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Bryan went in for a scheduled check up last week. As part of the routine, the doctor wrote him up to get a blood sample to run some tests.

According to Grace, Bryan cried REALLY hard as the nurse was looking for his vain to poke a hole in for the blood sample. Nearby toddlers cried their lungs out as they got their blood drawn… I don’t know how I ever got through childhood having to visit the doctors so many times with so many damn shots… I wonder when painless shots will arrive given how medicine has gone through miracle phases in the past century…

Bryan cried so hard on the way home that he fell asleep. But then when he woke up, he picked up right where he left off and started crying as if someone turned his “crying mode” back to “ON” again… Poor baby… but it was a pretty damn funny scene.

I got up early today for my micro-economics. And then I came home only to find out that Widodo and Hanny had invited us to their BBQ… Watched Spiderman 2 again… It was a pretty relaxing Saturday.

Tired, exhausted and eyes seriously itchy from the seasonal allergy, I came home to seeing a big, white envalope with a huge SCAD logo sticking out of the mailbox.

It could only be one thing… But… it couldn’t be. Katharine Harris told me she only sent out my diploma on May 18. How could it have arrived within 2 days all the way from the East Coast?

But sure enough, it was my Master of Fine Arts diploma for Interactive Design and Game Development.

Now only if I have a good/big enough body of work to land on one of those “interactive design” teaching positions…

Either way, I am pretty psyched about finally getting this damn degree after having started the program back 1998. Then in 2000, a startup came calling and subsequently occupied all of my attention when I was merely one class away from completing the degree (only this startup story didn’t end quite as “romantically” ).

Fast forward to 2005: After 5 years of nagging from my mom, laughters from Murdza and hundreds of “are you done with your thesis” inquiries, I finally re-enrolled in SCAD’s e-learning system (which, by the way, is far more superior copmared to UC System), took a make-up class and finally finished my thesis in Feburary, 2006.

SCAD could have been really nasty, greedy (as many people contend that it is) and made me take all kinds of classes to make up for the 5 years I was away from the program. But it turned out that SCAD’s support system worked extremely efficiently and took care of me and my degree. Most impressively, all this was done via correspondence through emails, phone calls and official documents from SCAD. This is the kind of stuff that makes me endorse SCAD and [most of] its staff/faculty without any inhibition*.

One Master down, what’s next?

* If anyone from SCAD’s administration is reading this, please get rid of Jeff Jones. He’s one useless scum who’s ruining SCAD’s reputation everytime he deals with another human being on behalf of SCAD. Seriously, ask any International student and get the true story.

An old lady moved in next door after the previous neighbor moved out three months ago. She’s into rescuing cats and all that good stuff. She’s managed to catch two cats and got them “fixed” since she moved here. We wish we’d known that Palo Alto Animal Services can do a relatively cheap “catch and release” program without putting the animals down. After our last experience with the San Jose animal shelter, we decided not to do the animals any favors… But what Palo Alto is doing seems like a pretty good idea…

So anyway… back to the neighbor… She has decided to move out of the neighborhood despite having only lived in her new apartment for only about a month. She thought the neighborhood is not up to her standards because we have a few Hispanic neighbors who like to play their music a little loud. Within days of moving in, she’d already verbally exchanged “kind words” with them about their music (which never really bothered us). This reminds me of an NPR (more like “This American Life” ) episode with Mr. Rogers. The segment had a scenario exactly like this — dealing with loud neighbors. When people know each other, what someone else does doesn’t really bother one another quite as much. But when nobody knows each other, friction seems to get picked up a lot more quickly.

I guess we’ll be welcoming a new neighbor soon.

Bryan fell earlier this week. He landed on a piece of area rug where it made a “grill” impression on his forehead.

