Luggage Found!

Someone from Dragon Air called me this afternoon that my luggage was found and should arrive in Chengdu on the 9:30pm flight. When it arrives, they will get a courier to deliver the bag to my hotel. It's 11:40pm now and I still haven't heard anything yet. The hotel is in the middle of a university campus and there are very few lights so I'm not holding my breath.

I opened a bank account today; I feel more and more Chinese every day.

Chengdu Sauna

Wow, I think today was worse weather-wise than yesterday. The temperature was about the same, but it seemed more humid, if that's possible. I skipped breakfast today since it is pretty lame at this hotel. There were some buns, a couple of spicy sides, porridge, and warm soy milk. It just made me sweat more.

I got to see the factory construction site this morning. Leon said that last Thursday, he took some pictures of the site and there was no crane. Incredibly, the workers have hoisted a crane today even though the site didn't have electricity for the past two days. I'm so used to seeing heavy machinery at construction sites, usually yellow. In China, it's more like a lot of workers with wheelbarrows. I guess labor is more available than capital.

The rest of the day was sitting at the PMI office, sweating. Even though the A/C was on the entire time, Leon and I were sweating profusely... ok, more me than Leon. I'm so glad I didn't end up working in Singapore. We had a couple of meetings and I spoke with the accountant about product cost, inventory management, and manufacturing scheduling. Exciting stuff to talk about on my vacation. Lunch was bento-like boxes with rice and three dishes for $1-$2 RMB and it was pretty good.

I spoke with Dragonair again this morning and they still cannot determine whether it got on the plane in LAX or lost somewhere in HKIA. They don't even show the bag in their entire system, usually a bad sigh. I also went to Wal*Mart to buy more shirts, socks, and underwear. Pretty soon, my entire wardrobe will be the 2007 collection from Wal*Mart.

Still No Luggage

I called Dragonair to check on my luggage. They were pretty nice on the phone but have no idea where my bag is. I guess I'm stuck with my Wal*Mart clothes until they find my bag or I go buy more. The problem is that I already bought a 2XL shirt and it's kinda tight; that's the biggest shirt size they have. :(

Today was pretty a day of meetings... and sweating. I don't think I ever sweat so much with so little cooling effect. In addition, everywhere we go they serve hot tea. Can I get a glass of ice water?! A supplier brought us to lunch, at the same restaurant they took us to this past May, and we ended up toasting a lot which meant drinking a lot of Budweiser. The last time I drank so much alcohol was back in college, ~20 years ago. I guess this is how business is done in Asia: eating, drinking, and KTV.

Mirror Lake Hotel - 镜湖宾馆

The hotel we're staying at is inside the Southwest Jiaotung University campus. The Chinese characters translates to mirror lake and there is a small pond outside the main entrance. Of course, where you have standing water, you have mosquitoes... and of course, my bug repellent is in my lost luggage. In the hotel room, there is a plug-in incense burning thing to get rid of mosquitoes. This is actually the 2nd room I got; the first one didn't have a refrigerator.


View outside my 4th floor hotel room window

Dragonair

Leon just told me that Dragonair called at 11pm last night and had no news about my luggage, i.e., they have no idea where it is. I hope I don't have to buy more clothes here in China. The shirt I bought was 2XL and it was still a bit tight. Hopefully the problem was in HKG and not LAX though my fear that my bag is sitting in a corner somewhere back in LA.



My meal on Dragonair: chicken noodles (at least they gave us something to eat on a <3 hour flight). The prepacked orange juice had an expiration date of "04 08 07" though; not sure how to read that other than August 4, 2007, which is 2 weeks expired. Of course I saw this after I drank it.

VPN

Well, I found a way around the firewall that's blocking the blogspot.com URL. If I connect back to the US through the company VPN, it lets me access everything since I'm connected to the Internet back in Irvine. Interesting...

