Tev's

Certified Copy

2011-07-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

So I went to watch another art house film with my friend Mark. I had previously watched the movies Before Sunrise (which I found out has a whopping 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes!) and Before Sunset with Mark and Certified Copy definitely reminded me of those two movies. Certified Copy begins by the main character British writer James Miller giving a talk to an Italian audience on his book on the topic of originals and copies in the art world. A French antiques dealer, whose name is not given, comes to attend the talk but leaves soon after entering since her son is hungry. She leaves her phone number with the book's Italian translator. Later James Miller comes over to talk with the French lady at her store and they begin on a short expedition to a town 30 minutes away from where they are. The movie mainly revolves around their dialogue and the beautiful scenery of Italy. Their conversation starts to take a strange twist when whilst at a cafe the woman who runs the cafe starts to talk to the lady as if Miller was the lady's husband. When Miller returns after having been talking on the phone the lady informs Miller that the cafe owner thinks that they are a married couple. Soon after Miller and the lady start talking as if they were truly married, to comedic effect. I think the movie really portrays human emotions well and I think the mystery around whether the two are married or not is entertaining. A really 'talkie' movie, enjoyable smart dialogue, I give it an 8/10.

Super 8

2011-07-22T07:49:00.000-07:00

So I forgot to review this movie, I watched it sometime last month shortly after it was released in Hong Kong. Having been a fan of the first two seasons of Lost I have since tried to follow up on J.J. Abram and his production company, Bad Robot Production, and their productions. First up was Cloverfield, which was a big miss for me mostly 'cos I couldn't take all of the shaky camera work, although I guess the story line was OK and the production value was pretty good. Next was Star Trek, directed and produced by J.J. Abrams, which was a fun movie, but the only thing that slightly bothered me was whether the physics of the movie was realistic or not. I even watched Morning Glory, although only at my mom's suggestion, and although it was a chick flick it was enjoyable. I've been digressing so I guess I should actually state my opinion about Super 8. At the heart of the movie is a coming of age story and a love story between the adolescent hero and his love interest. In the story the young characters are about 13 but we will see the young hero, Joe Lamb, overcome great hurdles in order to save his love, Alice. I actually was lured into this movie thinking it would be more of a sci-fi action movie when actually the coming of age story and the characters of the movie mattered more. The overarching story is that in 1979 a mysterious train carrying an unknown cargo crashes. A group of young kids witness the scene as they were filming their film project at the train station where the train accident occurs. As the next day comes strange things start happening in the neighborhood and the military comes in to try to manage the incident. It becomes clear that an alien was on the train and escaped when it crashed and it becomes clear that the alien is responsible for kidnapping many of the residents in the area. One night Alice goes missing and it is up to Joe to solve the mystery as to where she disappeared to and with the help of his friends he goes of on a search for Alice, even risking entering a zone where the military has been deployed and where civilians are not allowed to entered. The movie doesn't go too deep into the sci-fi aspect but instead focuses on the characters and the relationships between Joe, his friends and Alice. I guess it makes them more lovable and in the end you care about their fates. The ending reminded me of the ending of E.T. and although ending was abrupt I think it was saved by the showing of the movie project that Joe's friend directed. The movie project was a major part of the movie since it was how Joe grew attracted to Alice in the first place and also was how the kids spent their spare time. By showing the finished film project it gives hope that the town moved on after the incident. All in all a good movie. I haven't been giving my film reviews any ratings yet so I guess this one will be a first. This movie rates a 7/10, I would have given more but didn't mostly because there was such a build up to the ending but it sort of ended abruptly without answering questions about what happened next, like how the military would take responsibility for the incident.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Pt. 2

2011-07-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

OK so I had a period of time when I was too lazy to update what movies I watched and by now I've already forgotten what other movies I may have watched. However I would not be able to forget the latest and last episode in the Harry Potter saga, it signaled an end of an era and fine conclusion to the series. I won't go too much into the story but I guess the summary would be that Lord Voldemort is on a mission to kill Harry Potter and Harry Potter is on a mission to kill Lord Voldemort as well by destroying the remaining horcruxes, magical objects that contain part of Lord Voldemort's soul that allowed him to be resurrected after his death. Each of the horcruxes are created with a mysterious magic that revolves around a murder and Lord Voldemort had committed many murders to create more horcruxes to ensure his immortality. The story, I am assuming, is faithful to the book and therefore possesses all the qualities that attracted people to the book in the first place. Of course the special effects help too and to conclude the movie the story jumps forward 19 years to see the families of Harry Potter and Ginny, Ron and Hermione and others sending their children off to Hogwarts.

Taken

2011-07-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

So I'm not sure if there were any other movies I missed out, I can't remember. I actually watched this movie on Blu ray at a friend's house, the movie was originally released in 2008. It was pretty awesome since he had a nice home entertainment setup. It follows the story of a father, a former CIA operative, who chases for his daughter after she gets kidnapped by an Albanian group of sex traders operating in Paris. Although the movie was quite violent I couldn't help but side with the actions the father took in order to attempt to save his daughter. The ending was obvious but the story did have one or two twists along the way where you wondered how on earth the father was going to escape his predicament. A great movie overall, I liked the idea of attaching a reason and an emotion to all of the violence since you care that much more that the father achieves his goals in order to save his daughter. I also liked the investigative side to the story where the father picks up clues along the way and must use both his brains and his physical skills to find his daughter with the risk of failure meaning he may never see his daughter again.

X-men First Class

2011-06-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

So the movie revolves around the plot of how the X-men started out and how Magneto became a villain. The main plot revolves around another mutant named Sebastian Shaw who tries to start a nuclear World War 3 so that he can start destroying mankind. Charles Xavier (Professor X) and his team go on several missions in order to stop Shaw. Although this is probably not part of the plot I can also imagine that since Sebastian Shaw's ability is to absorb raw power he would probably also want to absorb the power from a few nuclear bombs. Once Shaw absorb the power he can reuse it to devastating effect. The other main plot is Erik Lensherr's (Magneto) mission of revenge against Sebastian Shaw since Shaw kills Lensherr's mother at the beginning of the movie in an attempt to stir up Lensherr's magnetic superpowers. I like how the movie provides the back story to the X-men universe, although I'm not sure how much of the story was actually inspired from the comic books. I like how the movie thinks of small details as well, such as the back story as to how Charles Xavier gets paralyzed from the waist down. Overall the plot was well written, I like how the story flows however the dialogue needed more work. It was a fun movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Plus Wolverine's cameo was hilarious! Also while I was procrastinating on this 'review' I also searched around Wikipedia for the new characters in the movie who I had not seen before and found out they all appeared in the comic books in the past, cool stuff. I guess the writers needed to use new characters since most the characters in the original trilogy are young, with only Mystique, the Beast, Wolverine, Professor X and Magneto being aged old enough to appear in both the original movie trilogy and this prequel.

The Hangover Part II

2011-06-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

So it's basically The Hangover in Thailand, virtually the same plot except different jokes some relating to transexuals. Wasn't too offended in the way they portrayed Bangkok, I guess it's kind of hard to hide the truth of how sleazy it can be. It's kind of funny because I've almost always been in Thailand with family, except for one school golf trip which was obviously kept PG, so that means I've never truly experienced the sleazy side to Bangkok, until I watched this movie. It's a funny movie but it couldn't beat the first. My dad wanted to watch it 'cos it was set in Thailand and I tried to persuade him not to. Letting him watch the first one just made him wanted to watch this one more. He had a blast watching both movies.

Souce Code

2011-06-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling lazy for this review so let's just say the name of the movie was kinda lame. Also I got confused.

Thor

2011-06-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

All around fun movie to watch. The story centers around the relationship between Thor, his brother Loki and his father Odin, all characters from Norse mythology. On the day that Thor is to ascend to the throne and take position as the new king a group of enemies from a different realm attempt to steal the source of their power which they used to attempt to take over earth years ago. The ceremony is interrupted and Thor is not yet made king. Thor plans his own revenge against the enemies, the frost giants, and travels with some friends to attack the Frost Giants, sworn enemies of the...

OK so I was sitting on this review for a while and couldn't really be bothered to finish it so I decided to rap up the review in 3 words. THOR IS HERE! (SC2 reference)

Lego Ninjas

2011-04-18T23:43:00.000-07:00

Limitless

2011-04-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

I liked the story of Limitless, I think the plot of any movie is important as I learnt from watching Sucker Punch. The basic premise of the movie is that there is a new drug that enables the user to enhance his or her intelligence and focus to the point that it allows them be almost supernaturally smart and it allows them to become very successful at anything they come in contact with. Naturally there are problems with others know about the drug and the main character Eddie has to fend them off. As he starts taking more of the drug he also starts finding side effects. I like the little adventure the story takes you through giving you some nice twists in the story. Oh and the movie definitely shows that the dudes with the brains get the chicks.

Also some other random notes...I was interested to see Anna Friel in a movie role for the first time. I haven't seen her in anything other than Pushing Daisies on TV. Too bad the majority of her screen time was short and for her role they had to put make-up to make her look older. Also at the end of the movie the main character tries to sound smart by speaking "fluent" Mandarin. Bradley Cooper didn't quite manage to pull it off and the audience got a couple of chuckles out of it.

Sucker Punch

2011-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Firstly I didn't realize this movie was directed by the same person who directed 300 and Watchmen. But I guess it didn't matter who directed this movie since the story line needed a lot of work. The movie is set in the 60's, when mental health care was still antiquated. The story involves a 20 year old girl "Babydoll" who is wrongfully committed to an insane asylum after her stepfather accuses her of killing her younger sister, when in fact it was the stepfather who killed her younger sister. This all happens after the mother dies and the stepfather realizes the inheritance was given to the two daughters. Here comes my first confusion: why did the stepfather kill the younger daughter? What could he possibly gain, it wouldn't have helped him gain the inheritance, unless there was something else written in the will that wasn't revealed in the movie. Once inside the insane asylum the asylum's orderly is bribed by the stepfather to perform an outdated procedure, lobotomy, to make his stepdaughter become mentally disabled for real. The main plot revolves around Babydoll obtaining various items that will help her escape. This is where the fun comes in, there are two levels of fantasy involved with the majority of the film with minimal amounts of time spent in the real world. The first level of fantasy is a mob run brothel where Babydoll and other pretty girls work to please their clients. They plot to escape and this part of the fantasy reflects what is going on in the real world. Babydoll does an erotic dance, that sadly never gets seen on screen lol, that distracts all the men in the brothel when she takes center stage and the other girls work to grab their items to escape. When she fantasizes that she is dancing she goes even further into another fantasy that reflects the struggle to obtain the item. In these fantasies she enters worlds inspired by other works of fantasy like anime and video games. The worlds include a samurai world, an orc fantasy world with dragons, a sci-fi fantasy with robots and a steampunk battle against zombie Nazi soldiers. Why do I have to explain all this? Because the plot seemingly tries to be interesting and convoluted but it's really not and aside from the fantasy the events in the real world part of the film are senseless. In the end after grabbing all the items needed for their escape Babydoll and one other girl almost manage to escape but given that there is no easy way out Babydoll sacrifices herself as a distraction whilst the other patient manages to escape. Spoiler: Babydoll gets lobotomized and becomes a mindless soulless person. The orderly immediately feels immense remorse for having ruined a girl's life permanently and he gets arrested for having forged the psychiatrist's signature allowing for the lobotomy procedure. I feel like this film had so much potential but it just had to end in a way that was sad and wrong on so many levels. I guess Babydoll payed the ultimate sacrifice to allow her friend to escape. It was a waste of all that effort into all the special effects for such a downer of an ending. All the pretty girls in the movie too, so pointless in the end though. Chick named Jamie Chung was in it, saw her in another movie too. She seems like quite the B-movie actress given her past record, although her next upcoming appearance is in Hangover Part II, which I'm looking forward to and I'm definitely watching. Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical fame (not that I've ever seen it) was in this movie too. To summarize my disappointment in this film I would have to say that it needed better writers, even a minimally creative plot would have helped drive the action better.

