Buy T?

Rumors have it that that some AT&T or formerly Cingular stores, working against company policy, are taking pre-orders for the iPhones and some store in New York City has a waiting list with some thousand names. If this is true, the pent-up demand for iPhones may even exceed Apple's expectation. The iPhone is scheduled to launch in June, most likely end of June.

Maybe it's time to buy AT&T and Apple? My opinion is free, your money is not, so invest at your own risk. APPL and T close at 110.69 down 2.2, and 40.42 up 1 cent respectively.

UPDATES:
According to rumor site, macrumors.com, the iPhone is available in store on June 20th. And iPhone support training runs between May 30 to June 20th. Get your credit card ready.

Die Hard

When analog meets digital, we have "Live Free or Die Hard," internationally known as "Die Hard 4.0."

In this summer, good old analog guy John McClane (baldy Bruce Willis) is teaming up with hacker Matt Foster (Mac guy Justin Long) to fight online terrorists who try to hold the US hostage by shutting down the information superhighway.

This is probably the only summer movie I am looking forward to. I need some good old analog red meat fist fight, gun fight. I hope it gets an R rating.



Summer movies:
Spider-Man 3;
Pirates of the Caribbean;
Shrek The Third;
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix;
Rush Hour 3;
The Bourne Ultimatum;

and more.

UPDATES: Memorial day weekend is right around the corner. Unfortunately there isn't a movie that I really want to see. Pirates of the Caribbean, I didn't see any of the first two and the third one is almost 3 hours long. So I don't think I can sit through it. I check out the movie listing, there isn't really a lot of choices.

All About Erasers

By Alex Lai

Large or tiny,
all useful to
erase pencil marks.
No matter how crazy they look.
They can even erase Poems!

It's a trade -
eraser crumbs on paper,
pencil marks on eraser,
Just like magic -
mistakes are gone!

Pencil top erasers
get solid and die,
large erasers
live longer.

A kid will ask,
"Can I borrow your eraser?"
"Can I borrow your eraser?"
"Yes"
"Yes"
"One last time please?!"
"NO"

I wonder why
everybody doesn't have A BIG ERASER?

Masthead

A spring time one of a kind masthead.

You only need to ask. I give you my tulip masthead. The reason I took it off was because the template doesn't mean to have a picture there, though it sure has that feature. The reason being the jpeg graphics doesn't scale if you resize the browser. Without the jpeg, the title actually scale with the rest of the page if you resize the browser. So I thought it wasn't meant to have a picture there. But since you like it I will put it up just for you until ... I feel like to take it down. Enjoy.

PS: Those tulips were taken in Queens Botanical Garden. They weren't the prettiest, but they were available ....
P.P.S. It was taken with my trusty Nikon D70 and Nikon 80~200mm f2.8 IF lens. I fired up my GIMP, cropped and scaled the jpeg so it looks like it will fit the width of my template. It's really trial and error but I got it to work somewhat beautifully or not so beautifully.

Viagra: The Paradox.

Fighting jet-lag while keeping you up. What paradox.

Viagra in the sky:-
It gives cockpit a whole new meaning;
More leg room is needed;

Here is your Captain speaking ...

• Please fasten your seat belt while we are preparing to jerk off.
• Please fasten your seat belt and lower your gear, we are preparing to land.

Cum fly the friendly sky.

Ref: Viagra may aid jet-lagged travelers

Week in Review

Thank you for those who come visit every now and then. You know who you are.

Tony Blair came over to the States and did a joint press conference over at the Rose Garden at the While House. The guy is really eloquent especially compared to our President here. Too bad, if not because of Iraq, he probably would have come down in history as the smartest politician in modern history. The guy has this English kind of horsey good look, well at least we have Bill Clinton both are slick and smart.

Hong Kong is getting stupider every day. The CU Student pornspaper is much ado about nothing. I don't know about you but to quote series pornographer Picasso, "Good taste is the enemy of creativity." Plus who's to say that it's bad taste to talk about incest and bestiality in a school paper. Art and literature or supposedly art and literature in a scholarly environment is not meant to make everybody comfortable and feel good, it's not like it has to serve that purpose. It's not prime time TV entertainment. On the contrary, I think art and literature are supposed to challenge and reflect the kind of life that we are living, and in this context, the ubiquitous media coverage of sex and online porn. I don't see anything wrong for the university students to explore, exploit and even make light of the topics whether for pure entertainment or literary purpose. The media shit storm is just unreal. If one can't even be a bit liberal in a university environment I don't know where else can.

