Marina Bay Sands – Singapore
In yesterday’s episode of Top Chef, the host announced that this season’s finale will be held internationally for the first time. Destination? Singapore. While it is no doubt a great foodie city, there are many worldwide cities with greater culinary significance. So why would Top Chef pick Singapore of all places?
I’m predicting that the finale episodes will feature Marina Bay Sands heavily in some form or another. Marina Bay Sands opened in June 2010 and is one of the most notable Asian construction projects in years. At $5.7 billion, it is the 2nd most expensive casino property, beaten only by the massive CityCenter project in Las Vegas. Considering how brazenly Top Chef has been highlighting their sponsors this season, I expect countless gratuitous shots of the property.
Not that I’m complaining, of course. Its unusual design would fit right in with Dubai’s skyline, but I am most enamored with the absolutely gorgeous infinity pool at the top of the hotel. What an incredible view. The desire to swim in this pool instantly rocketed Singapore up my list of future travel destinations.
A Bathing Ape tie collection
Apologies for the sporadic updates on my site! For the past decade, summer has consistently been the busiest time of the year, be it because of research, standardized tests or applications for the next phase of my life. This year is no exception! So updates will be a bit slow until I get over this hump.
Brief post today. A few months ago, I was complaining about the ridiculously difficult to find Mr. Bathing Ape ties. I searched high and low for them in a futile effort since the supply was completely dry. Finally, a reseller in Tokyo somehow managed to get a few in stock. Sometimes persistence does pay off!
EVO 2010 — Taiwan shocks the world
This past weekend was EVO 2010, the world’s largest fighting game championship, held annually in Las Vegas. The event has progressively become bigger every year, thanks to the breakout success of Street Fighter 4 that has re-energized the community as well as attracted legions of new fans. Over 1,700 people participated in the Super SF4 tournament!
If you have been following my Twitter feed, I was hyped throughout the weekend, following the live stream and watching exciting, world-class fights. I couldn’t make it out to EVO this year due to medical school obligations, but I definitely plan on attending in the future. Ever since my first taste of tournament competition at Season’s Beatings 4, I’ve caught the itch!
Taiwanese player GamerBee in a moment of triumph
Mr. Bathing Ape – jacquard camo tie
Japanese fashion label A Bathing Ape released a new collection in March called Mr. Bathing Ape. Collaborating with classy retailer United Arrows, Mr. Bathing Ape moves off the street into the gentlemanly domain of suits, shirts, ties, and dress shoes. I’ve wanted to buy a couple of these dreamy ties ever since I first saw them. The collection was released in only one store worldwide (Mr. Bathing Ape x United Arrows store in Shibuya, Tokyo). Luckily, I have some friends in Tokyo and asked a few to see if they could help with pick-ups.
Photo by Brandon Shigeta
Deciding on an iPad case
Summer is approaching and, as always seems to be true around this time of year, each day is not long enough to fit in everything I want to do. Or more importantly, everything I need to do. I’m nearing the end of medical school with applications, interviews, and all that hassle looming over my head. I’m hoping to avoid taking a complete hiatus like I did last year since I have tons of posts I want to write. Just need to find the spare time to do it!
This post is pretty simple, especially since I already had all these photos sitting around on my computer. After I bought my mom her iPad, I did quite a bit of research looking into the tons of options available for cases and sleeves. This is a quick look at my thought process. What she ended up using completely surprised me and negated all the work I did. Just shows how futile it is to predict what a woman wants.
By the way, I promise this is the very last iPad-dedicated post you’ll see on my site!
My Mother’s Day gift — iPad
For Mother’s Day this year, my brother and I bought my mom an iPad. Our family doesn’t make a big deal about gift-giving on holidays or birthdays, which I appreciate since I hate having a deadline to think about gift ideas. Instead we will buy gifts at sporadic times during the year whenever something appropriate presents itself. This way there’s no pressure to buy something random for the sole purpose of hitting those deadlines. Probably sounds weird, but it’s a more organic way of doing things and I think more people should adopt this philosophy. Not surprisingly, I don’t like Valentine’s Day.
So this iPad is “technically” for Mother’s Day and my mom’s birthday, even though we bought it in early April, Mother’s Day is today (May 9th) and my mom’s birthday is in early June. For those of you keeping score, I purchased my mom’s iPad before Apple banned me. It was the first iPad I bought actually; I walked into the Apple store on a random day and that’s when I realized they had lots of stock and started offering to do international pick-ups.
This also happens to be the first Apple product I have ever purchased. After getting a chance to play around with an iPad in the store, I realized how seemingly perfect it was for my mom and decided to buy. My parents came to visit recently so I was able to give her the iPad and see what she thought about it. This post is not meant to be a technical review, nor an exhaustive and complete analysis of all the features and functionality. You can track down plenty of reviews for that. Instead, it is a look at two people and if/how iPad is compatible with their lifestyles and computing needs.
The aftermath of my iPad ban story
Whew, the past two weeks have been crazy! What started as just a funny story I wanted to share with my brother and friends shockingly went global. When the flood of visitors first hit, I panicked as my site was mercilessly trampled. It took me over 10 minutes just to log into my FTP server. Triple that to upload WP Super Cache, a band-aid solution I hoped would ease the traffic stress. Luckily it seemed to work fairly well.
The floodgates have opened…
Now that the frenzy has mostly died down, here’s some miscellaneous notes on the whole adventure.
— Social media networks are so powerful. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit — these and others were the engines spear-heading the madness. Out of these four, the only one I use is Twitter. Hilariously enough, my original tweet about the story was unnoticed. But boy, every time a power user tweeted a link to my site, the retweets were incessant.
— Some of the articles that drove traffic my way: PC World, Consumerist, Ars Technica, Gawker, The Register. And that’s just Day 1, I stopped tracking after that.
— I was contacted by writers from newspaper organizations and magazines who wanted to publish articles about the story. They all requested phone interviews. I was actually considering entertaining the first interview offer I received. But as my article truly went viral and some people were misinterpreting what I thought was a fairly clear-cut story, I realized how easily words could be twisted. Suddenly the wild spontaneous realm of the phone interview, where I didn’t have a lot of time to shape my responses, was much less enticing. I rejected all the phone interview offers. Nobody was interested in an e-mail interview or Q&A.
— A major tech blog was interested in the exclusive rights to re-publish my story in full on their site. I didn’t realize a practice like this even existed. I declined the offer.
— I received a few dozen e-mails from writers for big-time websites, not to request interviews, but just to pat me on the back for a well-written story or to ask a question or two for curiosity’s sake. I definitely appreciate the gesture.
If you haven’t guessed already, I am fascinated by all the attention my site got in the past two weeks. Let’s face it, this is just a tiny personal blog that exists quietly in a corner of the Internet, known to only a very small few.
But surprisingly, the crazy traffic rush wore out its welcome fairly quickly. Want to know the biggest lesson I’ve learned from this experience? All these visitors and big-time traffic numbers mean nothing to me if they’re just people who click-through once and never return again. To my regular readers, thanks for sticking with me and I hope whatever attracted you to Protocol Snow in the first place keeps you coming back. To the new readers who like my content, some who have e-mailed saying you would never have discovered my site if it wasn’t for the iPad story, welcome!
