There have been years in which I have a long list of new year resolutions, and surprise, surprise, I didn’t complete it. And there have been years in which I have a really short list, and still, I managed to not complete it. So this year, I am not going to have any. I mean, why lie to myself?

Besides, sometimes announcing that I am going to do something has the effect of making me feel like it has already been done. I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed that it’s a fallacy that my mind falls into.

That is not to say that I don’t have any goals that I want to accomplish though. I now have something better – a ticket system / bug tracker!

What the hell is that, you asked?

I’ve seen ticket systems used in engineering, customer service, etc. but it’s probably the most widely used in software development, the line of work I am in. The work flow usually goes something like this:

1) Developers (people like me) make software.
2) QA (quality assurance) tests the software, and when they find a problem, they write up a ticket with the descriptions (such as “button doesn’t work”), mark it new/open, and assign it to me.
3) I read the ticket, and either work on it or decide why I won’t work on it. I then mark the ticket as “resolved” and give a reason such as fixed (“There, I fixed it”), cannot reproduce (“I don’t know what you guys are smoking”, or not a bug (“That’s right, quit wasting my time”). I assign it back to QA.
4) QA will double check to verify if it’s fixed. If it is fixed, they “close” the ticket. If it’s not fixed, they write a comment about it and assign it back to me.

It can also be used as a todo list. I can also write a ticket for a task that I want to do, and assign it to myself. And when it’s done, I close it or assign it to QA to verify.

One thing I noticed was that I am quite organized when it comes to work. Notes are taken. Charts are made. Tasks I’ve done are usually better documented than that of my co-workers. And stuff gets done. I also noticed that I am organized when I treat something like work, such as helping family members with car shopping or planning out videos. So I figured, if I want to get more done, I should treat those items more like work.

So now I have a constantly updated list of tickets with more serious tasks like “gather documents together for filing taxes”, “pay rent”, “go over credit card statement”, as well as errands like “take out the trash”, “return the phone call”, or unimportant (or rather, REALLY important) things like “watch last week’s ___ (insert name of TV show)” or “watch ___ (insert name of Youtube video that I meant to watch but was at work)”. And yes, I also have one called “write blog post about new year resolutions”.

With that, I should get more stuff done this year. So no new year resolutions. Whatever that’s going to be done is just going to be broken down into subtasks. I will write them up, assign them to myself, work on them, and close them when they are done. This is more concrete and productive for me, anyway.

Let’s see how long I keep this up!

PS. If you are technologically inclined and want to know which system I am using: it’s Mantis. It’s not bad. I also looked into Bugzilla and Trac, but in the end, I just wanted to get something working and was too lazy to figure out how to get to my server’s shell and all the other settings. In the end I just picked Mantis because it’s based on PHP and MySQL, and I am already familiar with how that was set up on my server.

January: It is a little late for Christmas specials now, but recently I came across this video of bloopers from Jim Henson’s 1977 special Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.

In my true procrastinator fashion, I was still talking about Christmas when it was already the new year. Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas was one of the best Christmas specials of all time though!

February: (none)

Hm, an entire month without any blog post. I guess I have been very busy working on something…

March: So, I have been very busy working on an iPhone project for a client which should be submitted in the near future.

Ah, that explained it. I went on to talk about hilarious dreams that made me laugh myself awake though. That was fun.

April: So the other day I was thinking about my professional life.

This was sort of a lame attempt at an April Fools prank. The one from 2009 was sooooo much better.

May: And it’s time for our graduation show!

And it was fun!

June: This video is made by fellow cast member Herman Gonzales.

And it was fun!

July: (none)

Hm, not a post for the entire month. Wow, I certainly neglected this blog for quite a while.

August: Wow, I certainly neglected this blog for quite a while.

Yes indeed.

September: Over the weekend, I played once again the first computer game I played as a kid.

And it was fun!

October: I recently read this article called “Eight Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression”.

Hm, talking about dreams again. I sure love dreaming, don’t I?

November: Once upon a time, a Pilgrim and an Indian were discussing the upcoming Thanksgiving party.

Ah, another one of my dumb stories. Unfortunately, no happy ending (for the turkeys anyway).

December: Isn’t that a cool picture?

