linterry's blogger

did absolutely nothing of significance today.
it's so nice having a job where I can pick when I want to work...

today i managed to get my ass out of bed before 3:00pm, which was quite an accomplishment. i biked over to NTU to have afternoon lunch with shinobu, we tried that bistro on the 3rd floor of xiao fu... nice place! coffee was alright too, whenever my brain gets turbocharged with caffeine... you know I'm going to do some deep thinking...

so here was my thought of the day. chaos theory... you know, the idea that if you go back a billion years, kill a piddly mosquito, and come back, everything will be totally different. the idea seems simple, but it really takes some thinking to understand the whole concept...

basically, chaos theory is a follow-up of determinism... the idea that every event has a cause, and that cause has it's own cause... in essence, the whole universe is nothing but a intricate chain of cause and effects playing themselves out endlessly. theoretically, if you knew everything about the universe, and knew all the laws that govern them, you could predict the universe for the end of time...

chaos theory, however, states this is untrue, not because the world is non-determinstic in nature, but because if you make just a slight error in measuring the present state of the world, the error your prediction will get exponentially larger as time passes, to the point where your prediction will inevitably become useless.. this is why weather forecasts cannot tell you anything past the current week with any degree of accuracy... the weather system is chaotic by nature... and nobody can measure anything to perfect accuracy. once you get down to quantum (read: smaller than an atom) accuracy, you can't go any further, because quantum mechanics state everything in probability... you can never know where a sub-atmoic particle is exactly...only the chance that it is somewhere.

life as well, is chaotic.... why people meet and fall in love, and then continue on to live their lives together, is the result of a infintessimal number events that occured in the past. why am i here now in taiwan? because i wanted to come? that's only part of it... if wei hadn't challenged me two years ago with the statement "i don't think you'll be able to go to taiwan, too many opposing forces", i wouldn't have felt so inadequate and wouldn't have a developed a burning desire to prove him wrong... if my relationship with my parents hadnt' gone so sour during my 4th year of university, i'm sure their (possible) objections may have changed my mind. hell, if I actually succeeded in getting a girlfriend in 4th year, I doubt I would have left her for an exchange program abroad.... and these are just the OBVIOUS causes of why I am here. i'm sure a lot of seemingly tiny inconsequential events contributed to raising the success rate of me coming here for an exchange program. i just can't point them out specifically.

and what about shinobu? she only came here because her friend Kei-chan called her up one night telling her about a scholarship for a chinese learning program that she saw on a bulletin board where she worked. the deadline was the following day, so shinobu thought it would be impossible to get all the materials ready on time, but Kei-chan said "just give it a shot, Okinawans are so relaxed about these things anyhow", and indeed, shinbou got an extra week to prepare everything. the rest, as they say, is history.

the interesting thing is... i look at us... shinobu and I... the reasons we are together. we'd like to say "we were meant to meet each other in this lifetime, if not now, then sometime in the future"... to which I must say... "horse poo", because the way i see it... if many key events that occured prior to us becoming a couple did not occur, then we wouldn't be together today... specifically

- if wei didn't challenge me at lunch
- if my relatinoship with my parents was better
- if i found a girlfriend in 4th year university
- if kei-chan missed seeing the notice on the board
- if kei-chan didn't feel like calling shinobu
- if shinobu was particuarily busy that week that she needed to apply
- if shinobu didn't win her scholarship..

if any of these tiny, seemingly insignificant conditions (I'm sure there are WAY more) were true, i would not be here, right now, living with her. and that just goes to show how delicate the event "terry meets shinobu" is... there were so many (infitessimal?) unseen forces that brought us together, so many forces out of our control, that the only person we can thank for bringing us together is Fate himself...

