Luxury Pens

I saw this pen online:



It's a fountain pen made by Namiki, who also owns the Pilot brand. I've heard of Montblanc and Waterman but I've never seen a Namiki pen, maybe because the list price of the pen above is $15k. Probably sell a lot of these in China.

Telephone Spam

I've gotten 4 calls this morning from telemarketers. Since I forward my personal cell to my work cell during weekdays, I'm not sure which number they called. I try to be a courteous person, saying "excuse me" and "thank you" often. However, I've decided that I would simply hang up the next time I get a spam call.

BTW, these are the numbers for just this morning:
9:32am 425-658-8994
12:17pm 916-596-6160
12:24pm 425-390-8126
12:29pm 310-253-6363

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More...
3:41pm 616-971-0252

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Ugh, another one this morning (Monday) at 7:30am from the first number above. I've added all these phone numbers to a contact labelled Spam; next is to change to ringtone so I can ignore it.

More Imperial Hill

Since I had to stop by work this afternoon (Sunday), I decided to go to Imperial Hill in El Segundo to look at planes for awhile. I brought my Sony a55 + the Tamron 75-300mm zoom lens. The lens is not all that great; at full zoom, it can only shoot down to f/5.6. Still, I think it's a wider than my 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 lens that costs ~3x as much.

None of the photos are all that exciting or even new. Here are some of the better ones:


British Airways 747 - I saw this take off as soon as I got out of my car.


Quickly followed by this Polar Air 747. It's a cargo freighter and by the new paingjob, it looks like Polar was recently acquired by DHL.


Since Terminal 1 is on the other side of the airport, hardly any Southwest flights use the south runway.


The Southwest flight was quickly followed by an U.S. Airways flight which also typically land on the north runways.


Smoggy wide-angle view of LAX


This plane landed on the other side of the airport and taxied over to the south side. I couldn't tell what it was from far away but through the camera, I saw the SkyTeam markings. It wasn't until I review the photo that I saw the small China Southern markings.


Take off next to LAX control tower


There sure are a lot of Alaska Airlines flights in/out of LAX


Air France Boeing 777


Lufthansa (or as Leon calls them, Luftwaffe) Airbus A340

China: 112th out of 156

China is the 112th happiest country on earth, out of 156. This is according to the World Happiness Report (PDF), published by Columbia University for a UN Conference. For comparison, Denmark is #1, Canada is #5, USA is #11, and Taiwan is ~#47. Now, regardless of whether you believe the methodology of measuring happiness, this is news. When Pew published its report in 2008 claiming that 86% of Chinese people were "Satisfied with country direction" (#1 out of 24 countries polled BTW), it was trumpeted by the CCP and their apologists as proof that Communism was superior to democracy. Nevermind that Pew only polled urban dwellers in a few cities.

Anyway, now when a report shows China is not Disneyland, it is banned.

The United Nation’s recently-released World Happiness Report has listed mainland China as the 112th happiest country out of 156. Many websites re-posted the report which was initially released by Xinhua.net.

From the State Council Information Office:
Regarding “UN Releasing World Happiness Report, China Ranked 112,” all websites are not to re-post the report. All existing posts are subject to removal.

国新办：联合国首发全球幸福指数报告 中国内地排112
国新办：《联合国首发全球幸福指数报告 中国内地排112》网站不转载此条新闻，已转载的删除。

This is the modus operandi of CCP propaganda. Instead of more speech to promote their POV, they simply censure and ban articles/news that show China in an unfavorable light. Sure, no government likes to highlight its own problems but in the US, freedom of press pretty much guarantees that all points of view are out there, from MSNBC to Fox News.

KMF10 Tickets

I bought 4 tickets today from the Korea Times website. They only charged $10 fee for the entire order... much cheaper than Ticketmaster. Since I'm going with Sunny & Steve + one more guest, I didn't want to risk waiting until the very last day to see if I can get Terrace tickets cheap. Our seats are in section F1 which is probably near the middle of Hollywood Bowl.

