Kiwi

This is soo sweet T_T

nice song

I was listening to "love someone tonight" Delilah the other night and I heard this song that I really liked. There was a section of the lyrics that was quite moving. I didn't remember the name so I emailed Delilah to ask her. She responded just a day later with the song name and artist. I was quite impressed. So here is the music video of "Sometimes When We Touch" by Dan Hill. This is a love song made in the 70s, and everything would be perfect if the singer didn't look like the caveman from the Geico commercial.



Lyrics:
Sometimes When We Touch - Dan Hill

You ask me if I love you
And I choke on my reply
I'd rather hurt you honestly
Than mislead you with a lie
And who am I to judge you
On what you say or do?
I'm only just beginning to see the real you

And sometimes when we touch
The honesty's too much
And I have to close my eyes and hide
I wanna hold you til I die
Til we both break down and cry
I wanna hold you till the fear in me subsides

Romance and all its strategy
Leaves me battling with my pride
But through the insecurity
Some tenderness survives
I'm just another writer
Still trapped within my truth
A hesitant prize fighter
Still trapped within my youth

And sometimes when we touch
The honesty's too much
And I have to close my eyes and hide
I wanna hold you til I die
Til we both break down and cry
I wanna hold you till the fear in me subsides

At times I'd like to break you
And drive you to your knees
At times I'd like to break through
And hold you endlessly

At times I understand you
And I know how hard you've tried
I've watched while love commands you
And I've watched love pass you by

At times I think we're drifters
Still searching for a friend
A brother or a sister
But then the passion flares again


I especially like the part where he sings "I wanna hold you til I die
Til we both break down and cry I wanna hold you till the fear in me subsides". It just seems like such a tender moment :)

fun screenshots in LOTRO

I am on my last day in LOTRO beta. If I don't buy it now my character will get erased. I haven't decided yet but I probably won't end up buying it right now. A level 10 char is not really worth saving. And MMORPGs are so time consuming as it is. I am not sure I want to get sucked in. I did have alot of fun playing the beta though. I grouped with some random person yesterday and it was fun doing quests. The surrounding scenery and atmosphere really is the most beautiful part about the game. For example, I accidentally wandered into the marshes one time, and I didn't notice that it was getting dark. So I was walking slowly towards the outline of a ruin in the marsh when suddenly it was dusk, the marsh fog rose and surrounded me and it was pitch dark. The ruin's sillouette disappeared and I can see nothing around except some swarming insects that likes to follow you around. I was totally lost. The music also changed to a dark creepy tone. Everything was very well done and I decided not to go there again after dark :)
Marsh when it is sunny


Marsh at dusk


Creepy night marsh


The other fun thing I did was this: I would never do this in real life so it was very satisfying to do it with such realism in a game.









everything looks better with a cloak in Bree town


Rich people ride horses, poor people walk..


Lastly, my favorite place: Celondim, the Elve's starting town.

One down, many to go

So Regi and I formed a plan to go to the Beijing Summer Olympics next year in August. I have always wanted to see an Olympics opening ceremony. It is one of the things on my "To Do" list. She is very excited about it as well, especially the men's gymnastic team ;). We finally submitted our ticket applications at cosport.com yesterday. I was keeping an close eye on when they are releasing tickets so to maximize our chances. Now I have never applied for Olympics tickets before so I don't know if it is always like this. But the ticket application process is incredibly vague and convoluted. They make you apply for tickets, but they can't tell you where you are sitting or how much they really are or if you are really going to get them. BUT if for any reason you got the tickets you requested you HAVE to buy them. So basically the whole thing is a crap shoot. You just go in and hope for the best. I am also kind of annoyed that the price discrepancies is so big between tickets in China and tickets for foreigners. The lowest level ticket for opening ceremony in China is 200 yuan (30 bucks). The lowest level ticket for Americans is 1500 yuan. >_< they suck so much!!

Anyway, I know all this will be worth it next year when I am standing in Beijing :)

P.S. funny story: A couple of years ago, Regi drove through Houston and I happen to be there as well. So She, Velius and I met together for bubble tea. Regi never had bubble tea before so we told her to try some. She tried one sip and almost choked on a bubble, so she asked us what is the bubble. Apparently we jokingly told her it was frog eggs (Now I seriously don't remember saying this -_-b) We all laughed and left it at that. But apparently Regi thought we were serious. She thought she ate a frog egg this entire time. She was so disgusted and resolved never to eat anything with Velius and me ever again. -_-! she calls this the "bubble tea incident". She finally looked it up a couple weeks ago and realized what it was.

