• Final prep for trip east. Limo coming at 3:35AM to get us to our 6AM SFO-BOS flight. (Verifying UA Visa+auto ins. will cover rental CDW.) #
• Old style trip prep: copying MP3 playlists from iTunes to my iPhone.
  New style trip prep: ripping DVDs to my iPad with HandBrake. #
• RT @sarahholtf1: What's that the sound of steady rain falling through the trees and trickling into the gutters? Good morning from Spa<Uh-oh! #
• Lack of imagination: "Another… said: 'I can't think of anything worse than being told your plane's about to crash." http://bit.ly/c36Rs8 #
• Common problem: @vambenepe: OK, so I looked at my blog logs tonight and apparently the way to generate traffic is to write new posts. Darn. #
• Waiting for a take-out order of sushi at Misono in Chestnut Hill. Feels just like 1998-2005 (before I moved to Seattle). #
• “@rww: Eucalyptus and Amazon – A Twist Forms in the Open Cloud http://rww.tw/cssrQ4” < Where's the twist? (Unless you live under a rock…) #
• Prediction: As soon as the @OpenStack baseline release is done, there will be new subprojects for EC2/EBS and S3 API compatibility. #
• Hotel Indigo in Newton MA has SpeedTV, so I'm watching the Belgian GP. Rain clouds on one side of the track, sunshine on the other. Typical. #
• Still hoping for a Hamilton lead-from-lights-to-flag win. All his pursuers have stopped for tyres… #
• “@ConnectionMaven: @geoffarnold We are watching somewhat delayed…so no spoilers.” <OK. Of course "rain at Spa" isn't a spoiler #
• So it comes down to tyres – intermediates vs. full wets – and visibility through spray. Classic! #
• “@GrandPrixDiary: For Gods sake Kubica – put your knees together….”< After 40 laps in that little tube of a cockpit, you'd want to stretch #
• “@jxstanford: Pop quiz: Why shouldn't a RESTful service have a login / logout?” < Idempotency, server state. Too easy. #

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The week’s twitterings – 2010-08-29

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Today’s my last day at Huawei. I’m going to take a couple of weeks off (first in Massachusetts, visiting family and friends, and then in Napa Valley, unwinding), and then on September 13 I’ll be starting at Yahoo! I’ll be working in Shelton Shugar’s Cloud Computing group.

I’m leaving one amazing company to join another. I’ll be traveling a lot less, and I’ll be dealing with a different set of customers, but in each case the vision is the same. It’s about computing as a service, and the operational and business possibilities this this opens up. It’s not defined by technology (despite what you might think if you dropped in on the various online discussion groups about cloud computing). It’s enabled by key technologies (virtualization, data center networking), and it establishes an “innovation vector” for new technologies to enhance and exploit it. I’m not too concerned about whether we label it as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or some other “XaaS“: what’s important is the “aaS“, not the “X“.

Over the last 14 months I’ve enjoyed working with the team at Huawei, in Santa Clara, Shenzhen, and Xi’an. I’m sorry that I’m leaving you all before the first release of the system, but I’m confident that the strategy is solid. It’s gratifying to see how recent events have validated the decisions we made a year ago. And I’m really excited to be joining Yahoo! and working with a company that has such a presence in the industry, and really understands operations at massive scale.

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From Huawei to Yahoo!

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The BBC is reporting that a early structure has been found.

The circular structure, found at a site near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, has been dated as being made in 8,500BC.

Details here.

I am always excited by new evidence of our past.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the Coit Tower images that I saw last weekend. I was going to write a post about movies that best show the Depression era, but just saw these color photographs of workers and families in the 30’s and wanted to share them.
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They are part of a larger collection at the Library of Congress of photos that where collected by government agencies in the late 30’s and 40’s.

I love contemporary sources. One of the things that I find fascinating in most of the collections of photos in this period is how most people are unsmiling. Even children don’t seem to smile much.

