Peter’s Blog V2

After record-breaking storms visiting all those regions surrounding us, New York finally got a sizable one this winter.

The District of Columbia needs to learn the spirit from the Big Apple: this city never sleeps, not even at 1AM in a freaking storm.  Armies of workers managed the streets with plows, blowers, and shovels of all sizes.  The fact that snow might’ve accumulated faster than they could clean did not discourage them… or maybe they just didn’t have a choice, like me working till 12:30AM with a pair of bad hands.

Cabbies also didn’t sleep, although they sure changed the rules a bit.  The first few that were neither occupied nor off duty asked for my destination before letting me open the door - and simply drove away once hearing Queens.  I didn’t blame them - if snow could accumulate up to 0.5″ around Times Square, it must be devastatingly trecherous outside Manhattan.  Licensed drivers wouldn’t want to risk their own lives… but those unlicensed town cars were a different story.  One of them willingly let me on to his car and offered to take me home - for an outrageous $100 in cash.  He explained that the ride would take at least 90-100 minutes due to the road condition.  At that point, I opened the door and got out.  A second unlicensed town car offered the same ride for $60.  What a bargain!  I didn’t take it.

Hungry for some Halal meat?  Look it’s open!

Back to Queens.  Thought this looked like sand dunes in a desert:

“Winter Wonderland”?

Still snowing 12 hours later:

Ice breaker:

Another army of snow busters.  I don’t know if these are, but a good majority of NYC’s labor workers are illegal immigrants.  We as a country are highly critical of the illegals… but without them, we’d be stuck!

Going back to school always makes me happy.  Even back in the days when driving down I-81 meant having to prepare for finals after Thanksgiving, I could never help but start to hum “country road… take me home…”

Well, this time we picked a really memorable weekend to visit.  The school was shut down on Friday, and so were most of the stores and restaurants in town.  Even the Math Emporium!

Nothing stops Wally World, though.  Where else would thirsty people go to clean out the water shelf?

While Blacksburg is still a rural town, the urbanization and commercialization had been cranked up like crazy.  Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Jos A Bank, and other big brand retailers creeped in.  A third parking garage is being erected in town, not that long after the first one surprised us with its presence.  The Kroger on South Main, holy cow, had doubled in size, added a drive-through pharmacy and a huge groumet section.  It’s now as impressive as Super Walmart and Boeing’s airplane factories.

Saturday’s lunch took place at Owen’s.  It brought a new definition to “home food”.  The same pasta sauce, garlic bread, General Tso, Philly cheesesteak, and smoothies that we had had hundreds of times since freshman year.  Freshens now has a new design to the cup, but that’s it.  Even the texture of the rice remained the same weird tasting that we’ve never had anywhere else.

The best moment of the weekend was when Phil walked into the bookstore and inquired, “TEN YEARS AGO, you guys used to carry this thing on that shelf…”  The cashier responded to the awkward question with professionalism, that if they had any of the older merchandise left, it would’ve been kept in another section of the store.  Right, she was probably still learning the Times Table when we last saw what Phil wanted.  Did we sound like grandpas or what?  Looking at the youthful faces around us and counting the number of businesses that used to be in More Than Coffee’s place, well, definitely didn’t help.  After all, we returned to visit our retired friend, Jason, right?

What did bring us back to youth was the incredible snow storm.  Running in knee-deep accumulation, taking silly videos, and throwing snow at each other helped discounting our maturity.  The white Drillfield, wow.

Here’s Jason, with one of several mini snowmen that we built.

One of two awesome snow forts, which always get built on the DF after a major snow:

Woohoo!  In the face!  (not a nice thing to do to the elderly, though)

And there on Alumni Mall, the cadets (I assume) built a huge snowman and a giant snowball.  It’d take some clever engineering students to make something that size.  Awesome.

Later that day, we found tons and tons of other snow sculpture around town, in front of frat houses and apartment complexes.  It was a calming throught that we all once knew how to put down the busy work to enjoy life and the world surrounding us.  The thought almost made me believe that I was young again… until I got exhausted walking across the Drillfield…

Phil and I decided to take a weekend trip back to VT.  So did a record snow storm.

We managed to escape before the worse part of it hit NOVA, and the highways were kept clean for most of the trip.  However, we did have to go through some pretty bad sections of the storm:

For the very first time since the marquee sign was installed!  No manager’s special today!

Virginia is full of farms but certain things just aren’t that visible when the world is not covered in white.  The black moo moo cows, for example, were everywhere!  Poor cows must be freezing!

Our return trip began a whole day after the snowing stopped.  Great.  Now the roads were perfectly clean and the sky was bright and clear:

We had assumed that the closer to civilization, the better the road condition would be.  After all, the rich NOVA people have all the money and expectation to keep things under control, right?

