HitHat - Billy Qiu's Blog

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is a museum and institution in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, dedicated, as the name suggests, to recording the history of some of the best-known and most influential rock and roll performers, producers, and other people who have in some major way influenced the industry.

courtesy of Wikipedia

The musuem is designed by Ieoh Ming Pei. He is a Chinese-American architect, was born in Guangzhou, China. Pei emigrated to the United States in 1935 and studied at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard.

I spend a whole day in the four-level museum. It is not a museum where you only watch, but also feel it. By watching many video clips and movies about the development of music, listening to many pieces of rock and roll musics of different years, watch the artifacts collections, I do learned more about the 50 years development of rock and roll.

Really a nice experience. If you are a music lover and when you go to Cleveland, this is the place you should definitely check out.

I’ve heard about Magic the gathering card games before when I was in university. I remember it was one of the activities organized by one of the student clubs in campus. However, I’d never tried playing.

I’m amazed to know that it was still very popular among the teenagers in the US, my brother who’s now grade 10 is one of them.

The game was introduced since 1993, created by Richard Garfield, Ph.D.
Over 7000 unique cards have been produced for the game, with about 600 new ones added each year.

My brother bought 3 new magic cards today for ten dollars, wow that’s not cheap at all. He’d collected several decks of these cards, which costs hundreds of dollars according to my aunt.

For more information about Magic: The Gathering Game
check out the following website:
(I recommend the tutorial program which 78mb on the official website, you can the game rule very well by practicing playing on your computer)

Learn about it (also download tutorial and online game cliet) - Official site

Wikipedia Info

Finally I got my eTicket boarding pass for the flight of Continental Airlines from LGA (LaGuardia,NY) to CLE (Cleveland,OH) on Jan 26. It was quite convenient that i was able check-in online 24 hr before the flight.

My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:05 pm. However, I arrived early at LaGuardia, when it was only 3:30 around. I’m also interested to know that I actually was able to catch the earlier flight which leaves at 4:15pm, when I asked my flight information to a continental airline staff there.

So I hurried to the boarding gate, surrendered my printed version electronic boarding pass, and got a standard boarding pass for the flight leaves at 4:15pm. Thus I arrived almost 2 hr earlier than I expected in Cleveland.

It was my first unpleasent experience of online shopping. One of the Logitech mediaplay mouse I bought from NothingButSoftare.com was a defective unit. Actually it looked like a refurbished item which the other one was brand new and working fine. I’d contacted the tech support from the site. And replacement request was confirmed. They stated that upon receipt of my returning item, they would do the testing and ship the replacement within 2 weeks.

No matter I can get it replaced or not, I feel glad that I’ve just learned a good lesson at least. “If possible always buy from the trusted major online vendor such as Amazon” this was true.

I’ll keep you posted about the progress of the replacement.

Today I’m amazed that all the stuff I ordered online from different vendors which were 4 packages all arrived. This was really amazing, cuz some of items only took 2 days for the shipment while I’d chosen the 5-day standard shipping method when doing the purchase online. Most of these goods were shipped from warehouses near PA, such as OH, and IL.

Think I’d just ended my trial with the beta “Yahoo! Music Engine”. It does have a more friendly windows looking UI than I iTunes. And I love Yahoo’s idea of monthly subscribe to online streaming media. Since that’s the better way to save some money and also expand your listening experience in terms of trying some different works. Cuz when you subscribed all the music store is yours, the cons were that you just can’t download. But if you wish to keep a copy of the music you are playing, there are always ways out there.

Even if you don’t subscribe, you can also enjoy the lauchcastRadio. This time it comes with better quality, not sure if it was exactly 128Kb, but it was way better than low bit-rate versions before.

Podcast functionalities was also good. All worked perfect for me.

The big disadvantage was the unstability of Yahoo’s software once again. Since using the music engine I always got error reported about malfunction of it. I think stability is over fancy functionalities. I’m switching back to iTunes although it was pretty slow on windows box, but at least it crashes less often.

Actually, I just hope if possible sometime soon I should swtich back to the Mac OSX. Cuz when using it, I was so relaxed and I didn’t need to worry about things like unstability at all. Everything runs more smoothly under Mac, no hussles such as frequent restarting to free up memory or reinstallation of malfunction softwares.

Today I finally received the JBL duet speakers shipped from Amazon. They look really cute, I like this special shape. They can perfectly match the Apple Ipod design. However, I no longer own an ipod for years now, since the one got burned during unplugging the USB port. You should also be very careful if you have an apple product, they are very nice but could be fragile!
Anyway, what I want to say here is that the JBL duet sound quality is amazing. Although it’s small if not tiny, but the sound is crystal clear. Signal-Noise ratio is very high. I mean by real feeling. Bass is much better than many other powered speakers of that size, Vocal also sounded clean, and tend to feel “real”. I mean acoustic not too “digital”, you know.
I tried playing some mp3 using creative MuVo, guitar intro sounded pretty cool. It was like someone playing in my bedroom. Nice that I made up my mind to buy this one, it turned out to be another good bargain, haha!

Watched Lost yesterday from ABC

Since I came to the US, it was my first time watching my favorite (and only) TV show LOST the 2nd season on ABC Wed 9/8c.
It was because of two things. One, Lost stopped broadcasting on late Nov for six weeks. Actually, resumed since last week, 11-Jan. Well, unfortunately I missed it, because the 2nd reason, that we don’t have a TV in our former apartment. I moved to this new apartment to share it with my colleague Pankaj. Nice he finally got both the TV and a working cable.
However, it was also very possible that I could have missed it. Since, cable signal was dead from Tue afternoon, but recovered like a miracle the next day in the evening. And I’m glad that I find the right channel for the show. We don’t have a dedicated ABC channel here, it was showed on the #62 channel, which usually was a very dull channel called RAI Internal.

The Pocket SharpMT actually had very sophisticated UI, which coupled all the MT functionalities, such as the category excerpts, keywords, ping info, draft/publish, comments control etc. But it only have the entries creation capability no editing functionalities available.

Wow, I’m doing pocket blogging now

Installed the Pocket Blog program which is free to download from Pocket Blog website. I support my MT based blog system very well, I can even create entries offline and get them synced when I get it online. Very practical function, even better than the MT admin console.
I also noticed another program called Pocket Sharp MT, I’ll try it as well and update this entry later.