My biggest hobby is probably playing guitar, and if you’ve read some of my blogs, you’d know I like to attach some videos of myself playing. My favorite type of music to play on guitar is blues. This is interesting, because blues isn’t a very mainstream kind of music, not like rock or punk or pop. Blues music originally came from black musicians, near the Mississippi delta. Later on, there became different types of blues like delta blues, Chicago blues, Texas blues, etc.
A lot of people find this interesting because its very rare that an Asian guy like myself would listen to blues music, let alone play it. And to be honest, there’s very few Asian American rock musicians, and even fewer Asian American blues musicians. However, someday I hope I can produce and record my own album, that would be cool.
I love to jam, improvise and record without any constraints on my music. This video is a blues jam in A minor, I used a bit of overdrive here, with a looper for the background music.
Here’s another funky blues jam that I fingerpicked, John Mayer style. I find this way you can get a lot of neat sounds and rhythm in. No backing track, but there’s a delay for a cool slapback effect. Both of these clips are near 10 minutes long, since I tend to lose track of time when I record >.<
Blues will continue to be one of my favorite genres of music. Its especially suited to guitar, and the first scale I learned on guitar (I’m self taught) was the pentatonic minor, which is the basis of blues. To get a better feel for blues music, listen to some Robert Johnson, Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B King, Albert King, Freddie King, Albert Collins, etc for some of that old 50s style blues. For 60s and more ‘electric’ type blues, take a listen to Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Eric Clapton (while he was in the Bluesbreakers), Mike Bloomfield, Roy Buchanan and Rory Gallagher. Those are some of my favorite blues artists.
I’ve just watched the Obama Deception, you can view it here:
The Obama Deception HQ Full length version
Runtime
113:40
View count
13,003,584
The premise of the Obama Deception is a conspiracy theory related to the New World Order. Now I know America has been the home to countless conspiracy theorists regarding everything from the Federal Reserve to JFK to 9/11, but this video I thought was done pretty convincingly. It’s a subject that I’ve thought about before, that the world is becoming more global and as it becomes more global, more organizations are built to communicate with other organizations. This creates the atmosphere for the ‘world government’ view that a globalist agenda is ultimately bad for society because of the same reason that big federal government is a bad thing: it has too much power and jeopardizes the freedom and liberty of citizens. I’m gonna go further with this with a rant about equality because I think it’s related:
Society and equality
Alot of people want to contribute to society, they set up foundations, they volunteer and donate to help the poor and disadvantaged.
I have several observations on society in general, and they are that:
1) Population continues to increase and life expectancy increases
2) Because of this contributing, equality also increases
3) Competition increases as a result of the population and equality increases.
Equality may seem fair but I think that it actually does some harm as well. In this recession, where the unemployment rate hovers around 10%,
the last thing we need is more competition. Because of population, life expectancy and equality, more people are getting educated.
Have you noticed the admissions rate for top US universities are getting lower each year? That’s because there’s more admissions each year,
as international students from China and India which are becoming more competitive keep applying. More admissions + Same student space at top universities = greater more competitive admission pool = less admissions.
At the same time, more people are getting bachelor’s degrees. I don’t even need to cite a statistic I think this is quite obvious.
The more bachelor’s degrees, the more employers are going to have to look for extra credentials. In this day and age, just a
bachelor’s degree is hardly impressive. In order to compete, you need some high GPA/ lots of work exp/research exp/leadership exp/etc
Those days when parents thought their kids can get a good job with just a university degree is over.
Therefore I believe the problem is that there’s too much competition, especially in the Western world.
The solution is that there needs to be population control and a maintaining of social order. Americans have priviledges that many countries don’t.
This can only exist when there’s a social order. I recognize the need to help starving families in Africa and India but if everyone were equal, then
no one could have priviledge and capitalism cannot exist. This is the same argument Democrats and Republicans are making. Democrats are for
equality and ‘socialism’ to an extent. Republicans champion freedom, choice and the free market.
The world needs to be more about freedom and social order. The problem is the world is getting more competitive and at this rate, we will see
the population of the United States double in 20 years and people from Africa applying to US universities creating even more competition in ADDITION
to people from Asia. This amount of demand needs to be balanced with supply, and I don’t foresee any way the US and Canada can meet this supply at the very top levels. Sure more people=>more companies=>more jobs but it seems the job creation lags far below that of job demand right now and that issue needs to be fixed.