We did the Puppet Jukebox sequel and it was fun!

Quite a busy year with plenty of work, and lots of weeks spent rehearsing and performing.

In 2011, I took Christian Anderson’s Theatre Puppetry class. His teaching style was very hyper and energetic, compared to Michael’s more mellow style, and the class was a lot of fun. This eventually led to a show, Puppet Jukebox, that was performed four times in front of sold-out audiences. I’ve performed on stage many times before, but I’ve never performed with so many puppeteers at the same time. It was quite a fun experience and I’ve also met many friends along the way. Some of us came back for Puppet Jukebox II in December. The experience the second time around was quite different, as I felt like I was just hanging out with friends, more so than actually putting on a show. So that was quite fun too. Good times.

In June, I entered a video into a contest for a pair of front row tickets for Les Miserables, one of my favorite musical that I practically memorized. I did not win the contest but somehow Matt Lucas, who performed the show in London, came across the video and Tweeted about it. To me, that was more of a win than actually winning the tickets. Besides, they decided to give every contestant a pair of front orchestra tickets so we still got to see the opening night of Les Miserables. Best consolation prize, ever.

And the Muppets movie was fun. I went with a bunch of Muppets fans to the opening night, and we all brought puppets. A movie is always better when you watch it with lots of enthusiastic fans. I will write more about this later, but I just want to say that I really enjoy hanging out with puppeteers. They are generally not people that are full of themselves. You can tell because they are willing to hide away or put themselves in uncomfortable positions to make someone else (the puppet) look good. They also tend to have a sense of humor and are willing to accept many kinds of ideas. (Come on, who are you to judge someone else when you are an adult that play with puppets?) I love these people.

There were quite some changes with my work situation too. I left the company that I had been working with for six years or so and started freelancing. Actually, it was more like the company fell apart. When your company only had four people, and one was going to Japan for a few months to study Japanese, and the main person who runs the company was planning his wedding and going on honeymoon, it was hard for the company to function. Timing-wise it worked out very well as well. I wanted to go out there and test the water anyway. After freelancing for a few months, I found a job and started working at a big company for the very first time.

Actually the timing worked out pretty well too. The recruiter originally told me that I would need to wait two weeks or so for the interview, because it happened to be a very busy time at the company. I actually didn’t mind at all, since I had a trip planned to go to Pittsburgh for my sister’s graduation. And after I interviewed, I actually took a wrong turn and ended up in the general area of where we rehearsed the show. I was at Starbucks checking my email to see what I should do next when I ran into the costume designer for the show and ended up going in to try on my costumes. Eventually I was told that I got the job but I would need to wait another few weeks for the paper work to go through and the equipments to be ordered. That actually worked out perfectly again, since I needed a little bit of time to wrap up my existing freelance contracts and I did not want work to interfere with me going to see Les Miserables. (The period of freelancing really got me used to scheduling work around play, rather than the other way around, which might or might not be a good thing…) And once again, the timing of everything worked out perfectly. Interesting how everything worked out that way.

So 2011 has been a good year for me, overall. Now how about some new year resolutions for 2012?

Well, I don’t really have any new year resolutions for 2012, because I don’t really keep them. No point in stating them then. Yeah, I do have things that I want to get done, but new year resolutions just aren’t a good way of doing it. I shall write more about this later.

Have a happy new year, everyone!

This, of course, reminded me of a post I wrote last year titled Barked at a Dog Today, written after barking at a dog to scare it away. Apparently, I didn’t need any lessons. It came naturally. I already intuitively knew how to bark at a dog effectively.

Nice talent to have, huh?

The game was not considered great, but back in 1990, there simply weren’t that many Chinese language games available in Taiwan. Let’s look at a few screen shots.

This is the main screen. You can see the map, and all the other information like how developed your land is, how much gold you have, how much rice you have, and how many soliders you have. At the bottom of the screen is the menu that allows you to do different things like drafting civilians into the army, developing the land, and waging wars.

Of course, you can’t do everything yourself. It’s time to find people to work for you! In the following picture, this person says 願為主公執戟, which literally translates to “I am willing to hold the halberd for my master”. Basically it’s a quasi-classic-Chinese way of saying “I agree to serve as a general for you”. How very exciting.