Edit: I feel I may have misunderstood the story but it doesn't really matter, I still don't like the story. After reading this the story makes more sense but I don't know, the feeling of the movie still doesn't sit well with me: "Its about escaping to your mind as a coping strategy so you won't have to face your much more grim and darker reality." Oh and the soundtrack was actually good.

Morning Glory

2011-03-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

Morning Glory is a lighthearted comedy about a producer who finds herself in a difficult position as a producer of a failing Breakfast TV news show. I would not usually be suckered into watching this kind of movie but I thought Rachel McAdams was cute so I didn't mind. The movie has the predictable overcoming all odds sort of story line and a few good laughs sprinkled throughout the movie. It made for a pretty enjoyable experience. Harrison Ford is getting old though haha, he looked a lot better a few years ago in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

World Invasion (Battle: Los Angeles)

2011-03-24T01:09:00.000-07:00

I always find a movie more enjoyable when I stay away from any hype surrounding it. Also, watching trailers can often ruin a movie for me. I had neither any hype nor any idea of what this movie would be like. I guess it helped to know that it got bad reviews. I didn't think this movie warranted the bad reviews it got. The basic story is that aliens invade earth and come to take our water as it is a resource that they want. They come violently, taking offensive action against the world's major coastal cities. It was a basic war movie when it came down to it. I guess my only complaint would be that the aliens didn't really have any special powers, they might as well have been humans fighting humans. The movie was action packed and although it was predictable at times it always kept you on edge, not really knowing what's up next. Also if you thought Transformers was a movie that was a major military propaganda tool then you'd be in for a surprise because this movie bleeds pro-marine agenda all over it. This movie was fun for the action and CG these days is so incredibly believable. I don't think at any point in the movie did my brain decide that the aliens were computer generated.

The Edge (Край)

2011-03-22T02:50:00.000-07:00

First off I guess I skipped out on watching Black Swan, I'm not so great with watching that kind of movie these days. My friend Mark is a big movie guy and since it's his last week of freedom before he starts work next week we decided to meet up to watch a movie from the Hong Kong International Film Festival. There were too many choices so we ended up choosing a random movie that would be convenient to go to both in terms of location and time. We didn't really look too much into this movie, but a quick look at it's wiki shows that it won a nomination for best foreign language film at the Golden Globe awards.

Knowing little about the movie we wondering why it got the category III rating (equivalent to being R-rated). Thankfully there wasn't any sort of uber-violence though, just a few nude ladies. The story looks at the main character after WWII. After finishing his duties at the frontline of war Ignat is hired to work as a train mechanic at a Gulag. From here on the story is rather complicated to describe though. However it is pretty interesting. With nothing much to do at the Gulag most of the story focusses on Ignat's obsession with trains. It also focuses on the Russian's hatred of a German girl who Ignat finds while trying to recover an old train and Ignat's efforts to protect her. High production values make for a very believable movie. The story of a protagonist protecting someone from discrimination is uplifting as she finds a way to live without hatred in her life in the end.

The King's Speech

2011-03-03T00:55:00.000-08:00

I must say I was a little disappointed about this one, I guess that's what hype does to any movie. It's not a bad movie but I guess it didn't really move me that much. The story is about King George VI who had a speech impediment and his struggle to overcome it so that he could make speeches, made necessary by his role. Not to say that it isn't an inspiring story, it's always great to see someone come through after their struggles. The acting was also good, I don't know, I guess I was looking for that extra bit of sparkle.

Shaolin (新少林寺)

2011-02-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

I'll start off by saying that this is the most pro-Buddhist movie I have ever seen. The movie doesn't stop to promote the Buddhist ideals of peace, harmony, community and zen despite all of the action going on. The main plot revolves around a fallen general who changes his wicked ways and becomes a shaolin monk. He trains in the Shaolin martial arts ways and becomes a good monk, defending the people from his power hungry former officer. I guess I'm not into all the emotional stuff in this movie. All the crying is just a bit too much for me. The action scenes were pretty good though and I guess I sympathize with some of the Buddhist ideals. I guess I like the lesson in this movie that that we can all repent from our sins and change our ways, which is similar to that of Christian ideology but obviously different in its execution and faith. Great acting skills from lead Andy Lau and Nicholas Tse, Jackie Chan added a few laughs too. A very serious movie, I guess I'd prefer something lighthearted, then again the most movie I'll probably watch is Black Swan, though my reason for seeing it is mostly for Natalie Portman, maybe I should watch No Strings Attached instead for the same reason? To be continued...

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2011-02-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

A rather strange but funny movie, Fantastic Mr. Fox is full of surprises. I guess from the opening scene it's hard to know what to expect next. The stop motion animation is pretty creative, going beyond the rules of gravity and common sense. The dialog is quick witted. I love when the animals break out of their human like character when they eat and become animalistic. All in all good fun I suppose.

The Green Hornet

2011-02-07T22:34:00.000-08:00

This was a fun movie, despite all of it's failings. I think the movie focused a bit too much on Seth Rogen's failings as a head superhero character and the drama over Cameron Diaz's character was unneeded. Also much of the script needed more work to make it more believable and less Seth Rogeney. What does make the movie enjoyable though is it's humor and craziness. One example would be when the Black Beauty gets cut in half but can still run in front wheel drive. Then there are the slow mo action scenes and Michel Gondry's psychedelic artistic shots. I guess in summary the movie was a good laugh, not something to be taken too seriously. Take a closer inspection and the story sort of falls apart.

The Tourist

2011-01-17T04:48:00.000-08:00

I really don't have much to say about this movie. I'd say it was disappointing. I don't think Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie had much chemistry. The whole plot doesn't make much sense. This is partly forgiven due to Angelina's still 'ravishing' looks, despite her age. That is all.

Tron: Legacy 3D

2011-01-17T04:45:00.000-08:00

Tron was a good no-brainer action sci-fi movie. Premium Hollywood material. It helps that Olivia Wilde was hot too, her eyeliner goes a long way. The graphics were good. The story line was terrible. I do like the Eastern mysticism theme that was going on though. What really doesn't make sense is how Quorra comes into the real world. Probably some bio-quantum techno-babble the film made a brief entry into. What more can be said of Tron? Awesome music my Daft Punk. Stuff all nerds would love. Instantly forgettable I would think, but time will tell.

Christmas Balls

2010-12-26T04:38:00.000-08:00

Christmas Dinner

2010-12-24T07:12:00.000-08:00

VII Sopranos

2010-12-20T23:30:00.000-08:00

Sony (Speaker and PSP)

2010-12-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

Christmas Toy Train II

2010-12-14T01:28:00.000-08:00

Christmas Toy Train

2010-12-14T00:48:00.000-08:00

Books to Finish

2010-12-12T23:18:00.000-08:00

Kitty Cat

2010-12-12T01:40:00.000-08:00

Sennheiser Earbuds

2010-12-12T01:39:00.000-08:00

HKUST Sundial

2010-12-11T06:49:00.000-08:00

Computer Mess

2010-12-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

Spinning Ball

2010-12-06T22:30:00.000-08:00

Crazy X'mas

2010-12-05T23:23:00.000-08:00

Pros

2010-12-05T07:10:00.000-08:00

Ramblings

2010-10-08T22:54:00.000-07:00

I found a way, that supposedly works, to post my blogger posts on Facebook as well but since it doesn't work yet I won't share it yet. I'm having a hard time sparing time to practice the bass, and I don't actually have one so I'm making due with practicing on the guitar. I guess if I'm at a point where I'm starting to have time management problems I really shouldn't add anything more to my list, but soon I'll need to when I job search. I really don't know what I want this time. It sounds ridiculous but I wonder how I would be as an actor (???). Such thoughts come and pass. More likely than not I'll probably land something pretty random. Next posts shouldn't be so random, I got a couple of photo ideas that I might execute, should be beautiful.

Restart

2010-10-01T01:35:00.000-07:00

Decided to restart my blog for my non-existent readers, mostly for the sake of my sanity. Lately things have been improving, my mental capacities are returning and I'm slowly easing into the work life mentality by doing lab research for a project for my Masters degree. I started playing in a band as the bassist (my previous background being firstly in piano then guitar) and hopefully things will continue for a while. Otherwise Church has been good as is my regular Bible study, some members of which are in the Philippines on a missions trip. Just praying for a blessed time for them and a safe return. As for the matters of the heart I guess I have nothing much to say except that I think too much. Next time...photos!

Lack of Inspiration

2010-07-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

Everything has become very routine, wake up, breakfast, lunch, piano, mandarin lesson, dinner, online, Big 2, take pills, sleeep. I also don't like my panic attacks that wake me up, I need little blue pills to calm me down. I hope God can somehow make me a better man out of this. My theory is that the highs and the lows I witnessed were to provide me with a practice for what might come in the future. Just a thought. Exciting events are coming up. Wedding Saturday between Jon and Ling. Gonna turn up in my best attire, despite the heat.

I was also excited by the prospect of joining a tight knit fixed gear bike community. It seems a little far fetched and dangerous but I'm still curious.

I can't wait to get back on regular meds. I can't wait to get back to work.

2010-06-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

I think I've probably finally come back down to earth and come to terms with what is going on in my life. I am bipolar so that means my general personality and moods tend to follow a certain pattern. Easy example, I tend to keep things to myself and not share as much. I am sharing now. I've calmed down and realized that my episode stole away my time with my girlfriend and also made many people worried about me. I am in good hands, I feel that with prayer, caregroup and church and my faith in Christ my improvement has been much faster. I am always thankful for finding a good doctor too and I am thankful that God is working so amazingly through him.

I've also come to terms with my break up with my girlfriend, Esther. I don't regret asking you out, because I would have missed out on the experiences I had with you. I hope I can be a good friend for you, despite being bipolar, although I'm sure you can make many more friends in Taiwan. I miss you.

Graffiti Journey

2010-06-23T05:41:00.000-07:00

All thanks to this site: http://www.legal-walls.net/walls/627

Found this nice little spot:

American football vs. British/International football

From Graffiti Jouney

Walking to our destination

From Graffiti Jouney

Ooooooh...

ahhhhhhhhh....

I want to do 'brain' something like those guys ^

Homeless people...

He has a stove

Streetpoint view of the alley

Brain '10b

brain '10

2010-06-22T06:12:00.001-07:00

Someone beat me to my idea!

http://www.toiletinspector.com/

Actually...still none for HK...so I can start a website maybe!

Brainstorm

2010-06-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

I love the word brainstorm.
For me when I brainstorm my brain literally becomes a manic centre in my head.
My thoughts from all corners are connected by electricity and the flashes of electricity contribute to the literal storm. When I brainstorm I try to conjure my manic energies and use them for a good purpose; to come up with new ideas that might help myself or others.

My Blog's Metaphorical Death and Rebirth

2010-06-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I ended our relationship sometime last week. We're still good friends but the timing was right. This frees up many things but one of those things is this blog. It has been stagnant and stale. I have failed to provide an interesting and artistic log of my life through this blog. Therefore, as with my relationship, my blog has died. But it has risen again, like the new friendship with my ex (I hope she sees it the same way). I am now able to write about anything since my audience has widened greatly. Hopefully my blog can be seen by many eyes and inspire others artistically.

2010-06-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

Lots of photos. No title. I guess when I'm in a better emotional state I can give a better reflection on events of late.

201005 Esther so many photos....

2010-06-10T08:31:00.000-07:00

2010-06-10T02:21:00.000-07:00

Finally found a way to blog multi photos from Picasa. I feel stupid but i'll show you later.

Distractions from project...

2010-05-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Was looking through my usual distractions, blogs I read (gizmodo etc.), this provided me with my longest distraction from my projects from school. I find this guy hilarious/creative. I like the way he edits his videos in the regular talking part at the end of each video. I find it funny how his eyebrows are usually hidden by his glasses...then sometimes they pop-out...