Per the official website, these are performers that I recognize:

- G.O.D.
- Brown Eyed Girls
- MBLAQ
- Bobby Kim
- and of course, Lena Park

Judging from the lineup last three years, I think (hopefully) they will add one or two more girl groups and maybe one boy band. Although Ailee just debuted in Korea, it would be awesome to have the Jersey girl perform at KMF10.

iPhone Camera Zoom

I was standing on Imperial Hill on Wednesday waiting to pick up Leon; he was coming in from Munich on a Lufthansa flight. I didn't have my real camera so I had to use my iPhone.

Using Camera+ app, here is 1.0x (no zoom):



The A340 is the big white plane in the center. The EXIF data says 3.85mm (wide!) at f/2.8. I then zoomed in all the way (6.0x) and here's the result:



Weird. It almost looks like I added a film grain effect. The EXIF data is the same as above so it's definitely a digital zoom; there are no moving parts in the lens assembly.



Photo of approximately the same area using my Sony A55 (240mm at f/6.3).

Food Truck License

I always wondered how much it costs to run a food truck. We have several trucks visit us at lunch, usually one "gourmet" truck and one generic truck; sometimes we get some taco only trucks too.



Anyway, I saw the DMV license stuck on the back of one truck yesterday (Shrimp Pimp). The license was good for a month (March 26 to April 26) and costs $932. That seems kind of steep but California is broke.

Bathroom Break

Since we have a fairly strict sign-in policy at work, there is a unisex bathroom behind the receptionist in our main lobby (in case you need to go but don't want to sign in). My sister was visiting me on Tuesday afternoon and need to use the bathroom. The receptionist told her to wait since there was someone else in there already. We waited for about 2 minutes and an old white guy walked out. There was about six people waiting for him in the lobby and he was giving orders to everyone; I got the impression that he was used to giving orders to a lot of people.

Anyway, I had to drop my sister off somewhere right after and we noticed that the old white guy had a CHP escort in front and a black Secret Service looking SUV following his car (another large SUV). We thought he was probably a VIP but couldn't recognize him. I followed his caravan out of our office and I think they took the 105 West on-ramp, probably to LAX.

I asked my boss today and it turned out that the old white guy was Harry Reid, US Senate Majority Leader. When he came out of the bathroom, he mentioned to someone (his staffer?) that the faucet was cool. I hope he wasn't commenting on the motion sensors because that's not rocket science. I was also told that Diane Feinstein was here earlier in the day... not sure if she was impressed by the bathroom.

Election Monitors?

In China?! Why would they have election monitors? How do they know if an election is fair if they've never seen one?

International Business Times

China has sent election monitors to check on Myanmar's recent parliamentary elections. The irony of a country without free democratic elections monitoring ballots has not been lost on the Chinese, who read about it in newspapers including the Global Times, Beijing News (Xinjing Bao), and Guangzhou Daily.

The news that China had been involved in election monitoring created indignation and surprise from commenters on Chinese news and micro-blogging sites. Posts focused on the fact that China had sent monitors to a country now opening to greater electoral freedoms.

Google Tap

Funny



Todd Smith is his real name

Cheer Chen Live

旅行的意義 - 陳綺貞

I tried singing this song a few times at KTVs in China... couldn't read about 1/3 of the characters. :(

More Random Food Photos

Bento dinner - Tampopo (Garden Grove)


AYCE Korean BBQ - Gen (Tustin)


Fried Yellow Corvina banchan - BCD Tofu (Torrance)


Pho - Pho Hoa (Hawthorne)


Potstickers - Peking Restaurant (Westminster)


Xiaolongbao - Ding Tai Fung (Seattle)


Chicken pot pie - Daily Grill (Seattle)


Taro pastry w/scallops - Sun Sui Wah (Vancouver)


Appetizers and beer - Earls (Whistler)


Shoyu ramen - Kairakutei (Tustin)

AS514 - Frameographer

Since I was crammed into a window seat, I may as well make a movie.



Not sure where this was but probably started somewhere over Oregon and stopped somewhere over California. Sometimes there would be a strange wavy effect on the iPhone screen but everything looked normal with the naked eye.

