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Help fight Post-VASCON depression!

Saddest face of the conference

So here we are basking in the Post-VASCON glow. Lots of packing, driving, flying, and hangovers. It isn't until now, looking back over the weekend do we start to get why they call it VASCON Love. The whole thing takes an abundance of care and passion to put together. We'd like to thank the VASCON 2008 E-Board for inviting us into their work and letting us throw in our two cents. These guys do a professional job for free and all they ask in return is for you to have as much fun as possible. The connections we make at these confrences with luck will last for many years to come. And yet over the upcomming days and weeks as we sink back into our home routines we'll start to lose that energy, those heads full of new ideas for the asian school orgs back home, and that glow. That's why so many students come to these confrences year after year, to get that recharge. That and to do something silly in a hotel hallway at 2am. So over the next few months we'll be working hard, rounding up as many pictures and videos of the confrence as we can, getting feedback about VASCON from you guys via Poll questions and comments section, working along with the website and Facebook group, and more. So check back in every now and than as we'll be updating this blog regularly, or subscribe to the rss feed. And remember, only 11 months 'till VASCON5!

Day II

8:15AM: MetroRail from Arlington to Rosslyn. Apparently Northern Virginia is one big spread out suburb of DC and anyone who walks for transportation is booed and taunted. However due to our missing one of the free buses to campus from Rosslyn Station and the next one not being due for 20 minutes we decided to ruff it over Key Bridge.

Nice View

...up the Stairs Of Mordor...

Fun Fact: these are the stairs from the final scene of The Exorcist; appropriate since you feel like death after climbing them

9AM: Had planned on checking out some more workshops and "Owl and the Sparrow" but alas, the volunteers need help and we showed up just in time. So for a few hours before lunch and a good while afterward we helped out setting up the equipment for VASCON LIVE and assembling the centerpieces for the Gala.



12:30PM: Lunch! Finally got to meet up with some of the home crew from the University of Pittsburgh and mingle a bit with some new friends.

Fun Game: Which of these VASCON attendees from Pitt is actually Vietnamese?

All this was eaten in like 20-25 min.

1:30PM: Back to preparing the centerpieces. I hope you guys appreciated the TLC that went into those at the Gala, especially since they used up all the yellow long stem roses in the Northeastern United States. VASCON love

This isn't gay at all

6:30PM: Gala & VASCON LIVE

VASCON LIVE video coming soon

10PM: Help the sound equipment guys break down the stage. Are all university kitchen's connected to a labyrinth? Anyway, below is a pic of just a handful of the micro-army that works behind the scenes to make things like VASCON LIVE possible. And they rock hard.

11:30PM: Party! And now your moment of Zen!!

VASCON MIC

6:30PM – 8:30PM: Keynote Addresses

Well it’s your eye in the sky Jason here working the Light and Soundboard up in the ICC Auditorium control room. In fact if you attended the Keynote Address Friday, odds are I was staring at the back of your heads from on high.

If all life is just high school replayed, as is my personal belief, than we’ve been sequestered to the Audio/Visual Club.

7:13PM: E-Board intro, US and Vietnamese national anthems

7:33PM: Dr. Dan Porterfield-Vice President for Public Affairs and Strategic Development, Georgetown University

7:40PM: Adrian Hong-Executive Director of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)

What, an asian conference without Adrian? Pure silliness

7:50PM: Keynote Speaker: Duy-Loan Le-Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments

If you've been in an Algebra class or higher than you've probably seen the handiwork of Mrs. Le, who made history in 2002 by becoming TI's (the calculater manufacturer, not the recently incarcerated rapper) first and only woman and Asian American to be elected rank of TI Senior Fellow, a title held only by 4 other people. Perks of this title include higher pay, more respect and a morpher coin that summons the powerful Megazord. Duy-Loan holds 22 patents and 8 pending applications, and yet over the years she's still found the time to be a mother to two children. Needless to say, much of her Keynote Address was dedicated to finding the balance between ones career and ones personal life. Apparently the key to this is patience, patience, and some more patience. "Get to know your parents, in our haist to gain to gain independence when we go to college we too often sever the ties that bind us to our family and our past." Best question of the night: 'Is America more racist or more sexist?' The majority of hands were raised for the latter. Which reminds me, to all the ladies reading this, you are beautiful, you are talented, and I live to serve you!

8:30PM-9:30PM: VASCON MIC (sorry, videos of MIC Night comming up soon)

9:35PM: Ami and I are chased out of the skybox by a big angry black guy, apparently they're supposed to be screening Sweeny Todd five minutes ago. That's right, we got booted for Johnny Depp.

Ami: Cancer Research Specialist

Ami Hobbes blogging live from the control room at VASCON MIC!

