Adventures in Chinese Videos...

I've been here for a while... and i tend to leave MTV (or the local equivalent Vgongshe) up in the background...

First off - a LOT of interesting influences... i hear C&W ballads, weird jpop-styled crap with girl bands dressed disturbingly young (not that chinese girls dont look too damned young to begin with), and odd stuff with very odd 'engrish' from time to time.

But here's the stuff that stands out - and my version of what's going on.

黃義達 - 完整演出 -- Yida... Chinese Emo music (as far as i can tell) - without the screaming or the my chemical romance makeup.
非你莫属 - TANK -- a popular song about a female stalker / chinese princess type who ends traps some poor guy into breaking her arm and doing whatever she wants. (he'd better watch out... there's usually a really big shoe budget involved in those...)
小情歌 - 苏打绿 -- a sad country chord progression ballad about a girl who has some sort of odd mirrormask problem with her walls - with lots of poison gas and blood raining from the skies and people who rip their hearts out of their chests... at least... that's what it looks like...
拥抱的问号 - 袁泉 -- Another country ballad - by another pretty chinese girl (damn but there are a lot of those) with one of those smoky jazz voices that would probably hold up in a more interesting musical style.
就算没有明天 - 孙俪/黄晓明 -- Hong-Kong Gangster Powerballad... think John Wu meets Michael Bolton. PC Load Letter my left nut.

on edit - one more
黑涩会美眉_-_晴天娃娃 -- ok - if theres one you gotta watch... the disturbing story of a group of 4 chinese lesbian cheerleaders and their attempt to get one of their coven pregnant by a very tall basketball player... or something like that.

I cant find some of the stuff i see in heavy rotation... hard to do when you dont speak the language... but you get the idea. It's pretty soft... even the harder stuff is soft... (never gets more aggressive than a Verve-esque guitar sound and guys with their collars turned up). I want to see Chinese punk - but oddly enough - that's one thing you dont see on the streets here... i dont think i've seen a single kid with attitude.

So... here's my take on the firing of the US attorneys - and it probably doesnt surprise any of you that I have a bit of a different take on this than most. See... everyone is focusing on the fired... the firing... the 'why'... people are doing the whole 'who knew what when' angle to death.

I have a different question.

8 US attorneys were fired because, after being pressured to play ball with the administration - pursue purely political indictments - create MSM stories of 'corrupt democrats' to offset all the the horrific Duke Cunningham and Tom Delay and that Gay Pedophile Republican Congressman (god i love putting those 4 words together) - that there were 8 attorneys who just wouldnt play ball... 8 of them.

And they didnt fire the other 85.

Why?

Why not fire the other 85?

What... exactly... did they do that merited, in the eyes of this remarkably corrupt administration, a pass? How did those 85 justice department officials comport themselves so as to KEEP their jobs... THAT is what we should be looking at. Not at the firings. The firings are the easy story.

Weird.
Blogging from china is weird.
Blogger knows i'm in china... and so everything is in chinese simplified chars..
hrmph

anyway - i'm here. Not all that much to say - honestly - friendly people taking my 'lost bags' report... friendly policemen screaming at cabdrivers to get out of the way... friendly cab drivers charging me less to get to the hotel from the airport than a montreal cabbie would charge for me to get into his car...

It is starting off as an adventure. My ATM card expired at the end of feb... Jake is going to fed-ex me the new one - if he can find it amongst the prodigious stacks of mail at my house. If it doesnt happen it's ok - I can get a cash advance from people headed this way next week - and i have enough cash i can manage.

Air Canada lost my bags ( I figured with 2, they could only lose one... i was wrong) They were in Vancouver... so in theory they're on their way here. The hotel lost my reservation - so when I did arrive - they had no record I was supposed to be here. Needless to say, when you have 20 nights booked in a hotel, having your reservation go missing can create a serious problem for the hotel... but eventually it got sorted (i gather the room aggregators have some method of pushing out reservations that's outside starwood's system - and it seems that the purchases dont come in a batch with some sort of Syn-Ack with the hotel). Once they found it - it was all good - but seeing as the room was prepaid I wasnt really in the mood to pay for it all over again.

When the roomkey didnt work in my door the first time i tried it - i just laughed. 'Of course it doesnt...'

The hotel is nice - the room service is better than i'm used to (room service in montreal hotels is expensive and generally beyond crappy - though, to be honest, food in montreal is a lot less spectacular than they think it is). The internet has some latency - but it's not as bad as people promised... (yet). Nothing to report on the work front - other than the fact that there are some *really* big things going on in the background - and they're all moving in positive directions... All I have to do is get this stuff working...

heh...

all i have to do...

Ok peeps... read this

Now - it's really simple. Look - I deal with customs people all the time... but this? this is beyond stupid. They had this guys FULL DIPLOMATIC PASSPORT and they didnt let him in to do his 'very necessary and helping the US in a bad situation' job...

We should just fire these DHS people - or better... use them for the surge. Send all these morons into iraq and let them be traffic cops outside the greenzone. Multiple idiots had a chance on this one - and all of them failed - i'd fire every single one of them. (I'm on a firing binge of late... i suppose that just puts me in a bad mood).

Ok. File this one under wrong.

