little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

Proof

Six years ago, I was on The Weakest Link. A bunch of posts were written about the experience, most of which was wrapped up nicely in essay form and published in a book. And finally - FINALLY - I’m able to upload the video to the Internets and embed it relatively easily.

Me on The Weakest Link from Ernie Hsiung on Vimeo.

I’m the blond girl in the flowery dress. Ha ha, just kidding.

But Ernie, you say. It’s 2008 and this was years ago. Why now? Sixty percent of the motivation is because the movie file was on a VERY old laptop I don’t use anymore - whereas in 2003 I had to host the file, embed the file, and not guarantee the movie will play properly due to your settings. Now everything is centralized and people embed video without second thought.

As for the other 40 percent: pure vanity - why fight it? I’d like to think that if I were suddenly to disappear from his earth tomorrow I’d like to be remembered, that there would be digital evidence that I had actually existed somewhere. And what better evidence than millions of zeroes and ones, forming the shape of me answering the question of “what is 9 x 5″ on national television?

(And to Tom, who recorded the episode for me a long, long time ago: Thank you. I owe you a beer.)

Where Anil extols the virtues of Snoop-Dogg’s new video

Anil: http://snoopdogg.com/player/default.aspx?mid=3578&bhcp=1

Ernie: oh no. the first second…
Anil: you has no idea
Ernie: he hasn’t even started performing yet
Anil: i’m telling you
Anil: it’s beyond anything you can imagine
Anil: i’m writing a book-length post on it now
Ernie: [watching now]
Ernie: …
Anil: YOU LOVE IT
Ernie: OMFG THERE’S A WIND MACHINE
Anil: you ain’t seen shit
Ernie: i am honest to god speechless
Anil: i win! i think it’s so special

Ernie: did they fucking put PCP in his weed?
Anil: no they put GENIUS in it.
Anil: this is why he’s snoop dogg

Ernie: this is on level with ice cube starring in kids movies, except… completely not
Anil: right
Anil: cube went soft
Anil: like, eddie murphy soft
Anil: meanwhile snoop got even more real
Anil: he’s like “yeah, i used to kill people. now look at my round bed in space.”

Playlist: BPR’s Shuffled

Last year, I compiled a playlist of the music I played the most throughout the entire year via last.fm and made a mix CD for all of my friends. It turned out to be a one-time thing, but when Boston Progress Radio asked me to contribute for their Shuffled! project - write about the songs that come up on their iPods in shuffled mode - I thought it was a good idea.

The fact that my iPod has mostly songs that I’ve played the most in 2007 is just pure coincidence. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

The blog post for bprlive won’t be out for another month or two, but here’s an unabridged version of what I wrote for the post:

1. Tracey Thorn - It’s All True [video]

   I’m a huge fan of Everything But The Girl, thanks to a little Todd Terry remix of “Missing” that I listened to over and over again in college. This is my favorite track from her solo album - her sultry and sad vocals complement the driving electronic beat nicely. This is my pinnacle “dance in the kitchen while you’re washing dishes” song.

2. Inara George - Fools Work [video]

   Doing some YouTube searches on Bird and the Bee I came across this simple but beautiful music video by it’s lead singer, Inara George. The video was enough for me to run on iTunes and buy the entire album on the spot. The song is both memorizing and heartbreaking.

3. Federico Aubele - Postales [video]

   I’m a big fan of Thievery Corporation, and I’m a big fan of Gotan Project. So when someone in Brazil that I met off a social network recommended recommended this Argentine down-tempo artist to me, well, there’s no real way I’m going to NOT like the album. I listen to this track in bed before I drift off to sleep - the accordion and classical guitar is perfect to chill out to.

4. The Cat Empire - In My Pocket [no good video on youtube]

   I can’t find a good video for this song on YouTube. This is a damn shame, because this is an incredibly fun song by an incredibly fun Australian fusion band - you know, those rock, rap, ska fusion bands that have a brass section that play songs that frat boys smoke weed to. Should you get a chance to listen to this song, wait until the “na na na na” part, and I guarantee that you’ll have the tune in your head for the rest of the week.

   Coincidentally, this is the only song in this shuffle mix where it’s a guy singing vocals. Draw your own conclusions.

