2014 X'mas So Cal Trip

I think it has been 3+ years since I last visited So Cal (We had a Spring break trip to Malibu/San Diego in 2011 and before that we spent the 2009 X'mas break there) This trip began at 5am on 12/24 when we started our drive. Arrived at Din Tai Fung for the obligatory Xiaolongbao (小籠包) around 11am as lunch. Next we visited Pomona for AMOCA and Cal Poly (more details later) And we had our X'mas eve seafood/brewery dinner at Brea. Then we called it a night. The whole X'mas day was dedicated to Disney (California Adventure, which the kids have not been to before) The waits were ~25-40 minutes per ride (with the help of fastpasses), which I considered not that bad. Here is my Top 4 list:

1. Toy story themed shooting game
2. Cars themed racecar ride
3. Hollywood hotel themed "dropped" elevator 
4. Mickey Ferris wheel

We decided to go easy on the boxing day and started with dim sum in the City of Industry. Then we headed to the California Science Center in downtown LA. To be honest, I don't see coherent flows of exhibits that explain related scientific theory and ideas. Still, my kids enjoyed the transportation exhibition. And I learned something new from the exhibition about ecology: the Antarctica was actually colder than the Arctic. We spent the evening at LA Live (the new buildings near the Staples Center, Laker and King's home court): first for the Grammy Museum (discounted ticket $8 each after 6pm) then the Yard house for dinner/beer.

Since we stayed at the nice Le Meridien in Santa Monica, the perfect activity was walking around the beach and the pier after breakfast on 12/27. Then we headed east to visit the "famous" Bergamot Station with many galleries (#12 out of 37 Santa Monica attractions from TripAdvisor, and frequently mentioned by the Visual Art newsletter). Next stop was UCLA. Then further east to Beverley Hills via Santa Monica Blvd and drove through many luxurious houses near North Rodeo Drive. Of course I needed to go to Sunset Strip on the way to Hollywood for some hair metal vibe but the only things that served as reminders of the glorious days of metal were some big guitar sculptures (one of them was inside a bank!) Then we showed the kids the stars and hand prints outside Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd and viewed the big hillside Hollywood sign from the mall there! We ended the night with more Chinese food in San Gabriel before leaving on 12/28. We drove down briefly to Venice Beach that morning. Then picked up our friend from LA Union Station. She took us to lunch at Farmers Market/The Grove at Fairfax and 3rd before driving for 8 hour back home ("holiday traffic" delay at the usual spots on I-5)

More on the food we had:

• TAPS Fish House and Brewery: we felt like having some seafood since we were close to the coast and craft beer is always good, anytime and anywhere. 
• Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen: it's a really popular restaurant at Disney downtown so we got a 4:45 reservation, which was actually perfect after 8 hours in a theme park. I had turducken (was traditionally for Thanksgiving which I missed because of my HK trip) but the highlights was the chocolate bread pudding souffles. And the New Orleans jazz was nice too. 
• Yard house: it's among one of the places that I saw most beer on tap ever. I got an IPA flight which had a good variety. 
• Vega Paradise: our first choice that evening was actually Cantonese style food but the place was packed. It's San Gabriel so there are plenty of other choices. It's good to take a break from meat some times.
• Dogtown Coffee vs Donut King: that's the two places we got breakfast from in Santa Monica. The former featured organic local coffee (which we didn't get but had a breakfast burrito instead) while the latter had more than donut and healthier than its name suggested: it had breakfast croissants and bagels too. 
• 800 Degree Pizza: this is near UCLA and its thin crust got 2 thumbs up from my daughter.
• Brazilian BBQ: this is something I wanted to try for a long long time and finally tried it as the Farmer's Market thanks to my friend's recommendation. It has lots of choices for meat including lamb leg, garlic chicken, garlic beef, sausages to name a few. 

It wouldn't be a complete trip without some museum visits:

• American Museum of Ceramic Art: this is another place introduced to me by the Visual Art newsletter. Ceramic art is an area I would like to focus on and glad to know there are museums dedicated to it. The building used to belong to a bank and a car dealer (as you could still tell from the heavy vault door and the tiles on the floor) but now converted to a museum with artist studios. We were given a tour to the latter. The 2 current exhibitions were American artist Chris Gustin's work and pieces from the Mettlach area in Germany. Gustin's teaware were particularly interesting to me.  
• Grammy Museum: Grammy is of course the most well-known award in the music industry. This is a very cozy 4-floor museum that features themes and artifacts from the award-winning musicians, like the late great blues guitar virtuoso SRV and the king of pop Michael Jackson. I could see it's hard to cover the many musical genres emerged since the beginning of the 20th century but I was happy that one corner was dedicated to the jazz specialty label Blue Note while my daughter enjoyed the Taylor Swift exhibition.
• Fowler Museum: this one and Hammer are both part of UCLA and both admission free. This one is about world culture. I particularly enjoyed "Round Trip" which was shown along 4 corridors that formed a square inside the building and was about 2 American traveled around the world using the newly invented bicycle with 2 equal-sized wheels (which replaced the old big-front-small-back-wheel type) and Kodak camera. The title wording also played on the fact that the pictures taken with the new Kodak camera were round in shape.
• Hammer Museum: it has a small collection of impressionist masters which were gems from that era. However, my favorite was the mythical Salome by Gustave Moreau.
• Dodgers Stadium: last and least ('coz it's enemy territories, which we have been to quite a few in this trip, e.g. the home stadium of Anaheim Angels, the home ice of Anaheim Ducks) this is not exactly a museum but its retired number plaza had quite a few players that deserve a lot of respect, including the racial barrier breaking Jackie Robinson, the great pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Sutton.

Lennon or McCartney?

Guitar Magazine has a post about a YouTube video in which 550 artists (including actors/actress/musicians) were interviewed and asked whether s/he prefers Lennon or McCartney.
Well, of course I have to ask myself the question too. My instinct said Lennon ('coz only the good died young!?) but after taking a closer look at my favorite Beatles tunes and who wrote them:

1. Yesterday (M)
2. All You Need is Love (L)
3. Eleanor Rigby (M)
4. While My Guitar Gently Weeps  (H)
5. Strawberry Fields Forever (L)
6. Michelle (M)
7. And I Love Her (M)
8. With a Little Help From My Friends (M)
9. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (M)
10. Penny Lane (M)
11. Here Comes the Sun (H)
12. Hey Jude (M)
13. She Love You (L/M)
14. I Want to Hold Your Hand (L/M)
15. In my Life (L/M)
16. Martha My Dear (M)
17. Here, There and Everywhere (M)

The answer is pretty obvious.

認識香港2014

過去幾次返港都有特地遊覽一些有獨特色彩的地方（例如去年一月到過多間藝術博物館，去年十一月到過港島東區），今次由於和同學聚會眾多，加上不宜過度行走攀爬，本來沒有甚麼目標，結果反而到了不少新地方！

今次香港之旅第一個星期晚晚夾band，上午比較多時間和爸媽活動。住得離粉嶺不遠，正好參觀該處兩間道觀(蓬瀛仙館, 雲泉仙館)及食齋（在前者）。蓬瀛仙館我較欣賞其堂皇的建築，供奉三位神祇（包括全真七子之首丘處機）的大殿及六十位太歲的樓層均極有特色；雲泉仙館我則欣賞其外所種之花卉，包括很雅緻的菊花，雖然今次不合時賞荷花，還是可以想像那大荷池在荷花盛放的景況,即使是枯枝也頗有意境！

至於位於荔枝角醫院舊址的饒宗頣文化館則是爸爸介紹我去的（可能因為大師和我們是同鄉,其中一項專研的科目正是潮學），也是約了在附近工作的朋友午飯局「順道」而去（BTW，多謝朋友在D2請食西餐，感覺和當年在那裡工廠區做暑期工的年代很不一樣。）本館有別於大部份為開設博物館而起的建築，而是保留具有歷史價值的舊建築，因此展覽室分得頗散，山腳的第一室介紹大師生平及展出部份他的書畫作品，再上是另一群建築，包括餐廳、大堂以及更多展覽室：當日分別有（現代南方）水墨畫、昔日香港照片以及介紹該址歷史（由海關到賣豬仔宿舍到傳染病醫院）三個展覽。

今個假期有幸得兩位同學當嚮導分別帶我參觀了港島區的幾處古蹟，包括現為餐廳及店舖灣仔的和昌大押，及位於半山曾是名門望族何甘棠府第及教堂的孫中山紀念館；還有原是警察宿舍現有售賣設計師產品店舖的元創方。

最後想提看過一場精彩的爵士音樂會，演出者是由口琴手Cy Leo帶領的樂隊，當晚演出多首我們熟悉的名作包括Cantaloupe Island及Bluesette等等，蘭桂坊當年的The Jazz Club and Bar我去過數次，自其結業後也沒有在那裡聽過jazz，所在的大廈California Tower由拆卸到現在差不多重建完成我也沒留意，今次的場地Orange Peel離那裡不遠，這是我首次去，希望有下次。（事隔多年，現在方知The Jazz Club and Bar的歷史）

後記：上次逛銅鑼灣誠品，得知那裡有大量雨果唱片公司新舊出品，今次買了2014新出的潮州二弦作品集，正！

Autosports highlights: WTCC finale, NASCAR finale, F1 finale

The biggest races during the 2-day Macau GP were the WTCC finale and F3. WTCC rookie Jose Maria Lopez has been dominating all season by winning 9 races before coming to Macau and has already won the series championship. Then he won 1 more (from the pole): the first race at Macau, to break the all-time single season win record of 9, previously held by Muller, who was also the defending champion, ousted by Lopez. I think he could have swept both races given how strong his car was if not for WTCC's interesting qualifying rule: the top 10 starting drivers in race 1 start in reverse order in race 2 (i.e., #10 in race 1 starts from the pole in race 2) That gave another former champion and Macau "specialist" Huff a chance. He climbed up to P2 shortly after race 2 started and eventually passed the leader (whose power steering malfunctioned) after a late restart. The other WTCC highlight was 9-time rally champ Sebastian Loeb showing off his drifting technique on the famous hairpin of the Macau street course. Not sure if WTCC will come back to Macau in 2015 (I'm pretty sure I'm not coming back to Macau GP in 2015 though :( ) The F3 race featured future F1 driver Max Verstappen (who will be the youngest ever at the age of 18)  The race didn't start well: a big crash in the front collected many cars, including the 2 frontrunners. Vestappen didn't get a chance to show off his ability. Rosenqvist was not challenged much after the restart and won easily.

