Madden Curse

Here is a list of all the Madden covers. We all know the story by now, which is about what happens to these players the year they appear on the cover of that game and subsequently. It's beyond coincidence when every one of these "curses" came to fruition...

...Which leads me to the 2009 edition with Brett Favre. So do you think the curse applies to his whole saga (and now apparently being traded) or to Aaron Rodgers who's obviously going to start mixing cocaine, alcohol, and sleeping pills nightly?

Zhi's Post

Rather than comment, which is never read, because it doesn't show up on RSS feeds, I thought I would comment in another post. Imagine my narcissism.

This is called getting older. This is why you cannot convince your parents of your "progressive" views. Because other adults have spent hears hearing opinion passed as fact and truths jaded and picked at by sniveling commentators (in the old world "pundits") . They are just as certain of their views and the ascribed validities as you are. No information comes from a primary source anymore, and every contradictory piece of information, further substantiates their opinion that they have made the right decision and that everyone else is wrong and misguided.

Imagine the entire world going around like this... it paints a pretty bleak picture.
You have the following options:
- Be a starving artist - proclaiming your views artistically and politically to the world through the only true form of expression - (note: rock band and guitar hero do not count.)
- Kill yourself (please make sure to get your whole head in front of the shotgun)
- Go into hiding.... forever
- Be jaded about everything and join the ranks of intelligent adults
- Add your voice to the fray, and find constant frustration about not being followed or heard
- and lastly, Understand that this is the way things are, pick your battles, surround yourself with like minds and people that are interested in hearing a well reasoned, articulate and well researched argument, and ignore everyone else. (My personal choice).

Love, Alex

Credibility

I am sometimes described as someone who is too trusting, and to some extent, I agree with that assessment. I am easily fooled, readily hoodwinked, effortlessly gypped. However, something has changed my views of the world recently. From "news" channels that blatantly pass off opinions as fact and agenda and objectivity, to politicians who spin and lie to my face, to editorials and blogs who do nothing but point out instances where the other side of the aisle is lying and deceiving. All of this information then filters and trickles down to the average person, and what I am seeing more and more of is public discourse governed by talking-points and misleading "facts".

I'm not going to get on my soap box over talking-point politics, but I want instead to focus on just one aspect of how this is affecting me. This is created for me a 'credibility gap' between my brain and everything I hear. When I see a politician speak (particularly one that doesn't agree with me), the only things I think about are how he/she is wrong and how to pick apart his/her arguments. When I read an article, I question the author's objectivity and instantly distrust any statement that sounds like opinion, even reasoned ones. I know the world isn't black and white, and trying to see everything so defensively is probably more of a personal problem than one that can be fixed by this most awesome of blogs, but how can I rectify this? How can I view any source of knowledge, or piece of information without the prejudice that it might be wrong or misleading? Not everything I hear, see, or read can be a debate-style back and forth, battling for the decision of my logical mind. But how do I cope?

F***ing itunes and their m4p

I just bought a ps3 and it is bad ass. I want to make it my media center for my living room so I don' t have to blast music out of my comp. But ps3 can't stream m4ps, and installing codecs that allow wmp to play m4ps also don't fix it. The only thing I can think of is to convert all my music into mp3s but I really don't want to do that because it's going to take up alot of space.

Since you guys are the most tech savy people I know, I come to you for help. Any advice would be appreciated.

I've been watching Weeds 1st and 2nd season on blue ray.... so good.... thanks for the rec.

Find Your Happy

This is an old post, but a good one. Something I've been thinking a lot about recently.

link

Find your happy.

Trip Report: Maine, July 2008

I'm assuming no one else regularly reads this blog, so everyone who is reading this was also there. So it's kind of like a group diary. In fact, my next post will be about our feelings. And how that cute guy in 7th period English is totally into our best friend, but not us, and it makes us so jealous.

But I digress.

Trip Report:
Location: Portland, ME
Dates: 2008-07-02 to 2008-07-06
Attendees: Ajay, Alex, Azim, Fu, Jack, Kanna, Zhi
Rating: 9.0 out of 10, but only because the Ukrainian Judge is a jack-ass.

- First off, big thanks goes out to Alex for planning most of the trip. It was awesome. Also big thanks to Alex's folks who let us use their places. I'm sure we brought down both their property values with our non-whiteness.

- Awesome effort on getting everyone to come out this time. I'm really proud and happy that we made it happen. By my count, we had 5 working professionals and 2 full-time grad students, from CA, CO, IA, and NY, and we all managed to take some time out for this reunion. I hope we can keep this up.

- Drinking was an awesome idea. Whoever decided that we would use our time getting sloppy drunk is a genius!

