inbae’s blog | [ i n b a e b a y . c o m ]

Undercover is a cool app that might just save you your most valuable investment - Macbooks! It silently runs on the background, and the server constantly gets updated with your laptop’s whereabouts. When you report theft, the company starts tracking the location of the laptop, as well as take a snapshot of the thief with the iSight. And they boast 86% recovery rate. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me.

Candido Godoi is a small German town in Brazil. Apparently they have one too many blond, blue-eyed twins born in this town. Check out UK Telegraph’s article about it. Creeeeepy.

…So, is the happy-looking female running away from the jolly bunch? Is she really going to tase someone at a beach? Wouldn’t it actually shock her too if she’s in the water? And… doesn’t the name “Lady Taser” sound misdirected, and should rather be “Creepster Taser”? And is that how they spelled “No worries” and “You’re” back then? (Maybe this is an old North Korean propaganda.)

“Lure him away from the poolboy”? I don’t think he’s necessarily “excited” to stare at the poolboy at the moment. I’m assuming this poster implies that the dude swings both ways.

Viagra. Spray-on version. For women.

Wow. Talk about provocative.

So, quadecuple is probably a real word. Real enough for me to confidently use it in the title of this post. Quad+deca+uple. Meaning 24 times. Google proved that my deductive skills are not crappy, and if Google says it’s a word, it must be, no?

Gary Chang’s apartment in HK can have up to 24 configurations by moving around walls like moving bookshelves. How cool is that? The architect’s house is only 344 sq feet. It’s not a shabby, matchbox studio, it provides full-feature utility like any regular-size house would. The cool factor easily outweighs the hassle to clean up and shift the walls. A small studio is still a small studio? Perhaps.

But also perhaps this could be a great solution for cramped metropolitan areas such as Tokyo or Manhattan. Or the idea could be partially applied to regular housing units as “the changing room”, i.e. walk-in closet + library. You don’t need to change clothes while reading or doing work, they can be mutually excluded.

Update: How could I have forgotten Benjamin Button? Mea culpa.

I give myself three months to be able to see all these movies. (Oh, some of these might not even be out till then, oh well.)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Cool storyline, and I hear that they had to use special type of powder, instead of those devices used for motion-capturing, on Pitt’s face to capture his facial muscle movements. So that they can make all the other versions of him look realistic. It just sounds so cool.

Tokyo Sonata: Because I love Japanese movies that are loaded with emotional scenes with blank dialogues.

Good: Because Mortensen is perfect for this role.

9: Because Burton’s piece finally looks “cool” on atop of his signature vibe.

Che: Because I must do justice to the historical character I used to idolize just because wearing a shirt with his face on was (and still is) considered to be cool. I did tried reading his biography but failed to finish it in high school. And I never watched (or read) The Motorcycle Diary. Maybe it’s time.

The Wrestler: Because the pretty-faced womanizer is back with a seemingly complete new body, and game. Everybody’s gotta be raving about the movie for a reason, no?

Up: Because I’m a sucker for Pixar movies.

Angels & Demons: Because even though this noe probably doesn’t fall in the category of “awesome must-sees” like the ones above, I know I will be watching it for one reason or another.

I’m back in Korea! Until January 9th. I gotta go get fat, I’ll be back in a few.

BusinessWeek has a series of pictures of “the biggest”. Some categories are “meh”, others are kinda cool. Like the biggest book in the world was not as impressive as the biggest burger was. And I’m sure there are many other interesting items to read up on or look at in their respective categories. Like, the largest Lego sculpture or Christmas tree or something.

Personally, I thought this picture was oddly… mesmerizing… because the big plane made the space shuttle look cute. Might I have plane fetish? Hmmmmmm. (Maybe I’ll throw it over to the Cute Overload blog.)

I wish I was gifted by god the way Takeshi Kaneshiro or Rodrigo Santoro are with their good looks. But realistically, if I can look in 10 years half as good as Tom Ford does, I’ll be happy.

I look back to realize that I have been to three awesome musical performances in the past 30 days. I should have blogged about them individually in a more timely manner, I thought for a second, but then this summary post is also good too. (They were all on different nights. FYI.)

- Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

BF&F is a futuristic funky jazz bluegrass (I just made that up) group, led by Bela Fleck. His banjo, fused with Victor Wooten’s bass, Jeff Coffin’s saxophone/flute, and Future Man’s percussion riddled holiday tunes at Yoshi’s SF for their Christmas album tour. Their instrumental mojo is quite top-notch and sometimes jaw-dropping: Fleck doing his crazy arpeggios, Wooten his crazy tapping and multi-slapping, Coffin playing two, I repeat, two, saxophone playing at once, and Future Man going downtown with his Drumitar (his own invention that looks like Guitar Hero controller but plays full drum set sound), very very inspiring.

Victor Wooten was my muse and idol back in high school when I was into bass guitar. And I got to see his performance in person. And took a picture with him. And got an autograph. Grrrrrreat susssssssssssessssss!

- Mahler’s Symphony No. 8

Mahler’s piece was a good excuse for us to make our debut appearance at the SF Symphony Davis Hall. The stage was filled with about ~400 performers, more than half of them being the SF Chorus members. This piece is nicknamed “Symphony for a Thousand”, by the first promoter of the performance when Mahler first presented it to the world, and even though Mahler himself never endorsed the name, it stuck. It’s called that because… it was meant to be performed with, literally, 1,000 people. And that’s how he did it for the debut. It must have been quite an aural spectacle, too bad no one really tries to replicate the scale of performance anymore. (I read it somewhere that there has been few concerts that actually had close to that many number of performers. But even with just less than half of that, it sounded grand and powerful. I loved it. Especially when the choir broke out. Tilson Thomas, the conductor, was quite an animated and energetic one, and the audience loved him. They at the end did not hold back on standing ovations and ended up bringing back Thomas and the lead singers four times on stage. I gladly took part in it because it was the best symphonic experience for me. (And no, no autographs from anyone this time.)

- La Boheme

To top our “Tour de SF scène musicale” we paid visit to the SF Opera House next door. We dressed up even a bit more than we did for the symphony a week prior to. And it felt right. It was also the first time for me to attend an opera, and for some reason it felt much more old-world than the symphony experience for some reason. The building, for one, was magnificent, with marblestone architecture and amazing interior details - especially the light fixture above the audience that contrasted well with the light blue ceiling. The orchestra and the singers gave an impressive performance, and the humor in the lines were funny. But for some reason, probably no other than the lack of research beforehand, I couldn’t recognize any familiar melodies from any of the pieces. Or perhaps it’s just me equating “opera = Cavalleria Rusticana” that I have listened to at my leisure. I need to go watch that at some point in my life. But anyways, La Boheme was a very approachable opera to watch.

SF MOMA (that’s right, we have one here too) lets you browse their entire collection online through ArtScope, a cool page that lets you look at thumbnails as if you’re looking through a loupe in a black light table. Kind of. It’s cool, go check it out. (There are other existing photo browsers that are already out there that has the similar look, but the fact that you can browse through an art museum’s entire collection adds significance to it, I guess.)