a hshieh blog.

I’m sitting at the San Francisco airport waiting for my red-eye flight to take off. Above are photos of my stuffed unicorn, random luggage picture, random guy who asked me to watch his computer, and more random pictures.

I had meant to write about this earlier, but I finally got a picture of the warning signs that are taking over the Stanford campus. The above sign’s purpose is obvious: don’t ride your bikes into cars. It’s dangerous. You may get hurt. Stanford students, with their lack of common sense, must of course rely on these signs for daily survival.

Why does Microsoft always have to go mess everything up? Shown above is the infamous blue screen of death being projected on the inside of the Beijing Olympics’ “Bird’s Nest” during the Opening Ceremony. First Silverlight and then this?

Apple. Think Different. Pay More.

After taking a linguistics course in World Englishes, I was exposed to the study of e-English, “electronic English”, which is quickly becoming its own dialect, and potentially the world’s most widely “spoken” dialect of English.

But what about other emerging internet languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. While many users in France, Germany, etc., have gone ahead and adopted e-English, these emerging internet languages are developing their own e-Varieties.

As a field of my specialisation is in Asian web-development, I henceforth formally launch my research project on the emergence of internet dialects of the Asian Languages of Japanese, Chinese and Korean, titled “Naomoji-kun: Understanding the Evolution and Development of East Asian Languages as Electronic Languages”. (translation: [JPN] 顔文字: アジア言語の電子言語進化 [CHN] 表情: 中文·日语·韩语之电子语言演变)

China has had a difficult time dealing with the criticism of their definitely-could-be-improved foreign policy. But arrogant and misguided attacks directed towards the Chinese people are never justified. The Chinese people are constantly berated and patronised for the Chinese government’s actions. China won’t pull out of Tibet, though they should, sure; but, when will the US pull out of Iraq? We don’t hear the Chinese constantly attacking US citizens with critical remarks.

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The Charlie Ticket and Charlie Card, the payment mediums of the Boston T, have greatly increased the security and integrity of the Boston T entry system. The Charlie Card, a move towards the new standard of Smart Cards, is very secure. However, with some ingenious work, self named “warcarting”, MIT students finally decoded the Charlie Card, and were asked to present their work at DefCon. The students were quickly sued by the MBTA.

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One of my favourite comedians, Iliza Shlesinger won Last Comic Standing recently. W00t.

Seriously, NBC? You expect me to install Silverlight to watch Beijing 2008 live? Why are you ruining the experience?

The Beijing 2008 Olympics is the most televised/broadcasted Olympics ever. In fact, if all of the future, current and past footage of the available cameras broadcasting presently to web and television viewers were combined, the total footage would be greater than that all of the footage from past Olympic events combined. China truly made an effort to let everyone experience the Olympics.

But Microsoft has a plan to end all of this (more…)

I never understood the point of web conferencing. Sure you get to see the other person. Sure you get to see reactions. Sure you get to point at things. But what’s the point about pointing at things in the first place? I always though audio conferencing was just faster and better.
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