LOTRO

So today I finally opened up LOTRO beta and played through the introduction quest arc. The graphics is definitely awesome. Everything is so beautiful, the trees, flowers, lakes and ancient ruins. After some consideration, I have discarded my Elven hunter (yes I know blasphemy) and made a Human female Lore-Master (druid/mage). I am sure Velius is going to kill me if he looked it up as I didn't really pay attention to any of the stats and strength/weaknesses. But I already created it so there =P. I had to get rid of Legolas wanna be as he was making this grunting sound everytime he hits during melee and it is driving me nuts. My nice new human is perfectly silent as she clubs bandits and wolves on the head with her staff. The storyline basically follows the same timeline as LOTR but you are on the peripheral. You will hear about the deeds of those Baggin hobbits and the fellowship but you won't really be involved in the main quest. It creates a kind of realism without actually allowing you to interfere with the main storyline of the book. Basically going through the intro story arc gets you to level 5. It is too early yet to see what kind of unique skills my human has. So far everything is pretty much standard MMORPG: quests, skills, leveling. I finally learned the Lute skill at level 5. Now I only need to figure out where I can buy a lute and I am on my way to rockstar-dom. The only thing I didn't like was the UI, all the labeling text seems unnecessarily big and it is giving me a headache especially when among multiple people as you totally can't make them out. It is also very laggy in town as usual. I also had the honor of being Gold Spammed during my stay in Middle Earth. 1 G for the very cheap price of 8.99 ( I have 7 silver at level 5). Do they already have sweatshops for this? It is only Beta people!!

And of course, how can any MMORPG be good without some domestic animal

dream and reality

To continue my chinese proverb lessons, I want to expound on the one that says "What you think of during the day you will dream at night". I really felt the accurateness of ancient people when I had this crazy dream last night. But before I get that far, I must start at the beginning. I had a pretty rough week because we are doing our final test pass before release. So basically I've been working 14 hour days and getting no sleep so my brain has been fried. So I finally finished everything Friday night on time. I got home, completely exhausted, and then I remembered that I signed up for Lord Of The Ring Online open beta last week and it is their first day on Friday. So I figure I would load it up, take a look for 5 minutes and crash. The game actually has beautiful graphics. The gameplay seems pretty similar to the other 100 MMORPGs out there (They do have this pretty cool music system where you can really play a song on your lute using your keyboard instead of just canned music) . So I created a woodland elven hunter by the name of Dashiel(Legolas was taken -_-) and did the first quest. Everything went pretty much according to plan without surprises. So I turnd it off and went to bed. And then the dream begin: I found myself first at a grass plain talking to some elves, they told me that the evil one (whoever it is) has risen again and we must recruit everyone to battle the darkness. So I courageously said of course I will join. Then since apparently I don't know how to do anything, they sent me to the terrorist, err I mean rebel training camp which looked just like my office. I got there and found out that they have converted the whole place into a obstacle course with multiple games like at a country fair. So I found myself spent days going through the obstacle course over and over again. The details are fuzzy now but I distinctly remember one where I had to shoot at some poor animal nailed to a wall using a bow and arrow. The poor little thing kinda exploded when it got hit (I am not bloodthirsty, really I am not). And there is also another one where I had to walk across this room on a wooden beam while on the floor there are tons of mice running around. It was horrible. Just as I was getting so tired of the obstacle course, I found myself back at the archery game. I found that after days of practice, I can successfully blow up the furry critters with no problem (YAY!). So my next goal is to shoot three at once using three arrows on my bow! Just as I was getting totally lost, this elf that looked surprisingly like my LOTRO character came up to me and started to teach me how to do it. mmm... and just as I was getting everything under control and gotten three arrows on my bow, alas, I woke up to another dreary annoying rainy day.....

