Some people just go bowling - 10 things I think

10 THINGS I THINK

1. Absolutely dreadful news out of Nepal. Earthquakes are terrible anywhere but especially so in third world countries. They simply haven’t got the capital or infrastructure to construct buildings that can withstand (or at the very least not crumble to oblivion) such destructive forces. I may live in an active earthquake zone (San Francisco!) but the city has proper earthquake-ready codes and regulations - Nepal, not so much. Please donate a few dollars to the Red Cross if you haven’t already.

2. A great shame that what was once peaceful protest in Baltimore in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s murder by the police has turned ugly in the worst way. Count me amongst the skeptics who question just how productive it is to burn down a local CVS and loot from community liquor stores. Of course, the perpetrators of those acts don’t give an ounce of care for the protest and the fight to end police brutality: they simply want to cause violence and destruction because it’s good sport. Since when did wonton rioting ever persuade those in power to alter their position? If anything, it strengthens their resolve, however misguided it may be.

For the record, I’m against any and all forms of violent rioting, by people of any color. Tipping a bus over and burning it because your team just lost the championship (or won, in the case of San Francisco…) is equally inane as the chaos happening in Baltimore in recent days.

3. Rumors has it that Lotus, the great little British sports car manufacturer, is planning to produce a sports utility vehicle. Cue the Colin Chapman rolling in his grave cliché. I have zero doubts that if engineered to the renowned capabilities of Lotus engineers, said Lotus SUV would be a brilliant drive, and will sell plenty to upper-class housewives. However, is an SUV really fitting for a company whose unofficial motto is the famous quote of its founder: "Simplify, then add lightness”? If anything, I don’t think one can get more removed and opposite of the Lotus ethos than a sports utility vehicle.

The company in Hethel should first concentrate on homologating the Elise/Exige twins for American consumption once again before commencing on an SUV project. Secondly, improve its current products. The once excellent Lotus Evora has fallen immensely behind its competition, notably the Porsche Cayman/base 911. There’s no secret to why sales have been so abysmal in the U.S.

A part of me still wishes Dany Bahar remained at Lotus long enough to realize his bold five-new-models vision.

4. Those that don’t watch Agents of SHIELD regularly or at all are going to miss out on the why with Avengers Age of Ultron’s opening sequence. As I’ve said before, AOS’s tie-in with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of my favorite aspects of the show, and the producers have done a fantastic job this time round with the second Avengers film. Viewers of show will instantly recognize just why (spoiler alert) the film launches right into the heroes attacking a Hydra base in Sekovia.  
I absolutely cannot wait to watch the Age of Ultron in theatre this weekend, and next week’s showing of Agents of SHIELD.

5. The biggest fight in boxing history is also happening this weekend, and all I’m hoping for is a great bout between Mayweather and Pacquiao. I’ve got conflicting emotions heading into the fight because while I’m definitely rooting for the Filipino champion, a gun to my head will have me picking Pretty Boy Floyd to be the victor.  

Whatever the outcome, we all know there’s going to be an eventual rematch with the two boxing greats.

6. Cecily Strong did a superb job at the annual White House Correspondence Dinner. A real win for women and women issues, and genuinely funny as well. Word of advice to the association: book Amy Schumer for next year’s soiree.

7. Ferdinand Piech being forced out of his chairman of the board role at the Volkswagen Group is a bit of a surprise. While you can certainly question his business acumen, Piech’s engineering acumen and enthusiasm for sporting automobiles is infallible. I haven’t the time to list all the great cars he had a hand in (see Top Gear’s brilliant expose), so I’ll simply present the most recently famous one of them all: Bugatti Veyron.

Shame, because there’s most certainly a mountain of non-compete papers to prevent Piech from working with any other manufacturer. He’ll probably go the way of Luca Di Montezemolo after his ouster from Ferrari, and be employed in a different industry - if he so choses.

8. Anything Google does to shake up the nascent and arguably anti-consumer wireless industry with their Project-Fi imitative can only be a good thing. The Internet is massively vital to a person’s everyday life, and must be regulated as a utility. As such, consumers should only pay for what they use. I’ve got a smartphone with a 2GB monthly wireless plan, but each month I barely breach above 1GB of actual usage. Therefore, half of what I’m paying Verizon is practically a bonus for them, a donation if you will, and that’s simply not awesome.

I hope Project-Fi’s pay-as-you-go wireless plan will achieve board enough traction to impel other carriers to change and emulate.

9. Turns out, backing up my entire music library to the cloud take a really, really long time. It’s long overdue, though. I’ve always kept a separate copy of all my songs on an external hard-drive, and that gets stored at work. The thinking is, in the extreme case the house burns down, my music will still be intact. Now that it’s also uploaded to the cloud (Google Drive, if you’re wondering), I’ve got triple-backup protection, which apparently is the standard amount of backup one should do for all their files.

