Sunday, October 22, 2006

photoshop sillouette

photoshop-ing

i found a cool little tutorial online the other day, and decided to wasted a beautiful san francisco sunday applying what i learned.


before:



after:

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

not here today.


Friday, October 13, 2006

alas, the united states of america turned into a striped fish.

Monday, October 9, 2006

i'm extreme

extreme

most people misunderstand when i say i live my life on the extremes.

cable tv has conditioned our minds to think that ‘extreme’ pertains soley to jumping off sky rise buildings, or some derivative of death defying feats. so for this post, let’s forget what we have learned and understand extreme from a different angle.

i live my life on the extremes. for example, there was a two-year stretch in high school where i wore only jeans and white t-shirts. i bought lucky brand dungarees (purchased at nordstrom rail), hanes a-shirts (aka wife beaters) underneath plain white hanes tshirts. if it got cold i’d wear a russel athletic sweatshirt (kangaroo pocket not zip up), i had every color. i was a simply dressed man in those high school days. i started out talking about being extreme, and now i’m filling the page with banter about my high school wardrobe? where’s extreme you ask? hang in there.

after college, my collection of jeans acquired holes in the knees, and frayed cuffs. instead of going back to nordstrom for $70+ jeans, i visited target and discovered dickies! soon i had every color of dickies in three styles: original, cell phone pocket with double stitched knee, and shorts. this is around the time i discovered t-shirts on ebay.

the post office charges $3.20 for packages <1lb sent anywhere in the lower 48 states. so when i did an ebay search i’d look for “tshirt” + less than $1.00. my total charge would be $1.00 for the shirt +$3.20 shipping = $4.20. i got some crazy shirts! but that’s all i wore, dickies and ebay shirts.

my extreme personality doesn’t start and stop at my wardrobe, however my dressing habits are a representative metaphor for the ‘extreme’ personality i have. other examples are: i used to like hot, and now i prefer cold. i only listened to rap and punk now i’m dance and acoustic.

i normally don’t sit in the middle of the road, i’m either on mute or full blast. drink only water or kill the 750ml that night. i figure if you don’t go all the way, don’t go any of the way.

anyhow, one of my favorite bands did a prince cover that i can't get enough of (click on picture to download the .mp3)





edit: the moment i found this song (mentioned above) i immediately thought to myself "i need to share this with karen!" and then i remembered =(. karen and i talked many times of going together to a tegan and sara show.

Monday, October 2, 2006

big boot sward man

mr stick man with big boots and a sword. i think he stepped in gum.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

death from above 1979

DFA1979



it's common knowledge that i’m not a fan of couples. breakups are something i heavily encourage (solely for selfish reasons). if anyone was wondering, misery is not the only one who loves company, so does loneliness.

it’s come to my attention that a breakup occurred which leaves me heart broken. this canadian couple made beautiful music together… death from above 1979!

i love this band *loved this band.

two guys from canada, an electric bass, and some drums give the basic formula to this late duo. jesse and sebastien created what people called dance-punk or dance-noise. high energy rock and roll lyrics, with a twist of loud synth make the death from above 1979 the kind of band that i blast on repeat on friday afternoons while driving home from work.

now jesse is still in a group called mstrkrft, who has remixed some death from above songs. if mstrkrft broke up i don’t know what i’d do.

i’ve reached the point in this blog where i go back and reread what i wrote. i realized that there’s a possibility one person who surfs onto my page and reads this will have heard of death from above 1979 or mstrkrft. that person will understand my pain and agony. for the others, i need to give some sort of reference point, a datum. let me equate this break up to that of say tom cruise and nicole kidman, or justin timberlake and brittiney spears for the younger crowd. ya, that big folks. you know you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard that cruise and kidman were unhitching!

i just realized how bad that analogy really was. it’s late, i haven’t had my coffee for the day. the sun got in my eyes.

death from above 1979 decided a year ago, and announced about a month ago this horrible break up (horrible to me). there’s a cliché saying that i simply despise when people blurt out. but i’m going to use it here as i would never use it in real life, without sarcasm. “things happen for a reason”. for all the cup-half-full suckers who preached these words to me when they really should have said something more along the lines of “you can only play the cards you’re dealt” i’m going to use their line. i’m optimistic, hoping that the loss of one awesome band spawns two equally awesome bands in the near future.

