Yummy or Crummy?

I’m freaking out because I’m about to decide to buy a new computer for the first time in about 7 years. Yikes. I bought my PowerMac 7200 when I was in college, and since that became useless Lucretia and I have been sharing her iMac — which despite being only the second generation (lime green!) model, is doing quite well after being given new life with RAM upgrade and installtion of delightful OS X. The problem is that both of us tend to be home together often enough that we find this sharing situation sometimes difficult. She has been more than patient about my aimless surfing, but a new machine is still desirable. The time is right, now that Apple has lowered prices on Powerbooks, and another freelance gig is about to fall on my lap. It’ll be a tax write-off for me!

I’m freaking out because 3 grand is a lot to drop when you’re more than semi-unemployed and planning to move to a new city in the next 3 months. But everything I’ve read and heard so far have convinced me that this will be a good thing. My faith in Apple has been renewed since trying Jaguar, so this will be a good way to go another step to explore the things I’ve been wanting to try, including wireless networking and movie authoring.

So here I come, Powerbook 15-inch 1 Ghz! (I’ll be gentle.)

Hideo Nomo, a.k.a. Tornado Boy, pitched a near-no-hitter for the Dodgers on Saturday, and Lucretia and I were lucky enough to witness it in person.

I have been a Nomo fan since he started his MLB career with LA. Since then he has played for many teams, for both AL and NL. He’s seen ups (rookie of the year) and downs (…playing for the Tigers…), but he’s always been a fighter. He pitches hard, hell bent on not chaning his unorthodox style of delivery. Whether he’s down by 8 runs or about to get his 8th strikeouts, his expression never changes.

He’s somewhat like Ichiro in that he dislikes being treated special just because he’s Japanese, and he’s not exactly media-friendly. Maybe that’s why you don’t hear much about his softer side — such as kick-starting (and funding it until a major sponsor is found) a new amateur baseball club in Japan to provide more playing opportunities. The tough economy in Japan is forcing many amateur clubs — including the one Nomo himself played for — to close down. Acts like this one, and the few modest comments he makes after the games, are what Nomo fans really admire about him. If any athlete was to be a role model, I’d nominate Hideo Nomo. Keep up the tornado!

By the way, Lucretia and I got on TV at the game!

The other day I went to the post office, and since it was a nice day I decided to take my skateboard. Only when a road construction forced me to take a more secluded street, I realized avoiding bigger streets was a whole lot less stressful. This may be obvious to some, but the smoothness of the pavement is very important to me when I ride my board somewhere, as are bike lanes. Both things are more often found on bigger streets.

Riding on a side street does have its disadvantages. I worry more about the noise that my board makes, because the street is more quiet. I like the convenience of getting somewhere quickly, but I’d hate to disturb somebody along the way. I was wondering about people’s perception of skaters nowadays when I saw a jogger approaching from the other direction. Trying not to seem obnoxious and overly aggressive, I maintained a consistent line of movement at a moderate speed. As two of us got closer I thought, “I wonder if that guy has a lot of people tell him he looks like Rod Blagojevich.” Two seconds later, just when we were about to pass each other, I realized it was the Governor himself.

In his plain white t-shirt and dark running shorts, he looked skinnier than I remembered him on TV. There were no bodyguards running beside him — there was nobody else on the block, for that matter. It was a sunny day, not terribly hot — but he must have been running for a while, because he looked pretty tired. He took his eyes off the road for a second, and glanced at me. I gave him a quick wave, still standing upright on the board, wondering if this politician-spotting is any more or less gratifying than others I would compare to: athletes, musicians, actors, etc. To my surprise, he immediately waved back. He seemed too tired to care about the skateboard. Or maybe he just doesn’t care anyway. His lack of hesitation for waving back at a slacker-looking Asian in his late 20′s on a skateboard in the middle of a weekday… inexplicably made me like him as a politician.

I decided then that this experience ranks higher than other minor celebrity-encounters in my life. OK, maybe not as high as spotting Jeremy Piven with his girlfriend at SOFA (and yelling, “Cupid!” from where he couldn’t see me), but definitely higher than living next to Jamie Navarro.

My lovely girlfriend turns 28 today.