Lost Luggage

Sigh... I knew that security lapse at LAX is a bad sign. After getting off the plane at Chengdu, I waited and waited and waited for my one bag and it didn't show up. I had checked it in from LAX and the tag said it was checked all the way to CTU. That means I'm now stuck in China without any of my clothes and also all my power adapters for both phones, extra batteries for the camera, and MP3 charge cable. My guess is that my bag didn't get a TSA X-ray sticker and somebody held it up. Cathay Pacific has 3 flights per day from LAX to HKG and even more flights from HKG to CTU so hopefully my bag is coming soon.

Since we have a business meeting tomorrow, Leon thought I should get some clothes since I only have what I was wearing on the plane (white t-shirt and khaki shorts). We ended up going to a Wal*Mart down the street and I bought a shirt, a pair of beige colored dress pants, a belt, and some underwear for ~RMB300. The shirt was okay but the pants has a small metal thingy with Chinese characters on it. I felt like a FOB just holding it... :(

Chengdu is hot and humid, just like last time. This time, we're staying in a hotel inside the Southwest Jiaotung University. It's not as nice as the one downtown but for only RMB220 per night, it has a working A/C unit and Internet access so no complaints. The cigarette smoke smell is not even that strong! :)

Leon also got me a SIM chip for my Motorola RAZR so now I have a phone number in China. However, my phone only has support for a few languages and Chinese is not on the list so there are a lot of black boxes where Chinese characters should be. We also recharged the phone with more minutes but I couldn't figure out how to check the number of minutes available. It'll probably run out during an emergency call or something. Since I've been up for the past 30 hours, I'm going to sleep and dream that they found my luggage.

Great Firewall of China

Strange... I can get to my blogger.com dashboard and create new posts but anything with blogspot.com in the address gets blocked. That means I can post messages but I can't see them while I'm in China. Oh well, it's not like I have any readers in China anyway.

Hong Kong

I just landed at Hong Kong International Airport. The flight here was about 13.5 hours but it seemed like it took forever.

At LAX, I witnessed a huge security hole. The check-in procedure, for Cathay Pacific anyway, is to go to the counter, check-in, get your luggage tagged, then bring it to one of the X-ray machines at the end of each counter. I took my bag to the one next to Eva Air and handed it to a TSA person. As I was walking away, I noticed that the X-ray machine was not working. There were several repair access hatches open and tools were everywhere. Curious, I walked back to where I dropped off my bag and saw APS (people who move your luggage) employees pick up my bag and loading it on to a cart. I thought they were going to bring the bags to another X-ray machine but rather, they brought it back to the Cathay counter and stuck them on the conveyor belt. I was there for about 5 minutes and saw at least 10+ bags bypass the X-ray screening. Great security... the X-ray machine is down so we won't screen any bags. Sigh...

BTW, LAX is a friggin' disgrace. Bradley international terminal is a dump, even compared to the airport in Chengdu. Right now I'm using the free WiFi at HKIA. LAX of course, only has paid acesss (T-mobile) to the Internet. Even Portland airport has free WiFi.

On the flight over, I also noticed that the flight path was slightly different from my LAX-HKG flight in May. Instead of flying over Taiwan, we took a more southern route and bypassed the area between Taiwan and mainland China. I think this was due to typhoon Sepat which should be off the west coast of Taiwan right now. I sat in seat 68K which is the window seat in the last row on the right. I kept looking out the window during the last two hours, partially expecting to see the eye of the storm but ended up just seeing a lot of clouds.

My connecting flight to Chengdu is in ~3 hours. There are so many flights at HKIA that my flight is not listed yet so I don't know what gate I should be at. I should go find out before my flight departs.


Clouds...


... and more clouds, but nothing that looks like a typhoon


Flight path around southern end of Taiwan instead of over Taipei last time

Supertyphoon Sepat

Great... it looks like Sepat has been upgraded to a supertyphoon with current wind speed ~140 knots and 43 foot waves. It also appears that it will cross over Taiwan on the 18th and make landfall in China on the 19th. Hopefully my flight can fly over the storm and I can get in/out of HKG. I have a window seat this time; it would be cool to see a supertyphoon from above. It should look like a category 4 or 5 hurricane.

[image removed]

Typhoon Sepat

I'm flying out of LAX this Saturday morning and landing in Hong Kong on Sunday. I just found out that a typhoon is going to hit that area this weekend.

