I came across a Taiwanese rapper last year (宋岳åº, 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”.
Category: Day to day life
Updates on what’s going on with us
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.
Turducken for Thanksgiving
It’s become a tradition to have Ee-bin and Patrick to come over for Thanksgiving. Grace and Ee-bin usually starts the day by prepping the Turkey (which takes a good portion of the day to bake in the oven) and making all other side dishes from scratch. This year was no different, except that they decided to get Turducken (chicken stuffed inside a duck which was stuffed inside a turkey) instead of plain ‘ol turkey this year.
Weeks before Thanksgiving approached, Grace and Ee-bin started planning what were to be included for the Thanksgiving dinner. Starting with email exchanges several times a week, just days before the BIG DAY, they started calling each other several times a day. And when they finally decided on serving Turducken, Ee-bin ordered from Hebert’s Meat Specialty down in Louisiana, which Ee-bin and Patrick saw in National Geographic.
One side note about the turducken: It arrived a day later than Hebert’s Meat had promised. Ee-bin tried calling to complain about the missing bird, but the line was busy. But Grace got through the first time she tried, and they decided to send another turducken free of charge since they couldn’t immediately locate the FedEx tracking number. And sure enough, the original Turducken arrived the next day, and the “replacement” arrived the day after that. So we got two turduckens for the price of one (~$110 each). All three birds were de-boned (read: a lot of labor), which means they probably aren’t making much on each turducken. I told Grace the poor mom’n’pop shops like this go bankrupt because of customers like them. Hah!
As for the rest of the Thanksgiving day, Grace and Ee-bin spent seven hours getting everything ready. But when it’s all said and done, it took us only half an hour to get really stuffed with all the food because we waited all day for this one big meal.
Last year, Kyung joined us on Thanksgiving. That was kind of cool. But that damn turkey was so big that it took Grace and I the next week and a half to finish everything they prepared on that one day.
Stupid turkeys.
E.T., Canada Wants You
Former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellyer, joins NGOs and asks the Canadian Parliament to engage in holding formal political relations with advanced alien life forms. Apparently, this broadcast had a huge effect on his decision to speak his mind.
In a separate news, the world’s ugliest dog died.
Self-portrait Over the Years
Thanks to Jason’s blog entry on this time-waster South Park self-portrait site, I found myself remembering the various versions of myself over the years…
Days of Innocence (High school)
Days of Freedom (College)
Working Life (New York)
Jobless Life (California)
Grace’s Mental Image of the Ideal Me (Next life)
What Happens If I Can’t Get A Job (Hello, Defenseless Taiwanese Military)
Worst TV Shows and Bad English
Taiwan makes some pretty bad teen dramas, especially those that feature the latest young idols the record labels or model agencies try to make money off of. One of them was “Meteor Garden” featuring the famous F4 boy band. The show effectively demonstrated that not only can’t the members of the band sing, those guys can’t do much else except looking pretty. But apparently the show was so popular that it became the first Taiwanese TV drama to have been imported to Japan and Korea, which was a big deal in itself. Before that, the relationship was one way: Korean and Japanese soaps have made millions of dollars from clueless and gullible Taiwanese teens for decades.
But just the other day, my theory that Taiwan makes the worst TV shows in Asia was broken. Singapore, despite its self-proclaimed better-than-the-rest-of-Asians status in the world, makes absolutely the crappiest and worst TV show ever. “The Hotel” (〠大 é…’ 店】) has a faithful following with an active forum (Simplified Chinese only) of fans with bad taste. The stereotypes and awful acting, script writing and pretty much everything else makes the sitcom impossible to sit through.
The good news is, Singapore’s investment on a bold new series “The Singapore Short Story Project” paid off with some decent acting and script writing. One thing I would like to comment on the project, though, is that I’d forgotten just how funny “Singlish” sounds (not to say that Taiwanese English is anywhere close to being better; but Singlish is, hands down, WAY funnier). Apparently Singlish is now a “recognized” slang of English that everyone knows what it is. Embarrassed, the Singaporean government is now trying to push for proper English to rescue its image.