Doctor said it will be permanent. So much for a cute-looking boy. Well, at least we have lots of pictures of him WITHOUT the mark. He looks like he was branded by some Medieval lord…
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Did I say the mark was going to be permanent? Just kidding…

He did cry pretty hard though… Broke our hearts. Good thing kids are resilient and built relatively tough (relatively tougher than my stupid spine which has been killing me).
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Bryan was finally able to steadily feed himself small pieces of cheerios today (cheerio goes into the mouth as opposed into the nose or the chin). It was really cool to see. Speaking of cool stuff, he signed “milk” earlier today which freaked me out. But then he wouldn’t do it again on command. So it’s not exactly a circus show piece yet… Maybe in another month… then we can put him on the streets of downtown San Jose to beg for money, especially now that he can sit up relatively well too… I bet we can double the income if we can train one of our cats to jump through fire…

An interesting article from “The Economist” (thanks, Jason and “A”!) about how India’s rapidly growing movie industry is thinking differently:

Thanks to a boom in urban multiplex cinemas, the economics of Bollywood filmmaking is changing. Small-budget productions, often made by debutant directors experimenting with genres-such as “Being Cyrus”, a twisted tale of a dysfunctional Parsi family in Mumbai-are now finding audiences and critical acclaim. Big Bollywood players are taking notice: “Iqbal”, another recent release, was financed by Subhash Ghai, a powerful producer.

One group of aspiring directors hopes to avoid Bollywood altogether. The makers of “Betelnut Killers” are using a website to solicit “investments of as little as $100″ to raise $1m for their film about an Indian shopkeeper in a small American town who plots to get rid of an unwelcome rival. The word “investment” suggests an eventual pay-off, and indeed there is, according to the site-a credit at the end of the yet-to-be-made movie, a T-shirt crowing “Co-producer, Betelnut Killers” and exclusive rights to contribute to a blog. By early May, contributions totalled almost $14,000.

The website actually offers a fairly complete proposal on many aspects of the project. So if you ever want to put “Movie Producer” as a credit on your resume, this is the time to do it…

On a related news, Patrick has decided to let his hair grow until he sells his next movie script (or so he threatened his agent). Apparently Hollywood is a bitchy industry to be in… His wife, Ee-bin, said Patrick’s hair is now growing nice and long. I told Patrick if he still has his hair by Christmas, I’d buy him a dress! Hah!

Bryan’s been demonstrating some real personality traits in the past few weeks. Ever since birth, we have noticed nothing more than the fact that he smiles a lot (and cries when he sees Jason and “A” ). But now we are also noticing his strong personality traits when he likes or dislikes something. But then again, I am sure it happens to all 9-month-old babies.

Another interesting thing we noticed about Bryan is his newfound ability to associate a series of events based on prior experience. For example, when we change his cloths and puts him in his infant car seat, he now knows we are taking him out. So if Grace tricks him by taking him out of the car seat again, he complaints as if he’s saying, “I thought we are going out! I want to go… I want to go… I want to go…”

Bryan is also showing some of those “manipulative” sides of him when he wants attention. Sometimes I purposely don’t pay attention to him when he plays (we usually know he wants our attention when he plays as his big eyes look our way). He will then proceed to fall on his back and makes fussing sounds (he can’t sit up on his own yet) to get my attention — it’s really cute and funny… But I have a feeling this is going get really old really fast when he turns 3 or something… (or maybe it won’t).

Wow… Has it really been almost a week since I last posted that short entry on the baby blogs? Time flies.

I “got” all five seaons of Futurama and have been watching them one or two episodes everyday. It’s truly a great show with so much stuff in every episode. I don’t know how they can come up with so many ideas, work them all in an episode and cram them out in animated series. Simpsons have been good, but I think Futurama tops it with Bender — sort of a “blend” of Homer and what Bart will grow up to be.

Blogging rocks.

I accidentally discovered two parenting sites…

Parenting Ideas
Parent Hacks

Brian’s mom is right about information being so readily accessible nowadays. There’s so much to read with so little time! One day I am going to get one of those bio-chips implanted and become 1000x smarter and 1000x more memory-efficient.

Being a parent definitely is almost all rewards almost all the time. It’s not always fun, but it’s always satisfying — almost.

