Author: F C

Sweet Land of Liberty

I’m in Philadelphia, the land of liberty, with P- for a Asian lawyers conference. More exactly, I’m here for the conference to score some continuing education credits, and she’s here to eat and shop.

Since it’s mostly on my own dime, we took the Apex Chinatown bus. $20 round trip is an unbeatable price, even with a few glitches. The driver had the heat ramped up while we were waiting – it was like 95 degrees even with the roof vents open. Someone convinced him to turn the AC on instead. Then we were in the stop and go traffic of the Holland Tunnel, and the clutch wasn’t cooperating in the low gears – every once in a while the driver would misshift and the transmission would jar the bus as if we ran over the curb. It got much better when we made it to the Turnpike and got up to highway speeds. In Cherry Hill, a few guys got off – apparently they use the Apex bus to commute to and from jobs in New York. That is really crazy.

Walking from Chinatown, we headed to our hotel at Club Quarters, which was a 15 minute walk through the heart of the city. We stopped by at 5 Guys burgers on Chestnut Street – even 15 minutes to closing, the food was fresh and flavorful. Recommended.

Tomorrow, judging moot court while P- goes while through the city and possibly gets a pedicure.

Oh yeah, I guess I was too pessimistic in my last post – the Dems did win that 51st seat in the Senate. To think that at the end the Republicans lost the Congress because that 51st senator insulted an Indian American – now that’s what I call karmic payback. Sweet!

The Revolution Will Be Televised

The election starts in about 3 hours. I’m going to be a pessimist and say that the Dems will only tie in the Senate, while sweeping the House.

Much of the recent political momentum is due to videos published on YouTube, which was recently cited by Time magazine as the Invention of the year. This was the next step from the Rodney King video; now everyone’s Rodney King videos have instant worldwide distribution. I’ve tried the upload interface and it is really uncomplicated – you upload whatever video file you have, and YouTube figures out all of the conversion, resizing, streaming, and all that other hard stuff about videos.

The other slick thing is the legal team that figured out how to use the DCMA in their favor; unlike Napster, as long as it stays in the DCMA’s common carrier safe harbor by doing what it has to do, YouTube is pretty much immune from lawsuits no matter what people put up on the site.

The other great thing about YouTube is not just it lets you catch up on the last 20 years of pirated broadcast history, but it is a revival of the lost art of parody, and also is an education in what is “real”.

For example, this guy makes the observation that one of Jolin Tsai’s Mandarin Chinese songs sounds a lot like English. (click on the pictures to play the videos).

Katers17, who is part Native American and works for a video game store chain in England, blows away the competition in an online video date-off, apparently only with a webcam:

After the founders of YouTube hit the jackpot, they did, of course post a video:

That invited the NoHo Girls (a group from North Hollywood apparently experimenting with creating an online soap opera) to goof on the YouTube guys:

The Vietnamese chick in that video, Berry “Blue” Nguyen (we’re not really sure it’s her real name), had her own intro video. It wasn’t clear whether her Valley Girl act was real or staged:

That led communitychannel, a 20-year-old Chinese-Australian from New South Wales to parody Blue’s act:

YouTube has become the killer video app, not just because of technical advances, but it is providing the vocabulary and mores for the average person to communicate using video in the same way that letter writing was in the last century. It’s about time.

Remember to vote today!

6 Steaks, 5 Takes, 0 Sense

We watched Bobby Flay’s Takedown last week on the Food Network, in which each week he has his own private Iron Chef-like dual with people with a particular expertise in a certain dish. He got his butt kicked by Tony Luke’s, who operates cheese steak restaurants in Philly and in New York. He won with his speciality cheese steak, “Steak Italian”, which is made with provolone cheese and sauteed broccoli rabe (aka “Chinese” broccoli). The broccoli rabe makes the sandwich much lighter than the traditional “wiz with”.

We had to try it out ourselves, so we went with P-‘s friends there on Friday through the rain. The service was slow (our steaks took a good 40 minutes to come out of the kitchen) but when they came out, it was as perfect as could be expected outside of Philly. Fresh, chewy Italian bread, paper-sliced tender steak, stir-fried broccoli rabe, all bound together with the cheese. P- got the chicken version, which was made with stir-fried chicken breast slices, which were succulent and perfectly cooked.

Just finished watching 5 Takes USA on the Travel Channel, which is basically a non-competitve version of Amazing Race. A group of 5 people from Asia are given $50 a day and a video camera, and they have to tour several American cities and give their reactions as non-Americans. Getting on the 5 takes team is the prize – there’s no million dollar pot at the end of this trip. Zack, the guy from outside Manilla, looks a heck of a lot like our friend AS. The footage is edited and shown the following week. They survived Los Vegas and the Grand Canyon, and are now in Alaska. They will be in New York Thanksgiving week, so that should really be a lot of fun for them. Recommended.

Slashdot reports NY Courts proposed rules considering attorney websites and blogs – or just about anything put into media or on the Internet – as regulated attorney advertising. The pertainent proposed rules, pushed by the NYS Bar Association, requires filing an entire copy of a website each time a change occurs on the site (i.e. each blog posting), and that the filing is public record. The City Bar and a gazillion other people put out strong objections to the proposed rule changes on First Amendment and stupidity grounds. While we’re not advertising anything (we’re not even using our real names), Triscribe could conceivably be covered by the proposed rules if we link to any law or lawyer sites. I don’t know.