MysteryGuitarMan

Also this illusion blew me away:

I think it was almost as mind blowing as me pausing, fast forwarding and rewinding live TV on my computer, it made me feel like a master of time haha. My new computer has one of those TV input options that allows the computer to record the HD TV that we have here. Of course the fast forwarding and rewinding only work after the computer has recorded for a while, but it still gives me the illusion that I'm manipulating live material.

Vlog xxx

2010-05-13T09:13:00.001-07:00

[edit] This thing is hideous haha...I'm recording all future videos in a mirror...

Mother's Day

2010-05-10T08:46:00.001-07:00

Hey boo. Just wanted to update with some photos taken on mother's day. Took some photos with mom while my dad waiting in line at the restaurant, my treat. They had a flower arrangement competition on display with entries from Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Did you do something special on mother's day? :) You can see my food below, didn't get a chance to take photos of my parents dishes 'cos I was too hungry. They bake the bread freshly at 6pm, so it was still fresh when we ate at 7. The starter is split pea soup and my main course was the special, crab meat with squid ink spaghetti in mustard seed cream sauce.

Dream log 0002

2010-05-09T08:31:00.001-07:00

I had a weird dream about a doctors visit. The doctor was British and had a beard and the nurse was Asian, maybe Chinese? I forgot what I went in for but I had a massive acupuncture session on my left arm. It was all wrong, they gave me all these needles with hooks and it was terribly painful. The needles kept coming out too, but somehow that was part of the procedure. The doctor was no where in sight most of the time either and the nurse seemed barely competent. For some reason she had a lot of her cleavage showing and she had two tattoos right above wear her boobs were. I talked to for her a bit outside the hospital (it looked like I was in a cross between Bangkok and Hong Kong) and her boss came over to ask her whether she was finding a new job or not and that she had to keep her job as a nurse since she was the only staff that lived near the hospital (this makes no sense whatsoever). I was then involved in some sort of massive chase, my needles kept coming out of my arm. I don't know what I was running from for sure but it was big and I had no chance of survival, I wasn't very scared for some reason though. Then I think you called...

Nissan GTR Lesson 1

2010-05-08T05:53:00.001-07:00

A little education on the Nissan Skyline GTR I took a blurry photo of, if you ever have 34 minutes to spare. Or you could just watch the first few minutes. It's actually quite entertaining, although I'm not sure I know any girls who are into the show. However it also involves travelling across Japan without any knowledge of the Japanese lanugage, which might interest you.

A little bit of fun to be had in an unrelated episode, the beginning chunk of which compares a Ford Focus RS and a French Renault car in terms of enjoyability to drive. Haven't managed to watch the rest yet though...some burning Lambos though? haha. And a bit on the first 4 door Porsche, the Panamera vs. the British postal system in a race across Britain:

Top Gear S13E04

Dream log 0001

2010-05-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

Had a dream last night. There were two Matthews. I recognized one of the Matthews as Matthew Spencer, an old classmate from high school, and the other Matthew tried in vain to introduce himself to me but I told him I couldn't recognize him. He told me his surname but I already forget it. It also involved a strange roadtrip or bus trip with a whole bunch of people. I think some people were British while others were American. I remember having to mediate an argument between an American and British person over the pronounciation of some words, to break up the argument I pointed out it didn't matter how they pronounced things since I understood both of them anyway. We had a tour around these museums and places with weird modern American artifacts, meaning that it was sometime in the future already. The details remain sketchy from here on but I think I had fun along the way. The thunderstorm abruptly woke me up at 4am. The strike that woke me up was extraordinarily loud, I kept thinking I imagined it since it was so loud and that it might have been part of my dream but this though was dispelled when I was kept awake by a few more thunder strikes. The lightning confirmed I wasn't dreaming. I knew the strikes were close by since it was very loud and the lightning and thunder came at almost exactly the same time. I woke up to check the time since I thought it was already around 7, but upon finding out it was only 4 I continued to sleep. I think the dream continued till I finally woke up at 9 but the details are even sketchier. I wish I had more dreams of you...

Sexy

2010-05-06T06:55:00.001-07:00

Just testing my different options for blogging from my phone. I can either use the phone's message function (for sms, mms and email) or use the gmail app that came with the phone. I'm afraid I'll get charged if I send it from the phone's message function so I'm gonna just copy this to the gmail app... So right now I'm writing this as I go to the bus stop. I've wanted to cut my hair for a few days, it's getting gnarly. Took a sexy pic of myself on the bus, hope you like it. I'm on the bus now, time to take a break from the phone :).
Writing from the phone is a strange experience, I'm out in the wild and I feel like my thoughts are more disconnected with all the distractions around me. I want to take photos of everything interesting but I can't do it fast enough. I wonder if people can write books this way, get their thoughts together and send them through the phone then collect their thoughts together to make sense of it all. I'd imagine that the generation born in the age of mobile phones and computing would probably start to get more comfortable with keyboards and touchscreens rather than pen and paper. Apparently there has been an increase in the usage of typewritters as some writers become discontent with Microsoft Word although I do wonder whether there are other professional publishing programs that are better. For most of the research articles I have seen thus far, most people use Microsoft Word. I have to help Phd regularly since Word is such an abominable beast. I think I have the beast mostly tamed and under control since Office is now an old friend of mine.
I'm on the MTR now and I added a photo of a car I like. It's the Nissan Skyline GTR, muscled up relative of the Infiniti G35 (still called the Nissan Skyline in Japan). It's one of the most expensive mass production cars and repair and maintenance costs are crazy. One thing I appreciate about returning to Hong Kong is the nice cars I see, the frequency of nice cars seen here is similar to that of La Jolla. Masarati's seem to be getting more popular here, a few years ago I'd think they would be unheard of here.
Also appreciable is Hong Kong people's taste for shoes (no offense to Americans). Got two pics of shoes I thought were interesting. I tried to be nonchalant when taking the pics. The red shoes reminded me of Minnie mouse's shoes. You can't see much detail on the other but its a nice pair of Adidas. Usually I'd be able to make out the make of the shoe but I guess this one is rarer.

Back to the roots

2010-05-06T03:50:00.001-07:00

This blog was originally written from my phone with photos uploaded from my phone. I soon grew tired of it though and my blog remained dormant till I started it up again for you.
With the new phone though I think blogging will be less of a hassle!
Here's a pic I wanted to use as my background, it ended up being too small cos I got it from Facebook.

New Phone: HTC Legend

2010-04-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

I just realized how much Google has taken over my life when I got this phone. I entered my Google and Facebook information so I could automatically get logged on. All the Google products, Gmail, talk, calendar were automatically set up. In the original wallpaper background I could instantly go through Facebook, and the calendar reminded me it was my payday tomorrow! When I tried to add contacts it automatically went to my Google contacts. Good thing I know where to find the information on how to wipe my info off the phone! I've been reading about it on blogs, and it's a concern of mine if I hand off the phone sometime in the future.

Where'd my face go?:

Oh...there it is...

HTC's trademark 'chin'

Mexican Take Away for Dinner

2010-04-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

My dad kindly brought back a burrito and 2 tacos for dinner. Do not be fooled by the closeup shots! The portions, unlike those that I'm used to back in Cali, were rather small. The food was still pretty tasty though. The new place was featured on local TV and one of the founders also posted an article in an online magazine. I thought the article was pretty interesting, it has the whole story and background behind the Taco place. It was really yummy but after eating it I wasn't satisfied, since I was expecting a Cali sized burrito. I took a break by going on a supermarket and department store run with my dad to get light bulbs and his breakfast. I think all these Hong Kong places are ganging up on me to try to make me eat less. I went to Mos Burger to get a Hokkaido ice cream. It was $16 (US$2!) for a tiny little cup. It was yummy, but like the burrito, I expected a larger portion. Since it was a such a small portion though I ate it slower and tried to savor it.

I'm gonna be trying out a regular push up and sit up routine. I tried looking up whether it's effective or not online and given my late hours at work I think it's a good regular exercise I can get done before bed.

Quick Canto Review

2010-04-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

Feel free, to skip through since I do not have the tools or the time to edit all the 'ums' out ;)

Just Some Thoughts...

2010-04-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

Today it was raining hard. I don't know why but that brought the dragonflies out and they were flying everywhere. I thought it was rather strange since once the dragonflies started flying around they started dying when the droplets hit them and they started to stick to the ground in puddles on the ground. I might be thinking about it too much but it also reminds me of the people in the world who do not know God, who do not have direction in their lives and like the dragonflies, they are headed in the wrong direction of the rain rather than that of safety and shelter. I guess it really struck me because dragonflies are also God's created beings, how can they survive out in the rain? Seemingly some people are also created and destined to fail. However, I remember what Jesus did for us at the cross, and I remember that we are not deserving of God's mercy. but that it is only through His grace that we can receive it through the belief in His son, our Lord Jesus. Unlike the fate of the lost dragonflies, there are many Christians in the world who have God in their hearts and have therefore dedicated their lives those people who lost in the world without faith. I am thankful for you and those people at Alpha who have helped to guide me to my faith. I skipped out on care group today to come home to rest and eat with my parents, and I'm most likely going to skip out on worship that I was going to go to with high school friends this Friday and Saturday night. I think care group is really great, it's a stopping point in the week where I can get back to the fundamentals and enjoy fellowship with fellow Christians. I've missed going these past two weeks. Hopefully this lung issue won't effect the upcoming weeks and months too much.

I've finally gotten to the good part in my book 'Bomb, Book and Compass', past all the nonsense of the life of the Chinese history writer from the 50's. I think it's good to get a good picture of the man, even with his flaws with his issues of polygamy, because we all have our flaws. But now that I've read past that I've gotten to the good chunk of the book, about how he dug up old Chinese scientific and cultural contributions that affect us even today. At that time (during the second world war) conventional Western wisdom dictated that Chinese people were backwards in terms of scientific discoveries and knowledge and that most of the modern knowledge of the time originated from Western countries. Most of us now know that this is wrong, and that due to many years of stagnation, the rich cultural and scientific past of China was unknown to the Western world. I'll probably start talking more about these Chinese inventions and discoveries as they come along.

Clinical Observations and Photography Thoughts

2010-04-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, I tried messaging you from the imaging clinic around 1:30am. Thought it was interesting they computers there, probably catering for the business man who's always busy, although they'd probably be more likely to just their Blackberries. Which makes me wonder, how's my boo been sleeping? Hope your sleep schedule is back to normal after Saturday night.

A few observations from the doctor's waiting room. I've noticed at my dermatologist and the lung doctor they like to keep newspaper clippings, often of news stories about themselves. Had a quick look through, not all of them are of him of course, he had some clippings about SARS and the avian flu since I was looking at the clippings from that time period. I thought putting Mr. Bean on the TV was a good idea at first since it provides comic relief (one of the patients was laughing out loud), until Mr. Bean's antics started bothering me so I had a quick look at the Time magazine. To my surprise it was the latest issue, don't doctors usually leave old issues in their clinic? I'm glad you called, it made me realize what time it was and it relieved me of the worry that you might stay up late waiting, hope you slept well.

Most of the digital photography that I did in the past was point and shoot, meaning I never really fiddled around with cameras since the past digicams I've used were are pretty simple. The most I ever messed around on my older cameras was on 'long exposure', keeping the camera aperture open to take a photo for a long period of time. I like making movement of light streaks come up on photos. With my newest camera however I can play with even more things, like manually focusing on objects (adjusting the focus distance), adjusting the shutter time (the amount of time the light is allowed to reach the film or sensor in the camera), adjusting the aperture size (the hole that lets light into the camera) and adjusting the ISO (high ISOs are more sensitive to light, meaning better photos for fast moving objects or things at night, the cost of high ISO is a grainy image). I thought it would be fun to review over these aspects of photo taking both for myself and for you.

