SF International Asian Film Festival

This year's festival is about to wrap up. We went to see "Music Video Asia" tonight at San Jose Camera 12. The film is a collection of 23 underground Asian/American MVs. Some of them I found very interesting:

Empire Dog: A post modern/brit rock band from Sweden, lead vocal Sung Kyu Choi, a Korean Swedish. I loved their music and showmanship. Actually all of the songs in their album were recorded lively, and they are rated "the best live band" in Sweden by many people.
Nortorious MSG: A trio rapper group from NYC Chinatown. Their songs are just hilarious.
Black Eyed Peas: One of the more famous musicians in the group.
Scrabbel: A bay area local band, interesting melodic lines
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Another local band, intense yet impressive MV directorial.

Others I am not so impressed with:

Tin Pan Alley: a musical band from Taiwan, dizzy and boring MV directorial.
Death Angel: a bunch of heavy metal losers, got a little skill, no talent, and absolutely no spirit.

Farewell Ray

God is treating everyone equally. When you lose something, we will be rewarded with others. Yet it doesn't prevent genius born and passed this world like a shining star. When a man lose one of his senses, he's got a unique opportunity to sharpen his others. One of the reasons I believe there are so many great blind musicians out there. You hear the world so clear, much clearer than many of us see it, and you sing your heart so articulated, much more articulated than many of us say it.

A life of darkness, yet full of love, music, dreams and sensations. So rich that it make rainbow pale, make lark silent, yes, you look cool outside, but inside, there's your wild heart, never stop beating unchained heart, your sticking mind, holding you strong like a normal man, you muse soul, bringing the world so much joyful tears.

Farewell Ray, may you see how much more colorful the world becomes because of you, may your heart be free forever. Written after watch "Ray", the movie.

Lao Cui's new album is out

先听为快： Mr. Red

Wondering where I can buy it, anyone going back China now?

Tech and Gadgets

Goggle map: http://maps.google.com It's been out for a while. Goggle obviously spent their recent fortune from IPO wisely in developing nice application like this. I am very impressed by its look and usability. It's much more beautiful than yahoo map and mapquest, at the same time give user a lot of handling flexibilities. You can drag-and-drop the map area to move it around, type in a few keyword will highlight all addresses related to the keywords. It's amazing how powerful JavaScript can be these days, although I would be doomed if I were the person who's gona maintain this piece of code :) Some of the very few things I would like to see it improve, it would be ultimately useful if I can right click a point on the map and get its location (and I imagine it would not be that hard to do), the print version of the map is not as nice as it looked on screen, it loads slow even on my dsl connection.

AllofMp3.com: http://www.allofmp3.com is offering $5/250Mb LICENSED mp3 download at ANY encoding method and bitrate! That's at least 2 full albums for just 5 bucks at considerably high resolution. Even walmart's 80c/song offer sucks compared to this. This Russian site takes a loophole in Russian intellectual law and made all songs you can think of so cheap to western customers. The only concern would be that my credit card number could fall into the hand of Russian Mafia. Nevertheless, I am stopping buying any CDs or mp3 from any other places!

Woot! : http://www.woot.com I recently found out this site, which offers tech stuff at a bargain price from time to time. I bought their "Rockford Car/Home wireless audio bundle" a few days ago for a bargain at $200 bucks. It's not cutting edge technology but good enough to make it worthy. I am anxiously waiting for its arrival to hook it up on my car and load it up with thousands of mp3s.