+++ the Shins - Wincing the night away +++
+++ the Shins - Chutes too Narrow +++
~~~ Some lessons - Melody Gardot ~~~
+++ Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight +++


I feel so volatile. Maybe that's a side effect of being in probably the most risky phase of my life. Anything can happen when you experiment. I think there is simply too much chaos to reflect upon, and the best you can do is make the most out of the few hundred balls thrown at you.

I'm a dreamer. I think moving to Beijing will assist in keeping my perspective long.

Brand Tags

Brands are the difference between a 300USD polo shirt with a 'BAPE' embroidery and a 20USD polo with any custom embroidery of your choice.

Easy way to reset your sleep cycle: Stop eating

I know shitloads of people who have trouble with their sleep cycle...

Not eating for 12-16 hours can help people quickly reset their sleep-wake cycle, according to a new study from the Harvard Medical School. This discovery can drastically improve a person's ability to cope with jet lag or adjust to working late shifts.

Scientists have long known that our circadian rhythm is regulated by our exposure to light. Now they have found a second "food clock" that takes over when we are hungry. This mechanism probably evolved to make sure starving mammals don't go to sleep when they should be foraging for food.

The lead researcher Clifford Saper explains:

The neat thing about this second clock is that it can override the main clock ... and you should just flip into that new time zone in one day.

It usually takes people a week to fully adjust to a new time zone or sleeping schedule. To think that this new "food clock" hack can help you change your internal clock in one day is mind boggling.

Something about Us

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is why I heart Daft Punk



Something About Us

It might not be the right time
I might not be the right one
But there's something about us I want to say
Cause there's something between us anyway

I might not be the right one
It might not be the right time
But there's something about us I've got to do
Some kind of secret I will share with you

I need you more than anything in my life
I want you more than anything in my life
I'll miss you more than anyone in my life
I love you more than anyone in my life

L'Arc en Ciel

Yesssss. Going to their show tomorrow.

Lots of crazy things are going on in the online social networking movement lately. Never mind that nobody has really figured how to truly monetize off of social networks, we've got facebook starting to look more and more like a walled garden due to google's open social.


Found this interesting "world wide social networking market share" picture (above). Thought it would give some of us a better perspective of who the market leaders really are.

Unless Facebook pulls off something game changing. I think it's going to end up like Friendster... i suppose it's why i don't waste my time on either.

Pixel Art

I just recently bought some pixel art for my brother Edwin's apartment in Beijing. I personally like the top one (LA) more than the bottom (Tokyo). They remind of my collages, very colorful and plenty to look at it.

Nice

Twitch’s body is stuffed with a mixture of beads and stuffing. The beads give the Squash-plush teddy a bit of extra weight, so he can lie spreadeagled in his blood and gut-pool. The blood and guts and gore are made using the latest, cutting edge stuffing. It’s a special new micro-bead stuffing that gives the guts and organs a more malleable, tactile effect. It makes it more squidgy. More gross-out. You can disembowel Twitch by pulling the blood and innards through the zips that line both sides of the teddy carcass.

The body and legs and head are made from specially sourced Squash-plush material. It’s a really good quality Korean fur, and it gives the teddy a convincingly mangy pelt. The Gut-plush, as we like to call it, is a stretchy thin material that squidges and bulges under your fingers. If you’ve ever squidged a Japanese Barbapapa plush toy, then you’ll know what we mean. And the claws that protrude from each of his four grasping paws are made of felt.

GTA IV Review

I figure I'll talk about something more typical like GTA IV today.


I got the 360 earlier this week and probably checked in 15+ hours so far. It doesn't occur to me, but that's pretty incredible considering I don't normally sit in front of any one game for that long in such short period of time anymore. There is something about the game which makes me want to continue to play it, namely, the story and its characters. I must admit beyond all the extra kinks of the game (such as the cellphone, web, dating, indoors, weather system, Kanye tracks), the one thing which really kept me going on were the characters of the game. As a game designer, what makes me want to put down the control the most is usually repetitive gameplay (or in other words knowing what I will be doing and what will happen for the rest game). GTA IV has done a great job of pushing this aspect of the game none existent in the previous series.

My expectations weren't very high to start off, so I would conclude the game beat it. Driving around New York is just awesome, you don't get to muck around Manhattan until further into the game, but for anybody who has spent some time living there, it's really cool.

I look forward to GTA XIII and how it will corrupt our future generations.

Beijing Midi Music Festival

Bullocks!

Park and I were pretty keen on attending the Midi Music Festival in Beijing this year -until we heard that it was canceled (read title link). It probably would have been a good time.

Urban Beijing

The architecture in Beijing is just a wonder to look at. Here are a few of many:

Resonance with my college years

5. They haggle with their teachers for extra points.
As a teaching assistant, I would have been rich if my pre-med students gave me a dime every time they nagged me for partial credit on questions that they had gotten completely wrong.

4. They use questionable tactics to get good grades.
Some of them may turn to study drugs like adderall, dexedrine, provigil, and ritalin. Others will beg upperclassmen for copies of old exams, which give them an unfair advantage over their classmates.

3. They horde leadership positions and then run organizations into the ground.
To pad their résumés, they run for the presidency of science clubs and volunteer organizations, and then fail to fulfill their responsibilities because they are too busy studying.

2. They game the system to get good grades.
By strategically dropping any class that is not going well and carefully picking courses taught by the easiest professors they ensure themselves a good grade point average.

1. They are not motivated by curiosity.
If they ask a question in class, it's often to find out what will be on an upcoming exam. Some of them volunteer to work in a lab on real research projects, but they don't give it their all because they have no passion for scientific inquiry -- it's just another line on their résumés.

Everywhere at Once

the album officially drops in a couple days. it's hot shit (thanks Rhapsody!).

Fate? Or do we have choice?

Lately, my world has been turned upside down. It's a rush of blood to the head. History tells me I ought to know better, but addiction is one ugly beast. Especially those that are capable of taking over your heart.
I'm contemplating jumping out at the peak of my high. The rest is just rubble; skeletons in the closet. Nothing more, plenty less.

Game Recommendations

I haven't recommended any games for a while. The truth being that its a combination of them sucking as usual and me being busy.



Smash Bros Brawl ought to make this list as well, but I've barely sat in front of it enough to recommend it yet.

BAPE Concert Hong Kong

N.E.R.D - I dig abstract hip-hop (hip hop with live instruments). Though, either the sound system at the event or Pharrell can use some stronger vocals.

Kanye W - Flat out good entertainer and light show. This guy is a professional.

Teriyaki Boysz - Who are they again?

Don't make the same mistakes again...

I'm a fan of failing fast, the contingency being that I learn from my mistakes. Lately, I find myself confronting the same traps I've fell into in the past. And I've been struggling to correct myself eventhough I ought to know better. There is no bigger failure than to make the same mistakes again.
Its so easy to settle for past mistakes. Maybe these are the type of challenges we confront as we grow. Part of me wants to procrastinate on my faults (don't we all).



Some of my friends have talked to me about stability lately. Personally, I think I'm way too young for that. I think I've still got time ahead of me to roll the dice a few more times. There is no other time to experiment, learn, and track aggressive growth. I think it ought to be like that for at least the next 4-5 years.

Illustrator rocks!

Fresh out of the oven, here's the logo of a new company I've been working on lately.



Please guess what we do.

+++ The Whitest Boy Alive - Dreams +++
+++ The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely +++
+++ Does it Offend You, Yeah? - You have no idea what you're getting yourself into +++
+++ Wilco - Sky Blue Sky +++
~~~ Justice - Phantom Pt.II ~~~