The 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup series finale started a few hours later on the same Sunday in Miami. The 4 remaining drivers eligible for the championship: Harvick, Hamlin, Logano and Newman, were up front for most of the race. Harvick, Hamlin and Gordon all looked strong. However, Hamlin faded after a late restart, leaving Harvick up front with Newman chasing in P2 but the challenge was too late and Harvick won his first NASCAR Sprint Cup championship. Newman almost completed THE "mission": winning the championship without winning one race all season long prior to this final race (He would have won this race if he passed Harvick on the last lap) and thus proving how ridiculous the current chase format is (but he didn't. So this chase format is safe for now :P Ironically, the 1-win Kenseth winning the cup over Newman, the winningest driver in 2003, was the reason that NASCAR started its 1st chase format) Check out how ESPN ridicule this 2014 season with its "awards"

Then we had the F1 series finale one week later in Abu Dhabi. It took me a while to find a bar that showed the race live (found in East TST) The pressure was on the point leader Hamilton and the 2nd place Rosberg, who could have leapfrogged if he won and Hamilton finished worse than P2 because of the double-points rewarded to this final race. Rosberg started from pole while Hamilton from 2nd but trouble with Rosberg's car dropped him all the way outside top 10 and Hamilton kept his lead over a strong Massa to win the race and the 2014 championship for the 2nd time in his young career His previous championship was won in 2008. Coincidentally, Massa won the final race of that season but lost the title by 1 point. That was the last season that the championship was decided on the final race prior to this one! As much as people hate the double-point rule (and likely to be abandoned,) that's the only reason this last race matter :P Let's hope for a more competitive 2015 F1 season!

The Movie Post

As usual, I have a lots of movies to write about after watching them on the long US-HK round trip. This time I watched:

- Lucy: obviously Scarlett Johansson was the draw for this one. They didn't even try to make her look pretty in this but it doesn't matter. The sci-fi story is good enough. Most of the special effects were done well to show her special power after the drug accidentally got into her body which forced her brain to develop to an unprecedented level. 

- Captain America 2: This is another movie with Johansson, who is even more attractive as the Black Widow here. I am a sucker for super-hero movies and enjoyed the first Captain America movie quite a bit (I liked the part about using the Captain as a propaganda machine) It's mostly predictable: the people with the most political power being the too-ambitious bad guy. The heroes had to fall from the grace before their triumphal return. Still, it's entertaining.

- Hercules: This is yet another movie with ties to comics, as well as Greek Mythology. Actually, it's more about de-mythicize the legends of Hercules: he didn't fight alone and the monsters he defeated were actually human foes. The centaurs he battled were actually cavalry. Again, it's kinda predictable like Captain America in the sense that the ones who were supposed to be good guys turned out to be bad guys.

- Million dollar arms: Sports movie is another of my favorite genre. This movie is about a once powerful US sports agent needed new blood to revive his career and decided to harvest talent from India, where there's a huge population of cricket players, whose bowling motion is kinda similar to pitching in baseball. He organized contests over there and the big prize money eventually attracted players with potentials. He brought them to US for more training and try out with MLB. I am not gonna give out the ending here. What I like about the movie is how relationship between people are portrayed: e.g., mentors and the students, family members, agent and the players he brought into this foreign country.  

- Draft day: a movie about American football is of course a must-see for me! And this is familiar territories for Kevin Costner, who has starred in a baseball movie before. He played the role of Cleveland Browns' GM in this movie. The plot is about how he handled the NFL draft: trading picks with other teams and evaluating talents. It's also about how he dealt with the existing players, his mom, his girlfriend, the owner and the head coach who didn't necessarily agree with his decisions. 

- 分手100次: 老實說我不像是會看港產愛情片的人，但我的確看了不少，尤其是坐飛機時，以及由鄭伊健主演的，以前有百分百感覺，近年有我老婆唔夠秤，我老公唔生性，還有本片。男主角伊健飾演一個kidult，女主角周秀娜（性感女神，片中不乏吊帶熱褲等養眼鏡頭）飾演對伊健照顧無微不至的女友，但常常會用分手威脅對方。雖然劇情頗有犯駁（伊健錢從何處來？），但相當成功帶出戀愛關係的無奈：必須包容對方缺點。這個網誌詳細介紹了本片，大家可以參考下。

And there were 2 movies from 2012 that I didn't get a chance to write about:

- Rock of ages: this is the big-screen version of an 80s hair metal themed musical (that's why everything is sung in the movie.) Fans of the genre would immediately recognize this as the name of a big hit from 80s hair band Def Leppard, even though the song itself wasn't used in the movie. The whole movie is pretty much an elaborated version of an 80s metal MV: a girl chasing her dream to Hollywood and had to struggle (working as a stripper to survive) Of course that's not enough for a 120 min musical/movie so a struggling male character was added (a rocker who had to join a boy band to get signed) The writer also threw in a larger-than-life primadonna (played by Tom Cruise) Don't get me wrong though 'coz I enjoyed the movie a lot, as an 80s hair metal fan myself. Each actor/actress actually sang their own parts. I'm surprised that Tom Cruise could rock! He has definitely earned more respect from me after this.  

- Batman Dark Knight Rises: this movie got famous for the wrong reason: a gunman opened fire at a movie theater on its premiere night :( I have never been a big fan of the Batman movie "franchise" so I've watched only a few (the "classic" one by Tim Burton came to my mind) This one is definitely better than expected. Again, the story is a typical super-hero one: Bruce Wayne was beaten and locked up and eventually escaped and revenged. The ending really got people talking: did he really sacrifice himself to save the city? Well, it can be interpreted in many different ways.

棋聖仙遊

一代圍棋巨人吳清源於11月30日仙遊，享年一百歲。各地棋界早前為他百歲壽辰舉辦了不少活動，令新一代棋友認識大師生平及對棋壇的影響。

2014培正同學日

(註：本文大量抄考去年為同學日所寫一文)

今年是母校培正建校125周年，同學日格外隆重，正日前一晚是禮社同學在TST富豪酒店搞的謝師宴，大部份同學廿幾年沒見，可喜的是大家「無穿無爛」，縱有昔日恩怨，隨著當晚我們樂隊演出，越玩越high，也即置之不理。（再之前四晚都在旺角先達Studio 310練歌）

同學日一早老友到我家攞Lego，並載我回培正，十時多行上中學部，同學仔帶領校友參觀新大樓，家政班示範雞翼去骨的學生有板有眼（雖然有點擔心她手中那把刀不聽話），拍片的學生使用器材看起來相當pro. 之後觀看禮社校友對教師的籃球比賽，戰況激烈（新電子計分板由本社捐出）。到了午飯時間，我們在中學小食部吃自助餐，味道真不錯，尤其是那杯奶茶！又和舊同學高談闊論，更是高興。

飯後在小學至中學樓梯來個大合照，然後到勝利道的Starbucks繼續吹水（不好咖啡的我首次在港光顧）。之後就是在當日才開幕的新小學禮堂舉行盛大的加冕儀式，主角當然是銀禧的禮社。儀式後到校友之家幫忙搬他慷慨解囊提供的紅白酒，再向大公宴會場九龍灣展貿中心進發。

九龍灣展貿中心乃係全港最大的晚宴場地之一，才能容納得了百席的大公宴，我們禮社訂了十一圍！這一席有我們校花，多年不見，美貌更勝當年。

大公宴表演節目包括魔術及校友胡渭康表演多首名曲。還有「培正姑爺」陳百祥主持的獎門人式乒乓球遊戲，兩位同學代表我們禮社上台，球技相當不俗！

後記：用了current affairs的label，皆因名人陳光明上報, 文中提到他順利搵番當年一班同學仔也包括我呢。

Random things

每週貼幾篇已成為生活習慣一部份，也是打發時間不錯的娛樂。這篇帖子有點特別：在2009年「響應號召」寫寫關於自己的25 random things，可是一直都未有完成，直至今天也只想到18件：

1. 我不喜歡隨波逐流，正好解釋了我五年後才發表my "18 random things" :P
2. 我在幼稚園低班曾經獲頒寫字獎（當年應該是人人有一個分豬肉獎）可惜小時了了，現在寫的字實在慚愧。（幸好不會像某雷大教授般自鳴得意，說甚麼樂於見到人們因為簡體字流行不再留意自己不行的書法一道）
3. 我小時候在母親鼓勵下和姐姐投稿《兒童樂園》這本兒童刊物，可惜現已忘了題目是甚麼。
4. 我不喜歡幼稚園美術堂上畫畫，還記得各種大樽顏料一樽樽充滿乾了的痕跡，和一樣顏跡斑斑的圍裙。今年竟然參加了數次PaintNite。
5. 我11歲左右開始讀金庸小說（第一套是射鵰英雄傳，我媽在旺角樓上八折書店買的），28歲寫了我唯一一篇短篇小說。
6. 我10歲左右開始對電腦產生強烈興趣，讀了不少雜誌書籍（當然只是一知半解），然後爸爸給了我幾百港元（人生首次拿這麼多現金）到黃金商場買下第一部電腦(Apple ][ clone)之後鍵盤部份接觸不良，還跟一位Uncle去買了IBM PC的殼來改裝這部Apple呢！
7. 我玩了一年電腦後，在該部電腦上用BASIC寫了一個打字練習程式，並參加了雜誌舉辦的程式設計比賽！
8. 我的第一部「音響器材」是給電腦作external storage的卡式帶機（數碼資料轉為模擬聲音記錄在卡式帶，還記得很多當年沉迷的好玩電腦遊戲都是儲於卡式帶）順理成章也用來聽音樂。
9. 我人生第一盒從唱片舖買的卡式帶是和姐姐夾份的《聽不到的說話》（呂方首張作品）
10. 在那之前我並不怎麼喜歡音樂，尤其是學校音樂課，樂理完全無心去理解，吹牧童笛永遠只是跟大隊作個樣子（正式濫竽充數）除此之外倒是媽媽買了一個（東南亞流行的複音）口琴給我教我吹音階。第一件自己要求學的樂器其實是二胡，不過卻學得一塌糊塗，一星期一堂group lesson，基本上不知老師所云。
11. 中學時代同學在背後說我是體育白癡，而我的確是我校少數體育科考試不及格（唯一一科）的學生。不過其實我不是不喜歡運動，打高球扒獨木舟等等，都是在大學畢業後愛上。
12. 至於踩單車，則是中學時代跟父母朋友兒子在元朗錦繡花園學識的，幾年之間爸爸買了一架BMX及一架RB給我呢，雖然當時我完全不明白轉波有何用。
13. 我小學時當過幼童軍（和我兒子一樣！）考過銅及銀箭章，不過最複雜的反而覺得是由各隊隊長輪流負責的升旗儀式（現在我兒子的隊伍由家長提場，跟著在手機上顯示的文稿宣讀！），小六那年我終於升上隊長，不過印象中沒有甚麼負責升旗儀式的經歷，可能因各種原因總是輪不到我那一隊呢:P
14. 我在中學時代曾經醉心下棋（中國及國際）每逢午飯時間（甚至短短十分鐘的小息也不放過）必定開局。
15. 在1989-2009年間我搬了14次家。
16. 1993年元旦香港蘭桂芳發生人踩人慘劇，我和其餘七個朋友（五男三女）在現場，其中幾位親身目睹事發經過並幫忙救人。
17. 我不算電影迷，雖然也曾經一支公去Angelica看藝術電影。看得最多的一套是在電影院看過三次（包括一次在UW Madison重映）的《英雄本色》
18. 我在十六歲前絕少做家務，遑論煮食，連公仔麵也不會；記得有一次媽媽病了，我要代她煲粥，完全不知要洗幾多米，結果洗了四五杯，多出幾近十倍！出國留學前才被迫學識煲飯（及蒸雞）