ETA: Ender was asking what guitar I have. It is a Model AA31 by Ovation Applause. Apparently it doesn't exist on the internet Lol(I looked). Anyway my teacher says it is a "traveling" guitar since its back is made of plastic and not wood.

trivia night record

it was so sad that I didn't even want to post about it. But then we must face the truth even if it hurts. Due to the unfortunate loss of Plop and the most ridiculous questions ever, we again was last place at Trivia Night with a world record shattering 14 points out of 90 something. 6/9 sections of the quiz we got 0 points. The good thing is that we are so famous now people kinda expected us to be in last place so no surprise there. The obscure question contained NCAA trivia like which Kansas coach had a losing record in the history of Kansas basketball, and the furthest bracket that a 5/12 upset ever went, which teams it was and what was the shooting percentage (or some nonsense like that). There were also questions like who was reputed to be the "most handsome man in America" in 1863, which was JOhn Wilkes Booth apparently. *headdesk*. Anyway, to sum it up, we sucked and the pitcher of beer was ours :)

speaking of guitar hero....

There is this saying in Chinese that "all smart people think alike". At least when it comes to making money. This saying can be exemplified by Harmonix's latest natural extension in their music game line: Rock Band. The press release explains it as:

today it has been revealed that Harmonix is working on a game called "Rock Band," which will let gamers perform music from the world’s biggest rock artists with their friends as a virtual band using drum, bass/lead guitar and microphone peripherals, in addition to offering "deep online connectivity."

Other feature they are touting is that they are going to use the original artist tracks this time instead of good imitations. I don't know if I care about that, I thought the imitations sounded pretty darn good in Guitar Hero. The "deep online connectivity" they are talking about is the mode where you can collaborate with people over the live network (and the equivalent for ps3). I wonder if it will be as fun though when you can't jam with your friend next to you. I saw comment that brings up another good point, when you have 2 guitars, a microphone and a drum set in your living room, how do you get all those moving notes onto the tv screen without making people dizzy? Something to ponder about and look forward to...

p.s. I also had to look twice to make sure it wasn't some April Fool's joke.

wannabe guitar hero

I happened to be given a guitar last year by one of my old coworker. Since it was just sitting there and I was inspired by all that Guitar Hero playing at Velius', I decided to take beginning guitar lessons in January this year. Our local community college offers a adult group lesson class at night. The cost is about 120 bucks for 8 hours of lesson which is not bad as far as classes go. It was a pretty fun class although he taught us way more stuff than we can actually learn. Since it was an adult education class there is no exams nor grades nor anything that can motivate one to actually practice afterwards. So I decided to record myself playing this first song I learned. In a way it forces me to practice so to actually be able to play this song in one sitting. I think it will be amusing to come back a year later and see if I have improved or deteriorated (or practiced even -_-!). So, here is my attempt at Youtubing :) Me playing House of Rising Sun by the Animals



And if you don't want to hear me butcher a perfectly good song, here is the real version with real guitar playing :).

PAX reinforcement!

Let me extend the invitation to the Veggies to come hang out during Penny Arcade Expo 2007! It is the August 24-26th weekend. You probably read Velius's post about early registration, etc. Personally I think the difference really isn't that much. I didn't pre register last year and there was plenty of room. But just to keep it on everybody's mind. Here are all the reasons you should come:

1) I have lots of space for people to stay (well not as much as Veliu's but enough).
2) Free car rides everywhere + tour guide
3) tons of cool stuff including the Guitar Hero tournament and Game music concerts.
4) Seattle is like the best around August with sunny weather everyday.
5) This is going to be the biggest PAX since its start.

You only have to take one day off if you like, get here early Friday and leave Sunday. Think about it people!!! :)

amazing technology

Recently I noticed M is watching chinese tv on the computer all the time. I was curious since I know she doesn't do all that p2p downloading stuff that I do so I asked her. Apparently she has discovered this software called UUsee from just surfing on random chinese websites. It is really an incredible thing. It is a FREE online streaming television network that uses the p2p technology. So basically you download a client that acts like internet tv. It has a bunch of channels like a real cable network with schedules of various tv shows, movies, anything you can possibly think of. Basically you can watch it immediately just like watching real tv, of course the more people who are watching the faster the stream is. I tried it out tonight and there was almost no lag. The only time I noticed lag was when we were watching the overly popular Chinese New Years Show, and that was only about 20 minute buffering. It has a DVR like option also. The quality is not bad either. I am so impressed that this exists and is completely free. It indicates that the piracy industry in China has climbed to an awesome godlike state. Look, one channel is playing the wide screen format of "300" with appropriate chinese subtitles as I am typing this.

Triumphant!