it all gives so much more meaning to Maximus's words in Gladiator

"brothers, what we do in life, echoes in eternity"

today i went with shinobu and her classmates to see kill bill at the theatres... WHAT A KICKASS MOVIE... never has mindless violence and killing been so fun... from the opening credits (which look like crap, just big text over a black background, but you know this was done purposely) you know this movie is just different from all the stupid "built-for-trailers" flicks (which are nothing but sheer robbery, baiting people with the promise of a good flick and then torturing them with 2 hours of garbage should be deemed a crime). It even has a 100% anime scene in the middle, which was quite a shock, because i don't think anyone has ever mixed live action and cartoon scenes in the same movie. By the way, I never liked Tarantino movies, but this one is just different... he's got this sarcastic twisted sense of humor (the Kaboom cereal box was just hilarious) and also seems to have a deep hatred for stupid cliches. also, the part of the movie is based in Okinawa, to shinobu's pleasant surprise...

i just pigged myself out for 5 hours playing NBA Live 2004 non-stop. that game is damn fun, it's got a lot better flow than 2K3 at least. don't know when espn nba basketball is coming out in taiwan, but i'm not so excited about it anymore... damn...all those moves when you're moving without the ball, just pure basketball bliss...

right... it's been a week, and only 1 song so far... gotta get workin' tomorrow... 5 songs is the minimum a month. yep... gotta get crackin'... tomorrow...

ONLY IN TAIWAN

Today, I was so fortunate to witness an entertaining scene at the shinkong mitsukoshi food court. while whoring myself on another artery-clogging kfc meal #6, all of a sudden this pretty ugly woman, wearing a gaudy dress and sporting thick rimmed glasses (aren't those trendy now... ahem) started yelling pretty damn loudly at this average looking middle-aged man... apparently, while the ugly lady was trying to get through the aisle, she bumped into the man's wife, and the ugly lady did not apologize. the man's wife was a bit peeved so she muttered to the woman "watch where you're going"... and that's when the ugly skank exploded. she started yelling at the wife (loosely translated): "do you think i fucking bumped into you on purpose? what makes you think you have the right to talk back at me like that?"... at which point the husband wasn't too pleased with scenario... and promptly retorted "don't talk so goddamn loud".

that's about when people started gathering round for the shout fest... mostly the husband and the ugly skank were going at it... "you have no fucking standards" was the ugly skank's weapon of choice, and "don't talk so fucking loud, bitch" was the husband's go-to move. it was really a battle of decibels... the argument was so heated that there was nothing really intelilgable in the conversation. at one point the husband got so fed up with the ugly skank's constant droning, that he suddenly stood up, and yelled, right in her face "DO YOU FUCKING LIKE IT WHEN PEOPLE TALK THIS FUCKING LOUD, BITCH!?!?".. which actually took the breath out of the ugly skank for a second... and then she replied "YOU WANNA TALK LOUD? YOU WANNA TALK LOUD?" (funny, I thought she was loud enough already).

after 5-10 minutes of this crowd-pleaser, security and few janitors came by and escorted the lady out of the food court. I really wanted to toss my chewed up chicken and smack that ugly skank in the head... but I'm truly gutless in these situations, so I did nothing...

the skank actually had a kid with her. i truly felt sorry for that kid, because god knows how much bad influence he got out of his own mother (or aunt) acting so inappropritately . but, i could understand why she acted that way. with the sheer number of people around the taipei main station area, the incesssant bump and grind of trying to power your way through the crowd... the crazy lineups...add to that a possibly disobedient kid, financial difficulties combnied with the desire to buy expensive designer clothes... you can get stressed out pretty damn easily.

this is, without a doubt, a prime example of an illness of a metropolitan society.

just finished watching A Good Girl. i've been wanting to watch this one ever since i saw the preview on the Jay Leno show half a year ago. it was a pretty good flick overall, quite introspective, but also very depressing... it got me thinking.. how sad it is that so many lost and lonely souls wander this planet questioning their existence, questioning the "meaning of life" day by day. I suppose I did so too before, when I would spend countless nights zombied in front of my computer, doing nothing in particular, just biding the time... as if I were perpetually waiting for something big to happen... but why??? why would mother nature design us that way?