STEM hysteria

I have subscribed to TechRepublic's newsletters for a while. (The place I work for has a learning-hour requirement and these newsletters did a great job in recommending tech webiners or white papers. I am not reading as much this time of the year 'coz the quota has been met :P) It does have its fair share of poorly put-together articles like "the Photo of Alan Turing" (the comment section of which is actually more interesting: some criticized TechRepublic shamelessly plugging Google's technology and Android all the time. Some defended the British government's harsh treatment of Turing for his homosexuality) On the other hand, I found one article argued that "not everyone needs to learn to code", which I completely agree. From the article:

some of the fundamental concerns expressed by the "learn coding" movement are legitimate. Skills such as breaking a complex problem into component parts, rapidly learning and applying new tools and methods, synthesizing a complex series of tasks to accomplish an objective, integrating disparate elements designed by multiple teams, and "debugging" a system when it doesn't work correctly are critical for success in a variety of professions. While coding checks all these boxes, so does woodshop, cooking and baking, advanced mathematics, or designing a house. "Debugging" a failed soufflé or a mortise and tenon joint that doesn't quite fit uses a similar thought process to debugging some pesky JavaScript code, but each content area likely appeals to different sets of people.

I also learned the term "STEM hysteria" from the comments (Yes, I do have friends who think STEM education is not enough in US and is hurting US economy in the long run) I tend to agree with another author, Michael S. Teitelbaum, who wrote the book “Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent." He urges that we continue to strengthen math and science education in K-12, because educated citizens should have an understanding and knowledge of math and science, not because there will be lucrative careers awaiting them. There will be for some, but not for all or even most.

I noticed one comment from the post linked above suggested engineering jobs are higher paid so if more students major in engineering, it would solve the problem with inequalities in the US economy. I cannot disagree more: wouldn't having more graduating engineering students drag down the salaries of engineering jobs?

Free software challenges

I am actually writing about 2 unrelated stories in 1 post:
- To me, the term GNOME in the context of IT immediately refers to the Linux Desktop (see my earlier post) Indeed, it was trademarked for such since 2006. However, the online coupon giant Groupon wanted to name its Point-Of-Sale system Gnome too and trying to register its own trademarks. Well, there are always 2 sides of any issue. Some denounced Groupon's act as bullying the open source community. On the other hand, some pointed out that the two applications are not exactly the same and the names should be able to co-exist. After all, GNOME has its fair share of detractor after all these years fighting the "Linux Desktop war" Anyway, GNOME requested $80k donation to engage in legal battle against Groupon. And they apparently have enough supporters to cover that. At the end of the day, it's all moot point though as Groupon conceded. (GNOME promised to use the money in other ways to benefit the community)

The biggest problem I see though, is the flaw of the copyright system: why does the party in the right (presumably GNOME the desktop organization) still need so much money to defend the copyright it deserves? 

- When talking about free software in the context of the likes of GNOME, the word free means "free as in free speech" Of course, another meaning is "free as in beer" That applies the Microsoft's new strategy to promote Microsoft Office to mobile devices. The author of this post thinks it makes sense as a way to lure more users to Microsoft's online service Office 365. I had an urge to install Office since it's free but then I realize I have Google Doc. I agree with one commenter that "the ship has sailed": a lot of users like me have already been using Google Doc, which probably has less feature than mobile version of Office but good enough for us.

後記：本來個blog有752個帖，我見到想起香港7俠52警察，很不安，快快多寫呢個帖。

How much money do NASCAR drivers make?

I was chatting with my co-w about sports (which is our favorite topic 'coz you can't do no harm with it) and was trying to convince them to follow the Chase for the Sprint cup. I was asked whether it's a big deal to win the chase (i.e., the overall championship) in terms of prize money. For comparison, the overall championship for golf (FedEx Cup of PGA) pays $10 million. And for baseball, each player on the 2013 World Series winning Red Sox got $307,322.68. I have no idea how much the prize money for winning the Sprint cup was! It doesn't seem to be well advertised: I googled and found the money comes from what is called a "points fund" (the term is used for NASCAR's lower-tiers too) When Brad K won it in 2012, he got $5.7 million from it. Not sure how much the runner-up gets these days. The only number I got was from 2002: the runner-up got a bit less than half of what the champ got. And of course, top drivers got a lot of endorsement deals and high base salary from team owners too. Check out Forbe's list of the world's highest paid athletes. Top golfers do make a ton: Tiger at #6 and Phil Mickelson at #8. The top of the list also features a lot of soccer, football and NBA stars. For the whole motorsports, F1 star Lewis Hamilton made it at #19, Dale Jr at #28 and Jimmie Johnson at #42. It's a bit surprising to see the top baseball player was Cliff Lee at #30. Don't get me wrong: he's a great pitcher but not the biggest name out there today.

Back to the topic of NASCAR, so how much does a "below average" driver makes? Here's the story of Landon Cassill: From his stats at NASCAR.com, he finished between 28th-32nd (out of 43) on average for the last 4 Sprint Cup seasons. He made ~$300k from each of his 2011 and 2012 season, which I think is pretty good (double the annual salary of a Python coder!)

Linux Desktop

To be honest, I never have much opinion on such a controversial topic among Linux users (it's kinda like emacs vs vi) I basically use whatever come with default install like your typical dumb user. I have no problem with GNOME or KDE. And if I have to pick one, I picked JWM. I have no idea what desktop I got when I installed Ubuntu 14.04. It turned out to be yet another controversial desktop called Unity, which I saw a lot of negative comments. What is so great about the open source community is that people are actually passionate about the technology. This guy wrote a looooong post to compare GNOME, KDE and Unity!

Sports highlights: Texan football sweeps

These teams from Texas played during the weekend and won:
- University of Texas: defeated #23 West Virginia 33-16. First victory over ranked team under Charlie Strong!
- Texas A&M: upset #3 Auburn.
- Baylor: defeated #15 Oklahoma fairly easily.
- TCU: defeated #7 Kansas State.
- Dallas Cowboys: defeated (unranked :P) Jacksonville Jaguars in London 31-17.
(The Houston Texan has a bye)

Smart music

The title is the name of a piece of software for practicing music (which I used for my jazz class at Stanford)  but this post is not about it. According to a new study, smart people listen to Radiohead and dumb people listen to Beyonce. (The "smartness" was based on SAT scores) Well, I don't listen to either. I found both boring. Some people who claimed they are Radiohead fans are actually kinda pretentious. Beyonce looked great when she was younger and had a few catchy songs earlier in her career but that's pretty much it. Well, people listen to System of a Down is also smarter than those listen to Bon Jovi (For the record I listen to some of both) The ridiculous part of the chart though was that Beethoven was rated way high while "classical" as a whole was way low. WTF? My conclusion: smart people diss the chart while dumb people created it.

Retroactive product placement

Just learned this new term from this Rolling Stones magazine article: old music videos were edited to feature "new" products (i.e., brands who signed up after the video came out) For example, a billboard of Grand Marnier liqueur was digitally "inserted" to Darius Tucker's MV of "True Believers" from 2012 (Coincidentally, I saw/heard the song for the first time a few nights ago! He looked familiar and I was wondering if he was the guy from the Hootie and the Blowfish) I guess the songs chosen for retroactive product placement gotta be somewhat successful to begin with. Hopefully the musicians earn a few more $ than getting their songs streamed by Spotify (the streaming service which just lost Taylor Swift's catalog. Taylor said "We're not getting back to together again. I know you were trouble") 

2014 deja vu moments?

I wrote this in 2010 about certain teams and athletes. Then I wrote this in 2012 about the same group. Here is the 2014 version:
1) The University of Texas football team lost to Oklahoma in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Well, this is a rebuilding year under 1st year coach Charlie Strong. In fact, it's unlikely the team will have a .500 season :(
2) The University of Wisconsin lost to Michigan State in 2010 and 2012. They won't play against each other in 2014.
3) Will Power couldn't win the IndyCar championship in spite of a good chance entering the final race in 2010 and 2012 but he finally overcome his last-race-jitter and won it in 2014.
4) US lost to Europe in Ryder Cup in all 3 years. US had a huge lead before the final day and blew it in 2012 but we are not even close in 2014. Looking forward to a new generation of young players picking up the slack.
5) Tiequan Zhang lost his UFC fight in Macau in 2012 and that was the last time he fought. Li Jingliang was another Chinese fighter signed by the UFC and appeared in FOX Fight Night 54 but lost.
6) Last but not least, SF Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014!