Notice the difference between the two photos?
2f

8f

The focus distance is the same, meaning the camera is focused on the card decks in both pictures. However, the photo on top was taken with an aperture of 2.0f and the bottom with aperture 8.0f. You can see a difference in the background. As I mentioned briefly above the aperture is the hole in the camera that lets light touch the film, or in the case of the digicam a digital sensor (either CCD or CMOS, but more about that later). By using a bigger hole on top the light from the background becomes blurred and only the object in focus remains unblurred. By using a smaller hole on the bottom even the light from the background comes through relatively unblurred.

A smaller f number means a bigger hole and a bigger f number means a smaller hole. It's a little counterintuitive but I try to remember that in low lighting I need a lower f number and in brighter lighting I have the flexibility to also use a high f number in addition to the low f numbers. When the hole is smaller (higher f) less light comes in, so to compensate you either have to make the film, or sensor, more sensitive by increasing the ISO or the time that the light comes in for (shutter time). By using a higher f you can also make interesting effects on light.
2f

Again the low f is on top and the high f is on the bottom. Since the aperture is made up of 6 pieces covering the hole by making the aperture smaller as shown on the bottom the light becomes distorted to look like a 6 pointed star. That's all for photography today, I'll continue to update tomorrow.
Publish Post
Tomato status report! They're growing quite handsomely.

Google Maps Fun

2010-04-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

I was just finding the location of the doctor's clinic for tomorrow when I decided to have some fun on Google street maps. I knew they had the street view for some of the main roads but they even have the street view for the back entrance to HKU that I take in the morning. I thought I might share it, it's a little road that leads to a pedestrian only entrance. I take this way since there's a minibus that stops close by and the building that I work at is near this back entrance, shown in the second map as the Chong Yuet Ming Physics building.

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

The West Gate

View Larger Map

The East Gate

View Larger Map

As a continued update here are my tomato plants, growing happily. You can see the little pot as well as the mossy pot to the right with more tomato plants that I started growing. I wonder when I need to transplant them. If you zoom in you can see that all 5 seeds in the little pot have started growing, and that two of the stalks are shorter than the others since they are late bloomers. This flash photo turned out pretty well I think, not too bright.

Last Nights Dream and Funny Joke From this Sunday's Sermon

2010-04-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share a few thoughts unrelated to anything we talked about your night time and your morning time. I guess I didn't get to share these thoughts because they were kind of random and had no reason to come up. Last night, or probably to be more accurate this morning, I had a rather vivid dream. I remember parts of the plot and parts of the locations, but not the people. I think the cast of my dream was an ensemble of unsuspecting classmates from high school. It was dark for the most part, I don't think we saw any daylight. The locales seemed like the countryside of Hong Kong. For most of the time I was preparing for this huge diving expedition. I don't think I've told you but when I was younger I thought that the deep sea would be scary. This might have been because of one of the adventure series of books that I liked to read, or the scary creatures that lived in the dark, or the immense pressure that was in the deep sea. It was strange that I would dream about deep sea diving since this would be one of my biggest fears, instead I treated the trip as a fun and liberating one. For some reason the deep sea was bright and clear and I could sea everything. I could breathe without a water supply, and so could my two companions. We dived near Hong Kong I guess, although we did take a boat ride that took us further off the shores. We were on some kind of mission, although from this point on it is a little hazy. By the time I woke up it was 11. I think I found it especially hard to wake up since the dream seemed so real so I slept in till 12. I think that was easily one of the strangest, most enjoyable and most vivid dreams I've had in a long time.

At church the pastor was commenting on how words are often complicated and easy to misunderstand, and how that affected the word 'deliverance' in Philippians 1:19, since the translation from Greek could be better interpreted as 'salvation' (can discuss more later if you want :) ). So he made a joke about how it is often easy to be misunderstood when speaking other languages and he made an anecdote about two separate events of miscommunication when he was a missionary in China. One time he was on a tour at the forbidden city and the tour guide made a mistake by describing a location where the emperor liked to come with cucumbers, she meant to say concubines. On another occasion he introduced his wife as his 茄子 instead of his 妻子. I think it's funny because I heard someone comment that pastors are often afraid that people will remember their jokes during their sermons, but not the message. I'm thankful that I remember some of his message too! I've been thinking about setting up a system where I write my notes on the service bulletin and then coming home to transcribe it onto a master set of notes on my computer...

To round off my thoughts I'd like to share that my butt muscle aches from squash. Why, why do I always forget the butt muscle? Next time I'll need to remind myself to stretch it well first. Actually, a lot of my other muscles are aching, but not as badly because I stretched them.

Squash and Other Shenanigans

2010-04-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

Boo, I had a good time at squash today. I was a little rusty at first but as I got more into it I had more fun. I think my skill level was moderate compared to the others, lost out to the more advanced players and won over the beginners. I think it was good exercise though, manage to get a lot of rounds in. Hopefully I stretched enough! I even talked to someone afterwards who wanted to make it regular club that would meet once a month or so, I should e-mail him back. The chap's name was Craig, it was interesting since he was from South Africa, like one of the people from my care group. They also happened to go to the same university. I also met someone from Chula Vista, San Diego. All in all it was a fun time, hopefully I can get some more squash in the near future and learn from the advanced players! I still have a long way to go in terms of most of the basics: fitness level, strokes and most importantly footwork.

After squash I went out to peep at shoes at the Adidas originals store. I don't know if it was the music or what but I felt kinda dirty looking at the shoes with a bunch of other guys in the store, we all over the shoes, examining them and scrutinizing them. Thankfully the changed the track from the booty rap song to some more tasteful stuff. Found the shoe I was looking for, the Nizza Zip Hi. Only saw one color, black fabric with white rubber, but that was the only one I was really interested in anyway. Costs HK$599 (77US), lower than expected especially since some other shoes were going for closer to $1000. I didn't try them on yet but I guess if really want them I know where to get them, although I'm having reservations since I have the same style of shoe but without the high ankle and it kind of pinches my feet at my little toes.

They're releasing the Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3D in the theaters here, are they doing that in the states too? They're really milking this new 3D craze and the profits they make from the pricier tickets.

I have not forgotten the three little monsters! Once I figure out what color I want for them I'll finish them off. Here they are protecting my computer screen from unwanted visitors.

Also here's the growing fourth plant, you can see it a little in the background. I'll take more photos of all the other plants in the big pot too when it's brighter.

Today I saw a little gachapon I couldn't resist. It was a little DIY 'puzzle' of various Marvel superhero characters. The one I got was the hulk, it was a lot of fun. Plus it was cheap so I don't have to worry if I lose the keychain. I thought that it was funny that my camera focused on the face of the little cartoon character in the picture of the second photo 'cos it though it was a real face.

2010-04-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

It's Friday night, I'm tired. I nearly fell asleep at my computer just now. I came home at 10:30pm and I should get started on my sleep. When I take the minibus from school to the MTR station I almost always pass by Central and Lan Kwai Fong. I didn't take you when you we were here, but in Lan Kwai there's a lot of bars and clubs. People were already drunk at around 10 when I passed by, makes sense since it's a Friday night. Usually when I pass by it's around 6-8ish so at that time people are usually much more sober since they're only started drinking. I usually pass by the gaslamp and that Starbucks I blogged about yesterday too, they're on the same road the minibus takes. If it wasn't for my dad I'd never have noticed there were gas lamps, and if it wasn't for my classmate I wouldn't have known there was a special Starbucks there. My dermatologist happens to be on the same street as the gas lamp and the Starbucks. I noticed the building before too, it has a weird name, Club Lusitano, only a few of the upper floors belong to the club and the rest of the building is rented out to offices or private doctors. As you know, my psychiatrist is also in Central, as was my former orthodontist. A lot of the office building spaces get rented out to Doctors in the Central district. This was actually how my mom found my psychiatrist, by looking through the directory listings of an office building predominantly rented out to doctors. I now know they have public listings of various certified doctors on the internet too, which is much more convenient.

Finished work around 9 and had a fatty dinner. Walked around and took some pics. I'm too tired to blog about Thailand's situation right now but I'll get back to that next time.

Cris cut fries with plenty of ketchup :D.

Pork burger mmmm.

Caramel custard for dessert,one of my childhood favs.

The little red dress.

Random sleeping couple...I wonder why they're sleeping here! I wonder if anyone woke them up before the mall closed...

Don't know how I didn't get to post this. Sushi dinner! A good reason to eat in.

Special Retro Style Starbucks

2010-04-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Went to Starbucks today to meet up to organize work for my project that's coming up next month. We actually didn't get to sit in the retro area since a couple were taking what looked like wedding photos. The decor of the retro area of the Starbucks is similar to that of old Hong Kong. It is very meticulous and I've only seen such places in movies or other retro styled places, such as Shanghai Tang, it is very rare to find a genuine old style restaurant in Hong Kong anymore with the rapid turnover of places due to competitive renting and leasing of retail spaces.

The couple with the photography crew. I tried to be discreet so I didn't get very good closeup shots.

More behind the scenes.

There's a Cuban coin there in the tip jar, spot it?

Old style windows, tables and seats. You still find these sorts of seats common, but they too are fast disappearing.

This display is cute, it's a collage of the rear ends of Hong Kong vehicles. The people's legs swing from side to side.

Old style TV and fan and little cupboard. Reminds me of grandma's place, except she recently got a new TV, and her fan is new too.

Old style Chinese calendar, still commonly used though.

They still do this too, hand written menus.

The style of tiling used is quite rare now too. I think there's a Chinese opera poster in the background. Even the store room sign uses retro type typography.

Miscellaneous house hold goods. The collaboration was between Goods Of Desire (G.O.D.) and Starbucks. The only reference to G.O.D. efforts is in this shot, can you spot it?

More random stuff, I like the toy astronaut/robot.

More menus, didn't take a photo of the actual Starbucks counter but they have the normal style menu there.

Back to reality *phew*, we were sitting here discussing our project for a mock marketing proposal for a fictional Alzheimer's drug.

My Tomato Plant is Growing!

2010-04-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

See those three little leaves sticking out? I thought the day would never come. I'm grateful for the amount of sunshine we've been getting lately, but not the heat that it comes with. Hopefully it will expedite the growth of my tomato plants though!

My progress with the 3 monsters. I decided to paint ears/horns today, didn't know what to do for the robot though. I finished coloring the body of the cyclops octopus. I aimed for an octopus kind of purple shade, it ended up really dary though. I like how the ride horns on the horny cyclops turned out.

2010-04-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

我今天回家得很晚，十点才回家。在上出租汽车的时候我听过一个电台广播节目，我觉得很有意思因为有一个人说普通话，一个人说广东话 (reminds me of when one of the small bosses talks to one of the researchers, he always talks in Cantonese whereas the researcher always talks in Mandarin)。Oh well, had fun swimming again with my dad today, it feels good to exert myself, maybe I should try to time my laps as an incentive to improve.

Japanese Food and other Random Saturday Happenings

2010-04-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update, I know I haven't blogged a while, been coming back late or been busy with studying for the midterm.

Just some random photos from today, I didn't mention it earlier but for dinner I had dinner with friends at a really authentic Japanese place. I mentioned that you were coming next month, so we'll probably have another dinner gathering when you come :).

First though, some random shots of what I'm guessing is a photography class. There weren't only guys, there were some ladies taking photos too so I wasn't as creeped out as I would have been if it was all guys. The model was OK looking I guess, the lighting wasn't great today though since it was foggy. Taking photos of photographers is one of my favorite subjects, since it's not often that you see the other side of the camera.

Cats are another favorite photography object of mine. They're common in an area I used to volunteer one summer back in High School so I took photos of them when I could. They like to hide in odd places, which makes for interesting photography. This was the cat at the Japanese restaurant.

This one's looking up to the top of the shelf. It eventually gathered the guts to climb all the way up the shelf by hanging onto the fabric with it's claws.

Gyoza. Pretty yummy, I thought it was interesting how they left the crispy layer intact.

