‘Tis the weekend and though I feel like I’ve been generally out of sorts for the past month or so, I really do have a lot to be thankful for. In particular, I’ve got to give thanks and props to friends and family who have been super supportive during this time.
The last few weekends have been really busy, so here are a couple vignettes:
11/11-11/13: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time”
This year saw a record number of birthday cakes, from a bunch of mini-cakes at OHO, to a birthday flan at Green Field, to an enormous cake with chocolate covered strawberries from the VariAsians, to the classic chocolate cake with strawberry ice cream (complete with 28 candles) from Jen Feng, to some apparently yummy cupcakes from Carin Lee (that I never got to taste), to a devil’s food cake from Kyle & Anna. Whew! We had plenty of dessert-y items for a while.
Other highlights from the weekend include getting to spend time with my favorite ladies from Berkeley who I don’t get to see nearly enough (including lots of meat, some memorable Karaoke Revolution, and a shutout (men (7) vs. women (0)) in Catch Phrase), having laghman (yum!) on Saturday with some old (and new) friends, two successful gigs with the VariAsians, coffee with my dear sister yooniverse… The list goes on and on.
On the other hand, this was the first year that a majority of people commented that I’m starting to get old, but hey… see the next post. 
11/18-11/20: “…did not know you could ever look so good…”
10 years since graduation from good ol’ Arlington. Seeing friends and catching up was so great. In general, folks seem to be doing really well.
One thing that surprised me was that in general, people looked better than they did back in high school. I suppose one of these years the tables will turn and we’ll start to have droopy features, but yeah… 1995 sure had some good looking people!
Another thing that surprised me was that there were a fair number of people who did not recognize me. I might point out that I was one of a very few (3, maybe?) Chinese people in my graduating class of 500. Apparently, I was sort of dorky in high school. 
So I guess I’m one of those people who looks better now than I did in high school. And I had thought I had always been good looking…
11/20: Scoring big with the kids
In a surprise move, Nathan has joined Annah and Elijah as a “kid who made me feel special.” Don’t get me wrong; I always love hanging out in the nursery and we always have good times. But every now and then, one of them does something special that makes me feel on top of the world.
Now it usually takes me a good hour or so to get Nathan (who’s 5) even to interact with me—he’s historically been really attached to his parents. Last Sunday, though, when I came down after service for the CCFC Thanksgiving Potluck Dinner, Nathan looks up at me and says, “Hey! You missed all the fun!” As another friend put it, I had one of those moments where I thought, “To me? Is Nathan actually talking to me?” Well, we talked a bit about the Potluck and he told me how he didn’t like any of the Thanksgiving foods (his loss!) and then he went to ask coolipuss for a horsey ride. Coolipuss begged off saying that if he gave Nathan a ride then everyone would want one. So then I asked Nathan if he’d give me a horsey ride. He said, “Sure! Climb on!” So I went over and stood over his back and he put his arms around my legs and we walked for a little while like that. But after just a bit he said, “You’re too heavy! We’ll need a giant monster to carry you!”
Ah… precious moments. Who will be next to charm me? 
11/24-11/27: Being Thankful
I travelled a lot and saw a lot of people over Thanksgiving weekend. Celebrated Thanksgiving Day with lots of family in Flushing at my cousin Richard’s Sheraton. Yes, that’s the possessive case. Crazy. Got to see my cousin Stu’s place in Hackensack. Visited my cousin Si’s grave; he would have been 33. Watched a whole lot of movies (I suppose I could put up some reviews one of these days). Had dinner with my sis and got to set up the Internet for her and her roommate (I love doing IT for friends). Visited Redeemer and had a “fun time.” No, really, it was a great service and a great sermon, helping me put things in perspective and to consider anew God’s incredible love. Taking the Chinatown bus back to Boston was decidedly unfun, but I made it back safely and in better-than-expected time.
Whew… this has been long. Hence the value in posting more regularly, I suppose. I didn’t really post that many vignettes either, I suppose—mostly just summaries. But I sorta just wanted to get most of what has happened down on paper because a lot has happened and I’ve realized I have a lot to be thankful for.
So over the past week or so I’ve been spending way too much time trying to burn a DVD to SVCD (on WinXP). There are a lot of pretty good programs (and documentation) out there, but I thought I’d just let you all know about my experience hoping that it might prove helpful for you. As always, I tried to use free programs to do it.
I started out with Sefy’s Guide from videohelp.com and I somewhat arbitrarily chose to start with the guide for Eazy VCD which you can get at eazyvcd.tk.
I mostly chose defaults, putting my output in a new directory, choosing to keep the temp files, and choosing to stop at the MPEG step. That’s important because the audio/video on the MPEG ended up being out of sync.
I halted the MPEG in mid-rip and deleted that file. Then I ran TMPGEnc (which was installed in the Eazy VCD folder). Again I chose mostly defaults, but I also:
- Edited the source range in order to correct the audio gap. I used 400 msec for my file but I’d recommend that you test a small segment to find what’s right for you.
