Money is the root of evil. Always.

Seriously though, how can people as dumb as a bag of rocks have so much money to spend on nice things that others can’t have because they’re too poor to buy them and have to resort to alternatives? Why the hell do these types of people buy things that they honestly don’t really need and waste so much money on them and never use their full potential? I’m talking about items such as iPhones, maxed-out MacBook Pros, and imported European cars such as BMWs and Mercedeses.

You know what drives me insane? Is that they buy those things, but all they do is just basic stuff they could do on different items. They bought a MacBook just to check email. I could check email at the public library, on a computer that’s about five years old, without the latest software, and still be safe about it. They bought it to also write shitty essays in Pages. They could’ve easily done the same thing on an Acer machine that costs barely even a fraction of the price of a MacBook and possibly do even more things on it than imaginable.

I’m not talking about Mac vs. PC. That’s for a different post. I’m talking about the people behind the Macs.

I get that some students buy Macs so that they don’t have to worry about compatibility, so that they can store photos more easily and so that they can have something that won’t give a flying crap if you drop it from a height (although a ThinkPad could survive an atom bomb), or professors want to look more elegant with it or whatever. But if you’re not either one of those who just has money and they prefer the brand name of “Apple” instead of some other cooler name like “Alienware”, then I will seriously give you the eye about it. And if you’re just buying it “because you can”, you’ll also get the eye about it. Think about it- there are kids dying in Africa!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy a Mac. I’m saying that if you don’t have a need for it, don’t buy a Mac just because you’ll think it’ll be easier for you to check your email, stalk around on Facebook and watch YouTube.

Same with cars too. Why buy a BMW or a Mercedes if all you’re going to do is drive to school and back and maybe the grocery store a couple times? You’re not a CEO or a famous person (that is, if you are a student) and don’t need to show off how rich you are. That just makes you look like a douchebag. Furthermore, if you crash it, you’ll be paying much more to fix it than you would on a Toyota or a Hyundai. Besides, the latter two mentioned last longer and are more fuel efficient than the more expensive imports.

And last but not least, don’t be one of these customers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

So on talking about alienation- just because someone’s had a hard time for a month doesn’t mean they should be ignored and, worse yet, have everyone’s feet wiped upon them. Yeah, they can be a prick at times, but that doesn’t mean to make things worse for them than they already are.

Okay, I’m done ranting for the night. kthxbye

As the clock is ticking until this year is up, I might as well reflect on what happened this year as long as I’m still sober. Kinda.

JANUARY:
That month, I realized that high school was utter BS. Most of my classes just wasted my time as I spent snoozing through them, doing the homework, and not getting anything out of them. Not because I was snoozing, but the fact that the teachers were bad and made me snooze. Plus, what kind of an idiot put the hardest classes in the first three periods of the day?! So, I had to switch and English class to a lower lane, which wasn’t a good move. But unfortunately, I had no choice. I couldn’t stand the existence of my previous teacher and would rather have some knowledge from a shady class rather than from some crazy, condescending woman who thinks that it’s a privilege to be in her class. Yeah, right. That’s when I also decided I’m going to go to Foothill Middle College.

FEBRUARY:
I had my US Open Music Competition! Although I didn’t win anything it was interesting to listen to other people play their pieces. Plus, when will be the next time you’ll ever play a piano in a church….on a basketball court?! That’s right, the competition was held on a basketball court. Beat that.

MARCH:
Oh the joyful Certificate of Merit. Although I barely did shit to prepare for it, I still managed to pull off a 5 from a judge who apparently gave 3s and 4s to some of the best students in the bay area. I don’t know how that happened, either.

APRIL:
Valve made probably the best video game ever in history. Portal 2 came out and it was only a matter of a few hours until I finished the entire game. And I STILL play it. It never gets old.

MAY:
All of a sudden, I realized that I had AP tests coming up. Well, actually only one AP test, the computer science one. Meh. Let’s move on to the fun stuff in the next month. Plus… I got accepted to Middle College!

JUNE:
The last weeks of June and the first week of July were probably the best of the entire year. The El Camino Youth Symphony had its tour those two weeks in Spain and France. We played at six five AMAZING concert venues (why not six? the other one sucked) and got outstanding publicity. Above all of that, it was just awesome to meet musicians across the globe and to bond with people who you’ve known for at least a year in the symphony. Oh and we made new friends with the young musicians in the conservatories there! Well, at least with one bassist who traveled with us throughout France. Apart from the musical stuff, our partying in the middle of the night, the bus problems and other mini-stories that are too inappropriate to post online, the two countries we visited were jaw-dropping. All of the monuments we visited were very interesting and eye-opening. Here’s my blog post about recollections about tour.