Some birthday links:

• Send a free e-card through Amazon
• Famous birthdays
• A birthday joke
• More birthday jokes
• “Happy Birthday” in different languages
• Some facts about the song
• Search for other people’s birthdays… scary

When I set movable type’s preference to display entries from the past 3 days (instead of the default of 10 days), I figured a little pressure to make myself put down my thoughts into words was a good thing. With the added pressure, I also knew that it would be a good idea to have some pool of topics to draw from in case I ran out of things to write about. That way, instead of writing about how I have nothing to write, I can write about something, and not nothing, which in my opinion, is more boring than anything.

Those topics are:

• Soccer — it’s my favorite sport, so I should be able to find something to say about it most of the time.
• No Logo — The book I recently finished by Naomi Klein. It opened my eyes to how effects of multinational corporations are infiltrating every inch of our lives, and what anti-globalization movement is doing about it, as well as how I may view the things I surround myself with.
• Tibor Kalman — A very influential designer who, who along with my friend Russ, taught me not to take myself or my job too seriously.

So, there you have it. I may or may not write more about these topics. But if I do, at least I can say I warned you.

Homeless to Represent U.S. in Soccer

Awesome! It’s nice to see my favorite sport help turn people’s lives around.

I often think about the little things in life that… that could have, BUT didn’t. Let me elaborate. For example, I’m cutting vegetables for salad, when a piece of tomato falls on the floor. Naturally I throw it away. That piece of tomato, with all the same “abilities” as other parts of the same tomato, could not live up to its potential of being consumed by somebody. It withstood the same grueling sun, it got shipped in the same box as all others — it even came so close to being eaten, having been sliced into little wedges. All for what? to end up in my garbage.

It’s easy to see many examples of this kind of tragedy in food — spaghetti that prematurely breaks off and misses the pot, a few grains of rice that — through no fault of its own — spend the next few weeks in the cold, dusty corner of the kitchen before they get swept up. But if you look, it’s everywhere. Take a roll of toilet paper, for example. How often do you scratch at the fresh roll before finally getting to a clean, usable square? If you are like me, a good quarter of the roll is on the floor, shredded to pieces.

I think about these underachievers like they really have feelings. Trapped in the dark behind a couch, a nail would look up, only to see two things — the nail that it could have been, and a narrow slit of light that sucked up all of its potentials. Sad, isn’t it?

Better Luck Tomorrow official Web site

Here’s Salon’s review. Not a great review, but I don’t really trust movie critics anyway, even Salon’s. As an Asian I should have been the first in line to see this movie when it came out. I’m shooting for this weekend — hopefully X2 will attract the big crowd so I can watch this in peace.

When I started college in 1994, I got my first email account. I would go to the computer lab, open Telnet, and fire off fancy commands like “pine” to check my email and “talk …” to chat with friends. At University of Illinois in Champaign, at a time when some of my friends in other schools hadn’t gotten their email (or didn’t use it saying, “I couldn’t bother”), there was already a sense that this was normal — nothing new. Mosaic was on every computer in school, ready to take me to various corners of the Internet. Aided by the copy of newly published “Internet Yellow Pages,” I was free to explore old song lyrics and stupid blond jokes. OK, so the content wasn’t new — but the medium was. While there were other icons on the school computers that I did not click on — like Gopher and Fetch (when I did I was greeted with a prompt window I didn’t know what to do with) — it was easy to embrace Mosaic for its graphical, not textual, representation of the Internet.

“Happy Birthday” may not be suitable for something considered dead today, but when you think about the impact it had on the growth of the Web, it certainly is easy to appreciate that it was born. 10 years sure is a long time in this industry — and still, most things we do today start by opening up a browser.

Chicago Public Radio – pledge drive until May 2

I haven’t been listening to NPR for that long — really, about two years at most. Still, though, I feel like it took way too long for me to decide to give them money. It’s so easy to turn on the radio and take them for granted, because really, they are. The whole notion of paying for radio programming is a difficult one to get used to — unless you start imagining the alternative…. Where would we turn to for reporting that provides unbiased information, and programs that encourage constructive discussions about current events? Without NPR we would be forced to swallow the lines that major networks and the government want us to hear as “news.”

The way I see it, NPR is the ultimate underdog in the world of ClearChannels and network TVs. Whether you agree with what they say or not, you’ve got to appreciate that fact. Unless you want to conform to the views that big corporations are feeding you, think about supporting NPR.