Outsourced

I recently discovered a short fan film called Lucas in Love, which, of course, is a parody of Star Wars and Shakespeare in Love. I believe it was created around the release of Episode I. It's a tale of how Lucas got his inspiration for the original trilogy. Quite funny.



Then for the RPG'er / gamer in you, there's the captioned trailer for Episode III. It translates every line into gaming terms, and is also pretty funny if you understand what it's talking about and what certain acronyms mean. My favorite bit is when Obi-Wan shouts, "You were the chosen one!"

I just got back from viewing Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Not a bad movie by any means. Quite tragic, indeed.

I came back to Katy on Tuesday. Remind me not to take so much crap with me to college next semester. It took three trips to get all my stuff down to the ground floor, not to mention how many full elevators came and went before one with enough space arrived.

While I was waiting outside, I saw a police officer ticketing cars parked on the side of the street since they can only park for 15 minutes. He was taking a break, and a car alarm started going off in the parking garage across the street. The policeman sat down and lit a cigarette. I thought it was sort of amusing. That just goes to show that nobody, not even the police, pays any attention to car alarms (in the sense of thinking that a car is being stolen), it only makes an annoying sound.

My corded Logitech optical USB mouse stopped working yesterday. Apparently some other people have had the same problems. I've had it for about 10 months. It's a shame; it is a good mouse -- or was, until yesterday. I guess I'll have to see if I can get a new one since it's got a warranty for at least a year.

So while purusing Slashdot comments, somehow the topic of Kancho comes up, leading me to this site about the experiences of an American guy who works as an English teaching assistant in Japan. Some of it is disturbing and vulgar, but every entry is pretty entertaining. I haven't read them all, but I especially recommend "My Kids Are Perverted" (where Kancho is defined) and any of the "Japanese Kids Say the Darndest Things" entries. Man, Japanese people are pretty strange.

An excerpt:

---

"'How many comic books do you have?' I ask. 'One million' she says in Japanese. I tell her to say 'one million' in English, but she says that's too hard. So I suggest she use a lower number, like 4 or 5. 'How many comic books do you have?' I ask again.

'Penis' she replies. Great, you have penis comic books."

---

It's not all dirty, and it actually gives quite a few insights to Japanese culture.

Travis informs me that Kancho is practiced in the US too, mostly in athletics. Didn't know that.

Being ahead in your major but not having a lot of credits in other areas already really really stinks. As a result, you have to try to register for upper-division courses while still being ranked a freshman. Thus, all the good upper-division classes are already filled up by the time the seniors, juniors, and sophomores have finished registering. It also looks like the honors course that I need to petition for is already closed. This officially sucks. My schedule is going to be craptacular.

I've founded a WASTE network, which is a secure and private way of transferring files between a small group of trusted people. What do I mean by secure and private? The data transferred can only be monitored by other people on the network, and thus no unwanted third parties (*cough cough* RIAA / MPAA *cough*) can track anything that goes on. WASTE simplifies file transfers, though I'll admit that setting it up can be tricky. Currently two other IMCM members are a part of the network. Let me know if you're interested in joining, and we'll try to hook you up.

And here's a quotable quote:
"Tube socks make you look gay." - John
"Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!" - James, standing behind John, wearing tube socks.

If you can beat The Dark Room in under an hour and a half, I'd say you're really smart or you've seen it before. The Dark Room is a flash puzzle game, and half the game (and half the fun) is figuring out what it is you're supposed to do. It's very creative and unique.

Who remembers that Smack the Penguin game? Of course, everyone does. Nanaca Crash takes the basic idea and puts an anime twist on it, and it's interactive beyond just hitting the penguin (or in this case, launching a bike into a guy). The rules appear to be in Japanese, but you can control everything with the click of a mouse.

Start the game by choosing an angle and power (hold down the mouse for power). This launches the guy and every time the guy lands on another person, he is affected either positively or negatively. Generally, hitting girls is good as they'll launch you further into the air (since the goal is to get as far as you can). Hitting guys will either slow you down or increase your angle (which is usually bad). Under the right circumstances, you can pull off a special when hitting a girl, which will launch you even further than normal. It should be noted that if the girl with glasses and the green background is not lit up under the special bar, hitting the said girl will cause you to stop instantly. Check out this page for more info on how the game works. It's actually pretty fun and easy once you figure it out.

Lastly, you can play 20 questions with a computer database at 20q.net where you're the one who comes up with the object and the computer asks you questions and tries to guess the answer. It can be pretty entertaining if you've got time to kill, and it can give you some pretty funny answers. Surprisingly enough, it can usually guess correctly if your object isn't obscure.

Fetch Text URL is now up to version 1.5. I submitted it to update.mozilla.org, the official website of extensions for Firefox and Mozilla, and they accepted and listed my extension. It's very exciting to be published, and now the top ranked page for a search on "Jeff Chien" on Google actually refers to me.

I didn't mention anything when I released FTU 1.4, which introduced icons for the context menu to help easily identify which item to choose. FTU 1.5 fixed some bugs and made a few minor tweaks. I better start using a major.minor.release format, or else I'm going to run out of minor numbers really fast.

This post is long overdue.

Mmm, almost everything is nice and cheap in China. We went to this flea market where all these peddlers chase you down saying "Hello. DVD? CD? Playstation?" And of course, they say with a very Chinese accent. It was crazy; you couldn't walk five yards without running into one of those guys. I ended up getting a pretty cool Shanghai shirt for like three USD.

The food was absolutely awesome. No where in America can you find a meal for four for under $10. We stayed with Terry's parents for three days after the contest, and they treated us to all these really nice dinners. Terry's mom even made us delicious dumplings.

Now I've been motivated to try and take Chinese next year.

Here are a couple of pictures.


Andrew (our coach), myself, David, and Terry.


Terry and myself during the Parallel Programming Challenge.


A view of what I believe is the Huangpu River.


A red panda at the Shanghai Zoo, also known as a firefox. It's an endangered species.


Another picture of a red panda with me in it. Too bad it's not looking toward the camera.


POS. Teehee.


Good old Engrish.


This one is for Arash, who loves that Go-Go girl from Kill Bill.