Pop artist Andy Warhol's Green Car Crash sold more than $71 million, a record.

Online ad agencies are hot. Traditional media companies are in a shopping spree. WPP, world's second biggest ad agency is going to buy 24/7 Real Media for $64 million, sort of a response to its frenemy Google which plans to pay $3.1 billion to acquire DoubleClick, another online agency. Microsoft is in a buying mode as well, it just announced that it is going to buy aQuantive for $6 billion. Publics Groupe, a France based global ad holding company is ahead of the curve, last year it paid $1.3 billion for Digitas, a leading online agency. Who would have thought Google turns out to a big threat to traditional ad companies? It's estimated that US online market can be as much as $40 billion as more print, radio and TV spots are moving online.

Hong Kong Shanghai-born director Wong Kar Wai is making his English language feature debut in Cannes. Blueberry pie is definitely not as Americana as apple pie is. Hope he is not making a distorted Americana, one that is embarrassing and too exotic as he himself has accused other foreign directors' take on Chinese.

Uncommon Places

"El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas. July 6, 1975. Stephen Shore/Aperture Foundation"

The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, has this to say about the photograph:

Two years later Mr. Shore went to El Paso, Tex., and photographed, from the back, a slump-shouldered man, in an untucked white shirt, waiting on a street corner in the slanting sun of the late afternoon. Painted lines of the crosswalk before him recede toward the Capri theater at the center of the photograph, where the movie “Lady Kung Fu” was advertising itself in big red letters on the marquee. Like a Renaissance painting, the picture unfolds in one-point perspective. Everything is still, held in place by the strict geometry, while the colors — baby blue, yellow, red and avocado green — bounce and shimmy.

I am floored by the above description, by what Mr. Kimmelman can see.

I can sure take snapshots, everyone can. But I just can't possibly take what seemingly look like snapshots like Shore's or Winogrand's. My mundane is really just mundane and can never transcend and levitate to the level of great photography. I tend to like their aesthetics, their no nonsense approach to taking pictures. You know at least it's easy to execute their approach, going around taking pictures of the mundane and banal. It gives me hope at least.


Shore's Americana kind of makes me think of Wong Kar Wai's aesthetics. Wong is very immaculate, very organized chaos. Wong's take on Americana can be seen in his latest movie "My Blueberry Nights."

In a Cannes press conference, Wong says,

"All through the years we've seen a lot of films made about Chinese from foreign directors and sometimes it looks very embarassing and because a lot of these Chinese characters have been distorted and hmm ... it's too exotic. So, I always want to make a film in a different language but I (don't want) hmm .... want to avoid this problem."

I am sure his version of Americana will be very different from say Spiderman-3 as he jokingly and eloquently put it in another interview. Whether "Blueberry" is just another "Zzzz" or turns out to be a major art house success in addition to "Zzzz" like "In The Mood For Love" has yet remain to be seen.

Source: Passing Mile Markers, Snapping Pictures by Michael Kimmelman.

Live Blogging: AI final two is here

Spoiler: Melinda Doolittle doesn't get enough votes to go the final.

iPhone Delayed? Leopard Delayed?

Engadget retracted its news on iPhone and Leopard delay. Bloggers have no journalistic standards because you know bloggers are not journalists.

But things do look a bit hairy. The spoof email may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy of some sort. Apple PR denies any delay and restates that both iPhone and Leopard are on track for their delivery dates ... that is until they are not.

Meanwhile just hold on to whatever cellphones you have.

updates:
Apple receives FCC approval for iPhone.

Hop Won

I haven't been to Hop Won for more than a month. I miss the food even though some people think Chinese food can kill you.
The food stays the same, the cashiers stay the same. Except they put up a new signboard with new prices. Now for a cook to order of say Beef with Bitter Melon is $5 plus tax. What used to be $5 was just $5, now it's more like $5.43. It's still cheaper than a lot of other places. Midtown is getting more expensive even for my lowly Hop Won.