Colorado to use inmates to fill migrant shortage
Tough laws passed last year against illegal immigration have created a need for farmworkers.

From the article:
Prisoners who are a low security risk may choose to work in the fields, earning 60 cents a day. They also are eligible for small bonuses.

The inmates will be watched by prison guards, who will be paid by the farms. The cost is subject to negotiation, but farmers say they expect to pay more for the inmate labor and its associated costs than for their traditional workers.

So farmers are upset because they have to pay $.60 a day for a worker - plus the minimum wage for the security guard to watch them - because that's more than they're used to paying. Sixty cents. And prisoners will be willing to DO the work for that sixty cents... And in the mean time we give Apple a hard time for the Chinese I-pod manufacturing facilities...

Along those lines - last week - IBM wanted to charge me several thousand dollars for management modules in 1U servers I'm having deployed in China for remote management - things that could open and close the DVD tray... do a little more than the typical remote login functionality. When I did the ROI, I realized I could pay 3 shifts of chinese workers 4 years of salary before I broke even - to sit there all day and push the button when i needed it.

The 'invisible hand' of capitalism is about to destroy your way of life America... and in the mean time you're so focused on chasing ghosts that you're not doing anything about it.

It continues

Terrorists: 2
Boston: 0

we are a nation of pussies...

Ok - i post a lot of video links... but my history degree forces my hand on this one. There are just days when people hit it exactly right...

See... it's funny because it could be true. Ok - maybe the idea is a little more surreal than some of the other crazy media frenzy stories of the last several weeks - but it's still bad. You know what this feels like? It feels like the time when the media was totally wrapped up in Gary Condit - right before 9/11... and suddenly everyone realized that all these crazy 'dumb biatch shaved her head' stories were pretty silly when you got right down to it.

The money quote?

Mr. Klein added that for the foreseeable future, “at least 29 of the 30 video monitors on Wolf Blitzer’s ‘The Situation Room’ will feature Anna Nicole Smith, and the other will have that crazy astronaut chick.”

I had a brunch date with a very nice girl yesterday... and I find myself interested...
Whether anything comes of it - I dont know...
But she's very cool - in a 'damn it... i might be in trouble again' sort of way

I seem to enjoy trouble though

So we'll see what happens

Otherwise - work is a bear... lots going on... we hit our launch date and successfully integrated with our big partner - so things are going well there... the team is burning hard - but they're hanging in there... a lot of positive direction there - just getting tired.

Still, when the girl somehow asserts herself as the highpoint of being up here, that's a general indication of being in trouble.

So I watched the Superbowl ads on Youtube (we dont get the US ad feeds up here... instead we're barraged with the same damned Rogers Wireless ad over and over... occasionally interspersed with some annoying ad for Fish Sauce - no i'm not kidding - i think i saw the same fish sauce ad 15 times - and i still dont remember the name of the company)

Anyway - some good ones. I thought the snickers ad that has people unhappy was funny... though i do think it, like others, could have been funnier. In fact - a lot of 'potential' was missed this year. The blockbuster mouse ad could've had a 'follow up' crack about optical mice and 'lasers'... The FedEx 'Not what it seems' FedEx Ground ad - with people acting like their names... they really blew that one... They needed a guy named 'Dick'... and he needed to be wearing a 'box' in front of his fly... that SOOO would've pissed some people off...

The winner in my book? Robert Goulet as the Boogeyman vs Emerald Nuts. Brilliant.

My Job

There aren't many days when my job is fun.
Somedays I'm a carebear... i keep the team happy, try to keep them motivated, take them out to play pool - buy them drinks - have fun. Me? Bah. I'm just fine reading a book or doing things that are with non-work friends.
Somedays I'm DPS... i have to manage the fight, line it up, make sure the Skull is on the right mob, that people arent trying for too big a pull just because they think they're better than they are...
Somedays - like today - I'm the tank. I make sure the firebreathing boss is aimed the other way so everyone else can get their crap done. I try to get my sunders in before anyone pulls aggro - and i try to pull him back onto me when he gets angry about something else...
It's sorta fun today...
but at some point doing this 40 man raid content with 15 has gotta stop...

Yes... i'm still harping on it... The Boston LED Party

It begs an important question...

how many Bostonians does it take to blow up a lightbulb?

Someone needs to edit the Wikipedia article on the Boston Teaparty to point out that Sam Adams was a terrorist mastermind and an inspiration to Al Quaeda operatives everywhere.

This picture of Boston's officials at the press conf on the subject just says so very very much about it all... and now they continue to insist on using the term 'hoax' and describing these things as 'infernal devices' in an effort to make the case someone intended people to believe these were explosive.

Idiots. Complete and absolute idiots. Not as big an idiot as some... but god damn.

Ok. The Mooninites controversy.

Comedy Central ran a guerilla marketing campaign featuring a number of light brites featuring an LED display version of their cartoon characters and placed them all over a number of cities.

Our nation reacts as one might expect - from a nation of complete and total pussies. WTF happened to my country. We see a god damned lightbrite and we run for our lives? God damn it!!! These pathetic sacks of shit make me sick. Someone needs to send Henry Rollins to Boston to kick all their sorry asses.