Super Cute Animal Friendship

Again, my Google Sidebar gave me this great little news clip:

Tiger, Orangutan Babies Playmates at Zoo

It's too bad they will have to be split up when the tigers grow up!

Note To The Academy

So Sunday night, we stayed up until 12:15 to watch the Academy Awards presentation. It's a little late to complain now, but looking back, it wasn't really worth the several hours of non-video game/sleep time, but there were some high points. Will Ferrell and Jack Black's song, for one, was classic. Ellen held her own pretty well, too. Most of the awards were given out to movies I hadn't seen and had little interest in seeing, such as Pan's Labyrinth and Babel, and some movies that I hadn't even heard of, like Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. I was pleased to see that The Departed won Best Film along with a multitude of other awards that I don't remember the name of now. However, there was one comment that was quite disturbing to hear, given the large audience that night. While The Departed was receiving one of its many awards, the announcer said that The Departed was based on the Japanese film Infernal Affairs. Loyal readers of Grant's Pad know that Infernal Affairs was, of course, a Hong Kong film, studded with Chinese stars, not Japanese! Do we really all look alike??! I hope the Academy hires a better director next time! Dayamn!

So, as for the rest of our weekend, this past Saturday Cherrie and I decided to go ahead and check out the 41st annual Grant Seafood Festival. No, this festival is not named after me, as much as I'd love to take credit. It's called the Grant Seafood Festival because it takes place in a tiny fishing town near here called Grant. To be honest, the festival itself was okay. The venue was extremely dusty, with sand being kicked up everywhere, and the seafood was not much different than what you might get at, well, anywhere really. The Manhattan Clam Chowder was good - nice and meaty, and the Key Lime Pie was fantastic. But the Mahi Mahi, Clam strips, and even the scallops all left something to be desired. But hey, we had to go at least once, as the Grant Seafood Festival is a classic Space Coast annual event!

Today, Cherrie and I went to a Student Recognition Event at Brevard Community College's Cocoa Campus. The Cocoa Campus is BCC's largest, main campus, and it shows. It's got a nice lake in the middle, and while Melbourne Campus boasts the posh King Center for Performing Arts, Cocoa Campus has an ultra-cool Planetarium, complete with a huge telescope and one of those cool dome theaters equipped with something called Digistar that allows them to project stars and all sorts of cool graphical motion effects on the domed ceiling. They made it feel like a deep space roller coaster - you'd have to see it to feel it, but trust me, the falling effects are pretty convincing. So, we got to check out the Moon and Saturn with the telescope, we got to watch the dome movie, and we got to play with the other exhibits in the Planetarium, all for free! Cherrie also got a framed certificate that recognized her President's List 4.0 achievement! And last, but definitely not least, there was a bunch of free food, so we didn't even have to make dinner after the 45 minute drive back home from Cocoa!

That's all for today, see you next time!

Hard Core Senior Citizens

I saw this incredible story on ABC News, and I had to post it. The guy was on a Carnival Cruise and were on a land cruise near Limon in a group of 12 of his other friends when their bus was hijacked and held up by a gunman, a knifer, and a third mugger. He managed to subdue the gunman in a headlock and disarm him while his buddies fended off the other two assailants. In his raging fury, the tourist breaks the gunman's clavicle, and his accomplices fled the scene. The tourists then drove the gunman to the hospital, where he was declared dead from asphyxiation.

That story, all by itself, is just about as hardcore as it possibly gets, but the the biggest surprise was this: the mugger was a 20-year old punk, and the tourist was about 70!!! Click the link below to read the story.

American Tourist Kills Mugger in Costa Rica with Bare Hands

If I can kick so much ass when I'm 70, I'll have had a successful life.

An Anagram

We have a few of those little electronic dictionaries in our home. I guess they would come in pretty handy if my vocabulary weren't so damn good! Just kidding. Anyhow, I never use those things that much, with the exception of playing a little Hangman or Anagrams. For those who don't know what anagrams are, they're words that you can make by rearranging the letters of other words. For example, the word PIRATE can make the anagrams RAT, RATE, PAT, PET, PIT, and probably a few more that my incredible vocabulary has overlooked.

Anyhow, during my busy day today, I decided to take a look at the ChuckNorrisFacts.com site. For those of you who have never been there, I highly recommend doing so, if only just to learn that Chuck Norris only has two speeds: Walk and Kill, or that Chuck Norris was born in a log cabin that he built with his bare hands, or a plethora of other verified facts about Chuck Norris. In any case, in my more than just a few minutes of wasting time at ChuckNorrisFacts.com, I came across the anagram below:

WALKER TEXAS RANGER becomes...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

KARATE WRANGLER SEX

It does. Really. I checked. All 17 letters are used, and only used once. It's the ultimate Scrabble victory... simply uncanny! Like they had it planned that way!