That is my complaint with the amount of contributing that goes on in the world. Population needs to be controlled. Third world countries exist for a reason and that is to be at the bottom of the social hieararchy. How can the United States and Canada be at the top if there weren’t any developing countries? War/disease also exists to control the population and thus lower the amount of competition. The employment rate after WWII was very low,
during the 50s and 60s unemployment topped at around 7% and is as low as 3.x% during the Truman/Eisenhower administration. Why? because soldiers who
died in WWII can no longer compete for jobs. This is part of the reason why the economy booms the decade after the war. In short, I think war/disease can actually be healthy for the economy in the long term if it occurs in line with population growth.
Personal situation:
So now that I got that rant out of the way: my finances have been suffering quite a bit recently. Stock market has not been good to me this year (lost all my profits from last year + $2000 in principal), I had to sell my car to pay for my tuition at a $1600 loss, I got scammed $2200 from a shady website contractor, and overall I’m in the red. Midterms have been stressful, and I’ve also joined some extracurricular activities like AIESEC and developing Magic cards in my spare time with CardForge. All in all though, I think my weaknesses here are evident. I am too impulsive with my money; despite my preaching of fiscal conservatism, I should actually work on practicing it sometime. I lack attention to detail in my projects, something that my PEY supervisor docked me for. What drives me is the thought that if I can do well in my courses, then I will have a shot at going where I want to go, and achieving what I want to achieve. Take a look at my spending distribution below and you can pretty much see that besides my tuition, my car was my biggest expense and perhaps the freedom of driving wasn’t worth the ~$10k that I spent on it.
Spending distribution (May '09 - Sept '10)
I will end off this lengthy post with some videos I recorded recently: while my singing is still not great, I think I’ve improved with that from before (and yes I’m obsessed with the Beatles):
The West coast mystifies me. Ever since I became interested in computer science and programming in middle school, the thought inevitably turns to the west coast and the high tech industry that it revolves around. Silicon valley in many ways represented what America was about – free thinking , innovation and entrepreneurship. Being on the East coast for 20 years, that culture to me has always seemed very far away, probably because my parents and my relatives have always been here and not there. We’ve never even visited the West coast even once. The closest I got to that culture was when our plane landed in Vancouver for a stopover flight.
But I’ve always had a longing for being part of that culture. Maybe its the extreme temperatures here or the more formal attitudes but I’ve always preferred the laid back casual and temperate climates of the West coast compared to the East coast. Vancouver and Toronto are different in so many ways. Los Angeles and New York City are also different in the same ways. The atmosphere is different. I wanted to experience the difference… but as long as I was in school I couldn’t go there. That had to wait until graduation to even consider the possibility.
Anyways, back to the West coast tech industry. Here’s a breakdown of which fortune 500 tech/ tech 100 companies are headquartered on the West coast:
Washington:
Amazon.com
Microsoft
Silicon Valley:
Oracle
Google
Netflix
Salesforce.com
Symantec
Intuit
McAfee
Autodesk
VMware
Hewlett Packard
Apple
Cisco
Intel
Sun Microsystems
eBay
Yahoo!
Electronic Arts
Southern California
Qualcomm
Western Digital
I think one thing to note here is the staggering amount of IT companies that are in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara County + San Francisco). If we include the startups + other companies that weren’t on the list but headquartered there (Nvidia, AMD, Sandisk, Adobe, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), it’s easy to see that the West Coast takes up a significant proportion of tech companies.
So what is it about the West Coast in particular that fosters such a high growth of technology and entrepreneurship? I believe Intel, Xerox and HP pioneered it with their presence and the establishment of semiconductors and microchips (Xerox PARC comes to mind with its many innovations). This in turn led to development of other companies to share in their growth. The fruits of such development are seen in the amount of video game companies that developed there and IT in general. Those companies continue to sustain growth – Washington State, California State, University of California and Stanford to name a few pump thousands of engineers and computer scientists into the region which in turn fosters more start ups and more growth.
Anyways, the point of all this is that in the East coast the infrastructure is not so developed for IT. You have a lot of formality in business attitudes, and New York and Toronto are better known for financial companies than for IT. The industry of technology has its headquarters in Vancouver, Washington and California and it makes sense for me to believe that my place and my career belong more to the sunny hills and Mediterranean climate than to the skyscrapers and extreme climates that dominate here on the East coast.
But there’s more. I’m also a musician, and many of the most well known guitar + effects + pickup manufacturers + music studios are located on the West coast (particularly in SoCal). So my connection to the West coast extends to much more than just the technology industry, it’s also the music industry as well.
