TheLeong.com

Saturday morning I had to wake up around 7AM, which was 2 hours or so after I went to sleep. Why would I break my seeming 1-month or longer streak of waking up really really late? To get IUSTV funding for next year, and hopefully more, that’s why! Brian and I had the Committe for Fee Review hearing (CFR) in the Union at 9AM sharp. Without boring my blog-fans (ha, HA) too much with the details, we have to present to this committee of students how much money IUSTV needs for next year, and why. It’s based on a system of student activity fees, which everyone at IU has to pay. This fee is split up among a whole bunch of different organizations, departments, etc on campus, and that’s how a lot of places are funded. IUSTV currently gets 64 cents. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s 64 cents per student per semester, which means this year we got about $54,000.000. Quite a nice chunk of change. We proposed increasing that to a dollar (so that we would get almost $75,000.00) for next year. We’ll see how that turns out in a month or two. Recommendations go from the CFR to the school’s dean to the chancellor (I guess provost now, since the whole chain of command just got overhauled), then to the Board of Trustees who make the final call.

Enough of that. After the hearing, ate breakfast at the Village Deli on Kirkwood, which I’ve only been to once before with TomSOB. I had the world’s largest breakfast burrito I think, and it was awesome. Afterwards I goofed around at home and at the office until the evening, went to sleep finally, and got up later for some TAIKO fun! That’s right, I bought the Taiko game for PS2. Nick brought his drum over and we played for a few hours. Seriously, one of the most fun games ever I think. It’s like DDR, but you play a Japanese-style drum. It’s a lot more fun than I’m making it out to be. I also have about 5 Japanese versions of the game, all with different songs, so the $30 I paid for the American game and drum controller was well worth it I think (yes, I actually bought a real PS2 game! miracle!

Quick deep thought for the night: have you ever thought about your family reading your blog? I’m not talking about your family right now. I’m talking about your family about 20 or 30 years from now. Considering that everything on the internet is pretty much archived or saved somewhere indefinitely, and internet indexing is becoming more sophisticated and powerful all the time (I mean, come on, look at Google compared to Yahoo from a few years ago), by the time we’re old and have families, it will probably be just a button press away to find anything and everything pertaining to you from anytime after the early 1990’s. This includes blog entries people. Your blog is public on the internet, which means whether you know it or not, it’s been saved and archived in a whole bunch of computers all over the world. Saved means it is/will be indexed, and viewable later on. Even much later.

I don’t know where I’m going with this thought, but it popped into my head earlier tonight when I was driving home. My blog is pretty boring and more just like something I use to keep track of what I do. Most likely, I’ll have a family and kids and stuff one day (as will most of you), so just wait for the day that they go “Hey, I found your blog from when you were in college. Were you seriously that much of a dork?” My kids won’t probably really ask that, because I’ll still be watching Kamen Rider and playing video games whether they like it or not, and the answer will be obvious. So in any case, in the ironic event that my kids are reading this exact blog post sometime in the year 202x (haha, like in Megaman), then HI KIDS BE GOOD MAKE ME SOME COOKIES.

Yeah, now all of you reading this are thinking about this concept, aren’t you? Thinking about what you’ve written, posted, alluded to, and saying to yourself in GOB fashion “I’ve made a huge mistake.” Not to make you paranoid or anything at all. I have given your mind a jumpstart and at least for a little bit, and you’re starting to think like I do: completely random and absolutely genius. I think of stuff like this all the time; welcome to the jungle. I’m joking, I’m not that arrogant.

I really want to play some Taiko right now, since I successfully obtained Japanese version 6 which just came out last month. It has a bunch of (obviously) current songs, like the Gorie song, Numa Numa (haha yes of internet fame), Matsuken Samba III, and even the gay ending theme to Magiranger. I’m afraid of waking and pissing off the neighbors below and next to me, considering its 2AM and I would be beating on a plastic drum in my living room. I guess I’ll just keep watching Detective Conan like I’ve been doing for the past hour (it’s a Special!). GOODNIGHT FUTURE KIDS LETS GO FOR A RIDE IN THE HOVER CAR TOMORROW.

The other day I was walking around in the business school, and I saw a group of people that I have seen before. It was the b-school’s tech department or something: about 5 adults (read: faculty/staff members) who were coming back from lunch. They were definitely not professors or anything, but went into the I.T. room if my memory serves me right (and I think it does).