- White water rafting is super fun. I think I'll try and do that more often. I'll have to see where I can do that here in CA.

- I would just like to point out that I am the greatest kick-ball pitcher of all time. If there was a Kickball Hall of Fame, I would the the first and only inductee. They would then close the place down for being 'too Asian'.

- If we were playing Kickball according to the rules, a foul ball is defined as such: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/downloads/y2008/official_rules/02_definition_of_terms.pdf
Basically, I was wrong on that call. Also, to settle the discussion, if the ball is touched by a player, it is judged foul based on the position of the ball when it is touched, not on the position of the fielder.

- Food seems to be a re-curring theme when I hang out with Alex. As such, the food on this trip was good, but not great. The sushi place was good, especially the pork belly appetizer and the spicy shrimp roll. The Salt Water Grill was decent, but non of the food was that great and the service was obviously sub-par. The Grill Room was nice, but again, the food not very memorable. Alex, you should so go back and hit on that waitress. And I'm sorry about the wine.

- As I gathered, the next trip idea thrown out was Chicago? Can I just start the lobbying process for Vegas again?

If you have anything to add, feel free to edit this post or comment.

peace

US Energy Woes

So I pretend to think I get news from multiple unbiased sources, and form an opinion after thorough fact checking but the reality is that I just learn about current events from Mr. Stewart and Comedy Central. There was an interesting bit about how China is destined to rule the world, but a bit of background first.

This whole energy crisis has got me thinking. Oil prices are through the roof, McCain flip-flops daily on energy policy (first he said offshore drilling was a temporary and non-sustainable solution, and now he's urging states to support drilling off their coasts), and both Bush and Obama wish they could use a magic wand to bring down gas prices.

This is a multi-dimensional problem with no near term viable solutions. The energy problems are somewhat related to how friggin hot it is predicted to be this summer, by the end of which the north pole will have melted. This is to be taken with a grain of salt, according to a journalist at the Times:

Given the unpredictable short-term dynamics up there, which make the ice subject to vagaries of Siberian winds and a mix of currents, a lot of polar ice experts tell me it’s pretty much impossible to make such a prediction with high confidence.

On the other hand, Fox felt that it was okay to simply cite other news sources without doing any fact checking for themselves.

For the first time in recorded history, the North Pole may be free of ice this summer, according to a published report Friday.

While I hate to spoil our good name by giving them any traffic, I just wanted to point out that the Times journalist did more research for a blog post than Fox did for a regular news piece, based solely on the number of links (17 vs 4). In all honesty, they might do better by just redirecting foxnews.com to something else.

Anyway, call me unconscientious, but I'm not really going to focus on the environmental part, because (i) I'm not a hippie, and (ii) we probably won't be around to deal with this problem. (I'm not saying I'm going to start driving an SUV anytime soon. With all the off-road terrain I need to deal with in the eastern US, I'm not sure if this is a good pledge to make, but I'll deal.)

The second part is the obvious issue of how this is hurting the American economy while it is in recession. In reality, Americans have been paying waaayy less for gas in comparison to other countries. So how have people abroad been coping with this problem, and now that domestic prices are approching the international mean, why are the effects on the American economy so much more drastic? There are several reasons I can think of, none of which seem to have come up in any of the campaigns of people who can actually do anything about this, mostly because of distractions like stupid people who correlate wearing a flag pin with being patriotic.

Do Americans drive too much? Have we consumed large amounts of fossil fuels in recent decades just because we could? A recent poll by Gallup shows that 31% of respondents are either limiting travel, driving less or going out less. This suggests that a sizeable portion of a family's transportation costs may be recreational. However, although I don't have the data to support this, I'm not sure we go on vacation any more or less than people in other developed countries. I think we're now forced to be in a position to conserve, which is in itself good, but we don't have the same processes in place as other countries because of our (till now) abundant supply of inexpensive gas.

Consider solutions adopted by the rest of the wor. In 2003, London started a congestion charge for vehicular traffic in the center of the city. According to the BBC, this decision, although initially unpopular, has paid off:

[T]he volume of traffic entering the congestion charge zone has fallen by over a fifth - with bus use increasing by 15%. Meanwhile the £125m extra cash generated by the charge (after its upkeep costs) goes straight back into public transport.

Taxing roads has the same effect on transit behavior as taxing gas. If U.S. cities had imposed restrictions on where you could or couldn't drive and how expensive it was as a means of transport, the effect of today's gas prices would be less significant (NY has accomplished this by its restricted supply of incredibly expensive parking spots). Although the same article says that Miami, Minneapolis, Seattle and San Franciso are looking to follow London's example, which is great, this is still not the root problem.