That said, no way I’m performing the same duty with my movie and video files, because not only will it take months upon months to upload (we’re looking at multiple terabytes of files), surely I’ll get a sternly written email from my Internet Service Provider long before then.

10. Is the Briggs Myers personality test making a comeback all of the sudden? In recent months I’ve got asked multiple times what my results were, and every single time my reply is this: IDGAF. I believe it’s incredibly fitting to my personality, don’t you think? 

Not spring, love, or cherry blossom - 10 things I think

10 THINGS I THINK

1. It’s always a fantastic time when the San Francisco Giants goes head-to-head against our bitter rivals the Los Angeles Dodgers, especially so when I get the chance to listen to the Dodgers’ broadcast legend Vin Scully calling the games. Don’t get me wrong, I’m massively fond of our very own Giants broadcasters, but as baseball fans all recognize, Vin Scully is simply on another stratosphere.

Every new season could be Scully’s last, so every opportunity to listen must be taken advantaged of. It’ll be a bittersweet day indeed when the great man hangs up the microphone.  

2. I love it when people call out Millennials on their frequent entitlement tendencies. As someone that works at a university campus, I witness first hand the disease everyday. Not exactly sure how the latest crop of college students were raised, but never before have I encountered a group of people so expectative of having everything handed to them or go alongside their wishes. Worse, college Millennials don’t seem to handle failure well, if at all.

I’d be a insanely rich person indeed if I received a dollar every time a student came into my office, asking if they could borrow a charger for their laptop. Why do people not bring chargers along with their laptops? It’s common sense, isn’t it? Battery technology hasn’t advanced to a state where you can risk not carrying a charger just yet.

And the students had the gall to complain the university doesn’t provide services for them. Sorry, darling, you’re responsible for your failure to bring a charger with you, not me.

3. Sad news: Chipotle will be raising prices on its steak and barbacoa meat in the near future. Well, sad news for other people, because personally I always select chicken when I frequent Chipotle, because I am a cheapskate, and chicken is likely better for me anyways.

Let me know when they raise the price on chicken, because then I’ll be incredibly annoyed like the rest of you, and subsequently will still begrudgingly eat at Chipotle. Because it’s so damn awesome.  

4. The news of that Pulitzer-winning journalist in Los Angeles having to quit his newspaper job because he couldn’t afford the rent on his salary is extremely depressing. The future of the fourth estate is murky indeed if talents are quitting the industry due to finances. People should be alarmed because local news media is immensely more important than national news networks because the stories they cover/uncover directly affects the citizenry. The survival of those entities is absolutely crucial.

On a more selfish tangent, I’m glad I chose not to major in journalism for my college study, though the reason wasn’t because I knew the financial future for journalist is less than ideal. I simply hated grammar and editing; it’s the writing component that I really enjoy.

5. Allow me to fully admit that I am a bandwagon Warriors fan, and now that they are in the playoffs, I’ve now started actually watching the basketball games. Hopefully the Warriors run through the playoffs will last all the way until the end of June, because the Bay Area certainly needs a championship for their sport franchises, am I right?

Unlike most bandwagon fans, I refuse to refer to the Warriors with the pronouns we, us, or our. Doing so would be despicable.

6. The second Star Wars Episode 7 teaser trailer is short, but spectacular all the same. Of course, we still have zero inkling of how the plot will unfold, nor have we even seen all the major characters yet. The producers did throw Star Wars fans a bone by ending the trailer with Han Solo and Chewbacca, and I’ve got to say that brief little sequence was absolutely awesome. “Chewie, we’re home.” My god that was perfect.

It’s going to be a banner year indeed for cinema, what with Furious 7 already broken all sorts of box-office records, the second Avengers movie comes out in less than two weeks, the 23rd Bond film, and of course, Star Wars to bookend it all in December. My wallet is ready.

7. Today is Earth Day, the one singular day out of the year where people whom otherwise couldn’t care less, pretend they actually give a crap about environmental conservation. That is no shade, because society has made it such that the priorities just aren’t there. The poor haven’t got the money or time to worry about whether or not they are recycling properly, because they spend all their energy simply surviving another day. Rich people don’t feel the need to care for the Earth and limit their personal carbon footprint, because I must have five cars and a mansion to park them in, damn it.

As someone who lives on the lower fringes of what is considered middle-class, there’s not much I can personally do. I sort and recycle, try to use as few amounts of water as possible, and keep a careful eye on my monthly energy consumption. Beyond those strategies, I can only entrust on the powerful few to fight the bigger battle in preventing humans from destroying the planet.  

