antiparticlehk's Xanga

First Day in Vietnam

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:50:47 GMT

Happy holidays! i'm having my warmest Christmas in my whole life this year -- spending 8 days in Vietnam backpacking with a few colleagues. We're getting up in 5 hrs for boat trip up Mekong River tomorrow but before i forget i needa put down a few thoughts in the past 8 hrs i've been in this country

1. Vietnam is a mini China
- Vietnam is a communist country
- Vietnam is market economy
- The Vietnamese government "logo" (or whatever the thing/pic/symbol that appears on the cover of your passport) looks exactly like China's, only with 1 star as opposed to China's 5.
- Vietnam's Asia's 2nd fastest growing economy, second to China
- Vietnam's GDP per capita is USD600, 60% of that of China
- Vietnamese Customs officers are dressed no different than Chinese "gong-an". Brown suit, green collars, brown straight pants.
- Ho Chi Minh City airport smells like the check point on the China side along the HK-Shenzhen border, especially the bathrooms

2. Customs people are interesting
- more on this later

3. Motorbikes rule the streets
i've never seen so many motorbikes in my life. They roam the streets like water gushes in a bursting river.
More on this later

Hi all

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 09:34:15 GMT

Alright it's been 2 days shy of a year since i last wrote anything here. This entry shall be a short one since i still got work to do. Working from home, but it still sucks when u have to work on Sundays

Anyway, everything's been fine. Been travelin' back and forth btw hk and shanghai these days. Had dinner with a few CF folks last night -- 5 of us, not a large crowd, but large enuff that we actually graduated from cornell in 4 diff years. Johnny's in hk for vacation, curtis is pulling all-nighters as usual, prudence just started school, justina's been staying more in hk these days. Sat at the restaurant for a good 4 hrs. i prolly chugged down a few gallons of tea.

Aspire to post stuff here more often. Was never used to writing open public blogs. Guess i'll be more motivated if i get a few comments from anyone who happens to venture across my site :)

Monday, September 19, 2005

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:25:44 GMT

So this time around, it's an email from Ben that's bringing me back to updating my xanga site. Apparently according to Ben the school administration has decided to put up some "man-height, red colored arches big enough for two people to squeeze through carrying the slogan open doors open minds" on campus. I'd love to see a picture of those edifices. From the way Ben described them they should make quite an unsightly scene.

So I'm back in HK after 2 weeks of training in Beijing. Colleagues are pretty chill, but one thing i've realized is that my Mandarin definitely needs some brushing up. A couple times I cracked up the whole gang when trying to say something in Mandarin but ended up mispronouncing the words making it sound like a totally different thing. And on the first few days I even had trouble tellling the cab drivers where to go. Apparently it was either my accent or the driver had some hearing problem, with the latter case being highly unlikely cuz it happened every time I was taking a cab back to the first hotel that I stayed at, that after I told the driver the name of the hotel, he'd stare at me blankly as if i were speaking an alien tongue, not knowing how to respond until I showed him the hotel address in words, then he'd appear almost to be like "Oh, THAT place" then with a slight grin in the face and mumbling a few words that I couldn't comprehend and which was probably something along the lines of "this dude must be a honkie", embark on a ruthless, reckless Formula-One like dash down the highway, zigzagging its way in between Mercedes, Audis, BMs and "Hongqi (red flag)s" and within seconds arriving at the hotel with me sweating all over, clutching firmly to the door handle in one hand and the seatbelt if there were one at all in the other. I'm doubtful if I'll ever dare to drive in Beijing unless if I'm driving a tank.

To that end, I'm glad to be back in HK.

In consultants' speak, i was "on the beach" in HK the whole past week, ie not having been staffed on any projects yet (or "engagements", or "studies") For one, consultants love using lingo that people from outside can hardly understand. Our first week of training was called BCR, standing for Basic Consulting Readiness. The second week was called NAT, or New Analyst Training. Each of us is assigned a mentor, or whom we refer to as a DGL, developrment group leader. People leading up engagements are called EDs or DCS, and consultants in general are called CSS, while there are CSSA and some other codenames for other staff. Maybe some day I'll be writing my xanga entries in acronyms that only consultants will understand.

