Jason Wong, HKG, YVR, HNL

After working non-stopped for 6-7 weeks, I finally got some personal time to have a hair cut appointment.  My stylist has consulted with me for 5 minutes and I have decided to go with something shorter for hot and humid Hawaii summer season.  Viola, the picture is my after-make over.  Please excuse the background where my cats were trying to make a stand on top of my shopping bags.

(For those with sharp eyes, they can tell the photo is taken by a webcam.  Just want to take it and go and take a full shower after a work-out session.)

Ever since, Burberry has discontinued Canine Fashion last Fall, I was having a bit blue feeling - no more fashion or clothes for my dog.  To emphasize how much do I care about my dog, well, my dog received his first Burberry sweater before I did.  I did buy my clothes to match my dog’s outfits in Canada - quite extreme huh?  Well, I love him and that’s all I can say the least.

Today, I went to Nordstrom.  Guess what, I’ve found something really nice for my dog.  It’s Juicy Doggy Couture!  I got the one which said, “My Dog for President” plus a nice hood attached.  The material is pretty decent too - cotton with small blend of spandex.  My dog loves skin-tight clothes and this material is perfect for him.  The only thing that I hope Juicy Couture can improve is option for colour.  I don’t like black and the only thing that is available is pink.  I got the one with a more taupe in it and it won’t look too bad on my male dog.  Besides, pink is hot for man fashion now.  To complete the story, I have bought a pink T-shirt and pink blouse for my parents.  That concluded my shopping trip this evening.

I am getting a bit more concerned about nowadays, applicants never bother much to compose a well written cover letter before sending their resumes along.  Occasionally, I did receive resume and “memo” looking cover letter: “Hey man, I am looking for a job, give me a ring.” and the fun part was, these candidates’ expected salary range = $80K USD and up.  Speaking of resumes, I received more and more PHOTO attached or GIF/JPEG “artworks” resumes…I don’t mind if those photos are professionally taken or those art works are well rendered - the poorest things are - they are too low-resolution, too dimmed, too yellow, too sloppy…Anyway, long story short, if you want a potential employer to look at your application, please have a decency to write or at least “copy” a professional cover letter along with your resume.  Nothing worse than having bunch of U-Grads submitted their ill-prepared package in such a care-free fashion.

How many times have you experienced huge disappointment due to high anticipation?  I just got one not long ago.  Before coming to Honolulu, the first thing that I did was to book my concert ticket to see Miss Diana Krall’s night performance way back in December.  On the show night, I put on my up-beat jazzy-blue mood and I thought I would have a fabulous jazz night.  Well, it turned out that there were tons of non-Diana-related local celebration and performances that I did not know they were part of the programs in the beginning.  Don’t get me wrong, I was not saying those biz were bad - but it would be nice to give everyone (which was audience) some advance notice about the show might start late.  After 1+ hours of unrelated business, Miss Krall finally came to the stage and she sat in front of a Steinways and played and sang.  I was expecting her to go through her famous songs, like “The Look of Love”, “Charmed Life”, etc.  Guess what, there was absolutely nothing about those tracks.  The whole night was jammed (yes, really JAM) with piano banging, rushy SUBWAY feel singing.  Nothing worse than, the Honolulu Symphony was in the background and not playing much with 80% of her playlists.  Nobody could imagine how could a talented singer’s concert could turn out to be such a disaster.  I was not the only ones who kept shaking head after the performance.  In fact, there were many well-heeled, mature aged audiences who kept saying, “I wish she could use her talents on something better.”  There was absolutely not a single moment that you could remember what she sang and what she said.  It was BANG, BANG, BANG (piano I mean) and then, “THANK YOU FOR COMING!  GOOD NIGHT!”  After this incident, I needed many weeks, if not months, to reach out and see other performances.  Literally, one bad show can scar you for life!

Remember the old days where every Friday evening, I sat in front of the TV and enjoyed my Sex and the City episodes from Bravo! channel.  There was no doubt about the plots were always witty and the casts were giving out the best performance in everything.  Though not all episodes received enough MUSIC attention.  There were a handful of those that blended the motion pictures and music perfectly.  “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” is definitely one of them.  The last part where Carrie got her revenge and the music by Bona Fide’s Tio Pepe truly highlightened the victory about single people did not need relationship but still stay fabulous.  (Though I was in a relationship during that time but still it was great to see how single people won the battle over pity-marriage-look-down-society)

This photo truly summed up my Vancouver feeling.  My Canadian born dog has immigrated to Hong Kong 1 day after this photo taken.  The back-drop was the place where I found my other half and the orange maple leaves and crisp blue sky were truly the best that Vancouver offered.  There were so many things happening in the past and this photo summed up all those feeling everytime I looked at it.  For better or for worse, my dog has walked through those rocky roads with me in Vancouver and now he is happily living with my parents in sub-tropical climate.

Back in Vancouver, I enjoyed feeding ducks/birds in the wetland park.  I was quite a regular there regardless the seasons.  Walking on sandy path and spreading seeds to the birds - quite enjoyable.

I was forced to study statistics in university.  Did I enjoy it?  Not really…but I just needed that credit to take other upper level courses.  After graduation, I always found statistics in real life quite disturbing.  Whoever needs more evidence to support some unheard claims, figures, decimal, percentage will be all over the map.  The best example is our Real Estate Booming Era 2003 - 2007.  Any John Smith instantly became real estate veteran by putting figures, percentage and chart in his/her press release/newsletter/blog.  There is no doubt about statistics is one of the highest abused items in human civilization.

Before I did anything to my site, I heard the term, WEB 2.0 for a while but I have never dug in to understand what WEB 2.0 really is.  Last week, just like most of you, I WIKI this and found out the definition of this term.  I am not here to make a stand but I do agree with Tim Berners-Lee that Web 2.0 is just a jargon.  What I find the most frustrating thing in today’s tech field is having some programmers self-invented tons of re-used methodologies and re-packed it to the market with a cute/witty label.  Of course, people who stand behind these new jargons can argue night and day about the differences, and I have no interest to follow up those discussions.  Web 1.0, 2.0, 2.99, 3.00 or Web XP - they are completely meaningless…in the same level, I do find BLOGGING is not a new thing - afterall, before Internet, people wrote diaries and later we had Internet, people used HTML to build their web sites and some people (like me using geocities account) provided dynamic contents which acted like BLOGGING.  Unless there are any new invention like, HTML, javascript, PHP, SQL or Flash, I still prefer people not to abuse terminology that much.

Believe it or not, I have not done much programming for many, many months.  A part of my brain must be very rusty now.  I am using my site as a perfect tool to sharpen my mind and keep up my tech knowledge.  In other words, more site features will be added when I do more trial-and-error testings.  Just to look at how much I have done for last 22 hours, I am pretty impressed about my progress so far.