Day Off

I am taking a day off to celebrate the nice weather.
I went to IHOP (International House of Pancake) with Alex and Harry. Plenty of sunshine and the temperature is just right for a day off.
Recent developments:
I haven't taken any new pictures recently and nobody really misses them, myself included.
I am reading some Ruby on Rails stuff, just another outlet to waste time on. I can't stop thinking of like Kate Moss blowing off rails everytime I read Ruby on Rails, is Ruby a person's name, who's just like Kate, like to be on rails...I think the name no doubt will attract some crack heads for this programming language. Ruby was invented by Matsumoto from the Land of the Rising Sun. My knowledge of RoR is limited to Hello World!, just like any other languages I know.

No Blog Entry

Well, because my life is just as boring as yours and my total lack of imagination doesn't help either, does it?
Weather:
Weather is nice, it gets warmer and warmer and the day is longer and longer, you know longer is better - just can't help myself.
Over the past weekend, I did some minimal spring cleaning. Kind of cleaned up the patches of green we have on the sidewalk. Basically, it's a cigarette butts recepticle. I cleaned them up but I don't think the cigarette butts free status will last long.
Activities:
Alex and Harry are learning to swim. Alex passed the first level. He still can't swim without the floaty or bubble. We did some ice skating as well in Iceland on Long Island. Look like we won't be going skiing anytime soon, maybe until the next winter.

Afternoon Report

Microsoft announces Vista will be delayed in the retail market to early next year. Corporate users can have it sometime in November. Yeah, let the corporate slaves in cubicle farms test it out first before rolling it out to the serious home users.
Earlier, Sony also announced PS3 won't ship until November.
For people who dig fancy UI, you don't have to wait for Vista, Mac OS X is available, now.

Paris is burning, again. This time is about entitlement, it's all about entitlement. The new law is supposed* to increase youth employment but at the same time allows employer to fire, without cause, any new hires who are 25 or younger, within the first 2 years of employment. I like to work in such an environment, like you can't be fired. And you are entitled to this and that. I never work under any contract and I think many people don't. Here is like "employment at will." One can simply walk away from work, or get fired on the spot. Of course, if you are not happy being fired, you can sue your employer. But that's another story. In essence, nobody owes any 1 month notice kind of crap to his employer. There is no contract, and hence no contract to dispute, isn't it neat? Picture credited to Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images, linked from the New York Times. (*note "supposed" is believe it or not, a freaking BIG word, like I am suposed to punch out at 5PM every day, but then I am a corporate slave, I never leave on time ....)

Kissena Park

Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou visits New York City. The World Journal reports that he was going to visit Kissena Park today, though I could not find any picture to verify that one way or the other.

Swing in Kissena Park

 

How to twist a swing

 

Swing

 

Swing

 

Swing

 

Swing

 

Kissena Park

 

Kissena Park

 

Kissena Park

 

Kissena Park

 

Kissena Park

Biking. 

Kissena Park

 

St. Patrick's Day

The city gets greener and you feel obligated to get drunk. And yes, men on skirt, or kilt. The Knicks, losers by default, even won a game against the Detroit Pistons, in their horrendous St. Patrick's green uniform. Jamal Crawford was the player of the game. Go losers, go Knicks.

Afternoon

FCC is postponing the mandatory adoption of terrestrial digital broadcast till February 17, 2009.

I suspect more actors and actresses will go under the knife once HDTV is in full bloom. Even Howard Stern went through one lately.

The older or old anchors are retiring as they don't look too good in HD. Network is replacing older guys with younger anchors for their morning and evening news. It's all HD's fault. That's just kidding. Getting old is OKAY, but not getting fat and ugly, that's different.

As more HDTV, or more flat panels are selling in the market, the risk of falling heavy TV sets killing kids should go down as well. Flat panel HDTV, it's all because of the kids.

Morning

Salon.com has an exclusive on the prison abuse scandal. Pictures too grahic to be linked here. I thought it's big news but I don't see any print media coverage, namely the New York Times. I first learnt about this exclusive from ESWN last night.

George Clooney doesn't know how to blog, and that's OKAY. So the blog appears in Huffington's Post is not his. Big misunderstanding or misleading. The link to the original Clooney's blog is gone.

