TheLeong.com

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.

I know everyone’s dying to hear what I’ve been up to, so here goes. My mind doesn’t really work in sequential order, so I’ll just go my category and/or topic.

Computer 復活
I got my computer back, but I had to buy a new HD and a new video card. I got that all set up, and after about a day or two of reinstalling Windows (3 times), going through the Registry, copying files, etc, I’m back up and running. The new HD’s name is Musashi, so that’s what the computer is now called. Kojiro is still alive (I guess it still works), and it’s in there as a secondary hard drive. I’d never installed a hard drive and/or done the whole setting slave/master kinda thing, but it was easy as hell. I felt accomplished. I have just about every program, etc that I need back on my computer, and even finally installed Firefox. The only thing I can think of that I lost in this whole ordeal (uh, aside from repair and new parts cost) was my AIM Away Messages. That, I can deal with.

就職活動Start
I’ve kind of started looking for jobs. This is pretty tough when I have no clue at all what exactly I want to do after I graduate in May. I’ve used the business school’s UCSO system to get some interviews and stuff like that, but I honestly don’t know if I even want to do sales or marketing. Advertising, I could handle. I’m wanting to work in TV more and more, but who knows if that’s easy to get into. A job in Japan would be nice also, but I don’t know if I want to live there for more than a few years. I might just end up doing JET or some other kind of program to go to Japan.
I had my first interview on Thursday morning…it was with Cook Urological. They’re looking for a Product Manager in Tokyo that will pretty much cover all of Japan. Only thing is, the job’s pretty demanding Nihongo-wise, and I’d have to live in Japan for a long time. Also, I don’t know if I want to sell stuff that people shove into their penises. In other news, I interview with General Mills on Monday for a sales-type of position, and I’m going to Boston at the end of the month for the Japanese job fair. Hopefully there will be some companies looking for Americans with only medium-level Japanese.

IUSTV stuff
Been pretty busy lately, although with exactly what, I don’t know. The office in Read isn’t going to be done until the end of the month, which is a huge pain in the butt. Oh well. 仕方ない。 Aside from the delay in new office space, pretty much everything is going great. All the teams are working, doing stuff, and being good. A few roadbumps have been handled, and I think by next week everyone will be doing something. Now that I don’t have to worry about micro-managing everything (each Exec can manage their team pretty well, and I just keep up with them), I can go on to doing more administrative stuff. Although I am really really considering Producing a new show myself. We’ll see if I have time. That’s what I came here for in the first place, right? To make TV. I’ve been thinking of trying to create the best show ever, maybe by the time I die I can do that.

忙しい Week だった
I think it’s been because I just passed the 1/3 mark of the semester, but I had at least 1 test a week for the past 2 or 3 weeks. On top of that, I’ve been somewhat busy (I don’t know exactly with what), doing assignments and other kinds of stuff. For this entire past week, pretty much, my schedule has looked like this:
12 noon: wake up in a rush, finish some work that I didn’t do
2PM-6PM: classes of some kind
6PM-11PM: go to IUSTV for meetings or goofing off
11PM-6AM: go home, either work on stuff or watch TV/use computer
6AM-12 noon: wake up in a daze and rush, repeat
One of my biggest problems, I’ve realized, is going to IUSTV. There are times when I actually have meetings to either lead or listen in on, but sometimes I’m there for no reason and end up staying the entire night. I need to cut back on this…

Everything has seemed so busy over the past few weeks, and I don’t know when it’s gonna ease up. I’m going to try and make things better for myself this week, otherwise I’m going to die from exhaustion. I’m tired of waking up and having to rush or panic to do something. I need to get myself re-organized this weekend, particularly for job interviews, the Boston trip, and partially for the Halloween Party/A-Team Reunion. Life is good, just busy. Maybe that’s good. I’m starting to see why Kieran wanted to go to Scotland for a year to relax after graduating. JET might not be difficult or perfect, but maybe I should do it just to take things easy in Japan for a year or two…

OK so wow; I haven’t made a really substantial update on here in a long time. I’m sure that all three people out there in the world who read this blog constantly (all of whom I have probably never met) are just grinding their teeth wondering “what has become of Mr. Anthony Leong?!” Well, internet-stalkers, here we go, with a giant update of the last three weeks or so of my life.

