goodbye

Goodbye, Jeff Ma. I miss you so much. It sucks because I don’t think you know how much I wish you were back in my life.

The world is honestly a really messed up place.

December 02, 1976- February 8, 2010

No hulu.com in Canada? No problem! (Well, maybe a few issues.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big Roosterteeth podcast listener, an American-based gaming company. One the guys. Geoff Ramsey, mentioned he has no cable TV whatsoever – all he essentially has are monitors around the house connected to his XBox and computers, and he simply keeps up with the latest shows by using Hulu.com and Netflix. I can definitely visualize that within the next ten  years, cable and satellite TV will be diminished as the versatility of the Internet expands exponentially. From what I understand, Hulu.com is just simply streaming everything that’s on TV for instant access – no more waiting around for when the show will replay if you miss it the first time. The pause button is there for you, monitors are fairly cheap, it totally replaces your TiVo and the flexibility is perfect. I’ve also heard nothing but good about Netflix – regular fees every month, everything gets delivered over the Internet or straight to your door, and it’s not illegal.

Problem is, outside of the US, Hulu.com has been blocked due to “licensing agreements” or something. Question – I’ve seen that statement for almost 7 months now – when will they ever change it to allow international access? I’m getting impatient! That sign is literally there to frustrate me. Sigh. I’m interested in solving this issue because I literally don’t have access to a TV myself. So I’ve done my best to look up alternatives to watching the latest prime-time shows for free (on major websites) that have the following requirements

1) Relatively high quality (better than Youtube HD)

2) Instant streaming (no lag time) –> This one really depends on your computer and your Internet connection, but I’m looking for something that doesn’t take more than a minute with an average laptop.

3) Good shows

4) Full screen

The first site I checked out was http://shows.ctv.ca/, with my first show being Flashpoint. Everything on my checklist was there, except for the quality. Interestingly enough, I discovered the length of my attention span has seriously deteriorated thanks to zero TV in the last year and a half, and way too much Youtube. About six minutes into this action packed show – I was bored. Apparently I can’t sit still if it’s not comedy and a 4 minute long video…

Second thing I noted was that every ten minutes, a 30 second commercial comes on. That’s way better than the six or seven commercials that show on TV every 8 or 9 minutes! It was also the first time I really noticed that yes, they purposely turn up the volume on commercials relative to the show itself. It nearly blew out my speakers. But hey, I have an immediate mute button on my keyboard. (To be fair, the TV remote probably has one too. Somewhere.)

http://www.globaltv.com/entertainment/videos/index.html was the next link I hit up. Then closed pretty quick. I’m not into videos that don’t go full screen.

http://www.cbc.ca/television/ Initially difficult to navigate, but I enjoyed watching everything but the news. I get so fed up with national news television. It’s all about scaring the viewers with statistics, or filler stories that are trying way too hard to pull for some emotional response. They find one person with some ridiculously one sided opinion just to create conflict for broadcasting… it’s rather annoying.

I also found a lot of sites promising “proxies for Hulu in Canada”, but proxies are usually patched much too quickly for reliability, and also I’m not interested in gaming the system. So far, bittorrenting looks like the best quality for a risky download everytime, but I’m still going to see if I can build up a collection of sites that I can refer to for any TV show. Can someone please tell me when Hulu will come here?

EDIT: After about four hours of posting this, I totally take back everything I said earlier. I’m going to do a 180 and say that TV will forever be trapped in the same slow cycle that it is currently in, and Internet will never ever replace it. Why? Not only is Hulu only in the US, but the CW, FOX, TV.com, ABC, and every freaking network that has any shows worth watching are all only available in the US. Every other person has to revert to downloading torrents if they want to watch ANYTHING good on their computer. Can you tell I’m angry at Americans? Just please, let us view your shows. Figure out some distribution license so we can watch. Your ratings will go up, people will start to really pay attention to shows, and there’s virtually no loss because you’re ALREADY distributing everything for free anyways to US citizens. Why make it difficult for your own audience?

PNEC Part II

I didn’t want to drag my post yesterday and anyway I hadn’t had time to do this, but today I managed to finally sort through the many photos I took of yesterday and Friday’s conference. You can view a good number of them on Flickr in this photo set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrealammie/sets/72157623324482660/

I have to say, I was really disappointed with my terrible photos. I initially was excited for a new opportunity to take photographs, and I just didn’t take anything appealing or compositionally nice. I look at my photos and they look… just amateur. But enough about me whining.

