Whew, what a day! I was only out for 5 hours today, but what a productive 5 hours they were.

My cousin Fan Wei and her husband picked me up around 9:30 this morning, and we headed promptly to Jing Shan Park (景山公园), one of Beijing’s famous historical landmarks. Although I had probably been here at some point in my life, I had forgotten all about it, and today turned out to be quite the refreshing experience. Jing Shan is essentially a mountain with 5 pavilions on it, 2 on each side and 1 on the peak. Each pavilion symbolizes something different, and each was previously occupied by a unique Bodhisattva, until they were looted by the Eight-Nation Alliance during the invasion of Beijing in 1900-1901. It was a beautiful day, and the view from the top of the mountain was stunning. Jing Shan lies directly on the invisible line that divides the city into its east and west halves, and from where we stood, we got a great view of the rear gate of the Forbidden City. After we descended the mountain and made our way through the rest of the park, I was presently surprised by the amount of activity that was going on. From practitioners of Tai Chi to people jumping rope and kicking 毽子 (Chinese equivalent of hacky sack), to calligraphers writing on the ground using large brushes and water as ink, to scores of people gathering around and singing folk songs, there was an inescapable feeling of “old Beijing” (老北京) in the air. The sights and sounds reminded of the Beijing I fell in love with as a kid before all the skyscrapers and automobiles took hold.

After Jing Shan, we headed off to 南锣鼓巷, a historical street buried deep in the historical hutongs of the city. It is now serves as a unique shopping and culinary experience for foreigners and locals alike. We took our time wandering through the shops, stopping to taste some of the famous local food such as stinky tofu (yes, it smells bad, but tastes delicious), homemade yogurt (more flavorful than any froyo I’ve ever had), and triangle cakes (a thin outer shell filled with red bean paste). We had lunch at a restaurant called 鬼味, which is famous for its many-flavored chicken wings. I even had some wasabi wings, which ended up being a bit more tame than I expected. Still I was thankful to have plenty of soda to wash it all down. 南锣鼓巷 is adjacent to 沙井胡同, where my dad’s family used to live, and where I spent a large part of my early childhood. About 5 years ago, the government tore down the family’s neighborhood, and my family was forced to relocate. As we walked by the neighborhood today, the old house was still a pile of rubble. My cousin said it’s probably because the developers ran out of money, but deep down inside I wish that they are taking their time to restore the neighborhood to the way it used to be. There is so much history ingrained in each of Beijing’s hutongs; their slow disappearance marks the end of an era.

After our journey down memory lane, we visited Wang Fu Jing (王府井), our last destination of the day and one of my favorite places in Beijing. It’s one of those places that’s designed to appeal to tourists, because in general the shopping is pretty expensive. However, many locals still go because some of Beijing’s oldest and most reputable stores are  located there. The store we went to today, Li Sheng Sporting Equipment (利生体育用品商店) is one such store. I bought my dad a new ping-pong paddle and some ping-pong balls for back home.

Tomorrow, I’m visiting my cousin Meng Meng’s house. It’s my first time going, and also the first time seeing him since he got married, so I’m looking forward to it.

I still feel light-headed when we kiss.

…to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to respond. But to think that someone has made such a large a impact on my life in such a short period of time, I never could have imagined such a thing even half a year ago. To a certain extent there is the fear of feeling exposed and vulnerable to the world, but we must remember that the world is by nature unpredictable; the future is always shrouded in some degree of uncertainty. To be sure, there is a large amount of anxiety associated with breaking out of one’s comfort zone and venturing beyond old habits, but to do it together with someone is a beautiful thing.

since we’re gonna end up in hell anyway, might as well have some fun on the way down. @DH/JD

It’s about time.

Slightly jittery, still tired from lack of sleep over the past week. Tourettes have improved significantly. Minor migraine, possibly from TMJ, hopefully not the flu. In any case, it’s bad news . Communicated with David using solely Google translator for 1 hour. Epic.

Aiming to sleep early today, let’s see if I actually get around to it.

My trio of Samsung Spinpoint F3s (triplets! ) arrived in the mail yesterday, and needless to say, I was super excited to put them into my rig right away and configure a 2 TB RAID 0 (known as striping) as my boot volume. The whole thing went very smoothly; save for a few hiccups when I tried to load up the RAID drivers, I was able to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 in half an hour. My current set up is a pair of F3s in RAID 0 (boot volume), and two separate 1TB drives (the 3rd F3, and my original WD Black) as pseudo storage/back-up drives. I originally thought about doing a RAID 1 (mirroring) with my two remaining drives, but then realized it was overkill, especially since I don’t need the redundancy at the moment. I am, of course, making regular backups of my boot volume, since RAID 0 is more prone to failure (if one drive in a RAID 0 setup fails, ALL the data is lost). My rationale for opting for the 3 F3s instead of, say, a SSD is mainly price. Sure, I could have gotten a 60 GB or maybe even an 120 GB SSD for around the same price, but the Price per Gigabyte for and SSD is still ridiculously high at this point. I’d rather take 3 TB of storage capacity for now and wait until SSD technology further improves and prices begin to drop. I also couldn’t bring myself to spend about the same amount of money for one WD 300GB velociraptor. And plus, I wanted to play around with RAID .

I’m including a screenshot of a disk benchmark I conducted in EVEREST, comparing my RAID 0 setup with my F3 and WD. Needless to say, the average performance for the RAID volume is significantly better than the single drives (I’m consistently getting 2oo+ MB/s read averages). In fact the figures are about double the single F3 benchmarks (save for the buffered read), which is to be expected. On the whole, these improved times haven’t been too noticeable. My bootup is about the same (maybe 1 or 2 seconds faster?) Programs seem to run snappier though, with Photoshop CS5 loading up in seconds (would take at least 10 on my older computers). File copying (where RAID 0 excels) has also sped up noticeably. I haven’t installed all my games yet, but I’m interested to see if there are any noticeable improvements in that area…I’ve heard the main perks of a RAID 0 setup is faster loading times. I think this is a significant advantage for people who play intensive online FPS games. The half second you gain from a “faster” (less-laggy) respawn may make a difference in performance!

(click for larger image)

Two weeks later, and my PC is still running smoothly; most of the time it’s only using 1-3% of CPU. Needless to say, I’m impressed. I guess I’ll eventually OC the processor some time down the road, but it’s definitely not something I need to worry about at the moment.

I’ve installed Crysis (the so called “computer killer” of games), and despite it being the most racist game I’ve ever played (basically, you’re fighting against the NKoreans in the game, but they made all the AI look the exact same…I think David and I discovered only two different types of faces so far, different characters were just given different hats or accessories, LOL), everything still runs great at max settings.

On another note, I’ll finally be dragging my lazy ass to see Inception this weekend. I know, I know, it’s long overdue, but the fact of the matter is that I usually just tell myself that I can always download the movie later haha.

Well, it really could not have gone more smoothly, save for the “duh” moment where I completely forgot to plug in the 8-pin connector from the power supply to the motherboard. My new computer is running Windows 7 and every game on max settings extremely smoothly. I learned a lesson from my last build that you never want to skimp on your graphics card, and I definitely don’t regret shelling out a bit extra for a quality card this time around. I expect this build to last me through the next 5 years a least, notwithstanding a few upgrades that I may consider, e.g., getting a WD Raptor hard drive to speed up the OS.

I’m going to continue to use the new system heavily for another week or so just to ensure that there are no underlying issues, and after that, I’ll send in the necessary rebates and write my reviews on Newegg.

well, everything!  Lot’s of stuff going on, and I’ve been too busy/lazy to update.

I got my first paycheck this Tuesday, and although I had to pay taxes (well, technically the money is witheld for now), it was still pretty exciting. It’s good to be finally making money again, since commuting and eating in the city are not cheap.  I also just witnessed one of the most exciting matches of the World Cup this year: a 2-2 tie between USA and Slovenia. Although USA were down 0-2 at the half, they came back strong and tied it up. They actually scored a third goal, but the ref overruled it, on the basis of a foul (on Bradley?). Personally I thought it was a terrible call, since it’s clear in the replay that the US players are not comitting any fouls; on the contrary, several of them are being tangled up by Slovenian defenders…if anything the call should have been the other way around. But despite the fact that many fans felt that the US were robbed of a game-winning goal, it was still a great effort by the Americans, and definitely the most exciting match I’ve seen so far. Let’s hope that the US can beat Algeria and move on to the knockout stages (assuming England doesn’t get upset by Algeria, which I’m not ruling out completely…)

Aside from the World Cup, I’ve been rewatching an old Chinese wuxia series: Return of the Condor Heroes. Though the special effects are not of the best quality, it’s still one of my favorite wuxia series (I love Jinyong’s works in general).

Here’s to a wonderful weekend of exciting soccer and of course, Happy Father’s Day!