Month: August 2007

So I was reading this article: Modern marriage and mortgages enter Chinese lexicon and helped me remember a discussion I had with my dad awhile back. I had asked him, if there’s been any new Chinese character for the past few hundred years, or has it always been the 5000 or some that has been standardized in one of the earlier dynasties. This is referring to Traditional Chinese, as I believe Simplified Chinese has drop that amount to about 2000 characters, which is still quite a handful for anyone wanting to learn.

My dad doesn’t think that any new characters have been added to the Chinese dictionary. This however differs from phrases. Any new concept or idea, people use existing Chinese characters to form up a new phrases to represent the new concept or idea. For example, computer is 電腦 (dian4 nao3) which literally means electric brain. The monitor is called 螢光幕 (ying2 guang1 mu4) which translates to fluorescent screen.

I always like to see how Chinese evolves with new sayings and understanding how they come about is always fun.

The new phrases mentioned in this article are:

• Economic reforms and soaring rates of home ownership have coined a new moniker for the tribe of youth struggling to pay off home loans in traditionally debt-wary China: “fang nu,” or “house slaves”. 房奴 (fang2 nu2) which as they stated correctly does translate to house slave.
• And young, married professionals who live in separate homes to keep the romance alive and maintain their own space have been branded “Semi-honey couples” (“ban tang fu qi”), the official Xinhua news agency said, citing education officials. 半糖夫妻 (ban4 tang2 fu1 qi1) which translates to half sweet couples.
• “Young Chinese moving in fashionable circles often drop phrases like ‘duan bei’, with a literal meaning of ‘brokeback’,” to euphemistically refer to male homosexuals, Xinhua said. 斷背 (duan4 bei4) which translates to broken back. I found it very interesting they’re using this phrase to refer to homosexual people and is a clear example of how Hollywood has affected the Chinese language.
• The emergence of city-dwelling couples choosing a pet over children had seen the use of “ding chong jia ting,” in Chinese, or “DINKS with pets,” in English, the report added. 丁寵家庭 (ding1 chong3 jia1 ting2) actually uses a Chinese character (丁 – ding) to represent the DINK acronym. 寵 means pet and 家庭 means family, and as suggested earlier, it means double income no kids with pets.

So every year around the Seattle area, there’s this thing called Seattle Street of Dreams, where 5 or 6 builders build these luxurious houses and showcases them off for a couple months, and then sells it off. These houses are usually over $1 million and according to Derek, one last year went for $6 million. These years houses ranged from $1.7 million to $2 million. Derek thinks that’s because the house market has slowed down and the fact that one or more houses didn’t get sold last year, might’ve made builders a bit scared of building extremely expensive homes.

Derek was talking about secret hidden rooms (like the ones you see in Batman), and it had pool tables and poker tables, and from the outside, you wouldn’t know there was a room there at all. Unfortunately, this year they didn’t have any of that. I think one of the main topics this year was Green and how to make house more environment friendly. I didn’t really see that much environment friendly things. I mean, it doesn’t even have solar panels.

I also got to see Dan’s kid and Matt’s kid. They’re both so cute, yet look like quite a handful. I nudged Derek and ask him when little Dereks will be coming out.

So I took a lot of pictures. You can check out the pictures I took in my photo gallery: Seattle Street of Dreams 2007

Here are few cool ones:

I personally like the Greenleaf Retreat the most (House #2). It had a very modern look and the inside look quite grandeur. One thing I realized was that outside patios apparently is a very big thing…

Afterwards, Derek, Shanna and I decided to go get coffee at Starbucks. On our way there, Tekman gives me a call and tells me that he’s in front of my house. I had picked up some Nintendo Wii component cables for Xyon and him at Monoprice, and they were there to pick it up. One problem, I wasn’t at home. They thought about calling me, but didn’t want to wake me up, so decided to just drop by unexpectedly. I had IM Tekman the night before telling him since I was going to be up there, I could just drop off the cables. Apparently that’s no longer his primary screenname. I’ve bumped that screenname down a level and moved his cell screenname to the top. I told him to meet us at Starbucks and with the help of Xyon’s GPS system, they got to us with no problems. We sat around and just chatted for awhile, enjoying the nice day when the forecast had expected rain.

Speaking of not waking me up, I had actually gone to bed at 6:30am the night before, and my alarm clock went off at 9:30am. Didn’t actually make it out of bed till 9:48am and thought I was going to be late. Fortunately, Derek was going to be late also.

So my dad called me in the middle last week, and he tells me he thinks he got scammed. I was like, my dad, scammed? How is that possible. He’s more careful about these things than I am. I mean he even modifies the patient-doctor contract that says if they’re unable to get money from their insurance companies, that the patient is liable for the fee to that the clinic is liable for the fees and can not come after the patient.

Anyway, my dad signed up for satellite TV that came with a series of Chinese channels and the company that he signed up with is a subsidiary of DirecTV called World Satellite TV (located in Rosemead, CA), which promised $5/month subscription. However, the contract states $30/month, but World Satellite TV promised the $25 difference will be paid by them every month. At first everything worked fine, but after a couple months, they started paying less and less, not enough to cover the full bill. I told him to send me what he has and I’ll investigate to see if anything similar is reported.

The company in question is:

World Satellite TV, Inc.
3337 Del Mar Ave
Rosemead, CA 91770
626-307-1888

My dad gave them call, but only seemed to get an answering machine/voice mail box. After his persistence, he finally gets through, but it was a weekend and they won’t be able to look into the issue until Monday. It feels like a scam and it smells like a scam. Then it’s probably a scam.

Anyway, it’s currently only 6 months, and they signed up my dad for an 18-month contract, and there’s a $250 ETF (early termination fee). I tried searching online for more information about World Satellite TV, but wasn’t able to find anything. I told him to call DirecTV and see if he can argue his way out of this since it was one of their subsidiary that was lying to customers.

I got a voice mail from my dad the next day telling me, that World Satellite TV apparently has credited the remaining balance on his account. However, he doubts that their company can last much longer and he’ll still be happy if he comes out of this just paying $15/month.

Turns out that if I use hot water to wash my clothing instead of just warm water, my cotton t-shirts become REALLY SOFT!!! I had some stains I wanted to get cleaned off a couple articles of clothing, so I decided to use hot water for my batch of white/light-colored clothes instead of the regular warm. I know hot water shrinks your clothes, but given that these clothes have already gone through the washer many times, I don’t really see them shrinking much anymore. Every other step of the laundry was normal, but after the dryer, these shirts were so soft!!!

Speaking of laundry, for some reason, many of my t-shirts during this wash, turned inside out. I don’t think it had to do with hot water, since my dark colored clothing pile also had a few. I don’t think it was when I took it off as I’m usually careful about remember to flip them correctly before dumping them into the laundry basket (since I hate have to extend my laundry chore by having to flip all my clothes back to their regular position).