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Christchurch 2013

Posted by on May 01 2013 | Thoughts

Yesterday we headed into central Christchurch. A lot of the city is still very much in ruins two years on, but we are suprised to see a bit of life here. There is colour, people, and even a few businesses have opened up here.

    Central city has opened up so much more since the start of the year. Our last visit was a few months ago. Net fencing prevented us from walking into the heart of the city; we could only peer into it. Yesterday, for the first time, we were able to walk into it and see all the restaurants, clothes stores, cafés and banks we used to visit before the quakes hit. They were all vacant, but at least they are no longer inside the cordoned off area.



    A few restaurants have opened back up in this part of the city. The fact that food places are opening here surely is a sign that people are coming back into the city—that there are people walking and working in central Christchurch again.


    This main artery in and out of central city has also opened (photos below). At the start of the year, it was partially opened, full of netting, construction cones and grey. Now, it is decorated in bright colours with matching planters lining the street. We wonder if painted central streets is going to be a feature of the new Christchurch.


    There are cute topiaries here and there, large eye-catching murals that span entire walls of buildings, paintings and an air bridge that’s completely covered in a bright blue sky artwork.




    We really like the artwork on this air bridge: stand at the right position and it should look like there is no air bridge. It’s just sky with buildings on either side. Being a grey autumn day as well as not standing in the right position, we didn’t manage to capture the effect on camera.

    Central Christchurch has been battered by a lot earthquakes. A little over two years after the quakes, it still looks that way on the whole, but there is definitely a lot more activity. More parts of central city is opened, roads are being cleared, landscaping is being done, more and more businesses are opening up. It’s really great to see this progress. We hear that this is the year of the rebuild and that the central city is planned to open up fully this year. We really hope this is the case. It will be exciting to see what Christchurch looks like as more and more buildings go up and city plans are made into reality.


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All-Time Favourite Asian Series List: It Started with a Kiss

Posted by on Mar 16 2013 | All-Time Favourite Asian Series, Julia & Tania's Asian Series Picks

We’re back with our All-Time Favourite Asian Series. We’ve written about this series before. We had a post about it way back talking about how much we loved the series after a friend lent the DVD set for us to watch. Many years have passed and since then, we’ve watched so many more Asian series; and still, this Slice of Life/Romance/Comedy series remains as one of our favourite Asian series of all-time.

    It Started with a Kiss, the Taiwanese adaptation of Tada Kaoru’s Itazura Na Kiss, is our latest entry to our All-Time Favourite Asian Series blog series.

A recap on our All-Time Favourite Asian Series first post:

As we look at the series that feature on our list and think of why they are our all-time favourites, three things keep on popping up as the reasons: the story, the characters and the relationships in the series. The series in the list are ones we consider to have an interesting story that progresses well and logically; they have strong lead characters that make the story the reason it is interesting; and many of them have an interesting romance storyline as a main focus or as a sub-plot.

    So instead of simply writing up posts about our favourite Asian series and why we like them, we decided we’d write it like a profiling of the series, using the aforementioned three reasons—the story, the interesting characters and the interesting relationships in the series—as the basis for the posts. We figured if we wrote it this way, it’d give a chance for those who haven’t seen the series or are new to the world of Asian series to go see it.

IT STARTED WITH A KISS / 惡作劇之吻

All-Time Favourite Asian Series Rank: Top 5

It Started with a Kiss
Main Cast

Joe CHENG / 郑元畅 as JIANG Zhi Shu
Ariel LIN / 林依晨 as YUAN Xiang Qin
Jiro WANG / 汪东城 as JIN Yuan Fen (Ah Jin)

Based on Itazura na Kiss / イタズラな Kiss manga written by
TADA Kaoru / 多田かおる

Genre
Slice of Life, Romance, Comedy


THE STORY

    Ever since Yuan Xiang Qin saw Jiang Zhi Shu confidently and articulately give his welcoming speech at their high school’s opening ceremony two years ago, she has liked him. She tries to confess to him through a letter, but is coldly rejected and criticised for her lack of purpose in life. As if this was not deflating enough, her poorly constructed family home is destroyed in a mild earthquake that only brings down her place.