8. A few weeks ago (some date in the lunar calendar) were the time most Chinese families visit and pay respect to their respective dead. That means a pilgrimage to the cemetery. Unfortunately for me, the entirety of my deceased relatives are buried in China, therefore I was unable to fulfill the annual duty. It did however led me to a discussion with friends on why did our previous generation spend so much money simply to have a plot of land to be buried in.

My own maternal grandparents are each paying more than ten thousand dollars for their eventual resting place, which I must admit if a bit morbid of an act. For me, I just can’t fathom paying such sums for a thing I won’t even be alive for. I’d imagine my offspring would rather me bequeathing them the money instead. When I’m gone from this world, I shall give instructions to turn my remains to ash, and then ceremoniously scatter into the ocean; the ocean from whence all life originates from.

9. Jon Stewart has announced that August 6th will be his final appearance as host of The Daily Show. His farewell show will no doubt be one for the ages, more so than even Stephen Colbert’s epic final Report. I quite literally grew up watching The Daily Show, and the sixth day of August will one of great sadness and celebration all at once.

10.  I’ve been having tremendous amounts of ‘grass is greener’ syndrome with my car lately. Fairly sure I’m not sick of the STI, but more than ever I find myself looking at other cars to buy. It certainly doesn’t make financial sense to trade the car in having only owned it for a little over two years, because the not insignificant amount of taxes I paid in purchasing it will largely be forsaken (not to mentioned I’d have to pay taxes again on the new car.)

But life is about variety, isn’t it? There are times you’ve just got to go for it. There’s a stark difference between financial irresponsibility and financial incapability, and besides, the future isn’t guaranteed anyways. We shall see, but chances are good I might not be in the same car in a few months time.  

See some good vibe - 10 things I think

10 THINGS I THINK

1. Marvel Agents of SHIELD just keeps getting better and better. Ever since last year’s Captain America movie turned the show over to an entirely new tangent, plot development have come at a much more rapid rate, and the show is all the better for it. I hope Agents of SHIELD had got enough longevity to stay on television at the very least until it’s destined intersection with the Inhumans movie. The show’s tie-ins with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe are a personal favorite of mine.

2. Looks like 2016 presidential campaigns are launching left and right (see what I did there?), all of which doesn’t remotely interest me. There’s still a massive amount of months to go before election night, and I think it’s way too premature to be discussing it already. Can’t we keep our focus on the current administration? Those ongoing discussions with Iran are a fairly huge deal, aren’t they?

Besides, I bet most of you can’t even name the person that represents your district in the state legislature. Those are the bureaucrats that have and will have an immediate impact on your daily lives, and not the president of these United States.

3. It’s always a lovely compliment when someone tells me that I’ve got the appearance of an 18 year-old instead that of a 27 year-old that I really am. It would appear those Asian genes of mine are doing a fine job at keeping the ravages of aging away from my face.

4. I don’t understand: what is the point of building and having hundreds of Apple stores but not a single person would be able to simply walk in and purchase an Apple Watch on launch day? It’s baffling to me that the vast Apple conglomerate, with enough cash reserves and economies of scale to bludgeon all, can’t conjure enough amounts of Apple Watch for people to buy in store.

Inventory shortage also plagued the newly released Macbook, with plenty of Apple stores not even having a model to display. What the heck is going on? Apple has been producing notebook computers for decades - it’s their core expertise! Something is not right in Apple’s retail supply chain.

5. Speaking of the new “retina” Macbook, my advice is to hold off on purchasing one until the next generation comes out. Much like the first ever Macbook Air product back in 2008, this completely redesigned retina Macbook is highly compromised in terms of function and power (you’ve got to be kidding me with that one USB port). The second generation will undoubtedly be vastly improved and a much more usable notebook - exactly like the revised Macbook Air that came out in 2010.

The new Macbook then is only good for early adopters and trust fund hipsters, because brand image to impress others is everything.

6. Steph Curry should (and likely will) win the NBA most valuable player award. The stuff he does night in and night out is simply spectacular, enough to have you question whether the moves and numbers he puts up can even be replicated in video game simulation. I get the chorus of James Harden supporters putting up protest  - and honestly I wouldn’t be at all mad if Harden wins the MVP - but come on: we all know Curry will win the award.  

Never thought I’d see the day a player from the Warriors will win the NBA MVP award.

7. It’s tax day, and if you’re getting or have received a sizable amount of money back from the IRS, then you’re absolutely doing it wrong. That is, unless you really do enjoy lending the government your money at zero percent interest.

8. We’ve got a little over two more weeks to go until the second Avengers movie hits the theatre. I’m not sure I will be able to last that long without internally combusting from anxiety and anticipation. Yes, it’s very much a first world problem. That said, I value my slumber hours too much to ever attend a midnight showing. The cheapskate in me will probably do an early Saturday morning matinee.