Sports highlights: two races in Texas

As a big fan of auto-racing who used to live in Texas, last Sunday was an awesome day: F1 in Austin and NASCAR in Fort Worth. Both were the 3rd last race of the season and the results would have big impact on the championship (It also helped that UT beat Texas Tech the night before) Rosberg won the pole of the F1 race and his car looked unbeatable in the first half of the race but Hamilton was able to catch up lap by lap and eventually passed Rosberg and went on to win his 5th consecutive race and 10th race of the season. Obviously there were many more lead changes at the NASCAR race ~200 miles north on I-35. Both Jeff Gordon (points leader entering the race) and Jimmie Johnson (eliminated from playoff already) had strong cars and Brad Keselowski used strategy to get to the front towards the end of the race. Too bad Brad K turned Jeff Gordon which resulted in a flat tire for the latter during a late restart and ruined Gordon's chance for a good finish (if not a win) So, after 2 races in the Eliminator round, no team has clinched a spot out of the 4 for the final championship race yet (Gordon went from 1st to 4th in point) 4th-8th were really close so all 8 drivers are still in contention! It was announced in the broadcast that the grandstand at Phoenix (next race) was already soldout. In addition, NASCAR got the Monday morning shows talked about them too, not because of on-track but off-track activity though: Brad K once again was in the center of controversy. He was pushed by Kevin Harvick post-race towards Gordon's team and resulted in a brawl.

The next 2 races are gonna be even more exciting!

Sports highlight: the Giants won it all again

Hopefully writing about this topic will become my every-other-year ritual. I posted this two years ago and this four years ago. Once again I am linking to Peter Gammon's writeup for the 2014 victory. Similar to last time, the Giants' great pitching was a key. Madison Bumgarner wrote another chapter in playoff history since 2010: 2 Win (Game 1 and Game 5, a complete game shutout) and 1 Save (Game 7, with 2 day rest and pitched as reliever for 5 innings!) in the World Series. And Tim Lincecum struggled as a starter in the regular season, too bad he was only able to pitch 1 2/3 inning as a reliever in "garbage time" (Giants was behind by 5 runs) and left because of injury in game 2 of the World Series. There were quite a few key hits from unexpected players in 2010, like Cody Ross and Edgar Renteria. In 2012 they have Marco Scutaro and Ryan Theriot. In 2014 they have Travis Ishikawa and Juan Perez. And of course great defensive plays from the rookie Joe Panik and the stud Brandon Crawford helped. I guess more things change, more things stay the same. The management has proven they know how to run the organization the right way. Both Brian Sabean and Bruce Bochy will join the hall of fame someday for sure. I gotta admit I have doubts in many of Sabean's decisions during his earlier days as the GM. I felt that he tended to sign over-the-hill/over-priced players like Barry Zito (yeah, everybody could cite this one) Randy Winn, Aaron Rowand, Armando Benitez ...... and hang on to older players for too long, like Ray Durham (see this analysis of the 2008 team and this 2010 breakdown of Sabean's success and failure, before he won the 1st WS) That's why I was so skeptical when the Giants signed Edgar Renteria, Pat Burrell, Aubrey Huff, Andres Torres and Cody Ross. Well, turned out they all helped with winning the 2010 championship, one way or the other. Now I become believing in whoever they signed, like Angel Pagan, Michael Morse and Tim Hudson (the last 2 were the only "big names" signed before the start of the 2014 season) They have certainly contributed a lot to the early season success (team W-L record for the first 60 games) which piled up enough wins to make up for the poor showings later and barely made it in as the last wildcard! Morse even had a few key kits in the playoff! The mid-season signing of Hunter Pence (and Jake Peavy to a certain extent) almost made me forgotten about Carlos Beltran.

I would have enjoyed this year's WS even if the Giants didn't win. Why? Their opponent Kansas City Royals certainly qualify as a Cinderella: one of the least likely team to make it to the WS in years IMO. (Check out this list of unlikely winners) Some pointed out this Giants-Royals matchup as the worst ever. In fact, the TV rating of game 1 was the lowest ever, which is understandable given the small size of the KC TV market (However, Game 7 had pretty good rating.) My friend who dislike baseball cited the low rating to support his argument that baseball is boring. Well, does it really matter? Parity in MLB was actually good to the business overall speaking. It's because more fans are likely to tune into broadcasts of the local team, which are making $$$ for all these regional sports network (this model is different from NFL's) I guess it all comes down to the fact that there are just not enough superstars in the games these days. Some say there are way too many teams (30) to compete for the talent. 

I can't wait for the 2015 Spring training!

Resuming Ubuntu from sleep makes thick black borders around windows to appear

This is an annoying bug of Ubuntu 14.04 but I found the workaround here:
1. Press the "Ctrl+Alt+F2" key combination (Warning: you will be sent to a text console where you won't be able to read this).
2. Press "Ctrl+Alt+F7".

聶衛平評李娜

看到老一輩棋王聶衛平一則新聞：大病初愈後露面，不改一貫意見多多的本色，對中國體壇指指點點，說不喜歡剛退役的網球名將李娜，因為她比較自私，國家隊不好好打。我驟耳聽只覺有點跟隨政府體育部的口徑，但也可能是老人家個人偏見，不妨一笑置之；想來內地網民也許會同意他呢。誰知看看評論，竟然有大量網民指聶不應信口開河，對他個人操守亦甚不以為然，真是始料不及。

Metal musicians on mainstream shows

Just read that Mastodon appeared on David Letterman's show. I was kinda surprised even though Mastodon's sound has become more mainstream these days but it is still a prog-metal band. Is it an act of selling out? Doesn't seem so judging by the comments but I found one interesting comment: these hosts may not really care or choose the musical acts on their show. For example, Slash once appeared on Jay Leno's show wearing a Team CoCo pin (for those who forgot or don't know the back story from 2010: NBC initially put Conan O'Brien on the Tonight show to replace Jay Leno but later on it brought back Leno, which angered a lot of Conan O'Brien's supporters, i.e., Team CoCo)

The Apple post

I am writing this as part of my effort to cleanup my long-forgotten-unpublished draft posts. Before talking about old news, I will start with a new one: RiteAid and CVS (two popular pharmacy chains in US) blocked Apple Pay over the weekend in thousands of stores. My first question was: wasn't Apple Pay become usable very recently? Why would a business reverse its decision so quickly? Well, it turns out: (1) RiteAid and CVS have installed NFC (near-field communication) terminals at some stores some time ago, not for Apple Pay. (2) RiteAid and CVS are NOT partners of Apple Pay. It just happened that the existing terminal works with Apple Pay, for a few days before being disabled. The "casualty" also included Google Wallet. Some Apple supporters were very vocal about this and claiming they will not buy from those stores anymore. Well, is it that big a deal? Currently only iPhone 6 owners could use Apple Pay anyway. Do you think it's a high percentage of the drug stores' customer base? And, most people shopped at a pharmacy when they really need the stuff (e.g. medicine) quickly so they just go to the closest one or the one they know will have the stuff. Do you think people will do otherwise just because it doesn't accept Apple Pay? Is it so much more troublesome to pay with (gasp) cash? And one news article brought out another point to support Apple Pay: iPhone users are richer than Android users. I can't argue with that ('coz it's true when it comes to my friends) but is that relevant?

An old news from August 2012: More than $60,000 worth of computers, jewelry and personal items have been stolen from late Steve Job's home in Palo Alto. A report in the San Jose Mercury News says that the burglar made off with iPads, iPhones, Macs, Tiffany jewelry, Beats headphones and Cristal Champagne, among other items. He also took Steve Jobs' wallet, which contained his drivers' license and $1. McFarlin, a former San Jose State football player, has confessed and has written a letter of apology to Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell, the Mercury News reported. Maybe he could write about his experience later. I'm sure a lot of people want to know more about what the house is like.

Finally, I commented on a report from July 2012: ABI Research recently predicted that in coming years, smartphone users around the world will be downloading and using fewer and fewer apps. What will they be doing instead? Using the mobile Web more and more, according to senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. Do people still remember when iPhone first came out, no app developer kit was available and Jobs was pitching software would be available on the phone by 3rd party (non-Apple) as Web application? Once again it proved he was such a visionary. I am no iOS expert but read that some App are actually "wrapper" on top of browser-webapp-based library. Anyway, as of 2014, I found most businesses still prefer users to download their own apps on iDevices, like Yelp or Groupon (the links from emails actually won't work with mobile Safari for me)

Ubuntu was borned 10 years ago today

Can't believe I wrote two posts about tech "birthdays" in this month! Let's face it: you lose "street cred" when admitting running Ubuntu instead of the more "hardcore" distro of Linux (like Arch?) but I really enjoy using it for "desktop activities" (i.e., playing back music/video, surfing web) rather than the "server stuff" (like serving up files or pages) I definitely feel the improvement during these 10 years: it became more and more usable "out-of-the-box" (i.e., right after installation) Less tweaking or installing additional drivers were needed to make things work.

Sports highlights: The Chase for the Sprint Cup

The last 3 NASCAR races were so interesting that I should dedicate at least one post to it (actually wanted to write last week and the week before but didn't get a chance) The last race I wrote about was the first race of the Contender round at Kansas won by Joey Logano who thus qualified for the next Eliminator round. The 2nd race at Charlotte was won by Kevin Harvick but the biggest story was the fights that broke out afterwards, centered around Brad Keselowski. Brad K got a poor result at Kansas and needed a better result at Charlotte. Otherwise he had to win Talladega to qualify for the Eliminator round. Well, Brad K did his best to drive but had a few clashes with Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth. He ended up outside top 10 and didn't improve his standing.  He was so mad at them that he tried wrecking them after the race during cool down laps, which was totally not cool. He accidentally bumped into Tony Stewart and the Smoke put his car in reverse to retaliate! What a scene!

Then we had the usually unpredictable Talladega race (because of the high speed and likeliness of big crash) One goal for the bottom 4 drivers: win to advance. And that list included Jimmie "Six times" Johnson, Dale Jr and Brad K. In the past years we saw Johnson playing it safe at this race but this new format kinda forced his hand and he tried staying in the front all race long but ultimately failed to do so. Junior had all sort of problems and was also involved in an accident which doomed his chance. The one who rose to the occasions was Brad K, who won the race and advanced. Another casualty was the originally Top 8 driver Kyle Busch, whose car was crashed without his own fault. He lost so many points to fall to the bottom 4. Kasey Kahne didn't make it either so only 1 our of the 4 drivers (Jeff Gordon) from Hendrick Motor Sports made it to the Eliminator round, which featured 3 former champs, 2 former runner-ups.

