All Things Yummy

Last night, we went and watched V for Vendetta, a movie based on a comic book series. The movie itself was fairly entertaining, with the right mix of humour and seriousness combined with slightly unconventional plot.

Before we got to the Feature Presentation, though, we had to sit through trailers for a:

1. Sequel of a movie based on a amusement park ride
2. Movie based on a Japanese game
3. Movie based a comic book hero
4. Third movie based on an old TV show

I guess this is where Hollywood is headed, though looking at companies like EA will easily tell you that making a sequel after sequel will eventually lead to saturation and people getting tired of the entire genre.

In any case, I’ve been going through season 3 of 24. It’s an interesting show. I’ve always believed that one of the reasons why animes are so popular is that because they typically don’t conform to the episodic nature of most TV shows, it allows them to have connected, tightly written stories. They can have overarching theme that doesn’t need to be resolved in 30 minutes, which allows them to tackle stories and themes with epic proportions. With the shows that have been coming out lately, I guess Powers That Be has figured out some of that magic.

Just because I like the show doesn’t mean that I can’t critisize it. As an engineer, I’ve basically been cringing everytime something technical comes up. Some of the funny things I’ve noticed:

1. Infinite resolution photographs. They’re everywhere!
2. What kind of operating system are they using? And they completely mis-use some of the common technical terms, like kernel, and socket, and mount, and crontab…
3. The entire signal processing section is laugh out loud funny. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think about Kalman filters without chuckling at the phrase “I’m losing the signal, do a Kalman on it”
4. “This search is taking too long! I’ll try using a tree!”

Well, I suppose they could’ve done far worse…

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.

I’m currently reading through The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - it reminded me of the joys of reading well crafted words and see them become real tangible objects within my imagination. This gave me an insight as to why I find books like Harry Potter and the Clancy novels so unfulfilling - simply, they are not novels. They are merely extended short stories.

Philip K. Dick defines the difference as following

a short story may deal with murder; a novel deals with the murderer, and his actions stem from a psyche which, if the writer knows his craft, he has previously presented.

These days, most of the book deals with the murder, the battle, the romance. We have 1000 page books that consist of Jack saw this, Jack thought this, Jack did this, which isn’t what a novel is suppose to be. There is no subtlety involved - either things are completely omitted, or hammered in with a very large, very blunt sledgehammer.

And it’s just not books that are being written that way. The entire culture and mass media is moving that direction as well. We have movies that have nothing but epic battle scenes. We have elections in which subtleties of good, thought-out policies are swept aside for broad stereotypical strokes that paint everything in bright shades of red and blue, covering over any issue of importance.

I don’t know, maybe I’m the one who’s crazy.

I keep meaning to post things but things keep coming up…  so this is just a very short note.  Texas trip was nice - it was good to see my grandparents (who are still going strong in their mid 80’s!) and I helped dad out with getting the new car wash’s computer systems setup.  Tried getting in touch with Phil, but no dice…

And while we’re on the topic of Phil…  Just because you don’t have comments setup in your blog doesn’t mean that nobody is looking :p  And please, please, setup your RSS / Atom feed - it makes things so much simpler for me

Yay, the tea arrived!  And yes, the dangerous Canadian aloe and spider plants also made it safely! :D  I need to find a small pot or something to put it in now!

I’m flying out to Texas tomorrow night to visit my grandparents who’re visiting us.  Flight leaves just after midnight (I suppose that would make it flying out the day after tomorrow night… but I digress) and arrives in Houston at 5:30AM where there’s 2.5 hour layover, followed by a short 45 minute flight to Corpus Christi.  It’s like red-eye flight from hell…  Ah well, it’ll be fun.

Today was the day for the Santa Cruz Science Fair. I was a judge for Physics in Juniors division - trying to rank all these eager students with their project is alot more difficult than I had expected, though it was still good to see lots of kids putting their mind to work on projects like the ones I saw today. The biggest difficulty I was having is trying to put myself in their Grade 6 to 8 shoes - coming in with close to 20 years of education under my belt, for the most parts, I was able to see where they had excelled, but also where they made some missteps. Specifically, for some of the projects, if they had made that last theoretical leap, it would be something that would’ve been really interesting and gave much better understanding of the world around them… but alas, not many made that final breakthrough.