Uh, will add more later. I just realized I have a calculus test in two days. Bye!

PNEC and UBC Choices

Yesterday and today, I attended the Pacific Northwest Economics Conference (PNEC) organized by first year Jacky Leung, which is an unheard-of move at the UBC Sauder School of Business. PNEC broke a lot of previously held traditions by being one of the most attended conferences, brought together by a first year university student no less. Having never been to anything like this previously, I had no idea what to expect. All I knew was that it was mainly for Sauder students, and it would involve a free lunch.

I learned a lot in the last twenty-four hours. Of course, you expect to gain some knowledge from a conference like this. And this is what I discovered: I definitely do not want to go into Commerce. Don’t get me wrong, I loved PNEC and I met tons of extraordinary people. I also am tempted to apply anyway because of the new faculty building and the many future opportunities in Sauder has to offer. But there’s something missing in it for me.

Let me backtrack a little bit and explain the dilemma that I’ve been struggling with. I’ve always enjoyed my Science courses – much more than math. I also ruled out Arts because although I do quite well in English and Languages, it’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life. And there’s always that glimmer of hope for me to become a fully-fledged doctor, because all my older cousins and aunts and uncles are dentists and orthodontists and practicing surgeons and family doctors. I’ve also held a grudge against people in business school because I ran a campaign last year for my Student Council position against a girl who was clearly only trying to win Finance Officer to add to her transcript. People like that absolutely drive me furious, by the way.

Then I hear the horror stories of medicine school. It’s absolutely brutal, the way the competition is. So many people have their hopes dashed interning because the emotional trauma and pressure is so intense. Medicine has been glorified by House and Grey’s Anatomy but in truth, the doctors in hospitals live a depressing, stressful life. And what else could one do with a B.A. in Science? There are no further opportunities other than research, which is a risky business, and I’m not enthused with the idea either. To top it off, Science students who graduated last year that come back and visit my high school tell me they regret going into that faculty. It’s a difficult road.

Then I hear from so many people – “Come join Commerce!” “We’re the best faculty at UBC!” I hear about how the community runs at this self-motivated school of open ideas and marketing. I get a good impression of social interaction between everyone – it’s “networking”, as they say. There are hundreds of ways to branch out after getting your B.A. in Accounting. And what I like best about Commerce is the idea of organization and leadership, something that I’ve enjoyed thoroughly in Yearbook and Student Council and Prom Committee. And I definitely do not expect anything like that from Sciences. Best of all, they just built a new building that apparently looks gorgeous. I hate being in old buildings, as eco-friendly as that sounds. I like my open, modern architecture. I don’t know how many times I’ve come close to calling UBC to change my application.

Then I go to PNEC. And then a light in my mind turned on for me.

I didn’t see any passion behind anyone. And I don’t call being passionate for money the same thing – I view that as greed. Of course, you can’t judge all of Sauder faculty through a single conference, nor is everyone who loves business some green-eyed monster. I just could not live the rest of my life knowing that I’m working a job that I’m not in love with. How could I wake up every morning and think, “I am so glad I’m a financial analyst.” Where is the drive, the passion, the motive? When I listened to the speakers talk about the labour market and the creative economy, what I really heard was, “Here’s an opportunity to gain untapped money. Here’s how we should exploit it.” Maybe it’s the strong Arts mindset in me, but I don’t feel compelled to do that. Business I can appreciate and live with is when one person has an idea, sits down and figures out how to do the business behind it, and if he or she plays their cards right, that idea becomes a local figure or even a global market. All the most popular, well known subjects in our lives were thought of by one or two creative guys in their basement, wondering how exactly they would follow through. What I see is that business people go through the process before they even have a conceptual idea of their goals.

And as for “networking”… I hate it and love it. I like meeting new people a lot. And networking really connects you to everyone else that you’d ever want to know. But there’s always an ulterior motive behind networking. It’s not “I’m glad to have met you”, it’s “I’m glad to have met you because you provide something for me that I need”. It’s extremely opportunistic in the negative way, very self controlled and capitalistic. I know the best opportunities can come from just having a small conversation. But I would not ever want to force it, especially only when you don’t even have a specific reason to network – it’s only to have a future reference just in case you need something.

Again, I will say I thoroughly enjoyed PNEC. I definitely don’t think every single Sauder student is like how I described earlier – every single person was extremely friendly as a matter of fact. Commerce is not for me. I’d rather slave away at something difficult that I could care about.