Happy mid autumn festival to those folks in the US. I miss you all. Heard that some 16 of you ate dinner at a new Chinese restaurant in East Hill Plaza Ling Ling to celebrate mid autumn fest. Amongst all the things that I miss about Ithaca, I think I'm even starting to miss the Americanized Chinese food at HK restaurant. Kung pao Chicken, Pork fried rice, the miserable General Tso who's more well-known for his namesake sauce than his very own person, and Hunan Chicken which i once misread as "Human chicken" and never dared to try after that... food back in HK is great, but my philosophy of dining is, however delicious the food is, at the end of the day it's the people one is eating with that matters the most.

Anywayz, i hope to get staffed on something that'll take me somewhere outside HK. Taiwan would be nice for a first project, and I'll be able to meet up with Johnny Fong there (!!!)

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Sun, 08 May 2005 13:10:12 GMT

Hoolala. It just feels so good to be gettin' up at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. Why I'd be able to wake up so naturally so early without the aid of the 5 alarm clocks in my room I honestly don't know, but this is definitely a day worth commemorating. It's been a long while since I was last up this early on Sunday, and that was probably after an all-nighter on Saturday night more than actually awakening to the chirping of the early birds.

And yes, 3 weeks after Jimmy Eat World's concert @ Barton, I'm STILL playing their songs day in day out on Napster. Their songs are perfect for a nice warm Sunday morning feelin' upbeat and cheerful and in for some vibrant music.

Karen's bday dinner at Chili's last night. Almost the entire hk gang in my year was there -- reminiscent of the good old, long gone freshman dinners at Appel Commons. Appel Commons hadn't even been dedicated yet; it was simply called Community Commons, or more commonly known as CC. By next fall when us Class of 05 folks are all gone nobody would even be using the acroynm CC to refer to Appel. Man, so that's it for 4 years.

On a lighter note, one of my roommies Yu Jye just headed out for his last scuba diving class in Cayuga Lake. The water temperature prolly in the low 40's if he's lucky. Wait till he gets into the water -- he must be so wishing that he had whale blubber.

A cappella recording on Tuesday. 4 finals, 3 papers and that'll be it for my academic life at Cornell. I could definitely feel senioritis kicking in here. Oh well.

Monday, October 11, 2004

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 07:24:26 GMT

Okay, another entry triggered by another person, not T Muk this time but Johnny Fong all the way over there in Japan.

There's nothing but admiration that I have for his courage to jump out of his comfort zone, from turning down the well-paid and comfortable job in HK and deciding to work in Japan instead for a lower pay and obviously the stress, uneasiness and anxiety that comes wth working in a foreign country.

An inspiration for me that I should jump out of my comfort zone too.

Fall break right now, but haven't been very productive at all. I vowed to myself that I would have to at least write up a song or two over the weekend, but things haven't turned out very well. Random tunes keep on popping up in my mind all the time -- I wish there were a program that could transform instantly the songs in my mind to the real, hard-copy, score-form that I could distribute to everyone and ask for comments. Such impulses of tunes just come and go so easily. One moment I could be humming up a random tune that sounds like the very ideal melody for an acappella song, two seconds after I stopped singing i could completely forget about the tune that I was just humming before I could even find pen and paper to jot it down.

Plans for tomorrow: Needa buy a power cord for my computer monitor, Gannett to get a checkup on my left pinkie to see what is that outgrowth of bone that's causing the pain when playing the piano, lunch/CS consulting hours with Vincent, BBQ (possibly?) with CF or dinner with Oat

Another random thought of the day. While I have always considered myself a liberal, a steadfast opponent of the war in Iraq and definitely a member of the group of Anybuddy-But-Bush'es, my advocacy of the outsourcing of jobs, a small goverment, low taxes and my stance that gays are acceptable but same-sex marriages are not have swung me more towards the conservative side, so rather than being able to proudly call myself a liberal, I can only claim that I'm a moderate Democrat with rather conservative moral values but a leftist yearning for changes in areas that don't intrude into traditional moral systems.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 07:01:30 GMT

Okay, so T Muk was inviting me to take part in his weekly English premier league "Betting Purely for Brownie points" thingy. So that got me back to my own xanga site which I've abandoned and totally ignored for a while.