    She, with her Dad, is forced to vacate and temporarily live at a home kindly offered by her Dad’s good friend and his family. To her surprise, the family’s eldest son is none other than the guy who had rejected her, Jiang Zhi Shu.

 

INTERESTING CHARACTERS

Yuan Xiang Qin
   Likes to daydream. Is impulsive. Intellectually challenged. She is an F-student who struggles to understand basic concepts and meanings; however, what she lacks in intelligence, she makes up with determination, persistence and optimism. Through sheer hard work, persistence and sincerity, she achieves tasks beyond her ability.

Jiang Zhi Shu
   Cold and harsh, yet also has an inner playfulness. Possesses an IQ of 200 with the ability to remember everything down to the word with just one look or listen. He is capable of becoming anyone he desires in the world; yet he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. Feeling the desire to achieve and having a goal to work hard towards is something he envies.

Jin Yuan Fen (Ah Jin)
   F-student and only one in the F-Class not to graduate from high school. He appears to have no prospects in the workforce, but within him is surprising dedication, focus and passion in the culinary arts.

 

INTERESTING RELATIONSHIPS

Yuan Xiang Qin, Jiang Zhi Shu and Jin Yuan Fen (Ah Jin) Love Triangle
    Zhi Shu is tall, handsome, popular, sporty and is the smartest person, not only in the high school, but probably in Taiwan as well. Xiang Qin has her own group of friends and even a couple of admirers, but she isn’t the brightest girl at school. This has caused her to be looked down upon by people at school, by Zhi Shu, and be worlds apart from him.

    Although he appears to have and be everything, he actually lacks inspiration, motivation and a heart that truly beats. Xiang Qin’s brain is lacking, but her impulsive, persistent, fanciful character and high spirit is what wakens Zhi Shu and is later attracted to. He realises she makes things in his life unpredictable and not so linear and set out. She provides him opportunities to realise his desires in life. She understands him. She is his voice.

    When she starts to take steps away from him upon realising that maybe she is better suited with someone more like herself, who’s intelligence is on a similar level as hers, who likes her (someone like Ah Jin), he realises Xiang Qin’s importance and what she really means to him.

 

COMMENTS

    On the surface, it looks like it’s a romance story about Xiang Qin’s unwavering crush on a guy who is beyond her reach. Go into the story more and it also tells a story of determination, perseverance and hard work. People who may not be academically successful are the series’ main characters. Their determination, passion and desire to reach their goals and dreams is ultimately what will get them there is its message. We think it’s a great message. The series also make being intelligent and able to achieve academic success cool. It’s not a view we see a lot of on our television screens over here, so it’s great to see such views in this series.

    Zhi Shu, we like seeing all the sides of his character. Surprisingly, he has quite a number of layers to him. Xiang Qin may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but we like her for her guts, strength and resolve to see things through. She is quite stubborn with her crush on Zhi Shu: many of her decisions relate to Zhi Shu somehow. Normally we find characters like that quite annoying for the lack of growth, but stubbornness seems to be a part of her DNA. Despite her many, many shortcomings, she does not give up on anything easily — not on her crush, not on schoolwork, not on sport. The way the series tells it is that Zhi Shu is a great motivator for her to do better and she is the same for Zhi Shu. And so, Zhi Shu and Xiang Qin, individually as well as a couple, we really like.

    Ariel Lin and Joe Cheng, we’ve never heard of these two actors before watching It Started With a Kiss. After watching the series, we certainly knew who they were! They were so fantastic playing their characters. They pull you in and connect you with the characters and the story. There is a lot of emotion and intensity in this series and it’s all carried through by Ariel Lin and Joe Cheng. To this day, years after watching them, they remain our favourite leads in a series to play opposite each other. Were these two to do another project together right now, we’d definitely be there to watch it front and centre.