We finally climbed our way out of loser valley yesterday at Trivia Night after hours of hard study and memorization...... ok ok, not really. We asked Plop (See media 1001 blog) to join us and he was totally helpful ;). We finished about middle of the pack with 59 out of 90 points. The winner of the $1 pitchers got 33 muhhahahaha! There were actually quite a few interesting questions this round and the rounds were very exciting. The categories ranged from Broadway shows, the Year 1999, one named celebrities, and best supporting actors from the Oscars. Some of the highlights:

1) What was the real name of the song usually called Teenage Wasteland (Velius! you should know this one)!
2) The full definition of the acronym NASDAQ - we were totally clueless
3) Bonus: name the 10 plagues of Egypt from the Bible - We got pretty close on that one

All in all, an extremely satisfying night! :)

Answers:

1) Bubba O'REilly- This is the song House was finger playing in one of the first season when Vogler was still there.
2) National Assocation of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations
3) Fires from the Sky, Lice, Beetles, Cattle Death, Death of First Born, Locusts, Darkness, raining Frogs, Water turned to Blood, Flies, Boils. Those poor Egyptians.

WE rock!

Completely within expectations, we were again LAST PLACE at yesterday's Trivia night despite an herculean effort. There were no sports questions but we were totally stumped by obscure movie quotes and text quoted from books. How can I possibly remember passages from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? There was also an entire section about obscure coffee beans *headdesk* Well anyway, we were again the proud recipient of the $1 loser pitcher. Everybody in the pub cheered for us !:). The good thing is that we got 22 points, 5 more than last week!! Next week the saga continues as we courageously try to climb out of the loser valley.

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day!! Now I don't really have much feeling attached to this popular Irish holiday with an green obsession. But it is a good excuse as any to go do some partying. K really wanted to go to an authentic Irish pub with some Irish music and beer so the three of us drove around downtown Seattle looking for a happening pub. We finally ended up at Fado in Pioneer Square. It seemed pretty cool as it says "Irish Pub" on the front underneath the name and there was a long line with lots of green covered people so I figure we were at the right place. Only on St. Patrick's day that pubs can charge $15 for cover but as K said, we must have the authentic experience! The line was actually pretty long but entertaining as they had the Seattle Firefighter's Pipes & Drums group doing some traditional bagpiping out front. They also had a beer stand outside for the poor souls waiting. The bagpipes definitely brought some party atmosphere. It is a weird combination as the club next door is pumping some heavy tech beats in between. I felt like doing some riverdancing but it was too cold =P. After about an half hour wait we finally got inside. The pub is actually pretty big with multiple rooms. It is too dark to really make out anything but I liked the fact it is roomy. In the second room, they had the McKinley Brothers doing some acoustic jamming. That was fun as they played alot of oldies like Brown Eyed Girl and I Love Rock and Roll (man I hear this everywhere now since GH). So we spent the rest of the night jumping around and having a good time. All in all, it was a very cool "Authentic" St. Patrick's Day celebration complete with Bagpiping and drinks and some weird old guy who keeps trying to give K a back massage (>_<)

beer and trivia night

Tonight my friend and I went to trivia night at a local pub "The Celtic Bayou" which as the name suggest, is a mix of Irish and Louisiana food. A very weird combination if you ask me. We didn't really go in with much confidence since we are by no means trivia kings. But it was a fun way to spent a night. The prizes goes as follows:

1st place: 35 dollars
2nd place: 25 dollars
3rd place: 15 dollars
last place: $1 pitcher of beer

Since the top 3 is pretty much out of our grasp, we figure it would be pretty cool to get last place, (with proper effort of course). The quiz had about 60 questions, ranging from current events to sports to weird deaths(Edward II was weeeirrd.) As expected, we were able to sweep the entertainment news and completely miss all the sports questions. The bonus round was TV theme song trivia and we failed terribly at that as well. So in the end, we have achieved our lofty goal of coming in last at 17 /60 points. The graders had to make sure we didn't try to deliberately throw the game. -_-. Since we were only two people and I don't drink we ended up giving the $1 loser pitcher to a group of 10 sitting next to us. We plan to come back next week as well, if we can keep our current record pretty soon we will be the most popular losers in the pub ;)

Impressive...

And this is why Dukies are awesome ;)
Article on MSNBC. Also I didn't know you can earn money from Metacafe?? is it like Googel Ads? hmm..

