Outsourced

Day 1

Terry was supposed to meet me at the Pudong Airport in Shanghai, but it turns out he never actually purchased a plane ticket. So he wasn't there to pick me up. He did however, have a plan for me to take a bus to Hongqiao Airport and then take a taxi the rest of the way to his home. I attempted to speak Chinese with moderate success to the taxi driver, who seemed to understand what I said, but I didn't understand most of what he said back. Terry's mom says he overcharged me for the taxi fare. Terry bought a ticket and should arrive on wednesday night.

Although the day was pretty crummy up until I actually got to Terry's house, his mom took Hoshino (who had arrived the day before) and I out for a nice dinner. There was some glutenous rice which was really good, and I tried some fried "nine belly fish" which wasn't bad.

Day 2

Hoshino and I took a bus into the outskirts of town, where there were several malls and places to shop. The first thing I bought successfully ordering in Chinese on my own was a bottle of Coca-Cola (yi ping ke kou ke le). Hoshino got a Sprite, which appears to translate into "snow jade". We walked around for several hours, but didn't buy anything else. We made it back to Terry's house alive.

Day 3

Hoshino and I have tried watching television, but I have no clue what the people are saying. So far we've found what appears to be a Chinese Idol, where a guy was trying to sing "Smelly Cat" from Friends. There's also a music video channel that seems to play the same few videos over and over. One channel was showing an episode of Everyone Loves Raymond -- dubbed in Chinese. Ray talks fast.

We've eaten dumplings two days in a row since Terry's mom left on a business trip and his dad has been out on business and is due to arrive tonight. Since Terry is also coming tonight, they were supposed to come back from the airport together. They should have been here by now. Terry's dad just called and said he couldn't find Terry at the airport. I wonder if we should eat something or wait. It's almost 9 pm here.


My parents seeing me off at IAH.


It was raining and gloomy when I got there...


... and I had no clue what was going on. This is me on the bus to Hongqiao Airport.


I thought these buildings looked cool with the vertical hole down the middle.






The traffic here is totally worse than in Houston.


Everybody loves Engrish!

Vince Young is so clutch. Coming back from a 12 point deficit with only 6 minutes left, he almost single-handedly took on the entire USC team. But the defense deserves credit for making the important 4th down stop against LenDale White. I wanted a close game, I got it.


Isn't Nitin's expression great? James kept wishing malice upon USC players during the game, and John pumped his fist rapidly and repeatedly. Sorry Zhi, blame John for blocking your face.

Anyway, I've spent (or am planning to spend) the money I got for my birthday and Christmas on new hardware for my desktop. I'm excited!

Went to Sweet Tomatoes for lunch with Mrs. Koss. Kinda expensive, but good soup. Linda got Mrs. Koss a box of chocolate truffles, but not the fungus that grows in France that you need a pig to find apparently. Fun times for all.


Zhi in the parking lot. April moved.


Linda, myself, Zhi, Sruti, and April waiting for Koss to arrive in the lobby. Stupid sunlight, this is a bit dark.


April, Sruti, Linda, Tommy, Zhi, and myself. The hostess took this one.


Zhi and Tommy being silly. I cut off Tommy's arm. Sorry, Ho.


Sruti and Zhi check out the April's hot pics.


I don't know what Sruti's doing.


Mrs. Koss and Linda!


April and Zhi enjoy dessert.


Ice cream!


Tommy filled up his mini-cone as high as he could.


Myself with Mrs. Koss.


Zhi and Mrs. Koss.

April should have the picture with everyone and Mrs. Koss in the same picture. I'll blog about my birthday later.

A search for "Jews" results in a lovely set of sponsored links. You can find almost anything on eBay apparently. To their credit, the folks at Google have a reasonable explanation that will show up as a sponsored link if you search for "Jew" singular as opposed to plural.

While studying a Burrows-Wheeler transformation with Rob for my CS337 Theory in Programming Practice class, we tested the validity of Wikipedia. We noticed that David Wheeler had an entry, but Michael Burrows did not. As I egged Rob on, he wrote "BURROW'D" and edited Burrow's page. While I was cracking up at the stupidity, within one minute an administrator had deleted the entry. While I'm not sure they can easily catch false information, at least the admins are really fast at catching irrelevant entries.

* 04:07, 9 October 2005 Paul August deleted "Michael Burrows" (content was: 'BURROW'D' (and the only contributor was '129.116.46.xxx'))

I've been playing Urban Dead lately since it doesn't take a lot of time to play each day and I've got quite the busy schedule this semester. Basically it's a web-based text player versus player rpg of human survivors versus zombies. You are allotted 50 moves (a.k.a. action points) per day to do various things like attacking or searching for items. If you die as a human, you become a zombie, though you can be revived as a human with the right items. If you die as a zombie, you can reraise yourself as a fully (un)healthy zombie for 10 action points. Check it out if you like web games.

So I try to buy a Pepsi from a vending machine, but it won't accept my dollar bill. I then put the dollar bill in another vending machine and press the change return button, but it only gives me 25 cents. So I then say "screw it", take another dollar, and put it in a third vending machine with the 25 cents I just got, and get a Coke instead. The third vending machine then proceeds to give me 75 cents change. What? I didn't complain. I tried getting a drink from that same machine another day, but alas, it didn't give me 75 cents back.

I also watched Serenity in theaters a week or so ago. Great movie.

Lesson of the Day: Don't buy a bottle of Pepsi, walk across campus, and try to open it in class.