Wroooong… the closer to DC, for some reason, the worse it became.  The stretch of I-66 around Manassass/Fairfax averaged about 2 accidents per mile.  It was crazy!  We saw an H2 with the hood poped open from a collision, and watched a Camry spinning in circles until it hit another car sideways on the shoulder.  Lots of trucks, pickups, and cars trapped on the shoulder or the median.  Here’s a rather strange situation with black slush flooding onto the road:

I also expected the nation’s capital to be maintained with the same diligent snow shovelers as NYC… wrooong again!  The streets were almost not drivable!  We need more illegal immigrants!

I find this story highly amusing.

Teacher asked class to draw something that “reminds them of Christmas”.  Second grade kid drew dead Jesus on the cross (and told teacher it was himself).  Teacher, concerned about the kid’s underlying violent tendencies, sent him for psychiatric evaluation.  Community got furious, labeling it as an antichrist execution of the separation of church and state.  Black dad pulls the racial card.  Everyone is blaming the teacher.

This story is controversial in many aspects, not even mentioning how some of the accused details were made up by the parents.  Judging from the Internet comments, people focus way more on the religious aspect than anything else, complaining about the lack of freedom to express religious beliefs in this country.  Well, if the teacher was seriously having issues with Christianity, how would she give a Christmas-themed assignment in the first place?

What I see is this: teacher suspects of a problem and takes an action, the suspected goes berserk, and the act of suspicion becomes labelled as the biggest crime known to men.  Now, let’s not forget what people say when a crazy kid actually gets violent in school - “oh he showed ‘obvious’ psycho signs but the ignorant teacher did nothing about it…”

It’s tough running a school nowadays.

For the past 10 months, I thought 2009 was a pretty bad year and couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Around New Year 2010, however, I “broke” my left hand.  According to the doc, it’s “just” an inflammation.  I think the formal name is deQuervain’s Tendinitis, but I wouldn’t quote myself on that :p   The cause was unknown - most likely due to overuse with the combination of office work, gym, and video games.  Or maybe it was as simple as a cursed bad luck

Well, four weeks later, as this problem was seemingly on its way to recovery, it got symmetrically reproduced on my other hand.  Now I feel like a big cripple with very restricted range of motion on either hand.  Performing certain simple daily tasks has become quite tricky.

Not sure what to say other than “this sucks”.  After one already unlucky year, this is not my preferred way of starting a new year.  But the benefit of being an Asian person is that, we do follow two calendars.  Therefore, instead of calling both 2009 and 2010 unlucky, I can simply think of the year of ox as the terrible one and pray for a real sweet year of tiger

Storm Riders is an epic comic series started in 1989 and still going strong today.  It was a top legend in Hong Kong’s comic book industry, likely being the most praised and most referenced work of all times.  It was also my absolute favorite epic story… for a long time.  The series started going downhill around 10 years ago, and seeing how the story is going these days, well, let’s not get into that.

Given its gigantic fan base, Storm Riders is probably also the most merchandised HK comic series: toys, replicas, games, TV shows, and movies.  The first Storm Riders movie came out in 1998 and was decently perceived.  It wasn’t awesome, obviously, but given how different the film medium differed from comic books, they did an okay job at capturing the essense of the story.

Twelve years later, Storm Riders II came out featuring the original two main actors:

It sucked ass to an unprecedented heights.  The poster above was honestly much better than any single frame in the movie, and for the last hour and 45 minutes of it, all I wanted was for it to end.  In fact, I went taking a nap after the first half of it.

It should be noted that bad acting and stupid plot are expected in an average action movie, so I didn’t really take any point off for those.  However:

• The character designs are all messed up.  Why does Wind still have both eyes and what’s with everybody’s TV-drama-styled personality?  And the original comic author claims to have been involved in the process?
• So… where’s the script?  Did HK writers also go on a strike?  I partially understood the movie only because I remembered the comics.
• Last but not the least… the special effects SUCKED.  Worse computer graphics than the movie 12 years ago?  How’s that possible?

The only redeeming value of this movie is to remind the hardcore fans how great the story used to be.  I despise the author’s shameless attempt to capitalize on his old work from 15+ years ago, allowing inappropriately funded amatures butcher such a classic.

Growing up sucks, when it involves watching your favorite art trashed by its own creater.

It’s been a while since the average independent short film freely available on the Internet was better crafted than the average Hollywood movie that you have to pay $15 at a theater for.  However, I had never been this impressed before seeing this piece: 李獻計歷險記 (Lee’s Adventures).

If I hadn’t glanced at the forum comments first, I might’ve been turned away quickly by the seemingly rough graphics and ghetto voice.  20 minutes later, I was in awe of the creative, hilarious, sad, and quite deep storyline.  With a plot as random as Alice in the Wonderland, this animation packed in elements of comedy, action, romance, and sci-fi.  The author cleverly incorporated tons of pop culture references and subtle jokes: including the character names.