And it’s time for the battle! Each side is allowed to send five generals to the frontline (kinda like basketball). They each can bring take 30000 soliders with them. Kinda arbitrary, but whatever, it’s an old game. You attack one another by standing in place waving your weapon and flapping your arms in the air. Hooray!

And after you win the battle, you see this picture. Look how happy the soliders are! Big grins and everything.

And finally, you defeat everybody else and see this picture that says you’ve unified China. Um, yay?

It took me around two hours to beat the game this time. No, it was not the kind of game that you can play for months. After all, it was originally sold on two 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, so the entire game is smaller than one mp3 file these days. My hard drive back them held 40MB of data, where as a smart phone nowadays can easily hold hundreds times more. Time sure has changed.

But hey, it’s nostalgia. And actually, it’s pretty entertaining just to play and see what you can get away with, since the artificial intelligence simply wasn’t all that smart for a military strategy game like this. It’s really not about whether I will win, but how I won it. The most ridiculous way of winning was actually how I beat the game for the first time. Basically, I just spent all my time looking for new generals to join my army. And then I used the “skip to end of year” feature over and over. After some number of years, all these game characters started to die of old age. And when a King died, a new King was chosen among his generals. But of course, if all the generals died too, there was nobody to be the King and the kingdom ceased to exist. Well, that’s what happened to everyone else. Since artificial intelligence was not smart enough to notice this problem, I was the only one who kept looking for new generals that were not old enough to die yet. Eventually, every other kingdom died out and I unified China without waging any war. That was dumb, but it was an amusing way to win.

So what have I been up to? Well, I took on a new job at a big company. That is certainly something different, as I’ve never worked a regular 40-hour work week in my life. I am more used to working way more when I am busy, and way less when things are slow. But hey, got to try it out sometime. I’ve also gone from never having more than five co-workers at a time to working in a company that uses ten out of the eleven floors in the building. Let’s see how it will go in a few months. So far, so good.

The job change also made my commute three times as long (was 15 minutes, now 45), which gave me a lot of time to listen to stuff in my car. All that driving gave me a lot more time to listen to things. Sometimes I listen to the radio (which I actually really enjoy) and sometimes I listen to my own music. And when I listen to music, sometimes I have strange thoughts pop into my head, especially if the lyrics is cryptic, poetic, or simply not the most straight-forward thing.

Let’s use Scarborough Fair as an example. If you’ve never heard of the song, it’s a traditional ballad from the UK and here’s a version by one of my favorite singer, Hayley Westenra:

http://youtu.be/_45W-Lq7ftw

The thoughts that pop into my head are in the forms of dialog, like this:

A: Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
B: Nah, I think I am going to stay home.
A: Dude, they got parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme!
B: Really? I am there!

A: Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
B: I am thinking about it. I don’t have thyme.

A: Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Victoria Beckham: Nah.
A: What? But they got parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme! I thought you are a spice girl!
Victoria Beckham: Those are mostly herbs, actually.

Doesn’t make all that much sense, I know. Oh, and I happen to like traditional ballads for some reason. Here’s another one I like, called Willie o Winsbury.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR8EHrUP97Y

While we are talking about songs and thoughts that pop into my head, when I heard “Baby Got Back” which had a line that said “Dial 1-900-MIXALOT”, I thought “Hm, I wonder who would pick up if I did?” I remembered it wrong and thought it was 1-800-mix-a-lot, though. So that’s what I dialed. That led to some kind of “Are you single? Call this number” commercial. Probably some kind of dating hotline. So that’s what the 800 number leads to. I wonder what the 900 number would lead to.

Have you laughed yourself awake before? I have. Sometimes, I have dreams that are so funny that I wake up laughing. This has only happened to me three times before (as far as I can remember) but it’s really fun when it happened.

The first dream that cracked me up so much that I woke up laughing was set in China’s Ching dynasty. To give a little bit of a background, in ancient China, emperors kept eunuchs (castrated men) in their palace as servants. The idea was that they would not touch the emperor’s women. So, young emperors and princes that are still kids also had eunuchs that are also kids as playmates.