Bill Gates is not happy with a $100 portable notebook jointly developed by MIT and Google. Obviously he is more happy with his ultra-mobile PC which retails for $599 to $999. I think I will be happy with any computer notebook that has somewhere close to a 12" screen, broadband connection, some USB port. I am not terribley about touch screen keyboard, I like real keyboard input. I write terribly longhand.

Microsoft took out pages of New York Times to advertise their people-ready software. For a minute, I thought it's a print ad from PeopleSoft. No, it's from Microsoft. I read that MS is planning to spend $500 million on this people-ready campaign.

I think the FCC just pushed back the ATSC schedule to 2009. Mike Wallace, Dan Rather could have stayed a little longer.

Dinner

Baked macaroni and cheese and spareribs and vegetables - all prepared by Jin Lu.

For the Rest of Us

If you don't have a 1-7 million to live fashionably next to Sean Jean's....now I am depressed.

Here's next door

Here at 475, the fashionably Sean John is hawking his perfume, you know every successful designer got to have his own line of perfume. Sean Jean is a marathon runner, I have no doubt he can do his 3-some all right.

Live Fashionably

If you are willing to spend 1 to 7 million, then you can live fashionably. With beautiful chicks like the one photographed here as your neighbors.

Untitled

Slowpoke.

Spare Ribs

Ribs prepared by Jin. Recipe is from Mark Bittman for the New York Times, here is the extract
quote
Winter Ribs
Time: At least 2 1/2 hours

1/2 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon paprika
About 4 pounds spareribs.

1. Preheat oven to 275 degrees. Mix seasonings together and rub ribs all over with this mixture. Put them in a roasting pan in one layer. Bake, pouring off accumulated fat every 30 minutes or so, for 2 hours or longer, or until ribs are cooked through and very tender. (If you are in a hurry, cover roasting pan with aluminum foil, which will shorten the cooking time by about a third.)
2. When you are ready to eat, roast ribs at 500 degrees for about 10 minutes (or grill them or run them under a broiler), until nicely browned; watch carefully for burning.
Yield: 4 or more servings.

unquote

Learn English

English is not something I am good at, in fact, I would admit I am not good at English or Chinese.
But I take pleasure in doing things I am not good at, like photography, snowboarding and even cooking much to the annoyance of others, perhaps.
Here is a piece I find it pretty interesting, it has the quality of great comedy: it's funny and it's sad at the same time. Without much ado, here is the piece.

Floating Ads

I am a reader of the mingpaonews.com.
I don't remember when they started using the all annoying floating ads on their pages.
Webmasters/Advertisers who have the gall to do floating ads just reflect how poor their web tech choices are. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should. Am I going to click on the ad just because it is scrolling along with me, hell no. It just annoys the hell out of me.
I believe in ads in general, somebody gullible has to click the ads to pay for the contents, right?
But floating ads? Pleasssssssssse. Take a page from Google, use text.

Scito Te Ipsum

After reading this, I still don't know what kind of a "photographer" I am. I kind of know my photos usually suck, that much I am sure. I don't live near any mountain or any water, so I don't take landscape shots. I take snapshots most of the time.
I got to buy more gears, more tools to enhance my photograhpy. I need to get a Canon 1DsMkII or whatever the latest pro full frame DSLR, or the Nikon D2X, with their whole lines of professional lenses, no consumer lenses, absolutely no. I deserve only the best.

Brokeback related

Se7en recut

Before Brokeback Marriage is called brokeback marriage, there is Jim McGreevey.

Flushing Brothel shutdown

Flushing made the frontpage of yesterday's New York Times, albeit under the fold. A brothel run by a couple of Koreans at 57-24 164th Street was shutdown by authority. What's interesting is "there were two prices in place, for some unexplained reason: $150 for Chinese patrons, and $200 for Koreans." So it's true, there is discount for Chinese...for sex. [picture copyright of the New York Times, of course]

update:
This probably inspired a story by Chinese American novel writer Ha Jin.

Toothing is a Hoax

Sid, you have a G3 bluetooth handset and yet you don't tooth, that's OKAY. Because toothing is such a hoax. Nobody does it anyway. So don't feel left out. On the other hand, if you are a sucker for mainstream media and believe in this hoax and actually made it a self-fulfilling hoax, I am mighty proud of you. Alas, that didn't happen, did it?