We also had a range of other stuff, we had grilled onigiri, where the rice started to become brown and hot. Probably a complete opposite of what you like, but I thought it was interesting. Also had chicken gristle, fried chicken skin, beef tongue, chicken liver, quail eggs, sushi, chicken wings and sukiyaki.

Here pictured is tempura and eel rice.

My Care Package!

2010-04-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the care package boo! I've been looking for a distraction from my video games, my new painting project should keep me occupied after work :). I've started working on the eyes first today, I'll try to decide what colors to do next. I had fun wetting the soil and seeing it expand and planting the tomato seeds too, I haven't done any handicraft or gardening work in a while. I might have been a little too eager, planting the seeds right away, since the sun isn't shining as bright as it would be later in the Spring, but I'm sure they'll grow fine and I have the backup seeds just in case :). I'll keep the plants plenty of company, it's on the window sill next to wear I sit. I'll be sure to use the Peter Rabbit notes too, I put the sticky notes on my table the magnet memo on the bridge. I'm sure they'll remind me to be a good boy and return home early.

Thanks for the letter too, it smells nice :). I like Luke 11:9, as it reminds me that it was Jesus who came knocking on my door first so that I would be able to seek Him.

I'll get to munching on these soon :D. I got home a little late so I wanted to save eating them till breakfast time. They look good! I think they should still be fresh since you wrapped them up in the box so well :).

Rising cake of soil.

Dotting the eyes. Decided to go for bright bold colors for the eyes.

I wanted greens eyes for the robot.

The end product for today. I'll update the three baby monsters regularly, I want to take my time on them :).

Baby Photos Overload!

2010-04-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

A couple of years back my parents took advantage of a new digital service for scanning films. I've seen scanners that do the same job but I can't imagine the agonizing monotony and pain it would take to scan all of the photos and adjust their color. All in all we scanned many old rolls of film. I decided to upload some photos in chronological order. Here are some photos from when I was about 5 months old.

Me with my bunny, I'm trying to gnaw on my cot, don't know how successful it was.

When I was very young my parents lived in Government quarters at Mount Davis on the South side of the island. In the distance you can see Queen Mary hospital, late last year I got an offer to work there at a university affiliated lab, but instead I decided to work on campus for several reasons. We also had a direct view of the cemetary, the big beige plot of land. A little dreary but the Government quarters were cheap, from there my parents saved enough money to move to a new place.

Me fast asleep, I wonder what I was dreaming about?

Playing peek-a-boo.

Looking gangster with my bunny and my first teddy bear.

Having fun in my cot with the cranes as my mobile.

2010-04-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

Just made my blog public. I wonder who will look. I just noticed under the basic settings page there are some important settings:

Add your blog to our listings?	A Listed blog may be linked to from Blogger.com, such as the Blogger home page, Blogger Play, and Next Blog. If you select "No" your blog will not appear in these places, but it will still be available on the Internet. This blog will still be displayed on your profile unless you hide it. Edit displayed blogs.
Let search engines find your blog?	If you select "Yes" we will include your blog in Google Blog Search and pingWeblogs.com. If you select "No", everyone can still view your blog but search engines will be instructed not to crawl it.

This might explain any random visitors that you may get when you make posts to blogger, since a listed blog can be linked on the front page of blogger.

Under the basic settings you can also try out the new post editor, that option is all the way down at the bottom. The photo uploader is much simpler to use and the other functions look much more straight forward. You might want to try it out.

Went swimming again today. I think I went all out today, tried to swim with bursts at full speed to get the most exercise at my time at the pool. The pool was quite empty today so I didn't need to go to the 'fast lap' lane in order to swim fast.

I have a few things on my to do list. I want to apply for my Joint Universities library card so I can spend time at the HKU library, if I have time tomorrow I'll go to HKUST to apply for it. I also really should look up squash and Mandarin classes. I've thought about it and I might have talked about it but I haven't really put my ideas into action.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow, I don't have anything in particular planned. Hopefully my mom will feel better so we can spend some time out. My mom opened the gift from you, she really liked it so she took a few photos of it to post on her blog.

My dad's sleeping right now and all of our old photo CD's are stored in his room, so I decided to find some other old photos of mine from my own back up DVD.

Swimming in Pattaya, Thailand. Not sure when this is from.

The next few photos are from our first digital camera, a Kodak. Looking at these pictures again I think the quality is quite bad. It's amazing how much cameras have improved.

Here I took a photo in the Sony building in Tokyo. It's kind of funny looking at the tech from ten years ago. They had a Memory Stick Walkman, one of the early MP3 players. It obviously didn't take off because memory sticks (Sony's own proprietary memory) didn't become that popular since they only work in Sony products. I have braces on in this pic, didn't choose the most flattering photos but I thought they might be interesting to you because you were interested in going to Tokyo. I'm kind of sad we didn't take more interesting photos.

At first I thought this was the bullet train but I guess it's not...

Last photo in the hotel lobby. I think I enjoyed Tokyo more for all the gadgets I saw rather than the tourist attractions, although I'm sure you can find lots more interesting things there.

Did a bike tour around Phuket. Thought I would post these because we were talking about going to Phuket earlier. We didn't take any beach photos because we were afraid the camera would get damaged so I took photos on the bike tour that I took by myself instead. Thought I might show you another side to the island than what you already know about, since Phuket is more famous for it's beaches and it's nightlife than for it's other areas.

Biked around the island for about half a day, not sure how far I biked for. These are rubber trees, Phuket's two main exports are tin and rubber.

One of the local huts in the villages, these are done in the traditional Thai way are similar to huts from other indigenous cultures in South East Asia and related places like Hawaii.

2010-04-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

I've looked back on my earlier posts and I've strayed from the style of love notes this blog was supposed to be to a more mundane update of the goings of my life. I hope I can be able to put more meaning and heart into my posts soon.

I just wanted to comment on my thoughts the book I was reading on the Chinese historian. You probably know my views on polygamy already, as I continue to read the book I obviously don't want to take this historian's life as an example for my life. I just thought it was interesting that his wife was willing to tolerate his actions, at least on the surface. Who knows what she was thinking deep inside. Still, it's an interesting book to read. I don't think I'll be learning any moral lessons from it but hopefully later on in the book I'll get to read more on the history of China, or how the historian dug it up at a time when China was still quite closed in terms of sharing their knowledge or history with foreigners.

Also, as I near the end of the book 'Counterfeit Gods' I think I'll share some of the commentary on modern day society and some of the Bible verses brought up for discussion in the book. It's a good book, and it's short. I'm nearing the end and once I finish I'll move on to read the other books gifted to me at my baptism. I pray that as we continue this relationship we can both grow stronger in our faith. As a new and young Christian I still have plenty of room to grow and mature.

Quickie: A long day's work and a Bday Celebration

2010-04-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

I stayed at work today until 7. It was tiring and I'm not sure if I was able to accomplish what I set out to do, but I won't worry about it till get back into lab. I might drop by on Monday or Tuesday if needed, otherwise I get a short break :). I don't know why I was so worried about doing the experiment I did today since I did fine doing despite the fact most people weren't in the lab and I didn't come across any real difficulties, I guess I was just hyping it up in my head.

So what I did today was extract RNA. I got a little excited thinking of how to describe what it does. So DNA codes for most things that we need for life. Think of DNA as a library of many books, each containing a code for a certain protein in our body. Each protein has a different function in order to help us live, some proteins, like enzymes, help to break down our food that we eat. There are 3 main types of RNA. One, mRNA, is a little messenger that copies information from the library, the DNA, to a little factory, the ribosome made up of rRNA. At that factory many tRNA, like little workers, come and bring all the parts that need to make up each protein. By extracting the RNA from the cancer cells and analyzing them we can see what mRNA was used when the cell was alive. When we see what mRNA was used we can see what different kinds of proteins were made in the cancer cell, some of them are specifically made more in cancers. These kinds of proteins that are over expressed can lead to the problems of cancers. By treating the cells with drugs and seeing whether these 'bad' proteins are affected we can see how effective the drug is.

Had dinner at a Mexican place with my high school friends. It's getting late so I'll post more photos later, for now you get a photo of the yummy strawberry cheesecake we had. I was too hungry to take photos of dinner but since it was Mexican I guess you aren't missing out on too much. We went out for a few rounds of drinks as well, I'll share photos tomorrow.

[Edit] Added two photos. I don't have the picture of us at the stairs. The birthday girl is sitting in front of the cake, I wonder if you remember her from your Facebook stalks...I had a lot of girly sweet drinks because it was the girl's birthday so she got to pick the shots that we took. The only manly drink I had last night was a whiskey on the rocks. I think I drank a good amount last night, not too much to get me drunk but enough to keep me happy and up for the celebration after a day's work. The shots pictured had three layers, orange tequila, Kahlua and Baileys.

Gmail Problem

2010-04-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

According to the Official Gmail Blog all vowels cannot be used in Gmail due to a technical difficulty. You can read the blog for help on how to get around the issue.

On another note, there's a bit of a random exhibition going on at the mall in my neighborhood. One of the lesser known Hong Kong stars, Louis Koo, is holding an exhibition of his collection of Star Wars, Batman, Spiderman and other movie-based life sized figurines. Didn't know if you would be interested but I took a few pictures. I'll take some more later. It reminds me of Michael Jackson's own personal collection, which he was trying to sell off before he passed away. I posted this link earlier on Facebook around the same time MJ passed away, it's an interactive view of a gallery of his collection. Some of the pieces are exactly the same, though they're probably different copies.

Official Baptism Photos: Repost

2010-03-31T09:16:00.000-07:00

My big day, a selection of my photos. I like the first and last photos, in the last photo I was caught just as I got out of the water. I also like the way the ripples form in the water. Since I went first I didn't really get to see the others getting baptized, I'm glad that through these photos I can see their special moment too :).

Official Baptism Photos!

2010-03-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

Official Baptism Photos are out! The link will only be live for 7 days, I'll download the photos when I get home :).

Dinner and Update

2010-03-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update. Had dinner with my folks at the food court in the Japanese department store. You know I like my burgers, so I had one and balanced it out with a salad. Salad looks good, except for that hole in the leaf. Had a quick walk around with my parents to bet brekkie then came home. I pray that you're feeling better and that the planning for the trip to Taiwan will go smoothly.

Short Update

2010-03-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hey boo, just a quick update. Nothing much new today, had dinner as usual at the food court. Had Korean noodles with BBQ beef, egg and plenty of veggies. I'm continuing to read the books 'Bomb, Book, & Compass' and 'Counterfeit Gods'.

Baptism Day: Photos

2010-03-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

Photos from my day anew :). I hope you have a restful sabbath day. I got a surprise congratulatory text from Vincent, my friend from class! I'm not sure how he knew I got baptized, although my best guess is that he attended the 5pm service today. I had a good restful Sunday, it was good eating with my friends and family. We're not going to Japan after all since all the tickets are full. I guess most people in Hong Kong try to take advantage of the Easter holiday to go travel. Are your siblings on break yet? I hope I'll get to do something restful here in Hong Kong, I actually wasn't so happy with idea of going on a trip to Japan on such notice since I thought it would be more stressful to have to plan everything out and take leave to make the trip worthwhile. So I'll get to spend my first Easter as a Christian in Hong Kong. I've been getting a lot of firsts lately, like my first true Christmas. It's exciting :).

Here are some select photos from today. I'll send the official church ones as soon as I get them.

Summarizing sentences of my testimony:

Baptism :)

Talking with the pastor after, receiving his book gift.

Caregroup!

Caregroup leaders

Talking with the head pastor.

Baptism pool

Yummy dim sum with caregroup and parents.

Last but not least, my books. I've started reading the Tim Keller book already.