5. Tokyo Jihen - 遭難 (sounan) [video]

   I picked up both of Tokyo Jihen’s albums when I went on vacation to Tokyo this year. I won’t lie - because this song is in Japanese I have no idea what lead singer Shina Ringo is singing about. I don’t care. This song rocks.

6. Catherine McPhee - Over It [video]

   Up to now, if you didn’t know any better you would think I’m only into indie, or at the very least, non-mainstream music. This is an outright lie, as I’m actually one of the biggest whores of pop music you’ll ever meet. Case in point, Catherine McPhee, runner-up to Taylor Whatshisface in American Idol. Pop music - especially cheesy ballads - is awesome because they capture one emotion amazingly well: the feeling of getting your heart ripped out from your chest and being stomped into a million pieces. Or convincing yourself that you will get over said heart-ripping, when everyone knows you’re really just fooling yourself.

   I had a couple of heart-stomped-on moments last year, and Ms. McPhee has done wonders for my sanity. For which, I am truly grateful.

7. Priscilla Ahn - Dream [video]

   Asian American artist alert! I first heard about Priscilla Ahn on MP3 blog aurgasm.us, where the following comment was posted on the blog: “A songbird voice, if ever I’ve heard one. She makes me relax and feel like I am sitting right in the middle of nature. To be able to sing a song and bring a near 60 year old woman back to feeling like she’s 12 again is an amazing feat.” Yeah, that pretty much describes it nicely. Dream kinda makes me want to cry.

A completely fictional phone conversation with my mother…

…after the events of today. (Mandarin, like always, is in italics.)

(The cellphone rings.)

Ernie: Hello?
Ernie’s Mom: SEE!? I TOLD YOU YOU SHOULD HAVE STICKED TO THE BUTTERFLIES!

(Cut to Mom high-fiving Steve Ballmer, turning to the camera and both giving the thumbs-up sign. Cue laugh track, fade to black.)

The BravoNation Book

So like any good web application, BravoNation, the site I’ve been working on at Yahoo!, also offers a badge. This is ours, developed by Jeffrey Bennett.

Kinda cool, huh? Kind of like that scene from Jurassic Park where that eight year old girl says she knows Unix. (And if anyone wants an invitation, let me know still.)

As far as the possible news about layoffs? I’ll deal with it when I get there. I’ve dealt with it before.

Change it to the Butterflies

For the past couple of months or so, my mom has been nagging me to buy her a computer - when my parents split, my dad moved out of the house and got a new laptop and DSL service, leaving my mother with a old computer running Windows 2000, a hand-me-down keyboard and one of those fucked up boxy CRT monitors that you only see when television news crews do stories on public libraries and elementary schools. (Well, actually, my dad got a new laptop and new DSL service and bought a new condo and a new SUV. But that’s not the focus of this blog post.)

Mom: I want a new computer. With a big monitor. BIG MONITOR.
Ernie: What are you going to use the computer for, mom?
Mom: I want to check my e-mail.

I know full well that buying a new computer and Internet service for my mother is a lose-lose situation: if my mother doesn’t use the computer at all, I essentially have bought her a very expensive paperweight. But if my mother learns to use the Internet too well, my mother suddenly has access to everything I’ve ever published over the World Wide Web. EVERYTHING. Thankfully, “the future” has let us down on many things - Chinese-to-English machine translation being one of them - so I push on with my plan to purchase my mother an early Christmas present: an iMac.

A $1,600 dollar, 20-inch iMac.

The iMac isn’t so much a computer as it is a big shiny white version of modern technology; a computer that was so different from the previous six year old desktop computer that it would be a symbol that her technically adept son does care about her, even through consumerist means. And it has a big monitor. I could just walk into the Apple store, buy a computer, set it up for her with a dial-up service, and that would be that, right?

Wrong.