- Clipped the frame using a black mask to get rid of the edge noise.
(Note that the version of TMPGEnc bundled with Eazy VCD can only burn MPEG2 for 30 days. You can find earlier versions without that limitation but I didn’t use them so I’m not sure how well they’ll work.)
Now that I had an MPEG2 suitable for an SVCD, I wanted to burn it. This is where it got tricky (well, okay, I spent a lot of time trying to sync the audio too).
The first time I created a BIN/CUE set, I used VCDWizard. It appears, in retrospect, that the BIN/CUE files that it created were corrupt in some way. I ended up using VCDEasy to both create the BIN/CUE and to burn them, but I grabbed an earlier version (1.1.2) which is still free from here. I also picked up ASPI drivers for WinXP from here.
Here’s what I did in VCDEasy
- Settings -> (S)VCD Player: Checked Update scan data offsets
- Settings -> CDRDAO: Forced generic-mmc driver
- (S)VCD -> Main: Picked appropriate settings and added the MPEG2 file.
- (S)VCD -> Chapers: Added chapter breaks. They ended up not exactly where I wanted them, but close enough, I guess. (I think forcing the exact chapter breaks may have been what was wrong with my original BIN/CUE files.)
Then I clicked Go. After the BIN/CUE/XML set was created, I went to Tools -> CDRDAO Tools, loaded the CUE and clicked Burn (don’t forget to put a blank CD in first).
And that’s it! My SVCD seems to play quite well on my computer’s DVD player. It doesn’t play quite correctly on my actual DVD player, but I suspect that might be because my player is so old. I’d like to test it out on a newer player one of these days.
Virtual CD
Oh, and for those of you who were only interested in the Virtual CD segment, while I was looking around for VCDs and burning, I ran across a link to a neat little program (unofficially) from Microsoft. It allows you to mount ISOs as virtual drives. Useful for checking if an ISO is good, and potentially useful for playing computer games that require the disc to be in the drive (haven’t tested that yet). You can get that here.
SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” alt=“The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is” />Well, I finally finished my first book since starting to “blog” so I figure I should write about it. There’s a part of me that wants to go back and review all the books/movies I really love, but most of them would need to be re-read before I’d have anything intelligent to say about them.
I’m actually not sure I have anything intelligent to say about The Challenge of Jesus anyway, unfortunately, even though I just finished reading it. I really wanted to like this book, having a number of friends who really liked it. But I definitely had mixed feelings. Part of it was really good, bringing meaning to rather cryptic sayings/actions of Jesus. Part of it was frustratingly sparse, making statements about 1st century Judaism that seemed plausible but without, IMHO, enough substantiating evidence. Part of it just went over my head, using theological jargon/references that the lay scholar just wouldn’t be familiar with. I’m no slouch when it comes to Bible studies, but I’m no seminarian either. For a book that is aimed at a more popular audience, I would have wished for a little more readability. Or maybe it’s just ‘cause I’m a dumb American who doesn’t understand British English?
Anyway, the gist of the book (for me, anyway) was that current Christian thought has missed some of the import of Jesus’s life because we apply his life directly to ours instead of through the lens of a 1st century Jewish community. I’ll certainly grant that I don’t know jack about 1st century Judaism (besides the snippets that I’ve picked up in Bible studies over the years), but I also get the sense that Wright thinks that his own research into Jesus’s life is the most accurate which may very well be true but is hard for my skeptical mind to buy at face value. Perhaps that’s what I found most frustrating about the book.
On the flip side, I think the “Challenge” is real and profound. Jesus definitely came into a context that had certain expectations of what success might look like, but he had a totally different understanding of God’s plan for the redemption of the world through Israel. And, as the prophets of old, his life and death were symbolic of God’s message to Israel and to the world. But because of his special relationship with God, it was not simply symbolic, but actually God acting out his love in a real and tangible way.
Now that “Challenge” comes to us, the church, who must bring a message that is relevant to our cultural context. As always, it’s distressingly unclear what that might look like. But I think the nature of the message is pretty clear after all: “Our task is to announce in deed and word that the exile is over, to enact the symbols that speak of healing and forgiveness, to act boldly in God’s world in the power of the Spirit.”
That’s a pretty good message. That’s good news. How do we communicate it? That’s a good question and the subject of much thought and prayer. But that’s what life is about… Bringing good news to a world that sorely needs it.
I got this from limitingcase. It’s pretty wild. Give all the glory to God.
Prophetic Worship & Apostolic Preaching @ UCLA
Now the thing that puzzles me is that I debated with myself for a while on whether or not to post this. I felt foolish re-posting a re-post. I wondered about the theology of the guy who originally posted it. I didn’t want to post so often. For whatever reason, I just didn’t want to do it. But I decided to post it because this really is the sort of thing that I want people to read about. God is at work.