Nothing in particular really. Karaoke night just now was okay, but there were so many new faces that I'd never be able to recognise them all. Not that I'll be seeing them on campus that much anyway -- most are freshmen, so we won't be taking any classes in common, nor are our paths gonna cross too often in my remaining 2 semesters at Cornell. Two words say it all -- I'm old.

Good news. Rio Ferdinand will be back in action for Man Utd's Monday clash with Liverpool after serving one of the most pathetically stupid bans ever in the history of soccer for having missed a regular drug test due to a simple lapse of memory. Watch out guys, we're making our comeback now.

The skies were so clear today. Saw Cygnus setting on the west while Auriga was rising on the east. My favorite winter skies to come soon.

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 21:38:04 GMT

Okay. It's been a pretty productive week. I got a prelim tmr so I shall keep this entry short.

Highlight of the week: Bill Gates came on campus on Wednesday (Feb 25) to give a talk about current difficulties in computer science. The talk itself was pretty good, but the Q&A session that followed was even better. He had this slightly sarcastic sense of humor, "inchy" in Chin-glish Like when this guy asked him abt the recent disputed between Windows and Linux users, he was like "Windows and what? What?" as if he didn't understand what Linux was... haha witty guy. But who else is in a better position to be "inchy" than him?

Went to a talk by a famous Chinese writer on Friday night. Yu Hua is his name, and though I had never heard of him before, one of his novels, "To Live (Huo zhe)" was transformed into a widely acclaimed movie directed by the renowned Zhang Yimou. Yu Hua was another witty guy. His answers were often short but hilarious, but then I thought he could have given more elaboration on his answers rather than just giving curt replies and not really answering the audience's questions directly. He lacked the composure and his speech lacked the substance that I was looking for in an established writer. I was expecting to get some insight about contemporary Chinese literature or at least to hear about some of his personal experiences in writing, but I can't help but say that I was a little disappointed.

Anyway, it was a nice week. Went to all classes Mon thru Wed. Quite a feat for me. And now it's time to get back to work...

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 13:10:49 GMT

Wow. An object in the Kuiper Belt, more than half the size of Pluto and larger that Charon has just been discovered. Impressive!!! http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~chad/2004dw/ So some day we might discover something that's even larger than Pluto, horhor, and if we do should we call it the 10th planet in the solar system or what? Been reading a lot of news about astronomy recently. Seems like my interest in astron has been recurbed~

Sunday, February 22, 2004

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 11:29:11 GMT

7:20am. Haven't been up this early for some time. Went to be really earlt last night, around 9-ish, was woken up by a call at around 4am. Doing my music theory hw now. Nothing much to talk about really. Okay so there was this mid year banquet organized jointly by HKSA, CSA and CTAS but i opted to stay at home instead coz it was snowing outside and i was too lazy to head out.

Been listening to Coldplay and Evanescence these days. Oh and William Hung too... had long heard about him but only saw his brilliant performance for the first time last night... hilarious.. i really admire his courage to audition for American Idol, but he looked so geeky and he didn't even know who Ryan Seacrest (the host) was!

Back to my diminished sevenths amd major sixths... optimization after that

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 06:37:54 GMT

My first entry ever here on xanga. I guess I must be one of the last people to have subscribed to a xanga account -- most people have been using xanga for more than a year, if not even longer, and some might have become bored with it already, but it's only now in the new age of 2004 that I'm posting my first entry. Dunno where I got this impulse from to suddenly start writing something here... I'm actually really sleepy and definitely not in the best of moods or "mental conditions" to start rambling about any kind of philosophical questions that I've been contemplating upon (not that I've been thinking about any) or any sudden surge of feelings or thoughts that I've suddenly developed towards the meaning of life or whatnot, it's just, well this is a run-on sentence but I shall carry on with it, it's just, I dunno... suddenly felt like posting this first entry here. Today wasn't a special day by any measures, but the fact that this being a normal day yet me having the the frame of mind to post this first entry is itself a thing to be worth remembered for.

