Random Brain Dump

As a former Yahoo! employee, I’m happy to see Microsoft gave up on buying Yahoo! It’s a good thing.

But as an investor, I’m running out of patience waiting for viable strategies for turning the company around.

As a Google investor, I’m thrilled at the fallout since the possibility of getting gang up is gone.

As you can see, I’m all mixed up with this… 🙂

I am part of the “boat people” generation. Our family left war-torn Vietnam in the 70’s. I have vivid memories of the escape. While it was harrowing, to a 12 year old boy, it was an adventure. The reality was a lot more tragic.

It is estimated that half of the 1.5 million people escaped Vietnam perished in the South China Sea. I can attest to that at some degree since dozens of my relatives never made it, including an uncle and a cousin who also was my childhood best friend.

Existing documentaries about them were usually told at a macro level and in the political context of the Vietnam conflict from American point of view. Human strategies were usually sensationalized at grand scales– inevitably emphasizing the positive: the message of hope, undeterred determination, overcoming wretched beginnings, etc… I’ve always felt that there was a lack of the element of raw story-telling, and that these tragedies are most appropriately captured and depicted at the intimate personal level without the context of politics.

So I was intrigued when I read about documentary called “Bolinao 52“, airing on PBS this week. It documents the journey of Tung Trinh, as she retraces and re-tells her torturous journey as a survivor.

Trinh’s rickety boat set out with 110 people in 1988– only 52 survived (thus the name of the film). It spent 37 desperate days stranded in the open sea with people fighting hunger, thirst and hopelessness. The young mother saved her precious ration of water for her boy, drinking his urine instead. She took turn to bail water from the leaky boat after the engine died. Her companion died next to her one night. In the darkest hours, the survivors turned cannibals and ate the dead. Minh, the leader of the boat rationed the human flesh to those who have the strength to bail water. Later, Minh was accused of murdering victims for their flesh.

They ran into USS Dubuque, an American Navy ship heading to the Persian Gulf. A few men dove into water and swam 500 yards to the ship, desperately seeking help. The sailors shook a monkey rope sending one of the men back into the water. The exhausted man drowned while the men looked on. Captain Alexander Balian, the commander of the ship, ordered a few sailors to give them the beef stew left over from lunch. Then he ordered his men to abandon the ship and head straight to Persian Gulf to fulfill their mission: protecting oil tankers from Irianian missiles.

The survivors were eventually picked up by a Filipino fisherman and were towed to the town of Bolinao.

Captain Balian was later court-martialed. In a collectively generous gesture, all 52 survivors submitted their signatures as a petition to pardon Captain Balian. But the U.S. Navy found him guilty of dereliction of duties and stripped him of his duties in 1989.

Tung settled in the U.S. with her boy, while Minh found refuge in Europe after the U.S. denied his entry into the country.

As today is the next “super Tuesday”, I have some comments on the whole voting process.

I think the American voting system is due for a revamp. The whole process is so long and inefficient.

First, we saw that the presidency can be won without winning the popular vote. That is so damn wrong. Secondly, the way delegates are won differs from state to state. Some states grant partial delegate count, while some go for all-or-nothing. I don’t see the need for delegates anyway, just another level of proxy we can do without.  Then the democrats have these “super-delegates” who vote freely which means their votes don’t necessarily align with the voting public. Plus since they are professional politicians, they can be influenced by special interest groups.

And some super delegates reportedly to be “rethinking” their votes. What? Furthermore some states like Michigan had their delegates wiped out as a penalty for moving their voting dates. Insane! I’d like to see it, along with our tax system, revamped and simplified. At least make it more direct and uniform so a simple man like me can understand.

To promote voting, why not make it more of a direct civic duty and tie it to a tax levy? If you don’t vote, you’re levied with a small tax, say $100. Think about it, most regular joe’s will vote to avoid paying the tax. The rich folks can afford the tax, but they probably already have the motivation to vote for their candidates anyhow. I’ll bet that gets a lot of ballots on a regular basis. 😉

Update: like most other taxes, the levy would work out better as percentage. Something like 0.5% with minimum of $100. Yeah, I think that’ll do…

Like most folks, I’ve been sitting on the sideline of the format war of HD-DVD vs Blue-ray. It’s finally over with Toshiba’s official defeat yesterday. It’s about time.

So is Blue-ray the best solution for consumers? I guess we can’t know for sure. One thing is clear: this battle wasn’t decided by consumers. There were a lot of dealing and wheeling by the manufacturers and movie studios, even some muddy financial deals between the big companies. There were a lot of stake for Sony & the likes. It wasn’t a pure consumer decision, but one format is obviously better than two for everybody.

The HD-DVD owners got burned, but most of these folks fully understand the risks of being early adopters. I’m usually an early adopters too, but definitely glad I chose to be more prudent this time. Now I can start looking into getting a player and start watching Netflix movies in their full hi-def glory. A PS3 looks like a great deal all suddenly…

After months of indecision, I’ve made up my mind on the candidate I’m voting for.

Last year was a slow movie-going year for me. I caught very few movies in the theaters, skipping most of the summer blockbuster sequels. Just didn’t find many movies worthwhile of $10 tickets, I guess.

However, it is finally looking up as I think I caught the best movie of 2007 last evening. “No Country For Old Men” was premiered in May 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s directed by the Coen Brothers whose stuffs are usually awesome! I’d say insofar that this is their best piece of work so far.

The film opens with a scene in the arid and desolate desert. A professional heartless assassin strangles a policeman and escapes. Chigurh is a monstrous psychopath killer and carries a air cattle gun; he has a knack for the game of chance. The guy just reeks evil. He is the best character of the movie and amazingly performed by actor Javier Bardem.

A man named Llewelyn on a hunting trip finds a Mexican dying in a pickup truck surrounded by bodies. It’s a drug deal gone bad! Llewelyn grabs the bag of cash and took off. But later that night, his conscience got the better of him and he returned to the scene with water for the dying man. His return kicks off a series of run-ins with other drug dealers and assassins, including Chigurh. The hunter quickly becomes the prey now as he desperately tries to elude the determined Chigurh.

The movie was sparsely scored, instead the intense drama is played up by the great dialogues. That worked really well for me. The photography was subtle yet unforgiving, keeping you on your seat anticipating the unfolding events. If there is one thing to complain about, I’d point out the miscasting of Woody Harrelson as the other hit-man. Woody Harrelson? Come on, he sucks in dramatic role! But Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin made up though, they were great in their roles.

The ending is refreshingly vague– a great departure from the usual Hollywood formula of happy ending. Definitely worth the $10 ticket; check it out if you had a chance.

Recently I started to setup my Vista desktop machine to double as our dvr, recording TV shows which we watch on our media center pc in our living room. These videos are DVR-MS files and they are MPEG-2 encoded. The files are huge– 1 hour of Monk eats up 3 gigs for best quality recoding! For the life of me I couldn’t find a configuration Windows Media Center to use more efficient codecs. Perhaps a reader of this blog can enlighten me.

Anyhow, the best workaround I’ve found is MCE Buddy: a windows service that automatically re-encodes the video files to other ideal formats like H.264 & DivX behind the scene. Added bonus: the program claims to be able to automatically removes comercials! Sweet!

This is jumping through a hoop, I wish the video codec was configurable in the first place to avoid this re-encoding business. I suspect copyright protection has something to do with the missing codec configuration. Annoying nevertheless.

The documentary starts off with a story of a young man in Mobile Alabama who learned that his professed love was spurned by his sweetheart. Devastated by the rejection, he drove off on his motorcycle in the middle of the night looking to drink his misery away. Even that simple attempt failed as the bar tender refused to serve the under-aged man.After wandering the night, he enlisted in the army and eventually chose to deploy in the Pacific front instead of troubled Europe.

Little did he know that the upcoming attack on Pearl Harbor will be laying the horrific war path ahead of him for the next 4 agonizing years. He served under MacArthur in the Philippines. As the Japanese closed in, MacArthur took off in a small boat with his family, leaving thousands of American soldiers and civilians to surrender to the enemies. The young man survived the Bataan Death March and endured savage years as POW in Japan.

Eventually, the determined man survived the war and headed home after Japan surrendered. Years earlier, the army had informed his family of his "death." When he placed a call home, his mother, his aunt and sister– all fainted after hearing his voice. His father instead spoke with calmness and with certainty; he told his son "I knew you’d make it!"

The young man’s sweetheart, who had a change of heart and had been waiting for his return all these years, decided on marry someone else after learning of his "death". Three days after his return home, the man’s sweetheart married another gentleman.

The War is a documentary that reconstructs WWII through microscopic stories like this one. I finished watching most the 15+ hours. Very powerful stuff; as usual, it’s the story-telling of Ken Burns that makes the documentary engrossing. In fact, unlike The Civil War, Burns used no historians or experts to dissect events and provide history lessons. I had expected that and do wish Burns had worked that in. Instead, Burns tells the war through sole the accounts of people at war and at home, barely mentioning Hitler and the likes. This bottom up approach offers a unique and very personal account of the war. While not as good as The Civil War, I thought is an exemplary piece work– 6 years in the making. I also wished McCullough was the narrator.

I hope some of the politicians like Bush, some of Japanese politicians and that idiot Ahmadinejad, watch it and learn from history.

Take-away points, learned or appreciated, from the documentary:

• General MacArthur was a coward
• The horrible Bataan death march
• Terrible sacrifices of that generation
• Bad planning contributed much to heavy losses of the war
• The greatest generation is disappearing: about 1000 WWII veterans die each day. In fact one of the man featured in the documentary recently passed away.
• A Marine said "I don’t think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars."
• One mother’s all four sons died in the war. She learned 2 of her sons died on the same day.
• Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye gave a Rambo-like effort taking out 3 machine guns firing at his men and got hurt in multiple places. He finally received his Medal of Honor 55 years later for that effort!
• Some veterans have post traumatic stress for decades, some never really recovered wholly

While David Letterman has mellowed out a bit in recent years, there are still glimpses of his former self once in awhile. Case in point: his recent interview of Paris Hilton after her stint in jail. No softy questions lofted here… It proves he’s the cooler late night show host and edgier than a tame Jay Leno; Dave wasted no time & relentlessly pounding on poor (okay rich) Paris.

Hilarious! Makes me almost feel sorry for the media-magnet girl…

I am highly anticipating the coming PBS documentary called “The War.” It’s a documentary film about World War II by Ken Burns. I have a fascination with that era and the generation that lived (or died) through the war.

I like documentary films in general, but I particular dig Burns’ works– he’s masterful at driving home the big stories by diving down to detailed personal affairs and relationships that most other film makers and historians neglect.

His films usually carry an air of authenticity and intimacy through personal interviews and his innovative use of old black and white prints and photos (the so called Ken Burns Effect). His work doesn’t rely on actors like a lot of modern documentaries to tell a story. I really hate that; nothing kill genuineness more than the use live actors in documentaries in my opinion. This is probably why I think stuffs on History channel are mostly crap!

Too bad this series will not be narrated by David McCullough who did the narration in many of Burns’ films. 🙁