Fantasy Symphony Contest

I am no stranger to fantasy sports, in which I handpicked a sports team to compete with others' teams. And I am pretty good at identifying lesser known talents, especially in football and baseball. However, when it comes to fantasy symphony, I'm no where near these guys. You might ask: what the heck is fantasy symphony anyway? Well, I just learned this term yesterday from the Stereophile magazine. Each fantasy player pretends to be in charge of a symphony orchestra and comes up with the program for a whole season (of 7 concerts), which cannot include works of the top 12 most popular composers (e.g. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms......) The editors have picked, subjectively, the winning programs. If you like to challenge your musical taste like I do, you should start listening to some of the pieces from these programs. Some are really "ear" openers!

週末派對

聽起來就像青春片的名字，卻是我們這幾天的寫照，心境青春即可！第一個是西式：其中一位賓客是小提琴家（也是我們當晚弦樂三缺一重奏一位成員的老師），承蒙她指點了我們一二，一首貓王金曲總算玩得成個樣子；另一位是她從事樂器交易的男朋友，聽了不少他游走國際的趣事。第二個是中式：舊同事主人家兩位是青島及揚州人，嚐嚐揚州菜，再聽聽揚州話讀唐詩，十分攪笑！一席話題倒不止於唐詩宋詞，總之就是大江南北。最後一個是運動式：在泳池慶祝太太放大假，之後當然大吃一場補充消耗了的能量:)

Hard rock 101

I was listening to FM 96.5 on the car radio while taking my son to camp. It played its slogan: "Lite rock, less talk" after a Kelly Clarkson's song. My son asked me the difference between lite rock and hard rock. I figured it'd be easier to explain with an example so I switched to the next station on the preset: 107.7 and surely it was playing Led Zeppelin. Enough said. 

好想藝術

香港電台電視部實在太多高水準節目，我每次飛香港在機上必睇，今日在香港電台app的podcast部份又尋到寶：《好想藝術》剛剛看完第五集其中一節：日與夜，講的是畫家海潮的一天。

The Youk is the Man

I bet Red Sox managment has some regrets about trading Kevin Youkilis away to the White Sox. Man, he helped the Sox winning a few games since the trade less than 2 weeks ago! Red Sox was swept by the 3rd place A's while White Sox just swept the 1st place Rangers. I've been able to follow these games thanks to my newly paid subscription to MLB.TV :)

MLB.TV Premium tips

Like every service, good ones or bad ones, there are always a few tricks to maximize your experience.

One big attraction of MLB.TV Premium (compared to the "basic service") is the ability to stream on mobile device using the At Bat App. There are actually two favors: At Bat 11 costs $9.99 while At Bat Lite is free. I was a bit confused. Turns out I could use the free version for streaming.

Next issue has to do with streaming in Web Browser (Chrome, fyi) on my PC. My internet connection does not have enough bandwidth for HD. I'm not too crazy about it anyway. I tried sliding the quality bar to the lowest and it kept resetting back to highest and the video kept buffering. In addition, it kept nagging me to use Nextdef (a browser plugin) I decided I couldn't do worse so I installed it. Now I have another slider that goes from "Standard" to "Nextdef." Once I slided it to "Nextdef." The quality setting would stay at the lowest, finally!

MLB.TV Premium

MLB.COM好勤力日日send e-mail俾我終於奏效：MLB.TV Premium這個棒球賽streaming服務，半季減價到$79.99；另一誘因係MLB.TV Premium可在新電話上用At Bat App觀看，我抵受唔到誘惑落左搭。

睇左幾場好波：星期五晚Mets出knuckle ball奇人再贏Dodgers，星期日Brewers在最後半個inning憑對方失誤險勝D-back。

The magical 1967

I just found out:

• The Velvet Underground and Nico 
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 
• Are You Experienced 
• Born Under a Bad Sign 

are all released in 1967. What a year!

New phones on Olympic years

It seems that I'm replacing my phone about every four years. My previous phone was an iPhone that I bought around Beijing Olympics. I bought my new phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note, just before the London Olympics. My phone before the iPhone, a Sony Ericsson W800i, also lasted ~4 years. I don't think I'm qualified as a "gadget" guy that a lot of people think I am based on this frequency.

Anyway, the more interesting question is: why did I switch from iOS to Android? Well, updating a jailbroken iPhone was a tedious process and I only did it once so my iPhone was running iOS 3. I wasn't able to install any new App from the official or unofficial App Store anymore. I might run into the same issue with Android. Who knows? I'm like the people who vote for a candidate from a different party because of poor performance of the last one. You just hope it'll be better. 