The problem is that the U.S. has simply not put enough effort into building mass transit systems as the rest of the world. That's why in that same poll I cited earlier, only 1% of respondents say they are using public transport more. To get a rough idea of how disparate the situation is in the U.S. compared to other countries, check out this data on the modal share of rail transport.

Yeah, that's right. We're last. A measly 0.3% of U.S. transport is by rail. Japan leads the pack with 27%. I'm not saying everybody should travel by train, but in the U.S. people don't even have the option to. The situation with buses, etc. is probably similar, but I don't have the data.

Who's fault is this? FDR did such a good job making our vast network of interstate highways that it squashed development of other modes of transport. We're in recession again, let's get some government money into improving transport collectively rather than sending people $600 to cover half their rent for a month. Also, since North Korea has officially been removed from the axis of evil, maybe we can scale back the global search for WMDs.

Back to China. Ted Koppel on TDS said that China is putting 25,000 new cars on its roads a day, or 9 million a year. Soon they're going to overtake the US, and then we're really going to have it out for the oil in the middle east. We are in trouble unless we start doing something soon.

Please weigh in.

P.S: I fucking hate blogger. I have a 24" screen in front of me and it decides to make the text box big enough to send a fucking IM. And there's no way to easily add images/data where you want, so I had to link to a spreadsheet. Super gay. Blogger, i.e. Google, learn something from Wordpress.

Zhi Skydiving

what? you may ask...

just think, a sexy oversized asian man in a tight blue suit flying through the sky. No this is not some perverted version of batman.

Its Zhi...



the raw link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBDIE1lW6Ng

enjoy.

Three Drinks In

I had a revelation over this past weekend, my sobriety is hurting my way of life. Based on this revelation, I've resolved to live my life three drinks in at all times. Let me explain.

Normal Zhi:
- Shy
- Does not talk to strangers
- Does not do anything out of his normal routine
- Never says anything when the situation calls for just the right words, and always says the wrong thing when the situation calls for just shutting up
- Is horribly awkward

Drunk Zhi:
- Out-going
- Talks to just about anyone and everyone
- Does things normal people would never do
- Always has just the right thing to say at the right time
- Plays fast and loose, and is the funniest, smartest guy in the room

Now obviously, the effects of drunk Zhi are either exaggerated, or unsustainable (I have but one liver and I like it). Also, I like money, so keeping my job is fairly important, and even though I'm a better coder when drunk, work is a problem. So I've settled on a compromise. I won't go all the way drunk, just three drinks in, and I'll only do this when I'm not at work (three because it's a good 1/3 mark between sober and sloppy).

So my plan is to go home everyday after work and down three of anything to get me loosened up and then pace myself at one drink an hour to keep it going. On the weekends, three with a healthy breakfast when I get up and same pace after.

Brilliant, no?

I am sure this will in no way lead to a catastrophic fall from grace or a lifetime of health issues. I have this faith because all of my plans made while sober have been less than dazzling, thus all my plans to be drunk all the time must be pure gold right?

Chase Utley

I have a huge mancrush on Chase Utley. It's not just because I'm a rabid Phillies fan, or that I have a special homo-erotic place in my heart for Philly athletes, but I think Chase Utley is truly special. The number's themselves don't lie: he's in the midst of a 5-game homer streak, has homered in 7 of the last 8 games, he's hitting .320, leading the league in HRs and RBIs, all from second base (where he has a decent glove, B T Dubs). People forget that he only has 3 full seasons major league under his belt, in each of which he had 100+ RBIs (and he's trending to shatter his personal best this year). His statistics are gaudy, and make his the best second baseman in all of baseball right now, maybe with a shot to be mentioned with the greatest all time.

But here's the thing that makes me go all ga-ga and gay for him. He does it the right way. Look, he's amazingly talented and gorgeous. Yes, I said it. Chase Utley is not only 'good-looking', but gorgeous. He's been blessed with the natural advantages to be able to just sit back and collect on his privilege. But he doesn't. He works at it relentlessly. He plays hard everyday, on every play. Always guaranteed to have dirt on his jersey at the end of a game. He's a grinder, but not in the David Eckstein use of the word where someone has to grind just to make it, no Chase Utley could sit back and his skills would make him an above average ball-player: .280+ BA, 15-80 guy. But he doesn't. Even last night, in a game where he went 3-4, he's laying down bunts, and knocking over catchers.

Off the field, he doesn't talk much, doesn't gloat, doesn't pout, doesn't call out teammates or talk trash. He just goes out and is damn good at his job, and works everyday to be better at it. He's also socially conscious and by all accounts, an upright, decent citizen.

Who wouldn't love a guy like that?