Anyway, Friday night, but didn't go to HKCF small-group gathering tonight. Was gonna go home and get some work done coz I'm already lagging behind in some of my courses but ran into a friend at the Valentine Place parking lot. And it turned out that we both wanted to ask Jessie for her notes on Econ 469 (Chinese Economy under Mao and Deng -- a really interesting class) so we set off (she had a car) to Jessie's dorm in West Campus. Got her notes, went home, was gonna get some work done, but failed when the wings that me and Patrick had ordered arrived and we started devouring our the delicious honey BBQ flavored wings. Headed back to my room, was gonna get some work done, when I got absorbed into the ongoing Mars Rover mission, in which Cornell is a key player where one of our astronomy professors is the principal investigator of the science team. I had been following the news of the Mars Exploration Rover mission quite closely since when both rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on Mars, partly because I'm still into astronomy though definitely not as passionate as before, and partly and probably more likely because the mission is featured on the Cornell homepage which I have set to be my Internet Explorer homepage so I read about any updates of the mission everytime I open up IE. I was just... flabbergasted would be a neat word here... to read about what they've been able to acheive -- that they could command a creature some 1 billion km away from us, and translate the data that the creature picked up on its way around the red planet back to Earth and transform it into colorful panoramic pictures depicting the live view of Mars right in front of our eyes. It's just... amazing... I have great respect for these people, and could only wish that I could be one of them. That's how I would characterize as living one's life to its fullest potential, to realize the dreams of one's ancestors, to mark the footprints of mankind to a higher level. I had once aspired to be a mathematician / scientist / astronomer when I was young, really young, still in primary school (or elementary school in the US though I like using the term primary school better). So back then in P.6 my math was good, really good I'd say. Nobody would be reading this entry anyway so I don't mind showing myself off here. This entry is only intended for my own pleasure when I'm reading it, say a few years from now if xanga is still around, but if it so happens that you're reading this and you aren't Edward Choi, please don't be offended by my arrogance. Well, it was really a GOOD feeling to be in the Hong Kong Primary Schools Mathematics Olympiad and subsequently the Primary Schools Mathematics Olympiad in China, and making the way to the top to be THE top student among all P.6 primary school students in Hong Kong was definitely one of the highest achievements I've had so far in my life, way surpassing my F.5 HKCEE results, in my opinion. Yea, so at that time, math was really something that would turn me on, especially numbers. I was reading Adrian (my Shanghai roommate's course textbook on number theory the other day and that stuff was just what I did in primary school and is the VERY kind of math that I enjoy. I'll definitely be taking that course in my senior spring semester. That would add yet another course to the long list of courses that I wanna take. Astronomy, yes, I should be taking at least 1 astronomy course at Cornell. Just now when I was at the NASA website, I suddenly wanted to see if the 2 Cornell profs who are now working full-time in Pasadena had ever had time to teach any astron courses at Cornell. Flipped through the course roster for Spring 2003, and alas, Prof. Steve Squyres and Jim Bell! Astronomy 102 professors! Can't believe that these 2 phenomenal figures were actually teaching Intro to Astronomy courses, and that was just the same time last year! How I wish I were there, then I could have boastfully told anyone that I knew that I was taught by 2 of the foremost scientists who specialize in the study of inner solar system planets. Okay, so I have astronomy, and that number theory math course, and pyschology, and modern Chinese politics, and history of Medieval Europe, and another music course on top of the one I'm taking right now, and history of the Middle East, and maybe sociology or anthropology or philosophy. There won't be any way that I can possibly take them all, but it's my goal for now to get a taste of each of those fields.

Enough's been said for a single entry. Nitez~