YouTube Tuesday

If you think Wong Kar Wai is too arty farty, perhaps this hardcore clip from Times Square is more for you. [WARNING: toddler performing a perfect somersault involuntarily. Bad Taste, bad humor.]
New York City is Dangerous For Free Range Toddlers



I know you and I are going to rot in hell for laughing at this.
Seen first at http://www.gawker.com

My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights is opening the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 16. This is Wong's first English feature film, starring singer-songwriter Norah Jones and Jude Law.

I wonder if the French got tired of Wong's self-indulgent bullshit since "2046."

A movie teaser can be seen here. (just sit tight, the teaser will play after a couple of ads)

UPDATES:

• Here is a Q&A piece from Jonathan Landreth, live from Cannes as reported via Yahoo! news. Wong says, Nights is very different from Spider Man 3. That's news to me.
  
• "Blueberry" an acquired taste for some by Jonathan landreth. The same can be said for all of Wong's films. Generally speaking, an "acquired taste" can't be good sign.
• 2-star review from Xan Brooks of the Guardian filed on May 17, 2007. So exit poll doesn't seem very promising even for the artsy fartsy set.
• Press conference (video) from mingpaonews.com
  

Apple Updates MacBook Line

It's a moderate upgrade, there is no LED screen, nor there is an upgrade to the new intel chipset called Santa Rosa.

The MacBook can be configured to max out at 2GB of RAM and 200GB harddrive.

In another Apple news, iPhone is just around the corner, selling $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model. There is no exact ship date yet other than a June shipment. It could be a phenomenal success like the iPod mp3 music player or it could be a tremendous blunder. When iPhone was introduced, the stock price was around $87, now it's more than $100.

http://www.apple.com

Amazon Acquires Dpreview

The world's chattiest photography site is acquired by the world's biggest store. Dpreview, founded by Phil Askey in 1998 as a hobby, shall remain in London. The site is extremely popular among people who enjoy discussing desktop photography as much as if not more than the actual activity of taking pictures. The public's insatiable demand for digital photography has fueled the growth of photography review sites, like dpreview.

Press regarding the acquisition.

Flowers

Week in Review

The porn provocateur 曾昭偉 (L) and his financial backer 李雅庄 (R). （曾國宗攝） from mingpaonews.com

"Guys calm down, it's only porn." Tsang is enjoying the media shitstorm.
This generation of kids grow up surrounded in sex and porn: sex education, safe sex, condoms, HIV, AIDS, and the ubiquitous online porn. Instead of enjoying sex and porn in private, they decided to bring them out in public and there lie the controversies: high education and porn don't mix well in lot of folks' mind; you do it enjoy it but you don't talk about it.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong Student Pornspaper is suffering from premature ejaculation. Look like the porn is not going to last. The students are a progressive bunch, instead of letting mainstream media spoon feed them porn, they become purveyors of porn; it's akin to the spirit of Web 2.0, one produces the Web they come to enjoy by actively participating. Porn for students by students.

Tony Blair calls it quits. After some ten years in the office, Britons are generally considered better off than they were before. But his tenure as a prime minister might just be defined in one word: Iraq.

Insider trading is in vogue and it can't be a good thing. This generation of Wall Streeters are simply too young to have watched Wall Street when it came out in 1987, the the seniors are now too old to remember the go go 80s. It's about time to have another Wall Street to remind these masters of universe that greed is good except when it's bad. Let's bring back the suspenders.

UPDATES:
More Smut from Higher Education
Warning: NOT WORK SAFE, may contain sexually charged words and images.

• Boink, sex positive magazine founded by Journalism major Alecia Oleyourryk from Boston University
• SWAY, Sex Week At Yale;
• H-Bomb from Harvard;
• Vita Excolatur from University of Chicago;
• Squim at Vassar

Related Articles: (may require registration)
Go to college, learn the Skin Trade, By Eric Gibson, 2/12/2004
The Student Body, By Jodi Rodoren, 4/23/2006
Campus Exposure, By Alexandra Jocobs, 3/4/2007

What's Old is New Again

The purveyor of style says they are supposed to be cool this season so there you have it, faded blue jeans with an updated cut, and gingham shirts.

source: http://men.style.com

First Casualty of the Murdoch Takeover

The long arm of law enforcement reached across the ocean to charge a Hong Kong couple of insider trading. As reported by Reuters, SEC charged the couple Kan King Wong and Charlotte Ka On Wong Leung "engaged in widespread and unlawful trading activity" and stand to make an estimated $8.1 million in profit on the Dow Jones take over by News Corp.

