A few days ago, Sui linked me an inspiring lecture by Randy Pausch on Time Management, and I think it’s worth a watch. A little background: Randy is a professor in Computer Science (automatic + points for me) at Carnegie Mellon with only months left to live after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and became famous after contributing to CMU’s figurative “last lecture” series with his own literal last lecture. ()
While that speech is famous for its own right, I found his subsequent talk on time management interesting and resonant with my own experiences:
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:
College life can drain 
the TV out of you. Well, it did out of me anyway, one of those monthly bills I neatly trimmed from my expenses in favor of traveling the cybertubes. Even now, I don’t think teevee is cost effective unless I have a lot of shows I want to watch, at my pace. (i.e., TiVo) It is nice, though, that more and more of those shows are available online.
Nonetheless, I miss that pleasantness of nothingness which comes from channel surfing, the same way one endures a favorite song on the radio, despite having played it to death on one’s iPod for two weeks straight. Nowadays, though, the only time I have access to cable television is when I’m at Sui’s (the programming tends to be Chinese-family-friendly), or when I travel, either on the plane or in the hotel room.
I had posted previously about that XBox 360 racing wheel I bought on a whim, and as fate would have it I needed a game to actually make use of the wheel, a game in the form of Forza Motorsport 2.
As I was messing around with the game tonight (my 450HP heavily modified Mazda Roadster is quite serious about outracing a Ferrari Enzo in all its hilarity), I found that the game has a fairly robust Photo mode which lets you take and tweak pictures of the game as you’re driving.
A few minutes of play produced these results; as you can see I got progressively better at it:
Just a quickie entry before I dive into the happy world of tax forms and W-2 crunching. This is a pretty good documentary on the state of credit cards in America and how the words “credit card nation” mean what they do today.
Frontline: Secret History of the Credit Card
It’s quite educational, and in this corporate-run-amok world of credit debt and revolving interest, it certainly pays to keep informed.
DRM is a pain in the ass; it’s that thing Microsoft and Apple and most hardware/software vendors are using to make sure their precious music and videos aren’t stolen and copied around in the computer age, and it works on the virtue of making everything non-DRM hard to do.
I don’t mind it so much on an intellectual rights protection level - people should be compensated for their work, and if you want to get around it you work harder - but it sucks on an implementation level. It has already been talked to death all over the web, but in summary: DRM lets hardware vendors force new hardware on consumers (stuff that’s “DRM compliant”, whereas old hardware conveniently isn’t), forces consumers to purchase the same work multiple times on multiple platforms, and can affect the quality of your system depending on how aggressive the vendor is pursuing protection (from Microsoft’s “check 30 times a second” DVD playback to Sony’s hidden rootkit…).