China was at war with a neighboring country/tribe (probably not historically accurate, by the way) and the really young emperor (still a kid) decided to lead the troop himself. As he gave the command, the two armies charged at each other and engaged in an epic battle, while he and his playmate watched from the sideline. Then the emperor turned to his playmate (also a kid) and said “Xiao ____ Ze (very common nickname for eunuchs), you go too.”

And the kid hopped on a little donkey, let out a battle cry, and charged toward the battlefield in slow motion. That imagery was somehow so hilarious to me that I laughed myself awake.

That was a fantastic experience.

The second time I laughed myself awake also involved the Ching Dynasty. Why the Ching Dynasty is so funny to me is another blog post. I am just going to describe the dream. So I was on a busy street with shops, street vendors, and people going up and down the street. Then a horse and carriage pulled up to the curb. Yes, there was a parking meter too. The person driving it then handed his keys to a valet guy. (Why were there keys? Beats me.) And then the valet guy took the horse and carriage to the back lot and proceeded to try to parallel park. He failed at it, epically. And then he tried to make three-point turns and back into the spaces too. But he just couldn’t do it. I woke up laughing because that was so hilarious to watch.

The third time happened more recently. It took place in modern times (finally). I was either getting interviewed or surveyed by a person. She had a clipboard with a long list of questions. I don’t recollect what we were talking about, but she asked “How would Confucius’ teaching influence your decision?” Somehow the idea of dragging Confucius into this discussion really tickled me. I totally cracked up when the question was asked and then I woke up laughing. I laughed so hard that tears came into my eyes. That made me want to cry… for half a second, then the thoughts of the Confucius question took over and made me crack up again, and I repeated that a few times.

So, conclusion:
1) Laughing myself awake is awesome.
2) I am weird and have weird dreams.
3) Somehow ancient China is very funny to me. I don’t know why. (Actually, I kinda know why Ching dynasty is so funny to me. I’ll write about that later.)

Have you laughed yourself awake before? What was your favorite dream?

Since it was too far from the sides for me to reach in, I needed a tool. Since I didn’t really have a tool for this purpose, it was time to MacGyver it. For you people that didn’t watch American TV, MacGyver was this fictional (or was he?) secret agent that didn’t like using guns. Instead, he used his knowledge in physics to set up traps and distractions for enemies, and used his knowledge in chemistry to create or disarm bombs. He always improvised using whatever that was near him.

So, here was the tool that I put together!

Ok, fine. It was just a tripod. But hey, I felt kinda clever.

It was long and adjustable. The end of the legs had these rings that worked as grips. I was able to grab onto this white piece of packaging material and tear most of it down. So here’s the culprit:

And the final result:

Some of it was already melted onto the pipe but I was able to remove most of it (and most of the smell). The rest would probably melt away on its own.

Oh, and here’s an anecdote about MacGyver. Once my sister was taking a test and she noticed that some classmates were peeking at her answers. So she changed her answer to one of the questions to MacGyver. And obviously her classmates were too young (or too “cool”) to know who MacGyver was, so they just copied it down. Of course, she changed it back to the correct answer before turning in the test, but this still left the teacher wondering why so many people randomly put down “MacGyver” on a quiz.

Oh, also, I cracked up when I saw this, but when my sister watched the movie in class (you know, after AP tests), she was the only one laughing. Nobody else got the joke. Tsk tsk. Kids nowadays… They don’t know the classics.

When I was a kid, my dad would get go get a cake for my birthday and my family would eat it together. My birthday was during summer vacation so I’ve always associated celebrating it with family, rather than friends. As an adult, I never really felt like celebrating it all that much. After all, what’s there to celebrate? I didn’t actually do much to make it happen. It was all my parents efforts, aside from that I was born one day after my dad’s birthday and my parents’ theory was that I smelled my dad’s birthday cake and decided to come out.

So, I don’t really have the habit of celebrating it. Sure, sometimes I would take the day off but usually that was about it. It was just another day. However, every few years, I would decide to celebrate it on a whim. In 2006, I sent out an invitation asking people to “come by and have cake” just 22 hours beforehand. This year, I upgraded the event to “Play with puppets! Eat cake!” Look, a doubling of the planned activities! Wow! And I sent out the invitation three days in advance. That was triple the notice! Wow!

