Yodlee

With so many financial accounts these days, it's hard to know exactly how much money you've lost in the current market. But never fear, because Yodlee is here. The Redwood City based start up will linked to all your financial accounts from Credit Cards to Mortgages to 401k. At one glance you'll know exactly how much you regret that decision to not sell your assets the previous day!!

Benefits of Wii

Gave my Toastmaster spiel on the Wii, here are some statistical highlights

Calories
-- Doing nothing burns 70 cal/hour
-- Playing the PS3 burns 100 cal/hour
-- Playing Wii Tennis: 200 cal/hour
-- Playing Wii Boxing: 400 cal/hour
-- Jogging/Playing Real Tennis: 400 cal/hour

Hand Eye Coordination
-- Surgeons in Arizona scored better on training equipment after playing Wii
-- Same surgeons are now developing a surgery simulator for the Wii

Self Esteem
-- Scoring well in Wii sports promote participation in real sports
-- More self esteem for those not typically physically fit

Conclusion
-- Playing wii is good for you.

Voting for Palin Election 08

yip, i've decided, i'm voting for mccain/palin.. not because they're more qualified or more likely to save me money on taxes or have more foreign policy experience.. because they'd make a funnier pair for late night tv.. by the looks of tonight show and SNL (gotta love Tina Fey as Palin), clearly comedians are playing it safe with obama jokes, so my vote goes with the GOP for the first time. more laughter = better life

Movies about Shanghai

Watching "Lust, Caution" (色戒) past weekend really piqued my interest in movies set in Shanghai, so I searched for other movies that my home town starred in. I found two great ones in Shanghai Kiss and Shanghai Baby上海宝贝.

Shanghai Kiss is about an ABC type who once disowned his Chinese heritage, but through some unlikely circumstances rediscovered his roots in the city of Shanghai. Basically it's a movie about me.. I had to order the DVD from Amazon, I can't wait to see it, since even if it turned out to be nothing more than the trailer, i would have still gave it too thumbs up.

Shanghai Baby was the first Chinese book that was brought to my attention during my recent quest to learn Chinese. Naturally i have to see the big screen adaptation of the original work, even it is really about how capitalism and materialism corrupted and took over the Shanghainese culture. It'll be hard to swallow, but the fact that the pornographic nature of the original book have led to its ban in mainland china should boost the worthiness of the movie.

Birds Nest

Birds Nest
Originally uploaded by Karl Qi

Last year, a bird made a nest on top of my stuff in my patio. I thought it was some random twigs so i tried to clean it up. I cracked an egg in the process of doing so.

This year the bird's back.. 2 eggs this time. But i mercifully let her stay there.. for now. Why would she come back? don't they learn?

if anybody wants to make bird nest soup or want to eat some bird eggs.. you know where to find some.

Staff of Fujifilm Marketing should be all fired.

I've been playing with the Fujifilm F31fd that Jamie bought for the past week. It is awesome! The high ISO performance is just as advertised on dpreview, face recognition was superb, and the usability and features are better than what I expected. My only question is why no local store I know carry it. This little camera to me is far superior to the Canons and Sonys, yet nobody outside of the hardcore photographer circle has ever heard of it. Some heads at Fuji really needs to roll, they really should be selling way more of these.

Euronese Blog

Wherever there's Chinese people there's bound to be some Chinglish signs. After seeing endless blogs, Leno jokes, and Flickr groups dedicated to the embarrassment of the ill-educated Chinese, the latest being chinglish.de, I went out to look for the opposite, a site dedicated to the disgraceful Western usages of Chinese.

To my delight, I found hanzismatter.com! The site, started by a Chinese American, has collected hundreds of pictures featuring misuses of the Chinese language, including some by well know corporations such as McDonalds, Nike, and MSNBC. Most of the posts, however, feature funny Chinese permanently etched on someone's skin. Can you believe people actually have tattooed "crazy diarrhea" and "stop female flow" on their bodies, check it out!