Total frames = 2030
Capture @1fps
Playback @15fps

Paparazzi

Leon called me this morning from his flight that he saw Tyra Banks in first class. He'd better be right... I came home from work to get my camera even though my work is only minutes from LAX. I'm banking on the fact that she will get out first because she is in first class and will let the little people (entourage) handle her luggage. Yet, she not VIP enough to warrant a separate exit so she will need to come out of the LAX Bradley tunnel/ramp/exit. I'm betting $3 in parking that I'm right.

Flight lands in ~an hour so I'd better get going.

==========

So I get to LAX at ~8:30pm, parked, and took some photos of planes from outside the Bradley terminal.


British Airways 747 between TBIT and Terminal 3


More planes on the other side of TBIT, including planes from both Taiwan carriers (China Airlines and EVA Air) = lots of Chinese people waiting in the arrival area

CX880 from Hong Kong is about an hour early and lands at ~8:50pm. The arrival area is about half-full and I find a spot along the long ramp. Meanwhile Leon is texting me (illegally) status updates. I think he wanted to try and exit next to her so I can get a photo of them "together". :)


Random people walking up the long exit ramp


I decided to go to the other side of the exit area and use the zoom lens

Finally, I see Leon walk out... by himself. He is signalling to me that Tyra was exiting behind me through the little used transit exit. Sure enough, we see Tyra exiting after about 2 minutes.


Hiding behind huge sunglasses


She stopped to wave at the CX VIP handlers and gave one woman a hug

Sigh... those are the only non-really-blurry photos. I was actually outside the sliding glass doors since I didn't want to get in trouble. Likewise I didn't use a flash... should have brought a faster lens. Hmm, I guess I'd better keep my day job.


Parking ended up costing me $5 since I was there for over an hour. There was a Ferrari parked next to me... I thought rich people sent other people to pick up at airports.

AS514

To save a vacation day, my sister dropped me off at Sea-Tac Airport instead of driving all the way back to Portland and flying back tomorrow. It was a full flight and the flight was full of kids. It's Spring Break season and lots of families are going to Disneyland. The flight was also very bumpy; we were flying from one pocket of turbulence to another for almost the entire trip.


Flight path for the last part of the flight (from FlightAware). I thought he made the last turn earlier than usual.


View as we flew over the coastline near Ventura


It's hard to tell because of the clouds but we were probably somewhere over the channel that separates Catalina Island from the mainland


Somewhere near Huntington Beach


Final turn before landing... I think I can see my house (not really)

Acura GPS Fail

We were driving my sister's Acura MDX to Whistler when the on-board GPS navigation system stopped working. Evidently we've driven off the end of the earth.


Driving along the Sea to Sky Highway


We noticed that the map cuts off shortly after Squamish


Message from nav display right before it shut itself off

I realize the car is a few years old but Whistler has been around for many years. I'm surprised that it was not included in the US/Canada database. Maybe if you buy the MDX in Canada, it would have the full Canadian street database but probably missing a few US roads.

Frameographer - Work to Home

I know it's kinda boring but I love this kind of stuff. I think my dream job would be sitting behind a huge CCTV wall (Closed Circuit, not China Central) as a security guard watching everyone, although those guys usually gets killed first when baddies take over the building.



I recorded my commute home today. I tried to get the navigation app on my Android phone in the shot but I couldn't get the right angle and it covered some of the frame. Nothing exciting happened but the "sunset" (it was behind me) was kinda cool... the sky got dark really fast. The iPhone 4 camera also wasn't very good with high contrast images. When it got dark, the bright screen on my Android phone basically wiped out the rest of the image. Not sure why it didn't go into night mode. Arg, too much technology.

Immortals

Not very good. It was so much like 300 that I though it was a continuation of Greek history. Turned out the movie was made by a different director. All the actors and actresses were very pretty, except for Mickey Rourke, but there was not much acting... probably made a lot of money though.

Frameographer iPhone App

My 42 mile commute to work compressed down to 2 minutes. I used FramesFrameographer on my iPhone 4 and a suction cup camera holder. The app took a picture every second (or a bit longer) and compiled it into a movie file. I ended up with 1799 frames and set the app to play back at 15 fps for a 2 minute video.