JULY:
Coming back home jetlagged on the fourth of July might not have been the best thing ever, but it was fully worth it after the tour. Nothing much happened in July other than just my buddy and I were chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool.

AUGUST:
August was an interesting month. Not only did a friend from Seattle come back for a couple weeks to California, but I also got to meet new people in the ECYS Retreat at UCSC. Not, it’s not bandcamp. It’s much more civilized than that. But anyways, it was fun to just hang out with people I’ve known for the past years, from tour, and just from other places. Oh and I got my drivers license that month! And even though people went to school in the last weeks of August, I got to relax for another month as the Foothill quarter doesn’t start until the end of September.

SEPTEMBER:
September is probably my most hated month of each year because of school and all that crap, but Middle College made it a whole lot more better. I met probably a few of the best friends that I’ll have for the rest of my life. These people just made school a whole lot more worth it. I love it. Also, my classes were so much more legit than the crap I got at Paly!

OCTOBER:
Ooooh. Fun stuff! We just had fun things happen on weekends and other awesome things happened. You know what was NOT awesome though that month? Having a physics final on Halloween. You know what else isn’t awesome? Having a physics lecture that night. You know what also isn’t awesome? Having a physics lab that night. But what was good was the ECYS Season Opener. It was a great night.

NOVEMBER:
Oh, the usual stuff happened. Nothing too major. Just another month, that’s all. But what redeemed it all was Thanksgiving. The turkey is always done right in my household. Not too dry, not too wet. It’s always good. Oh and the Paly Turkey Trot was good, too.

DECEMBER:
December is always a great month for me. Not only do I have a birthday there, but I also have a concert, Christmas, AND New Years party. Life is good when you have the friends, the atmosphere, and the awesomeness of it all. Although finals are a pain in the ass, they’re at least off your shoulders when you’re done with them and you don’t have to worry or study for them over the winter break. Hell, this is probably the best winter break I’ve had in a long time. I wish I had more of these. It’s awesome.

So yeah, that’s my short reflection on the year 2011. Hope you enjoyed it! Now, I’ll be off to party the crap out of this into what might be the very last year of our lives, 2012! Nah, I don’t believe that Mayan stuff, but oh well. LET’S MAKE THE MOST OUT OF IT NOW!

This has been something that’s been bugging me for quite a while. A lot of stinky rich wealthy folk now currently have some form of a smartphone, most particularly the iPhone. Although it is a blog post worthy topic, I’m not going to rant about upgrading from the iPhone 4 to the 4S, but rather I’m gonna ramble about the apps out there that I’ve seen a bunch of people use. Most particularly in Palo Alto, and even more specific, around the Town & Country area. Yeah, that shopping center with ridiculously overpriced menus. And so if you’re ready to hop aboard the train of my colorful rant, let’s begin.

1. Instagram

   Hello “great” photography on a very crappy camera. Instagram allows the user to take a photo in the app, add an effect to it and share it on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and your toilet paper. Okay, maybe not the latter, I knew they were missing something. But anyhow, this app made a lot of people with iPhones take crap quality photos of random things and post them on Twitter and Facebook for a living. If you want to increase your rating on my douchebag-o-meter, you can order for at least $100 photobooth strips of your images, however crappy they are.

2. Foursquare / Gowalla
   What’s more fun than checking in to places and letting the entire Internet know your precise location in real-time? Oh right, NOT DOING THAT. By showing off your location on Twitter, you’re doing nothing but wasting time telling people how sunny or how crappy it is where you are at that moment. Nobody cares about your travels other than your other, parents, and close friends. Point is, nobody wants to read your travels to the local gas station. You don’t get anything beneficial other than some digital badge which calls you a douchebag (literally). Oh and maybe a dollar off some already overpriced sandwich after the 20th visit check-in to the venue.
3. Any Twitter app other than the official Twitter app.
   This is especially if you paid any cent on it. WHY. Why why WHY would you need another app that does the exact same thing? iOS and Android already have it integrated into their system, why would you need to have another app to do the exact same thing? And pay for it too? It doesn’t matter if it’s only one dollar, but still- you’re wasting about 20 megabytes of your iPhone’s capacity with each extra app that you’ll use about twice and then revert to the normal integrated one. There goes one dollar per each download down the drain.
4. Find My Friends
   Apart from being utterly creepy,  it’s ugly as shit too. Who the hell designs a friend finder app with cowboys and leather in mind? Oh, and it also led to a divorce.
5. Flipboard
   Do you really need a “personal magazine” that will collect every single bit of information about you, put it all in a blender and barf out all the articles it think you might find interesting? Yeah, I thought so. Oh well, you don’t lose anything because it’s free.
6. OpenTable / OrderAhead
   Not only do these apps have names that make me boil (oh hey let’s be awesome and modern and name our app with two words and drop the space in between! so awesome!!1), but they also serve probably the douchiest customers. Only those would go and order food with the smartphone app and expect it to be ready by the time they arrive there. To begin with, they only serve a limited number of restaurants because they’re “elite”, but they’re also the most expensive on the planet. No, I won’t order a pathetic measly sandwich for $12 so that I can expect it to be fresh and ready for me to devour when I arrive at the cafe.
7. QR / Barcode scanners
   These types of apps bug me a lot. Sometimes I just want to tip over one of the unsuspecting people trying to bend over and scan a QR code of a restaurant or product in a CVS store.

Okay, now go download something useful off the app store.

Remember, this post is just for fun and satire. If you are the developer of one of the apps above, don’t take offense, please.

I wrote this beat poem as an assignment for a class and got an B+ grade on it. The assignment was to write a beat poem that was in relevance to Ginsberg’s poem titled “America”. Note: I wrote this with a sense of humor with no offense intended. If you don’t get it, well then.

America why are you so fat?
Your hamburgers and hot dogs
Makes me sick
I #2 after every meal in UCSC
So much grease.

America what’s up with your South?
All those rednecks
Driving in huge Chevy’s
Fat, loud, not-so creative rednecks.
Trying to imitate us Russians in solutions.

America why you so uneducated?
No wonder why you are in debt.

America quit being pretentious.
Your people didn’t invent the awesome technology
Immigrants on your territory invented them.
You didn’t do anything.

America quit being such douchebags
Driving around town with your Prius
Talking on an iPhone
Having movie theaters in your basement
Wearing Rolex watches
Having weddings meaningless like Kardashian’s
Hell, quit stalking her too.

America quit partying so much.
And clean up your ghettos.

America quit thinking marijuana is good.
It isn’t. Prove me wrong.

America quit sitting in front of TVs
Watching BS like How I met your Mother
or that weird hearing aid stabber thing you call Glee

America quit fussing over your facial appearances.
You won’t make it prettier anyway.
oh wait, skynet called. nevermind.

America, what will I ever do with you.

America when will you ever have normal music?
Your Black Eyed Peas deserve black eyes
My soul sister doesn’t need a song
and I don’t want to listen to a song calling me a jerk.
And songs overusing the word ‘baby’ too.
Wait.. nevermind, that’s Canada.
you autotuned robots.

AMERICA Y U NO TPE N CHAT NRMALY
AMERICA Y U USE INTERNET MEMES IN REAL LIFE
LOL!!!

America when will you quit tweeting so much?
@america quit talking about your big number 2s on the internet so much #pointless

America when will you quit being such douches about legalities and bureaucracies?
nobody cares about copyright infringement
damn you, VEVO. Damn you.

America why you do things like occupy wall street?
Like it will definitely get you a job by holding a sign in front of a web camera.

America quit studying sociology.
It isn’t a subject anyway.

America quit having stupid movies.
I didn’t need to see Bruno.

America, you disappoint me. Like, really.
Fix those stereotypes listed above.
And you’ll become a country like Europe.
Oh yeah, and Europe is a country. People speak French there.

Enjoy it. If you don’t, then don’t. No hate please. If you don’t get it, google in the phrase and you’ll probably find your answer. Frankly, I don’t understand the point of beat poems either.

[oh and UCSC's food is occasionally good, just not all the time. and that's with great exaggeration. at least in college 8.]

I’ve recently had all of my extra space removed from Dropbox and all of my invites that I sent out to people have been nullified due to a mistake on my part. So, I want your help. I want you all to click on this following link: http://db.tt/yFEAuM9 and create yourself a Dropbox account and install that on your computer. It only takes about five minutes to do and it won’t bomb up your computer or bugger it. It’s also very useful software as you can share pretty big files with other people and have free 2gb of space in the cloud. It’s kind of like an internet flash drive if you think of it.

It’s been nearly a couple of months since I last made a post, so this is kind of an awkward blog post to put up. Oh well.

Okay, I lied about the part where I’d be ranting more on why Macs suck. But this time, I’ll be ranting on something that ails all PAUSD students (if not all, at least most)… Paly vs. Gunn.

What led me to writing this post? A Facebook post. Here’s what it looked like:

Honestly, I don’t give a crap which school someone goes to. I have friends all over the SF Bay Area from San Francisco to Fremont to Palo Alto to Cupertino and to San Jose. Why is everyone so territorial about their place of residence? It’s just a city that several people live in. I constantly see scratches of “650″ or “EPA” all over Paly, even in places where you wouldn’t expect anyone to go into. Even people wear it like it’s some kind of talisman or something. WHY?!

But back to the topic, this pisses me off so much when people bitch at each other “we have a prettier campus than you” or “ha!!! we have a higher API score than you guys!”, or my all time favorite, “oh hey, my school’s so much better, we have some stinky shops right across the street while you guys have a cemetery!”

Come on. It’s just a school where your friends go to. Just because they come from a different part of the same exact city doesn’t make them your worst enemy that you have to avoid at all costs. Quit bitchin’ about it and grow up. Hell, you’ll probably have at least one person from the other school be in one of your courses in college.

Also, if you twerps recognise your writing in the above screenshot, congratulations, you sound like little kids who just picked up some new words and don’t know how to use them. Also, football sucks. Good night, I’m out.

Apple is trying all its best to try to get all of the PC customers to transition to a Mac. It started (or maybe it didn’t, I don’t care) with their TV ads of the Mac vs. PC, where it shows two douches that stereotype the typical user of a PC and a Mac. Here’s my response to that (not created by me, but you get the point):

Joking aside, Apple has this page on their site called “Why you’ll love a Mac”. Apart from having numerous grammatical errors on their headlines (“Make the ultimate upgrade. To a Mac?”), they’ve also included 9 big reasons why they think their product is supposedly superior to a PC (also, why do they call it “Mac vs. PC?” It’s not like a Mac is a Personal Computer as well… it’s like saying “Square vs. Rectangle”). So here are their reasons and my counter-reasons:

1. “It’s designed to be a better computer.” (When you buy a Mac you want it to last. And it will…)
   Exactly how does it make it a better machine if it’s more eye candy than performance? Sure, it may look beautiful (in fact a lot of people go apeshit over the design itself, as if Jonathan Ive was some god or something), it may feel nice when touched, but how exactly does it make it work better? It doesn’t solve the heat problem, it doesn’t solve the space problem (well, maybe the iMac, but then again HP has the same damn thing with a touchscreen), and it certainly doesn’t add wings and unicorn blood to its processor. It’s just the damn exterior. Oh, and about “built to last”: my old Pentium 4 machine has survived at least 5 years of being on in one computer case, been transferred over to a cardboard box, collected an ungodly amount of dust, transferred over to an even crappier and older computer case with the same PSU from 2003, survived computer-unhealthy room conditions and STILL goes strong, and it’s not even near dying. Well, my friend’s three year old MacBook decided to live a long life.
2. “It comes with software you’ll love to use.”
   This section talks about how a PC comes with a bunch of bogus software that nobody ever uses and how a Mac comes with all the software that’s “easy”. This reminds me of a book I once saw at Border’s that was published by O’Reilly, titled “Windows 7 Annoyances”. Why? Because the first page that I randomly flipped to described on how to “Delete All Programs”. Obviously a Mac user wrote this, as 1. they were referring to the “All Programs” menu in the Start menu and 2. they think it’s “annoying”. But anyways, sure, PC laptops come with bullshit software that nobody tends to use, but that doesn’t make them any worse than the Mac. Apple claims that anybody can make a movie, photo slideshow, playlist, website, and all those crazy bells and whistles right out of the box. Best of all, they’re using that argument against the PCs when they can do exactly the same things. iMovie? Windows Movie Maker. iPhoto? Windows Photo Gallery. iTunes? Windows Media Player (also, itunes.com). iWork? Microsoft Office. There’s so much more that Apple claims a Mac can do that a PC can’t when it can. …Maybe except for PhotoBooth. That, yes, isn’t included in Windows. Refer to the picture above as to why it isn’t.
3. “It comes with the world’s most advanced OS.”
   “Most advanced,” you say? Really? If it is the most advanced, why isn’t the government using it? Why isn’t NASA launching space shuttles with it? Why isn’t MRI powered by it? And with the new toys Lion boasts, how is that going to make it more advanced? By having more pretty animations and sharper graphics? Oh come on. There’s probably a reason why no professional institutions other than Apple and college students use Macs. Again, refer to the graphic above.
4. “It comes with award winning support”
   Okay, Apple wins with this one that I don’t reach India by calling 1-800-MY-APPLE. But this just proves that Macs are inferior. If they were really, REALLY superior, they wouldn’t even need support in the first place and that the built-in help and support section of the product would be sufficient. But then again, nothing runs on orphan tears so I guess they need that support. Guess it isn’t superior to the PC in this aspect, is it now?
5.  ”It runs Office and works with your existing PC files”
   I think any computer by now should run a .doc file. Hell, even my mobile phone can run and edit Microsoft Office documents. That doesn’t make it any superior to the PC. But let’s talk about Apple’s claim about working with existing PC files… being a kind of a programmer, I have to work with Java, C++, PHP, HTML, and what not. At least in C++, when I compile a program, Visual Studio makes an executable file (.exe extension). In fact, all Windows programs are .exe files with many supporting DLL files and other archive files that the program might need.
6. “It’s compatible with your stuff”
   RIGHT. Last time I checked, it couldn’t run my AVCHD files properly from my video camera. Sony doesn’t release Mac drivers for my HDR camera, so I guess this statement from Apple is null and void. Oh and it doesn’t run with many USB webcams either (not that it needs them, but for Hackintosh builders it’s a pain). Oh and Mac OS didn’t like my Canon MP480 for some reason.
7. “It doesn’t get PC viruses”
   …and PCs don’t get Mac viruses. Next!
8. “It’s loaded with the latest technology”
   …at the time it was shipped, yes. In a year, it won’t have the latest technology. But my PC could (if I get the money) thanks to its openness.
9. “It runs Windows and Windows applications”
   OMG! So does my PC! And so did my old PC, and so did the PC I owned before that, and so did my old Pentium III! And now it runs on a new computer!!1!
   Sarcasm aside, if Apple really wanted to dominate the computer industry, they’d make all the Windows apps work natively on the Mac platform without needing to install Windows or a virtual machine. This is just more proof that nothing good is made for the Mac as they’ve added a feature that can run Windows programs through BootCamp.

Now you’ve seen my counter arguments. Just keep in mind that most of my posts are supposed to be funny, satirical, sarcastic, and are written just for fun without intentional harm. If you’re an Apple fanboy and you are offended by this, I suggest you seek professional help.

Next blog post will be more ranting about why Mac is not so great. Hint: Maddox is probably gonna be a source for some things. It will be soon, but I’ll take a break for now as this one took two days to write. Also, it’s 1160+ words.

Not that the book itself is a challenge, but reading it in a week in its original language is one. 900 pages (or 1500 Kindle pages for me) in a week is quite the amount. I won’t probably be online that much for this week as I’ll be working on my music stuff and reading this behemoth of a book. Well, not really a behemoth (the REAL behemoth was War and Peace, even that I didn’t finish reading (er.. start reading)).

Seriously. I’ve had this happen to me and someone I know a while back. Just recently someone’s father decided to talk shit about me. I’m not someone who would take offense at that because I’m used to being spread shit about, but that dad also decided to talk shit about someone else who I really care about (I won’t tell who it is to preserve privacy). But still, I really now want to break that guy’s nose. That person who he was spreading crap about is very close to me and it bothers me more than when it’s taken to my face. I’m not saying it doesn’t bother me, and I still want to punch him for doing so, but when they talk shit about people close to me, that lets the bear out in me. Just my thoughts for the day. Pardon my English language.

It’s already 1:05pm and I already hate my day.
Where to begin. First off my landlords decided to put up a sign saying everyone to remove their cars from the garage as they are going to be repairing the garage ceiling. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t post it right before they would start working on it. So pretty much I had a rude awakening of people banging on my floorboard under my bed in the garage.
Now I’m standing in line for a school picture. Apparently they’re behind schedule by 40 minutes. Great!!
And now god knows what will happen next since I’m not going to be taking classes at Paly but rather at Foothill because of the Middle College program. I can imagine what my Paly schedule would be… All periods “empty!”