I had some other great stuff to write about all planned out, but when I found that anagram, all bets were off, and I totally forgot what I was going to write about at first. A can't-miss blogging opportunity, if you will. Guess my Chinese-oriented post will have to wait!

Classy Fans

So apparently, Nike had this little contest going on for a few weeks between Ohio State and UF fans to see who would run the most miles over the contest period. The winning school would get to erect a statue of their mascot in (or near) the campus of the losing school. Naturally, since it is the Year of the Gator, the Gators were victorious once more. The video below shows the events following the Gator victory.



I read that poor Albert only lasted about five hours in Columbus! But it was still great to stick it to those Bucknuts one more time!

In trying to keep with my promise of Chinese oriented posts during the Chinese New Year two-week period (between the first new and full moons of the Lunar Calendar), I'm going to post another YouTube cop-out. Here's a highlight reel of Donnie Yen, one of my favorite martial arts action stars along with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. In my opinion, Donnie is probably the best athlete of the three, and these videos show that he could probably use some of his Beijing Wushu Team training in some real combat! So, since Donnie is Chinese, Wushu is Chinese, and the video is Chinese, this post qualifies as a Chinese oriented post!



Enjoy!

Welcome to the Year of the Pig

Well, there you have it. The Year of the Dog, my year, is over, and the Year of the Pig has just begun. This Chinese New Year, we stayed here in Melbourne - partly so we could get some things done, and partly so we could see what kind of celebrations Melbourne had in store for Chinese New Year.

As mentioned in the previous post, our first CNY activity was a visit to BCC's King Center to see the Peking Acrobats perform. Unfortunately, I couldn't get any photos (cameras were restricted), but I can tell you that it was a great, great show. As I told my friend Eric yesterday, the show was at least on par with the acrobatics show we saw in Shanghai five years ago. Although the acrobats themselves were fairly similar in skill level, the production value of this show was much grander - with sets, multiple costumes, and smoke and lighting effects. By comparison, the show we saw in Shanghai was more or less exploitation of the athletes, featuring only the acrobats and any tools they needed. Not that that's a terrible thing, but in this day and age of Cirque du Soleil like productions, some effects and props are appreciated. Plus, you couldn't beat the student price of $12.25 if you tried!

Our next weekend activity was watching The Departed, with Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio. While this may not seem like a very Chinese oriented activity, some of you may know that this film is in fact a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong movie called Infernal Affairs, which starred Andy Lau, Tony Leung, and a slew of other big name Hong Kong stars. Since the original was such a hit, I did not begin watching The Departed with very high expectations, especially since Matt and Leo (not among my favorite American actors) were playing the parts of Andy and Tony (among my favorite Hong Kong actors), respectively. However, I was presently surprised and found that not only did they not slaughter the story of Infernal Affairs, they arguably did a better job with it - retaining some of the best elements (such as the rooftop scenes) and refining others that admittedly needed work. I would still recommend watching both, just so you could see how the different crews put it together, but I was very pleased with the Hollywood rendition. I can only hope that the American re-make of the my favorite Korean movie, My Sassy Girl, will be done just as well!

The latest Chinese New Year activity we attended was the Lion Dance and Kung Fu demonstration by Melbourne's Wah Lum Kung Fu School at the Hong Kong Super Buffet. Some of you may know that Gainesville had a very large Wah Lum kung fu school, at least when I was at UF. The Grandmaster of the Wah Lum system is actually located in Orlando, so around central and north Florida is largely Wah Lum territory, much like how South Florida is largely Choy Lay Fut territory. As such, there is a fairly large Wah Lum branch here in Melbourne. This year, as usual, the Wah Lum school performed literally dozens of demonstrations over the Chinese New Year weekend, so we decided to check one out. I had actually read the schedule wrong and thought that they were performing at Hong Kong Super Buffet on Saturday, so we went over there and waited for about fifteen minutes before I discovered my mistake. We went back on Sunday and watched the 40 minute demonstration in the 45 degree weather. The show was pretty good - the Lion Dance itself was not all that impressive, but they did set off the traditional red firecrackers, which was something I hadn't seen in a while. They let a bunch of beginners perform, which was nice as well, and finally towards the end, a few of the veteran students, some of whom I recognized because my Sisuk Lance told me about them. I did take a bunch of photos, but because it was so late at night, they came out kind of dark. Check them out anyway in the photo album! And, while you're at it, check out photos from Cherrie's International Leadership Conference!