Baptism Day: My Testimony

2010-03-28T00:36:00.001-07:00

I grew up in a predominantly Buddhist household. I was never deeply religious and I was taught to be self reliant. This led to many problems in my life. I led myself to carry the burdens of life and not share with others. This led me to adopt addictive habits in my life, such as the indulgence in gaming, alcohol and pornography, and instead of facing the issues or work in my life I led myself to my indulgences. The first time I heard about Christ in my life was when I was young in Primary School where during Christmas time we would often hear about the nativity story and sometimes about the life of Jesus. Many of my close friends and classmates were also Christian and they would often invite my family and me to Church on Sundays. I would go with my parents since they were open minded to exposing me to the Church experience but since they were not believers themselves I never had the opportunity to truly experience the love and caring of a Church community and to truly grow closer to God during my early years. I was taught how to pray but being young and naïve I prayed to God to show himself to me, to prove that he existed. I prayed that he would talk to me and answer my prayers. This went on for a few nights but I convinced myself that God could not hear me.

It would not be until many years later that it took an emotional crisis during my secondary school years to return me to Church at the suggestion of my parents, and with their emotional support too. I could not control my emotions and I would cycle between feeling extremely depressed and extremely elated. I felt that return to Church during this time in my life truly helped me to recover from my emotional crisis, but yet again my stay at the Church was short-lived. The crisis was led on by my inability to cope with the stresses at my school and my striving to remain self reliant. However I did not truly learn from this crisis and my harmful habits remained due to the fact that I could still not fully open myself and share my feelings, thoughts and struggles with those in my Church community. It took me a second more serious emotional crisis during my college years in the States to reach out to God again. This time my condition was more serious, the episodes of depression and unnatural feelings of elation would disrupt my life. It was made worse by my attempts to run away from my struggles with school work by indulging in my addictions in gaming and pornography. This was obviously not the solution. I went to an evangelical event on campus called Impact 1 that shared the stories about how God was working in Africa. In retrospect I truly felt the Holy Spirit move through me as I heard the stories and joined in the songs of worship. I was given my first personal Bible at the end of the event and I even talked to others about my new interest in the Christian faith. However even though Christ was knocking on my door, my stubborn and doubtful heart refused to receive him. I would spiral further into my emotional turbulence and I almost even dropped out of college when I had to take an academic term off to come home to recover. I was blessed that I would be able to return to my studies and even graduate. When I look back into my former spiritual life it confuses me why it took me so long to come to Christ. It took me two crises to both bring me closer to God again. I feel blessed that it did not take a third in order for me to come to Christ. While I was at college I met a good friend who was Christian. When she told me at first it did not really strike me. I had many Christian friends in the past and I associated being Christian with being good. We developed a close friendship and she eventually became my girlfriend. Being a good Christian girl she invited me to go to Church. I was very open to the invitation due to my good experiences with Churches in the past. At first I enjoyed going so that I could take away the moral message from the Church service but I was reluctant to to truly believe in God. It would take nearly a year later for me to come to Christ. My girlfriend was concerned since I was moving back to Hong Kong from the States. I was blessed to find the Church community at Island ECC. Going to the services made me even more curious about Christ so I joined myself onto the Alpha course. The Alpha course was the pivotal point in my Christian life. I could truly experience the community and caring of the Church in an environment where all questions about faith could be asked and answered. I saw God moving through other people's lives and change them and this affected me too. When I look back on my previous spiritual experiences I know understand that Jesus was always knocking on my door and that it was only because of my stubborn heart that I would not let Him into my life. My previous Church going experiences were not a waste because they gradually led me to a true understanding of God. My walk through two emotional crises without faith was a way for God to call out to me and point out the sin in my life. During the Alpha course there was a retreat and during this retreat I truly felt at peace and I felt closer to God. I felt the Holy Spirit moving through me again, as I did before during Impact 1. I prayed the sinners prayer and I truly felt at peace with clarity of mind. I came to Christ. Though through my human eyes it felt like it took me a long time to come to Christ I know and trust in God's perfect timing.

Since coming to Christ I now have a clearer outlook on life. I am still an imperfect person but by God's grace I know that He has always been reaching out to me throughout my life. Since I have accepted Him into my life I can now trust in His power and I know that I have never been alone in my life since He has always walked with me before I even knew His name. With God in my life I am no longer bound to my former bondages, addictions to gaming, alcohol and pornography. Even if I am tempted again I know I can confide in Jesus and repent. I now know that there is Jesus in my life and despite any trouble I face He is all that matters and He will be in my life.

Day Before Baptism

2010-03-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

I've got my clothes ready and the caregroup leaders thoughtfully organized a lunch get together for the caregroup tomorrow after the Church service. I'm excited :). Tomorrow will be a new day for me. I'll send you photos :).

Also, on a random note, I finally found my iPod shuffle. I lost it a while back, I found it underneath the sofa. I think that made my day. It also means I'm going to postpone my iPod photo revitalization until later.

That's all for today. I'll see you tomorrow.

Tapas with Beer

2010-03-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

Good food, good cold beer, good company :). I had dinner with my friends in Central tonight, in Lan Kwai Fong.

We had a bunch of dishes: pizza, salsa on toast, lamb skewers and lastly (as shown in the photos) ribs and nachos. I'm glad the photos came out well, one of them came out dark but I was able to manage to edit it in Picasa before posting it. Guess which one was edited? Afterwards we went for frozen yogurt, then called it a night. It was nice meeting up with my high school friends again, we're thinking of going out again for dinner in the next couple of weeks.

On my my way home with my friend I saw a lot of drunk/rowdy people in the MTR. I guess right now is the beginning of the qualifying games for the Rugby 7's in Hong Kong. Rugby 7's is a variant on regular rugby in that there are 7 players, instead of the usual 15, per team with each half playing for only 7 minutes, making for a fast paced, offensive focused game. The rowdy people in the MTR were all wearing pink rugby shirts and they were making noise on a little trumpet. One of the people in the large group of rugby fans accidently started going up the down escalator so the whole crowd started cheering her on to run to the top. She successfully did it, although I think one of the MTR staff turned off the escalator just before she reached the top for security reasons. The Rugby 7's in Hong Kong is the single largest party event of the year, people traditionally go to watch rugby and party and get drunk. I've never been but then again tickets are rather expensive. I read this news article and I guess since it's from BusinessWeek it was hard to tell that the story was actually about rugby and not finance.

Also, somewhat random, but I found this commentary from Gizmodo about Google pulling out of China and censorship issues and how that relates to previous Western Imperialism. The writer's (actually he's one of the head writers) parents are evidently from Hong Kong so he spent a his summers here. I found this paragraph interesting:

China should fear Google, as a government, and a people. And even as people scared of their own government, and people like my father, a capitalist living in Hong Kong, who often defends China's right to freedom from western influence. Seeing the perverse effects of westernization on Hong Kong, good and bad—a land where a few years ago it had the most Rolls Royces per capita of any country, where shopping seems to be the national past time, and with no major art museums—I don't blame China for being wary of big business: "Regrettably, Google's recent behaviors show that the company not just aims at expanding business in China, but is playing an active role in exporting culture, value and ideas."

Videoblog No. 001

2010-03-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

It's been a tiring day today, caregroup was a good break from that. I brought in pizza, as usual and we also had home made purple rice porridge with chicken Korean style and 'Chinese style' spicy Korean rice cake with sausages. The Korean rice cake was dubbed Chinese style since it was made by a Chinese member of our caregroup. Someone also brought along fries from the Canadian burger joint, Triple-O's. Another person came a little late with salmon sushi bento. It had different kinds of salmon sushi, salmon sushi roll (with the salmon on the outside), salmon sashimi and salmon nigiri. To top it off, we had homemade oreo base cheesecake for dessert after the bible study. According to the baker it took only 30 minutes to prepare then 1 hour to bake. The cheese was cream cheese and it was combined with egg and sugar. Crushed oreos were used both as a base as well as an additional filling. It was yummy, but a little on the sweet side, had to follow it up with plenty of water.

Here's my videoblog, in case you forgot what my face looked like and what my voice sounds like.

Summary of Chinese Learned At Work

2010-03-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be useful if I summarized some of the Chinese I've learned at work, perhaps you might learn some new characters, certainly since they're simplified, I still can't figure out an easy way to type traditional since I use pinyin input. The dictionaries I use are the CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary and the 21st Century English-Chinese Bidirectional Dictionary through the Lingoes dictionary program (it's free to download). When I hear something being said I'll try to type the pinyin correctly into Chinese characters and see whether the definition in the dictionary matches the context in which I heard the phrase.

恐怖 (kong3 bu4): According to the dictionary this means terrifying. The context I heard it in was when Phd was talking about how the vast amounts of cells kept in petri dishes by another lab worker.

赶紧 (gan3 jin3): To do things in hurry. I actually learned this inadvertently when I actually heard the next word...

干净 (gan1 jing4): Clean. Heard in context of 洗干净, since stuff in the lab often needs to be clean so as not to contaminate samples.

懒(lan3): Lazy. You can probably guess the context.

认真(ren4 zhen1): Used to describe me from time to time. I thought it meant busy but according to the dictionary it's more along the lines of 'take seriously'.

试验(shi4 yan4): Experiment. One of the first words I learned.

毒 (du2): Poisonous. Used to describe whether our drugs are effective against cancer cells or not.

小/大老板 (lao3 ban3): 小老板 is my boss. 大老版 is the guy who's there, even on Sundays, and enjoys walking around the labs. He does have a purpose of course, I think he's been coming more frequently also because of the new lab room that just opened with the new employees coming in.

骗 (pian4): To deceive, to cheat.

傻 (sha3): Foolish. Mentioned when I tell a bad joke.

杀 (sha1): Er... To kill, murder. I found this by accident when trying to look up the above word.

困（kun4): To feel sleepy. Phd mentions this when she feels like dozing off.

中联办 (zhong1 lian2 ban4): Liason office. 北大 mentioned he needed to go there before he left.

钥匙 (yao4 shi): Key. I lock up my laptop in a drawer so I need it in the morning and when I leave. I usually get it by myself but one of these days, when I remember how to say 钥匙 I'll ask someone to pass them to me.

手机 (shou3 ji1): Cell phone. It's prounced with an extra word in Canto so I didn't quite catch this at first.

恭喜(gong1 xi3): Congratulations. Said after a long experiment.

成功（cheng2 gong1): Success. After a long experiment.

坏掉 (huai4 diao4): Broken. Our water purifier, a very vital piece of equipment since almost all experiments need pure water, was broken for a long time. You can't imagine how happy I was when it was fixed. The machine is surprisingly complicated and expensive, we go through a lot of effort to have pure water. I think that it's funny that before the machine was fixed we would sometimes use distilled drinking water since its purity is good enough for our experiments. I guess in the long run it would be more expensive to buy water on a regular basis rather than have an expensive machine that purifies water for a long time.

分手 (fen1 shou3): You already heard about this one. Boss and Phd were jokingly asking when I would break up with you.

份 (fen4): Portion. I think this is the right word? I heard it being used to describe a routine work in the lab, where we split a big bottle of a solution into smaller bottles.

定 (ding4): To place an order. Mentioned when we order stuff for the lab.

配(pei4): To make up (a prescription). Used in the context of mixing powders into solution or making other simple routine chemical solutions in the lab.

打水 (da4 shui3): Fetch water. Context is for when we fetch water for our flasks for drinking, or to fetch pure water when our water purifier was broken. At first I thought it would be a 'da' that I didn't know, I didn't figure it would be this 打.

I think that's all for today. Hopefully you found this interesting/useful.

Lazy Post III

2010-03-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

Another lazy post! I finally managed to call up the doctor, I got an appointment from April 9th. Tonight my dad called to check up on my uncle, and he's doing well after his surgery. My mom's coming back for a week for Easter. She's back on time for my baptism. Hope you slept well, I want to see what food adventures you're up to today :).

Today's youtube

Collection of Today's Thoughts

2010-03-22T08:12:00.000-07:00

I came back a little later today, I had an experiment that I had to attend to till 8 and I left the lab around 8:50pm and arrived home around 9:50pm. I'm a little tired, but otherwise I'm in good spirits.

