After two and half months since I landed in Australia, I found a professional job pushing me back to my career. I am very lucky in that way. Now I come back to my normal life, gym, piano, cooking, maybe singing.
Now I am looking forward to our 3p first oversea trip during this christmas, should be a lot of fun 
It’s been a long time, since I left you. I learned a lot of things during my left. I can use Gimp to draw some naive cartoon character and create some realistic metal panel, I learned some ndk and image processing stuff. Unfortunately they are not enough to made my new game, I made some mistakes and almost need rebuild it from the original idea. That’s OK, making game for me means one prototype after another. I just worried about maybe it’s too late for registering the IGF China, the deadline is 1st Sept. .
Give up or hesitation? No, I’m just a little tired and need talk to you. Everything will be fine in the future, at least will be fine in my mind.
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Moving countries is not an easy job to do, especially when the great Air China only allows their passengers in economic class to take the maximum of 20kg luggage. So basically I got rid of a lot of stuff in Beijing and posted books and files here to Sydney, which is also prohibitively expensive. The thing is that you never know what you will need when you go to another country no matter what other migrants tell you. But here we go, I pulled it off and landed in oz two weeks ago.
The weather was a bit disappointing when I landed in sydney airport and saw the rain outside. Oh come on, that’s not what I come here for. However, it’s getting better and better. Friendly people, fresh air, clean streets, I felt all refreshing. Oh btw, big thanks to Karen Deng, a girl that I got to know a few years ago in chongqing, who helped me a lot with settlling down.
Living in hostel can be fun if you live with the right roommates, and Elliott is one of them, who is a new migrant from Britain and tries to get a music teaching job here in oz. He is a very talented jazz guitar player, and we even jammed a little bit for fun with me singing some standard jazz songs. Our daily routine is going to a place called “incafe” for its free wifi service because hostel charges you 7 dollars for using 3-hour wifi, and then head to either pepper lunch or hungry jack’s for food. In the afternoon, we went to inspectthe room that we intended to rent.
We saw some of the worst accommodations ever and I couldn’t imagine the accomodation here can be that bad. In one instance, it is only a mattress behind sofa with a curtain drawing over and seperating the space in a big living room and the landlord claims it as a self-contained space, while the another one is just like a temporary shed without any foundation built in a backyard. It takes me almost two weeks to find this apartment and Elliott is still searching. Good luck!
Funny people are everywhere, arent they. Crazy Lauren, a girl who tried to accost my roommate on the train and gave him her number when we were about to get off, “Ursulla”, a friend of Crazy Lauren who looks just like Ursulla in “Little Mermaid” and whom my roommate and I dislike, the aussie guy, who snores like thunderstorm back in our hostel and who even woke himself up by his own snoring.
Bla bla bla…. but important thing is “hey, I am in oz now!”
Gameplay is the most important thing in the game. I have played lots of games, from physic to mental, from paper to video. Finally, I will create my own game, so exciting. And then, so frustrating.
Designing a game is not as easy as playing it, I know that before, but it’s more difficult than I imagined. I spent some time to learn basic concepts about game design like game, play. I thought I had some ideas of game design.
Game is an interactive system, and also is a complicated system like the reality. The distinction between boring reality and funny game is game has clear rules and targets and always give feedback to player. A good game in my mind should be neat, don’t have too many factors lead to complexity nor few factors lead to boring.
Because my target platform is mobile phone with touch screen, the control system is also my focus.
Dream Home is a movie directed by Ho-Cheung Pang. This cult film told us a story of a normal woman did some crazy things for the apartment she dreamed of.
Actually the reality is crazier than the film. Since 1994, the system of dividing taxes lead most tax to the central government of China. Local government have more responsibilities but less money to spend. Some provinces found that they can lend the land to land agent for big profit. Because land in China belongs to Chinese people, so the government can not sell it but lend it. There are people live on the land would be lent. If some family don’t want to move to other place, it’s easy to solve it, as you can see in the movie. The officers and agents hire mobs to force the people move. Self-burning cases happened sometimes.