    We also love the series’ music and soundtrack. We’re not sure if this is a moot point because it seems that every series on this list so far, we always like the music and soundtrack as well; we believe it fits super well. It’s no different with It Started with a Kiss.

    This series is 30 episodes long, each about 45 minutes in length. With Korean productions being so popular with so many these days, 30 episodes sounds so long compared to the shorter format of their dramas of a similar genre. It’s really not that long. It Started with a Kiss offers its audience a lot: development of characters, development of story, comedy, a super great cast and beautiful music and a great soundtrack. This series needs 30 episodes to fully give the story a bit more depth than just about a girl having a crush on a guy and do justice to the themes and messages the series is trying to convey.

    We really love this series. Re-watch-a-bility: high.

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Writing Lyric Timings for MiniLyrics

Posted by on Feb 28 2013 | Entertainment, Multimedia

A while back we wrote about finding this fantastic plugin called MiniLyrics that displays lyrics on the desktop screen as we play songs on various popular media players. It includes a database of lyrics to songs which saves us from searching for the lyrics ourselves. This database of lyrics is pretty wide-ranging, showing results for pretty much all the songs in our collection except for the less popular songs. (Perhaps the term isn’t quite the right one: they are pretty popular where they originate, just not with the group of MiniLyrics users who submit to the database, which is how the database of lyrics grows.)

    For our latest post, we’re going to write about writing your own lyric timings so that you can either save them as .LRC external lyrics files or embed them directly into songs itself so that any player that supports displaying lyrics will display them automatically when played.


The “Language” of the Lyrics File

    Creating your own lyric timings and files isn’t a very difficult task. It doesn’t require expert knowledge. The lines in the file consists of a timestamp followed by the lyric:

 

[mm:ss.000]The lyric to be displayed

 

—where “mm” are the minutes, “ss” are the seconds and “000″ represents the time in milliseconds.

    Assuming the song does not start immediately, the first line of the lyrics file is set to zero with a space (you can’t see the “space” that’s after, but it’s there):

 

[00:00.000]

 

    The subsequent lines will then follow in the same format as mentioned above: [mm:ss.000]The lyrics to be displayed. The 2nd timestamp will represent the start-time of the 1st lyric, the 3rd timestamp will represent the start-time of the 2nd lyric, the 4th timestamp will represent the 3rd lyric, and so forth:

[00:00.000]
[00:04.425]사 랑 은 아 닐 거 라 고
[00:08.076]절 대 로 아 닐 거 라 고
[00:12.484]매 번 속 여 왔 지 만
[00:15.995]내 맘 은 자 꾸 너 를 부 르 고

    If there is an intermission in the song where there are no lyrics, the timestamp will be the start-time of the intermission, followed by a space. In the example below, the intermission begins at 2 minutes : 32 seconds . 360 milliseconds, so the timestamp is [02:32.360].

[02:24.596]사 랑 해
[02:26.822]내 곁 엔 너 만 있 으 면 돼
[02:32.360]
[02:48.496]여 전 히 사 랑 하 나 봐
[02:52.622]여 전 히 기 다 리 나 봐

    That’s pretty much it to the “language” of the lyrics file. Now we need to find the times for each lyric.

Finding the Lyric Timings

    Finding the timings require loading the music file into a sound editor and reading the timestamps at which each lyric begins. We like to use Audacity. It’s a fantastic program for editing sound, with lots of features, and it’s free to download and use. If you don’t have a sound editor already installed with timestamps, we recommend downloading Audacity.

    With the sound editor running, import the music file into the editor. Scrub across the timeline to the beginning of each lyric and note down its start-time. You can note the times on the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor or note it down on a text editor of your choice and then copy the lyrics into the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor after you’re done.

    When you finish noting down the times, you don’t need to save or export the song file out. Just close the sound editor since we only used the program to grab the times and didn’t do any editing to the music file itself.

