I was in Manhattan last weekend and walked into a regular hole-in-the-wall on upper east side. It was emotional. I was very close to bursting into tears. I asked the slice, why did I move so far away from you?

Last night I finally walked into Cafe Luigi. I’ve been meaning to check it out because it looked more legit than other Chicago pizza joints. Not only did a slice cost an ungodly $3, it again failed to meet my standards. The sauce out here is way too sweet – is it an American boondocks thing to always strive toward diabetes? The dough almost always tastes like cardboard, with slightly charred odor I could really do pizza without. You can’t possibly screw up cheese and toppings, but man, the sauce and the dough really ruins Chicago pizza. They say it’s in the water – well, isn’t it time some chemists ran the Hudson River water through an HPLC or NMR and came up with a “pizza dough water electrolytes” mix?? I understand it’s important to use those machines to analyze things like antioxidants and paramagnetism, but really people, first things first.

The best pizza I’ve had out here remains D’Agostinos at Addison and Southport. Even these guys fall short of the most plebian NYC joints, but they put good Chicago-style toppings on like Italian Beef.

And don’t even give me that deep-dish crap. That’s not pizza. It’s quiche.

Is it too much to ask? I don’t think so. Learn to make pizza right, Chicago. Throughout history Chicago has been trying to catch up with NYC, and with this problem unsolved, it will always be so far behind.

I have been writing HTML and CSS codes since high school – about 10 years now – and thought I had learned most, if not all, tags and tricks to make my code do what I want. That is, until I was shown an HTML/CSS introductory page for Japanese people. If you can read Japanese, it’s here, still containing a lot of deprecated tags. It reminds me of HTML Goodies years before the emergence of W3C standards.

Anyway, browsing through this page I found two tricks I had never known before – and rightfully so, because they are completely useless if you don’t code Japanese pages.

Trick 1: Vertical write mode

Japanese books, newspapers and other print media are often printed in vertical lines, with the lines moving from right to left. Though they for the most part have abandoned this for web and other screen media, it is possible to replicate this with a CSS styling writing-mode:

Here’s how the above would look in Internet Explorer:

How cool is that!

Trick 2: Furigana

Furigana is a way to clarify the Japanese pronunciation of Kanji, or Chinese characters. While hiragana and katakana are original, phonetic, Japanese characters, they also use Chinese characters extensively (as do Koreans, but we don’t usually write out the words in Chinese characters) in their writing. So they write hiragana pronunciations in tiny letters above the character to tell you how to read it. You would often find this in manga, since most kids would have trouble reading all the kanji in them. It turns out, since the early days of HTML, it had tags for this.

I made the font large so you can see the effect:

No separate lines, no tables, just in-line, semantic tags.

There’s also a trick to make your characters display from right to left, which I assume is useful for languages like Hebrew and Arabic, but I don’t know those. Granted, these tricks are so close to being useless, and possibly deprecated. They also only seem to be supported by *GASP* Internet Explorer. Having dealt with Korean clients, I know Asians are very reluctant about changing to a “better” browser like Firefox or Chrome, and I wonder if it has to do with IE’s support for international features like these.

I learned something today in a field I thought I knew everything about! And for the very first time in my life, I said, “way to go, Internet Explorer.”

HappyKorean is a giant project I have been working on for the past four months or so. It is a start-up social networking site for the Korean community in Chicago (although they are open to expansion in the future), and I must say it was a grueling task to create this site from scratch – I delivered all the graphic components, front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript, back-end PHP and MySQL, not to mention the dual-language support requirement, allowing users to toggle between Korean and English at any time.

I must say, if I were the client, I would have narrowed down its focus a bit – as of now, it serves as a Facebook-like social networking site, a Match.com-like dating service, a Craigslist-like bulletin service, a Groupon-like coupon service, a Yelp-like directory service, a Blogger-like blogging software, and Sayclub/Cyworld-like group activity site. It’s a monster and they know it – I was told that it started out as a dating service, but when the traffic proved unsatisfactory, they kept adding on these features – and now the users have come to expect them. After streamlining it for them as far as they would allow, the project still gave me hell of a time developing.

Here’s my “profile.” You can add people as your “neighbors,” track your “groups,” send messages, winks, and follow blogs. If you’re intrigued or would like to hit on Korean women, feel free to sign up for the free “basic” account. Actually, for the latter, you would probably need to sign up for the charged “premium” account.