I left Japan on July 28th. While I was planning on pulling an all-nighter before my flight, I accidentally fell asleep for longer than planned and had to rush to finish up all the packing and stuff in the morning. To make a long (and slightly funny yet slightly embarrassing) story short, I made it to Narita airport only about 30 minutes before take-off, thus missing my flight. After a few hours of waiting around at the airport, hanging out with Yuji, unsuccessfully waiting on stand-by for two flights to the US, they decided to transfer me to Singapore Air. This was actually a better deal for me, since it was a lot nicer than what United would have been. So I made my way to Los Angeles via airplane, got to sleep most of the way, watched some movies and TV on the flight. The nice thing about Singapore Air was that all the programming on the personal TVs (every seat has their own, as do most nice international planes) was on-demand. I don’t know if I’ve ever had this before. But instead of waiting for the movie you want to watch to finish then start-up again, you just use the remote and access what you want to watch. I watched an episode of Frasier and one of Arrested Development, saw the I, Robot movie that wasn’t as bad as I expected, and watched the first half of Kung-Fu Hustle. This was all after I slept for about 8 hours, having not slept much the night before.

After I finally made it to LA, I had a bit of time before my flight back to St. Louis. I got stopped by some Indian guy (from India, not native American), and he tried to get me to donate to his cult or whatever in exchange for some books about Indian religion. I lied (of course) and said I didn’t have much cash on me, and ended up giving him only like 120 yen and still got one of his weird little books. Nice omiyage, I guess. After that I got on a plane to StL and things were good. Now for another funny story: I’m sitting on the plane and hear the lady next to me talking about her son who graduated from Northwestern, something about law, something about marines, etc. Since I spent so much time in Japan this time watching Detective Conan, I think my detective skills were pretty polished or something, and I figured out that the lady sitting next to me flying to St. Louis was Bryan Reynolds’ (from IES Fall) mom! Wow what a weird coincidence. But his mom was busy talking, and I was really tired, so I went to sleep for most of the four hour flight. I woke up and near the end of the flight asked his mom if she was who I thought, and I was correct. Conan would be proud. And I did it without a bow-tie, stun-gun watch, and a crazy Professor friend. Well, that was a mystery solved. And thus I was back in America.

I only spent about three days back at home in St. Louis. I actually really liked it, even though I didn’t even leave the house for two whole days. My sleep schedule was still pretty messed up, but it was nice relaxing at home for a bit. I think I must be getting older or something but just sitting at home or hanging out with my parents is pretty nice nowadays. On Saturday morning I left with my parents to hit the road back to Indiana. I had to move out of my old apartment by the end of the month, which was kind of a pain in the butt as I would have rather just loafed at home for longer, but oh well. Spent all weekend moving and stuff from one apartment to the other with my parents, and that was that. I’m living in a new place now, it’s really nice. The set up is different from the old place, and while I think the new living room leaves a bit less space to have people over, it’s definitely better for me just being lazy by myself, which I probably do the most. And it’s not like I ever have masses of people over anyways, so it’s good.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been back in Bloomington for over two weeks now. Things have seemed to just fall back into place like I never left. My schedule for now is really easy. The only thing I do every day is go work on IUSTV stuff at the office from around 1 to 4PM. Starting tomorrow, though, I’m having more important meetings, etc, so I suppose things will get a bit more intense. Hanging out with everyone (who’s back) has been great; I think senior year is going to be a lot of fun. I got the new Katamari game, and it’s awesome. I beat it in like two days, but like the first one, there’s so much replay value that you never really “beat” the game. I’m not especially looking forward to the start of classes, well at least not for the actually class work, but I guess there’s no real choice for that.