Since I am on the topic of making fun of Singaporean English, there’s also “Manglish“, referring to Malaysian English. It’s just about as funny as Singlish but with a lot more “flavors” added in (Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin, Tamil… etc). Because parts of it you can’t understand, it’s not quite as funny as Singlish. Another funny (maybe funnier than Singlish) variation of English spoken in Asia is “Engrish“, really really terribly bad English spoken by the Japanese. I mean, Japanese is a serious, no non-sense culture. Naturally, they take language learning seriously. So mostly, Engrish is just a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations or misuses of the English language by the Japanese when they attempt to reinterpret Japanese meanings using inappropriate English words or pronunciations. And sometimes it’s funny as hell. Engrish.com is a famous site with countless funny examples (tip: try not to laugh out loud at work). Austin Powers has its fair share of puns on Engrish.
Pets, Infants and Allergies
My mom’s been pestering me about raising Bryan while having two cats at home. Almost every time I talk to her on the phone, she never forgets to nag about it (on top of her 5-year nagging about my thesis). Rightfully, she worries that Bryan may grow up with respiratory problems and more prone to allergies like I have been. And she cites evidence from everyone she’s talked to about the subject. Of course, everyone has an opinion when it comes to childrearing practices.
While at dinner at Jason and Alicia’s, Alicia casually mentioned that a recent research concluded that having pets at home actually HELPS infant and young children build up their immune system to resist allergies when they grow older.
CBC News
The 10-year study showed children who were exposed to the furry pets during their first year of life were half as likely to develop common allergies by about age six than those living in petless homes.
CBS News
The bottom line is that maybe part of the reason we have so many children with allergies and asthma is we live too clean a life. When kids play with cats or dogs and the animals lick them, the transfer of bacteria may be changing the way the child’s immune system responds in a way that helps protect against allergies. Parents should not be concerned about having pets in the home with a new baby but the findings do not go far enough in allergy prevention to warrant the purchase of pets.
The fact is, the society today is super freaked out about being sterile and germ-free. Every cleaning agent you can buy in America sports a guarantee of “killing 99.99% of germs and bacteria” on contact. The same hysteria is driving people to use obscene amount of antibiotics to the extent that someday there will be a new species of superbugs that will be resistant to all antibiotics and kill off a significant portion of the human race. I bet those hardcore, conservative right wing Christians will somehow tie that into the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ the Savior, the only son of God, the one and the only salvation to eternal afterlife. So let’s not piss off God by using too much antibiotics and leave them germs and bacteria alone once in a while.
People, let’s relax. It’s perfectly natural and OK for kids to be dirty from time to time. It’s good for them.
As for my mom, I found similar report in Chinese and am planning on sending it to her, with key points highlighted, along with the latest video clips and printed pictures of Bryan.
Volusion — User Unfriendly
A couple of months ago, I was consulted by an online outfit to analyze their ecommerce strategies given the long term vision of the company (that was the reason I looked into Yahoo Merchant Solutions, the client’s current online store front service provider). After doing a thorough market research, I went back to them with three alternative alternative solutions to Yahoo:
MonsterCommerce
Volusion
OS Commerce
Given the requirements and budget, these three solutions were most fitting for the client. Unfortunately, due to concerns with support on open source, OS Commerce had to be dropped. Out of the other two companies, the client picked Volusion as the ecommerce solution of choice to migrate their online store front to.
Volusion’s online presentations and everything else looked wonderful. But as soon as we started porting existing products and started to configure options in Volusion, we realized just how terrible Volusion’s administration interface is. Granted they provide a fairly decent documentation and speedy tech support, its terrible user interface design just pisses me and my client’s internal staff off. As a tech-savvy person, I understood some of the jargon Volusion’s website spit at me. But I can’t imagine someone with the experience level of MS Word to grasp the extensive (read: things most people don’t care about) and sometimes trivial features the interface insists on displaying.
Why can’t the geeks at Volusion take a page from Apple: show optional features only when necessary by those who need them; and in god’s name, polish up the god damn interface a little. Sure, it’s usable, but damn it, even I was intimidated when a page of roughly 120 form fields (I kid you not) appeared just to add ONE product. WTF?!! Did the monkeys at Volusion even bother to do user testing with their cumbersome interface?
Even though we haven’t tested MonsterCommerce as extensively yet, but for those who are considering trying Volusion, BE WARNED. And no matter how bad MonsterCommerce’s interface is, it can’t be worse than Volusion’s presentation of 120 form fields on a single page with dozens of useless optional fields. Com’on, even volunteers working on OS Commerce could make a usable interface. Why are those paid programmers at Volusion not doing half of what OS Commerce can delivery UI wise?
