Without being in China, it would've been impossible for me to understand just how important the Beijing Olympics is to the Chinese people. To everyone else in the world, this is just a sport competition. To China, this is a matter of prestige; a matter of honor; a matter of life and death; and a matter more important than freedom.
Just a few examples. All construction projects, there are usually hundreds in Beijing, has been stopped for the past two months. All the laborers (who are usually from the countryside from all over China) has been sent home. All factories within a 100 mile radius of Beijing has been shutdown for the past month to cut down on pollution. Traffic has been severely curtailed. Entire lanes all over the city has been reserved for the few dozen official Olympic vehicles (with the roads re-painted). Cars with license plates that end in even numbers can only be driven on even days and odd on odd days throughout the duration of the games. Sporadic traffic control measures, such as those being employed right now for the opening ceremony, has the entire city pretty much shut down. All of the 2nd and 3rd ring roads has been closed to all but official traffic.
Nothing has been left to chance. Today is a holiday in Beijing. All government offices are closed. The city is dead, and I have never seen Beijing so empty. There are almost no cars on the road, which kind of remind me of pictures of North Korea. Everyone was told to stay home, watch the event on TV, and stay out of trouble. Everyone obeys because no one want to be the cause of something going wrong. As an extra precaution, most of the large clubs in Beijing are closed. Although I have gotten word of a few big parties that will go on after the opening ceremonies. The only thing which no one can control, the weather, is a matter of national importance. The location of the National Sport Stadium (called the Bird's Nest by everyone here) is subject to "precise" weather forecasts in 1 hour increments. Earlier there was reports that there may be rain during the opening ceremony around 8pm, and people are freaking out. CCTV Channel 1 just spent the past 30 minutes clarifying and reassuring everyone that even if it does rain, it would be "light rain" with zero chance of "heavy rain".
This begs the question: why? Why is China taking these extraordinary, nay, obsessive attitude to the Beijing Olympics? One answer I can think of is history. China has always been psychologically burdened by its modern history. A history of humiliation, of subjugation by foreigners. China was never a colony of a western power. It was worse. Foreigners came, got everyone hooked on opium, took whatever they wanted, and didn't build any roads, a government, or administrative functions. So after more than 150 years, this Olympics is a chance to show the world, almost as a "we made it so fuck you". But, in a more polite passive-aggressive manner. I'm being a bit crass, but you get the picture.
So, therein lies the gulf separating how China views this Olympics and how everyone else sees it. To an ordinary Chinese, it's incomprehensible, how issues like Dafur or Tibet can even be on the table when national honor is at stake. Protesters, no matter what the topic of protest, is taken as an egregious insult on not only the country, but the people of China. It's like having foreigners come to America and then shit on the American flag. Only 5 times worse.
It's been very interesting being here in Beijing. Originally I thought it would be like a giant party, as all Olympics are supposed to be. But it turns out to be more of an educational experience and a chance to be caught up in history. I got to see a side of China that I never saw before, and I will probably never see again. This should be an interesting few days.
I wanted to write this story for a few days now, but didn't find time until now. I was in LA last weekend and had a lot of fun. It was surreal from the start. Within hours of landing, I found myself in the middle of a movie set.
I arrived a few hours before my roommates, so I decided to go and check out the campus of UCLA. It was the week in between graduation and summer term, so the campus was deserted. I walked around aimlessly, took a few pictures and just as I was about to leave, I saw a girl sitting on a bench talking on her phone. She looked at me, I smiled, and she ran towards me (I gotta do that more often).
She asked me if I had some time, because she was helping to make a movie and her help didn't arrive. Since I had nothing to do, and I was in a mood for adventure, I agreed to help her. It turns out, they were part of the LA Film Festival's 72-hour film challenge. They have 72 hours to make a movie, from start to finish. I got introduced to the director Insung, and the two actors, Rick and Maureen.
My job was simple. Hold a reflector dish to bounce light toward the actors' faces. In fact, I've done this many times before since both my dad and my uncle are avid photographers. The scene was quite touching. The man (a janitor) is proposing to his girlfriend (some recently made actress). It occurred just as the sun was setting in the background. The actors were very good, and there wasn't a script, they basically just ad-lib it.
So, after we're all done, we took a picture.
The coolest part is that this is a very small film. There's (from left to right) Insung, the director, Rick and Moreen, Me and Aimee. That's it!
The movie is already made, and you can see the final credit screen where my name is prominently displayed.
Anyways, I was very excited to be a part of the Hollywood experience, especially only a few hours after arriving in LA for the first time. I swear... this stuff only happens to me.
Yesterday I found a song while listening to an internet radio station, and it has become my favorite of the moment. The song is A Girl Like That by Lucas Prata featuring Jeannie Ortega. I love it because it's upbeat, great to dance to, and the lyrics are awesome. And yes... I want a girl like that too.
I found the only copy on youtube, so you can sample it for yourself. I've already purchased my copy from iTunes.
Also, I didn't find the complete lyrics to this song anywhere online. So I decided to post it myself.
(I wanna a girl...) [4x]
One look i’m hooked, like out of a dream.
And her lips burning
She looks tight, so right, if you know what I mean.
Heads are turning.
My jaw just drops when she’s walking away.
And my head is spinning.
She’s out there somewhere, but I don’t know her name.
Think I’m going insane.
[Chorus]
Cuz I wanna a girl like that. (I wanna a girl)
A Heart like a maniac.
And I wanna a girl like that. (I wanna a girl)
A girl that’ll have my back.
I wanna a love that’ll still be strong,
After loving her all night long.
Cuz I wanna a girl... I wanna a girl... like that.
(I gotcha back... gotcha back... baby)
She hangs out, no doubt, like one of the boys.
And there’s no mistaking.
But when we’re alone she likes to make some noise.
And the walls are shaking.
My heart can’t stop, it’s running away from me.
She’s wild, so hot, but she’s only a dream, that I gotta see.
[Repeat Chorus]
The type of girl that just can’t get enough.
Gasping for air and she’s calling your bluff.
She does her nails but she like to play rough.
So hard to get that you’ll falling in love.
She blows your mind, and she’s class tho you’re acting crazy.
Another kind not too wild but she’s still a lady.
The kinda girl like the one in your dreams. (oh yeah, that’s the one)
I’m that girl baby.
[Repeat Chorus]
There are a few lines toward the end that I'm a bit hazy on. Maybe someone can correct me...
This weekend I celebrated the start of the summer movie season (as defined by yours truly) by going to the premier of Ironman. The movie was sold out, so it was good that we got tickets before hand.
I was pleasantly surprised. I expected the movie to be mostly silly and possibly "suck ass". It did not. It wasn't as good as Transformers of last year, in my opinion, but a thoroughly enjoyable movie nonetheless.
If you haven't seen the movie yet, I won't ruin it for you, but here's a sneak peak.
I never read the comic book as a child, since the theme of a billionaire turned superhero is antithetical to the communist ideology of the country of my birth. I was told there were many inside jokes and references for those who have.
My only beef with the movie is the lack of female characters. Spiderman had the perky and beautiful Kristin Dunst and Transformers featured the amazingly sexy Megan Fox. Ironman had Gwyneth Paltrow. To be fair, she's an extremely talented actress. But this movie is Ironman, not Shakespeare in Love. Even so, her character was pretty minor compared to the female characters in the movies aforementioned.
On Wednesday, the Olympic torch arrived in San Francisco. My roommates and I decided to skip out of work and went to the Embarcadero to see the torch relay.
The advertised start time of the relay was 1pm. We arrived at Pier 5 a few minutes past 1:30pm and the torch was nowhere to be seen. We walked towards the Ferry building and as we got closer, we saw hundreds of demonstrators and they completed blocked off the street.
The demonstrators, most of them white, held up various signs. Some printed before hand, others, hand-drawn. Most were protesting human rights abuse in Tibet, but some others were about Dafur and Myanmar. I decided to take a stroll in the middle of the demonstration and I was quite taken with the energy and the passion of the crowd. A few people were yelling slogans into the bull horns, like the classic, "Shame, Shame, China Shame", or the crowd favorite, "No Freedom, No Olympics". There are a small contingent of counter-demonstrators (as I predicted there would be), waving Chinese and Olympic flags. However they were vastly outnumbered by the Tibetan demonstrators and were relegated to the corner.