my theory is that modern lifestyles has evolved into something that is no longer in harmony with our inner selves.... really, mother nature never intended us to be the way we are... people enslaved to a 9 to 6 routine, then zombifying themselevs in front of the telly or PC until 12... all in the name of the "global economy" that continually destroys natural resources so that we can sit immobile in an air-conditioned electric powered shelter and eat food that has been processed and re-processed countless times with the latest in food technology...

something is just wrong with this picture. I think Matrix said it best... humans are like the cancer of the world, they are the only species that do not live in harmony with the environment, and must continually destroy and spread in order to survive. there are so many signs of disharmony with the world everyday. people commiting suicide, people who can't sleep, people who feel that they have already "given up on the world". In a harmonious world, there should not such thigns... nor should there be books like "catcher in the rye" or movies like "the good girl", because if people were too busy eating, having sex like crazy, and dancing... or doing whatever the hell they felt like all day long... nobody would want to read such books or watch such movies...

i can't sleep at ALL.
too much caffeine past midnight.
just terrible.. terrible...
but at least I'm getting lots of work done.... having lots of fun with the new globe track...

My new set of music (CMUSIC contract) for this month are 5 lesser-known tracks from globe. The main man behind globe is the same dude who was the producer of move, Komuro Tetsuya. At first, I felt that globe was a lot "duller" compared to move (famous for their intro and outro tracks for Initial D), but after listening to some of the globe tracks for a while, i've changed my mind.

globe is just way, way, better.

move is generally a lot louder, busier, and has a stronger melodic line (thus making it more digestible) however, globe just has that special "zing" to it. The production is damn good, the sound is super-clean, and while it's not as in-your-face as move, it showcases a lot of more modern musical styles (also employed by Radiohead, Prodigy, Chemical brothers, although I can't say I like their new songs all that much).

trying to simulate these unique synth sounds into a old SC-88 unit though... will be a total bitch. it's really, really unfortunate that I can't use the much vaster sound library of the SC-8850... i think most of the final MIDI's will really end up butchering the feel of the originals.

I have a new silly theory about why so many young Asians are suffering bouts of depression in Canada... it must be somehow encoded in the DNA. If our parents grew up in a totally different environment, then perhaps somewhere during the birth process we were programmed to live in a similar environment. I can't explain why everytime I come back to Taiwan, I always feel "this is the right place for me". I also have good feelings about Okinawa... partially positive experiences I'm sure, but that doesn't explain the same feelings I experienced when I was 10 years old....

Yesterday night, I went to bed at 9 in the morning. At about 4, while randomly surfing the web I stumbled upon my high school classmates' web pages.

昨晩午前四時に、ネットを見ていたときに、高校の知り合いのホームページ が見つかった。今朝９時まで起きてずっと見ていた。

It was a real nostalgic trip. These were people I knew quite well back in the day, who've been to my house and all, but I haven't seen or talked to them for years. And it's quite surprising how they've turned out.

とっても懐かしかったな。何人かはよく知っていたけど、とても長い間会わなかったんだ。　　みんなのその後の様子にちょっと驚いた。

Nostalgic as it was, it also brought back unsettling feelings of my depressing, cocooned life that I used to live there. I now start to wonder, maybe there really IS something wrong with the environment in Toronto.. it just doesn't suit Asians well.

懐かしかったけど。嫌で憂鬱なトロントの生活を思い出した。ちょっと考えているけど。。。もしかして本当にトロントの環境はどこか何かおかしいんじゃないかな。多分アジアの人には合わないかも知れない。

Isn't it sad how people behave so differently when they are in front of people they don't know well? I notice it quite often at dinner parties. Everyone seems to be on a self-promotional campaign. Beneath every vacuous pleasantry lies a secret message "like me, like me, oh please like me". The most unfortunate thing is, it's such a natural human reflex that trying to hide it does no good, you'll just end up looking like someone who is trying to hide his desire to be loved by everyone.