2nd Floor

3/8/2006

Origami = Ultra-Mobile PC

If you think the suspense is killing you, hey, the wait is over.
OKAY, if you are loaded, or thought you are loaded, or you are some executive with some deep pocket expense account, here is what MS wants you to buy. The so called ultra-mobile PC.

Face time

I don't like pictures of myself, they totally shatter whatever disillusions I have about myself.
If this picture induces nightmare, sorry, blame that on william2006. OKAY William, at your request here is my picture. Hope you are happy. This is a face only a mother can love.

Google guessed Crash is Trash

Apparently that's what Google thought about the Oscars winning motion picture, Crash. I, being very so not original read it somewhere else but was still able to duplicate the search result today. Google, you have spoken for millions.

Censorship is hot

I think censorship is really hot these days. Information needs to be free, how long can you actually censor some news or block some sites. Somehow, some people always find a way.

New York City Weather 46F

Grand Central.

Blogging on blogs

I am not sure if the New York Times is that original. I came across a Times article that seems deja vu to me yesterday about Chinese bloggers. And today I came across an article here.
I guess Chinese bloggers are really hot now, or actually blogs that blog about Chinese media in general.
I believe there is yet another article on the NYT today regarding China's online market.
I for one admits that I am totally not original. I usually blog about other people's blog or just BS abour things in general.

The Lovely Natalie Portman

The always lovely Natalie Portman as in Saturday Night Live.


Watch it before it's gone.
Update: 3/6/06 4PM or earlier. Youtube pulled the video.

The rightful copyright owner finally got their acts together and put it on nbc's website. Just don't expect the thing actually works like from Youtube. You would have thought NBC would have done a better job hosting a video, no. The link just says LOADING...gosh what happens to these gazillion companies? Can't they have enough bandwidth? Oh, it works with IE, but not Firefox, so that begS the question WTF?

Let's pray MTA and TWU work out a contract soon

Here is a piece on New York City transit workers, how they fare in comparison to the riders they serve.
Also, in the same article, it mentions that young lawyers who are getting starting from $125,000 to $145,000. If you can't be a transit worker, a young lawyer in a white shoed law firm isn't such a bad idea, provided you are willing to work 15-24 hours a day and don't sleep at work.

Make sure you have a nice pair of running shoes some where under your desk, you may need them for yet another transit strike.

Oscars

Zhang Ziyi just presented the best film editing award to Hughes Winborne for Crash. I didn't see all of her films, the ones that I saw, Rush Hour included, she did deliver some solid performance. I would say anything she got, she earned.
Philip Seymour Hoffman won Best Actor in his title role for Capote.
Reese Witherspoon, Best Actress for Walk the Line.
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, won Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material previously produced or published for Brokeback Mountain.
Now the Best Director ... goes to Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain. The always humble and gracious Ang Lee, in closing, thanks everyone in Taiwan, Hong Hong, and China in Mandarin.
Best Motion Picture goes to ... Crash.
Brokeback got all the buzz but loses to Crash, it isn't totally unexpected but it is quite a surprise. In 2001, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon won best foreign language film while Gladiator won Best Picture. If the pictures wins, the director loses, can't have it both ways.

Some Random links

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/weblog.htm This is probably one of the best blogs I come across, not counting this one of course. This is in essense like a good a RSS feeds for all the Chinese news that matter, except for the entertainment news I care. I can't read Apple Daily's online edition as the site demands pay subscribtion, so we give up on each other.

A spoof on the movie Wu Ji by Chen Kaige. The clip is in Mandarin and I didn't see the original movie. This is probably 2 months old news but it's news to me, I think it's worth the link. The clip is pretty long, and the download speed isn't all that great, but I guess you will be rewarded. The original Wu Ji was almost universally panned by the critics and the general audience alike. Chen was greatly embarrassed and now with this spoof, he was incensed and he threatened to sue or had sued Hu Ge, the maker of the spoof. I didn't follow up on the latest.

China has changed so much, I am just constantly and sometimes presently surprised by all these.

Origami

Microsoft's video promoting its latest soon to be released handheld invention.
"The viral marketing" plug on google and youtube is not rocket science, but then not every agency is catching up.