Peter’s Blog V2

I’ve been waiting for this movie since 2005.  Only one more year to go!

Click to see the teaser trailer:

Hey Yo!  Tasty Chinese Tonight!

I think “ho jaye” translates to “let’s have”.  Found this poster on the window of Patel Brothers, an Indian chain supermarket.

This wouldn’t have been so funny if it weren’t found in Flushing, where the store was surrounded by a whole city of Chinese more real than “Real Chinese”.

We had no idea what this movie was about before it was half over.  On Thursday, I heard about it for the first time.  On Friday, I heard about it for the second time.  On Saturday, Hong mentioned how she also heard many excellent reviews, so we hit the movie theater, paid for the tickets, and loved it.

It’s not one of those big Hollywood blockbusters, and it doesn’t even have the spontaneous singing/dancing from Bollywood.  But it’ll make you laugh, make you cry, make you cringe, and make you appreciate life just that much more.

Did Wall-E come from Walmart?

When we watch the movie and see the portrayal of Buy n Large, the retail chain super store that covered Earth, it’s pretty easy to make an association with Walmart: gigantic stores, feel-good commercials, cheap goods, and fat people.

Is this connection subtle or obvious?  How about the robot hero’s name itself?  Was Wall-E genuinely meant to be an acronym of “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class”?  That’s a mouthful of words and not a straightforward way to state the robot’s purpose.  Perhaps, the sounding of the acronym, Wally, came directly from “Wally World” in the first place?

Wally World is a nickname for Walmart, commonly used in mainstream America (but apparently outside of major metropolitan areas).  I’d love to pick up a Wall-E DVD from Wally World.  Would you like one, too?

Another “evidence” is in the spelling of “Wall-E”.  Note how the hyphen reminds you of the spelling ”Wal-Mart”.

This is the most extreme chess victory I’ve ever come across: winning with two rooks, two knights, two bishops, two queens, and the majority of the pawns, after slashing just about everything from the opponent:

My perfect life.  On stage in Beijing (but it’s over by now).

Tim found this ad in a cab.

Jay released his new album – Capricorn (魔杰座).  As usual, he’s awesome (and still very daring with his outfits…).

The first hit is 稻香.  It’s another inspirational song from Jay to bring positive thinking to the society.

追不到的夢想  換個夢不就得了
Fail to chase down your dream?  Why not simply find another?

Storm Riders, my favorite comic series from Hong Kong, has officially set foot across the entire spectrum of the entertainment industry by having released an animated movie – 風雲決 (Storm Riders 2008).

I wouldn’t call it a great movie.  The plot is sloppy (which is the norm for movies), and the voice actors don’t quite sound into it.  However, as an animated version of a classic HK comic story, it’s excellent.  It’s got a good balance between the Japanese anime techniques and the Chinese styled sceneries and action representations.  It gives life to the ink-on-paper heroes that thousands of us have admired.

Storm Rider fans would love this, almost certainly more than the movie with real actors.  It’s got a “new” storyline, i.e. twisted side-line plot from the original series, without losing the heart or soul.  In fact, it assumes a pretty good knowledge of the characters, weapons, and locations in its audience.  It might be hard to understand this movie otherwise.

Check out some previews and commentaries.

For background information, 風雲 = Wind Cloud (AKA Storm Riders) is an HK comic series originated in the 80′s and had been extremely popular in the first ten years.  It’s likely the most well known and most read Chinese comic in history.  Numerous pop culture byproducts were created in the past ten years – souveniors,novel,  a movie (with seriously famous actors; sequel is in the making), two TV series, two or more computer games, and now an animated movie…

Just watched the Olympics opening ceremony at Hong’s neighbor’s house, and got two words to describe it.  Freaking awesome.  The compliment goes to the performances, the spirit, and the neighbor’s gigantic HDTV.

It was truly fantastic.  Not sure whether the powerful choreography, the flashy technology, or the enormous budget was more impressive, but I was amazed by the huge number of performers involved.  At first I thought they just went on the Tiananmen Square, grabbed a few thousand volunteers and trained them for a couple of weeks.  But when the martial arts group did 2008 synchronized flying twist kicks, I realized that these weren’t just random average people… but then again, it’s China, aren’t we all kung fu masters? 

Those on the luckier side of Earth got to watch it on TV real time.  The rest of us watched the “replay” 12 hours later.  Everyone that I knew had religiously watched the whole thing and engaged themselves in the passion.  I had never cared about any of the Olympics games; but now I’m a fan.

You can find more of these high quality photos at boston.com.  There’s also a blog dedicated to the Beijing Olympics.  Of course, let’s not forget the official website of the Beijing Olympics.

During the past month, I spent most of my subway rides playing the Medieval Kings Chess II on my Blackberry.  There are five difficulty levels:

• King Author (Beginner)
• Frederick II (Easy)
• Charlemagne (Medium)
• S. Mehmed II (Hard)
• Will the Conq. (Very Hard)
• Gengis Khan (Master)

Since I never really touched chess after high school, the “easy” level was killing me in the beginning.  After I got comfortable enough to beat each level, though, I moved on to the next.  Now I’m winning 17-10 at the “very hard” level and will soon move on to face Gengis Khan.

Just a few weeks ago, I could’ve done 2-3 games during my morning commute.  But now I can barely finish one.  The reason?  The computer got really slow – I think much faster than the Blackberry processor at this level.  Too bad there’s no timed game on this thing.

While impatiently waiting for my Blackberry to make its next move, I often wonder what algorithm a chess game implements.  Mine apparently just increases iteration to increase the difficulty, but are there more efficient chess algorithms out there?  I wonder what I can come up with… hmm… probably nothing good :-p