1) Buying the computer is easy enough. The nice geek in the Apple shirt swipes your credit card, goes to the stock room and hands you a thirty pound box. You then carry the thirty pound box half a mile to the parking garage, then an additional mile to the other parking garage when you realize that your mother has guided you to the wrong parking garage. (OPEN NOTE TO VALLEY FAIR MALL, SAN JOSE CA: WHY THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TWO MACY’S ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE MALL? SERIOUSLY, FIND YOUR MALL DESIGNER AND SHAKE HIM FOR ME. <3, ERNIE)

2) Purchasing dial-up Internet service is surprisingly difficult nowadays, especially when you're sitting in a house that doesn't have Internet service, and your mom is looking over your shoulder baffled as to why she can't get her e-mail, while the giant-monitor computer is plainly in front of her. Gone are the days of AOL CDs, and the one time I wanted a desktop icon to install dial-up Internet service for my mom, there was none. I end up being up-sold at a local Best Buy and end up buying a DSL Modem for my mother. DSL service, which takes up to four days for the telephone company to install. Which means I have to come back to my mother's house again in a week.

3) Once the DSL finally works, I sit my mother down, set the mouse pointer and font sizes annoyingly large, and load up Safari. My mother is finally ready to drive on the Information Superhighway, and god knows that she's going to be a crazy old Asian lady about it and drive hella slow and piss everyone off.

Ernie: And here you go. Look, it even has Yahoo! Taiwan on the front page! You don’t even have to type anything.
Mom: I don’t want Yahoo!. I want the one with the butterflies.

“The one with the butterflies,” of course, is MSN.com, the service she had when my parents were on dial-up.

Ernie: But Mom, I work for Yahoo!. You know that, right? That I work for Yahoo!? See that link to your left? Mom, I WORKED ON THAT.
Mom: Yes, I know. But the butterflies, they are so colorful!
Ernie: The site is in English. MSN Taiwan doesn’t even look right on Safari with big fonts. Are you going to be using the page at all?
Mom: Change it to the butterflies!
Ernie: …

Ernie: Okay, we’re ready to set up your e-mail. What’s your e-mail address?
Mom: … I don’t have an e-mail address.
Ernie: I thought you were going to use this to “check your e-mail.”
Mom: Eventually. How would I be able to write e-mails anyway? You don’t know how to write in Chinese.
Ernie: I’m going out for a cigarette.
Mom: I thought you quit smo-
Ernie: I’M GOING OUT FOR A CIGARETTE.

So yeah. With my hard-earned time and money, I just invested in a very nice computer for my mother. That she’ll probably won’t use. On the flip side, she probably doesn’t know that I’m writing about her on the Internet. I’m making a long bet that she won’t know how to type my full English name into a search engine. If there’s a God in Heaven, He’ll keep her from typing my name in a search engine.

BravoNation

(I’ll make this post short and sweet, as I accidentally lost my previous blog entry. And honestly, I’m getting tired of seeing embedded videos of myself.)

But yes, I can now officially talk about BravoNation - the project a group of us been working on in the past couple of months and one of the main reasons why I returned to Yahoo! after a four month stint working in Canada. The product is currently in a closed public beta, meaning we’re currently offering invitations for people to check out the system and give constructive feedback. (And yes, if you want an invite, go ahead and contact me - I’ll see what I can do.)

What is BravoNation, you ask? BravoNation is an achievements community website and API platform. Andy Baio has written up a pretty in-depth overview of the system, and Gordon talks about it a little bit on Yahoo! Next* as well, so you can read all about it there. For those of you that aren’t so much techies as you are gamers, think “Xbox Live Achievements, but for community websites.” (For those of you that aren’t gamers, think “the bastard child you get when you cross a thank you e-card with Magic: The Gathering,” or something like that.) If it sounds like there’s a lot of gaming elements in the product, it’s because there is - most of the team are huge gamers, and we adopted a lot of gaming principles into the application. It’ll be interesting to see what crosses over well and what doesn’t. It’ll also be interesting how the product - and our roles - will change and evolve over the next couple of months. And by “interesting,” I mean a mix between “exciting” and “petrifying.”

For those that couldn’t give a shit about BravoNation, I offer this personal moment: everyone on the team sits together. We also just happen to all be Asian American. And because we’re politically correct like that, we called ourselves “Chinatown.” Gordon even brought moon cakes once for the Lunar Festival! Seriously, you should see us do a dramatic recreation of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year’s Parade - it’s good times.

(Somewhere in Sunnyvale, someone at the Yahoo! Human Resources Department just buried her face in her hands and started sobbing.)

But in the meantime, yay us. I’m going to bed.

