Dillan, I Got Your Back

Hey D,

I got your manuscript! Man, that photo shoot was harsh, but I'm totally happy to publish your version of the events. It might be hard to understand your mom these days, especially with your mom speaking in that abnormally high voice. Don't worry, Auntie does it to me too. It's kind of weird actually.

Anyways, it was fun playing Starcraft with you. I didn't know you could actually play but I think that was a good trick getting Tucker to get into your crib. Alright, I gotta bounce. I'll put your comic up on my blog. Hopefully your mom will get the message: NO MORE PHOTOSHOOTS!

If you have any problems with your mom, let's talk. I'm here for you.

Your Uncle Ave

Transformers 3

One of the amusing (or I suppose, not amusing, if you're a movie executive) things about this country was how quickly I saw Transformers 2 DVDs, BEFORE the movie even finished showing. (I think it's showing at the local theater, but I also think it's Mandarin only). What most foreigners don't know, though, is that there are actual Transformers here in this city. I took pictures of several and I even saw a mini-van Autobot.

I spotted this Decepticon right outside of the police station. I don't think that the police knew that Decepticons are more than just F-15 fighters!

Here is an Autobot in our bike garage. I'm glad it's guarding my bike.

And finally, there are even motorcycle police Autobots. Which makes the first picture even weirder because you would've thought that Autobots would recognize Decepticons. Overall, I think the number of Decepticons and Autobots are pretty even in this city. Which is a good thing I guess. :)

Uncle Rico

Facial hair and I don't really get along that well. I always want to love it. It doesn't love me. I tried to grow a mustache last week. Here's the result.

The Boss kept on calling me Uncle RIco. Which is fine, cuz we could've won state if the coach would've put me in.

It's You, Not Me

I've been a Mac guy pretty much all my life. I remember when Macs were a magnitude of awesome better than PCs (5th/6th grade). Then I remember when all my friends had PCs and got to play cool games on them. And the Mac, still pretty advanced, sucked pretty bad (7th grade to high school). Then Windows 95 came along, and the PC not only was awesome at gaming, but it was pretty good for getting things done too. I used Xacto's Dell my whole freshman year. It was challenging to share a computer, but he was gracious in giving me free rein over it. I remember when Toshi did something to screw it up and I recall thinking "I'm glad I don't know that much about PCs; I could've done that". My biggest fight with the Dell came when I accidentally emailed to my whole address book a sappy love letter. Sigh. I wanted to throw it out the window. Or hit control-Z on my life. My year-long experience with the Dell, though, convinced me to buy a Mac. I bought my first computer my sophomore year in college. It cost $1800 and I bought a 17 inch Viewsonic monitor for $300 to go with it. Sigh. Those were the days. After I graduated from college, I bought a Powerbook G3 Pismo (one of the best laptops ever made) and then a Powerbook G4 12 inch (also one of the best laptops ever made) after that. Since then, though, I now share (by marriage) a Macbook with the Boss and, recently, a netbook, an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE. It came pre-installed with Windows XP.

We had been doing pretty well with one computer. I've been able to cobble together a system where we have different user accounts but share the same music and photo library.  But as I began doing more and more web work, we thought it would be best if we got another computer for times where the other person just wanted to check something on the web. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do. I didn't really know XP that well, and had really no interest in trying to develop skills in understand that system. There really wasn't a low-power netbook-type of computer offered by Apple. We bought a Mac-mini first; that became our family computer with the Macbook being the mobile computer. But as we moved overseas, it wasn't that practical to have a desktop computer.

I did a little bit of research and I discovered something called Ubuntu. It was a free operating system, based on UNIX, and it was touted as being extremely user-friendly. One of the things that I'm hoping to do here is to leverage technology as a business. Piracy is pretty common-place here and I was wondering if this could possibly be polished enough to use in a work environment. So I decided to buy the netbook and install Ubuntu on it.

And after trying really hard to use it and like using for almost six months I've given up. There are a lot of cool things you can do in Ubuntu and I really appreciate its UNIX roots but it's just too much of a hassle to use.

•  I found that the wireless and networking configuration were spotty. Sometimes I had have to toggle it on and off to get a connection. 
• The suite of applications that it had to offer were as good as the ones offered for XP but not as good as the ones offered for the Mac (Textwrangler vs JEdit; iTunes vs anything-else; web browsers). Granted, there's some nerdy/programmy stuff that I could on Ubuntu that I really wouldn't know where to begin with XP, but in terms of everyday usage, I didn't find Ubuntu compelling.
• The software updating system seemed cumbersome to me and I felt that, unlike the Mac, I had to conform my usage behaviors to the system instead of being able to tweak the system to enable me to work the way I like to work. Some things I did like better because Ubuntu was UNIX, but I suppose that wanting it to be well-organized was something that I've been spoiled with on the Mac. Granted, I had the same experience with XP, but if Ubuntu is just as good as XP in some areas and not as good in other areas, wouldn't that make XP the better choice?

So... now I'm officially abandoning Ubuntu. Maybe it will be more usable in a desktop environment. Or maybe version 10 will be much better. But for now I've gotten used to using XP. And I like it a lot better than Ubuntu.

Happy birthday to me

I am 31. Which means I am officially old. But because I live in the future I am able to tell you what I did on my birthday even though it is still my birthday. It was a pretty normal day. EXCEPT THAT IT WAS THE DAY THAT I WAS BORN. This made it the awesomest day ever in the history of days. First, I got to play around on the computer. Then, I got to hang out with Chipmunkgeek for almost 2 hours! After that, I ate lunch with the Boss. It was a delicious meal of soup, noodles, and chicken salad. I proceeded to take a luxurious 4 hour nap. Upon waking, we went around town. First went to the street market, looking for a birthday mug. Then we went to the hip-hop store to get a birthday hat. After that we went downtown where we ate roast duck! Yum. If you know me, you will know that I lack many things, but one of the biggest things I lack is discipline. I am trying to be more disciplined this year. I'll let you know how it goes!

Stronger than a tiger

Spread your fingers as wide as possible. Now curl the ends of your fingers. You have just created a claw. This is a little smaller than the size of the claw that I saw in the street market today. We were looking at these different oddities when a man comes over and tells us, with a noticeable accent, that this stuff is good as a medicine for sickness. He also told us that he was from Tibet.

Have you ever wondered if you could take on a Tibetan man? I am warning you right now. Do not even try. I asked the man what animal the claw came from. 

TM: "A tiger." 
Me: "Oh. Did you kill it yourself." 
TM: "Here read this." (I can't read it).
Me: "Well, did you kill it yourself?" (I guess the paper said that he kills terrifying mythical beasts using only a toothpick).
TM: "Of course."

Wow. As you ponder the age-old question of whether you can take on a Tibetan man, the real question you should be asking yourself is if you can kill a tiger. I'm assuming that he didn't use a gun (guns are hard to come by in this country). Which means he used a crossbow. Or his hands. If you cannot kill a tiger, I suggest that you do not consider trying to take on this man. He is stronger than tiger. More graceful than an eagle. Faster than a cheetah. More intelligent than a computer. More hungry than a hippo. 


On a somewhat unrelated note, he looked very Native American. I remember Doug B once told me that he thought Tibetans were the Native Americans of China.