fling93 loves fishies

The titles are links to the post's excerpt within this category archive page. The dates are links to the post's excerpt within its monthly archive page.

"Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends..."

Hello. My name is Felix. Felix Ling. And I have a blog.

And now that grad school is done, I've come back. A lot has happened. More later…

Katrina Bleg

By now, I hope you've heard about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. If you haven't yet donated, please do. Give to the Red Cross or to the charity I gave to, America's Second Harvest (we already give regularly to the Red Cross), or pick a charity of your own choosing. Pretty please! With a cherry on top!

If that's not enough motivation for you, well consider some of these:

Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy had an interesting challenge, where his donation would increase from $200 to $1,000 if enough readers promised to do the same. He's already reached that $1,000 level, but he's welcoming further $1,000 matches.

For a challenge that hasn't yet reached its goal (and for those of you of a more liberal persuasion), you can contribute to the Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief, who have a goal of $1,000,000 (link via Liberals Against Terrorism).

If you want a more tangible incentive, consider Jane Galt's tantalizing offer:

Being a journalist, I'm afraid I can't afford matching funds, nor do I have anything nifty to offer like the folks at Crooked Timber have. But I'll offer this: for every hundred dollars you donate to a recognized charity (or the Lake Providence effort), I will mail you a homemade pound cake. I'm a pretty good baker. If you donate $250, I will write a blog post about anything you like*. It's on the honor system; just use the NZ Bear registry, or email me.

Mmmmm! Pound cake from the ever-effervescent Jane Galt! That's a deal I couldn't (and didn't) turn down. But for those of you watching your belt line, the Crooked Timber offer she refers to is Ted Barlow's promise to burn you a custom mix CD if you donate at least $100.

Me, I don't know what I could offer. I have quite a few artistic talents, but all of them are quite unremarkable. Well, how's this? If you donate at least $100 to a hurricane-related charity, I'll write at least an eight line rhyming poem about you and post it here. You can see the silliness I've composed before. It's not exactly fine art, but probably the best I can offer in terms of entertainment value.

We'll go by the honor system. Just e-mail me the name of the charity and the amount, plus enough information about you for me to work with (at least your name, occupation, and a hobby or interest or two). No promises on when the poetry will be done, as I'm taking two night classes this semester. And definitely no promises as to the quality. But I'll do my best!

Reconnecting with a few dormant artistic interests

I apologize for the lack of posting lately, and since I'm not actually writing a real post right now, let me at least explain what's been going on (nothing to worry about!).

Anyway, there was my vacation in Montreal (and in case you missed them, here are all of the ridiculous number of photos, and my sister has some as well, although many of hers are visible only to her Flickr friends). I've jotted down a lot of notes and memories and have been meaning to post them, at least on my LiveJournal, but I haven't had the time. And alas, I know that it's going to be harder as time goes by.

This is because work has been dominating my life for the past month. I'll refrain from going into more detail, because that's how bloggers end up getting fired. But I really just don't have the energy to be working 60-hour weeks anymore and still be able to craft a blog post that I feel is worth putting up here. In fact, it's been rather overwhelming, and most of my free time has been spent just vegging out in front of the TV or PS2. When I'm not vegging out, I haven't really been in a mood to write, but have instead been exploring other creative areas that I've been neglecting, namely music, drawing, and even photography.

Vacation (All I Ever Wanted)

I'm on vacation in Montreal! Totally flingalicious blogging to resume next weekend sometime.

Rambling, Running, Ranting, Romping (but alas, no Raving)

Couple of totally unrelated things I wanted to talk about. So this is going to be one of those rambling posts that don't really go anywhere.

Running

First off, I ran in the 28th Annual Bridge to Bridge Run in San Francisco on Sunday. I'd run it a few times before, but this was the first time in about five years or so. I used to be in much better shape at my last company, where we had a weekly volleyball game. Plus we had a co-worker who was an avid biker (and by avid, I mean he regularly does centuries), and he would organize these mountain-biking trips almost every week. And I also used to play some pickup basketball every week on Sunday. I'd be in such great shape that running a 10K would really require no extra training.

Nowadays, I don't really do any of that. The company I work at is much smaller, and the only semi-regular sporting event is cricket, which I tried but isn't really my thing. I haven't biked in over a year. That pickup b-ball group fell apart, and I haven't yet found another one. Combined with the fact that I'm spending a lot more of my free time writing for this blog, and I haven't exactly been keeping myself in shape this past year.

But then, as I mentioned earlier this year, my cousin Rich entered a triathlon. Rich had never really been all that athletic, but a friend of his convinced him that this was something that anybody could do with the proper training. Indeed, I think that is true for a good many things, including writing (which I'll hopefully discuss further in a future post). Being inspired by that example and knowing full well that a specific goal is very helpful for motivation, I decided to run the Wharf to Wharf 10K in Santa Cruz this year. Rich signed up as well (and my wife too, as a walker).

Busy, Busy, Busy

Okay, maybe I was wrong about last week being unusual. I think my general lack of free time may be an ongoing theme for a while, so posting may get a little more erratic. If you're not yet reading this site using an RSS feed news aggregator, I'd highly recommend it. I was hoping to blog on that sometime, but in short, it saves you the trouble of browsing to websites to see if they're updated. Instead, when the site has a new post, the aggregator grabs it for you to read. This is real handy if you follow a lot of blogs and websites and news sources, especially if some of them update irregularly.

I still hope to post at least a once a week, but let me tell you what's been going on so you'll understand if I don't.

Busy Week

Update 8/24/04: Whoops, I'd left out a bunch of stuff on Sunday I meant to mention. Added that, plus a few other odds and ends.

Well, apologies for yet another slow blogging week, but this time I had an excuse, since it's been a fast and furious week out in meatspace (uh, that's the “real world”, for you people not addicted to blogging). Let me recap it.

My Balloon Fish Hat

Well, I doubt any of my readers were there, but if you saw Astral Projection (or rather, @$tr@L pR0j3cTi0n — a kick-ass psytrance group by any other name) at 550 Barneveld in San Francisco last night and noticed a silly guy with a balloon hat with a cute orange balloon fishy on top (thanks to the lovely Missy!), well, that was me.

Yeah, I seemed to think the hat had special powers.

I might post some more details later (if they aren't too incriminating), but for now, Cormac has a bit of a rundown (and you might be able to pry some more embarrassingly humorous tidbits from Sylvia).

Update 11/17/04

Don't know why I didn't mention this before (I suppose I was saving it for a future post that I never got around to writing). But reading about how Buzz noticed iTunes being used at a Vegas nightclub reminded me that the DJs at this thing were using visualizations up on big screens (trippy visual effects for tripped out dancers, go figure), and I recognized some screens using no other than Andy O'Meara's G-Force, and as my blog post on such continues to be one of my highest-trafficked posts (after the Bush one), and as my… um… mixed poisons gave me a heightened sense of self-importance, I assumed they found out about it from my blog. Wackiness ensued.

And yes, this was part of how I came to the conclusion that I was Neo, sent here to lead everybody to write in Tyler Cowen for President in the last election. Well, by now you know how that worked out.

From Beneath You...

Well, like everybody else, I could blog about Reagan, or George Tenet resigning, or maybe about that fantastic seven-game Stanley Cup Finals. But instead, for reasons that will become apparent, I'll just talk about our weekend at the excellent Claremont Resort & Spa up in Berkeley.

I'd booked us a room and a couple of 80-minute therapeutic massages to celebrate my wife's birthday and graduation. While the massages were absolutely heavenly, the view from the room was spectacular (deluxe bay view), and yes, it even came with free Internet access (not that I needed it to feed any sort of blog addiction whatsoever), we'll forever remember something else…

As we were settling in and I was admiring the view, my wife called to me from the bathroom. “Come here! You've gotta see this!”

I rushed over to see… two toilets.

“No, silly,” she said, with obvious excitement. “It's a bidet!”

Strange Connections

Here's two seemingly unrelated posts from some fellow SFBayBloggers that I just had to tie together. According to Rich Thomas:

Phil Collins is coming to San Jose on his First Final farewell Show. … I know that Phil Collins has to be someone's favorite artist. I just cannot imagine who those people are.

Here's a reason he shouldn't be your favorite artist, especially if you live in the Bay Area. Per Mark:

This morning a mountain lion was spotted in a Palo Alto neighborhood. “If you see a mountain lion, don't run, but instead raise your arms and open your jacket to look bigger.”

And, of course, according to Phil, No Jacket Required. So if you listened to Phil Collins, you'd be royally screwed, not having a jacket with you to scare away the mountain lions.

And so, the moral of the story is that I'm terminally weird.

Season's Greetings

Just thought I'd showcase my wondrous talent in MS Paint to wish everybody a…

Keiko Is Dead

No, not O'Brien's wife from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but the star of Free Willy. No, I've never seen the films, but for a guy who likes fishies, this is sad news:

For kids, Keiko the killer whale was the charming hero of “Free Willy.” For biologists, he was the focus of fierce debate on whether captive animals could be returned to the wild. Keiko, who died of pneumonia this week, never strayed far from humans, keeping company with them in a Norwegian fjord to the end.

Keiko's apparent love of human company — and his popularity — frustrated handlers' dreams that he would one day leave them in search of food on his own. Millions of dollars were spent trying to teach him to survive, but he didn't bond with other whales, apparently feared swimming under ice and died less than two years after he was freed.
…
Keiko's handlers noticed on Thursday he had become listless, and the six-ton orca died Friday afternoon despite veterinarians' efforts to save him.

“It was pretty sudden,” his animal care specialist, Dane Richards, told The Associated Press. He said Keiko's handlers went out to check on him during a late afternoon blizzard and he was still alive. Two hours later, he had died.

The whole article tells a pretty interesting story of Keiko's life. Anyway, killer whales aren't actually fishies; they eat fishies. So maybe I should be happy, instead? Of course, I eat sushi myself. Can't bring myself to give it up. :( And I love kitty cats, and they eat fishies, too. Ditto with dolphins.

Grammar Wars

Kevin Drum takes on the great evil menacing our society: the mighty apostrophe. The Telegraph argues for correct punctuation:

...punctuation makes it easier to plot your way through the highways and byways of the English language.

Kevin responds:

...it is 100% wrong for the apostrophe, a piece of punctuation that serves no purpose at all. The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused

Aside from the important distinction between singular and plural possessives, I think apostrophes serve another purpose: making it easier for the human brain to identify a word. The brain actually doesn't parse every single letter in the word before it recognizes it; it looks at the overall word shape.

Reorganized My Archives

I've reorganized the archives a bit to have a more scaleable directory structure and recognizable filenames, so if you've bookmarked or linked any of the individual entries, you may want to update them (note, this doesn't effect your bookmark to this main blog site -- hey, you got here, right?). The old files are actually still in their original locations for now. I may even eventually get them all to redirect to the new locations (like this one), but maybe not. It's a lot of work, and I don't think too many of you really care.

And do note that they will not be updated when I go back and make changes and corrections (e.g. my fixing of the misspelling of Alegria). Okay, even fewer of you care about that. But note this, and note it well! The presence of the old files may annoy me enough someday that I'll just delete them! After all, we're talking about a guy who makes sure his CDs are oriented right-side-up inside their jewel boxes.

Ooooh, I'll bet yer scared now, huh?

Mmmmmmmm! Yummy food!

Mmmmmmmm! Yummy food!

Break for the Holidays

I'm flying down to Southern California tomorrow morning to visit my folks for Thanksgiving. I don't have a laptop yet, so I might not update this site very much for the next week, and even if I do, it'll probably be pretty useless stuff, like, "Mmmmmmmm! Yummy food!" Come to think of it, that'd probably be more interesting than the stuff I usually post.

Anyway, take care and have a Happy Thanksgiving! I'll be back on Monday.

My Hair Is Blue!

Well, not all of it, just in patches and chunks. And given that the rest of my hair is black, it's actually not immediately obvious unless the lighting's really good. And yes, it's on purpose.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, fishies are so cute, the way they swim around... if only they were furry so you could pet them, like kitty cats, but then the kitty fish couldn't roam around your place unless you filled it with water, which is so damn inconvenient, so what we really need are anti-gravity kitties with fins... Ooops, that's what I'm thinking... err... I mean that's what somebody else (who's really weird) is thinking. You're probably thinking, so, what the heck is a 30-something Asian guy doing with blue hair?

New Server is Up

If you're reading this, then the new server is up (yay!). Welcome! I've tried to keep the look and feel pretty similar, with most of the enhancements in the archiving. Let me know what you think (especially if it looks wrong in your browser -- I've only tested it on Opera 6 and IE 5 and 6). Still minor work left to be done, but I think it's time I get away from the tinkering and back to the writing...

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday dear Winona!
Happy Birthday to you!