Marker spooge

Last week everyone competing in the Gay Bloggies had to undergo the following challenge: “Make a short film (no more than 5 minutes) on any subject matter. It can be of any genre - Comedy, Documentary, Horror, etc. Share with us the inspiration behind the piece.” We had two days, and I had never had any previous video recording or editing experience.

So I decided to do an interpretation of… a porn scene. Using magic markers. What. (Note: NSFW AUDIO)

Some geek footnotes:

• I was all ready to do this with the webcam in my MacBook pro, but my neighbor Laurie saved the day and let me borrow his pocket video camera. Doing this was surprisingly fun, but I’m not really the type to videotape stuff and I’m not sure if I can justify buying a video camera, solely for vidcasting. The world doesn’t need a fat Asian version of Lonelygirl15.
• You might notice I posted this on Jumpcut instead of YouTube. I used Jumpcut for two reasons: because I share an office with them, and because I knew their spiel was that you could edit video online. As someone whose first experience editing video was with Jumpcut, I have to say I was impressed. The UI was simple enough where my eyes didn’t glaze over, but I could still edit clips and add effects and what not. Count me a fan.
• As for the porn music: “Take Me Now!” by Nick Chapman, used with a Creative Commons license. I’m fairly certain that when the Creative Commons license was created, it was specifically for this purpose: for people to use porno music for two minute Internet skits about gay magic markers having sex, without being sued for copyright infringement.

All in all though, from video from concept to finish took around three or four hours. Not too bad.

The Gay Bloggies, part 2

I’m competing in the Gay Bloggies this year. It’s in the form of a webgame. A webgame where people vote.

More than a year ago I was nominated for the the same awards, similar to the Weblog Awards that are announced every year at the SXSW conference except with categories like “Best porn star,” “Sexiest Queer candy” and sponsored by a bunch of gay porn all-male adult entertainment websites. I didn’t win the “Best Gay Asian” category, and after a year of therapy and mild sedatives to dull away the thought of being the “WORST GAY ASIAN EVER,” I’ve moved on with my life.

When they invited me to join the contest, I hesitated. Blogging now is very different than when the first community of bloggers developed in 2000 - it was a time before 9/11, corporate blogging or social networks like MySpace gave non-computer nerds an internet presence. Nowadays, it feels like people are more self-aware about putting things up on the Internet to reveal to the entire world, and rightfully so - the blogs I skim across now seem to have blog titles like “15 WAYS TO MAKE MORE MONEY OFF YOUR BLOG” or “20 WAYS TO EFFECTIVELY ENGAGE YOUR BLOG READERSHIP.” (And yes, there is a little hypocrisy in writing that since creating 8Asians and dabbling in corporate blogging. Thank you for noticing.) Gay blogs in particular seem to be hyper-glossified (thanks for the word, pk) with posts about celebrity gossip or targeted ads for gay cruises or HIV medication. Hey, I’m a blogger that wouldn’t mind getting paid, but that doesn’t necessarily mesh with my vibe, either.

Then I found out they were offering $2,000 for the winner. And subscriptions to gay porn sites, but mostly $2,000. Two thousand dollars is also the answer to the question, “How much money will Ernie sell out to compete in a contest sponsored by what is, essentially, a gay porn portal?” Ding.

So here I am, competing against a former go-go boy and a porn star and a bunch of guys with really good abs and Dan from The Real World: Miami. (A sidenote: Dan actually sent me a really nice e-mail to me, saying that he called into a radio show and was going to “wipe my face on the floor.” Which is really awesome when you think about it - it’s kinda like Omarosa from the Apprentice popping out of the television “The Ring” style and telling you that you totally suck. Kinda.)

I feel like I’m probably not going to win, but it’s an experience I’ll take full advantage of. It’s been a while since I’ve been motivated to write on a regular basis, and I’ll probably repost some of the stuff I’ve written there on LYD as well. You can visit the contest here, but a word of warning - while my content will be tame for the most part, I can’t gaurantee the same about the banner ads and the links and my competition. (In other words, quite possibly NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Alas.)

Che’nelle (and other urban artists)

If LYD seems sparse (it always seems sparse, doesn’t it?) I’ve been posting on a bunch of other blogs lately. While I’ll link or cross-post about my other blogging endeavors in due time, I recently wrote a post on 8Asians.com about Asians and Asian Americans in urban music - all three of them.