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

karen chuang

karen

i moved up to the bay area in october of 2004. i knew that i’d be temporarily living with long time uci-made friend vicki and her roommate. i had briefly met her roommate one time during a birthday visit, sept of ‘04. her name was karen.

karen and i talked briefly of our first found similarity, stick shift hondas. i was amazed that she not only knew how to drive a manual automobile, but she actually owned one! she wasn't the best driver to walk the earth, but she knew how to use a clutch.

i moved into karen and vicki’s 2 bdrm 1 ½ bath appt in san jose. i shared a room with vicki, more accurately i lived in vicki’s room and vicki lived at her boyfriend's house. karen and i sat at home on weekdays watching tv, eating takeout, drinking beers, and playing on our computers. karen loved craigslist.org, enjoyed knitting, and hated drinking "cheap ass beer".

i'd jog, and used to run past this mexican restaurant with a goofy name. i think the name was el taco, or something of that nature. every time i ran by i promised to eat there just once. karen joined me on that “just once” trip to el taco. to this day i have never in my life eaten such crappy food, and karen agreed. the food was utterly horrible. though laughing about the experience with karen once vicki came home is priceless.

after a few months of playing three’s company karen moved to alameda, and vicki and i moved to vicki’s dad’s vacant house. in feb i moved up to sf.

after fronting over a thousand dollars of my savings to secure and pay for my new found san francisco apartment i realized that i was broke, had no food, no job, not even a can opener. karen asked me what i was up to for my first weekend in sf, club? bar? friends? i had no plans. she drove from her alameda apartment to mine and took me to the grocery store. she bought me pickled peppers, fruits for snacks, all the ingredients necessary in order to make my favorite dish that she cooked, and of course… a can opener.

we sometimes would hang out and ‘play laptops’. she’d come to my place, or i’d go to hers with our laptops. we’d sit next to each other on the couch and do our tasks. she would work on a spreadsheet while i composed a blog post. instead of talking, we’d have music playing and communicate via instant message. yes, we immed each other while sitting in the same room, everyone’s done it at one point. we geeked out and loved it.

but we still did cool things, we’d hit up bars, clubs, and concerts. karen hated paying a cover charge, hated it! i knew i could get her to come out to a club if there was no cover charge regardless of the theme. and i didn’t have to ever worry about her not getting along with my friends. a simple introduction to get karen and my friends acquainted was all i had to do. she would approach and talk to my friends with no signs of intimidation. my friends remembered her as “the girl who likes to dance”.

when she moved to sd i saw her a lot less. we’d talk just about as much over email or instant message. some conversations i’ve had with her lasted from logon to logoff, some were 2 sentences all day. but her presence was always somewhat felt. there were days we didn’t even chat but her away message would either make me laugh or think about something. i remember one of them was regarding words you can type with only one hand. i messaged her string of 5 random left hand typed only words, and right away she understood what i sent her!

i’m so sad she’s gone. i still don’t believe it. i’ve said it again and again in my head that she’s gone but my head just won’t get it. she was goofy, quirky, extremely caring, and intelligent. the last time i saw her was for my birthday in san diego. she came out to the onyx room by herself to spend an evening with me and my friends. she bought me a sierra nevada, and had one herself. we cheers’d and enjoyed. i'm glad i gave her a huge hug when she left that night.

mercury news article

Sunday, August 20, 2006

numbers

numbers!

i love numbers- how else could i have lasted taking 5 years of math intensive mechanical engineering classes? for the love of numbers! through all this, i’ve found that each number holds a special place in my heart. all ten digits and me, we go way back. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. numbers >9 are disregarded as simply one number, they are a combination of the first 10 (in my world).

i may sound ignorant for saying this, but i assumed everyone loved all numbers the same, just as i do. yet recently i was completely appalled during conversation about numbers. the person i was talking to exclaimed that they hate the number four and love the number eight. apparently 4 is bad luck!?

in my eyes four is a pioneer. it’s the first whole number (besides the exception of the glory hogging #1) to have a whole number as a square root. four is the last “quick to recognize*” number.

four and i go way back, i love four. and i love 8. i couldn’t see how she could hate four so much, but she did. her plant had 4 flowers on it, and she cut a perfectly healthy and beautiful flower off simply because she needed the plant to have three or five flowers, but not four.

i asked her why 8 is was a good number (i mean, i know it is. me and 8 have history like you don’t know). she said, “because it’s lucky, the chinese think it’s lucky and i’m chinese. it sounds like the word ‘prosper’ in chinese”. that’s it? that’s why? i was outraged! in english, 9 sounds like ‘mine’ does that make it lucky? 8 sounds like ‘great’ =luck? seven sounds like heaven –lucky? maybe rhyming doesn’t work in this case… four sounds like the word you yell when you hit a golf ball in someone’s direction. perhaps the originator of that action was chinese?