Watching Bryan growing up on the daily basis is a strange experience. There are times when I held him in my arms, rocking him to sleep, that I wished time could pause and that he’d stay a tiny baby forever… (until my back started aching like a thousand needles piercing through the spine.) But the truth is, time seems to have tripled in speed now that Bryan has entered our lives. I almost think it’s unfair that other parents have to work 8+ hours a day away from their child(ren) when i get to stay home with my son almost 24×7.

When Laura was constantly interrupting my conversation with Brian, I thought that was just super cute. And I thought to myself, “Some day that’s what Bryan’d be doing to ME when I talk to Brian.” I secretly envied Brian and Birgit for a brief moment. But then I thought I’d sorely miss Bryan at this very stage as Brian has confessed to me at times that he missed when Laura was just a tiny baby at times.

Bryan is going to have a healthy and comfortable life ahead of him. But just for my selfish pleasures and inconsiderate egocentric fatherhood, I hope he doesn’t grow up too fast — just so that his dada and nana can savor these fleeting moments before he leaps into his own independence.

I don’t know where he found it, but Murdza sent me a link to City of Cupertino’s webcast archives. And in it, there’s a short appearance of Steve Jobs announcing Apple’s decision to stay in Cupertino for its second campus it decided to build.

To view it, you can download the Real Player file here. Or you can go to the webcast archive, under “CITY COUNCIL MEETINGS”, and in the “MEETING VIDEO” drop down menu, select “April 18, 2006″ to download. When your player of choice launches, there should be a menu somewhere around the main video itself. Simply click on “Oral Communications”. Steve is the first one to speak.

Murdza said Steve looks drunk. I thought the image of him scratching himself didn’t look too graceful. But at least he was true to his all-too-cliche image… he wore a black turtle-ish long sleeve shirt with jeans. I wonder if he considers that outfit his uniform… I mean, I wear similar stuff all the time, but not to the extreme of wearing the same thing day in and day out… I guess the way he thinks is the same as how school administrators in most Asian countries think: Don’t get distracted by what you have to wear everyday to school/work. Thus, if everyone wears exactly the same thing everyday, there’s one less thing to worry about which allows one to concentrate on what matters the most — work.

Hu looks normal. But Gates and Ballmer look like idiots.

What’s up with Gates’ haircut? Did he fire his stylist again?

via [News.com]

After getting off of Skype with Brian ealier this morning, I started reading an article (Million-Dollar Murray) he sent me from earlier. The article is so fricking long that I had to break it up and read it thoughout the day. But it was more than worth the time it took to read. I haven’t read a powerful article like this in such a long time.

It started with a powerful story of a homeless man, Murray, an ex-marine, whose medical bills came out to an estimated million dollars over the years he’d been homeless. Quite simply, for the sake of economics, maybe it’s cheaper to just solve the homeless problem than to ignore it. But then on the ethical stand point, simply treating the homeless issue as an economic problem is almost immoral and unfair (unfair to those who work three jobs to put their kids through school but still makes too much to qualify for social services). And politicians on both sides don’t want to touch this issue precisely because of that — Republicans want to be fair, and the Democrats want to treat the issue with more dignity.

The article is broken up into five parts. If you don’t have time, at least read part one and part five to get a closure to Murray’s story. But if you can spare 20 minutes, the article will enlighten you on the issues of homelessness, economics and politics (and even pollution) in a way that you’d never thought about before.
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For those who have been in at least an Econ 101 class can probably still recall why rent control actually puts more people out on the street. The same reason applies to the very basic question as to why millions of people still live in hunger EVERYDAY even though there’s an over abundance of food collectively in the world. I used to think Economics is such a dull subject, but my instructor constantly attaches a human face to every single concept we learn in class, making each theory we learn unforgetable. The more I learn about the truths of how the world operates through the goggles of economics, the more frustrated I am about how the system operates. Malcolm Gladwell puts it best in the article:

Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases [referring to the hardest cases of the homeless people]. Power-law* problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

* Power-law is a systematic way to prioritize solving social issues using economics. We take care of the people who cost the system most resources first and then others later. This is what causes outcry from people who think this methodology is unfair.

Harsh realities versus principles of our ethics. What a predicament.