Congratulations Chris and Nicole

Cherry and I took a road trip out to the middle of nowhere this weekend to attend my good friend and fellow Tri-fectorate member Chris's engagement party. In doing so, the Tri-fectorate - Chris, Kaveh, and myself - were united again for the second time in less than six months, which is probably a record dating back to after we graduated!

There were a few other somewhat familiar faces there as well. Obviously, Nicole, Chris's fiancee, was there, but also Chris's mom, dad, and brother Sean, whom I had met when I stayed over at his house in Spring Break 2002. They all seemed to be doing well... though Sean is now a little more flamboyant now than when he was 13! I also met a few other family members, from Nicole's parents and grandparents to Chris's Aunt Linda and her husband, famous "Uncle Bill", an eccentric, very well-traveled water plant engineer that Chris and Kaveh had often talked about. Uncle Bill and Aunt Linda lived up to my expectations, and were very funny and pleasant!


After the party, we drove up to visit Karn at his apartment in St. Petersburg. Regular readers know that Cherry and I ran into Karn unexpectedly at the airport in Shanghai this past summer on our way back to the States. Since then, he has often invited me to go over to get a ride in his bright yellow S2000, and more recently, to visit him and go go-karting with him. Since we were on the west coast already, I thought it would be a good a time as any to visit Karn and his wife Jessica on this trip. We got there pretty late, at around 10:30, but Karn (being the video game lover that he is) convinced me (quite easily, I might add, being the video game lover that I am) to play some Rock Band 2 on Xbox 360 with him. I'd never played the game before (or Guitar Hero before for that matter) - it's pretty fun, but gripping the guitar controller really does a number on my left forearm!


The next morning, we got up, all ready to go to the go-kart track. Unfortunately, it had stormed like crazy the night before, and was still raining in the morning, so we had to scrap our real-life Mario Kart plans. Instead, Karn and Jessica invited us for a huge breakfast at Cracker Barrel, and then we went back to his apartment to play some more Rock Band 2. Before heading back to Gainesville, however, we did get to fullfill one other task - I took a quick ride in his S2000 (albeit a little more controlled than we would have liked because the streets were still wet and we didn't want to fishtail out of control)!

Keep an eye out for pics in the next update of this post!

Awesome Stuff from the Gator's Pro Day

UF held its NFL Scouts Pro Day in Gainesville last week. Of course, Percy Harvin was the main event, and he showed those scouts what we already knew - that he is teh awesomenezz and ripped as all hell. Here's a video of a short interview from that event showing off:



Tight End Cornelius Ingram also had a good showing, with some scouts timing his 40 in the 4.5 second range (though I find that highly dubious). Both Ingram and wideout Louis Murphy had great Pro Day workouts, not dropping a single ball in passing drills from former Gator QB Doug Johnson (I remember him! He was the starting QB in '99 when I started at UF!).

Below is an article I found of several short interviews of Gator players looking to go into the NFL this year: Percy Harvin, Louis Murphy, Cornelius Ingram, OT Phil Trautwein, TE Tate Casey, and RB Kestahn Moore. They ask such deep questions as "Who would win in a fight, Percy as a lion or Tim Tebow?" and "If you could punch one person in the face and get away with it, who would it be?" Fun stuff. Check it out here: Gators Pro Day Surveys

Tee Dubbleyu Eff See, rebooted

I'm at Library West again, trying to catch up a bit on homework that should have been done through the week. I tried to be disciplined in doing homework this week, but several factors contributed to the undoing of my plan:

1. I played in not one, but two Mario Kart Tournament Night's with my colleagues from work.
2. I watched Secret again last night, and I actually highly recommend doing this too because it is WAY better the second time around, knowing what you know after watching it the first time.
   
3. I started learning a new kung fu form, this time from a VCD I bought in China last summer.
4. That's about it really. The rest of the blame really is on just me because of plain ol' laziness!

I don't actually have a whole lot to say today, but I figured it would be a pretty good opportunity to promote Ed's webcomic, Tee Dubbleyu Eff See, again. Ed and Shawn recently started getting back into webpublishing and this webcomic effort in particular. Their labors have bore some fruit for me as well - you might have noticed my new "Happy House" icon, which actually shows up in Firefox browser tabs! In addition, the Cbox was also something that Ed used on his Tee Dubbleyu Eff See before I swiped it for use here on Grant's Pad. Unfortunately, he seems to get more participation on his Cbox than I do... That's a cue for you all to comment away, if you didn't notice it yet!