Children at the fair

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Perhaps fragmentation isn’t the right word… but this issue certainly confuses me.  It seems trendy to throw about the term ‘platform fragmentation’ as it pertains to Android, so I’ll capitalise on that buzzword and go with that for now.  (To be fair, I’d love to be proven wrong and will happily eat my words if someone can point out a better way I should be addressing this).  While developing the Rdio Android app, I’ve been testing on a bunch of different devices and frankly, with generally stock widgets in use, I’m running into the problem where widgets look different on each device.  This wouldn’t be so much an issue, except often times the differences are visual/stylistic tweaks in things like background images or colours which cause our design assets (icons, text colour, etc.) to look bad on one or more devices.

Case in point: TabWidget.  Using a completely stock TabWidget on our app which has minSdkVersion 4 and targetSdkVersion 6, I get the following:

Android 2.2 on Nexus One

Android 2.1 + Sense UI on HTC Droid Incredible

Android 2.1 + Sense UI on HTC Hero

Android 2.1 + Motoblur on Motorola Droid X

In each above screenshot, the leftmost tab is selected (i.e. active/current), the centre tab is focused/pressed (i.e. my finger is currently holding it down but I haven’t released it, while the rightmost tab is unselected.

As you can see from the above images, things like the selected and unselected tab icons look fine on the Motoblur and Hero with Sense UI, but look like crap on the Droid Incredible with Sense UI and stock Android on the Nexus One.  Meanwhile text colour looks fine on Motoblur, looks passable on the stock Android, looks mostly awful on the Droid Incredible with Sense UI, and is completely unusable on the Hero with Sense UI.

One option we have available to us is to hardcode all our own widget styles, which means completely skipping the system look and feel.  This is great for the Rdio brand (i.e. we can use our own highlight colours, etc.).. but this is like going back to the days of the 1337 90s when we were all cool kids in college running Litestep, XFCE, GNOME, etc. and only apps with custom themes and skins.  At some point it gets old, we grow up, and we want apps that match the system styles.  I don’t mind mobile apps having their unique personality, but I don’t want widgets having their own custom look and feel.  I want a ListView in one Android app to look and behave like ListViews in other Android apps.  Ditto that for TabWidgets, Buttons, etc.

But how are we supposed to do that if there isn’t a standard widget style we can rely on?  Am I just missing something painfully obvious about system-wide styles I should be using?  And what about custom widgets?  For example, in the above screenshots, each album art is clickable and relies on a “button” like look and feel to it… but buttons on stock Android use orange focus/select/press states, while on Sense UI they use green, and on Motoblur they use red.  We need to make custom graphics (in this case a 9patch drawable) for this, so are we expected to make one version for every vendor?

What are other Android developers doing to get around these annoying vendor-specific extensions and styles to the Android UI?

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As I recently blogged, I just started working at Rdio. Specifically I’m working on the Android app. A fair amount of code is shared between our Android & Blackberry app (since they both use a common platform of Java). Since I’ve been making changes to the Android code, I wanted to be able to build the Blackberry app to make sure I didn’t regress or break anything there.

I’ve got a shiny new MacBook Pro, and well… it just feels like sacrilege to be running Windows on this thing. So I set out to see if I could get the latest Blackberry SDK working on OS X. And… well, it works! Requisite screenshot:

I owe a huge amount to this blog post, which I used and simply updated and hacked around with the latest rev of the SDK… I can’t claim much creativity for my steps since it’s clearly a derivative of azizuysal’s work.

Downloads

• Eclipse 3.5 (I used the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers package)
• Blackberry SDK/JDE for Eclipse (As of the time of this writing, I got BlackBerryJDEPluginFull1.1.2.201004161203-16.exe)
• bb-ant-tools (I got bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin.zip)
• mpowerplayer (I got build 1185)