Tooting my own horn for a bit :)

This is probably going to be the only 15 seconds of fame in my life. Laughing at silly names are not allowed! Well ok, It is totally a groaning party whenever we have meetings to talk about this stuff. Because people can't stop snickering at me. I was totally embarrassed but at the same time, when will I ever see my name on a commercial website again?. Also for the record, they totally picked the name without telling me first. These are meant to be samples for beginners so of course they will continue to put up better and more worthy games but mine was the smallest and simplest so it made the deadline. :) Yay me!

Also, if you are just dying to make your dream game, they are hosting a competition for the best game developed in 4 months with some nice prizes.

A totally different sort of party

In the continuation of my social experimentation, I went to a totally different sort of party this Sunday. I was invited to a "Pride and Prejudice" viewing party. It all came about quite accidentaly as I was having lunch of my coworkers and some of her friends whom I never met. One of them mentioned that they are doing this party and I guess I squeaked in excitement, forcing them to invite me =P. Anyway, for those who don't know, the quintessential edition of "Pride and Prejudice" adaptations is the BBC/A&E miniseries starring Colin Firth. It is close to 6 hours long and officially brought about the revival of Jane Austen fever in '98. I already seen this like 10 times but it is always fun to see it with a group, kind of like a LOTR sitting (but much shorter haha).

So anyways, I was a little nervous since I have never met any of these people before and my coworker wasn't even going to be there. But anything for Jane Austen! There I met about 30 other people. They turned out to be extremely nice and interesting people. Most of them belong to this Christian Fellowship mailing list so that is how they know each other. All the guys there pretty much worked at The Company. We had scones, cream puffs and tea and watched English gentlemen and ladies flirt on a big projection screen in the basement. I had a great time. This is a totally different sort of party from the one I went to last week. There was no drinking, people were extremely nice and polite. The conversation was stimulating. The only downside is most are introverts like me , which makes starting conversations even more difficult than talking to drunk extroverts. In the case of latter, you just have to stand and let them speak. So more practice to be had to have good conversation that does not always start with "so where do you work" especially since I was the only stranger there. But I am glad I made that leap there. And for those that are thinking "P&P, eww girl cooties!", I have to report all the guys there liked it. Even the ones that were reluctant to watch it :).

and I thought I was the only one

I was just coming to do a post on this Akon song I heard on the radio yesterday and how I think it is exactly the same as the R kelly song Ignition. I was all prepared to delve deep in analysis to prove my point until I saw this. Why do people have to get ahead of me like that hmmph. Now I saw in one of the post that Akon supposedly "sampled" the R Kelly song to make his own song. But seriously, if Vanilla Ice can't get away with Ice Ice Baby (Under Pressure by Queen). Why should Akon get away basically singing the exact same song as R Kelly but with different lyrics. At least Vanilla Ice tried to do a totally different song.

ETA: 30 second survey for a friend at school.

Jumping On the Bandwagon

We all know that "The Departed" is the newly minted Oscar's Best Film of the Year, giving Martin Scorsese his first oscar after more films than can be counted. He actually jokingly said this is his first movie that actually had a plot. The ironic thing is of course that "The Departed" is basically a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong movie "Infernal Affairs". I thought it was funny when the script writer won for "adapting the other movie". Is that really a huge accomplishment to take a movie that was made just a couple of year ago and switch around the actors and add more bloody scenes and call it best film of the year? To add insult to injury, the announcer lady said it was a Japanese movie when doing the introduction. I feel like it is such a ripoff. It saddens me to think the audience in America will never see how great the original was (which by the way I actually saw at Velius' during a party, good times :)).

Anyway, I was just discussing this with my cousin in China when she mentions that there is a rumor going around of Hollywood buying another Andrew Lau movie "Confession of Pain" featuring the awesome Tony Leung. Anyway, I haven't seen the movie yet so I can't comment on whether it will be good *runs to download*. This gets me thinking though, does this mean that there will be a whole slew of remakes of Asian movies now that one has earned the prestige of an Oscar? I think I will be both gratified by the recognition and annoyed at the fact the original will never be seen. Although I hope that if this does happen, it will jilt the mainland movie scene out of their ridiculous pseudo kung fu epic movie trend they got going on. They all suck! When are they going to realize nooexistent dialog, extravagant costumes and no plot does not a movie make?

ETA: I really shouldn't post after midnight, I had to edit this like 10 times cause I was writing nonsense