Quality Fade: American or Chinese, which is worse?

I've been thinking about writing a similar entry lately...but Paul delinger did it better...


Paul Midler is an experienced sourcing expert who has worked in China for many years, and publishes The China Game blog. I believe that he is the first person to coin the term “quality fade”. Quality fade is, according to this article published in Forbes:

This is the deliberate and secret habit of widening profit margins through a reduction in the quality of materials. Importers usually never notice what’s happening; downward changes are subtle but progressive. The initial production sample is fine, but with each successive production run, a bit more of the necessary inputs are missing.

It seems a long time ago, but last year, a great deal of ink was devoted to covering the issue of defective products from China. In some cases, lives were lost in the US.

If I have one criticism of Paul Midler’s criticism of this very real problem, it is the impression it gives that somehow unscrupulous Chinese exporters are deliberately seeking to cheat and harm Americans, when in fact, many more Chinese have been injured and even killed by defective products coming out of Chinese factories. It’s just that the US media does not pick up these stories because the victims are, well, Chinese.

But if we are going to be fair about this problem, then shouldn’t we talk about the Chinese and other non-American victims of this problem as well? I think so.

Now, when it comes to the credit bubble problem, the issue of quality fade becomes even more interesting. This time, the culprit is not Chinese, but American. For a problem of such immense proportions, which is getting bigger and bigger by the day, amazingly, no one has identified the human culprits responsible for the bad decisions. But then, accountability never been a strong point for this US administration.

In China, when there was a problem with deaths caused by tainted drugs, the head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration was sentenced to death and executed. No one yet knows the size of the credit bubble, but I have heard numbers from $15 billion to $45 billion bandied about. Mind you, the US economy is a US$12 trillion a year economy, so we are basically talking about anywhere from 1 year to four years of economic output disappearing.

Americans are losing their jobs, many are losing their homes, and the Fed has been scared into a series of panic interest rate cuts and into subsidizing the purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan Chase and offering a Fed-backed unlimited credit lending facility to US investment banks.

In this article from The Washington Note, Steve Clemons talks about how the US exported poisoned financial products.

So, while Chinese factories have on occasion exported defective products, the US has exported defective financial products. And the US government participated because Treasury sold T-bills which were backed by these defective financial instruments.

Hmmm….

Now, back to quality fade. Let’s see if we can modify his definition of quality fade to capture the credit bubble situation:

This is the deliberate and secret habit of creating the illusion of increased purchasing power through the creation of fiat credit derivatives of dubious value. Exporters usually never notice what’s happening; downward changes are subtle but progressive. The initial credit derivatives are fine, but with each passing year, lose their value as more credit derivatives are created until there is a gradual collapse and new currencies and trading rules have to be established.

(The italics are where I have made changes to Paul Midler’s original text.)

When it comes to quality fade, the Americans have been wholesalers, while the Chinese are just occasional retailers.

While I'm rambling about iPhone Apps

Nope. No, iPhone Turntable Application

I've been working on a few projects recently. The iPhone turntable application being one of the smaller ones which I was fairly excited about. It was more of a passion project and not very $$$ making so I'm okay with having to cut it short.



It sucks to say but the app is going into my recycle bin because Apple has its arms around its itunes jewels -they are not allowing any 3rd party applications to mess with their itunes music model. The SDK does not include any frameworks to access the music on the iphone/itouch and allow application to do anything with them (such as scratching, changing pitch, etc...).

Thought it would be interesting to post some failures within my seeding process...

Modest Mouse - Dashboard

More awesome work by Motion Theory

Justice @ Commodore Ballroom

Saw them live at Vancouver last night. Sick!