The street was completely blocked off, and there was no way for the torch to pass through the original route. My roommates were using internet on their phones trying to figure out the precise location of the torch and no one knew what was going on. Both sides of the sidewalk was lined with police, but they made no effort at directing the crowd or clearing a path for the Olympic torch.
Sometime after 2pm, we had enough. We got back to the car and headed back to work. However, we made a wrong turn and went through the Broadway tunnel. As we came out of the tunnel, we saw that Van Ness avenue up ahead was blocked off by police. Suddenly we realized that the torch had been diverted. And guess what? Our apartment is on that very same street.
We quickly parked the car, and I ran into the apartment and grabbed my camera (I had forgotten it earlier). As I came out, the torch was just passing in front of our door.
We had time for a group photo before the torch came and you can see the spectators gathered all around us.
The torch (on the left side of the picture) flanked by police on both sides as it makes its way down Van Ness avenue.
The torch was carried right past our front door, with only one protester in the background with a "Free Tibet" sign (probably drawn 5 minutes before the torch arrived).
Afterwards, the news was filled with reports about the torch relay and how the organizers completely deceived the demonstrators. I think my roommates and I are probably the only people in the city that got to see the demonstration on the Embarcadero and the Olympic torch (and have it come to our door steps).
It is unfortunate that the Olympic torch relay had to be conducted this way, but I also experienced the full power of the freedom of speech and assembly. My personal feelings about this issue aside, I'm glad I got to see both events. And I still can't get over the fact that we're just too damned lucky.
Well, it was embarrassing. My old homepage was ugly, unprofessional, and grossly out of date. I made it a long time ago, using Ruby on Rails, but it never was the site that I envisioned it to be.
Last night I stayed up until 5am creating a new homepage for myself. I chose to use tiddlywiki, because it was simple. Only 1 file. I can edit it in my browser, then upload it to my server using sftp. One drawback is that I don't get any of the fancy features that I designed for myself (such as a photo gallery with an admin page), but then I realized I never use it anyways. All my public pictures are uploaded to facebook instead.
So, simplicity won. Maybe this time, I'll feel inclined to add content every now and then.
After all that we’ve been through
When everything that felt so right is wrong
Now that the love is gone...
Last night I went to the David Guetta show at Slide. The concert was sold out, and the line was around the block at 10pm. I don't usually go out on Sundays, but I suspect this is somewhat atypical because David Guetta is really freaking popular right now.
But of course, David Guetta didn't start spinning until after midnight, so technically the concert was on Monday. All the technicalities aside, he's a pretty chill guy and I submit the image below as proof (I don't know who was flashing the hook'em horns sign). And he's 40 years old, but looks like he's still 22. How does he do it? He's not even asian!
I really like his music and I love dancing to it. The crowd was pretty good, considering it was mostly dudes. The boy girl ratio is about 4 to 1, which is definitely weird considering it's at Slide. Slide is notorious in San Francisco for turning guys away if they don't bring an equal number of girls. But the girls that were there, some of them are pretty hot (the whole euro crowd). There's something about a really skinny girl with big boobs that just intrigues me. But I digress...
Now, while everyone was getting hammered by $10 drinks and awestruck by David Guetta, I observed something interesting. There's this private table behind the DJ booth. There, sat two old dudes (like 80 years old) with bunch of younger women (young is relative to the aforementioned dudes). It was kind of hilarious as they're grooving to David Guetta or at least, trying to. The real question is who are they? So, I took a picture (and you thought I was taking a picture of David Guetta... NOT).
Anyways, I had fun. David Guetta is awesome. Now back to work everyone... but watch this video before you do.
A few days ago I signed up to join the gym near my apartment and proceeded to go work out with my roommate. We only did chest and triceps for an hour. But because I haven't worked out since coming back from Europe, my muscles became extremely sore and rigid for the past few days. Today, I could hardly raise my arm and it was seriously pissing me off.
On the way to dinner with my roommates tonight, we passed by Hot Tubs. There's also one in Berkeley, on University and MLK. I walked by there a million times but never went in. One of my roommate postulated it's a place where couples go to hook-up. Something akin to a by-the-hour motel.