[image removed]

Hong Kong is in the shaded area... that's not good, right?!

Yellow Warning Light

I ran out of gas on the freeway yesterday. The low fuel light has been on for about 2 days but since I didn't drive anywhere far, I thought I had enough gas to get to Brea for a NewSong CAM BBQ. Everything went well until I got on the 57 freeway. Suddenly, the car started losing power and the tachometer needle dropped towards zero. The engine was still running so I quickly crossed 5 lanes of traffic and took the Katella exit. There was a Tim McGraw/Faith Hill concert at the Honda Center but since it was still early (5pm), there was not too much traffic. Not being familiar to the area, I gambled and took a right turn off the exit and headed east on Katella Avenue. After about 4-5 blocks without seeing a gas station, my 4Runner stalls out. Since the car was designed with power steering and power brakes, it was really hard to drive. I managed to pull into a parking lot but since I effectively had no brakes, I "drove" over a concrete barrier and almost hit a tree. At this point, I was resigned into calling AAA for help, and being really late to the BBQ. I though I would give it one try before giving up and to my surprise, the car started. I got on to Katella again and luckily found a Shell station on the next block. I now know that the 4Runner gas tank holds 17.054 gallons of fuel.

New Yorker Cartoon

Sound Check

Hmm, during sound check this morning, the sound engineers told me to turn down my bass amp volume on stage. The dial ended up at less than 1/2 the gain even though I couldn't hear myself too well; I had it cranked all the way up during rehearsal on Thursday. It's still better than my old Peavey combo amp but not sure if it's worth the ~$600 I spent. I guess I'll hold off on a preamp until I get a rack case.

Also, the drummer asked during sound check if we can turn down the bass in our monitor mix since he can hear all my mistakes. Sigh... I think I played better for the actual worship service but it was a bit discouraging nevertheless. :(

Bass Rig

This is my current setup:

- Yamaha RBX250 4-string bass (from 1992)
- BBE DI-100x direct box
- Carvin DMC1000 amp
- Eden D210T cabinet

I'm a bit disappointed in the volume during rehearsal. The setup is not very loud but should be sufficient for monitoring purposes since I'm also sending signal to the main house system. I think it's because the impedance of the cabinet is 8 ohms which drop my amp to 225W per channel RMS. I plugged my amp into a 4x10 cab in the ministry center and it was much louder. Also, since my bass has passive pickups and BBE DI is not a real preamp, I'm probably not sending enough signal to the amp. I either need to get a better preamp or bridge the amp which should double the power output.

I'm going to leave it for now. The next purchase needs to be a rack case since I'm carting the amp around in the original Carvin cardboard box. :(

Another One Bites the Dust

I just found out that another one of our undergrad finance hires from USC last year is quitting. Out of 5 hires, that leaves only one left in Irvine: two quit and two were forced to leave due to work visa problems (although we transferred one of them to Singapore). I'm not sure if it's just new graduates trying to figure out what they want to do with their life or if I've been here so long that I don't see problems.

Paging Nicolaus Copernicus

Wow. One stupid guy I can understand, but 56% of the audience thought the Sun revolves around the Earth! It would have been even funnier if he used the 50/50 and it eliminated Mars and Venus.

Head Injury

I watched an episode of CSI:Miami several nights ago where one of the CSI guys got shot in the head. He was in the hospital and was asking for his sister who died in a previous episode. A doctor commented that in severe head trauma, the victim may sustain memory loss.

Is this true? I'd hate to sustain a head injury and wake up somewhere asking for Shirley. That would suck.

Used bass cabinet

I'm off to pick up a used bass cab I found on Craigslist. It's an Eden D210T which has dual 10" speakers. It's about 60 lbs. which is close to what my Peavey amp weighs. Now all I need to do is to find an amp for the cabinet. I'm still debating on getting a real bass amp head or a PA amp (Carvin DCM1000/$300) connected to my BBE DI-100x.

Pupils browse porn on donated laptops

Reuters

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.

NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children's laptops.

"Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," NAN said.

A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.

Great... I'm sure my tax dollars are involved somehow. I thought there were a lot of computers available in Nigeria already, judging from the volume of email spam I get from there.

LA Galaxy

Boy they suck. I watched most of the soccer match between LA Galaxy and Chelsea on a Spanish channel (no ESPN). It was a pretty lopsided game although the final score was only 1-0 Chelsea. They were much more precise in their passing and plays; the Galaxy looked like a high school team compared to Chelsea.

David Beckham came in at about the 36 minute mark in the 2nd half. I think he touched the ball 5 or 6 times and they let him have the final corner kick. He has an ankle injury or something so he didn't play much.

==========

In the U.S., we have official sponsorship for cars, cameras, etc. I just checked out Chelsea FC's website and there is a betting section. They have official online betting partners: Power Paddy Casino, Coral Poker, and a sports book. I wonder if they have an official beer or pub sponsor too.

Also, the Galaxy website is available in English and Español while Chelsea has English, simplified Chinese, and Korean. I guess the Korean is there since Samsung is their sponsor but why Chinese?


That's a lot of characters for "Chelsea"

Efficient Market Theorem

Press Release

IRVINE, Calif. and NEW YORK, July 19, 2007 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ -- Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM) and Verizon Wireless, an affiliate of Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), today announced a licensing agreement that permits the continued importation and sale by Verizon Wireless of mobile devices that are the subject of the current litigation between Broadcom and Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) before the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The agreement allows Verizon Wireless, the largest wireless provider in the country by revenue, to sell new handsets and other wireless devices, ensuring the availability of the latest cell phone technology in handsets and personal digital assistants (PDAs) to consumers and businesses. Under the agreement, Verizon Wireless will make payments to Broadcom at a rate of $6.00 for each 1xEV-DO handset, PDA or data card sold after the effective date, subject to a maximum payment of $40 million per calendar quarter and a lifetime maximum payment of $200 million. The agreement provides Verizon a license to the six Broadcom patents currently being litigated between Broadcom and Qualcomm. Other terms and conditions of the agreement are confidential.

We learned in b-school that the market is efficient and news gets factored into the stock price in matter of minutes. The press release went out at 2:32pm. Here are the stock charts for BRCM and QCOM at 3:10pm with a 20 min delay.


BRCM


QCOM

Chinese, English Speakers Vary at Math

Live Science

WASHINGTON (AP)-Things add up differently for native English speakers compared with people who learned Chinese as a first language.

Simple arithmetic was easily done by both groups, but they used different parts of the brain, a new study shows.

Researchers used brain imaging to see which parts of the brain were active while people did simple addition problems, such as 3 plus 4 equals 7. All participants were working with Arabic numerals which are used in both cultures.

Both groups engaged a portion of the brain called the inferior parietal cortex, which is involved in quantity representation and reading.

But native English speakers also showed activity in a language processing area of the brain, while native Chinese speakers used a brain region involved in the processing of visual information, according to the report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The article doesn't explain whether they believe this is cultural or genetic. I think they should test Chinese-Americans that were born in Asia but learn to speak/read English at a young age. They should also test Vietnamese, Malay, or Indonesian people since they use romanized writing vs. Chinese pictographic characters.

Lord Stanley's Cup

... is downstairs right now!

I think Henry brought it for Family Day at Broadcom today. Each group was alloted some time to take pictures and finance was at 8am. Of course, I wasn't on the invite list but since it was in my building and I got here early, I crashed the party and took some pictures (which I will post as soon as I find my camera's USB cable).

Pope declares Protestants cannot have churches

The Guardian

Protestant churches yesterday reacted with dismay to a new declaration approved by Pope Benedict XVI insisting they were mere "ecclesial communities" and their ministers effectively phonies with no right to give communion.

Coming just four days after the reinstatement of the Latin mass, yesterday's document left no doubt about the Pope's eagerness to back traditional Roman Catholic practices and attitudes, even at the expense of causing offence.