Rose Hunting and Chinese New Year 2007

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. For some reason, I've never liked Valentine's Day much. Likely, it was because I usually never had a girlfriend on Valentine's Day until Cherrie got here. Now, I think it's another problem. Like many other men with significant others, I never know what to get her, or whether to get anything at all! Last year, I opted to simply send a text message, and I was dubbed a bad man by many a female reader. So, this year, in order to avoid a similar onslaught, I made it a point not to pick Cherry up without first getting some roses.

Unfortunately, I didn't get out of work until about twenty after five, so I was pretty worried that all florists in town would either be (a) closed, or (b) sold out. I stopped at one florist, aptly named Melbourne Florists, and Fear (b) realized itself - they were all sold out of roses. Then, I headed to Bloomin' Basket, a shop that I had actually tried to visit earlier in the morning in the hopes of getting my rose shopping done early, but Fear (a) realized itself - apparently, it wasn't just closed at 8:15 in the morning, it was closed at least all day!

Finally, I stopped at Design by Nina's, where there were two other desperate men picking up last minute flowers. However, by the time it was my turn, Fear (b) reared its ugly head again - Nina was out of roses for the first time in twenty-six years! Fortunately, ol' Nina is a pretty resourceful lady, and she noticed that one of her pre-ordered bouquets, which was supposed to have been picked up the day before, had still not yet been picked up, and she was going to close the store for the day after serving myself and the gentleman behind me. So, she salvaged the roses she needed from the no-show's bouquet and hooked me up! By the time I picked up Cherrie, she had gotten off work for about an hour and a half. But the roses put a big smile on her face!

In other news, Chinese New Year (Year of the Boar, I believe) is coming up this weekend. The Wah Lum kung fu school here is putting on dozens of Lion Dances over the next three days, and tonight, Cherrie and I are going to see the Peking Acrobats perform at the King Center next to her school. As I've mentioned before, Chinese acrobatics are da bomb - very Cirque du Soleil caliber. Unfortunately, I doubt I'll be able to take very many pictures, but I'll let you know if, in fact, they live up to my high standards. If you're in the Melbourne area, and you've never seen a Chinese acrobatics show, I highly recommend that you join us tonight at the King Center!

As for our own celebration here at Grant's Pad, I'll be posting some Chinese themed... uh... posts (dangit! There's that double usage again) over the next few days. To start, we have this joke that our Transponder technician Bob sent me this morning:

Enjoy!

Street Fighter II, the Stage Show

This could not be ignored...



Thanks Chris!

The Protector

I haven't gotten around to uploading the photos Cherrie took at the First International Leadership Conference that she went to in Ocala this past weekend, otherwise I'd post one of my obligatory photo album links. However, I will say that she got me an awesome lanyard with the flags of more than 20 countries and territories to put my badge on! It must have been pretty unique, too, since two people commented at work about my new lanyard. I've been working here for more than one and a half years, and no one's ever commented about anything I've worn! Not even my new glasses, which costed several hundred dollars, drew a single peep from anyone! Leave the attention drawing to the six dollar lanyard!

So anyway, we watched The Protector, which new Thai martial arts sensation Tony Jaa, yesterday. I don't understand why the localization teams that bring foreign movies to the states insist on renaming the movies with these generic one-word names. For example, Jet Li's 中南海保膘 (Zhong Nan Hai Bao Biao), which actually had a perfectly good English name when it was released in Hong Kong (Bodyguard from Beijing), was inexplicably re-dubbed as The Defender when it was finally released to the masses in the US on video. OK, I guess you can say he was defending his client, but "the defender" could have been sacking quarterbacks, for all you could tell from the title!

It turns out that Tony Jaa's character Cam was actually protecting some elephants of his in The Protector, but he has a very hard time doing it, since he has to fight well over 100 men in the process, including the huge wrestler that was also featured in Jet Li's Fearless. Watching those fight scenes immediately reminded me of those great arcade beat-em-up games in the 90's. You know, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fight, or one of my favorites, Knights of the Round. He simply plows through droves of lackeys and has no fewer than three "boss fights"! In one segment of the movie, Tony literally fights his way up a winding staircase in an upscale restaurant. Patrons are going crazy, trying to escape, and henchman get throttled by Tony. Straight up Dynasty Warriors stuff!

Although the story wasn't much to speak of (not entirely unlike Jaa's breakout film Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior), it does showcase his amazing acrobatic martial arts skills once more. Supposedly, he does all his own stunts and without any wirework, much like Jackie Chan did in his younger days. However, Jaa seems to do more flips and aerial moves, and it's really incredible that he does all of those movies without wires, though you can tell he isn't using them since he seems to lose a little balance on some of the bigger flips - something that wirework usually eliminates since, hey, the wire's got you!