So, what were my top priority action items after getting the phone?
1) Sync contact from iPhone to Google
Android is tightly coupled with your Google account (well, everybody has one, right?) Basically the address book and calendar on your phone ARE the ones in the "Cloud" associated with your Google account. All I needed to do is to open iTunes and sync the contacts to Google. I think not every contact went through but it seems to have taken care of the majority.

2) Sync Yahoo Calendars
iPhone's builtin Calendar app allows you to sync with many different provider that uses CalDAV, including Yahoo. Not so for Android. There are 3rd party app that is supposed to work but I'd rather not risk my money. The solution? Export my existing Yahoo Calendars and import to my Google Calendar and stop using them for good. Yeah, it's more like a workaround. (Google has cut off yet another source of traffic to Yahoo!)

3) Add music
This is easy: connect the phone to any computer using USB and simply copy the files to any directory on the memory of the phone. The phone will automatically scan for the new files.

4) Customize ringtone
Once I have music files on the phone, I could open my Contact list and simply assign one of those files as the ringtone for a particular contact. However, I might not like to use the beginning of a song as the ringtone, for example, I prefer the chorus part in the middle of a song. For this, I downloaded the free app Ringdroid and pick the part I like. Ringdroid saves it as a ringtone file. (I think internally Android OS uses a particular directory for ring tones. It's hidden to un-rooted phone like mine) I wonder why the app is not banned by the phone companies who wanted to squeeze more money out of people. Some are willing to pay $3+ for a ringtone.

5) Whatsapp
It relies on your Contact list/address book. The only thing I changed is its Notifications setting: I turned off "Contact Ringtone" so that it won't play the ringtone of the person who messaged me. I'm confused 'coz I thought I got a phone call.

6) Cangjie input
I downloaded this popular Chinese input method app. I could have made it my default input method because when I type English, it will try to translate and I could pick either the Chinese word or the English word I typed. So it works for both Chinese and English without toggling "modes" like the other Chinese input method app (Go Keyboard) Its prediction is pretty accurate too. However, the reason it is so accurate is that it has generated statistics from keystrokes collected from user. Yes, it did warn user about it. I don't want my keystrokes to be collected all the time so my default is still the Samsung one.

Here is the list of other free Apps I downloaded. I learned about them from my Android tablet experience.

• Color Note
• Blogger
• Apple Daily
• Discuss(香港討論區)
• Rhapsody
• XiiaLive Lite
• Pandora
• cBook
• SpeedCar
• AirPenguin
• Google Drive
• HKBN 2b

SlingPlayer is not free ($29.99) but I gotta take advantage of the big screen! In fact, the 5.3 screen is the reason I chose it over any other phone. The newer Samsung Galaxy S3 is supposed to have better spec (and running Android 4 aka Ice Cream Sandwich already) but I couldn't resist the BIG screen.

認真失威

IndyCar因為天雨遲左開場，到NASCAR Nationwide開場都未完，ABC電視台決定將前者掟去ESPNEWS台，轉為播後者。
IndyCar堂堂北美頂級open wheel賽事，竟然要讓路予只是次級房車賽的NASCAR Nationwide，認真失威。
其實IndyCar都幾好睇，不過太多非美國人當道，難怪美國人不支持。更不幸的是，Indycar似乎前路頗為坎坷：原本安排在青島舉行的賽事被取消（無端端學人想打入强國市場作甚？真的活該）少了該場，就低於贊助商所要求的場數；另一方面，贊助商合約還有三年才完成，有消息指IndyCar已在找下一手頂上的贊助商，實在有點耐人尋味。

陰晴不定

對上一次出三藩市辦公，已是十幾天前的事！今早離家時陽光普照，還在考慮穿不穿短Tee，不過深知三藩市天氣不能低估，感冒初癒，還是著件長袖Polo比較穩陣，果然，在SF一下火車，即見烏雲密佈，就像昨天電視直播SF Olympic Club上演的US Open高爾夫球大賽；踩車途中還覺點點雨粉撲面，決定不要「蛇」得太遠，就在Alcatraz Landing掉頭向office算了。

波係圓既

揭幕日氣勢如虹的俄羅斯，竟然臨尾香，只能再講一次伍晃榮名句：波係圓既。其實，民主思想的發源地和獨裁統治的佼佼者的對決，我比較傾向支持前者。唉，誰說政治和體育可以分開呢？

收放自如的熱情

家中兩個寶貝去年暑假最沉迷的是Pokemon，電子遊戲及figurines玩過不停，讀得最多的也是Pokemon指南。去年開學後當然繼續沉迷，我們於是嚴重告誡：只有週末才能玩，學年轉眼過去，他們也倒真夠定力，一個月只玩它一兩次。我還以為他們對Pokemon熱情不再，已經outgrown了？原來不是，一放暑假，兒子便把他的寶貝傾巢而出，他的熱情真夠收放自如，成年人也屬少見呢！
令我想起一位常常睇波的老友，觀看賽事過程當中他固然極之投入，但結果塵埃落定之後，從不見他為愛隊落敗而沮喪不已，或因愛隊成功而喜形於色。
其實近年自己多隊愛隊受挫（例如曼聯，UT，UW都僅敗）相對而言，不甚喜歡的如車路士，Kings，Cardinals，NY Giants等等就成功奪錦，的確不是味兒；不過想深一層，自己的愛隊之前亦屢獲佳績，似乎也無需為一時失敗而介懷。看看歐國盃看台上那些弱隊擁躉，很多都做到勝固欣然敗亦喜，真的是為了能夠參與而高興，實在值得學習！
到有一天能對愛隊的熱情收放自如，也許可以試試如何對人也能如此，現在只能以一句「我是熱情的rock友」來解嘲吧！

What he does for a living

Today I read an article in American Airline's magazine about Metallica's drummer Lar Ulrich getting a side job as an actor in a movie about the Spanish Civil War starring Nicole Kidman. At this point in his sucessful career he could pretty much do anything he likes (including making music that suck badly with his band coz they made enough great ones to justify that.) The most interesting quote though, was when asked about his future acting plan, he said, "Actually all this music and acting isn't even what I do for a living -- on days like today, it seems my full-time occupation is driving children around." So both Ulrich and I have something in common in addition to making rock music!

幸福唐人街

今天午飯時間因為開會推遲至一點，尚有餘暇快快「踩」一轉唐人街，踩到新香港，只見門口一個聲勢浩大的中樂團在演出（就是圖中這班）中阮裝上pickup出Pignose amp（我家也有一隻），認真夠特色！經過金門餅家，還在放假；於是到天后廟街找上次那家抵食麵包舖，原來叫幸福餅家，名字取得很好呀！

Music of the day: Piano Trio by Anton Arensky

Boston's public station WGBH has been making great podcasts of classical music for years. I felt so bad that it stopped releasing new episodes some time last year and couldn't really find any alternative to it. Fortunately it's back! I'm listening to this one from last month. Beautiful piece.

莫批鬥

陶傑被稱為「才子」，老實說，我對他很多論點不敢苟同，只覺得語出驚人死不休，早幾天他寫的算是例外：

當中國官方也加入圍剿一個人的時候，不管是誰，如果你有一點政治觸覺（或者尚有點人性），即使你本來很討厭這個人，但此時也要停一停，想一想：此一跡象，是一個臨界點，不要加入眾聲的喧嘩，反而，要沉默了。 其次，至目前為止，只是住了幾天總統套房，租了豪宅，沒有貪污千億，英國人是他的師傅，但他沒有把至少八十億託一個英國人轉移海外。身為一名中國官員，有人早就指出過了：他的清廉品格，已經十分高尚。

家長活動停不了

臨近學校暑假，小朋友的「大型」演出活動無獨有偶都排在今天舉行：今早先看了一場娛樂性頗高的音樂劇；中午是扮演歷史名人，女兒扮的是紅十字會創辦人，她的同學有一個扮海倫凱勒（不過她不聾也不盲），有一個扮女神槍手Annie Oakley（回家查查才知她事跡），有一個滿頭白髮的愛因斯坦，還有一個拿著Mac鍵盤扮Steve Wozniak，Wozniak是另一姓氏劃掉後改上的，不知原本是不是扮Steve Jobs？傍晚中文學校還有一場歌舞。各位要上班的家長如果全部出席簡直搏炒。

五月

原來上星期我寫了本blog第五百個帖，剛剛才發現，值得慶祝！「重奪」00zine.com網名好像只是幾年前的事。這個五月也真的過得超快，在寫每月的支票時特別覺得，也可能因為短短數週藝術史課就教了千幾年埃及希臘史吧。公眾假期外又放了幾天假，和親朋好友聚聚，真是快樂不知時日過！

情趣

剛才在交通燈位遇見一位踩單車阿嬋，寒暄了兩句，我們都覺得實在太大風了，她說她和丈夫打賭她出車期間會下雨，如果輸了會買他半打cupcake。結果？她丈夫待會應該要出車消滅那些cupcake了。（估計她職業是對冲基金經理。）