With their reboot of the series, Ed has already come up with 12 episodes in the last six weeks or so, matching his entire output of his first run at the comic. He's made it a point to make several obscure pop-culture references, which are pretty much better than most of the storyline... More importantly, he tells us that there will be a major facelift to the site by next week! He publishes on Tuesdays and Saturdays, so make sure you check it out next Tuesday!

Jay Chou's "Secret That Cannot Be Told"

Cherry and I watched a pretty good movie last night: Jay Chou's directorial debut, Secret, or 不能说的秘密 (bu neng shuo de mi mi) in the film's native Mandarin.

I was admittedly a bit skeptical at first when I learned about this film. Jay Chou, while being easily one of my favorite musical artists, simply isn't that good of an actor. Although he starred in the critically acclaimed manga adaptation, Initial D, his part, Takumi Fujiwara, was probably one of the easiest characters to portray, and Jay simply didn't have to do much of anything to get that part right... in essence, his Toyota AE86 Sprinter made up for most of his, uh, lack of acting.


The second major feature film starring Jay that I saw was all-around bad picture Curse of the Golden Flower, which was so bad that it doesn't even deserve a photo op here on Grant's Pad (a second one anyway, I believe I actually wrote a review earlier here that wasn't nearly as harsh, but that's just because I'm a nice guy).

In any case, I figured, Jay is such a crappy actor, how much better could he possibly be at directing a full length feature? Now, Jay has had quite a bit of experience putting together outstanding music videos that often have a very cinematic storyline, as shown here with one of my favorite songs of his, Faraway:



However, shooting a music video is not quite the same as doing a whole 90-minute movie. So, when I started watching Secret, I found my fears to be coming true... it was horrendously sappy and shallow. Boy comes to classy secondary school in Taiwan, meets girl, and they play piano together (they are both talented music students), go on long, romantic bike rides, and other fairly mundane "dating" activities, all the while framed by somewhat annoying Taiwanese schoolboys and schoolgirls.


About 60% into the movie, however, the film makes an awesome twist, and transforms into a genuinely touching story that had Cherry and I talking about it for nearly an hour after the movie ended, going as far as to looking it up in Wikipedia to get a recap of the spoilers (which I don't recommend that you do until you watch the movie, because it will, and I repeat, it will ruin the entire movie for you - it is this plot at the end that saves the film!) and even watching the last bit again to see what all we missed the first time! It's almost as though Jay set us up by making the first half so bad that the second half would seem that much better! =P

The movie was especially cool for those who can appreciate musical talent, as Jay, who is famous for his classical music background, female lead Kwai Lun-Mei, and some of Jay's buddies from Taiwanese band Nan Quan Ma Ma put their awesome piano skills on show. Some of you may know that I played classical piano myself for almost ten years. The piano scenes in this movie really made me kind of want to get back into it! Check out the piano duel between Jay and Nan Quan Ma Ma's Yu Hao below:



Pretty wicked. So, all in all, the movie turned out to be pretty good. At first, I thought the lead girl character, Xiao Yu (played by Kwai) was first of all, not that pretty and second of all, kind of annoying with her mysteriousness, but as I gradually understood what was happening towards the end of the film, she really grew on me and even started to get prettier to me as a result! Weird, I know. The pacing of the movie was, as mentioned previously, absolutely atrocious, but I think this can be attributed to Jay Chou's lack of directorial experience. The story, also a Jay Chou original, is not incredibly novel, but slick enough to get people talking and get a few tears to well up, which is commendable. And of course, Jay puts his musical skills on showcase, composing and performing the vast majority of the classical, Chopin-inspired soundtrack himself! So impressed was I, that I have gone ahead and featured the original soundtrack from Secret in my sidebar music player. Be sure to check it out!

If you want to check it out one step further, you can view the film here at MySoju (in 8 parts, subtitled)!

Happy Pi Day 2009!

Happy Birthday to Me and all of my fellow Pi-day birthday boys and girls!

Cherry + Grant = 4 Years

W00t! Four years of marriage have just flown by!

Cherry, I tiger you so mush!


Direct your congratulations to the comments, or better yet, the new Cbox in the sidebar!

Kwan Dao Kid

Return of the YouTube cop-out! Even so, this video is quite awesome. It is a Kwan Dao performance by a 5-year-old kid during Chan Heung's 200th birthday celebration in China.