I was especially moved by the stories of how they went out in twos and loved the people who stopped to listen. God is a God who stops, talks to people, listens to stories, loves. And he calls us to do the same.
May all who bear his name love as he did.
Nice. My boys Sam Yoon and Felix Arroyo have won their seats on the Boston City Council. Now let’s see what they can do.
Election Results
SCTHUMBZZZ.jpg” alt=“The Ultimate Star Trek Collection” /> And yet… there’s that small part of me that’s tempted. Weird. (If you can’t tell from the picture, I’m talking about The Ultimate Star Trek Collection which has pretty much every episode/movie of Star Trek ever made and is selling for $2500 at Amazon (and is a whopping $4000 at list price).)
What’s odd about wanting this is that I didn’t particularly care for Voyager, and was turned off immediately by the gratuitous “porn” scene in the pilot episode of Enterprise. And yet there’s something about the words “Star Trek” that make me want to give it a second chance, never mind the travesty that Paramount has made of the franchise.
Here are a couple of questions for discussion, most of which I’m not going to answer:
- Though there will always be debates on whether The Original Series or The Next Generation was better (which often are just debates on Kirk vs. Picard), every Trek fan that I can think of has at least enjoyed The Next Generation. However, these same people differ wildly on whether Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise were any good. So what gave The Next Generation a near universal appeal?
- Corollary: Even though The Next Generation held wide appeal among sci fi fans, I can’t think of any non-sci fi fans who liked the show. Will there ever be a show that will successfully bridge that gap?
- Just what is it that makes me want to always give Star Trek another chance? It’s not just me… I have another friend who is even more willing to look past the “blemishes” in the hope that someday the franchise will be redeemed. But yeah… I’m actually less willing to give arguably better series like Babylon 5 or Firefly a chance because somehow I’m stuck in the Star Trek universe. Is it the same phenomenon that causes people to want to see movie sequels even though they’re often worse than the originals?
I’ll stop there to say that I think that a large part of the appeal of Star Trek for me is the bonding time between me and my dad. No matter what we were doing, we’d always stop when Star Trek came on. And when it was over, we’d continue on with what we were doing. But for that one hour we bonded. I think that’ll always be special to me. And whenever I watch Star Trek, I will think of him.
Anyway, I doubt this set is going to sell very well, but I do hope that it goes on deep discount someday.
Well, after snatching a very SlickDeal on web hosting, I decided that I might as well do something with markstudy.org, which I’ve owned for a couple of months now. The two laziest things I could have done would have been to revive my old website (now at markstudy.com—as usual, it’s not working as well I’d originally designed it) and to start a blog. And so there you have it. (A more interesting thing that I could do would be to set up an online Mark Study reference site. I’ve “started” that by installing Joomla as a content management system, but I haven’t really gotten past that, and I’m not sure if it really makes sense at this time.)
Why am I doing this? I’m not really sure. Anyone have any ideas for me? There’s so much garbage out on the Internet right now that I don’t really see the point of adding more. And it’s not that I think that my thoughts are particularly worthwhile, nor do I think that I’ll post particularly regularly. Here are a couple of ideas I had though:
- For starters, I’ve felt ambivalent about spamming my Yahoogroup (most of you are probably reading this post because of my Yahoogroup—I figure it’ll take a while before other people find out about this blog). I started that group back when I thought I would be moving overseas any day and I wanted a good way to communicate with my supporters. I’m pretty sure now that I’m not headed overseas anytime soon and so it doesn’t seem the most appropriate forum anymore. I felt like I wanted a place where I could say stuff that wasn’t necessarily all that significant, but still important to me. This is that place.
- Sometimes I run across neat deals on the web or neat places in Boston (or elsewhere) that I want to let folks know about. It’s often hard for me to figure out whom I should tell and how I should tell them. This seems a decent place.
- I want to start reading books and Scripture more. I thought this would be an okay place to write reviews and reflections. We’ll see if this idea really gets off the ground… I’ve said I wanted to start reading again for years, but I always have a lot of trouble getting into it.
The overarching “chool” thing about this forum, though, is that with the advent of RSS and content aggregators, you can subscribe to the “Reflections” category, for example, and just get that information, without hearing about how I got to try out Amazon Prime for free for four months.
So let me know if you have other ideas about things I could or should write about, and we’ll see if this turns into something significant or just a bunch of noise.
BTW, the “Theme” on this blog is still a work in progress. Let me know if anything doesn’t display correctly or is confusing to use. I know that the Flickr gallery doesn’t display particularly well, but I already spent longer than I care to admit “rasslin’” with the CSS. And the top-level links are most likely going to change as well—in particular, I need to find a better Photos section, and I may link to other content as I create it.
Well, that’s about it for now. If you’re interested, stay tuned to find out what happens!