Using the Lyric Timings

    With the timings noted down, you can either create an external .LRC lyrics file from them or embed them directly into the song. Saving them as a separate external .lrc lyrics file will mean you’ll need to either store the .lrc files in a directory where you’ve set MiniLyrics—or any other media player capable of playing external lyrics—to find them or manually locate the lyrics yourself.

    If you choose to embed them, it will give you the freedom to play the song and display lyrics on media players that support embedded lyrics without having to define the directory of the stored external lyrics. We like to embed the lyrics for that reason.

In case you don’t wish to embed them, we’ll write about saving the lyric timings as .LRC file as well as embedding the lyrics into the music file.

Creating the External .LRC Lyrics File

    There’s really not much to creating the .lrc file. If you’ve noted the lyrics timings down on a text editor, like Notepad, all you need to do is:

1. Click “File > Save As…” on the text editor’s menubar

2. Type the name of the file follow by the ‘.lrc’ extension. (Do make sure the “Save as type” is “All Files” else you’ll get something like “lyrics.txt.lrc” instead of “lyrics.lrc”.)

3. Click “Save”.


    If you’ve noted the timings down into MiniLyrics’ Lyrics editor, do the following:

1. Click “File > Save Lyrics As…” in the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor menubar

2. Type the name of the file

3. Click “Save”.

Embedding the Lyrics into the Music File

    Before we begin embedding the lyrics into the music file, we like to make a copy of the music file as a precaution. We’ve never had anything bad happen to the file, we didn’t corrupt the file or lose the file, but it’s always good to know that if something horrible happens, we know we have a back-up.

    On to the embedding. If you’ve added the times directly into the MiniLyrics’ Lyrics Editor, skip the first five steps and go straight to step 6.

1. Open/run the media player with the MiniLyrics plugin if it’s not already opened. (We use VLC player.) Hopefully the MiniLyrics window also pops up. If it doesn’t, you may not have installed the plugin for your player.

2. Load the music file into the media player with the MiniLyrics plugin. You can go to the directory and double-click the music file or you can go to the media player’s File menu and open it.

3. Play the song if it’s not already. (Playing the song will ensure that we are adding the lyrics to the song we want and not some other song in the player.)

4. Go to the MiniLyrics menubar. Bring up the Lyrics Editor by going to “View > Lyrics Editor…”

5. Copy and Paste the lyric timings into the lyrics editor.

6. Still on the Lyrics Editor window, embed the lyrics by going to “File > Save Lyrics in Song File…”

7. A dialog box will pop up (see picture above), asking which format you wish to save it as. Select the appropriate format for the kind of player you use. We like to select the one for Windows Media Player since we use that program as well. With MiniLyrics plugin installed, the embedded lyrics will show on the VLC player. (We assume with MiniLyrics installed, any of the options will display lyrics.)

8. Click “OK”.

    That should embed the lyrics into the music file. You may find that after hitting the “OK” it plays the lyrics. Then when you exit out of the player, a dialog box asks you to “Confirm to save the lyrics file” even though you just did. You want to click “Yes”. As far as we can tell, this dialog box pops up every time you open the Lyrics Editor, regardless of whether you made any changes or not. If you don’t, you may find that all your hard work disappears.

    One other thing, you may find also that after you confirm to save the lyrics file by clicking “Yes”, another window pops up asking whether you want to save it as an external .lrc lyrics file. Click “No” or “Cancel”. It is not required to save the embedded lyrics as an external .lrc lyrics as well.

    If you have any trouble with writing the lyric timings or embedding the lyrics, send us a message and we’d be happy to offer our help!

    (Just in case you’re wondering what song the lyrics above belong to, it’s Lee Hong Ki‘s / ANJELL‘s Still (As Ever) from the You’re Beautiful OST, the soundtrack to a popular Korean drama series. : oP : oP.)

Till next time!

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