The Eliminator round started at Martinsville. Ironically, it was won by a Hendrick driver not in contention: Dale Jr. His victory came one race too late (he would still be in the chase if he won at Talladega!) but he totally deserved it: when he was leading the race late, he had to survive a late caution by passing the cars who didn't pit to regain the top spot. Jeff Gordon had a strong car too and almost caught Jr at the end. What an exciting finish! I think the new Chase format definitely added excitement to every race. Thumbs up to NASCAR (and proved the naysayers wrong! Still, a lot of fans are complaining that it's possible to win the cup without winning one race)

Video editing software

I have always enjoyed editing home/music video. Back in the early 00's, I actually bought Adobe Premiere for such purpose. Of course, newer versions of Windows come with Windows Movie Maker free and I stopped using my purchased copy of Premiere. So, what's the alternative to Windows Movie Maker on Linux? There are at least five.

Menuhin Competition

Came across an interesting article from the magazine of my Alma Mater University of Texas about a violin competition held there in Austin back in Feb.

Part of the competition was to play an original piece by UT faculty member Don Grantham, commissioned for the 2014 competition. Each semifinalist performed the tune as part of their repertoire, having received the sheet music just four weeks ahead of the premiere.
Stephen Waarts, the eventual winner, was the first one appeared on the video. The video editor did a good job piecing all these different performances together! I went to a concert in Palo Alto that featured Stephen Waarts as the soloist a few years ago and was already very impressed by his techniques.

Netscape was borned 20 years ago today

Do you still remember people suggesting you to install and use the brand new Netscape browser instead of the "good old" Mosaic 20 years ago? For me, it's probably one of my professors or fellow grad students at UWisc. If I remember correctly, one of my friend actually bought Netscape as boxed software in the late 90s. Those were the days.

Music critics favoritism

I certainly enjoy reading reviews from magazines like Downbeat or web sites like AllAboutJazz. I guess I am old school because these are the main ways I found out about new music in addition to the radio. I had an interesting observation from the October issue of Downbeat, in which Latin jazz master Paquito D'Rivera's "Jazz Meets the Classics" and Andreas Varady's self-titled album are both reviewed.

Every month Downbeat highlights 4 new releases in its review section called "the Hot Box." These albums get 3 additional short reviews in addition to the main review. D'Rivera's got 4 stars from the main one but also a 2 and a 2.5 because one reviewer thought it's unnecessary to emphasize the fusion of jazz and classical music (which D'Rivera did successfully and better than other well-known players like Jacques Loussier, who is the Bach-Jazz specialist, IMO) while the other thought the arrangement is too busy and showy (which I totally don't mind. To me, there's nothing not to like about jazz musicians with great techniques) I just find these 2 critics a bit too harsh.

Varady's album got 3 stars (not part of "the Hot Box") I would have given 2-2.5 because it's way too commercial with strings, vocal, and borrowed "star power" from guest like Roy Hargrove. I actually think it is a step back from his earlier debut album "Questions" with producer/drummer David Lyttle. The Downbeat reviewer wrote "Clearly there is a huge talent beneath the gloss here. Here's hoping he reveals it in a more genuine sense on the next outing" I suppose the magazine is more lenient to him because he is only 17 year old.

詰棋、張栩與小林泉美

看了一篇小林泉美（日本女棋手，旅日台灣棋手張栩之妻）寫她當年和張交往的文章，覺得這樣的愛情實在浪漫啊！

他們這個級數的棋手花在練棋的時間多得普通人無法想像，要拍拖又不影響練習，真是一片苦心！

小林寫了這麼一句：

因為這些詰棋，事實上也更讓我重新加強了「能和張栩交往的女生，恐怕也只有我了」的想法。

這般談戀愛算得上是最高境界吧！

Sports highlights: MLB Playoff

This topic deserves its own post as there were tons of highlights (and 1 lowlight) from the first 2 weeks of MLB Playoff. First of all, those 2 wild card "play-in" games were something. I predicted only one of the 2 Bay Area teams would have advanced and I was right. At one point the A's had a comfortable lead but gave them all up and eventually lost to Kansas City Royals in extra innings. A sports talk show host said it the best: that one game summarized what happened the whole season: superb 1st half, lousy 2nd half. On the other hand, the Giants built up a huge lead in its game vs the Pirates and never looked back.

My second prediction was totally wrong though: I thought the World Series would be LAD vs LAA. WRONG! Both of them finished the season strong and featured quite a few superstars on their rosters: Puig, Hanley Ramirez, Adrian Gonzalez, Kemp, Kershaw (who will no doubt win the Cy Young), Pujols, Trout, Josh Hamilton, CJ Wilson, Weaver. Well, both of them fell to teams from Missouri (Royals and Cardinals) in the Division Series round. Why? For the Dodgers-Cardinals series, I think Game 1 set the tone: Dodgers kept hitting and scoring runs and built up a 6-1 lead after 5 innings. With Kershaw pitching the way he did all season, it seems the outcome had already been decided. Well, who could foresee the Cards scoring 8 runs in the 7th? Matt Carpenter had 4 RBI in that game and he was THE man (instead of the more famous Dodgers) in the whole series. Game 1 of the Angels-Royals series was not as dramatic but close: they tied 2-2 until Moustakas hit his solo HR on the top of 13th which turned out to be the game-winning run. I guess Angels losing Game 1 at home did them in.

Of course the Giants vs Nationals series was the big focus here. The two SF home games certainly affected the commute, which was all forgiven because they won the series :P All 3 wins by the Giants were nail biters. The midseason acquisition, pitcher Jake Peavy, proved once again the Giants front office's ability to identify talent and make the right move. Peavy had a poor W-L record prior to the deal. In fact, he had a bad start with the Giants too but it was mostly bad luck. He pitched great in the Game 1 victory in Washington. The 18 inning Game 2 was an instant classic for sure. I started following the game at the beer fest in San Mateo ~3pm (which was kinda disappointing because most beer there was rather mainstream anyway. The highlight was the performance by an 80s Metal cover band, Hairstrike!) And the Giants was trailing 0-1 after 2 outs in the 9th inning. Then they tied it. And Brandon Belt hit a HR in Top 18th to win it. Game 4 was another strange one: 1 run scored on a bases-loaded walk. And the game winning run scored on a wild pitch!

Alex Skolnick's Vinyl Encounter

If you have been following my blogs, you probably know Alex Skolnick is one of my favorite (jazz and metal) guitarist. Just read his recent blog post titled "Vinyl Encounter or other Mr Baker" It's very interesting and I can't believe I did two things before he did:

1) "Discovered" Mickey Baker: Like Skolnick, I wasn't aware of this influential guitar player years after I played. Unlike Skolnick, I learned about him several years ago via a Jazz Guitar Forum, where study groups were formed to learn jazz guitar from Mickey Baker's instructional material. It was a kinda heated topic there: some touted it as one of the best out there while some thought Baker's way was too old-school and took long to get results. 

2) "Rediscovered" vinyl: I agreed with him that small apartments in Manhattan wasn't exactly the best place to be a vinyl collector/turntable lover. I was one when I lived there in 2000. I gave away my turntable in 2001 and didn't got back to listening to vinyl until 2013. There's simply no substitute for vinyl's magic.  

Sports highlights: F1, NFL, EPL, NHL, NASCAR

This is yet another eventful week in the world of sports:

Lewis Hamilton defeated his rival Nico Rosberg once again in the rain shortened Japanese F1 GP to extend his lead in the championship standings.

Joey Logano won his 2nd race in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship (and the 1st race of the 2nd round of playoff which advanced him to the 3rd round automatically) I have been following his career since his Nationwide series day. He did quite well there. However, he underachieved during his days with Joe Gibbs Racing in the Sprint Cup series and raised some doubt about his ability. I think he was a bit overshadowed by Brad Keselowski, who won the Sprint Cup quickly after moving up from the Nationwide (BTW, Xfinity will be the title sponsor of the series starting in 2015) Ironically, leaving JGR to join Team Penske and becoming a teammate of Brad proved to be a great career move by Joey. This guy could win some (actually a lot of) races! It's time for his generation of drivers to shine. One could feel the next generation is coming quick, like the 2nd place finisher Kyle Larson, and the current leader of the Nationwide championship, Chase Elliott. It's gonna be exciting the next few years to see the elders and the young guns duking it out. (Drivers like Hamlin, Edwards, Busch don't seem young anymore) And it showed how competitive this sports is. Gotta appreciate the drivers who are able to last long (without support from family money) there.

Manchester United defeated Everton with goals from newly acquired Di Maria and Falcao. Most Man U fans still remembered the last loss to Everton in last season, which was the last straw for firing former Man U (and former Everton) manager David Moyes. Not many are calling for firing of Louis Van Gaal now but it's gonna be a long season with this leaky defense.

The Dallas Cowboys defeated in-state rival Houston Texans, barely, with an OT FG. Didn't know it was on local TV until I headed out biking with kids. Glad that I missed it 'coz I would not dare to watch the last few minutes in which the Texan came back and the Cowboys missed a late FG that would have won the game in regulation time. On one hand, I can't be too optimistic. On the other hand, a 4-1 record has some margin for the team to fall back to .500 later in the season (that's how they finished the last 3 seasons) And I was glad that the Texan was not one of the many teams that were able to comeback and win this week. Most notably the Cleveland Browns came back from 25 point down in an away game. There were way too many blowouts this season, especially for the Monday/Thursday night games! Speaking of blowouts, the Patriots had a horrible loss to the Chiefs last Monday. One could only imagine the Chiefs will have a let down at the next game while the Pats will likely to rebound. So, the fortunate team was the 49ers (who played the Chiefs next) and the unfortunate one was the Bengals (who played the Pats)  Last but not least, Peyton Manning scored his 500th TD this weekend and will break Brett Favre's all-time record soon. I read that Favre said he's happy to see that but I think he is secretly looking for teams who need a QB now.

While this season of Champion's League of Twenty 20 finished on Sunday (still haven't finished watching the 2nd half of the final!), the new season of NHL starts on Wednesday. Go Sharks, Pens, Rangers!

[Update: finally finished watching CLT20 final. Chennai Super King, especially Suresh Raina, put up a strong performance. Congrat to my co-workers who are fans of the team! BTW, I looked up the name of the runner-up Kolkata and confirmed it's the city formerly known as Calcutta. The name changed happened in 1996. Chennai was renamed from Madras in the same year too. I actually knew about Madras from my schoolmates earlier and didn't know it's the same city 'til now.]

Tech from the olden days

I am cleaning up some really old posts that I wrote way back yet still in draft status. The title used the term my daughter likes to play with: olden days (which apparently many others found interesting too. In fact, it has a long history according to this.)  All those posts are consolidated here.

1) Workaround was needed for sharing files from Win2K to Win7 Home Premium Edition (dated 2009.) Those were the days I still used a Win2K laptop as our home NAS. It required a registry change.

2) Guest Additions (dated 2010) was for VirtualBox. I needed it back then for sharing files between my VM and the host (and I still need it now!)

3) Dell DJ 20 Gen 2 was my latest toy in 2010 (and I still listen to it almost every night!) When it was newly released in 2004, it cost >$100 and I bought it for $40.

Its drivers were still available for download from Dell in 2010 (not sure if the link works now.) It is not a plug-and-play device on Win7 and the Windows driver needed to be installed for it to be recognized. The WinXP driver actually works on Win7 too. Also, to use subscription service like Rhapsody, one needed to upgrade the player with a PlaysForSure compatible firmware (the last one on the page) Unfortunately that .exe only works on WinXP so you need to somehow find one. And when I ran it, it stuck on "Restarting player" even though the player was restarted (and upgraded) Fortunately it didn't matter. I just close the installer and it didn't cause any problem. Once the player has been upgraded, you could still transfer subscription tunes using a Win7 computer.

Fast forward to 2014: I could use my Dell DJ 20 on my Win8 PC in plug-and-play fashion. I couldn't get it to work with the Rhapsody client though. Rhapsody no longer officially supported it (no more PlaysForSure?) Today it plays non-DRMed files for me only.

4) CopyTrans is a free tool for copying songs to iDevice without iTunes

5) 2009 was the 50th anniversary of COBOL. It was obviously an important milestone but it's also one of the few major computer programming languages that I knew little about.

6) Shozu was an iPhone App I experimented with (and wanted to recommend) for posting to Blogger. I don't think I used it that much after I drafted that post in 2008 with it though :P

Fast forward to 2014: the official Blogger app on iOS is free yet still not very good. I'm writing this on a PC instead.

7) I wanted to raise awareness of radiation level in Hong Kong back in March 2012. Excerpt from the CNN article:

When Pieter Franken visited Hong Kong one of the first things he did was measure the level of radiation in his hotel room. "The whole idea is to measure everything (rather than only performing spot checks)," said Franken. Hong Kong lies just 50 kilometers from a nuclear power station located in Daya Bay in Guangdong province, but its 12 permanent radiation monitoring stations are not in heavily populated urban areas. On a six-hour drive around the city's major commercial and residential, Franken mapped radiation levels with a portable monitoring kit devised by Safecast. All the data is publicly viewable as interactive heat maps on Safecast's website. The drive revealed that Hong Kong had a constant level of radiation that hovered around 0.2 microsievert per hour for an annualized dose of 2 millisieverts. This was slightly higher than the 0.1 microsievert per hour that Safecast mapped in the major urban centres of Tokyo and Beijing. One millisievert per year is an internationally-recognized nuclear factory guideline for exposure to radiation by the general public, according to Dr. John Leung, radiation expert and physics professor at the University of Hong Kong. "Your risk of having cancer is increased for 4 to 5% per sievert of radiation your body absorbs," explained Leung. "The way to control it is to receive as little as possible." On his drive around Hong Kong Franken wanted to see how localized the radiation was, "but it seems to be all over," he said. Franken believed that the common denominator throughout the city, concrete, was a key source of the radiation. Or more specifically, the locally-sourced granite aggregates used in place of pricier cement to make the concrete. "Hong Kong is lying on a high-background radiation level because the radionuclide content in the granite in this region of the country is a bit higher than the world average," said Leung. "There is more uranium and thorium in our granite. It's natural." A study conducted by Leung and his colleagues in 1990 found that the gamma radiation dose rate of local soil to be 1.8 times the world average. Hong Kong's concrete infrastructure poses no immediate harm to residents' health, but some wonder if more attention should be given to how buildings are made in the city. "When we make concrete, we don't pay attention to the mineral content of the rock, so long as it is strong enough," said University of Hong Kong structural engineering professor, Albert Kwan. "If it's really is the case (that local granite has elevated radioactivity), perhaps we should import our granite from elsewhere." The everyday doses of radiation we encounter are far from being fatal in one shot, but it is the accumulated exposure that may be cause for concern. To reduce everyday levels of radiation Safecast suggests opening doors and windows to ventilate rooms. This minimizes the accumulation of radon - a radioactive gas produced by the decay of naturally occurring uranium and thorium. Inhaling radon - one of the leading sources of human exposure to natural radiation - in the home and workplace causes tens of thousands of deaths from lung cancer annually, according to the World Health Organization.

8) I was experimenting with booting to a Live version of Arch Linux on a USB drive on my personal laptops in 2009. larch was the next thing to try after my FaunOS experiment.

I basically followed the instructions and also did the followings:
I) make a copy of an existing profile. I copied xmini to a new one named "my"
II) I changed the addedpacks by
- remove all xfce* lines and added one line with jwm (pacman cannot find those xfce related packages and I prefer jwm anyway)
- remove aufs (otherwise I got error about dependency on pre-2.26.29 kernel. It has actually become part of the new kernel anyway. However, the included one is aufs2 and it doesn't support "Merging overlays" when you save sessions from running the resulting image of larch.)
III) create a directory for building the image. Make sure it is on a filesystem with lots of free space!
IV) the command should be./mklarch -ug -p ./larch/profile/my [dir created in 3]

Fast forward to 2014: I tried something similar again: Live Ubuntu on USB on my Intel Core i5 laptop. The performance was horrific. Slow to boot and slow after boot (probably worse than the 2009 experiment!) I ended up buying a $50 60 Gb SSD (el cheapo and SSD didn't appear in the same sentence back in 2009) and installed Ubuntu 14.04 properly on it. I like this setup. It didn't require much tweaking at all and most things work out of the box (except this)   

Yahoo Mail glitches: font size

I have been a Yahoo Mail user since the dotcom days. Gotta admit GMail has a better UI but I am still "loyal" to Yahoo and use it for communications with most of my friends. And I gave Yahoo credits for not letting the product sit still and keeps trying to improve it. However, for some reason they tend to introduce bugs (Well, I do that as a web app dev too but our apps are not as widely used as Yahoo's) and sometimes annoying new features (like the tabs vs no tab fiasco now I don't even remember which is better. Still remember using this workaround last year though) The latest bug is defaulting the font size to 'Tiny' Yes, it's really tiny. Simply go to "Settings->Writing emails" to change it back :)

國民與棋迷質素

兩個月前寫過一篇重回棋壇的文章，提到古力李世石十番棋，剛剛曲終人散：古以2:6不敵李。本來兩個棋界響噹噹的名字來個十回合大戰，頗有古風，實為美事，棋迷其實無需太介懷戰果（棋手可能在意那高額獎金）不過據報導不少中國棋迷指今次十番棋無意義，是否有點輸打贏要？

後記：比賽結束已一陣子，仍有不少文章討論是次十番棋，總算有點一石（李世石？）激起千層浪之感。有位老外高手(業餘七段)Rob van Zeijst更就此戰寫了一書（兩冊）有趣的是作者講明每冊分析五局，但十番棋只下了八局:P

Concern for trade secret and source code

I dug up an old unfinished post of mine from years ago which has to do with the controversy caused by the China Compulsory Certificate on IT security products back in 2009. Foreign tech industry worried such certification would require disclosure of source code used in their products and thus leaked out trade secret and intellectual properties. Seems like that didn't happen as China changed the rules.

Save the planet with tech industry and politics

I first came across this topic because of this story about Apple's Tim Cook vs the group NCPPR back in Feb. Basically the group, which invested in Apple, urged that profits should be the only thing corporations consider and requested Apple to be transparent about the costs related to environmental sustainability. Well, Tim Cook rejected this and told the group not in invest in Apple if they insist. Gotta say that's gutsy even though I'm no tree hugger. The linked article suggested that NCPPR has political agenda behind this anyway. On a somewhat related note: the fact that the yearly cost of charging an iPhone 6 would be ~$0.47 made the news! Apple saves the world again, right? Oh well, found an 2-year-old article for iPhone 5 (and some phones not made by Apple): so tree huggers should really stick with iPhone 5 since it takes less energy to charge! (And btw, the Samsung S3 costs a whopping $0.53, based on 2012 electricity rate. Buyers beware!) Finally, I wanna mention an interesting article about yet another company that I'm not a big fan of: Facebook. It saves electricity consumption by using its Autoscale load balancing technology. Here is the gist: instead of distributing workload to all of its available servers, it would make some servers idle when usage is low enough and achieve overall lower power consumption. Smart move as it saves the planet and more importantly (to the shareholders), the energy cost! Disclaimer: not a shareholder now.

The Van Halen brothers inteviewed

... by none other than Van Halen's vocalist, David Lee Roth! Here is the video:

Very interesting! (Came across this while cleaning up old emails from 2012!) As a rock/metal fan, I certainly have listened to a lot of Van Halen's. However, I have never been a huge fan. So I just found out from the video that Eddie lived in the Netherland until he was 7. Their mom was from Indonesia while their dad was a traveling musician. Mrs. Van Halen was very serious about her sons' education, including Eddie's music training, which started with classical piano. In the video he mentioned he didn't actually read the sheet music but instead memorizing the tune (and fingerings) while his teacher played! Yet he was able to win piano competitions back then. Amazing.

Dishwasher blues

Gotta admit as a guy who deal with technology all the time, I am not "handy" when it comes to fixing "hardware" like home appliances, cars (or even bikes) Two weeks ago my dishwasher started malfunctioning (tablet did not dissolve and dishes were not clean.) So my workaround was NOT to use it. However, it started to get flooded with water even without being used so it's time to call repairing service. Found from Yelp a peninsula-based company called BayTech and gave it a try. When the repairman (probably the boss) arrived, the dishwasher again has water sitting in the bottom. So the first thing he did was closing it and hit 'Cancel' to drain it (learned something new immediately!) Then he made 2 changes: (1) the valve underneath the sink is not opened enough (and not maintaining the right water pressure according to him)

The valve on the right controls water to the dishwasher

 

The repairman turned it this way to allow more water. To close it completely, turn clockwise.

