红酒·绿茶 / Red Wine & Green Tea / Vin Rouge et Thé Vert

My PS2 stopped working a few months ago despite my last save . So I looked around online and found ps2parts.com . I decided to give it a shot and they fixed it pretty quickly. So far so good. So game on, my friend! Game on!

I have always wanted to go to an opera, the classical counterpart of a modern musical, which I like very much. But I have been careful enough not to rush the first experience because I know how important that is. Once a friend of mine was trying to experience some classical music and decided to go to a free concert by our university orchestra. Not a bad idea, you might think. However, I knew his adventurous encounter was ill-fated because the program happened to be Stravinsky's "The Rite of the Spring" . Indeed, he was so lost that he walked out of the concert. So I have waited for an "easy" opera, in the sense that it's popular and lyrical, preferably by one of my favorite composers. When I knew the Peabody Opera Theatre was going to produce Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) , I booked the ticket in no time. It was fantastic: Three hours literally flew by. Peabody students gave this two-hundred-year-old opera an energetic treatment. The use of projection a...

I was very happy with Leopard except one problem: I couldn't print anymore, not even save as pdfs or preview. I suspected it was a printer driver incompatibility so I deleted the printers and added them back. Didn't work. Reseting the printing system, which you could do by right clicking your mouse in the "Printers & Faxes" system preference panel, didn't work either. So I made an appointment with the Genius Bar . The guy was very friendly, tried several method and found out that after we reseted the system, I could save as pdfs or preview again. However, whenever I added my printers back, the symptoms came back. I was almost about to give up and do a fresh re-install. (Sounds familiar, PCs?) But I was too proud to let it go. So I sat down there and dug even further until I found this . I followed the advice to delete the whole /Library/Printers directory. Then simply adding my printer as a generic postscript printer worked. (Of course, you can also find the ...

Just installed Leopard , the "latest" version of Mac OS X. Feels good!

My hostel at Venezia , Residenza Santa Croce, was a delightful surprise. Conveniently located near the Santa Lucia Station, it had a nice room and a, by hostel standard, huge bathroom. The staff was very helpful: She not only gave me a free map (Yes!) immediately but also gave me very detailed information about major attractions, transportation, walking trails and so on. But the most interesting thing was still to come. After I introduced myself to my fellow hostelers, I hesitantly asked two Californian girls, Sydney and Roxanna, whether we met before. They didn't think so, of course. But when I reminded them that we might have seen each other two days before in Nice, they recalled. After further confirmation of the name of the hostel in Nice, we started to laugh. As if two same hostels wasn't enough, we exchanged further travel plans and found out that we booked the same hostel in Roma, too! What a coincident! (Well, considering the fact that we were all "planning freaks...

I started to realize that I could sing, in the sense of "better than average", when I was in the junior high. As teenagers, we loved pop music; as Asian, we loved karaoke . So I started my singing "career" by singing along the popular tunes on TV. I can control my voice quite well, especially in high register. Even though I barely speak Cantonese, I can sing in Cantonese, often better than people who speak it. (Of course, this is no news, as I learned later. Opera singers learn to sing in different languages without really speaking them.) And as time went on, I even taught myself how to expand my vocal range via better skills. I have had no vocal training at all. Singing on the Stage Originally uploaded by yisu9 , courtesy of RFL So I was sometimes asked to sing in school talent shows, or to compete in amateur karaoke contests. This time it was the 2007 Chinese Moon Festival Party . (More pictures here .) It had been a long time since the last time I sang ...