On that note, I am looking for new projects and jobs, so if you hear of anything or own a company that’s hiring a web professional, let me know!

The movie runs three parallel plots, jumping in and out of all three until the end. Virginia Woolf, in her manic-depressive self, writes her famous Mrs. Dalloway while Moore’s character is inspired by it to attempt suicide, while Streep’s character is somewhat of a real-life version of Mrs. Dalloway. As always I’m going to stop myself here before I bore myself describing the plotlines, but the movie is chalk-full of metaphors, parallelisms and concurrent motifs – it is a great thinking movie. Every line is painfully meaningful, and when the movie finished I had to devote a good amount of time just thinking about all the elements. It is a wonderful refreshment for all of us who feel like we were forced into lives quite different from our desires; obligations and responsibilities that the adult life represents. In the face of death, one can appreciate life so much more, and the themes are well-contrasted in the three plotlines, each in its own social frame.

I forgot all about Nicole Kidman winning an Oscar for her role in this, but all acting in this film is superb. All the requirements of a great movie are there: script, acting, cinematography, and score. The eerie, Danny-Elfmanish music runs consistently through all three plotlines, and gives otherwise neutral images a somber air. A must see, and I’m glad I got to.

Perfume is a Japanese technopop group made of three girls, each one uglier than the next. Listen to them once, you’ll hate it. Listen to them twice, you’ll hate it. Listen to them a third time, and they will get stuck in your cerebral cortex and come back to haunt you every time your neurons are idle. Their music is really what their name suggests: hypnotizing, volatile (as in high vapor pressure) and frankly, a little bit annoying.

Asia has always been at the forefront of creating no-talent pop groups based on looks alone, but with Perfume, they failed in even that. The girls are not even close to being as attractive as say, Wonder Girls (of Korea), and from what I can tell from their interviews they’re dumber than my left toe, but whoever’s writing the songs for Perfume is a synth genius. It hasn’t been too many years since I started appreciating processed music (largely in thanks to Daft Punk and Infected Mushroom), but man, the vo-coded harmonies of Perfume will get stuck in your head faster than Come On Eileen.

Which makes me wonder: how did they pick these girls? Perhaps they had to pick the most bland voices so they can vocode them more easily. Now that would be quality casting.

I was down in St. Louis last weekend and because that city does not have enough things to do/see over a 4-day weekend, decided to go see Prince of Persia.  Coming from Chicago, I couldn’t really pass up paying mere $ 6.50 for it. Anyway, I had been extremely disappointed with how this “summer of blockbusters” was turning out to be after seeing Iron Man 2 and Robin Hood. The latter was my mistake, I probably should’ve accepted how bad it looked, and not seen it. But I did and after the 2+ hours of boobless, anachronistic, culturally-confused wannabe epic, let’s just say I have a newfound appreciation for “relatively well-made” movies. Prince of Persia turned out to be one of these.

Being a Disney film, its protagonist Dastan severely lacks the badassity all of us who have played the video game were looking for. That and it’s played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who Heath Ledger would’ve agreed is prettier than his sister. His onscreen brother – the future king of Persia – looks so Scottish he belongs in Braveheart. With all the Disneyesque suspension of disbelief aside, this film is entertaining for sure. The action sequences are not cliche, and faithfully reconstructs techniques and styles from the video game (fortunately not the one pictured above). The exotic nature of all things Persian (not the weird shit they showed in 300) kept me engaged throughout the movie, from the Scimitars to the gorgeous CGI scenery of ancient cities.

See, this is why I can never be a film critic, because I don’t know how to provide a synopsis of the plot without giving things away. There’s so much to make fun of in this movie – like how ugly the “princess” was and how everyone seemed to be denying it – but before I know it, I’ll be spilling the beans on how the sands of time sends Dastan back in time to kill his evil uncle or how the best scene in the movie is when he’s climbing up the walls as his minions make him steps with crossbows.

I wonder how much the creator of the game got paid for this? I remember playing it for the first time on my cousin’s 386 computer. The original is a tough game, much more difficult than the new ones on Playstation. No dagger of time to cheat death with if you miss a ledge and fall onto white impaling spikes. Revolutionary game, though, and I’m glad it’s gotten the credit it deserves. At least the movie kicked the Mario movie’s ass.

