I found out today that my 360 has finally left the doors of the repair facility somewhere in Eastern Canada, and is on its way back into my welcoming arms; just in time for Halo 3 (technically a touch late but close enough). And I can’t wait. Obviously the Orange Box, BioShock and World in Conflict have held me over well (especially Team Fortress 2), but even though I risk being labeled a console-tard, I’m eagerly looking forward to my return to hi-def console gaming. I got a hint at my here-to-fore unconscious longing when I played through Metroid Prime 3, and became utterly disinterested in BioShock. Maybe it’s just a better game. But as a Comp Sci student, who spends most of his day sitting in front of a computer anyway, being able to throw myself onto a couch in front of a big screen TV with excellent sound and just enjoy the game was priceless. I was doubly sure of this when futzing about with the TF2 beta release (it’s a damn good thing that game is so good, given how shoddy the beta launch went), and the numerous technical hiccups I experienced with World in Conflict (uh, 8 fps on default settings on my brand-new gaming comp?).

I know this isn’t exactly a new insight I’m arriving at, but as I’m reading the pre-launch-day reportage all over various gaming blogs and news sites, admittedly at first to justify the awesome amount of money the Legendary Edition will cost me, I’m beginning to look forward to this game more than I did the TF2 beta and BioShock. And yet with about the same anticipation I had for Metroid Prime 3. Maybe dealing with Lisp errors has hardened me against any sort of technical tweaking whatsoever, and I just want to stick the damn disc in and play.

Here’s hoping my 360 is in playable condition when I get it. Otherwise this will be a very ironic post.

It started when an interview came up on the director of Brokeback Mountain’s latest film. Of course, since it was a Chinese station, it was done entirely in gibberish to my ears. I recognized him as Brokeback’s director though, and pointed that out. I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name though. My dad pointed out his name was “Liong”.

“Liong?”

I’m not a movie buff, but I like to think I could recognize the name of an Oscar-winning director when I heard one. Especially since he won it during the year Jon Stewart hosted, so it was one of the few iterations of the award show that I actually watched from start to finish.

“Well, how would you pronounce his name in English?” I had asked.

“Liong!”

My parents couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, pronounce it differently. Now I could perhaps forgive my mother of this, as she speaks Chinese nearly exclusively now. But my dad regularly conducts business negotiations and conversations in English, so I was particularly confused by his insistence.

“Okay, I know he’s chinese so he has a chinese name, but for example, what would be written on the Oscar he won in place of his name?”

“LIONG!”

This was becoming an exercise in frustration. Luckily my Daily Show-inspired memory came to my rescue.

“Wait…Isn’t his name Ang Lee?”

“That’s what we said!”

I admit, for those who regularly speak in both English and Chinese, they could’ve seen this coming from a mile away. Forgive me, I’m absolutely terrible at swapping back and forth from Chinese to English, but I honestly could not put two and two together to convert “Liong” to “Ang Lee”. (And yes, I’m well aware that last names come first; I was under the impression that “Liong” was one word, and that they were repeating his last name over and over again).

So we argued back and forth on the correctness of one form over the other. Clearly, since he’s chinese however, the pronunciation offered by my parents would be more accurate than mine. But it still brought up an interesting point.

“If I was one of your English-speaking colleagues dad, would you still have insisted to him that the director’s name was ‘Liong’, knowing full well that he would be even less equipped than I to translate it into a form he would recognize?”

“Yes! Because it’s the correct way to say it!”

And I think that’s one of the biggest differences between my parents and I. I understand the importance of being correct (Hi Jason), but I think that it shouldn’t trump being understood. When the iPod Touch was first announced, my friend and I spent about 2 hours discussing it. The entire time, I referred to it as either the “iPod Touch” or just “Touch”, whereas he referred to it as “iTouch”, which was obviously incorrect. It wasn’t until he was just about to leave to head to class that I finally pointed out to him it was incorrect. It wasn’t necessary to do so otherwise in order for us to just understand each other. During Orientation when I was an OL, they taught us to always use the correct names of buildings (”Don’t call V-wing ‘vwing’, call it ‘vee-wing’”), but we were never trained to pretend that we didn’t know what the delegates were talking about when they used an incorrect name when asking us where their classes were.

I hate Chinese television anyway.

I can’t stand how slow Webkit/Firefox are sometimes on OS X. I’m tempted to say that this might be due to the fact that my MacBook just doesn’t have the processing power of my other two desktop-bound boxes, but the relative smoothness of how Webkit and Firefox both act upon a clean startup make me hesitant.

I was first tempted last week, when I saw the pop-up for pre-ordering Bioshock on Steam. And now I’m glad I got it not just the PC version, but the Steam PC version. (more…)

It took a week to get everything in, but it was worth the wait. I decided from the beginning to make this a dual-booting machine. Ubuntu and Vista Ultimate. Unfortunately, Vista didn’t arrive with the rest of my pieces, so Ubuntu had first claim upon my primary partition.

The omnipresent component list below:

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However in my case, things have an unfortunate tendency to get fucked.
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While it’s been fun learning how to use Perl and Ajax, the whole experience has been far more stressful than anything else. Midterm comes tomorrow for the Summer of Code, and I think I’m a bit behind. I’ve never been so frustrated with a project before, since those in authority are not authorities when it comes to the subject matter. Or rather, they are only authorities on half of the subject matter. The half that doesn’t really apply to me. The half that is already written in terms of open source modules which I have already for the most part integrated into my scripts.

Privately I am glad that I had a chance to participate, but I also wish I had chosen an organization that was not newly accepted in to the SoC, and one that was more software oriented.

Gran Paradiso 3.0a6, you were so beautiful, your interface so sleek, your adoption of native OS X Aqua widgets so intriguing. And for a while, all was good. Until the dark times. Until the memory leaks.

Oh, but they were innocuous at first. And the sheer beauty of your quickly responding interface bewitched and glossed over the steadily growing number below VSIZE. But by the end of the weekend, a memory consumption of 1.40gb and a 5 second delay on just switching tabs was too much. The instability when closing was the last straw. I’m back on Webkit daily builds.