9. Every day I get increasingly resigned and disappointed at the glaring reality that I won’t ever be able to afford a home in San Francisco. How tragic is it that a kid that grew up here, and is now gainfully employed within the city, can’t afford to live in it. I don’t think that is what cities were designed to be. Certainly, cities should never be a haven for investors that don’t even live there (looking at you, rich Chinese nationals that buy up a tremendous amount of San Francisco’s housing inventory.)

10. I think Couchella is an infinitely better than Coachella. Thanks, YouTube!

Though I’m not sure I’d be willing to pay a monthly subscription for the rumored ad-free YouTube. Thanks to a certain widely known browser plugin, my Youtube experience is already advertisement-free.  

When you're in sublime - 10 things I think

10 THINGS I THINK

1. It’s going to take all my self-control powers (and there isn’t much to begin with) to not trade in the STI for the forthcoming Mazda MX-5 Miata Club. A lightweight roadster with just enough power (atmospheric, of course), mechanical limited-slip-differential, Brembo brakes, and forged BBS wheels: the recipe for pure driving fun. The amount of want for that car is immensely palpable. Someone please stop me from pouring all the positive equity in the STI down the drain.

2. I’m supremely happy that Duke men’s basketball has won the national championship. I know rooting for Duke is akin to rooting for the Yankees or the Dodgers, but they’ve been my favorite team ever since I started watching college basketball more than a decade ago. Every year I pick them to win the tournament in my brackets, even though I know the likelihood of that happening is next to zero. Duke does have a knack of winning it all once in every decade, so as a fan I can absolutely live with that. Granted, I sure hope this championship won’t be the last in the 2010s.

3. Baseball is back, and the Giants are already in trouble (haha!) Before the first pitch is even thrown the team lost two starters in the rotation, with no timetable for their return. Hunter Pence is still recovering from his spring training injury, so he’ll be watching from the dugout for the first few weeks. It’s going to be tough sledding for the team at the start of the season, with big question marks in the rotation for anybody not named Madison Bumgarner.

I couldn’t care less, really, whether or not the Giants are competitive this year. After winning three championships in the previous five years, I’m more than fulfilled and satisfied as a long-time fan of the team. This year I’m simply going to enjoy the baseball for what it is: a good time no matter what. I will draw zero negativity from the Giants, even if they lose every night in the most stupid of fashions.

4. The ending tribute to Paul Walker at the end of Furious 7 was so incredibly, brilliantly well done. If I were a person capable of crying in movies, I would have (lady sat next to me had full-on waterworks.) For sure that final sequence will be replayed on my computer many, many times once the film is out on home media.

RIP once again to Paul Walker. A good guy, a car guy; he was one of us, and gone far too soon.

5. Food product manufacturers: please stop trying to infuse Sriracha into every bloody piece of food you can find. If I wanted a Sriracha-flavored doughnut, I’d put actual Sriracha sauce on a doughnut (that actually sounds quite disgusting) Leave the flavor as what it originally is: hot sauce.  

6. The blatant murder of Walter Scott by a cop in South Carolina is absolutely sickening. Scott’s family and the American public cannot accept anything less than a first-degree murder conviction - it’d be an epic failure of justice otherwise.

It’s horrifying to think the aftermath of the shooting would’ve transpired completely differently (and the murdering cop likely off the hook) had someone not caught the heinous act on video.

7. You know that phenomenon where you think you don’t need something until you’ve got it, and that once you’ve got it, you don’t know how you ever did live without out it? Well, like a smartphone or Bluetooth in a car, my recently purchased Macbook Air has been a joy to use. Browsing the web while lounging on the couch is such an experience, especially for the massively lazy person like me. Needing a lightweight laptop when you’ve already got a desktop computer is for sure a first-world problem.

8. I’ve found a new favorite font! In place of the previous champion Helvetica, I’ve moved my typeface preference to Helvetica Neue Light (big difference, I know.) It’s the same gorgeous Helvetica, just much more minimalist and elegant.

In fact, this humble blog have just converted from vanilla Helvetica to the evolved version. Looks awesome, doesn’t it?

9. Apple finally rolled out the much-anticipated (by me) Photos app alongside the new Yosemite 10.10.3 update. Finally, I can save my entire photo collection permanently (hopefully, anyways) into the cloud. I’ve been meaning to collate and organize my photos for the longest time (compared to my immaculately maintained music collection, the state of disarray is downright tragic), and now with the transition to the Photos app in OS X, I finally got the impetus to do it. Best of all, I can access to all of it from anywhere on the planet right on my iPhone.

10. All the congratulations in the world to my good friend Charlene for passing her board exam, and is now a certified family nurse practitioner. All my friends are smarter/better than I am, and that’s absolutely awesome.