposé. Now that’s pretty damn cool. Even Windows users can enjoy a small piece of Mac.

Foxposé in action

Remember a while back I decided to use Opera full time? Boy, what an experience. The interface took me a week to kind of get used to. I must say that Opera’s interface is not very intuitive at all, or as what UI designers would say, poorly conceived “affordance“. And then I had to deal with it sporadic crashes on random sites. Worst yet, I can’t download the latest build in hope they may have fixed the problem in one of the builds. That’s when one starts to appreciate Open Source software… You can always get nightly builds of your software of choice, and there’s always the chance one of the developers would have addressed the issue you are dealing with…

Armed with Foxposé, I installed SessionSaver .2 (for Firefox 1.5, install this version instead), Yahoo Companion (the feature I missed the most on Internet Explorer) and StumbleUpon, I am going to try to use Firefox 1.5 full time for a while to see how the new version fares on memory management. Carl swears by Camino (Mac only), but I just don’t see its value without all the cool plugins Firefox enjoys. I am also tempted to switch to Thunderbird since Apple Mail has been doing a piss poor job on filtering out the latest junk mails. Ah~ Open Source…

Poopy Bath

Grace and I always try to come up with worst case scenarios about certain things so that we don’t panic when they happen. One of those things was: What if Bryan poops during bath? We never did come up with a clear action plan for it.

And of course, it’s the things you don’t plan for that will always strike you… Kind of like The Murphy’s Law: “Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong”. A couple of weeks ago, Bryan made a small poop-poop while I was bathing him. Lesson learned: When the water becomes murky, leap into emergency action… but before that, always have your emergency actions planned.

It was a mess. I had to call Grace to change out his bath water while I rinse him in the bathroom sink. Even though we laughed more than we panicked, the whole experience was just silly.

I think this is the beginning of a whole new way of life: To expect the unexpected. When there are children involved, no moment is ever a dull moment; there’s always something going on. The same has been true with Bryan. A friend once told me to be happy when my child is hopping, jumping and getting into trouble because it’s when he’s not, I should be really worried. Wise words.

Other developments of Bryan include:

  1. the ability to lift his head at 45 degree angles when on stomach;
  2. discovered screaming and is not shy to use it;
  3. just begginning to brush on the concept of object permanence where we notice that he realizes something in front of him can be behind him when we turn him around;
  4. chuckles when he sees things he likes;
  5. is able to finish whole 8 oz of formula in one go;
  6. is beginning to be able to trace the origin of a sound;
  7. discovered hands and starting to manipulate objects with them;
  8. discovered starting to explore his toes;
  9. developed independence where he can stay and play by himself in the crib or playpen for up to 40 minutes at a time…

Email Time Capsule

Forbes.com is running an interesting story on “Email Time Capsules”. I wish I’d thought of something like this for my thesis project. It’s a cool article nonetheless.

It’s one thing to have a physical time capsule where you can access it later. But it’s quite different to preserve things digitally, mainly because technology changes quite rapidly that you just don’t know if the technology in 20 years is going to be able to access what you tried to preserve 20 years ago. Some museums are trying desperately to find ways to preserve their digital art collection. Wired also has an interesting article on the subject. Here’s another article on the subject of digital art’s longevity (or lack thereof?).

via [Forbes.com]

War of the Worlds

I joined PeerFlix a couple of weeks ago mainly to get rid of DVDs I regretted getting, and hopefully, I can exchange them with something I wish I’d gotten. Against my better judgement, though, I got “War of the Worlds“. I read reviews and they all said the movie sucked. But I had to see it for myself.

What a mistake.

The movie sucked…

Well, coming from a special effects and 3D background, I have to give it to Steven that the effects are great in the movie. But the plot, story, logic, ending… sucked, sucked, sucked and sucked. I think I am going to avoid Steven Spielberg films until he can remove that sappiness from his ass and starts making movies with decent plots and endings. “A.I.” suffered the same fate when he got too sappy with the ending. The movie could have ended and stayed decent when David gets trapped at the bottom of the ocean. But NO, Steven has to reunite David with his mommy for 24 hours and kill her off for good using Alien technology.

Now I just got to get the rest of the movies on my list, including “Sign with your Baby Training Video“.