PS. I came pretty close to pronouncing the “C” in PNEC with an “S” sound. Clearly it should never be promoted as so.

“Juxtaposition” and other issues

Okay, I’m starting to feel like my Olympic community project is a bit hokey, because there’s no rhyme or reason to any of the submissions, and 90% of the photos aren’t even that good.  Case in point:

http://code.vancouver2010.com/explore

I’m starting to see almost little to no motivation for me to take my daily required 3 pictures of my community, when I have a narrow schedule and it’s raining outside. Anyway, I might as well throw my photos into the vast sea of Flickr and it’ll probably be at least viewed favorably.

Anyway. I just signed up the SMS function on my Twitterfeed, and I’m relatively sure that within the next five days I’m going to disable it. Here’s a few reasons why:

http://tweetingtoohard.com/

A site where people repost “tweets” that are the most obnoxious, self centered sentences you can pack in 140 characters.

Also, another great analogy that I’ve heard from a podcast about Twitter (I’ll paraphrase a bit):

“Twitter is like the equivalent of a group of people, at a party, and every single one of them is just talking really loudly about themselves. And they all happen to face the most popular person in the room.”

What’s going on in Granville Street, DT? A bunch of art stuff piled everywhere. Modern art and Canadian don’t mix well, I have to say.

Vancouver Olympic Community 2010

Hello! Has it been a while? My apologies. I’ve been quite busy raising over ten grand for Haiti, which is actually being matched by the government, so technically 20,000 dollars towards saving lives. But that’s another story. Another less epic but hopefully still intriguing topic is my new Vancouver Olympic assignment given to me by my yearbook advisor Mr. Choi, who was asked to get some students to participate in this international journalist project. We were told to take photos of our community on a daily basis to record what was going on in our areas, continually until the beginning of the Olympics. I’m not sure if I should be honoured or I’m just being scammed into some lame Flickr group, but I’m assuming if my mentor approved it, then it’s something potentially awesome.

So I went out extra early today to take some photos of Yaletown and the area near Pacific Centre. Hurray for taking hundreds of photos of the same object just so I could get every setting right! I really worked on WB, which is something I always complain or mention, but I feel it’s just such good setting to manipulate because it really helps with the tone of the image. Otherwise, the photos weren’t anything too interesting. I have to say, there are plenty of dogs in Yaletown. I know where I’m moving to when I have the money.

Oh, and before I forget – I’ve been trying and trying to get an original name for my watermark, but I really don’t want to say “Andrea Lam”, since I really don’t like my first name and according to the Internet, it’s some famous Asian piano player in Australia anyway. Lammy and Lammie are already taken as well – unfortunately for me, neither of those people take good photos. So I’m using my Chinese name. Apparently it’s quite phonetically beautiful in Asian talk, but I can’t even tell. I’m assuming it’s some equivalent to “Jasmine” or “Rosaline” or “Dark Strong Coffee”  in terms of prettiness.

More photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrealammie/

Dog. Woof.

A dog's fur. Very soft.

Raising Money for Haiti: How to?

I just received an email from the Student Council president, who sent out a mass forward to all of us on Student Council.

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Hello District Student Council,

As we’re sure you’ve heard, Haiti was devastated earlier this week by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Current estimates are placing casualties at around 50,000, but thousands more have had their homes and neighbourhoods destroyed. Hospitals, schools and other buildings vital to communities have been ruined. The country, which has been troubled for years by poor leadership and extreme poverty, had weak infrastructure before the earthquake. Haiti needs a serious amount of outside help to get back on its feet.

That’s where you come in.

John Oliver is challenging every other public high school in Vancouver to meet or beat our goal of $5000, all of which will be donated to the rebuilding of Haiti. We are planning to make this money in a week (January 18-22), by running a massive coin drive, having a bake sale, holding a students vs. staff basketball game and even raffling off the opportunity to be principal for a day.

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Basically, in the next week, we’ll have to raise enough money to beat the 5000$ goal. Literally a grand a day. Now, no offense to those generous exceptions at Prince of Wales, but for some reason our school is really uncharitable. Not only that, they are one of the richest schools in Vancouver (or possibly even Canada). How can I come up with an idea to encourage raising so much money in so little time, when Prince of Wales reluctantly brings in 600 cans during Christmas, versus East Side schools who eagerly donate up to 6000 cans? When we go around for the coin food drive, we raise about 100$ in coins after a week? There has got to be a better way to support Haiti.