Quote of the Day: "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand." -Confucius

Question of the Day: Why does "Oh boy!" (non-sarcastic) imply excitement whereas "Oh, man" implies disappointment or unhappiness?

Good Shows to Watch: Battlestar Galactica, Lost

Dumplings are far harder to make from scratch than one would imagine.

Thankfully Rita didn't annihilate Katy or Houston. But you can't ask a hurricane to spare one town without it destroying another, I guess. Sucks for Port Authur and Lake Charles.

Avast, it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Though I don't really plan on saying anything in pirate lingo, I'll say "aye" and "yar" as I normally do occassionally. However, they had a pretty entertaining Letterman-style list of the Top Ten Pirate Pick Up Lines (to be used by pirates, not to pick up pirates; actually, it probably doesn't matter). "Yar, matey. Vote for Katie." Anyway, I'll make Guybrush Threepwood proud today.

Speaking of pirates, a certain prophet named Bobby Henderson has completed extensive research and has found a correlation between a decline in pirates and increase in global temperature.

There are many Pastafarians who have been touched by His noodly appendage including Zhi and John. I'm talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course. If Kansas is going to teach Intelligent Design in school along with the theory of evolution, then surely they must also include this alternate logically-sound theory of Intelligent Design in their curriculum. Let there be "One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence." Ramen.

I went to my first concert tonight with John, Alvin, Tommy, James, and Jenny; Weezer and Foo Fighters performed at the Erwin Center. We ended up getting seats near the top of the stadium, which I didn't think was bad, since it wasn't deafeningly loud. Rivers Cuomo (who also happens to be an author, hehe) and company played all my favorite songs including Buddy Holly, Island in the Sun, Say It Ain't So, and Photograph, so I am satisfied. Foo Fighters wasn't as good in my opinion, and I was disappointed that they didn't play Times Like These. However, they sang much louder than Weezer. Everlong was really good, though, with cool laser-light effects, and they played Learn to Fly and All My Life. Foo Fighters weren't bad, it's just hard to be as good as Weezer.

Today my iPod froze on me while I was changing the audio file to play. I was walking to the RLM for Chinese and I decided to try and play my Chinese audio where they read the Pinyin sounds to do some last minute studying before our quiz. And of course, when I tried to do so, that's when it froze. It didn't respond to holding down the play button to turn it off or any other commands. At first I was pretty worried. However, when I got back, I quickly googled "iPod froze" and found a solution. For iPod minis, iPods with click wheels, and later generations all you have to do is hold down menu and the select button for a while (with lock off, of course) to reset the iPod. I also had to recharge it some before it'd turn on again.

I'm probably not getting enough sleep these days when I need it. I spend a couple of hours meticulously working through each Chinese homework lesson, with about 3 or 4 lessons a week, a test every Monday, and a quiz Wednesdays and Fridays for this week and next week. After that it looks like there's only one homework lesson a week, but we start having an additional oral quiz once a week. It's a lot of work, and I'm pretty sure Mintra agrees. I suck at speaking it and recognizing tones as the TA speaks, but I really want to learn it. One could say I'm determined. I'd like to thank Terry in particular for putting up with my constant inquiries about the Mandarin dialect.

I did manage to set aside time to watch Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children. Very cool movie, running 1 hour, 40 minutes. Lots of cool fight scenes, beautiful graphics and animation, Square Enix managed to work in every main character, and great music by Nobuo Uematsu. I thought the piano renditions of the original FF7 music were most excellent. Tifa's theme is the most relaxing non-lyrical music ever. I can't wait to pirate legitimately purchase the soundtrack when it's released. Ahem.

Although Tommy thinks Advent Children's plot is weak and practically non-existent, I didn't think it was that bad, though some parts were confusing. I also think the fighting style stays true to what I think fighting in the Final Fantasy world would be like. If you watch, expect to see a few limit breaks in action. Travis agrees that the lack of Chocobos is forgivable due to the awesomeness of the movie. Check it out if you've played FF7.

So apparently some guy makes this 15 move version of Rock, Paper, Scissors and it gets posted on Fark. And since it's on Fark, of course Travis tells me about it (but it's okay, because I usually send him Slashdot links). So I see the chart the guy makes, and I think, "I can do better than that." Turns out I can't. But I reworked some of his names for gestures to fit a Texas college theme.



Yup. The only thing that can beat the Texas Longhorns is a dragon, cause they're awesome. And it'd have to be a Chinese dragon too, probably. So dragons are invincible, but the Longhorns beat everything else. In hindsight, I should have reworked the dragon's arrows too, so I'm sure someone will be mentioning how an Aggie can beat a dragon while being upside down, which can beat a Longhorn, so Aggies are superior or some nonsense. Anyway, the Longhorns own all. Except dragons.

Speaking of which, the Texas - Ohio State game was awesome. Once again Texas came from behind to win, even with the running game stopped. Vince Young made some pretty good passes (and some bad ones too, like that time he threw it right to Ohio State, ahem) though. All those ESPN analysts were like, "Ohio State will win," but now they're all "Nobody can beat Texas now." Word.

While I'm stealing links from Fark, some guys tested the durability of the new iPod Nano by dropping it, launching it at relatively high speeds, running over it with a car... twice, and more. Pretty interesting read, as they reported their findings.

The other night I was thinking about how Apple tries to make it hard to copy your music from your iPod onto your (or another person's) computer. Basically they put all the mp3s in hidden folders. I know there are already some programs that'll copy it onto a computer, but I was thinking my next project might be to write a program allows you to browse and select music to be copied to a specified folder. Expect another Swing interface if tests work out.