The view that Protestants cannot have churches was first set out by Pope Benedict seven years ago when, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he headed the Vatican "ministry" for doctrine. A commentary attached to the latest text acknowledged that his 2000 document, Dominus Iesus, had caused "no little distress".

But it added: "It is nevertheless difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to [Protestant communities], given that they do not accept the theological notion of the Church in the Catholic sense and that they lack elements considered essential to the Catholic Church."

Duh! That's why Protestants are not Catholic; we don't have to listen to this guy. Is he's claiming the word "church" can only mean the Catholic church? I guess we need to rename NewSong Church to NewSong Ecclesial Community.

Way to make yourself even more irrelevant to the Protestant community.

Candidates lost in Chinese translation

USA Today article

Boston's 2008 presidential primary ballot could read like a bad Chinese menu.

There might be "Sticky Rice" in column A, "Virtue Soup" in column B and, in column C, "Upset Stomach."

Those could be choices facing some voters if the names of Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Hillary Rodham Clinton were converted into Chinese characters, according to Massachusetts' top election official. And that gives Secretary of State William Galvin heartburn.

On Tuesday, Galvin filed a challenge in federal court to a Justice Department agreement requiring that ballots be fully translated to protect the rights of Chinese-speaking voters.

Galvin says Chinese — which uses characters, not letters; has sounds with several meanings; and is spoken in several dialects — will create ballot chaos.

This is stupid. I can live with translating voting instructions, even though citizens are supposed to have some English proficiency, but transliterating candidate names into Chinese characters is retarded. Most Chinese names are chosen specifically for their meaning (and number of strokes) and are pronounced differently depending on the dialect. On a voting ballot, all you need is to distinguish one from candidate from another. If a voter can't even tell the difference visually between "Hillary Clinton" and "Fred Thompson", I'm not sure that person should be voting. Also, unless candidates are running ads with their new "Chinese" names, how will the voter know who they are on the ballot on election day?

What I want to know is whether they will print the Chinese ballots with traditional or simplified characters. Taiwanese people will probably protest for a "Taiwanese" ballot since they claim they're not Chinese.

Live Earth

Seriously, who are they trying to reach with Live Earth? Are there people at the concerts or watching online that haven't heard about global warming? Eight concerts! I wonder how much electricity it took to power all the sound equipment and lighting at each concert. Not to mention how much oil was burned by cars and buses to get everyone to the concerts.

Whatever...

1 vs 100

I'm watching this game show on NBC where one contestant goes up against 100 people (the Mob) and answer multiple choice (3 choices) questions. At each stage, the contestant gets more money per wrong answer by the Mob. Anyway, a new contestant comes up (from Tustin!) and the first questions was:

Which one has the least number of cells?
A. Eastern Gray Squirrel
B. Calista Flockhart
C. Amoeba

The contestant had no idea what an amoeba was so she had to use a "help" which meant that she would go with the most popular answer. Of course the answer was amoeba but 11 out of the 100 got it wrong. I thought we learned this stuff in junior high school biology.

Subpoena

"No good deed goes unpunished."

I got a subpoena tonight. I witnessed an accident near the 5 freeway and Alton Parkway awhile back. Doing the "right" thing, I stopped to help and the CHP took down my name as a witness. Last year, I was deposed by a couple of lawyers representing an insurance company. It took 45 minutes and I had to review a transcript of everything I said. I guess the case is now in arbitration and they want me to show up again. I don't even remember when the accident occurred anymore and not sure why they need me at all after the deposition.

"Free" Cable TV

I split my incoming cable for my cable modem and plugged it into my new TV just to see what I could get. With the old analog TV, all I could get was CBS and G4. To my surprise, the new TV picked up some analog channels but also a whole bunch of digital channels, including some 1080i HD ones and 45 "music" channels. Weeding out duplicates and shopping/Spanish stations, I think I have about 25 channels I can watch.

I don't know if this is actually good news since I'll probably end up spending too much time watching TV again.

