Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
Cherry Blossom lane
Spring is here at last! With spring comes not only pleasant weather and girls in shorts, but also tons of jealousy-inducing blog posts about cherry blossom season in Japan. I subscribe to lots of Japan blogs and it seems everybody’s having a great time with the sakura flowers and hanami parties. A couple of my life goals: to experience Chinese New Year in Taiwan and to attend hanami parties in Ueno Park, Tokyo.
But even we in the USA can have our fun. Washington D.C., of course, has its famous Cherry Blossom Festival. And I’ve even discovered a random neighborhood close to my apartment that harbors a secret: a small street lined with cherry blossom trees!
A Bathing Ape diehard on Taiwanese TV
A Taiwanese singer/actor named 阿Ben (Ah Ben) recently went on a variety show where the topic of the day was “name brand vs. no brand clothing”. He was head-to-toe in Bape merchandise and brought along some pieces of his collection to show the audience. There’s a lot of fans who will no doubt be interested in watching this so I will be supplying a general translation of what they talked about. Thanks to DJ-Shareen for bringing this to my attention.
On a side note, as a fluent Mandarin speaker, I’ve been asked why I watch so many Japanese and Korean TV dramas and no Mandarin-language shows. From my experience, there are only two types of Chinese and Taiwanese dramas — 1) poorly acted modern-day dramas featuring the latest hot singers or models who have no business making a show and 2) epics set in various dynasties of China’s long history, which have legitimate actors but uninteresting subject matter. I would love to be proven wrong though, so if you have a favorite Mandarin drama I should look into, let me know!
Southwest airline Wi-Fi at 30,000 feet
On my flight home to Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to ride a plane that was equipped with the in-flight Wi-Fi service Southwest is beta-testing. The Wi-Fi is switched on upon reaching cruising altitude at 30,000 feet, and then the fun begins. This was my connecting flight from Phoenix to Los Angeles, so I only had about half an hour to test out the service. Screencaps below with some basic speed tests. Overall I was impressed (click on pictures for larger images).
Eye of the Tiger
So with this flurry of blog posts in the past few days, it’s time for me to take a break. I have less than 5 months until I take the USMLE Step 1 exam, possibly the most important test of my medical career. As I mentioned a while back, I will be taking a blogging break until then so I have one less thing to distract me. I will, however, still be visiting my usual sites so don’t be surprised if I stop by and drop a comment (I can’t study all day after all).
My schedule for the next half year or so: finish the 2nd year of med school strong, prepare for the test in early June, attend my brother’s graduation at Harvard, come back to school for hospital orientation, and then a vacation at an undecided location. Take care, and see you in the summer!
Toto Washlet S400
I had planned to post about the Toto Washlet a few weeks ago when I returned to my Los Angeles home. These washlets aren’t that common in the U.S. and are probably best known as those “crazy Japanese toilets that spray water at your butt”. They’re everywhere in Japan restrooms, of course, but they’re also fairly common in Taiwan and I’m sure in other Asian countries. My uncle has had these toilets in his Taiwan house for a few years, which was an inspiration for my family to install them.
Banned from Something Awful forums
For virtually all forums on the Internet, getting banned isn’t a big deal. Just register a new account, maybe create a fake email address, and you’re back in business. Something Awful forums, however, requires a one-time membership fee of $10. That doesn’t include access to threads over a year old or the ability to search, both of which cost extra. But more on that later. Once you’re banned, you can re-evaluate how much the forum means to you and whether you want to pay $10 to re-activate the account.
Before I say why I was banned today, let me backtrack a bit and explain why I thought it was a good idea to pay for an Internet forum in the first place. Back in 2005, Amazon was running an experimental service called Mechanical Turk. In short, Amazon was paying people to look at photos of storefronts and pick the most appropriate photo for a given address. At $0.02 per storefront, this was hardly an efficient way to make money.
But I was linked to a Firefox script posted in a Something Awful thread that somebody there had created which streamlined the entire process, minimizing load times and number of mouse clicks. With that script, I made almost $100 in about 6 hours spread over a week, doing nothing but clicking while watching TV.
Without a SA account, you can browse through some of the subforums, but there’s ads everywhere that interrupt the experience. I figured it was worthwhile to pay a mere $10 out of the $100 that I earned to register an account and get access to all the subforums, ad-free. Over the years, the deals I’ve purchased from the SA marketplace and the entertainment I’ve received from the threads have repaid me manyfold.
But back to the banning. My mom had asked me to sell some a couple of hair and beauty products. One was from the UK, one was from Japan, and neither could be found on eBay. I didn’t want to spend eBay listing fees for some items that most likely wouldn’t get any views, let alone bids, so I decided to try listing them at the Something Awful marketplace. I took photos, grabbed product links so that people could read for reference and reviews; in short, made a proper thread. When posting a thread, you have to pick an icon to categorize the contents of what you’re selling. None of the icons really fit, so I chose “HOT” because, well, these were beauty products.
Bad mistake. “HOT” is apparently one of the icons that only moderators can use to draw attention to official threads. I didn’t even have a chance — the instant I pushed “post thread” with that icon, I was automatically banned. The screencap above is what I saw, minus a nasty picture of an old lady that I quickly ad-blocked.
I appealed to the moderator of the SA Marketplace, but there’s nothing he can do since it was an auto-ban. And while it is my fault for not knowing all the rules, it seems just a bit draconian that a mild transgression like this gets an auto-ban. What sucks even more is that if I pay $10 to re-activate my banned account, I’ve lost my archive and search privileges and will have to rebuy those.
Lesson learned: read the Terms of Service! I’m annoyed now so I probably won’t be buying my account back anytime soon, especially since it looks like most of the forum is now open for browsing to the public. Next time I need the SA Marketplace though (which really is awesome), I’ll probably have to fork over the $10.