The story is about a young man with a strange disease trying to get back together with his ex-girlfriend by beating a video game that will turn back time.  His stubbornness about love is a reminder of how naive many of us used to be… but of course nobody I knew had the courage to go through the kind of adventures that he did.

Instead of YouTube, you can also download a higher res version via eMule from VeryCD.

Official website.

Happy New Year.

Logically, however, I don’t see what’s there to be so happy about it.  New Year happens on roughly 0.3% of the days, which is a lot more common than your birthday if you were born on February 29th.  A new year means a rent increase, a new set of work goals to meet, an older age, closer to death, and higher insurance premiums.  Maybe the new year partiers would realize this once they sober up.

I happened to turn my head during the countdown to the “1 hour to go” mark at 11, and the crowd exploded in cheers.  Obviously, when you have been standing in the cold rain for 11 hours and know the suffering will end in one more, you’d be pretty happy too.

The cheering, honking, and other noises were even louder when the 2010 sign lit up.  One avenue, 33 stories, and a thick layer of glass away, those noises could still be heard.  Remind me not to buy a condo in this neighborhood.

For this NYE excursion, I pulled out the camcorder that I haven’t used in about five years. It’s got much better zoom than my point-and-shoot still camera, but the only problem is I have no Firewire on this computer to upload that stuff with.  So here we are stuck with slightly less than optimal images:

The actual ball drop, fireworks, and confetti rain at midnight was unsurprisingly unimpressive.  Perhaps the point of this event is mostly about the celebrity presence and not so much the fireworks?

When you have hundreds of thousands of people, they not only pee in their pants but also produce a lot of litter.  Therefore, as soon as the clock hit midnight, a mile long of sanitation trucks were deployed.  Is it just me, or does everybody think this is more cool than the ball drop?

The Times Square ball drop is one of the biggest events in the world on New Year’s Eve, and the ball that drops is practically right outside my office window on a year-round basis.  This New Year’s Eve, over the option of staying home to play video games with myself, I chose to commute into the city and exercise a privilege that many would dream to have, by staring at the silly ball from the comfort and warmth of my office.

As you might remember from my post last year, Times Square on NYE is all about police work.  A pretty large chunk of the city around the ball is barricaded at every street intersection.  Very few, such as guests with proof of staying at a hotel within the area, can cross the police line and all their belongings have to be searched.  Hundreds of others stay on this side of the police line staring hopelessly into the distance.  Cops get tired explaining all day how, in theory as if there’s still space available, to detour into Times Square.

I’m not a fan of that Times Square ball, but always love the lights on Sixth Avenue:

Sixth Avenue from above:

The ball (the dot of light) from 42nd floor:

The ball (note how it changes colors) from the 34th floor:

Times Square at 46th Street.  Those ant-sized dots underneath the American Eagle ad are crazy tourists who had probably been standing there since noon.

Had McDonald’s for dinner.  For some reason, they think by printing blue lizzard people on my food would enhance my appetite.

Here’s the nearby McDonald’s with some crazy crowd of customers.  Note the security guard that restricts access to the upstairs seating area.  Hey, this is New York.  Even a McDonald’s has to have heavy security!

While waiting for the moment to take this picture, someone who I assumed to be a student-tourist from Taiwan, pointed to my cup and asked whether I had seen the movie Avatar.  We then exchanged some mildly excited thoughts on the movie, and the fact that he saw it in IMAX 3D (which I pointed out must be at Lincoln Center).  The Eve is one of the few occassions when it’s appropriate for a New York person to respond to a random and pointless inquiry and actually carry out a conversation that lasts over 5 seconds.

Haven’t updated my blog in a while so here’s a half-assed quick round-up of interesting things that happened.  Gotta do this before 2010 hits!

On Nov 14, Hong took me ice skating for the very first time.  It was supposedly disappointing that I didn’t fall on my ass.

On Nov 21, I participated in my first Chinese Harp recital.  I messed up my song terribly but at least I can now say I’ve done a music recital.

Thanksgiving was spent at Dennis’s house with a subset of our large family network.  Not sure why Ariel and CS weren’t in this picture.

The first turduken I’ve tasted.  There were a lot of firsts this November.

Hong and I also (for the first time) learned to play mah jong.  It was sort of like deeds done for senior appreciation day as we appeared so dumb and slow next to Grandma and Anita’s dad.

We watched two awesome movies - Jim Carey’s Christmas Carol and James Cameron’s Avatar.  The similarity that they share is the amazing blend of computer graphics with actual film.  It was hard not to think that they drew Jim Carey by hand and captured those blue people on film.

On Dec 19, the East Coast had a blizzard supposedly most severe since 1996.  I assume that means the biggest snow I have ever seen in my life.  Shoveling driveways sure brought back memories.

Christmas was spent with Hong’s family.  Here’s a group picture after the fun-filled gift exchange session:

On my birthday, a bunch of coworkers took me out to a very nice lunch.   Here’s the cake that Lauren got me: