Blogging by email...!?

Testing...

Flash

Wow, after 4 hours of trail and error, I just published my updated website. For some odd reason, www.josekin.com doesn't work, but the movie starting page does. Anyway, prior to today, I had to email the designer to tell him what type of change I want and then he would make it. Now I can do it myself. Sort of. I'll keep trying!

Anyway, a bit of mixed success and failure. I got tired of trying to make some of the boxes smaller. I got tired of adding dots. I got tired to typing enough to fill the boxes.

So this is what you are going to get. I plan to update this a bit more often though!

Family Dinner

There's not quite an English phase that spells 幸福. Here are some of the words I can think of: satisfying, gratifying, happy, fulfilling...

So last night my friends and I had a family dinner at one of our homes. Why? Ironically, one is to cheer me up, and the other is that we have two birthdays to celebrate! Anyway, two of us made most of the dinner. I did the dishes. It was a funny feeling where all six of us where sitting around the table, feeling the full effects of food coma, and then moving over to the TV set to catch the latest shows, only to be so bored that we again chatted about life.

That is 幸福. It's that simple. It's that easy. =)

J commented that my life is blue. Not true. Lately, I blog when I am blue. And now, I blog when I feel 幸福 as well.

聖保羅

偶然 (還是無意?) 之間, 看了英雄好漢. 中間有一段對白, 以前沒有注意到:

黑社會大佬: 我的女兒不聽話, 喜歡去Disco玩...
黑社會大佬的朋友: 我的兒子就好多了, 在聖保羅男女讀書, 每一年都是頭三名的!

Haha!

Hero

"死, 要死的其所."
"你為甚麼不擋...?" "(因為) 這樣你就信了."

I watched the movie again. Will explain why in a minute. Anyway, rediscovered how a beautiful language Chinese is. Here are two memorable quotes. And, if you know Chinese, a bit closer to my heart.

After finishing my internship, I had to move out of the corporate apartment. I foolishly did not ask for more nights (beforehand, I felt bad asking in the last week since I do have a home to go to), haha! Anyway, I moved back to my parents... they are in the Phillippines right now, so I have all the space for myself. Since poker night (more on that later) started at 9, I decided to stick any DVD in our new 50 inch TV - dad had commented that he's never used the DVD machine; so I was determined to check it out. =)

Wow.

Poker night was a productive one. I took a cute friend of mine to the game since she loves to gamble and she has never played poker. I taught her some basics (Yup, I consider her the second student of mine) and started the cash game. The fellas were obviously pleased. And both of us won money at the end. Good times all around.

I also drove from home to Happy Valley to Kowloon to Kowloon Tong to Cheung Kwan O to North Point to home. If you know Hong Kong, you'll appreciate how much distance I covered. Anyway, driving is still a very convenient thing even in HK where cabs are cheap... maybe I will buy a car at some point.

Whenever I feel sad, distressed, stressed, frustrated, etc etc, I seem to get very busy at everything I do. Take now for example, it's 1:30 am and I'm typing a blog at home. I just got home about half an hour ago from work, my second night in a row working pass midnight. And I have a breakfast meeting at 8am this morning. Anyway, it did get me wondering about the correlation.

Being occupied is nice when you are having emotional problems. The brain doesn't have to think about the sad stuff and focuses on the task at hand.

This isn't a very organized blog. Um... I was thinking whether I deliberately make myself busy.

Then I thought more.

And more.

Oh... this is how it works: mind isn't focused on anything in particular, not even work, it's wandering around, and it takes longer to do everything... until things need to be done. I guess it's better to not be distressed.

I'm the chair.

I took this picture in May while in Michigan... I'm the chair. Sit on me, and you'll be alone looking out at sea too. Walk away, and you'll be back in the vacation house, looking out at the stationary me. Sigh...

Would love to type more about my current mood, but the irony of blogging kicks in. It's private, yet public. It's not exactly my tell-all personal email to my best friend...!

 

Asian Youtube

I have sort of a love hate relationship with Youtube, as you can see.

I think I blogged about this a while ago... silent library

I also blogged about 美女廚房 (Beautiful Cooking)... there's a lot of episodes here... I'm not sure which one I would recommend though.

Here's the Japanese version of Beautiful Cooking. The best part is at the end...

Why HK education is perverted.

hmmmm

Awesome!

Cash game is pretty fun as well. This is my first time playing it seriously. The strategy is a bit different and the games, in my opinion, are a bit more challenging. You have to be much better at reading your opponents.

Winning money is cool, but this is awesome. I've been to all of them. How about you!?



Got at b3co.com!

Are you okay...?

The depends on the timing, really. Sometimes I feel great, sometimes I don't. Long term, of course I'll be okay! Meantime, just have to deal with emotional swings. Oh yes, the male sometimes isn't so different from the female. I told TGF that I am 90% logic and 10% emotion. The 10% creeps up every now and then... I can't really control it. Or can I?

Maybe use the logic? Oh, but I haven't got any basis for anything! Maybe use imagination? A very dangerous art (not act)... in fact, in the midst of anger and dispair, I wrote a pretty compelling piece of story; as I re-read my little piece, I was surprised at how far the mind can go when it lacks answer. I'm not sure if it was imagination or logic. Maybe both.

And you know what the ironic thing is? There are so many possibilities that whatever imagilogic comes up with is surely a thousand miles from the truth. I guess we all want to know why when sh!t happens... oh well.

I'll be okay... in the long term. (nope, I can't tell you what the long term or short term is)

=)

Alternative reviews!

Beautiful cooking - local HK TV game show invites beautiful stars to cook hard core chinese dishes. Wildly entertaining show. The guests are all male and they have a trash can behind them in case they need to puke. It's all very sexually degrading, but you can't deny that the premise is funny. The next step is the have HK male stars demonstrate how to fix up stuff around home. But... back to the gals. The "Iron Chef" lookalike is extremely well done with tricky ingredients; not so much because the ingredient itself (octopus, sea urchin, anything that is slimy and in general repulsive in live form), but because, as I said, they are all alive to begin with. The starlet has to grab the incredient while it's moving, kill it, and then cook it. One of the best moments was when an octopus latched on and refused to let go it its tenticles. Another is when ALL the guest stars had to puke upon one dish. There's a negative score too, so the poor gal got -110 (max is +120) score. Good times all around.

Death Note - Japanese comic about a kid who picked up a notebook from the Death World in which he can write names and kill people. He battles a detective who is determined to arrest this kid, who slowly thinks that he is god (not capitalized intentionally) and that his deeds will lead to a better world by killing criminals. Very underrated at first but quickly gained a cult following. I shall not spoil the ending for you (not that you'd ever read it)... but the comic does raise a very interesting point as to what is right and what is wrong. The kid who plays god against criminals that police cannot pin? Or the detective, a kid as well, clasically Japanese, who thinks the very act of not using the justice system is criminal? In the end, I think the author has a pretty clear view of who can play god. In fact, the author questions the authority of god and whether god can ever exist. Good comic book. There's a movie coming out as well; I wonder if we can show that movie at school or something.

Distance

After my alone-lonely post, this is an interesting article.

In other news, I broke up with TGF. Last night was an interesting swing of emotions. Sometimes it felt very alone, looking inside myself; other times it was just plain lonely, not knowing whom I should talk with. I found the article quite fitting.

High Low

From my weekend trip

High: Heading to Shanghai!
Low: Dragon Air information on delayed flights...

High: None!
Low: Cancelled and delayed flights...

High: Shanghai!
Low: Hot...

High: Shanghai office!
Low: Shanghai office "offsite"...

High: Food!
Low: Price...

High: Internet access everywhere!
Low: Expensive Internet access everywhere!

High: Xintiandi! Park 97! RenJian!
Low: Same places next weekend... if I stayed...

High: Catch the Red Sox live on ESPN from my hotel!
Low: Javy Lopez grounds into DP with bases loaded with one out in the ninth...
Low2: Woke up at 8am to do so...
Low3: Woke up because phone ran out of batteries and charger needs a different plug for China...
Low4: Oh come on, it's not that bad...

An eventful weekend... not really given that its Shanghai and it should have been much more interesting.

Bathroom again!

Nah, just kidding. I noticed that the most comments were left on my bathroom posts. I want to talk about Lebanon instead.

Here's betting that nobody leaves a comment besides those who just want to spite me. hehe.

What is the "root cause" of the conflict, as the US and UK says and commend to eradicate? How's about going back way back when someone... um... US and UK... drew lines on a map of the Middle East and created the state known as Israel? Now... I'm a am a big fan of dealing with what is now, so I shall not go back to the root cause. But the irony is certainly not being touched by the mass media. Oh, while I'm at drawing maps: Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, etc were all drawn up.

As Spiderman's uncle once said, with great power, comes great responsibility. What the great power has done so far in his 6 years of governance is great responsibilities forgotten.

In asymmetric warfare (i.e. two sides of very different levels of capabilities), the smaller force has to find gaps to strike the bigger force. And because it cannot afford to line up troops on the same field and get run over, it has to attack where the larger force fears. Civilians, therefore, come into the line of fire. There is no justification for this, obviously, but as a smaller force in asymmetric warfare, they may not have much of a choice and will face defeat if they do not resort to these tactics. I am not defending organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah; merely stating an obvious that I learned from Fletcher a few years back.

On the other hand, the larger force has to eliminate where the small force can inflict damage. That means pushing back Hezbollah from the borders. Airstrikes are very much necessary. Facing a almost guerilla enemy, blanket bombarding might be a viable tactic that will cost little in terms of military lives. Then again, I'm not defending the IDF.

What happens is naturally both sides have civilian casualties. One incident has stood out so far: the bombing of a Qana village in which many villagers seeking shelter were killed in an airstrike. I don't want to get into whether Israel was justified to do what it did... but consider this: what if this happened in Israel? A Hezbollah rocket hits a building with Israel civilians, killing many including children.

What would the great power with great responsibility do?

What hurts me most is that we claim to be civilized and with values that terrorists are trying to defeat, we sometimes employ terrorist tactics and mentalities: that it's okay to bomb them because we're defending ourselves. True, perhaps... but the enemy is thinking the same thing. In order to defend themselves (a.k.a. poverty, says Colin Powell), terrorists need to make potential recruits believe that they need to join a terrorist organization. Every time the great powers act in favor of Israel (or anything against the Islam world), it is fuel for the terrorist.

Please use the great power for greater responsibility.