Let the shitstorm that is called insider trading begin now.

UPDATES:

More names, including Michael Leung (not charged) and David KP Li (not charged), are disclosed as the transcontinental insider trading is unfolding rather rapidly.

It's 20 years since we have the last Wall Street. Let's bring back Mr. Zeta-Jones as Gordon Gekko flanked by suspenders. It's time to have another Wall Street. Greed is good and every dream has a price. A crime is not a crime until you got busted by the SEC and got butt fucked in the Big House. Good luck all insiders.

Face of the alleged insider trading

Charlotte Ka On Wong Leung, one of the two alleged insider traders, so far.

I think the SEC is still trying to figure out what the name is supposed to be, like what is the family name, the given names .... Let me help, Leung is her maiden name, Wong is her adopted family name taken from her husband, Charlotte is her English name, Ka On is her given name.

Week in Review

It's all about the girls.

Just when you think she is going to leave us alone, celebratard Paris Hilton up the ante by going to the Big House. Now she is in the same league as Martha Stewart and also Nelson Mandela. The Free Paris t-shirt should be coming out soon.

French Socialist Party presidential candidate Segolene Royal got royally screwed by the voters. If Royal, as pretty as any 53-year old can be, can't make it to be the first French woman president, what are the chances for our Hillary Rodham Clinton make it to the White House? Clinton really needs to run as a woman, instead of pant suit, how about some skirts?

Who needs a last name if you have a first name like Madonna, Cher or Bjork? This crazed [warning: violent content featuring Bjork goes berserk] woman is releasing her latest album on May 7. Bjork, no matter what she did or going to do stylewise, she will always be defined by her "swan dress" [warning: some consider it fashion faux pas] in the 2001 Academy Awards. I guess her equally crazy ardent fans [warning: real disturbing footage of delusional fan who committed suicide in the name of Bjork] won't be disappointed of her latest album, Volta.

Bad Handwriting is detrimental to your Job Application

A good job application letter and a good resume will get you an interview.

I was reading an article in mingpaonews.com regarding how fucked up university students are in terms of penning their job application letters (or how bad they are in modifying sample job app letters for their own use). In it there is a principal from some school who criticizes some applicants betrayed their poor penmanship by signing like a child. Apparently she is the boss, she can do anything she wants. Good thing I don't have to work for such anal-retentive person. I really think typewriter, keyboard and laser printer are the best inventions for people who has no or poor penmanship. Gosh, I think all her teachers probably write like those scripts in Hallmark cards.

Then the article goes on to say some applicants can't distinguish the use of "Yours Faithfully" and "Yours Sincerely." First, I don't think I would capitalize the second word (that could be the reporters' fault). All I know is I try to avoid using "faithfully" at all cost, it just sounds very anal-retentive but now I know why I didn't get no interviews, because most bosses are anal-retentive and they think they are the overlords and "sincerely" is never good enough for them. I think the usage is very much regional (and dare I say dated) as here I don't think people are so hung up on insisting people to be faithful. Here most employees are hired "at will," meaning no contract and employees can walk out anytime they want. If faithful is important to them, use faithful and just play by the rule. Because the goal is to score an interview, have some face time with your potential overlord.

One of the good things about job application here is you never ever have to send in any head shot unless you are applying for a model or something (that again explains why I didn't get no interview in Hong Kong). At least you are given a chance to meet your overlord purely based on your writing and your credential not your look. Of course, if your address is in some so called "estate" in some seedy neighborhood, that may turn off your potential employers too, you never know. Maybe it's a good idea to leave out the address, so they can't judge your upbringing, not that you are ashamed of it, you just want a level playing field. I don't know how acceptable it's that in the Hong Kong employment market. Maybe just leave it in, full disclosure, if they don't like it, fuck it, find another employer who can appreciate how far you came instead of where you came from.

Do applicants really wear scent to interviews? I say fuck it, leave your perfume, cologne, toilette or whatever fancy concoction you have at home or wear it when you go out on a date. Don't distract your interviewer.