Just so you know, setting this up was crazy: laptops, karaoke videos, cds, cd players too old to play them, ninjas, guitars, pianos, projectors, and a whole bunch of song titles that I can’t read.

But its all good, Eyes had my back, and so did the board members (who later on, solidly rocked out the Vietnamese National Anthem), and we got it all hooked up, MacGyver style.

But let’s take that and rewind it back. I didn’t stop moving all day, if you saw a blur of dreadlocks whip by, that was definitely me. It might have been the Jamaican bobsled team, but it was prolly me. I stay hustling kids. For more on this topic, check below posts.

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah.....

The highlight of my day was Christina Wadhwani talking about the victimization inflicted on the Vietnamese Community by Vietnamese Gangs. My girl took a minute or two to explain that gang members themselves are also being victimized by the disadvantageous situation. This hit home for me because, coming from an area of LA that has both a lot of Vietnamese people and a decent gang problem, I’ve seen that some of these guys join gangs because their backs are to the wall, and they feel they have no other option (and the gangbangers I knew didn’t have to deal with things like language barriers and immigration, just cops.). With so much negativity surrounding the concept of gangs, it’s important to remember that everyone affected by them suffers, and they all need our help. So some personal thanks go out from me to Christina, and I hope you all enjoyed her presentation as much as I did (if you woke up early enuf). GO SIGN HER PETITION.

Runner up moment of the day: Makin the T-shirt.

In the viral marketing workshop me and my team of marketing wizards came up with an ill slogan for VOICE, and threw it on a t-shirt.

It’s crazy hot. Like….One Eye Left hot.

I can’t let you see it yet cause we’re still perfecting it like Blue Steel, but I have cleared it with the higher ups that you can see some early concept art from the project:

WHOEVER DID THE ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IMPRESSION IN MY FIRST WORKSHOP IS A PIMP. If I don’t see at least 15 women grinding on him at the party tomorrow then there is no justice in this world. Adrian Hong and I will then start an NGO to remedy this immediately.


Quote of the day:
"I want to share my VASCON love by giving you all my sweetness!"
- Vudoo Soul (good look on the starbursts)

”Red Bull, we’re going to need lots of Red Bull”

Jason waking up to his evil alarm clock at 7am this morning. At least that’s how it was supposed to go in theory. Eh, getting a full 8 hours of sleep is overrated anyway. Having stayed up most of the previous night moving boxes from one place to another with the board and stuffing those sweet goodie bags you got this morning with registration overnight rest was few and far between.





In fact you can usually guess who is on staff at these conferences just by looking for the dark bags under their eyes. That and the frantic running. Anywho, expedient traveling behind us (one interesting part involving a Segway, Dean Kamen’s anti-climax) we rushed past the sign up table

and made it to the workshops.

3PM-4:15PM’ish: Hoang Sa/Troung Sa- South China Seizure and the New Generation of Student Protests

For those of you not in the know, the Hoang Sa/Troung Sa (or Spratley and Parcel Islands if you want to be like that) are the McGuffins in a three-to-five way tug of war among China/Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and to a lesser extent Malaysia and Brunei. All countries involved lay claim over the chain of islands as a historical right. Unrest in the area has been going on for hundreds of years and at times make the similar dispute over the Liancourt Rocks between Korea and Japan (a subject I’m a little more familiar with) look rather silly by comparison. Despite this the reasoning for the territory disputes in reality are rarely about history and more about the highly lucritive fishing rights to the area. Anyway, that’s was my interpritation of the events after the workshop visuals (where would Powerpoint presentations be today without Google Earth?). One espicially cool part was when the presenters actually got a student in Vietnam who works with the Hoang Sa/Troung Sa dispute via Skype. Now normally I would have to edit the dialoge to save the privacy of the interviewed student but lucky me, I had no idea what was being said anyway since the whole thing was being spoken in Vietlish. Here I am spending 2 hours trying to connect to the Georgetown Wireless and she’s Skyping with Saigon…I really need a Mac. After that we went into a short Q&A section, ranging from the Summer Olympics in China and the ensuing torch relay to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN (proof that an affinity for acronims isn’t just for college asian organizations). Below are a YouTube vid that illustrates the subject further (apparently Hans Zimmer did the soundtrack) and links to websites that give further background.

Truong Sa-Hoang Sa-Ta La Mot-Vietnamese are one

360.yahoo.com/tuoitrevadanchu

www.vietwill.com

4:15PM’ish-5:45PM: grab a quick bite to eat at the Subway in the student center

5:45PM-6:15PM: Icebreaker

Video to come

6:15PM-6:30PM: VASCON MIC prep