Freeways: 55, 22, 405, 110. I didn't take the 105 at the end but rather exited on El Segundo Blvd. The resulting movie was a 213MB MPEG4 file at 1280x720.

Sony a55 Firmware Update

While browsing through some old photos in Picasa, I saw one of the EXIF properties listed for each file was Software. For my new Sony camera, the text was SLT-A55V v1.10. I searched online for "a55 firmware" and sure enough, there was an update. I dug up the original USB cable and I'm going to try and apply the firmware update to my camera. I hope it doesn't brick on me.

==========

It's updating... I'm nervous. The last firmware upgrade I did was for a Linksys wireless router and it bricked on me.



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Looks like it worked... the camera now says Ver. 2.00.

One of the main update features is the addition of Picture Effects. They combined it with the SCN (scene) mode so it's kinda hard to get to. The last effect on the list is Toy Camera:

Creates the look of a Toy Camera photo with shaded corners and pronounced colors.

Sigh... that's what Instagram is for, not a $1200 DSLR.

Random Photos - March 2012

Now that I have a new camera app (Camera+) on my iPhone, I've been taking more random photos. I also just received a tripod mount for the iPhone in the mail so I may try recording time-lapsed movies while I drive around town.


My parents brought me to some hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Westminster. The front and inside was pretty ghetto but the food was good. They are still using the old school Chinese Zodiac paper placemats.


I don't even know the name of this dish/soup in English. The main ingredient is lumps of dough. I guess white people would call it dumplings but Chinese dumplings have filling inside the dough.


A few friends and I went to a Korean BBQ place Sunday night. The food was good and they served a lot of banchan (Korean side dishes). Usually restaurants bring out 4-5; they brought out about 10 different sides.


I saw this HUGE tire in the dumpster room at my friend's condo in Torrance. Seriously, who has something like that lying around? I doubt the trash company (or the City of Torrance) will pick that up though it may be worth something to a tire recycler.

Customer Service

I hardly see any other Maximas on the road

I brought my car in for the 15k mile intermediate service (I have 22k miles) at Stadium Nissan in Orange. I'm already a bit unhappy with my 2011 Maxima since Nissan decided to use a very expensive motor oil ($90 oil changes) and I had to replace my battery after only one year. Anyway, they said it would take 2-3 hours so I opted for a shuttle ride home. After waiting for 30 minutes, the van returned from its last run, and 4 of us got in. When the driver did a role call of addresses, one of the passengers was out by 91 and Gypsum Canyon. The dealership is near Honda Center so that's ~25 miles round trip; I always thought there was a limit. Aren't there other Nissan dealers in Yorba Linda? The other two people were in Placentia so I thought I would be the last to get dropped off, kind of like riding a SuperShuttle from LAX.

I was about to pull out my iPhone and blog the fact that I'd be stuck in a Nissan minivan for the next hour when the driver asked me to get in another car (Toyota Highlander!). They brought out a used car and had another customer service guy drive me home. That was pretty cool. Since it was a Saturday, I was okay with riding around North OC but it was a nice gesture. Counting the guy's time and gas money, it probably cost them $12 to drive me home.

Now if I had bought the cheapest Infiniti (G25) instead of my Maxima, I would have paid ~$5000 more for my car and gotten a smaller engine. But at least I could get loaners each time my car was brought in for service. :)

Early Ailee Videos on YouTube

Heh, Korean-American born in New Jersey



Video from 4 years ago. Surprising that she can't get recognized in the US and have to go to Korea to debut as a singer.

Sistar Live in Paris

K-pop overload! Dang it, I missed them last year at KMF 9. Maybe they'll show up again this year at KMF 10.


So Cool

It was cool to hear Dasom speaking English but they're in Paris. Maybe she should have learned some more French. Something seems to be wrong with the sound again. It sounds like there's an echo effect being over-zealously applied.


Medley

Lots of white/French K-pop fans in the videos. Both KMF I went to in LA seemed to be 99% Korean people.