I read this article on my Google Reader when I got back home. If you didn't know already, I use Reader to read almost all my websites I go to. What Reader is it gets what's called an RSS feed. An RSS feed is basically the original website's blog posts/news posts exported into text and pictures that can be read like e-mail. Reader regularly checks for new posts from the websites and puts all of the posts from all the websites together in chronological order. It makes for much easier reading, since everything is in one place. It's also rather addictive. Like e-mail it is almost impossible for my Reader 'inbox' to be empty. Until I get really bored and 'read' all of my websites. I don't read every single article and I usually just skim through and use stars to mark interesting articles to read later. By doing so, I have lately managed to keep my inbox relatively empty. As opposed to thousands of posts I'm now left with 68, as of the time of writing. You can add any website that supports RSS, as a matter of fact your public blog supports RSS. I've subscribed to it but since I read your site directly from blogger anyway I rarely read it on Reader.

Today I found this article, I found it rather interesting. It says that shopping 'European-style' by shopping for groceries daily can help to make your groceries fresher and cheaper. I don't think it's solely a European concept, here in Hong Kong most housewives/helpers shop on a daily basis. I often see helpers get on my mini-bus from the Wan Chai market in the morning with groceries to head off to the homes of their employers in the Midlevels in Hong Kong. I know that my mom shopped for groceries almost daily too, and so does the helper for my grandma. In my personal experience I've also found that meats will often have discounts, as mentioned in the article. Also at the two Japanese supermarkets in the Japanese department stores in my neighborhood have deep discounts on fresh sushi near the end of the day, although the time they have the discounts is too impractical for daily eating.

I wanted to elaborate a little on my favorite science fiction writers. Frank Herbert wrote Dune, it is an epic book that has been compared to The Lord of the Rings in terms of epic scale and detail. The style of science fiction writing at the time of Dune was more focussed on new technologies and new ideas, whereas Dune was ground breaking more for its ideas on geology, psychology, religion and its unique depiction of an alien planet. Dune is set on a dessert planet and follows the journey of a young leader in a foreign land where a rare drug-like substance called spice is mined. It is very valuable and enables space travel, among other things. I don't think this short synopsis would do the book any justice so if you're still curious the wiki is here.

My other favorite is Phillip K. Dick. His short story The Minority Report is the basis of the movie of the same name starring Tom Cruise. His book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. The book is about a blade runner, a man who hunts for androids who break the law. In the case of the book the androids are latest model produced by a technological corporation for use in mining labor. There is also a 'pleasure model', I'm sure you can figure that one out. The corporation uses a new technology to synthesize emotions in the androids, making them impossible to distinguish from humans using emotional tests. Again, if you're interested the wiki is here.

Last but not least is Isaac Asimov, perhaps you can tell Isaac about him (Isaac Newton is another famous Isaac!). He is one of the most prolific science fiction writers of all time, he wrote about 500 books and over 9000 letters and postcards. I'm not sure what books he's famous for, however he is famous for creating the fictional 3 laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I think the most recent movie based on Asimov's works is 'I, Robot' starring Will Smith. It is based on a collection of short stories of the same name. I have read this short stories and I look forward to reading more of his works in the future.

I was thinking of compiling all of the new Chinese that I've learned at work but I suppose I'll save that for another post. I don't think I know how to write all of the words I've learned!

Reading Habit

2010-03-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Have you read a good book lately? I just finished reading Rendezvous with Rama, a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, as I mentioned earlier. Clarke is famous for penning another science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was put onto film by Stanley Kubrick. I haven't read such a good book in a while, I couldn't put it down as I was finishing it last night before going to sleep. The next book I'm interested in reading is Bomb, Book & Compass, a non-fiction commentary by Simon Winchester on Chinese civilization. I'm assuming it's good because it, like 'Rama', is also from my dad's book collection.

Looking at old book covers makes me feel lonely for some reason, their cover art is often dull and abstract. The smell of old books always brings me back to the days in primary school when I used to read books more either in the school library or in public libraries. I think it's good to continue my old habit and pick up reading again. Any suggestions?

Quick Update

2010-03-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

Hey boo, it's been a long day at class and I managed to get some relaxing time around home with dad, ate in and had sushi for dinner. I should sleep soon, it's getting late.

Please pray for my uncle, this morning my dad got a call from my uncle's wife saying that he had to go to hospital for surgery on his stomach cancer. Please pray as he prepares for surgery, I pray that his surgery goes successfully and that he does not have to endure much pain.

Special Dinner Today

2010-03-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

Special might be a little bit of an overstatement but dad was happy today because his stocks are doing well, so we ate out at the Thai restaurant in the neighborhood, Thai Pepper. We usually 'eat out' on weekdays but we rarely eat at restaurants, we usually eat in food courts. We had a pretty simple, but wholesome meal of fresh fish and rice, as well as a shrimp cake and fish cake side dish. I was actually so tired and hungry that we ate the other side of the fish before I realized that I hadn't taken a photo yet, luckily the other side remained intact. It was a nice refreshing meal after a long week of work. After work today Phd wanted to figure out how to walk from the uni. to the Central MTR station, so we went together on a 30 min walk. It was mostly downhill so it wasn't too tiring, and there's also a machine where you can save 2 dollars on the MTR by tapping your octopus card. So, by skipping on the bus trip to the MTR, in total I spent only HK$3.4 (less than 50 cents) to get home. The time it took to get home was about the same, 1 hour. I might try this in future, get some exercise in everyday!

Yummy fish!

Vlog Thursday

2010-03-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

This week's videolog

Some pictures of the birthday cake baked by Ling of our caregroup (she's on the far right of the first photo) for Ed, the birthday 'boy' turning 30. These shots were kind of bad in terms of timing because someone else was taking photos too, I was kind of just taking candid shots. The candle was a sparkler! Too bad Ed blew the candle out before I got a photo.

Here's Ed blowing out the candle, his wife, Jo, is next to him and Ling is on the far right (not sure where her fiance is).

Yummy homemade chocolate cake getting cut. Yoona, on the right, is the co-host along with husband Charles.

A Burger and a Salad After a Long Day at Work

2010-03-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

I'm glad that TPR is being so helpful to you and I'm glad that you've made the decision to come to Taiwan. We'll be closer and besides you'll be makin' that bacon. You've got plenty of time to prepare yourself physically and mentally.

I worked till a little before 8 today and decided to treat myself to a burger at the Japanese burger/coffee shop called Freshness Burger. I pass by it almost everyday to get the minibus home since it's right in front of the bus stop and I've seen several branches elsewhere, but I've never eaten there. I think the name put me off at first, I thought it sounded weird, but today I decided to give it a try. At first I was thinking of getting a regular beef patty hamburger but instead I decided to go more healthy and chose the mushroom burger instead. I got 15% off using my student card and snapped some shots while waiting for my burger.

This is their little ketchup and condiment stand. The spherical light says 'World Spice' and the bottom looks like a retro fridge.

The 'Yucha soda'. It's soda with honey citron mix at the bottom. My piano teacher once gave me honey citron tea mix, it's kind of like marmalade but it's good for making hot drinks, especially when you have a cold. It tasted pretty good as a soda.

Maybe next time I'll try the regular hamburger, apparently the beef is 'healthy hormone free 100% Australian'.

The salad and drink, looks awfully empty without the burger. I was too hungry so I ate the salad first while waiting for the burger.

The mushroom burger! It's literally a large mushroom the size of a meat patty in a burger. The onions were sauteed just right, it smelled really good and the onions were really soft. The mushroom was big and juicy, I hope it had enough proteins to substitute for the beef!

It's so hot and juicy that it steamed up my camera lens...

My stalkerish view of the bus stop.

Hope you enjoyed the burger as much as I did.

Back to food...

2010-03-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Back to my regular material. Today's lunch was 米线 with 水饺 and broccoli. It's supposed to be in Yunnan style and it's been one of the regular dishes at 美心 along with 四川 style spicy noodles. I think it's one of my most veggie filled meals lately.

My dinner looks a little sparse from this angle, but you know I'm a sucker for omelet rice. The chicken steak and tomato sauce wasn't bad either.

Just a few random thoughts as well, often on the MTR I see people playing all kinds of games on their DS, PSP, iPhone or other device. Before it used to be that the DS and PSP dominated the handhelds being played but lately the iPhone/iPod touch are starting to dominate. Sometimes it can be annoying when people are so focussed on the game that they lack awareness of their surroundings, playing as they walk or blocking doorways while they play. Gadget owners in Hong Kong generally fall into two types. The cheapo who uses old Nokia phones from the early years of mobile phones and those that change there phone every few months. I forget the exact figures, but an average person in Hong Kong will change their phone probably around once a year. Today I saw a person who probably falls in the cheapo category, he was using an old Palm PDA with black and white screen to play Bejewelled. I think he was playing the demo version as well since he kept restarting the game. I guess this disparity reflects the class gap in Hong Kong well, but somehow Hong Kong seems to chug along just fine. Crime is relatively minimal and despite the stressful nature of Hong Kong I think most people are generally happy.

I hope you get all of your questions answered about TPR, hopefully I can catch you in the morning.

I Love You

2010-03-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

On pain of making a corny blog I titled the blog "I Love you". I don't have any food photos for you today since I didn't have anything particularly yummy. Instead I chose a few pics to post up before I slept.

Lookie, it's a heart I drew for you a while back using a red light and long exposure settings (15 seconds if I remember correct) to get the effect right. It took a few attempts but I liked how this one turned out best.

One of my favorite pics from the trip, makes me feel all warm inside.

Finally, a fun photo. You already know I like this one but I wanted to share again.

The end of this post is a little random but I was reminded by what my friend Vincent posted on Facebook, "Whatever He says to you, do it". He didn't quote where it's from, but it's from John 2:5, when Mary, mother of Jesus, tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them to do. This Sunday, our guest speaker for our sermon, who once taught our Pastor in seminary, argued that this is the most wise and most important advice imparted by anyone, in the whole of history and the universe. I hope that this will hold true for both you and me. If you have time you can listen to the sermon --> here.

The sermon is on March 14th and is given by Ronnie Stevens titled "The Wedding Feast at Cana". I just realized that I can now also go back and watch the sermon I missed on Valentines day, I'll watch that tomorrow morning perhaps. I love you, I hope I can get some rest tomorrow and spend some time with you.

Lazy Post II

2010-03-13T08:43:00.000-08:00

Lazy Vlog

Went swimming again today. The air was a little cold but the water was warm. Did the frogstyle again. Talk to you tomorrow.

Lazy post

2010-03-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

Boo. Today's post is a lazy post, since I celebrated the end of the work week with a meaty gaming session. It's 3am, it's late and I should sleep soon. You get another videolog since you didn't get to see me much today...

Today's Youtube vlog

This post is kind of all over the place, but I've also discovered a new way to watch/listen to music on Youtube, it's a new function called the 'YouTube Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool'. It's kind of like a smart electronic DJ that will select the artist you search for and other related artists and songs and create a playlist. It's kind of like Pandora, except you get the music video and you can also directly modify your playlist. You can check it out at www.youtube.com/disco

Saw this one from the car blog I read...

Saw this when I got distracted uploading my videolog. I think we heard it in your car. I like the song. The video is also trippy. Listening to it on my headphones makes me happy, the sounds really come out clearly.

Short Videolog

2010-03-11T08:29:00.001-08:00

The Game I've Been Playing Lately

2010-03-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

This post, however unlikely it seems, is for you. I feel like videogames are sort of my arena and are my little world when I don't get to talk to you at night, so I thought I might share my little world with you.