It was really more as an excuse to have a gathering because I wanted to see some friends, which I stated in the invitation and was true. I also said that I didn’t want presents but just friends’ presence, which was also true. Since my birthday was on a Tuesday this year, I also said I wouldn’t be drinking. I was never into drinking anyway. (But the side effect of that was that since I said no presents and not drinking, several of them decided to bring me non-alcoholic drinks so my fridge had a ridiculous amount of drinks afterwards.)

So in the beginning, we were just sitting there chatting. After a while, I decided that it was time to break out the puppets. So I brought them out and had a little bit of a show-and-tell. People asked questions about puppeteering and puppet-making and I showed them some of the fun stuff I learned. And then I said I wanted to see everyone to put on a puppet and start talking to one another, which everyone did and goofy conversations ensued. That kind of silliness was what I liked. I would rather have that than drunken debauchery any day. Then everybody decided to sing happy birthday to me with the puppets, which was pretty awesome. Then we had (coffee ice cream) cake.

It was a great night for me. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday. (Actually I probably could have asked for a better one, and not actually get it.) I would like to thank everyone (Rex, Rick, Crisman, Anisha, Beckie, Tru, Jarrett, Jerry, Raymond) for coming, and many others for wishing me a happy birthday on Facebook and on the phone.

In retrospect, everything actually turned out just right, number-wise. I had twelve puppets, twelve slices of cake and a not-so-big apartment. If there were too many people, the place would probably be too packed and I probably wouldn’t have the chance to really talk to everyone. If there were very few people, it would probably be a little sad. And the people that showed up were not casual acquaintances (not that I invited any) but some of my favorite people in the whole wide world. So yeah, it turned out pretty good. I am glad I did this. Who knows, maybe we’ll do it again in a few years.

PS. No, don’t go wishing me happy birthday now cuz it was over long ago. I just wanted to write it down. That’s all.

According to the fork etiquette, when you are using a knife and a fork to eat, you are to hold the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left. This is also how the utensils are set in formal settings. However, many left-handers opt to have the knife in their left hand and fork in their right because they find it easier to do the cutting with their dominant hand. This also happens to be the way I eat. It has a little bit to do with my upbringing, and the rest is just me being me.

See, I grew up in Taiwan so I was used to eating with chopsticks instead of forks. The only situation in which we would using two utensils at the same time was when we ate noodle soup. In that case, the right hand would hold the chopsticks, since I am only capable of operating the chopsticks using my dominant hand. And the remaining utensil, the spoon, would be delegated to the left hand. So here’s what we have:

Left = spoon; Right = chopsticks

So what did I do when I ate noodle soup in restaurants in the United States without chopsticks? I just replaced the chopsticks with a fork in my right hand. So we have:

Left = spoon; Right = fork

So, in the noodle soup situation, the fork goes in the right hand. Also, if I was just eating with just one utensil, I would simply use it with my dominant (right) hand. Moreover, the fork was sort of established as the replacement for chopsticks. It was then given the status as the main eating utensil, and it was the one that was more complicated and delicate to operate than the spoon. Therefore, fork was always in the right hand. So what would I do if a knife was added to the mix?

Since I was never formally taught the etiquette, I just did what was logical to me: since the fork was already in the right hand, the knife would go to the other side. So we got:

Left = knife; Right = fork

And that happened to be what was only done by left-handers. I got so used to it that when I tried to do it the “correct” way, it would feel really awkward to me. I got pretty used to cutting with my left hand that sometimes I would use my left hand when I am chopping vegetables on a cutting board, if there’s something in the way that makes cutting with the right hand inconvenient.

So am I ambidextrous? Not really. I can’t write with my left hand. It feels awkward and my aim is everywhere when I throw a ball using my left hand. However, I can sometimes bat left-handed in softball games, but that comes and goes. I can bat really well with my left hand one week and have a hard time hitting the ball the next week. It’s really inconsistent. The only other thing that my left hand does better than my right hand is cutting the fingernails on the right hand, but then again, duh.

But I guess a part of it is just me being me, coming up with weird ways to get things done.

Are you right- or left-handed?