After dinner I got curious and went in. Sure enough, in the lobby sat a couple making out. Made me feel right at ease. I inquired of the price, and was told it's $20 per person per hour. And, I get a private room (I'm shy). I was sold.
Best $20 I've ever spent. I get a private room that comes with a bed (for massages... I think), a shower, a hot tub that can seat about 6 people, and a sauna. You get a key to the door, a radio (so presumably you can tune into "Love Songs After Dark" on KOIT FM), and a clock. It was relaxing to the extreme.
However, I did seem to recall that the AIDS epidemic began in San Francisco bath houses. But no worries. This joint seemed to cater to the heterosexual crowd. The front desk lady did seem a bit surprised when I said it was just me, by myself. Whatever. I had fun. And it was clean. Besides, the only thing that could survive hot tub temperatures is possibly Helibactor pylori and maybe Anthrax spores. Only one of which is fatal. Despite this and smelling like a chlorine pill afterwards (which is a good thing), the soak in hot water made me feel much better. I didn't spend too much time in the sauna, as the thermometer on the wall read something like 260 degrees F. (Bonus question: assuming I'm a 150 pound man made of 70% water, how long would it take in minutes, for me to evaporate into a puddle of glue if the sauna is rated at 1800 watts?)
Anyways, I feel much better now. And I found a pretty good place to take a girl (or two) for "dates". Not bad for $20. Next time I'll bring some water and flip flops.
Oh, and after soaking for an hour, then rubbing Icy Hot on my arms and chest induces the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life. Don't try that at home kids.
Earlier this week, I bought myself a brand new MacBook Pro at the student computer store. As with all my computers, I name them after characters in Greek Mythology. So my MacBook Pro is now Hephaistos (pronounced He-FES-tus), the Greek god of technology. Which I thought was most fitting.
Hephaistos has a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 4 MB of cache for each of the two cores. Currently it has 1GB of RAM, but I plan to add another stick in there soon. A 120 GB hard drive, a 128 MB ATI graphics card, and a DVD burner is pretty much standard for the 15 inch MacBook Pros. What I really love is the little extras, like the built-in iSight webcam and the Apple remote. This laptop is currently the most powerful machine I have, so I'm transitioning to using it as my primary computer.
This summer I got myself a brand new Motorola V3 RAZR phone. This is actually my first Java enabled phone, so ever since I got it, I've been itching to hack it. However, out of the box the phone is quite crippled, and my service provider made it as difficult as possible for me to write programs and upload to it. One big problem is that the V3 is supposed to have CLDC 1.1, but mine was apparently an older version that only had CLDC 1.0. So what's the big deal? Well, CLDC 1.1 has floating-point numbers, that's what. I tried to get a firmware upgrade for my phone, but no such luck. Even aside from that, I had to do all kinds of things (including HEX edit on my phone) to make everything work. Long story short, I finally got my phone the way I wanted a week ago.
So, I decided to write an application for it. I've often found myself in Safeway or Target and completely forget what I was supposed to buy. Moreover, when I return home, there's always a thing or two that I was supposed to buy, but didn't. Since I always have my phone on me, why don't I just write a shopping list application, so that way I'll never forget anything (in theory). This easy application is perfect for me to learn JavaME (and it doesn't require floating-point operations). Alternatively, I could write stuff down on a piece of paper, but smart people should come up with smart (or ridiculus) solutions to simple problems.
I've never programmed in JavaME before, but it turns out the API is really simple (after all, it's a very small subset of Java). I downloaded the Motorola Java SDK, which includes various emulators and an Eclipse plugin. Also, I had a JavaME book with me, so it's off to the races. I went all out and made a MVC design (I love MVC), eventhough such a simple application probably doesn't warrant it. So in the end, it looked something like this:
The application allows for creating, editing, and deleting shopping items, as well as checking them off as they're purchased. Also, along with each item, a short note can be associated. The order of the list can be changed by moving an item up or down. Lastly, the list is saved upon exit and reloaded upon start. All that in less than 500 lines. And yes, I uploaded it to my V3, and it works!
I'm releasing this ShopListME application under the BSD License. You can download the application [zip] or if you're curious as to how the program was written, you can get the source [zip] as well. This application should run on any phone with CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 2.0, but I haven't tested them on any other phones.