(2) the valve underneath the dishwasher was out of position. It should be "snapped in" so he pushed it back.

Someone posted this pic online. It showed where the valve is.

Problem solved (for the time being :)

Sports hightlights: MLB, NCAAF, NFL, EPL

What a weird day in MLB on 9/11 with so many batters got hit! Hope Miami Marlins Giancarlo Stanton has a quick recovery. Can't believe 2 batters got hit in 2 innings of the Rays-Yanks game with the former leading 4-0 and a potential no-hitter becoming the loser because of the walk-off homer by former A's Chris Young. The A's could definitely have used more power as they scored a combined 1 run in 2 games against the "lowly" White Sox. Even the Giants had a weird episode against the D-backs when pitcher Jake Peavy's bat flew off his hands during his at-bat. Speaking of Peavy, after 3 shaky starts with the Giants, he has finally showed the stuff that made him a great pitcher at San Diego (and a good one with White Sox) The Giants were riding the momentum back home to win the first game against the Dodgers but then the next game was brutal, losing 0-17. The only memorable moment was Bruce Bochy calling his son Brett in for relief, the first time a father and son did it in MLB history. 

An interesting Saturday for college football that 4 teams in Top 25 lost to lower-ranked teams (#6 Georgia, #9 USC, #17 Virginia Tech and #21 Louisville) #12 UCLA was almost one of them but they came from behind to beat the Texas Longhorns. Coach Strong is 0-2 against ranked teams so far.

The highlight on Saturday came from the newly "rebuilt" Manchester United's 4-0 victory against Queens Park Ranger with contributions from new comers like Di Maria. Mata and Rooney both scored. Definitely a confidence boosting game.

Another highlight was the Cowboys' first win of the new NFL season against Tennessee Titans (former Houston Oilers if you will) They played solid but nothing spectacular as I felt they should have scored a few more TD instead of FG. Still, it's better than losing to the underdog in the inaugural regular season game at their highly hyped brand new stadium (Bears at 49er. 28-20) or down by 24-0 at one point (Texan at Raiders) I hope the Raiders will not ruin the career of yet another QB. The list of QB who didn't play well with the Raiders since 20 years ago is a long one:

• Jeff George
• Kerry Collins
• JaMarcus Russell
• Jason Campbell
• Carson Palmer
• Terrelle Pryor

Note that Kerry Collins and Carson Palmer have both performed better on other teams before and after playing for the Raiders! In fact, here were only 2 successful Raider QB in the last 20 years: Jeff Hostetler and Rich Gannon. Hopefully the rookie Derek Carr will join the latter list instead of the former, unlike his older brother David Carr, who was a bust drafted by the Texan as #1 pick.

Tablet and phone only?

I don't think I can survive my complete daily routines without a PC (Windows/Mac/Linux doesn't matter) yet. Just tried taking care of monthly bills with them. Not exactly an efficient experience like how they wanted you to believe in TV commercials. I prefer going through a few spreadsheets I built for such purpose and at the same time browsing/entering numbers/dates into payment websites. It is still much faster with keyboard/mouse and monitor showing a few browsers/tabs. Worse yet, every month I upload a generated CSV which becomes a spreadsheet on Google Drive. Couldn't get that done with Google's Apps on iOS and Android.

Marty Friedman and his career in Japan

Marty Friedman certainly is NOT a household name here in US, his home country. He's definitely more well-known in Japan, according to the Rolling Stone magazine. He's kinda like the 'Ryan Seacrest of Japan.' Long time metal fans like myself are familiar with his guitar work during his shredding days (with Jason Becker in Cacophony on the Shrapnel label) and as a member of Megadeth. Then he left Megadeth and US and started a new career in Japan as a TV celebrity starring in shows like "Mr. Heavy metal" and "Rock Fujiyama." What a move! The linked article also mentioned his insights on Japanese music from the perspective of a session musician playing there. He thinks the pop music there is more complicated than that in US (more chord changes for example) and pointed out interesting new groups like Babymetal, which put a metal twist on top of a girl group.


Looks like he got quite inspired by his experiences in Japan judging by his new album "Inferno" which features quite a bit of twists and turns rather than straight forward rock.

Sports highlights: IndyCar championship

It has been 5 years in a row that a Team Penske driver has a chance winning the championship going into the final race. Well, it turns out a Team Penske driver got runner-up in the championship 5 years in a row, after the final race concluded at Fontana last Saturday. However, this time "another" Team Penske driver became the champion. And it's finally the time for Will Power to be crowned the champ. I wrote about Will Power's struggle in the 2010/2011/2012 seasons before: every season he built a big lead on road courses which evaporated near the end of the season due to miscues and misfortune (and oval courses.) Again, he had an early lead this season. However, one could sense how comfortable he was with oval courses this season, unlike in the past. The confidence was probably built from his oval course victory from the final race (Fontana) of the 2013 season, in which he started so poorly that he was not even in the hunt for the championship. And he won again on oval this season (Milwaukee) However, there were still doubts whether he could close the deal. After all, he still had a few pit road speeding penalties and an unexpected spin in the previous race at Sonoma, a road course he is usually good at. 2014 proved to be a different year though: he started near the back of the pack at Fontana hoping to stay out of trouble, which he did. Calmly drove back to the Top 10 and maintained his points' lead even though for a few laps his closest competitor, Penske teammate Helio Castroneves took over the lead. After getting to the front row on a restart, he briefly turned on his "crazy mode" and raced with leader (and eventual winner) Tony Kanaan fiercely but then quickly settled down. And late in the race Castroneves got a penalty for improper entry to pit lane. That pretty much sealed the deal for Power. Congratulations to the 2014 Verizon IndyCar champion Will Power of #12 Team Penske sponsored by Verizon. (BTW, the other Verizon driver, Juan Pablo Montoya, finished 4th in the championship standing in his first year back to IndyCar. He actually won the A.J Foyt Trophy for most points on oval in 2014. Looks like Verizon made a good investment in their drivers, and the series too! Verizon got some good exposure in the home country of Power, Australia)

Refreshing and tailing a file loaded in Emacs

Let's say you have already opened the file you want to view in the current buffer of Emacs, to refresh it, hit C-x C-v RET (FYI, the command is "Find alternate file") This is particularly useful when monitoring log files. And for automatically displaying the end of a log file, I would use tail on Linux but Emacs could achieve the same purpose (simply type M-x  auto-revert-tail-mode)

Slingbox and Ubuntu

According to the official Slingbox website, Linux users are not supported. In fact, if you try watching your Slingbox from their site, it will refuse to do so, which is a bit puzzling since Slingbox is offering a web-based solution. And there's workaround to this restriction: all you need is an i-frame!

Ubuntu 14.04 System freezes on wakeup from suspended state

After using Ubuntu on my Toshiba Satellite notebook for 2 days, the most annoying issue that prevented me from keep using it is actually an oven-overlooked feature: suspend. The title of this post said it all (in fact, you could google it and find a post on AskUbuntu) That's how I found out it has to do with the Nvidia (display) driver. However, I didn't follow the suggestions there (there's a link to a post in which a reply listed a multi-steps complicated solution) to make Ubuntu using the Nvidia proprietary driver) Instead I use the Ubuntu built-in "Additional Driver" utility. Switched from the open source driver to the proprietary one (the first choice, see image):

After making this change and reboot, I am able to suspend and wakeup :)

Cloning hard drive with open source software

You might have listened to me griping about my misbehaving PC lately. If things go well, I might be able to make it work again by cloning my old hard drive to a new one. Cloning software existed for a long time but I have never tried any because I didn't want to pay. This article explains how to use the open source Clonezilla.

Good question, bad question?

今日見到一則圍棋新聞標題提及香港記者難倒殿堂級大師李昌鎬，原來是採訪李參加的三星杯。

記者難倒李昌鎬的三個問題是：

• 圍棋的本質是甚麼？
• 如何看待勝負？
• 對圍棋的境界如何解釋？

李昌鎬雖然外號「石佛」，倒不見得擅長說法。面對空泛的問題，他來個籠統的答案：這三個問題需要一輩子來探尋，也無可厚非；接著還使上一招順水推舟，請身旁的日本大師高尾紳路來答，高尾也高章，說如果李答不了的話，這世上都無人能答了。

為甚麼記者會問如此空泛的問題？可能根本對圍棋及棋壇動向欠缺認識吧。頗有興趣知道是那間傳媒的記者！

Jazz playlist

Just realized I haven't written a post about my Jazz playlist since Jan. I was in the mood of discovering more "new" albums and found a few good ones from the Downbeat magazine and the radio station KCSM.

I first wrote about trumpeter David Weiss last year for his big band release of Wayne Shorter's music. His 2014 album features a smaller ensemble yet equally enjoyable: "When Words Fail" which paid tributes to the jazz musicians and family members who passed away recently.

Speaking of big band, which I was not familiar with, I did listen to an impressive arrangement of "Emily" by Bob Florence Limited Edition (yes, that's the name of the band) on the 1997 release named "Earth" Interestingly, most of the reviews on Amazon praised the same piece! 

The next album is from another trumpeter named David (Dave Douglas), "Time Travel" from 2013. Very modern sounding but not hard to digest.

I saw saxophonist Melissa Aldana played at the famous Small's jazz club in the village in NYC 2 years ago. She played with the Crash Trio on this latest album. Her sound reminded me of Joe Lovano. That's a big compliment to any jazz musician!

Unlike Aldana, fellow female saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom has been a well-established voice in the scene for years. For beautiful sound of soprano sax, none could beat her 2013 release "Sixteen Sunsets." It's literally out of this world.

Last but not least, the prolific pianist Kenny Barron showed yet another side of his superb artistry in the Brazilian flavored 2013 release "Kenny Barron and the Brazilian Knights" The sound of the harmonica by one of the "knights", bossa nova master Mauricio Einhorn, fits perfectly with the mood of the album. Check out his 2007 album "Conversa de Amigos 2" for some tasty jazz played by the group he led.