The Chinese housing price is very high. How high it is? For example, Google spent $1.9 billion bought new office in New York, it’s $6600 per square. And the housing price near second ring of Beijing is almost the same. The average annual salary of Beijing citizen is about $7000 and I think the number of New York is more than that.
There’s circle in Chinese society, government lent the people’s land to business men, business men built apartment and sold them to the people. People spent all the money their family have, from grandparents to parents, and also lent big money they should repay with their whole life from bank. The master of the land became the slave of it, the humble servant of the country stole everything of it. That’s the real story of the Chinese dream home.
This is not another story about a saint gave up fortune and did some meaning things, like helping children in developing country or save some wild life close to extinction. I want to talk about greedy.
I met many people, they complain of everything. Their job, family, girlfriend and social status are not what they want, they always said if big money can help them to do something they can’t do right now. At first, I take their complaint to the symbol of ambitious, I thought they want do something big to change. And I found I was wrong, they love spending big money instead of making it, that means they want reap without sowing.
Making big money always accompanied with some risk. Only brave man dare to take the challenge. Most people said they want want to make big money just means they want to enjoy the experience of spending money. They just want the result not the process, so they deserved to complain.
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Last week, I went to shanghai for the EXPO. In fact, I’m not quite a fan of it, besides I’ve heard there are tons of people there in such hot weather. However, it’s a company trip which leaves me no choice.
I went to the venue right after I put my luggage in the hotel. It was a very hot day in shanghai, however there are tons of people there; you need to wait at least half an hour to get in even the least popular pavilion there, let alone the 4 hours long queue outside Japanese Pavilion and 8 hours outside Saudi Arabia pavilion. The shanghai EXPO committee seems to have predicted the situation, so there are security everywhere. Plus, in order to prevent people from heatstroke, there are fans and sprayers along the queues.
Due to my personal attachment to Antipodes, I went directly to New Zealand and Australia Pavilion. New Zealand Pavilion is quite small but an interesting one, especially from the perspective of architecture design. Inside of the Pavilion are there many videos playing everywhere, which is an introduction of life in New Zealand. The rooftop of this pavilion is a slope that is used for a garden with local flora.
Australia pavilion is a large brown-colored building, which symbolizes the red rock in the middle of Australia. Like all other pavilions, it shows the culture and life styles in Australia via sorts of means, either videos, sculptures or posters. The whole theme of Australia pavilion is how different people, either Caucasian, Asian or Black people, live together in harmony there. One interesting thing about Australia pavilion is that they have a camera and a screen with a plate in front of it that will play video on the screen, once you hold towards the camera. That’s why I took a picture there.
The most innovative pavilion in this year’s EXPO must be British pavilion. British pavilion looks like a hedgehog which is made of thousands of glass needles with seeds in each of them. British attach a great deal of importance on greenery, which is why they choose the seeds of plants as the idea of their pavilions. It’s hardly for me not to be surprised that what a detailed work they have done when I took a close snapshot of the needles with seeds in each of them.
Some of the pavilions take a lot of time queuing, like Japan, Germany, Switzerland, China and Saudi Arabia, the average time of queuing is above 3hours. I woke up quite early in the second day and I went to Japanese Pavilion, even so it took me 2 hours to get in. The most important part in Japanese Pavilion is the cutting-edge technology, like high-definition camera from Canon and the future personal vehicle from Toyota. Sadly, they don’t allow taking pictures inside of the pavilion. I also went to the Switzerland pavilion, the most interesting thing in that pavilion is the chairlift. However, we failed to take that because there were thunders while we waiting and they shut the chairlift down.
The last day I went to the urban best practices Area, where there are some practical examples in my professional field, but nothing new.
The theme of this year’s EXPO is “Better city, Better life” linked closely to energy conservation. But after I come to the EXPO, I cannot help joking with my colleagues that how much energy they could have saved if there were no this EXPO with tons of people here at all.