New TV

OK, I finally bought a new TV today. I went to Costco and got a Vizio 42" 1080p LCD TV. The price was $1199 but I had a $200 off coupon so it came out to around $1100 with tax. A coworker helped me get the TV and also move my old tube TV off my TV stand so I can setup the new one. It didn't look that big in the warehouse but it's huge inside my tiny living room. I was surprised that it was able to pick up several digital TV stations with my $15 antenna. It also has a VGA port that I'm using right now with my laptop.

I'm pretty happy with it right now. Next I need to decide whether I should get cable or just watch DVD's or stream stuff off the Internet with my computer. Now all I need to do is get rid of this huge box in my living room.

Gospel Brunch

Instead of service yesterday morning, NewSong NOC had a volunteer appreciation event at the House of Blues. Each Sunday, there is a Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney and we reserved almost the entire venue with 170 people.

We were told to arrive at 9am at Downtown Disney even though the doors didn't open until 10am. They decided to have a couple of icebreakers on the 2nd floor patio before the event. The first icebreaker was to swap cell phones with someone you didn't know and look through their contact list for interesting names. My cell phone is the Treo 650 from work which has all ~6000 employees in the contact list. Next, they asked for 2 volunteers from each ministry (worship/sound is part of CAM - Creative Arts Ministry). All the other ministries quickly got volunteers except CAM. We stood around pointing at each other until I got called out by the pastor. Anyway, it turned out to be a eating contest of eating applesauce with a pair of pantyhose over your head. Since April was the other "volunteer", I got to eat while she spoon fed me. Long story short, our team won with the "stuff it as fast as you can in my mouth" strategy, and our prize was a 6 1/2 pound can of applesauce.

Since I was lugging around a huge can of applesauce, I ended up at the back of the line and got in last. By then, there was a long line at the omelet bar so I just got some stuff at the buffet line. The food was decent but I wasn't expecting too much for $30 at a Disney attraction. At around 11am, the band (two vocalists, electric guitar, bass, keys, and drums) came on stage and sang for about 45 minutes. Some pictures from the Treo:


There were quite a few monitors at the front of the stage causing feedback if you're not careful.


Bass player


Female vocalist... the other singer called her his "daughter" but he didn't look very old. Yup, that's a Shure SM58UA wireless microphone.


Audience waving on stage. Notice the singer wiping himself off.

The music was pretty good but a bit loud. There was a lot of sound equipment for the small room. All the band members were wearing a suit but each had a towel for wiping sweat. At my old church, we had to wear a shirt and tie to lead/play on the worship and I would always end up sweating like crazy if I was playing guitar. At the end of the show, they started a dance line and got some audience members on stage.

Does anyone want a large quantity of applesauce?

Chinese Car Crash Test

Sam sent me an article on a crash test in Germany of a Chinese built sedan. As someone commented, "Is the entire car a crumple zone?" I'll bet the Chinese car manufacturer never crash tested the car. Why waste a perfectly good car?!


Amazing... the entire car almost folds in half in a 40mph collision.


For comparison, here is a Renault hitting the barrier at 40mph.

CTIA asks for presidential veto of ITC Qualcomm ban

NEW YORK, June 20 (Reuters) - CTIA, the U.S. trade group representing the wireless industry, on Wednesday asked U.S. President George W. Bush to veto a government agency ban on the importation of some phones with Qualcomm Inc. chips.

The Bush administration has 60 days to review the International Trade Commission's ban on U.S. imports of new high-speed wireless phones with Qualcomm chips the trade agency said infringe on a Broadcom Corp patent. The ban exempted phone models that had already been imported by June 7.

CTIA said in a letter to Bush that the ban would freeze innovation, cause economic disruption including job losses, and adversely affect public safety and the competitiveness of the country's telecom industry.

The letter, signed by CTIA President Steve Largent, cited expert predictions that high-speed wireless services would account for half of wireless growth in the next five years and generate two to three million jobs over the next decade.

Qualcomm and Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc have also said they would push for a veto of the decision.

Some thoughts...

1. Why does the president get a veto? This is all about money. Qualcomm can settle with Broadcom tomorrow if they wanted but they're afraid that they'll need to renegotiate or be sued by all their other licensees. The CTIA letter is full of crap. The only thing in jeopardy is Qualcomm's profits.