As for OS Commerce, I couldn’t find a module that conveniently imports an existing Yahoo Store easily. I mean, Yahoo has a feature that exports; and OS Commerce has a couple of features that import xml/cvs files. But I didn’t spend enough time to make them play nicely together. To that end, I give Volusion credit for being able to nicely import products from Yahoo (sans product categories and images). Big deal; so can MonsterCommerce.
UPDATE 01/10/2009: A lot of what I’ve written here have become irrelevant since Volusion proactively updated their software. I’ve written a more updated review here.
Baby Jam
We took Bryan out to the mall yesterday for a walk. Ever since his one-month-old party, he’s never seen so many people in his 3.5 month-old life! He stayed up past his 2PM nap time people-watching. He was fascinated with the sheer number of the Christmas crowd. Jason was right about the crowd. The fact that all those malls and department stores having sales early doesn’t help either.
Another phenomenon Grace and I never noticed before was how many babies there were at the mall. Babies, toddlers, baby strollers…. There were so many strollers at the mall that occasional traffic jams were common among narrow strips full of strollers of various sizes. Grace and I even caused a couple ourselves. Did the architects of the mall even take the strollers into account when they designed those walkways?
It’s a weird thought to see that all those babies will someday be competitors with Bryan for jobs, food, breathes of clean air and social benefits. Good thing competition for mating isn’t quite as bloody as it used to be.
Another Reason Why Songs Are Pirated
The music industry has been complaining about how cheap songs are on Apple’s iTunes music store. Even though iTunes seems to be the only solution to curb the explosive music pirating subculture, the record executives just don’t get it.
Sony, acting like a jackass, put out a CD with a copy-protection measure built-in. The CD installs an invisible piece of software in the computer to make sure the owner of the CD can’t rip it. But the plan backfired as a trojan virus, brilliantly, piggybacks on the Sony code.
And the record executives complain about CD sales going down the hill? Who’s going to buy a copy of CD that they can’t rip, and worst yet, could potentially put a security flaw in CD owner’s computer?
Dumbasses.
Friends
After more than 15 email correspondence between the Malaysian/Indonesian gang, everybody finally settled on meeting at Michelle’s apartment on Friday night for hot pot. Bryan behaved exceptionally well, sleeping through most of the night, while the adults dined and wined.
We talked a lot about the troubles Chee-hoi and Widodo went through with “cat problems” around their houses. They complained that neighborhood cats refuse to stay away from their yards with occasional acts of retaliation, especially with Chee-hoi’s back yard. Then Widodo proudlly shared his money-saving tricks on his pool (one of the only TWO in the entire neighborhood, according to Google Earth). I never knew pools can take so much to maintain! Kind of takes the romance of owning a pool knowing all that insider knowledge.
On Saturday, Yi-sheng, an old friend from high school called to see what we were doing. So we decided to get out of the house and show him this Thai noodle place in San Francisco we love so much. We just love Thai food!
Sunday afternoon, we went over to visit Jason and Alicia, good friends I met from college, over at Menlo Park. Jason made us some really nice home-made Japanese dishes. The visit also gave me a new insight to Jason and Alicia’s past through a series of albums (including a scrap book that Jason’s mom made of his baby years). According to Jason’s mom, he liked Kung-fu when he was four years old. Maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t really follow through with it. At over 6-ft tall, he could easily be a killing machine.
We also saw Jason and Alicia’s two cats (finally). It was amazing to see how their cats are so totally fine with having leash put on them when going out for a walk. It was also funny to see how cats just can’t tolerate baby cries (ours eventually got used to it after a couple of months). But Bryan did OK today. We went through three diapers and a bottle of formula during the visit. Jason blogged about our visit soon after we left. He has a couple of tight shots of Bryan. It was very nice to just talk to friends without other distractions in the way.
It was nice to be out of the house to get some fresh air.
Will Work for Housing
After having some troubles with Yahoo HotJob’s resume builder earlier last week, I finally got a more generic resume set up to bombard the newspaper ads. So on Thursday, I emailed about a dozen companies with positions I thought I am capable of doing well from local Chinese papers.
Next I combed through Craigs List for any computer administration or web design gigs I could find and inquired about them. But such as the nature of Craigs List: Everybody wants a lot for nothing.
So the job search continues. As 2005 draws to a close, Grace and I prepare to tighten our belts for a long winter. But even in the wake of our worst financial crisis, we still feel lucky everything else in our lives are in still in good order (relatively speaking).