Chan's Personal Blog

To bring everyone up to speed, I've been wrestling with what to do after I finish school. I'm doing my final term now, and the road ahead diverges. I've been debating whether to work after I graduate, or continue on to get a masters degree. I'm biased towards the masters degree, but it's not as easy as wanting to get a masters degree. Getting into a masters program seems a bit competitive these days.

I've been doing quite a bit of research over the last few months about masters programs and potential supervisors at various schools. For the most part, it was a fairly fruitless search. A lot of the professors I did approach weren't taking in any more students.

The Turning Tide

I met with a professor today to talk about taking me on under his wing. I told him I might be able to get external funding for my masters degree. In the end, he has tentatively agreed to be my supervisor. Step two is to actually secure this funding.

Nevertheless, it is a big psychological weight off my shoulders. The road ahead begins to converge once again. Thank God!

Stay tuned for End Game vol. 2, and for the exciting season finale.

Well, I'm signed up to go to the Merge 2004 in Abbotsford, Nov 5-7. It's a youth convention for young adults, and it should be pretty fun, enlightening, and refreshing. The organization that puts this on is called History Maker. I've been to two previous youth conventions in Kamloops, which was presented by History Maker, and they were amazing.

The production value of their events is amazing. As a geek, I drool at all the sound/light and computer gear they use to put on one these events. The multimedia presentations they use is amazing as well.

Here's the opening movie to youth convention in Kamloops this year. Pretty cool video all set to the soothing music of the Kill Bill Soundtrack . The song is entitled "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" by Tomoyasu Hotei. (Click on the history maker image below for the movie)



The company that made the movie also has pictures and more pictures of all the behind the scenes hardware that is used to make it all possible. I'd love to do something like this as a job. It combines lights, sound, stage craft, computers, music, and video all into one job.

Another thing I really like about History Maker's conventions is that they offer a Christian experience that is with the times. Some of you may know what I'm talking about. For example, they have DJs spinning Christian electronic music at some of these events which I love. You don't see too much of that in mainstream churches these days.

If anyone's interested in going to the Merge, you may be able to tag along with my youth group. We should still have a few spaces available. Contact me, and I can hook you up.

Well, the beta test for Chan Productions is over, and the site is ready for the public. Most of the major bugs have been worked out. This site should work on Internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari. Special thanks to all my beta testers who checked out the site for me. Many thanks to Brenton for hosting my site.

Today we had a missionary speak at my church. He works as an English teacher in China for more than 10 years now. The first interesting point that he brought up was that China is a restricted access nation, which means you need permission before entering the country. He entered the country as an English teacher, whereas in reality, he is a missionary. It's unlikely missionaries can enter China because of its religion repression.

They're Watching You Neo

What he said next was very bizzarre to me, and it's like something out of science fiction. He was saying how the government was always spying on its citizens. All the mail he received was always opened because the government would read the contents. Every phone line is tapped by the government. The government monitors everything he does on the Internet, and reads every piece of e-mail.

He told us about one of his friends that encrypted his e-mails. The government couldn't break the encryption, so they sent the police to the guy's house to question him. They asked why he was encrypting his e-mail and what he had to hide. After they finished questioning him, they told him they'd block his internet access if he kept encrypting his messages. After the incident, the guy had the secret police follow him around.

These kind of stories remind me of science fiction novels that talk about authoritarian governments... but my goodness, this is real life! This makes me value the freedoms we enjoy in the West quite a bit more.

The Underground Church

The missionary also said that churches as we know it don't exist because they're banned from the government. Thus, the church is an underground movement that meets in people's houses. Bibles have to be smuggled into the country.

Another story he told us was that the government is always trying to uproot the underground church. They send spies to infiltrate the underground church, and the spies stick around in the congregation for a few months collecting intelligence. In those months, they try to figure out how the Bibles are coming into the country, and they identify who the leaders of the group are. Once they have enough information, the secret police shows up at a church meeting and arrests all the leaders and break up the church group.

Despite all their hardships, the underground reports that they get 20,000 to 40,000 new believers every single day. That to me is very amazing.

I think this exposes a dark side of the repressive communist regime in China that we don't see too often in the media these days. Whenever I see China in the news, they usually show an industrious nation who's becoming a rising political/military/economic power in Asia. They portray China as a modern nation with great economic prosperity, a nation that will host the next Olympics. Despite all this, they're fairly backwards in many respects.

Long live the underground...

I was watching The Daily Show a few months ago, and came across this hilarious interview they did with one of the most evil spammers of them all, Scott Richter. So, I'd thought I'd share this with everyone. Enjoy!

The movie clips are about 10 megs big, and requires the Windows Media Player. Please right click the link and select 'save link target as' so it saves to your computer. Choose only one link, they're all the same.

http://www.badmonkey.ca/files/show.wmv
http://dnsbl.net.au/files/show.wmv
http://www.ianai.net/jokes/DailyShow.ScottRichter.wmv

Intro

Last month I went on an end of summer paintball excursion at TNT Paintball. This was my first time at TNT Paintball. A bunch of people said they were going to come, but it ended up being just me and Tyler. In either case, it was still a lot of fun. Lucky us, we went on the day that rained the most that summer.

The morning was great because it was cloudy and cool which is ideal; however, it started coming down pretty hard in the afternoon. My googles were fogging up quite a bit, and the rain started affecting the gun's accuracy. We played 10 games I think, and I ended up using about 400 rounds of paint which is typical for me. My battle wounds are fairly superficial compared to other battles I've had. I could still walk properly the next day, so that's a good sign.

We worked pretty darn well as a team. Tyler's my trusty tail gunner. Usually I run up front and draw fire, while Tyler responds in kind to enemies. If an enemy is bunkered down real well, usually Tyler will give suppression fire while I sneak around for the kill. It worked really well.

Play of the Day

In either case, a bunch of my friends asked how paintballing went, so instead of retelling the story a billion times over e-mail, I made a Flash movie that tells our tales of valour and glory.

This movie clip highlights the play of the day that Tyler and I had. The mission was to deliver a backpack bomb to the enemy base. So, Tyler and I being a special ops unit was given the task to neutralize the enemy base's defences. (For those who can't play Flash movies, I'll summarize it by this: Tyler and I managed to sneak into the enemy base and took out 6 of their defenders.)

Use the buttons in the lower right corner to control movie.

I was looking through Yahoo News and came across this headline, "Company Making Fake Urine For Research." Upon reading the article, I was informed about a urine trade that I never knew existed.

From the article:
"The laboratory industry has a serious need for synthetic urine. Researchers, drug-testing labs and other institutions buy thousands of gallons of the real stuff, mostly to calibrate the equipment used to test regular urine samples for drugs or other substances. Researchers periodically check the accuracy of their equipment by introducing samples that have been intentionally spiked with drugs and other chemicals.

But human urine has its limitations: It decays rapidly if not kept refrigerated and must be frozen when shipped. It can smell, and it foams. Donors must be screened carefully for drug use or disease. Also, different body chemistry guarantees that no two people's urine is exactly alike, an irritation for researchers who rely on consistency. "

I learned two very important things.

1) Researchers buy urine! I'm a sucker, all this time I've been merely flushing yellow gold down the toilet. It's like flushing down a $100 bill.

2) No two people's urine is exactly alike. This could be a new means of identifying people. It could be just as good as collecting fingerprints. Actually... this explains why the paranoid conspiracy theorists keep all their urine in jars... because the government might try to use it to ID them.