For those not in the know, Chan Heung founded Choy Lay Fut, the system of Kung Fu that I practice, back in 1836. Learn more about Choy Lay Fut in my educational posts here and here!

Very Interesting Article on TV vs. the Internet

Karn forwarded me this very interesting article last night about the rise of the Internet bringing about the fall of Television. It makes you think about human nature and why Internet entertainment, be it games, video, or, most importantly, social networking, is just leaps and bounds better than anything the big TV networks could ever hope to offer in terms of what we as people desire.

Just thought I'd share it with you all. The original link is here. Read away!

P.S., if you are a regular reader, and you haven't done so yet, be sure to register in the Grant's Pad Fan Club - just click Follow in the upper right corner of the blog sidebar!

March 2009 About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers. What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to. One predictable cause of victory is that the Internet is an open platform. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds. The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth. [1] The third reason computers won is piracy. Users prefer it not just because it's free, but because it's more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen. [2] The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can't physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it's social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. [3] Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it. This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers. After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another. Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words. ___ The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. They still seem to wish people would watch shows on TV instead, just as newspapers that put their stories online still seem to wish people would wait till the next morning and read them printed on paper. They should both just face the fact that the Internet is the primary medium. They'd be in a better position if they'd done that earlier. When a new medium arises that's powerful enough to make incumbents nervous, then it's probably powerful enough to win, and the best thing they can do is jump in immediately. Whether they like it or not, big changes are coming, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. On the Internet, you don't have to send everyone the same signal, and you don't have to send it to them from a local source. People will watch what they want when they want it, and group themselves according to whatever shared interest they feel most strongly. Maybe their strongest shared interest will be their physical location, but I'm guessing not. Which means local TV is probably dead. It was an artifact of limitations imposed by old technology. If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it wouldn't be a top priority. Synchronicity and locality are tied together. TV network affiliates care what's on at 10 because that delivers viewers for local news at 11. This connection adds more brittleness than strength, however: people don't watch what's on at 10 because they want to watch the news afterward. TV networks will fight these trends, because they don't have sufficient flexibility to adapt to them. They're hemmed in by local affiliates in much the same way car companies are hemmed in by dealers and unions. Inevitably, the people running the networks will take the easy route and try to keep the old model running for a couple more years, just as the record labels have done. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to add more live shows, partly as a way to make viewers watch TV synchronously instead of watching recorded shows when it suited them. Instead of delivering what viewers want, they're trying to force them to change their habits to suit the networks' obsolete business model. That never works unless you have a monopoly or cartel to enforce it, and even then it only works temporarily. The other reason networks like live shows is that they're cheaper to produce. There they have the right idea, but they haven't followed it to its conclusion. Live content can be way cheaper than networks realize, and the way to take advantage of dramatic decreases in cost is to increase volume. The networks are prevented from seeing this whole line of reasoning because they still think of themselves as being in the broadcast business—as sending one signal to everyone. [4] ___ Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks. That's what a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal. People only have so many leisure hours a day, and TV is premised on such long sessions (unlike Google, which prides itself on sending users on their way quickly) that anything that takes up their time is competing with it. But in addition to such indirect competitors, I think TV companies will increasingly face direct ones. Even in cable TV, the long tail was lopped off prematurely by the threshold you had to get over to start a new channel. It will be longer on the Internet, and there will be more mobility within it. In this new world, the existing players will only have the advantages any big company has in its market. That will change the balance of power between the networks and the people who produce shows. The networks used to be gatekeepers. They distributed your work, and sold advertising on it. Now the people who produce a show can distribute it themselves. The main value networks supply now is ad sales. Which will tend to put them in the position of service providers rather than publishers. Shows will change even more. On the Internet there's no reason to keep their current format, or even the fact that they have a single format. Indeed, the more interesting sort of convergence that's coming is between shows and games. But on the question of what sort of entertainment gets distributed on the Internet in 20 years, I wouldn't dare to make any predictions, except that things will change a lot. We'll get whatever the most imaginative people can cook up. That's why the Internet won. Notes [1] Thanks to Trevor Blackwell for this point. He adds: "I remember the eyes of phone companies gleaming in the early 90s when they talked about convergence. They thought most programming would be on demand, and they would implement it and make a lot of money. It didn't work out. They assumed that their local network infrastructure would be critical to do video on-demand, because you couldn't possibly stream it from a few data centers over the internet. At the time (1992) the entire cross-country Internet bandwidth wasn't enough for one video stream. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than they expected and they were beaten by iTunes and Hulu." [2] Copyright owners tend to focus on the aspect they see of piracy, which is the lost revenue. They therefore think what drives users to do it is the desire to get something for free. But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience. [3] Or a phone that is actually computer. I'm not making any predictions about the size of the device that will replace TV, just that it will have a browser and get data via the Internet. [4] Emmett Shear writes: "I'd argue the long tail for sports may be even larger than the long tail for other kinds of content. Anyone can broadcast a high school football game that will be interesting to 10,000 people or so, even if the quality of production is not so good." Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nancy Cook, Michael Seibel. Emmett Shear, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.