8 is a superb number don’t get me wrong. 2 cubed, 8 bits in a byte!!!, it’s in fibonacci’s sequence, binary for 8 is 1000, it is the octo- prefix helping name the octopus and the octagon. 8 is even the second magic number in physics. magic! but she didn’t know this, she had no true attachment to 8 besides the fact that chinese people say it’s lucky. prosper, hmph.

just because chinese people say something, doesn’t mean it’s correct. i’ve been to china town. heck i bought a squeegee there for $1.99. the guy said it was a good deal and a good squeegee. it broke during my first use! he was chinese, he said it was good. he was wroooong.

i didn’t dare ask why she disliked the #4, my precious #4, but she told me anyhow. that’s right, “chinese think it’s unlucky”. well i think 4 is super lucky. if i won 4 million dollars i’d take it. if i found a 4 dollar bill, i’d feel blessed. if i had 4 fingers… let me stop there.

in persian culture 7 is a lucky number. i like seven, but not because someone tells me it’s lucky. 7 sins, jackpot 7 on the slot machine, and 7 is such a bit*ch of a number in mathematics that you have to give it respect. seven is one of my children.

sometimes i ponder: am the only normal one, thus making me weird?

*quick to recognize numbers are usually 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. when there are 5 or more of something, it usually takes time to count them or recount because you can’t recognize exactly how many there are in one glance.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

ipod game

ipod game

i didn’t realize that i had made up a game for myself until i told someone about it not too long ago.

everyone i know has an ipod. nano, mini, photo, video, old, new black white, you name it. it’s impossible to go through every song on everyone’s ipod without borrowing their electronic best friend for a month or so –and nobody is ok with that. so i devised a quick system which i use to ‘rate’ a person’s dap (digital audio player).

another similarity my friends and i share is that we have all gone to school. at school you get grades, and grades are determined from a scale. the scale is simple, cmon we all know this: a=100%-90%, b=89%-80%, c=79%-70%, etc etc.

so how do you play?

this game is normally played when the ipod is hooked up to a stereo, or speakers that enable more than one person to hear it. the more people the more fun! the ipod must be set on random or “shuffle”. you can start by simply pushing play, but i like to push the track forward button a few times just to get the ipod warmed up and ready to play. make sure that the ipod isn’t playing a playlist, all songs should be selected for the game.

the game has started, and the first song is playing. this is where audience participation comes in. it is the responsibility of all members playing the game to decide what value this random song deserves. i use a scale of 0-5%-10%. if the song instantly brings you to a euphoric memory, or gives you a tingly spine it’s a 10%.

songs that you just have to listen all the way thru –even though you’re playing the game –are dead 10%’s.

if the song doesn’t suck, and given the right scenario you would probably listen to the whole track, it’s a 5%.

finally, when the owner of the ipod hears those first 2 seconds of the randomly chosen song, and blushes, immediately blurts out an excuse, or gives you that smile. you know the smile that says “oh gosh you just pulled me out of the ‘i love kelly clarkson’ closet and i wasn’t expecting that” smile. songs that suck and songs that are embarrassing are 0%’s you’ll know within seconds if it’s a 0% song.

repeat this rating of random songs 10 times. this is a continuous string of 10 random songs, each rated on a scale of 0-10%. no cheating here people, if you push forward two times in a row and skip over a 0% song in hopes of a 10% song coming up, karma will catch up to you –and you won’t want that, believe me. i knew a guy who cheated on this game once and he ended up driving a honda with no ac through death valley on summer solstice through stop and go traffic with no radio and only hot coffee to drink for 10 hrs. abide by the rules.

at the end, count up your %’s and you get a grade! sometimes your ipod can grade at a a and other times the same one can grade at an f-. sure there’s inconsistency, and it’s a voting system so there can be biased. discussion about the songs is heavily encouraged, as is humiliating ipod owners for 0% songs.

to date i’m the only one who has scored a 100% (thanks in advance to anyone who doesn’t point out that it’s my own game and i normally play this game by myself with my own ipod.)

Monday, August 7, 2006

information red apple