ね、人はいくつのあまり知らない人の前にいるときに、性格はよく変わらないの？晩御飯パーチによく築くんだ。みんなは自分のCMをやってるみたい。くだらない甘い言葉が多くて、みんなは「私を好きになって、私をっ好きになって」って言ってるみたい。でも、これは自然な人間衝動で、仕方ないかも。隠しても無理だ、多分何か隠してる人のようなになってしまうかも。。。

Well, I do it too all the time, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

やっぱり、自分もこんなことをやってるから。。。文句言わなくても方がいいかも。。。

MPC (MusePack) is a newer format alternative to MP3.

And wow, is it so much better.

Whenever I downloaded MP3's from the net, the quality was of such varying quality that I often had to download multiple copies of the same song just to ensure that I would have a higher change of getting a good encoding.

MPC's have officially changed this. I listened to a MPC recording of Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral and I was really impressed by the quality... you could hear far better definition in the higher frequencies and it almost felt like listening to the original CD.

I just listened to an MPC recording of the Gladiator soundtrack, and it was quite an improvement over the previous 192kbps recording I had made. Maybe some of it is just my imagination, but I can swear that the high frequencies sound cleaer with MPC.

Sunday, October 19th, 5:37am

My first blog post. I must say, I can see what all the hype is about. This is instant idea web publishing done fast, easy, and painlessly. I can't count how many times I have had some interesting ideas but I was always bogged down by the technicalities of publishing some piddly little document on the web...

Well, let's begin by talking about fast food, or just food in general. It's been on the forefront of my mind recently...

I recently read this book, "Fast Food Nation", by a pretty perceptive fellow called Eric Schlosser. It talks mostly about the corporate evils of fast food companies, but the most interesting chapter was the one on how McDonalds makes their fries taste so good.... they add beef tallow (aka oil) during the cooking process, and how Burger King used some weird-ass chemical simulated smoke flavor in their Smokey BBQ Chicken Sandwich... and it's not just the fast food companies who indulge in the seedy practice of using all sorts of simulated flavors (and using beautiful pictures to make you think otherwise), but basically almost all the frozen/canned/packaged foods in a supermarket probably has a crapload of chemicals in it that enhance the flavor to the nth degree. When I say a crapload, I mean a crapload... if they were to list all the chemicals they put into a frozen pizza, it probably wouldn't even fit on the packaging... but conveniently, they can just combine them all into a simple "natural/artifical flavors" label which sits innocuously at the end of the ingredient list.

While at first I was a bit surprised at how prevalent artifical chemicals have found their way into almost anything that's not picked off a tree or killed 5 seconds ago in a slaughterhouse, I finally came to the realization that food technology has evolved so greatly over the last 50 years that it's no longer profitable to make real food anymore. There's no point trying to make a real burger when a chemically-enhanced "beef" patty formula costs 10 times less, and when you slap on some super-duper-chemically-enhanced-fat-loaded-dressing that costs 1 cent per pound... nobody's really gonna care anyhow. While in theory, eating real food should be the right way to go, in practical application, chemically enhanced foods are going to win everytime, because it costs way less, and unless you're a food purist, will almost always taste "better" on the 1st try. Even foods that you "think" are better foods... like those found in a decent restaurant, often buy their food supplies by companies who partake in the use of the same chemicals anyhow. Those who didn't probably went out of business long ago because customers probably found their foods tasted too bland.

Strangely, after I learned that half the crap I was shoving into my mouth everyday was laced with a shiteload of flavor enhancers, it did almost nothing to change my eating habits. I still have the occasional cravings to go to McDonalds, and I will still indulge myself with a Big Mac Combo. Now though, I will sometimes stop midway during eating and look at my Big Mac and simply marvel at how much human effort and intellect has gone into the creation of each individual part of the burger.. and then a few seconds later continue to shove it down into my stomach without giving another thought....

When I get cancer in the next 20 years though, I may regret my carelessness....