With guests sitting on the lawn with their picnic in a beautiful garden and with soft breeze and an orange colored sky, our magic madrigal evening starts. It might sound familar to you especially if you are a fan of movies and mini series based on Jane Austin’s novel. True, this cannot be more british. I am very lucky to attend such an activity last weekend at June 5th, not as an audience but as a madrigal singer. Madrigal concert is one the the IFC concerts every year, which is usually held in british ambassador’s residence.
I am always a fan of accapella, chorus without accompaniment, but I didn’t sing it before until this year’s madrigal concert. The repertoire is sort of miscellaneous, british traditional songs mixed with a bit jazz. I have many favorites this year, including the Prince of sleep, Faries, I got rhythem, Miss otis regrets, Every time we say goodbye.
This year’s madrigal concert proves to be the best of this kind so far. Afterwards at the party, we basically did it again just for our own sake of fun. Oh, i forget to mention that we had another madrigal concert the day before in Tianjing Concert Hall, and we sang together on the train on our way back. It was so much fun, though it seemed we annoyed some passengers on the same carriage. One of other things i need to mention is that the british ambassador was standing right besides me when he gave the opening speech of the evening.
Tomorrow is a big day for China and Chinese, who still remember the slaughter in Beijing 21 years ago.
Some website already closed the tweeter-like function forbid anyone post something with this issue. June 4 is a taboo like the name of Voldmort in China.
Justice is shit for Chinese because we face injustice everyday. Compared with the evil, we are so weak. Remembering the June 4 1989 is our little rebellion.
“We have met the enemy and he is Powerpoint” says a senior officer in U.S. army after he saw a slide shown above, which is a diagram about the military strategies in Afghanistan made by Powerpoint. He even remarked that we would have already conquered the terrorists if we figured out the spaghetti-like slide when the audience erupted into laughter in a conference meeting. It is not just government officers who are complaining. As an engineer myself, I increasingly find that Powerpoint is the culprit in modern enterprises that lowers down the productivity because of its time-consuming and over-simplified nature, or over-complexity for that matter.
Making Powerpoint slides is obviously a time-consuming task, which, all too often, overwhelms the concrete and productive work. The purpose of making slides is for the convenience of presentation, however its time-consuming and overwhelming nature goes against this intention. A junior officer based in Afghanistan said that he spent most of his time making Powerpoint slides when interviewed by New York Times. In a modern enterprises like the one that I am working at, employees making Powerpoint slides are easily spotted in the office. Sometimes, one may wonder what the slides are about when they make slides all the time. The time-consuming nature of making slides occupies too much time for people that would otherwise be used to do more productive work, thus bringing down the productivity.
Powerpoint slides tend to be over-simplified, as some victims might state, or over-complex for that matter, the reason of which can attribute to another nature of making slides, interpretation. When making slides, one needs to interpret concepts and ideas in a thesis or a report into Powerpoint language, bullet points. However, the fact is some logical relationships are often too complicated to be stated in this forms. On a contrary, some ideas are straightforward enough that they need not to be interpreted into the diagrams in Powerpoint, or simply not applicable at all. Even so, people in modern enterprise tend to stick to Powerpoint while neglecting the downsides.
In China, People sing praises to Powerpoint while it is undermining their productivity without their notice. Chinese people, from central government to small local business, are inclined to rank form as their first priority, while Powerpoint really hits the spot for that need. In addition, due to the bureaucracy, it is always your superior who is the presenter of the slides instead of you who make the slides. Therefore, making Powerpoint is not only an interpretation from reports to bullet points but also an interpretation for your superior to understand the reports since they are too busy to read it through. The double interpretation task increases the work load of employees that wasn’t in existence before, thus lowering down the productivity.
All in all, Powerpoint is the reason of a low productivity in modern society due to its time-consuming and misinterpretation nature. A good presentation does not mean fancy pictures and animations shown on slides but a lively and wholehearted speech delivered by the presenter that arouses compathy and recognition from the audience, which can never be done by just several stupid bullets points.
