After reading this I was inspired to relive the fun and frustration of the classic Sega Genesis game “Toejam & Earl”. TJ&E is an early 90s hip-hop inspired game where you play as a couple of “funky” aliens who have crashed on Earth and must collect the pieces of their ship to return home.

After playing for a bit, I’ve come across some areas that I never knew existed:

Present Island: Level 1

Apart from a little island where you start, the first level is primarily made up of water. If you go swimming here to explore, you’ll end up drowning. However, if you come back to Level 1 after collecting some items like rocket skates, an innertube, wings, or anything that will enable you to get past a massive area of water, you’ll be able to reach the first hidden area, “Present Island”.

Read the rest of this entry →

Not usually a fan of xkcd, but I thought this one was funny…

(from reddit)

I would love to have been a fly on a wall during this discussion:

“Which video should we show of Jackson?”
“How about the one where he is a zombie?”
“Roll it!”

Hellotee.com now has “Break the GFW” t-shirts for sale. For only 25 RMB you can simultaneously express your disgust with China’s Internet censorship and your love for Arkanoid.

Sigh. It looks like Google is on the bad side of the Great Firewall again as its services seem to be blocked in China. Google.com, Gmail.com, Google Analytics, Google Docs etc. are all inaccessible as of 10 PM China time today. They’re all accessible by proxy, so it’s probably not a problem with Google. Google.cn seems to work.

Hopefully this “ban” is only temporary. It’s extremely lame of the Chinese Internet censors to do this, but it also reminds me how reliant I am on Google as a single source for so many services.

UPDATE: Google.com appears to be back up, but all other Google services are still down. Some sites are speculating it’s a warning to Google (who has been ordered to modify its filters to better filter out pornographic content; interestingly enough, Baidu is exempt from this). Chinese netizens think this is all just a smokescreen to take attention away from the Green Dam. Many Chinese and foreigners in China are complaining on Twitter: #GFW #fuckgfw

In the meantime, I’ve set up OpenDNS which seems to be a good workaround.

Green Dam has detected something that is not harmonious! Would you like to…

• Be publicly humiliated?

• Voluntarily sign up for re-education?

• Admit to other traitorous acts against your comrades?

There has been a lot of talk about the Green Dam filtering software that was commissioned by the Chinese government to be installed on all new PCs in China. Intended to protect children from pornography and other dangerous material, many Chinese believe it will be used in other ways like blocking out content deemed inappropriate by the government. Privacy advocates both in and outside China criticized it immensely, and after its numerous flaws have been exposed it seems the government is de-emphasizing its importance and it is no longer a mandatory install.

Read the rest of this entry →

I don’t know why I’m only noticing these places now, but Shanghai seems to have a bunch of little restaurants serving Korean food at great prices.

There is one place on Wuding Road / 武定路 (519号) that is incredible. It’s so cheap and so good that I’m starting to get a bit embarrassed because I find myself going there every day. But can I be blamed? For 9 RMB (less than $1.50), you get a sizzling pot of rice with breaded chicken pieces, mixed vegetables, an egg, hot sauce and peanuts. It also comes with some pretty unremarkable egg soup that I am not a fan of.

Anyway, you stir it all up and it sizzles together to become an amazingly spicy dish that you can’t live without. For 1 RMB more you can get a side dish of kimchi (泡菜), or for 3 RMB you can get other sides like extra chicken, broccoli or other vegetables.

They don’t sell drinks there so it’s BYO or just grab a beer or 王老吉 from the convenience store across the street.

Last night we finally watched the film City of Life and Death (Nanking! Nanking!), director Lu Chuan’s epic drama of the Nanjing Massacre that took place in 1937 when the Japanese invaded and occupied China.

The film gives a glimpse of the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the weeks following the capture of then capital of China, Nanjing. During this short period, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed, raped, and tortured. To this day, this event remains a serious political issue as the Japanese government either disputes its existence or claims it was exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Needless to say, this makes the Chinese quite upset. It would be like the German government officially denying the holocaust. It’s almost unbelievable that in 2009 this event is still glossed over or banned outright from Japanese history textbooks.

The story revolves around a few characters: a Chinese soldier, a remorseful Japanese soldier, and a ‘running dog’ or traitor who gives information to the Japanese to save himself and his family. The film depicts the mass slaughter, rape, and sadistic behavior of the invaders, while trying to humanize it through representation of both sides.

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the constants for me in Shanghai is being woken up by some form of drilling or construction noise. With all the demolition, renovation and construction constantly going on in the city, I don’t think I’ve ever spent a lot of time in any apartment or office here without hearing the sound of a drill or jackhammer. Even worse is that it always seems to start at like 6 AM. Saturdays and Sundays are not exempt.

Well today took the cake. I woke up to a loud sound of crashing metal and rocks being crushed, synchronized to the shaking of the whole apartment. I thought a nearby building collapsed or there was an earthquake.

I went outside to the balcony to see an excavator-mounted hydraulic jackhammer in our lane.

When I went outside, I saw the concrete lane at the back of the building had been drilled with a grid of holes about a metre apart; the pavement looked like swiss cheese. The lane adjacent to ours was completely dug up with huge slabs of concrete piled up against the walls.

I’m not sure if the sound in the video does it justice, but picture this going on ALL DAY LONG. The workers stop at 6 PM and you get some peace, but you go to sleep knowing that you’ll be woken up by this beast in a few hours.

A co-worker showed me this a few months back and I just got around to playing with it now. Hobnox Audiotools is a virtual studio environment based around the classic Roland x0x series. It’s like the old app ReBirth but with the ability to add unlimited (?) x0x boxes and effects in a browser based Flash application.

I killed an hour or so playing around with it, and while it’s pretty limited compared to major sequencing apps like Ableton Live or Logic Studio, it is a lot of fun.

Setting up is simple. You start in the environment by choosing a blank template or some preset configurations. In the blank one, you’re given a master output. From here you can drag and drop the available equipment into the environment including the obligatory Roland TR-909 and TR-808 drum machines, TB-303 acid bassline synth, a grid based step sequencer, and an assortment of stomp boxes. You hook everything up by connecting virtual cables to the inputs and outputs of the devices and use the channel mixer, splitter and merger components to connect everything to the master output. For those who’ve used Propellerheads Reason, this virtual connecting business is familiar territory. Other nice touches include a ‘tape’ record that enables you to render your track to an audio file, the ability to resize your workstation, and undo/redo capabilities.

Read the rest of this entry →