Beethoven and movies

I was chatting with some friends on the topic of learning more about great artists/musicians.  My answer is simple: movies!

For Beethoven, it's easy: Immortal Beloved is critically acclaimed. The radio station WQXR actually came up with a list of Top 5 Beethoven (the composer, not the dog) centric movies.

For Jimi Hendrix, just wait til this September when "Jimi: All Is by My Side" comes out.

For Frida, obviously there is "Frida" starring Salma Hayek.

While researching this, I am surprised there's no biopic made for jazz giants like Miles and Coltrane! Well, you could always come talk to yours truly.

四個小生去Field trip之踩爆Guadalupe River Trail

週末一時興起決定和朋友由北聖荷西踩單車來回市中心的San Pedro Market Square。那段單車徑我並不陌生，當年新買Vilano Road Bike一到手就是由Alviso開始踩相連的單車徑試車，還記得有一段碎石路，顛簸得很。之後也曾用我的Downtube摺車踩過，由玫瑰園開始，在機場附近爆胎收場。今次舊地重遊，還帶了兒子，這個暑假開始和結束都讓他各踩一次「長途」（上次是18英里的溫哥華士丹利公園及獅門橋）起初7英里相當平靜，只見不少球迷前往附近新建的Levi Stadium，踩至機場，當然少不了和機場大樓那畫滿手的外牆拍照，還和大家提起上次爆胎一事。

不提由自可，一提就歷史重演！四架單車中有兩架爆了內胎，一架則是外呔破裂，結果唯有前往最近的單車舖La Dolce Velo，推車1.5英里說長不長說短也不短；換完後胎，幸好請師傅順便檢查一下前胎，才發現也被一小塊乾硬的具尖刺植物部份刺破，亦要更換。到達Market時已被原定時間遲了1.5小時，大家當然飽餐大喝一頓，Port Brewing Co的Old Viscosity Ale被評分100，飲完頓覺再辛苦也值得！回程時較大風及曬，加上友人又再爆胎，也花了好一段時間才完成全程，總之就是有驚無險！

Guitar diplomacy

40 years after the historic ping-pong (a.k.a. table tennis for American) diplomacy between US and China, John Kerry wrote a new chapter: guitar diplomacy. Check out this article with a video showing John Kerry playing guitar after his big meeting with Chinese officials. The article also included reviews of his playing by some experts, including THE instructional video guru Esteban! I agree that he played at the level of an amateur who were once a competent player. In any case, that's gutsy.

BTW, this is post #700 on this blog!

More metal. RIP Robin Williams

I checked out the MyRadio feature on Rhapsody today. So it basically plays tracks that I recently listened to, e.g. Overkill's new 2014 album "White Devil Armory" They never disappoint and always stay true to their thrash metal root. That set me in the mood for more metal: Morgengrau's "Extrinsic Pathway" and Pentacle's "Under the Black Cross" Both captured the classic death metal sound and they will be playing at Thee Parkside this month.

This is kinda metal-related: I read an article about Ozzy Osbourne thanking the late Robin Williams for visiting his wife when she got cancer. Sad to see a great actor leaving us.

The MMA Experience

I have been a fan of fight sports for years but I saw my first fight live (boxing) only last year and my first MMA event, Dragon House 17, last weekend. Kezar Pavillion was a small venue and we bought VIP seats so we got real close to the actions. I knew it won't be like watching on TV with many different angles and replays but I didn't miss much of it. 13 fights were on the card. 9 of them were KO or submission. And none of them was boring. I'm surprised by the quality of the fights given these are not big names from UFC. We were impressed by the victory of Robert Prakhantree who was taken to the ground by Alex Uribe but got on top later and ground-and-pounded to win. The Light Heavyweight Championship fight between Marcel Fortuna and Mike Ortega was another good one: Fortuna seized the opportunity to summit Ortega via rear-naked choke. Definitely looking forward to attending more local MMA events.

沒女=蝗語

想不到一星期內要鬧TVB兩鑊，我在此呼籲大家不要使用沒女一詞，老實說，用普通話讀還算語帶雙關玩字音，在香港說就真是低俗不堪了。何況有幾多人真正百無？樣貌天生無得說，但身材勻稱可靠運動，學識更是努力可得；不過有缺點不肯改善的人也多的是，電視台硬要無限放大爭取收視，實在缺德。

Sports highlights: International Champions Cup, MLB, NASCAR

I stayed home quite a bit this weekend and thus watched quite a bit of sports. First of all, MLB trading deadline was passed last week, which kinda grabbed my attention and I watched a bit of these 3 series during the weekend:
SF vs NY Mets: the Jake Peavy deal hasn't helped the team yet as he went 0-2 in the first 2 games with the Giants (he did pitch a few perfect innings in his 2nd game) Hopefully he still have something left in his tank. And ironically SF won all the other 3 games showing quite a bit of offense and power.
Oakland vs KC: the A's lost the series. Maybe trading away the All-star outfielder Yoenis Cespedes hurt them after all. The only game they won was started by Jon Lester (the pitcher they traded Cespedes for) so it's still not that bad.
Yankees vs Red Sox: Red Sox traded Stephen Drew to the Yanks at the deadline. Drew got 4 RBIs on the series finale while Cespedes hit .143 with 0 HR and 0 RBI in 2 games with the Red Sox. Enuff Said.

Even though the World Cup is over, the fever has not totally subsided. EPL is starting in 2 weeks anyway. 
Man U vs Real Madrid: I know it's a meaningless pre-season game. Still, a win is a win. (A US-record setting attendance means something too) No complaint.
SJ Earthquake vs Seattle Sounders: another record set: it's the first ever game played at the new Levi's stadium in Santa Clara. And it's won by the local team (and the underdog)  Victories would not be something I look forward to there.

I usually watch my NASCAR races tape-delayed by days. Well, finally I had time to watch all 3 on Sat and Sun! What an exciting finish of the Sprint Cup race at the Poconos! The leaders were trying different strategies: Biffle was in fuel-saving mode. Gordon got 4 new tires. Jr got no new tire. Jr managed past Biffle after the restart. Gordon was not able to get back in front while Harvick was charging hard to the front. Then another restart. I thought Harvick might be able to win it but at the end Jr held on.

俾個like陳校長，俾個dislike CCTVB

香港的電視劇，我好少承認我有睇（除左今年那些年情懷爆燈的《女人俱樂部》）期望既然不高，就算再差也懶理；但今次這套《我們的天空》離譜得令我不能不「幫港發聲」

話說香港一位陳葒校長義務為學生補習，傳媒表揚他實在應該；但無線這集《我們的天空》之《非常校長》標明以陳校長真人真事為藍本卻歪曲事實，必須譴責！劇中校長被香港人業主迫遷，受內地富商捐助支持，陳校長出post證實純屬捏造，甚麼人被刻意醜化及美化，明顯不過。

Free admission to museums

Growing up I am used to paying admission fees to get into popular museums like the Space Museum in Hong Kong or the MET in New York. Then I found out a lot of museums have free admission days (like every Wed in most museums in HK or some Sundays in SF) so I would plan my visits accordingly. Finally, there are museums that are free all the time, like the Smithsonian in Washington DC, Cantor Arts Center in Stanford, Triton in Santa Clara (which I just visited yesterday for the exhibition of 10 artists inspired by John Lennon's "Imagine" and 2014 Photography competition) BTW, the $25 admission fee people paid at the MET is actually the "recommended" amount only. I could have paid $0.01 to get in :(

What started this post though, was the HK government backed "Sport For All" day: all government-run sports facilities (e.g. public swimming pool) were open free-of-charge to the public yesterday. Inspired by this, one newspaper columnist suggested that the government should offer full-time free admission to all museums in HK to encourage creativity of its people. At a first glance this seems to be a great idea but then I read the comment sections and saw a ton of naysayers: most think such policy would be abused: those free museums would have been "occupied" by the elders or tourists who simply enjoy free A/C and also kids treating the places as playgrounds (and the displayed pieces as toys!) This is sad but true: a reflection of the quality of the people (or the lack thereof.) There's no such problem with the free museums in the US from my limited experiences.

Using Oracle SQL Developer with MySQL database

I have been using the free Oracle SQL Developer as my main "alternative" to the text-based SQL Plus client for a while. I have used TOAD before. My co-w's favorite was Golden32. Even though I work with the database quite a bit, I am actually not too picky about what client to use. After all, there are times I have to get on to the database server itself and use SQL Plus. Any GUI is a luxury compared to that. Recently I needed to work on a MySQL database so I wonder if I could "re-use" SQL Developer. I didn't have high-hope to begin with (the alternative would have been the free MySQL Workbench from MySQL.) After all, it's from Oracle and might work with Oracle DB only. MySQL was acquired by Sun which was acquired by Oracle though. It turns out Oracle SQL Developer does work with MySQL (since 2007) I learned from this page that all it takes is opening Tools > Preferences > Databases and there is a third party JDBC driver. Simply add the MySQL Connector JAR. I also opened Help > Check for updates and get the MySQL related update. Not sure if it's really necessary. These links (1,2) did not mention this step. Another MySQL tip I learned today was how to limit the number of rows it queries. In M$ SQL Server, you simply add TOP [N] after SELECT. For MySQL, it's adding LIMIT [N] at the end.

Some new (and old music)

Some of the albums mentioned here actually came from a post that I started last year but never finished :P I couldn't believe I missed the SFJAZZ concert by Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood last month (what else better could I have done instead?)Well, there's another funky group featuring guitar and organ called Organissimo that I "discovered" last year. I must have been in the mood of trio when I started that post because I was also listening to the avant-garde Tin Hat Trio's "Book of Silk" (love the instrumentation with violin and accordion) as well as the Steve Kuhn Trio's "Life's Magic" (Very interested in listening to his 2009 release of "Mostly Coltrane" with Joe Lovano on sax)

I have listened to some more old music of the recently passed away blues rock guitar great Johnny Winter. Alex Skolnick from Testament recommended "Nothing but the Blues" while "Live Johnny Winter And" (what an interesting album name!) topped the Guitar Player's Reader Poll.

Finally, time for more metal: I found Suicide Silence's brand new 2014 album "You Can't Stop Me" on the top of the Billboard's Hard rock album chart. Definitely doesn't sound like commercial B.S. though. Highly recommended.