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Rich Eisen's Annual 40-Yard Dash

A funny video of NFL analyst Rich Eisen running the 40-yard dash at this year's NFL Combine. It really puts into perspective how incredible elite athletes really are!

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Kung Fu Movie Fans, Rejoice!

In this day and age, it's getting harder and harder to find a good kung fu movie in the vein of my favorite Jet Li movie of all time, Fist of Legend.


In my opinion, several things have contributed to the decline of kung fu movies. First is the proliferation of Hong Kong style choreography and wirework in Hollywood productions, such as Charlie's Angels, who's saving grace was the humor and star power in it, and more recently, the Underworld vampire films, which are actually also pretty good in their own right but still feature pretty bad fighting. The fact is, you cannot put pampered Hollywood actresses through just 3 months worth of "intense training" and expect the action to be nearly as clean or convincing as Jackie or Jet, who have been doing this for the better part of 40 years! Even Hong Kong studios have been guilty of this, putting actors with little to no legitimate martial arts experience in action roles, such as Cecilia Cheung and Ekin Cheng, among several others.


Perhaps most obviously, is the aging of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, the most recognized names in kung fu movies in the West outside of Bruce Lee. As they approach their 60s and 50s, respectively, the quality of their work has declined. This is not to say that their movies are poor, in fact, they're still better than 90% of the aforementioned crap being featured in martial arts action movies today. But, as good as they were, you simply cannot compare Fearless to Fist of Legend and to New Police Story to Legend of the Drunken Master.


Fortunately, Donnie Yen is here to save the day! Over the last few months, I have been very impressed with several of Donnie Yen's most recent works.


For those of you not familiar with Yen, he hails from the same Wushu team as Jet Li, only several years later. He actually starred with Jet Li in two films: as a Mandarin in the timeless Wong Fei Hung film Once Upon a Time In China II, and more recently as Sky in Hero. He has also starred opposite Jackie Chan as a villain in Shanghai Knights. However, Donnie doesn't really like playing second fiddle all the time and has starred in a number of great kung fu movies since the early 90s. In my opinion, taking into full context Jackie and Jet's current age, Donnie is by far the most athletic of the three action stars, and may well have been the most physically gifted to begin with, not to take anything, at all, away from Jet and Jackie, who's on-screen feats have yet to be matched.


Donnie's latest works include Sha Po Lang, Flashpoint, Dragon Tiger Gate, and most recently, Ip Man. Of these, Sha Po Lang and Flashpoint feature the most realistic fighting, as Donnie employs several Jujitsu-style takedowns and holds in this modern, organized crime movie. Dragon Tiger Gate was the most stylized, with Dragonball Z style super-powerful moves and otherwise very flashy acrobatics and, to top all that, bad Asian hair!


Donnie's latest film, released in Christmas of 2008, was Ip Man. It is a heavily dramatized documentary/period film featuring the life of Bruce Lee's venerated Wing Chun sifu in the 1930s, right around the time when various parts of China were being occupied by Japan. I think Ed put it best when he said that this exceptional film is something of a cross between Fist of Legend and Fearless. Not bad models for excellence, if I may say so myself! Early 20th century Chinese setting? Check! Beating down hordes of Japanese Karate masters? Check! Liberal biographical account of a famous Chinese martial artist, who fell from the upper echelon's of society into a life of hardship? Check! Casting a real, experienced martial artist as the lead role?? Check mate!

Yep, Donnie Yen is here to remind us that Kung Fu movies still kick the crap out of Western action movies any day of the week! Be sure to check out the trailer below!