I’m thinking of having each separate day mean something, such as:

1) Sell red t-shirts for $5 in support

2) Bake sale

3) Miss class for “Hope for Haiti” presentation, collect donations at the door

4) Bubble tea, Coffee, Hot chocolate, Frappuchino? sale

5) Bottle drive?

Can anyone think of something new, creative, and helpful to this cause? I really hope this week doesn’t become embarrassingly uncharitable. I’d die at the lack of humanity of my high school.

quick

sorry about the week long hiatus i’ve taken from this blog – i have a few ideas waiting to be written down, but lately i’ve suffered from writer’s block. as i said, it’s been a tough time for me so i’ve just been wandering around in a daze, trying to keep everything on track while hoping i’m not messing everything up.

i’m almost over my recent breakup; it’s taught me so many things, the most important one being you really do discover who your true friends are, and those people will come to your rescue when you don’t even need to ask. of course you also discover those who won’t be there in times of need; you just have to take the good with the bad.

i really do want to keep updating this with more fun stories – sorry about the depressive tone this post has; i’m just really sick of sitting in front of the computer.

Cooking: Brownies, Lemon Poppy Seed Loaf

Giant "Samurai House" california rolls. Disgustingly huge.

To demonstrate how huge these were.... my thumb and index finger were about the circumference.

I don’t really feel like writing. Going through a not a very good time right now, so photos will sum up the nicer stuff. Anyway, I will link in the next post the recipes I used. Hey, I’m living up to my New Year’s resolution!

Ingredients for "healthy" brownies!

Beating the batter for the brownies... our first hand-mixer, by the way. We had to buy it a weekend ago.

Yum, they're all done! I'll link at the end our recipe.

Our gooey batter just waiting for a nice hot oven to bake in.

After sitting in the (toaster) oven (for an hour), doesn't it look lovely?

Lemons in the picture to demonstrate the lemony-ness of my loaf.

Lemon Poppy Seed Loaf ready to serve the general public!

So did not make these... my aunt did. Delicious.

New Years Is Over… *link dump*

Today I had an interesting day after an interesting night. All I can say is that I must have really trusted my friends, and I missed the countdown because of my boyfriend needing to be escorted back home, so we had to wait around in front of Ms. Hughe’s house (note: The stuff of a high school’s nightmare) and guesstimated the midnight change.

Hey it’s 2010! Despite the fact I said my life was interesting, I don’t have much to say in this post. Um… “awkward pause relief”

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

It’s a fun, interesting link. You always wonder about these kinds of things.

Some interesting facts that I learnt: There was only one camera that took the video of the first 9/11 plane crashing into the first tower. That kind of blows my mind, because this was the age before camera phones. And 9/11 is still quite fresh in my mind – I still remember waking up, getting to school, and the PA announcement for a moment and silence. Yet technology wise, in 2001 video phones were still underground. Imagine if it were as widespread during 2001 – we’d have footage of the inside as the buildings collapse, or even inside the plane as it hit.

Speaking of unrelated morbidly freaky internet things, there have been many times where I’m on some socialt networking site, thinking: This is sucking the life out of me. I can’t stop checking people’s updates on crap I don’t care about. What would happen if I got rid of it all in one sweep? All my old blogs, some myspace account in oblivion cyberspace – everything wiped clean. Well, here’s a site that can help you get rid of everything for 2010:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/31/web-2-0-suicide/

Called “Web-2.0 Suicide Machine, it kindly does all the work for you as you watch in real time the python script erasing all evidence of friends, messagse, your information, etc. Sounds like a useful option when you want to erase your cyberself, not that I’d want it right now – I rely way too much on Facebook for stalking purposes *cough*. Maybe later when I fuck up my life. I wonder if it can get rid of past embarrassing forum posts from my pre-teen years?

EDIT: Sorry, just felt like adding one more thing. By the way, I get a lot of the links from listening in to Roosterteeth podcasts, as unbelievably dorky as that sounds. Here’s a fun story:

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-soldier-who-wouldnt-quit

Apparently some Japanese soldier was stationed on a small island and was told by his commander not to stop for anything, and to lead his small force against any Allied attacks. Some number of years later (I think they said 40 years?) the soldier was reduced to killing local villagers because even though they tried to convince him that the war was over, he thought they were spies and shot them. This story would have creeped me out more had it not been for the existence of the Internet, so I would never miss out on some giant catastrophic or important event. In fact, I’m updated on too much information at times… okay, we know Tiger Woods cheated on his wife, now what?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/31/web-2-0-suicide/