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BTW, my favorite K-pop YouTube uploader is back with several channels. I think she got tired of having her videos/channels flagged and deleted a few years ago so she didn't post for a long time. Welcome back monmonsnow!

Dirty - Miryo

Live performance of Dirty by Miryo on Music Core. She will be performing at KMF 10 on April 28th at Hollywood Bowl as part of Brown Eyed Girls. I need to buy tickets soon!



She's the rapper for BEG so she doesn't usually sing but her voice is not too bad. Sigh... the sound engineers on these Korean music shows are terrible. The volume drops for no apparent reason at 2:20 in the video. Likewise, both times I went to KMF the sound has been bad too. I'll run sound for them for this year free if they let me hang out backstage. :)

The Greatest Love of All - Ailee

Wow!



I just heard about her a a few weeks ago. I think she recently released a debut single called Heaven. I thought it was just ok when I heard it... but evidently the girl can sing. She reminds me a bit of Hwayobi.

Here's a performance of Heaven on SBS.

DLTDHYAOTWO, the Sequel

Since we're building our finance team at work, I got an ex-coworker to come in for several interviews and we make him an offer. However, he ended up turning us down because he wanted almost my salary and many times the number of options I got; I'm a director and this was a senior analyst position. Anyway, this is not about him.

Continuing our search, we got a referral for a CPA who is only two years out of school. He said during the interview that he always wanted to work in finance (instead of accounting) and he had already quit his public accounting/audit job several months ago. He had potential but we were worried because he had zero finance experience. Anyway, we decided over the weekend to take a chance and make him an offer. Since our company is basically an one-man show in terms of management control, the CEO used to interview every candidate in person. As that is no longer feasible due to the size of the company, each candidate now has to answer a few questions in writing for the CEO to review. Me and all the other directors in finance had to do this. For engineering candidates, they even have to prepare a PPT presentation on themselves and present to the entire hiring group.

While preparing the offer yesterday, the HR recruiter received an email from the candidate saying that the written Q&A was a stupid exercise, and he didn't want to work at any company that wasted its time on something like this (I'm paraphrasing). Surprised, the recruiter called him and it turned out the email was meant for someone else, someone personal and unaffiliated with our company. Well, that made our tough offer decision much easier... don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.



Seriously though, always check the recipient list on your emails, especially work related stuff, and don't reply all when the email was sent to all-10000-staff@company.com!

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Completely unrelated post: DLTDHYAOTWO

Big Rock in Carson

Meh...

After hearing about the LACMA rock for the past few days, I decided to drive by after work and take a look. It turned out it was difficult to "drive by" since city workers were already moving traffic signals around to accommodate the next leg of the trip last night. A lot of intersection became 4-way stops and traffic was terrible. I ended up taking side streets and parking a block away.


For some reason, I thought it was going to be bigger. I kept hearing on the radio that the trailer was "the length of a football field." The trailer didn't look that big either.


There were quite a few people on either side of the street (Avalon Blvd. in Carson) and almost everyone was taking photos with their cellphones. These were taken with the crappy camera in my Samsung Galaxy. I did take one photo with an iPhone and it wasn't much better.

If the US was a communist country, then we would have a few streets that were 12 lanes wide for national day military parades (like Chang'an Road in Beijing). Then we could have moved the rock without this much fuss. Communism 1, Democracy 0. :)

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They mentioned again on the radio today that it will cost $10M to get the rock to LACMA from Riverside. The rock "cost" them $70k and the truck gets 15 gallons to the mile, but most of the cost is the 100+ people involved. $10M for 100 people = $100k... not bad for 10 nights of work.

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Hmm, the custom trailer was supposed to cost $5M. That's a crazy amount of money just to move a rock. They could have made a plaster copy and no one probably would have noticed.

Firewalled

No, it's not about China.

I got this message at work today.

This Page Cannot Be Displayed

Based on your corporate access policies, access to this web site ( http://www.carbonite.com/ ) has been blocked because the web category "Online Storage and Backup" is not allowed.

