I had recently finished the Hong Kong drama series The Drive of Life (歲月風雲). An epic 60-episode production (each show is an hour long), the shooting primarily done in a trio of cities – Hong Kong, Beijing, and Vancouver – previously unheard of for a television series. It covers the multi-decade history of a wealthy business family through the Asian and dotcom financial crises to modern times, through relationships and business successes and failures, and the complex character interplay during tough times.
The show also spends significant time celebrating Chinese ingenuity; not a surprise considering it is sponsored by the Chinese government to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to sovereign Chinese rule, but some of its influence is blatant and distasteful propaganda and tarnishes an otherwise excellent show. I wonder if anybody watching the show really believes in the stated convection of the characters’ patriotism and love of all things Chinese.
It has been a while since I got hooked to a Chinese drama series, so it took only a week (something like 7-8 shows a day) for me to fly through the DVD’s. While the story was captivating and acting superb, I can’t help but be reminded of all the clichés by drama series since the beginning of time, plot devices overused to the point of being offensive in their dismissal of viewer intelligence:
I came across this pretty cool site today: kwout is an utility for bloggers and web developers to quickly create good-looking screen captures off of URL’s. It’s not anything a screen capture, Photoshop, and some careful image map placement can’t do (it maps all the links on the page into actual clickable links!), but obviously it saves a lot of time and effort.
Taking a shot of my v5 page right before this post (the copy+pasted code is hideous, there are a ton of links on my homepage…):
It’s probably been a while since you’ve Googled yourself. Maybe it’s time to revisit those search databases and check your fresh digital footprint of the past few months.
Go on; I’ll wait.
Chances are, beyond random forum posts and site login pages Google/Yahoo/MSN Live figured out how to access, most of us who are not famous and do not share a name common with those of higher fame (the lack of originality in Chinese surnames doesn’t help) escape from the eternal archiving crutches of the great interwebs.
Sure, the internet is great for transferring information, but it’s pretty lousy at keeping and organizing that information, despite the efforts of a truckload of very smart people. New data replaces old, and keeping accurate historical information is a difficult task when so much information exists; beyond the likes of Facebook profiles, most of our contributions are decentralized and loosely tied together by a name or most likely, an online alias.
Do you Lumines?
Following the legacy of Tetris, 
Lumines is a puzzle game about blocks: clumps of colored pieces drop from the heavens, and you the player arrange them into overlapping squares, which are then eliminated from existence by a relentless sweeper treading across the screen in its eternal monotony. Achieve a certain score, and the music and visual theme shift; the sweeper tweaks its speed, and clearing the squares becomes a different task. It really embodies the markings of a classic puzzler in its simplicity and addictiveness.
I had recently finished the Hong Kong drama series The Drive of Life (歲月風雲). An epic 60-episode production (each show is an hour long), the shooting primarily done in a trio of cities – Hong Kong, Beijing, and Vancouver – previously unheard of for a television series. It covers the multi-decade history of a wealthy business family through the Asian and dotcom financial crises to modern times, through relationships and business successes and failures, and the complex character interplay during tough times.