Well I think that’s a pretty decent entry. I do have to say, my life isn’t exactly amazingly exciting, but I’m going to keep doing this blog thing for a long time I think. I’ve said before that I don’t really care who reads this. I’m sure some friends and stuff read it, but mainly I think the reason I have this is so I can look at it a bit down the line and just see what I’d been doing, what I was thinking, etc. A journal or something like that, although it’s also fun to post up stupid stuff for other people to see. It seems like a few more people I know have blogs nowadays, so those are always fun to read when I’m bored. Now it’s time to plan a bit for my first Exec meeting of the fall IUSTV semester. I’m really in charge now, so it’s a good and weird feeling. That’s about it for now, I’m watching Iron Chef and just loafing around. Life is good, summer has been great, and this entry has officially become way to freaking long.

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.

So I was grocery shopping today in-between classes to get some food and also some lunch, and there seemed to be a more-than-usual “2 for $…” deals, and also a few “3 for $…” deals. You know, it’s like “2 bags of chips for $4.” These have always been sort of an enigma to me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. You’re always standing there wondering if you HAVE to buy 2 (or 3) to get the deal. Can you just pick up 1 and still get the special sale price? WELL ladies and gentlemen, the answer is NO. I asked the cashier and unless it says “Buy one get one free” or something to that effect, you can just buy 1 of the sale item and get the lower price. The wording must just be the marketing tactic to trick people into buying more than they need. Actually this time I decided to play it safe and did indeed buy 2 packs of soda and 3 bags of cheese cubes. But no more. Now that I have official word from the inside, I’m just buying one of everything from now on.

You’d think I would have actually just gone and asked an employee at some point in the past 21 years. Nah, I’m too lazy.

This was, of course, at the grocery store (Marsh). I think Sam’s Club might be different, maybe because everything there is in bulk. I was there over the weekend and I did indeed have to buy 2 bags of chips to get the deal. Oh man this is confusing. I don’t need 3 boxes of cookies!

Finally getting around to writing a post, which for some reason I feel compelled to do, even though most people won’t be interested in reading this, haha.

As a bunch of you know, the last few weeks have been pretty busy. I think it’s midterm time, since I’ve had a bunch of tests. IUSTV is keeping me pretty busy also. We premiered a new show, called “On the Edge of Your Sport” last week. I haven’t been that involved with it, but it was really great to see a new show get on air. It reminded me a lot of some other new shows starting, especially the first taping. Although I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about not staying as involved with it next year as I am now, this really is a lot of fun. I feel guilty sometimes for spending hours upon hours at the IUSTV offices when I should be doing school work, but I guess this will look good on resumes, and gives me a lot of material for interviews. At least I’m doing a lot better on actually doing classwork than I did last spring or summer.

I’ve also been trying to find a decent internship for the summer. Ideally, I could find something paid, in Japan, and in the marketing or TV industry. I’m sure I can’t find something that is “ideally” perfect in all three of those, but I’ve got some leads so far. Haha, I’m going to apply for a job in Japan working for the FDA. Never thought I’d say I was considering working with anything remotely connected to agriculture, but who knows.

As far as next year goes, I’m leaning towards staying at IU the entire year. I talked to the B-school advisor last week, which was pretty much a huge waste of time, but oh well. My one question was whether or not I should graduate early or not to get a “International Business” major instead of just “International Studies,” and all the lady says is “well, that’s up to you.” Yeah, I know that. BUT I’d think an ADVISor would be able to ADVISE me on what to do. Anyway, I’m leaning towards having a really really easy next year, and work at IUSTV or something. Who knows. I also am 70% sure I’m going to stay at my current apartment, just because it’s great so far and I wouldn’t have to deal with finding a new place, moving, etc.

I can’t think of anything else to put here. I’ve been watching DVDs in my freetime (usually a few hours before I sleep), which I’m getting from Netflix. I’ve gotten through the first 3 seasons of Seinfeld, the first 4 of Frasier, and the first 1 and a half of Curb Your Enthusiasm in the past 2 months. I guess you can call that an accomplishment. Oh, and yes Frasier is an awesome show, even though most people are half and half about either liking it or thinking it’s too “high-brow.” Hoo-ah!