I clicked on the Carbonite link after reading an article about how their stock dropped 12% today after cancelling their advertising on Rush Limbaugh's show... something about Slutgate (I was going to link to something but everything I read was either far-left or far-right, sigh). Anyway, I think our IT department is trying to block employees from backing up stuff externally.

Brown Eyed Girls at KMF 10

Finally... they announced the first confirmed artist at this year's KMF (Korea Music Festival).


http://www.facebook.com/koreatimesmusicfestival

Brown Eyed Girls is one of my favorite K-pop groups so I need to go find tickets.

I Hate iTunes

So after listening to the song below (I Choose To Love You) by Hyorin, I want to buy it. The YouTube video lists two places: iTunes and Melon. Melon is a Korean website and everyone knows about iTunes Store. The only problem with iTunes is that songs are encoded by AAC with DRM, which means I can only play it on Apple devices after authorizing, syncing, and all that other control-freak steps Apple makes you do. Even though iTunes Store is convenient, I've been buying music on Amazon since it comes in MP3 format. Of course, I can always burn a CD with iTunes with protected songs then rip MP3 files... but why bother when I can buy MP3s directly?

Anyway, as a previous owner of a Apple II+ and a Mac Plus, I love Apple products but hate their management.

==========

Song is not available on Amazon so I may have to suck it up and buy it from iTunes. Can't figure out how to buy stuff from the Melon site.

Learning Korean through K-pop

I thought this was a possibility but each time I put in Korean song lyrics into Google Translate, it comes out really weird. But now, I have a new strategy. Even though my English (native fluency) is much better than my Chinese (3rd grade education), the assumption is that Chinese is closer (whatever that means) to Korean than English. It I translate Korean into Chinese using Google Translate, maybe it will make more sense, and I can brush up on Chinese as well. If you can't learn one language, why not try leaning two at the same time?!



Here is a MV for a drama OST by Hyorin (Sistar). The Korean title is 널 사랑하겠어, and the translated title on YouTube is I Choose To Love You. I have no idea whether that is correct... all I know is 사랑 = love. If I put the phrase directly into Google Translate, the English translation is:

You will love

Well, the word love is in there but the two translated phrases are slightly different. If I change the language to Chinese (Traditional of course), the translation becomes:

你一定會喜歡

This is closer to You will love but it's probably because I'm using Google for both translations. To me though, 一定 is more meaningful than will... there is an added level of certainty, more like surely will or something. Also interesting is that the Chinese translation has 喜歡 instead of 愛, though when you translate love in English to Chinese, Google comes up with 愛. For me, I would translate 喜歡 as like, or a lesser degree of love.

Language is cool. I wished I would have lived in Taiwan a few more years and learned more Chinese. :(

==========

OK, I tried it with the first four lines from 다시 만난 세계 (Into The New World) by SNSD and it's not working out... :)

Korean:

전해주고 싶어 슬픈 시간이 다 흩어진 후에야 들리지만
눈을 감고 느껴봐 움직이는 마음 너를 향한 내 눈빛을
특별한 기적을 기다리지마 눈 앞에선 우리의 거친 길은
알 수 없는 미래와 벽 바꾸지 않아 포기할 수 없어

English (Google Translate):

I want to pass along sad time, but it sounds scattered after
Close your eyes and feel like moving my eyes towards you
Do not wait for miracles in front of our eyes a rough road
Unknown future and can not give up on the wall do not change

Chinese (Google Translate):

我想通過一起傷心的時候，但它聽起來散後
閉上眼睛，感覺我的眼睛朝著你
不要等到奇蹟在我們眼前一條坎坷之路
未知的未來，不能讓在牆上不會改變

English (translation from Soshified):

I want to tell you, even though the sad times have already past
Close your eyes and feel, how you affect my mind, how you attract my gaze.
Don't wait for a miracle, there's a rough road in front of us
with obstacles and future that can't be known, yet I won't change, I can't give up.

Hmm. As expected, the English translation from GT is pretty bad. I've tried translating Chinese text into English and the results are similar. I can't understand the Chinese either but that's probably because my Chinese skills are lacking. Maybe I need to start with single words or phrases.