Speaking of movies, Grace and I watched “PTU” (Police Tactical Unit) again the other night. It’s easily among the best of the best Hong Kong films, especially those with the Hong Kong police force as their underlying themes. Johnnie To never disappoints. Even crappy scripts can turn into gold with his magical directorship. While we are on the topic of Hong Kong films, “Infernal Affairs” (more about it here) is also an excellent movie though its subsequent sequel and prequel weren’t quite as tightly written and directed. Like all good movies, prequels and sequels never live up to the excellence of the original release of the film (with the obvious exception of “Lord of the Rings. But then that trilogy doesn’t really count because Peter Jackson cheated by making all three movies in one go with creative editing). Yet others will say that the “Godfather Trilogy (more here) should also be excluded. But I say, “whatever, dude”. To see an A-Z list of trilogies Hollywood ever made, find them here.

Emotional Distance

The emotional distance between people usually affect the way we interact with each other physically. For us humans, physical distance doesn’t seem to exist when certain emotional bonds are attached. On the other hand, without this emotional bond, the person sitting next to you in the subway might as well not exist for all you care. This explains why some people can walk right by dying bodies injured from traffic accidents (this has been happening quite frequently in Taiwan, of all places, a “country” that no international community cares about, where its people doesn’t even care about their own!).

“Distance”, in our limited mental capacity to understand the world around us, only makes sense when it’s quantifiable in yards, meters or even in light years. But what about emotional distance? How does science quantify intangible ideas exist purely in the realm of concepts and cognitive matters?

It’s rather interesting to observe that when two people share a strong emotional bond, the physical distance between them seem to drastically shorten, or maybe disappear altogether. In the old days, handwritten letters can instantly fuse two distant hearts. Nowadays, those same feelings can become instant gratifications with the use telephones, emails, instant messages, or combination of all three, Skype. But still, nothing can fill in the lack of emotional bonds between two strangers.

These emotional bonds, of course, fluctuate. People fall in and out of love; the intensity of the feeling changes; this chemistry always affects the emotional distance between people. This invisible distance is particularly evident when two people quarrel. They could be under the same roof and in the same room, but they scream as if the Grand Canyon is in between them. We sometimes also use the analogy that “someone feels distant”, obviously referring to that emotional distance we somehow feel between each other as living beings.

Applying the same logic to physical distance, the lack of emotional bond can sometimes be detected when people-watching in public places. It’s obvious to see the young couples walking by with their tongues practically in each other’s throats don’t suffer a shortage of emotional distance. On the other hand, a couple can walk as close to each other as they want, but that tiny quarter-of-an-inch gap their shoulders are not touching can tell eons about their emotional distance.

Ah, all the things you can conjure up from people watching.

Environmentally Friendly Conumption

Last year Grace’s mom gave us a gift basket from Bath & Body Works. In it were a couple of bottles of foaming hand soaps. The design of the bottle is such that when you push down the dispenser, the liquid soap foams on its way out of the bottle to your hands. The system works great; the combination of little things for this bottle is just right — each push at the dispenser generates just enough soap, not too much, not too little; the foaming liquid soap never hardens at the exit point of the dispenser (like traditional liquid soaps), which if it did, would then block the flow of the liquid soap, forcing the user to push the dispensing mechanism harder, making the dispenser to dispense more soap than needed, which then creates waste (on both the soap and the water needed to wash it off); the foam is easy to wash off and leaves a rather pleasant scent on your hands.

But of course, nothing can be this perfect when it comes to corporate interests v.s. human interests. As it turns out, the dispensing unit won’t foam any kind of liquid soap other than the specific formula supplied by Bath & Body Works. Sure this is to make sure people don’t buy the dispensing unit they invented and fill it up with someone else’s product inside. I can understand and relate to the market strategy. But surely, they make refills for those wonderful, perfectly working dispensing bottles!

F*&k, no. And that’s the part that really ticked me off about Bath & Body Works. They put all that R&D into coming up with this wonderful dispenser (or maybe they just hired some two-bit Chinese factory to do it) and a foaming formula that works, but they’d rather people throwing away perfectly working dispensers than to sell refill bottles for those units. Is it corporate greed or just plain stupidity? I am inclined to say B&BW is the latter.

In some European countries, providing refillable bottle designs and supplies is part of the recycling legislation. Simply recycling millions of bottles consumers throw away every year is no longer enough to curb millions of tons of perfectly reusable bottles going to waste. This was something that Brian shared with me when he started noticing Austria’s recycling policies. The United States, being the number one consumer waste generator in the world, should take a page from Austria’s recycling program in that aspect. Like Brian, I hate it every time we throw a perfectly reusable bottle away. Unfortunately I don’t see this as something that will ever be legislated in the U.S. because of powerful lobbying efforts driven by greedy corporate interests. What a shame.