This little cluster of people, however, had to have been the most blatantly dorky group of adults I have seen in a long time. They all were dressed in weird colored slacks with golf shirts, each had about 4 electronic gadgets in various holsters on their belts, and were talking about, well, dorky stuff. It got me thinking: those cliches that people always talk about from high school pretty much never go away. I don’t think when you’re in college you notice them too much; I mean, there are a few definite and broad groups/categories of people (which I will not go into here; that’s a whole other article, and a much longer one at that), but in general you are friends with and interact with a much more varied group of people as a college student.

When you graduate and get a job, however, I have a feeling that they might come back all over again. The b-school tech guys, I mean, were obviously the kinds of folks who throughout middle and high school probably didn’t have a lot of friends, probably liked dorky stuff like Magic cards and Star Trek (haha no offense Frank), never talked to girls, and in general, were losers. Hey, guess what? They still are. Using the business school as the first group of people, I have a feeling that pretty much every company/group/organization of adults (meaning, people out of college) has these cliches. Groups probably interact with each other in much the same way they do in high schools. I’ll bet the tech guys at the b-school don’t talk to a lot of the female young staff (maybe the equivalent of the hot girls). Maybe there are equivalents of the goth kids, the jocks, the artsy kids, the weird crazy ones, and the uppity hippy types. I’m not going to waste my or your time by trying to relate all the groups from high school into old people groups, but I think it’s just interesting to think about I guess. Another brainfart.

It seems like everyone wrote a nice long blog entry last night. I, on the other hand, fell asleep around 1AM-ish laying on my couch watching Frasier on DVD. So that I can stay competitive here in the blogging world, I will also attempt to write a nice long entry, although i can’t promise it will be meaningful at all. You know how they say that some people go to psychiatrists just because they need to talk or vent or something to solve their problems and stress? From that, journals and diaries also became a popular way for people to record their thoughts and ideas. This was like 1800-1970 I think. Nowadays, since Blogs are so popular, people are going to start using them to vent their emotions and things like that. This is not some amazing revolutionary theory that I had, since I’m sure it’s already been talked about a lot. However, I thought of it this morning and decided to write a quick side note about it. Also it doesn’t make sense because I’ve talked to 3 people online since I started writing this paragraph 20 minutes ago.

Down to business. Life has been good, but I’m only going to talk about this for 1 paragraph. Why, you ask? Because the majority of my posts are just boring rants about my life (see above paragraph about the Blog-therapy theory), and no one wants to read that. This past week was extremely busy, but right after my Marketing Strategy exam on Thursday, things seemed a lot better. I booked a hotel for Boston, so next weekend is all set. I’m not going to bother translating my resume into Japanese, mainly because it would be too hard and secondarily because I would make a lot of mistakes. Take my English resume, kudasai.

I think I’ve had this conversation in short form with some of you before, but did you ever wonder what will happen to Facebook in about 4 years? At that point, everyone who signed up in that first year or two will have graduated college. I’m not sure if Facebook makes a LOT of profit from their ads, etc, but will they keep letting people retain their Alumni accounts? After a few years, this is going to get huge and their network is going to quite hefty. Then, since they have this high school Facebook or whatever, are they going to be able to easily transfer their account to college? This is a huge number of people, and I really wonder if Facebook is going to be around forever. On that same note, we are of the 1st generation of people, ever, to use IM (particularly AIM) as a real communication tool. Are we still going to be IMing our friends in 20 years? Kind of funny to think of a 50 year old sitting at home, listening to MP3s, IMing their friends, and checking their Facebook account, but this might happen sometime in the future. I would enjoy retirement if I could do that for a good 20-30 years with no work or obligations at all. Actually that would be ideal.

So this isn’t really a structured blog, but I’m just thinking about how society is going to evolve with the modern applications that the college generation depends on today. I mean, everyone reading this probably has considered IM equal to the telephone at least a few times before. Heck, maybe all the time. Are we going to keep using all this stuff when we’re older and have kids of our own? Are we going to be “brb”-ing because we have to go pick the kids up from school? Are we going to be leaving away messages up that say “getting married”? Actually, people are already doing this, so maybe I answered my own questions. I’m not really asking these questions to be answered; these are more of the pondering-type of rhetorical questions.

Let’s go back to me for a minute. The computer programs/things that I probably use fairly often are: e-mail, AIM, MP3s, Facebook, Blogger, and I’m not including just general internet surfing in this. So if I keep using all these things (not e-mail, because DUH, that’s gonna be here forever) after college, into getting a job, into getting married, and into having kids (wow, scary, I guess I might do this eventually), then retirement, the world will be a weird place. Everyone will be doing the same thing, so maybe we’ll have a society of retired people at nursing homes who chat on IM and say stuff like “LOL my teeth just fell out again, brb.” I realize that there are probably some retired people out there who use IM, but I don’t care about you, you’re just ahead of the times. I think my mom is a good example of someone who isn’t “withit” on stuff like IM. As an example, she has on numerous times signed her IMs like an e-mail, complete with line breaks and “Love, Mom.”