2. Hmm... Broadcom is not a member of CTIA. Why not?

3. Steve Largent? Ex-wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks?

康熙来了

Since the two Korean variety shows I used to watch on YouTube are cancelled, I've been watching 康熙来了. There are two hosts and they invite celebrities on the show and talk about a particular topic. I'm pretty sure it's from Taiwan; I can understand most of what they say so no need for English subtitles!

This show has four female guests and they are going to see what is in each person's purse. Supposedly the producers went out and "hijacked" their purses before the show so the guests can't remove embarrassing stuff. The two on the right (nearest the male host) are models and I think the other two are hosts on other shows.


Part 1 of 5
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

They all seem to carry a lot of stuff around with them. The tall, dark model (2nd from the right) is 王麗雅. The female host, all the way on the left, is 徐熙娣 or 小S (little-S; her older sister is big-S). I saw her picture in Chengdu on billboards and buses, advertising some cosmetics products.

Cucumber Soda?

Bottles of Pepsi Ice Cucumber are on display at a convenience store in Tokyo Wednesday, June 13, 2007.

Worship

I'm playing bass on the worship team for NewSong NOC this weekend. We're short on worship leaders so Irene is leading again. She picked two songs from Hillsong United with similar bass parts with lots of 1/16th notes. My right forearm was about to cramp during rehearsal Friday so I'm bring a heavy guitar pick (gasp!) with me.

Stanley Cup

I heard at work that Scott Neidermeyer brought the Stanley Cup to his kid's graduation ceremony Thursday night. I guess they each get to spend a few days with the Cup and he's first. I also heard rumors that Henry may get the Cup today or tomorrow (that seems pretty early for the owner) and he may bring it to work. Hmm, I need to bring my camera and walk by his office more often.

June 4th

18 years ago today

愛相隨 Chords & Lyrics

Someone requested this in a comment. I had to work out some of the chords myself so I'm not sure it 100% correct. The final chorus modulates up a half-step to C#. Blogspot didn't let me put the chords over the right lyrics so you'll have to figure out the chord changes yourself.

Not sure if this is something you want to sing to your girlfriend though...


KTV (C#)

C Em Am F G C C7
別想你 忍不住我提醒自己 傷了心 有些事也要過去
F G C Am F G C G
心很痛 痛得不想再做我自己 別回頭 情已去 緣已盡

C Em Am F G C C7
很想你 也不是因為失去你 愛了你 用盡我全心全力
F G E Am F Dm7 G
一生情 只為這一次與你相遇 情難了 難再續 難再醒

C Am F G
人分飛 愛相隨 那怕用一生去追
Em Am F G
我又怎麼能追得回 與你相慰
C Am F G
我為你癡 為你累 風雨我都不後悔
Em Am
我又怎麼有路可退
F G C
曾經深情 你給了誰

很想你 也不是因為失去你 愛了你 用盡我全心全力
一生情 只為這一次與你相遇 情難了 難再續 難再醒

人分飛 愛相隨 那怕用一生去追
我又怎麼能追得回 與你相慰
我為你癡 為你累 風雨我都不後悔 我又怎麼有路可退
我如何面對

人分飛 愛相隨 那怕用一生去追
我又怎麼能追得回 與你相慰
我為你癡 為你累 風雨我都不後悔 我又怎麼有路可退
曾經深情 你給了誰

Hillary Speech

It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an "on your own" society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a "we're all in it together" society.
-Hillary Clinton

Ahem, no thanks. This "we're all in it together" society sounds very socialist to me. Why do Democrats always want to raise taxes to fund their priorities? If it's so important, why don't they give their personal wealth to those programs? I donate to several charities yet I don't expect the government (i.e., other people) to do the same. Perhaps it's because there's no political gain on personal donations: tax the "rich" few, give to the "poor" masses, get elected from this wealth redistribution scheme. Sigh...

Also, "government of the few"? You mean our current government is not big enough?!

Ducks Win Game 1

NHL.com

I wonder if Henry will bring the Stanley Cup to work if the Ducks win the playoffs.