There were some very interesting projects, though. Since I probably shouldn’t talk about projects that I judged, I’ll talk about other interesting projects that I saw. One of them was search on whether you can teach old dog new tricks. Their conclusion? For tricks, age of the dog didn’t really matter. Some 10 years old dogs learned tricks on the first try, while some puppies had difficulties picking it up after 10 times. There was a report about having office plants (conclusion: office plants help if they can get direct sunlight. Otherwise, not enough oxygen gets generated to matter). A project on hooking up (girls hook up because they’re lonely, boys hook up because they’re drunk… And boys most likely break up because the girl cheats, and girls most likely break up due to losing interest), and another one in difference in creativity and destructiveness between guys and girls (conclusion: inconclusive, as you’d expect :p ). The quality of projects varied wildly but there were many interesting topics being pursued, which made judging and perusing a joy.

Lately, I’ve been pondering about possibly attending Burning Man (more info here). I think it would be an interesting experience, but that’s really not the reason why I started thinking about it. I think the actual reason why it’s drawing me in is the fact that I’ll get to build something. I think that’s one of the things that I miss about solar car - not having something physical to work with, ponder about, and lose sleep over. Some of the ideas I’ve had is giant LED lighted screen (not feasible, it’ll need too many LEDs which are fairly expensive), giant rotating LED screen (more interesting engineering problem - you have to turn them on and off at the right point, and you need less LEDs… but you now need a way to supply power to a rotating apparatus), or an old style telephone network with switching area (which will be fun project to hunt down the old phones).

But it seems like no matter what gets done, it’ll take whole bunch of time, effort, and money which is different from solar car in that it’ll be my own money. So for the time being, I think I’m going to try to express my creative urge by trying to design t-shirt designs for Threadless. Much cheaper, and if I crash and burn, I can always Ctrl+Z.

A friend is sending me some Earl Grey de la Creme from Distintly Tea in Waterloo. Since she’s shipping over a package anyway, I asked her to put something interesting in it and send it to me…

So, she decided to send me some small spider plants and aloe from her house, backed in a small empty vanilla extract bottle, completely forgetting that vegetable and other plant products are not allowed to be shipped into US. And she even listed the content as “Tea and Small house plants”.

I guess we’ll see how thorough US Customs will be. It should get here in about a week and I really really hope the plants make it here, but I’d give that about 5% odds. Chances are, the package will arrive here sans the small vanilla extract bottle and maybe some kind of note inside the package…

I love getting thins in the mail, even if they’re just bills, so I guess I’ll have something to look forward to and ponder over the next week or so. And for some reason, checking the mail sort of reminds me of my favourite chapter from The Little Prince.

This is so cool! And the actors they chose actually makes sense too! Too bad they couldn’t figure out how to do the last part whent they sat on the couch.

Here’s an interesting article about Hines Ward Jr, a Korean-American biracial Super Bowl MVP. Korean society in general do have a stereotypical view of people who’s not pure-blooded and it is somewhat xenophobic (though probably not as much as, say, Japanese). However, they also have this idol culture where they look up to anyone who has made it big (though it’s mostly for actors, singers, etc) so it’s interesting to see these two views intersect in this way. Everything I know about Korea is at least 12 years out of date, so who knows what it’s like right now… but hopefully people like Hines Ward Jr. will change how Korean society views these issues.

For some reason, many people I talk to (some of which don’t have blogs or don’t post about these things :p ) seems to be searching for, longing for, and being confused over relationships. I’m also aware of 2 weddings and 4 proposals, so things are definitely starting to happen in that sense as well. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it quite yet - I suppose I’m looking out yonder to see what’s there, but I don’t think it’s one of those things where actively doing things like going out to singles events or signing up for a dating service will really help. I’ll just go about in my day-to-day activities that I enjoy doing and see what happens from there.

Talking about that, I’ll a judge for the Santa Cruz Science Fair next weekend, which should prove to be interesting. Apparently the science fair got fair amount of attention over Mary Jane for Pain project that was presented couple of years ago in which using Marijuana Muffins for pain management was discussed. Hopefully my 5 years of engineering school will be enough to judge some of these projects.

Hmm, what else… I’ve increased my 2 mile run time to about 8.5 minute miles, though I’ve pulled something on my hip which prevented me from doing any further running. It seems like so far, it’s things like aches and strains instead of cardivascular limitations that’s limiting my runs… hopefully once I learn to work out those kinks and do proper stretches before I run, I’ll be able to run longer. I’ve found out that the treadmills at the gym maxes out at 11mph, so another interesting exercise would be learning how long I can run for at that pace, just to see my top exertion level. Who knows, maybe I won’t even be able to run 100 meters at that speed. I’ve been also participating little more in UCSC Badminton Club - I’ve been there for the third time yesterday and I think I’m slowly getting better.

Instead of making these Sunday posts, I’ll try to make more frequent updates throughout the week.