In any case, I would say that, if you want to see some awesome bone crushing, flying knees, and elephant tossing (I kid you not) action, I highly recommend that you check this movie out. Just don't expect Oscar winning acting performances or storyline, and you'll be thoroughly entertained.

I Finally Touched a Wii!

That title does sound a bit dirty, but I would think that most readers by now know that the Wii is Nintendo's new motion-sensitive console for this generation. It was released a few months back on November 17th with a very large launch library that included games like Wii Sports, which demonstrates many of the innovative ways you can use the motion-sensing controller that is so unique to the Wii, and the Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess, which was originally supposed to be a Gamecube game before they tweaked it to use some of the, you guessed it, motion-sensing features of the Wii!

In any case, my readers all know that I have been enamoured with my Nintendo DS for the past six or seven months. At the same time, I have been keeping my eye on the Wii, but until just yesterday, I haven't gotten a chance to play it! A number of my friends already got theirs, but, as usual, most of them live away from me. Fortunately, Nick's roommate Chris loves video games and picked up a Wii a few weeks ago. Since I am all alone this weekend, I decided to head over to their apartment to try it out. And it was oh-so-sweet.

I'm not going to go into them much, since an interested reader can find plenty o' info about the Wii on the internet if they so desired, but the first thing Chris did was show me some of the features of the Wii Channels, an interface of various online channels that you can access on the Wii, such as a cool weather channel that is somewhat reminiscent of the Google Maps tool that I had a spot on several months ago, and the shopping channel where you can buy the retro "Virtual Console" games with your Wii points. After that, we started on the games.

Chris started by showing me a little Wii Tennis, then transitioned over to Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. It was my first introduction the the Wario Ware franchise, and I found it to be very entertaining, so much so that I later downloaded the original Game Boy Advance Wario Ware during my GBA downloading rampage this weekend (I'll get into that a little later). After Wario Ware, we popped in Twilight Princess. It took a while to get going, because at first Chris didn't want to use his own save file and the other save files couldn't let me use Link in his human form with his bad-ass Master Sword. However, eventually, he softened and let me play a little on his latest save file, and together, we got past the dungeon that he was stuck on. However, while we were playing Zelda, Nick started to get really sleepy, so I didn't stay much longer after that.

One of my projects this weekend was downloading Visual Boy Advance, an emulator for Game Boy Advance. I started downloading it because I wanted to try and play Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, an RPG released for the GBA back in 2003. I wound up downloading something like 17 games, including Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, three of the four Super Mario Advances, Mario Vs. Donkey Kong, King of Fighters EX and EX2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Advance Wars, Kirby, and of course Wario Ware. I managed to dabble in all of them a little bit over the last two days, and once again. At first, many of the games seemed to run very poorly until I finally figured out that I should use an older version of the emulator that wasn't in Beta. After that, most of the games worked pretty great. I think I'm going to be set as far as video games are concerned for quite a while longer. Wii can wait once again!

Big Tools, Small Airplanes, and a Weekend By Myself

Time sure flies when you're having fun! Or when you're incredibly busy too, I guess.

I spent most of my time this week working with Ron, pictured to the right with his new "filter tuning" tool. Ron is a veteran engineer (and a Vietnam veteran, as well) who came down from Cedar Rapids to work with us for the next two weeks (and possibly more). I've been a big part of one of the smaller projects he is working on, and I've been learning a lot about his favorite toy, the Time Domain Reflectometer, which he uses to make sure the cables, boards, and connections work the way they are supposed to and identify problem areas on the circuits. It's pretty expensive, too - the 20 GHz TDR module itself runs about $16,000, but you also need a high-end digital sampling oscilloscope which would set you back another $20,000 or so! A lotta dough, but it is a cool tool to be sure!

I saw Pearl Harbor for the first time on Wednesday for the first time. It was Cherrie's second time seeing the movie. Being Chinese, she gets a kick out of seeing Japan and the U.S. fight it out. But anyway, I was pretty impressed at how star-studded the cast was. It's got Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett (bleagh), and Kate Beckinsale as the leads, but how they got Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding Jr., that guy who always plays the big bad Asian thug in movies, John Voight and Jennifer Garner to play parts that have combined footage of about four minutes, I'll never know. And man, it was long. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that was legitimately on 2 DVDs. I mean, a lot of DVD's have the feature film on 1 DVD and the bonus features on the other. But when I saw the "Intermission" at the end of the first DVD (which lasted some two and a half hours), I couldn't believe it. Fortunately, the second DVD only contains about half an hour of actual movie and then some bonus features. But still, the feature film itself exceeded the capacity of a whole DVD! Oh, and it was pretty good, actually, despite my initial aversion to war movies. Dogfights and naval battles make war movies look really, really good.

