Hacking the Good days…

A good friend of mine sent me a link to MJ’s Photo essay on Phone Sex Operators, and asked for my thought on this. At first I thought it was a prank - as the thumbnails of the photos seemed to be a bit revealing, especially when he posted that on my facebook, where I still have not yet set out proper privacy levels (say my boss is on my facebook, duh!).

To my surprise, I was moved. This is good journalism - a subtle lens for us to see things in different light while maintaining neutral point of view. More importantly, you feel like you grow up slightly before and after reading the essay.

For the aesthetics of these amazing photos, and for taking a step back and see the world from someone else points of view, I recommend you to check out the photo essay, too. Oh, and by all means let me know what you think. I’ll end this post by my favourite quote,

I try to heal the wounds that our closed-minded society inflicts.
It may sound weird, but it’s true.

We as people should learn to talk and listen to our neighbors and share our inner light.

I wish the world was run by phone sex operators.

Spend your every minute as if it’s your last one.

You think that’s a cliche until someone you care might be leaving you for good.

Dave kindly spotted Kate Reider’s story,

I read a very sad story today about a young, female singer-songwriter from my hometown. Her name is Katie Reider. She developed a rare facial tumor that took away her ability to perform, her left eye, and eventually her voice.

Her brother, Rob, was a classmate of mine and a fantastic guitar player. He was one of the rare people that managed quiet confidence and self-awareness even in high school. I remember being really impressed when he won a local ‘best guitarist’ contest on the local hard rock radio station — when his entry was played entirely on acoustic guitar.

Anyway, this site is dedicated to exposing Katie’s music to 500K people in one year. I highly encourage you to go there, read her story, and download Katie’s songs for a small $1 donation. If you like Patty Griffin, The Weepies or The Swell Season you will like Katie. Her albums are also available on iTunes, just search Katie Reider.

I urge you to visit the site, scroll through the photos and witness how Kate fought her battle, listen to her music and ponder on what really means to be here and now.  I was profoundly moved - hope you feel the same.

I think it is in love with the weather man.

[Thanks E for sharing, super cheery, made my day].

Only parents can teach us how to love. It is the world that teaches us how to be tough. But it can never be the other way round.

- from a very very wise friend

It’s London Web Week last week, and I attended @Media where keynote speaker, Jeff Veen, gave a pretty enlightening presentation on digital visualisation - and brought out the importance of mapping ‘dry’ data to meaningful references that click with real people’s day-to-day schema. There are plenty of good blogs out there summarising the conference, but I particularly resonated with Jeff’s ending quote from Steve Jobs,

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

I might have found the wrong quote here but the gist is, when we’re faced with problems we tend to first arrive at a simple solution, which is usually the wrong one, and then we realise the magnitude and the complexity of the whole situation.  People usually stop here.  It is with perseverance and the ability to distill layers of dependencies, very few of us arrive at the core, ’simple’ solution.  It never comes easy.  But when it happens, you never feel any better.

/Staring at comment #33 on bugzilla…

I did a lengthy post for YDN links here.

For those who’re interested in the presentation on Wikipedia’s Community deep dive, check out the deck here:

| View | Upload your own

It’s been almost 4 years since I started observing and learning from the growth of the Wikipedia community… so the deck is actually pretty dense, and I’ve been too swarmed to do any fancy ppt magic - forgive me!  Any comments/questions, just give me a shout!

Oh and Rain requested me to post a photo of me playing with Diablo under Ian’s patient instruction,

Incidentally the one and only one computer game I was addicted was Diablo I - I killed Diablo when I was 14! Probably more than just once as well.. Thanks Ian for bringing back my Über geek memories…

If there is only one track of song that you can choose as your favourite, what would that be?

There are many people who have asked this questions, and I was also told that it is almost impossible for any music lover to come up with only one. Incidentally I was chatting with Blackdown (who would be playing at Fabric this Sunday) about Chinese music, and how they incorporated Chinese Zither into their music, check out ‘the bits’. (love them btw, and tracks are available for purchase here)

Of course I have more than one favourite tracks, but the most symbolically important track of mine is probably liangzhu - ‘the Butterfly Lover’ [1],

The Butterfly Lovers or Liang Zhu is a Chinese legend about the tragic romance between two lovers, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, from whom the name of the legend is known in Chinese (梁山伯與祝英台, pinyin: Liáng Shānbó yǔ Zhù Yīngtái, often abbreviated as “梁祝”, Liáng-Zhù). The legend is sometimes regarded as the Chinese equivalent to Romeo and Juliet.

I bag to differ that The Butterfly Lovers is equivalent to Romeo and Juliet per se - I’m sure the latter one has its own appeal, but The Butterfly Lovers is about how a young woman, being disguised by her family as a boy so that she could go to school, fell in love with a lower class young man. Not only it touches on gender and class, the struggle between being true to your heart or to your obligations, it also relates to the audience by gently revealing Chinese way of how love unfolds - very subtle but yet powerful - ultimately tragic, and supremely timeless.

It is in this context [2],

The legend had been adapted into traditional Chinese opera in several local varieties, as Liang Zhu in Yue opera (also called Shaoxing opera, not to be confused with Cantonese opera) and In the Shade of the Willow (柳蔭記, Liǔyìn Jì) in Sichuan opera. The Shaoxing opera version was made into a colour motion picture in the 1950s ([2]) in the PRC. The filming by the Ministry of Culture and the East China Military and Political Commission took place in Zhu’s legendary home town of Shangyu.

Thanks for Baidu search, the track can be downloaded here (25 minutes long).

What is this Chinese fascination about butterfly? Perhaps is only when we become butterfly, we are truly free?

from IHT:

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

My usual response to outside-the-box ideas that blend arts and science by default, is in awe. But this feels too weird - (a) mouse + (b) living cells that keep on multiplying + (c) shapes like a coat but is living…..

/yike

[Hong Kong only]

We lost our cute puppy, Coco - please help us find him:

Small White Male Dog with White Curly Fur 白色捲軟毛男小狗

Also Black Collar Little Bell

Last Seen on Friday May 16TH AT 9AM
ON DES VOEUX ROAD WEST, SAI YING PUN
星期五(16/05)最後到見在德輔道西. 西營盤

[Update: We found Coco!!] Yaya!!!!

I know you feel this, too.