So yeah, I guess I’m going to end it here. If my blog text remains somewhere that I can read it 20 years from now, I will try and comment to my own post. I actually have a feeling that a lot of these technologies will converge with mobile technology (like e-mail and IM are kind of blended in Japanese cell phones), so maybe one day no one will sit at a desktop, but will have some kind of funky portable device that they use all the time. You can IM people across the room or something like that. It’s going to be an interesting future. And yes I realize this post was somewhat of a mindbarf, and I don’t have any idea of what I’m talking about, but I think this whole idea is cool. And yes, I know for a face there are people out there who’s official job is to sit down and try to figure out how this is all gonna roll out. If anyone reads this blog for research, I expect a reference and a copy of the finished work. Note: aleong.com has already been quoted in at least one college paper that I know of, written by a Mr. Brian Blanchard.

When I’m 60 and check my Facebook account, set as an alumni, will I be able to poke Freshmen girls? Because I most definitely will.

After the IUSTV banquet last week (I need to put up pictures soon), I’ve been doing a bit of thinking. When I graduated from high school three years ago, I hadn’t planned at all on coming to college and getting involved in video and stuff. I had spent two years making short videos, teaching myself Final Cut, working long hours for nothing, and also having a lot of fun. I worked with the school to expand the video department. Who am I kidding? Before me and my group (PoS Productions) started actually doing stuff, there WASN’T enough of anything there to call it a department. I’d spent many nights, days (skipping classes), even summers and a winter break of my high school days editing video. I knew I wasn’t going to major in telecom in college, and I thought I’d never really have to sit all night in front of a Mac ever again.

Then I came to IU and as fate would have it, I met Kieran down the hall in my dorm who was starting a TV station. Haha, what are the chances? I’ve spent the last three years here editing video again, working much the same way I did back then. I’ve helped manage an organization that went from a group of kids saying something like “man it would be cool to make TV,” to a 100+ member group on campus with a huge office, somewhat impressive recognition, producing everything from a dating game show to a sports news show to a food review show. In just a few years, I’d say this is a pretty nice list of accomplishments. A lot of the growth at IUSTV, I’ll say, was with my help. Not trying to brag (seriously), but I’ve given a lot to this organization (I never call it a club because I think it’s a lot more than that) just in my free time, for no reason other than because I wanted to do it. I’m not a telecom major, I’ve never taken a formal class, yet in a few weeks I’ll be leading the entire shebang.

Just like in high school, really even more so, I spend a LOT of time working on video stuff. That includes a lot of managerial type of thing, not just the practical skills. IUSTV really does take higher priority with me than schoolwork, as pretty much anyone who knows me will agree, although it probably shouldn’t. I’ll pull an all-nighter helping edit an episode of something, whereas I’d never even consider doing that for a class assignment. I guess it’s some kind of fate (or maybe addiction) that’s kept me here in the biz. I don’t even really know if I’m going to do anything related to this when I graduate into the *real* world next May. I really enjoy all my work here at IUSTV, and it’s gone from just a hobby I had in high school to something I really am proud of. I’m usually pretty modest, but at least to myself I do have a certain amount of pride whenever someone recognizes the name Hoosier Date?. Sure, we don’t exactly make stuff that’s going to pass as a network TV program, but it’s still pretty impressive I think for a group of college kids, who have a million other things going on, to make so many hours of quality programming with somewhat ghetto-rigged equipment setups. I even sit down and watch IUSTV shows, not just because I make them, but because they’re fun to watch.

I guess the point of this entry was to reflect on what I’ve been doing. Although I might complain sometime (about everything, not just IUSTV), I’m really lucky that I got “roped into” this a few years back. I honestly don’t know what I’d do with my freetime if I weren’t involved with IUSTV. I was playing with that thought even before the banquet, and I figured that even if I hadn’t gotten in on the ground floor, it would have been pretty impossible for me NOT to have joined at some point. It’s just too tempting and too much fun for me.

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about this over the past few days, I just got a message on MySpace from Nick Lambrou, one of the guys I worked with in high school. I gave him a quick line about what I’ve been up to here at IU, and his response was:
“That is awesome. You cannot escape film and video anthony. Its in your blood.”

That’s probably true.