You probably didn't know but there is a social network for games where you can play with friends. It's called Steam and it's very popular. Many of the computer game publishers publish their games on the network and you can buy and download them, instead of the traditional format of buying the games in-stores and on CD/DVDs. I haven't bought many games but one of the games that I've been playing lately is called Team Fortress 2, it focuses a lot on team work. There are two teams and usually the objective is to steal the enemy team's intelligence. The basic rules are that there are two bases, yours and the enemy's. The two team colors are red and blue so the bases are also colored accordingly, as are the characters. There are points where you can pick up packages to replace lost health and lost ammunition. After you consume these they are regenerated after a fixed period of time. The main goal is to collect the intelligence from the basement of the enemy base and return it to the basement of your base 3 times. Whichever team does this first wins. You get points for killing enemies, healing people, capturing the enemy intelligence and defending your intelligence from being captured. At the beginning of each game you are spawned in a 'safe area' where the enemy cannot enter and you can replenish your health and ammunition indefinitely. You can return to the safe area at any point. When you are 'killed' you are 'respawned' after a set period of time depending on the specific rules where you play (the details of the rules can be changed). Killing the enemy only has the advantage in that you slow them down slightly from capturing your intelligence and your team mates.

You can play as many characters:

a heavy weapons guy: he has a strong machine gun but he walks very slow. He also has a lot of health to compensate for his slowness. Russian nationality.

engineer: he builds stuff to help the team, these include automatic sentry guns, teleporters and resupply for ammunition and health. American nationality (midwest accent).

medic: he heals people. After healing people for a long time he can charge up an invulnerability ability, which he can employ to make the person he is healing invulnerable to enemy fire for a short period of time. This can be a great advantage when you need to storm the enemy base and get rid of many enemies or the engineer's sentry gun. German nationality.

spy: he can cloak to become invisible and he can destroy the engineers buildings, disguise as the enemy and backstab people (which instantly kills them, but only works when you sneak up from behind). Seems like the coolest character but people quickly start becoming paranoid and start shooting their own people because they think you're the spy. Once you get shot by the enemy your disguise is revealed. It's not easy being a spy. French nationality.

Scout: he runs really fast, he usually steals the intel but his firepower is weak. His main strategy is to hit and run to slowly wear down the enemy. American nationality (with a Boston accent)

pyro: shoots fire, is resistant to enemy flames. He's pretty fast on his feet and is good for close range attacks. You can check for spies using your flames, when an invisible spy gets lit on fire he become visible. Your flames will continue to damage the enemy until they are put out by themselves, until your enemy is submersed in water or when you are healed either my the medic, items or by an engineer's building. This guy wears a full flame retardant suit, no one has any idea what his nationality is because his voice is muffled.

soldier: shoots rockets. He can either be a close range or far range fighter. His rockets are great for dealing with sentry guns or heavys since they deal a lot of damage. American nationality.

demolitions: shoots mines that explode on his command and shoots grenades. Arguably the most overpowered class. Since it is hard to aim grenade they do a lot of damage, but a lot of good players have already mastered the art of shooting grenades so they can be deadly. Using mines he can also be a very tactical player. He is a black Scottish man.

sniper: he can shoot people from afar. If you hit people in the head, the payoff for the difficulty of the shot is, of course, that you incapacitate the player. Australian nationality.

You can also talk and communicate, I usually just type shortcuts that allow me to communicate quickly, I find it weird to speak on my mic with strangers. The game tries to foster team work and usually the team that works well together and communicates best will win. The game regularly updates every few months with new 'maps' (locations to fight) and weapons for each of the classes. Each update is free and you can play the game indefinitely. The game also has an 'achievement' system where you can earn achievements based on your performance. This makes the game more social since you can share the list of your achievements with friends.

You can find my website with my achievements here -->Clickity click

You can also see how many hours I've been playing, about 2 hours on average for a weekday. Although this is much less than what many players play on other games, say World of Warcraft, I'd probably want to spend a little less time in the game. Also, unlike World of Warcraft there is no monthly fee, so I won't spend a fortune playing this game.

Just wanted to share my little world with you. I hope you gained some insight to my gaming habits. If you clicked on the website you'll see that currently my favorite character is the heavy weapons guy (aka the heavy). Each class has a different nationality and everyone, except the pyro, has a little video exposing their charcter. My character is dumb witted but powerful guy who loves nothing but firing his gun, he even named his gun Sasha. He has a strong Russian accent. The game makers have an interesting sense of humor. You can find the character expose videos --> here.

Even though you might not relate to the game the videos are quite funny.

Photo Overload!

2010-03-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

My noodle bowl in action! I actually didn't have this today, I took the photos earlier but didn't get the chance to share.

My lunch today, 烧肉饭. It's a little fatty but it's a good small portion. Got my meat, carb and veg (yes I know, I should eat more veg).

On one of my walks today I headed to the lotus pond, next to there was a little pool of koi. Unlike the poor koi in Hawaii these aren't overfed. I took advantage of a man feeding the fish to take a nice photo of them all gathered around the food. I know you don't really like fish, but aren't they pretty?

Last but not least, dinner time. I had 上海排骨担担面. It came with 菜肉包 which is lightly fried after being steamed. Yummy meal. It's not as spicy as it looks! The black stuff isn't soy sauce in case you're wondering, it's 辣酱 with 黑醋. I like to dip my 包 into it.

Food Adventures

2010-03-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

My food adventures today started once I got off the bus on the way home. I usually take a green minibus to Central then take the MTR home. I can pretty much take any bus going out of HKU, but I prefer to take the 28 minibus, because it's very slightly cheaper and it's fast. Getting home later is actually a relief for me because I get to miss the large rush hour crowds.

Remember this pic?

Today I took the 22 minibus, which drops me off at a different spot in Central. This is the first thing I saw when I got off. [edit] You can see the Emporio Armani sign in the reflection off of the store's window.

It's a place that sells...salads. I was wondering how this place can stay alive in Hong Kong, but then again it is right in the middle of a trendy upper scale business district/shopping area where Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Brooks Brothers, Coach and every other imaginable luxury brand name is. I'm sure they can manage to get their fair share of trendy health conscious consumers. I like the sign, it's made up of salad bowls. It says 'New York - Hong Kong', such is my cynical nature that I thought that this was a clever marketing ploy, but after checking out their website and an article in NY Mag it appears to really be founded in New York. Not sure many other places/franchises boast being set up in Hong Kong second after being started in a different place. It'll be interesting to see how long this place lasts in Hong Kong's tough real estate market, although I'm pretty sure the markups on salads are pretty high.

Speaking of lasting in a tough real estate market...The local Jollibee's, a Filipino fast food chain specializing in fried chicken, has been around for ages. I can remember them from my early childhood so they must have been around for about 20 years. They have a great strategic position right outside one of the Central MTR station exit. On Sundays Filipino domestic helpers get a day off and so Central/Causeway Bay/any public park becomes their place of refuge. A Filipino friend of mine from the States was shocked to find so many domestic workers in Central on a Sunday, they pretty much take over the parks there. It's a big contrast to the crowds of office workers, bankers and other suits that roam the area on the weekdays. The Jollibee's, in addition to being right outside the MTR station, is near a building where there are many Filipino goods shops too, making the place even more strategic. Every time you leave this MTR exit you can smell the heavenly fried chicken. I want to try their chicken, but I haven't had the chance yet.

More fast food back home after the MTR, you probably know the Japanese Mos Burger chain from the branches that they also have in Kaohsiung. They have special burgers around every month or so. Past ones have been a shrimp burger and a pork katsu burger. They also had an anniversary burger, which looked pretty plain but it was pretty cheap and looked yummy enough. The special now though is octopus burger. Only 19 dollars too (US$2.44), if I was more into octupuses I would try it. Mmmmmm...

More octopuses are on the way to increase/decrease your appetite! After my dinner of course. I love me some curry and Japanese style hamburger steak. Plus I got my veggies for the day.

Japanese seem to like to wrap things in omelets. Key example below, takoyaki wrapped in omelet, looks like overkill. Maybe I'll try it if I ever need to gain weight?

Here are the workers doing their best to make the best fresh takoyaki (it's kind of hard to slack when everyone sees you). I wonder how many octopuses this stall consumes every day...

That's it for today's food adventures. Be sure to check in for more foodings and random thoughts.

Vitasoy Machine

2010-03-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

I finally took some pictures of the Vitasoy machine with all the different pictures on the drink boxes. Click to expand to see them in all their glory, it was kinda hard to take the photo though because of the high contrast between the bright lighting and the darker cans and boxes so only some of the drink boxes are clear. Which one do you like? I picked out one below for you.

Test

2010-03-07T19:54:00.000-08:00

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Sed in nunc quam. Sed tincidunt magna et justo venenatis viverra. Aenean arcu orci, lacinia ac hendrerit ac, euismod at eros. Duis odio lectus, pulvinar eu tristique in, malesuada ac elit. Nunc ligula dui, posuere sit amet tempor eu, mollis a felis. Cras eros purus, imperdiet a gravida sit amet, molestie id mi. Nam lorem est, ultrices in egestas vitae, molestie nec enim. Aenean eget sem nec augue tempor commodo. Nullam eget ipsum non felis gravida cursus vitae eget velit. Sed ac orci sit amet lorem pellentesque hendrerit. Proin eleifend volutpat nulla, nec aliquet erat vehicula ut. In vitae tincidunt turpis. Sed sodales, sem at lacinia porta, erat lectus pellentesque tellus, eu tristique lacus ligula vitae justo. Nulla facilisi. Proin sem dui, dignissim sed pretium non, dignissim sed quam. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Etiam aliquet dui ac ipsum sodales at congue purus iaculis. Suspendisse nec sollicitudin ipsum. Fusce euismod nisl at elit gravida pharetra.

Maecenas ultricies leo vitae nisi tincidunt dictum. Aliquam semper, ipsum in ullamcorper rhoncus, elit urna vehicula dolor, vel vulputate nisl dui id velit. Nam scelerisque, ipsum nec commodo lobortis, quam sem fermentum neque, id sagittis eros dolor luctus purus. Nam dictum fringilla nisi, in molestie lacus feugiat sed. Nam placerat, magna suscipit condimentum placerat, lacus lacus aliquet turpis, eu tempor lorem nibh at odio. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis condimentum porttitor urna sit amet rutrum. Pellentesque sollicitudin pulvinar suscipit. Sed vel dui lectus. Proin eu mauris id augue semper vehicula. Donec et arcu purus, non venenatis justo. Etiam at erat elit, vel varius purus. Nulla bibendum eleifend interdum. Aliquam sollicitudin vestibulum nisl vitae ullamcorper. Ut feugiat scelerisque lorem at blandit. Suspendisse sit amet urna vel dolor fringilla vestibulum eget a mi.

Alice in Wonderland: Mini Review

2010-03-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

So I only missed a few minutes of the movie and I managed to catch when Alice's husband to be proposes to her. He's pretty funny, in a pathetic way. I liked the movie for several reasons: 1. Tim Burton's imagination 2. Helena Bonham Carter 3. Johnny Depp 4. Minor characters who I recognized. I liked the reinterpretation of Alice, it was darker but not too dark. I think my major complaint was that the 3D often didn't feel very 3D. I read a little about the making of the movie and instead of shooting directly in 3D the artists would later put the different parts of the shots into 3D layers, but each layer seems a little flat so it doesn't feel like true 3D. The movie might have been better off as a regular 2D movie.

Here are a few of my favorite actors/voice actors that came up in the movie, and a comparison to other roles they played.

Alan Rickman's voice (it's Snape!)

The flirty Helena Bonham Carter (looking better back who knows when on the left) as the red queen

Matt Lucas as tweedledum and tweedledee: You probably don't know him but he's a British comedian from the series Little Britain. The humor's a bit coarse but I still find it funny. Here's one of the more tasteful skits, he's the fat one in the wheelchair.

Stephen Fry: Another British comedian. He used to have a show with Hugh Laurie (House!). He's the cheshire cat.

[edit] Comments about the actress who played Alice: The new actress was pretty decent, she was suitable for the role. She wasn't amazing but she played the famous lines well enough. [spoiler] At the end after Alice comes out of the hole she wakes up and realizes that she should decide her own destiny, decline the marriage proposal and go to Hong Kong to help continue her dad's shipping business. I thought it was an interesting ending, I'm sure the audiences here appreciated the little detail at the end with a chuckle.