Last but not least, I will be spending my first weekend by myself since Cherrie moved here to the States. I really don't think we've spent more than one night apart in the last two years. The only time I remember not spending the night with her is when I went to Gainesville to get the rest of our stuff with my dad when we first moved to Melbourne. Heck, even when I went to my job interview here at Rockwell, she came along to give me support! But this weekend, she is attending the first annual International Leadership Conference in a campground in Ocala, which apparently has representatives from several universities, including UF, UCF, FIU, FAU, as well as her community college and I would imagine several other community colleges. So, while she's having fun networking with other International clubs from other colleges, I'll be at home, filing for my tax return and most likely playing a lot of video games. I'll try to train a little too, I guess. If anyone is in the Melbourne area, let me know if you want to toss the football a little!

More Meihua SAMA Kung Fu Performances

I must say, one of the sucky things about being one of the founders of a school organization is the fact that, after you graduate, you no longer get to participate in many of the events that said organization hold. Such is my case with the Meihua Student Association of Martial Arts, which, as my most avid readers should know, is the kung fu club that Kir-Wei and I started together in our autumn years at the University of Florida.

Since we graduated from our respective programs and left UF, the club has gone on under two presidents, gained numerous new members, expanded its curriculum, and performed in a number of public venues, such as the 2006 Asian Food Festival and the Chinese American Student Association's Chinese New Year Celebration this past weekend, both shown below. It would have been really cool to participate in some of these shows, and I just found out that they have been requested to perform at least one other show at a charity event and are planning to compete in this year's Gainesville Challenge once again! Although I'm disappointed I don't get to perform or compete any more, as one of the original visionaries of our club, I have to say I'm very proud of how far our club has come along!



2006 Asian Food Festival

2007 CASA Chinese New Year Celebration

Enjoy!

Guess that Gator Karma...

couldn't last forever. After an eerily familiar kickoff return for a touchdown by the Chicago Bears' Devin Hester, the Indianapolis Colts pretty much had their way with the Bears, besting them in almost every measurable statistic (time of possession, plays from scrimmage, total offense, takeaways, points scored) by almost 2:1 (not entirely unlike a certain Tostitos Bowl Championship Series National Championship that was recently played between an Ohio State University and the Mighty Florida Gators). In a rainy Dolphins Stadium, the "soft dome" team led by the Tennessee quarterback who could never beat the Gators in his four years in college finally won the Big One, ironically at the expense of a supposedly elements-hardened Bears team that featured four Gators in quarterback Rex Grossman, defensive end Alex Brown, defensive tackle Ian Scott, and safety Todd Johnson.

Peyton Manning, who received MVP honors, didn't really play lights out. What he didn't do was make many mistakes. In fact, after his first interception a few plays into their first possession, he was pretty much mistake free. Everyone else, however, seemed to make plenty of mistakes. The Colts suffered from four or five false starts, and there were back to back fumbles on two occasions. However, Grossman's last two interceptions, one of which was returned for a touchdown, gave Indianapolis the marked advantage in turnovers, with five takeaways to Chicago's three.

Being a Gator, I was definitely rooting for the Bears to win. How often does a team start three players from essentially the same class? Well, this year, I guess two - the Patriots also started up to three Gators as well this year. But I can't really be upset that Indianapolis won. It does suck that ol' Peyton finally got his signature win against players from the team he was never able to beat in college, but I'm happy for him - he's going to shatter all the record books and will not suffer from the criticisms that Dan Marino has to endure for never winning a Super Bowl. That said, I'm even happier for Tony Dungy. Being a Bucs fan, I've always liked and appreciated Dungy for what he built at Tampa Bay (notably the "Tampa Two" defense), but to become the first African-American head coach to win the Super Bowl (and one of the first two to even coach in one - the other was Chicago's Lovie Smith, who was Dungy's linebackers' coach at Tampa Bay) and show that nice guys can win, I think that's pretty huge. Especially after what Dungy went through last year with the loss of his son, I'm really happy for him.

Guess we'll have to wait till March to see if we have any of that Gator Karma left in the tank for Billy D's kids to use!

ABC News: Dutch Gym to Introduce 'Naked Sunday'

After having a couple of hot blogging days (Monday and Tuesday, to be exact), I haven't written much. What better way to make up for that then to bring you some crazy news?

ABC News: Dutch Gym to Introduce 'Naked Sunday'

Those crazy Dutchmen/women...