Worth $ 6.50 for sure. Now if all the other movies for the rest of the summer didn’t suck camel balls…

This website has been sounding like a food blog lately, and I apologize. I haven’t really had the time to write about all the little things going on in my life but now, something other than food to update!

I recently created a WordPress-powered website for my friend Kelsey Arlen, a budding actress and singer from New York City. There was a lot of CSS magic I had to work – the lower-right corner graphic gave me loads of trouble, but in the end I was able to create a fully flexible layout.

So the rave about this place is that it serves fusion-style ramen and fancy appetizers like lamb and brandy dumplings. It also helps that the chef, Bill Kim, used to be a chef at one of those high-class, fancy-food-only restaurants that I could not care less about. TimeOut will tell you that he was some sort of a saint for abandoning that cushy position to bring his awesome cooking “to the masses,” and to a degree, this is true. Entrees average at about $10, and appetizers, considering the ingredients, are also on the cheap side. To an average American, this would be a great way to have some “genuine (in the loosest sense of the word)” ramen.

It’s genuine because the noodles are pretty close to what you would get at Japanese ramen bars, but I think any Asian would agree that their dishes are just plain overpriced, if not blasphemous. Their pork belly ramen does sport a great piece of pork belly, but it sits in a pho-like broth (not quite pho), and a lot of their ramen puts kimchi into that faux-pho (ugh) broth. All this does for me is to muddle up the flavor profiles and remind me of what Koreans would give to their dogs by combining everything on the table. It’s unique for sure – you could not get such a hodgepodge anywhere else, and I can see people wanting it from time to time. But any more than 10 bucks is way too much to pay for it, when you can get the real thing at Japanese grocery stores all over Chicago for around 7. The perpetual shortage of seating is also not worth it.

To be fair, the dishes are well thought-out and I must praise the chef for managing to make their ramen not taste like garbage. If I want pho, I’d go get pho. If I want Kimchi stew, I’d make it at home. And if I wanted ramen, there are definitely better places to go. But if I wanted to be able to mix all those in my mouth as if I were a sink drain, then Urban Belly is the way to go.

And with the success of Urban Belly, the chefs opened another joint in Humboldt Park called Belly Shack, with the same mix-it-all philosophy but a different direction – sandwiches. It was recommended to me a few days ago, and upon finding out that it’s heralded by the same chefs, I decided to check it out this weekend. And I must say, the food there is much better than Urban Belly. I had the Korean BBQ Kogi sammies and the Togarashi fries (special), and I was blown away – by the latter, mostly. The sammies are nothing special, and again, overpriced. I was served a quartered pita bread with Kimchi and Bulgogi doused in what they called the “ssam” sauce, though it was quite far from actually ssam sauce. All the fillings tasted great in the pita, but the whole time I could not help but think “I could make this at home for $3″. What made all this worse is that my mother had the same exact idea 10 years ago – “What if we opened a sandwich shop? We could put bulgogi and kimchi on bread!” Terrible idea not to act on, ma. The fries, however, were amazing, probably because I love Japanese food so much. The mayo-based dipping sauce seemed to have enough dashi in it to put the entire Madison Square Garden to sleep (yes that’s an MSG joke…sorry) and the Togarashi introduced a whole lot of umami to the potatoes. In fact, it was exactly the same recipe as that of classic Korean chips called Korebop, which makes it a lot less impressive. The food here was worth going back to once in a while, but I really wish they would stop charging out their asses. Moral of the story? If you’re Asian be ready to be open-minded and to lower your standards, because the only surprise you’ll get is that everyone else is surprised by this food.

I do get to do a decent amount of graphic design for it, though, with my Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash skill sets. This includes newspaper ads (shown to the left), animated banners, pamphlets, posters, flags, and so much more. The one on the left represents my first newsprint publication – and full page! This was on Chicago Korea Weekly – sadly they don’t seem to have a website – and there have been other handful of newspaper ads I made on Kyocharo, as well as all sorts of web ads since this. I may post them here in the future, but since I am still a bit embarrassed by the website, perhaps I will wait.

I will wait because currently I am working on a complete redesign and reprogramming of HK to follow the standards (mainly CSS), do better with SEO and have a better user experience. This is probably going to take a few months, but do keep checking back because I will be sure to post about it when it is done.