SDK & ant Setup

1. Install Eclipse wherever.  It doesn’t matter where.
2. Create a Blackberry directory for your Eclipse workspace and to hold the SDK.  I used /Users/stevel/ws/Blackberry.
3. Launch Eclipse and specify that directory (/Users/stevel/ws/Blackberry) as your workspace directory.
4. Launch a terminal and do the following:
   1. mkdir $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK
   2. cd /tmp
   3. unzip $HOME/Downloads/mpp-sdk-1185.zip mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify
      unzip mpp-sdk-1185.zip mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify
   4. unzip $HOME/Downloads/BlackBerryJDEPluginFull1.1.2.201004161203-16.exe
      1. (this will create two directories: InstallerData & Windows)
   5. unzip InstallerData/Disk1/InstData/Resource1.zip “C/ABS10/Components/EclipsePlugin/1.1.2/EclipsePlugin/installer/InstallAnywhere/InstallerData/EJDE\ Plugins1ae15a8ca04czgiasf.jar”
      1. (this will create a retardedly long subdirectory path, as you can see)
   6. unzip C/ABS10/Components/EclipsePlugin/1.1.2/EclipsePlugin/installer/InstallAnywhere/InstallerData/EJDE\ Plugins1ae15a8ca04czgiasf.jar
      1. (this will create two subdirectories: features & plugins)
   7. rm -rf C_ InstallerData Windows features
   8. cd $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK
   9. mkdir net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25
   10. cd net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25
   11. unzip /tmp/plugins/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25.jar
   12. mv /tmp/mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify components/bin
   13. chmod +x components/bin/preverify
   14. cd ..
   15. mkdir bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin
   16. cd bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin
   17. unzip $HOME/Downloads/bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin.zip
   18. rm -rf /tmp/plugins /tmp/mpp-sdk
5. Now go back to Eclipse, and go to the Eclipse>Preferences menu
6. Go to Java>Build Path>User Libraries and click New
   1. Enter “Blackberry 1.1.2″ as the library name.
   2. Click Add Jars and select $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/lib/netrimapi.jar
   3. Then select Javadoc location and choose the $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/docs/api directory
7. Go to Ant>Runtime in the Eclipse preferences
   1. Under Global Entries, click Add External Jars
   2. Choose $HOME/ws/Blackberry/bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin/bb-ant-tools.jar
8. Click Okay and save the Preferences
9. Add $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/bin to your PATH via your .bashrc file

Building Hello World

1. Follow the exact steps (heck, use his sample code) in the blog I linked to above.  It works perfectly.
2. Only hitch is make sure to update the jde.home & simulator.home properties in your build.xml to the right paths of course.

Running the Simulator

1. Call me nuts, but I didn’t feel like install MacPorts.  Instead, I built my own Wine from source.  To do this, just follow the instructions here.  I installed it to /usr/local.
2. Grab winetricks and put it somewhere in your path (curl http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks > $HOME/bin/winetricks)
3. Install various winetricks packages:
   1. gdiplus msxml3 msxml4 msxml6
   2. (yes really, I had to install all 3 for some reason.  I have no idea why)
4. cd $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.0_5.0.0.25/components/simulator
5. cat 9550.bat | sed -e ’s/^M//’ > 9550.sh
   1. note the ^M isn’t a literal ^M, it’s the ctrl code for <Return>, hit Ctrl-V and then the Return key to generate it.
6. Edit the 9550.sh file and make it look like:
   1. #!/bin/sh
   2. cd “dirname $0“
   3. /usr/local/bin/wine fledge.exe /app=Jvm.dll /handheld=9550 /session=9550 /app-param=DisableRegistration /app-param=JvmAlxConfigFile:9550.xml /data-port=0×4d44 /data-port=0×4d4e /pin=0×2100000A
7. Fixup the 9550.xml file

1. cat 9550.xml | sed -e ’s/^M//’ > /tmp/foo
2. mv /tmp/foo 9550.xml

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Problem Networking the TiVo box to provide to enable Netflix streaming and access program guide information Possible solutions 1. Buy a TiVo Wireless G USB Network Adapter Cost: $59.99 2. Run an Ethernet cable between rooms. Cost: $0 3. Use a Powerline network. Cost: $40 The Winning Alternative As the CTO of my house, I was not willing ...

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OK, OK, OK.  So I’ve been remiss about blogging - nothing new there.  Earlier in March, I went to Taiwan with my dad… Have lots of photos there to organize and upload.  But I think that’ll have to wait.

Today, this entry will be a confession - a self-imposed intervention if you will.  The first step to solving a problem, I’ve heard, is to admit to a problem.  So, here’s my problem: I have no social skills.

OK, let me qualify that.  I have certain types of social skills but not others.  I bet most people have never really taken the time to deconstruct social skills, but really, given the way my brain has been trained - split, qualify, and split some more until a whole is divided and identifiable by its sub-units - I think this is a very natural way for me to pinpoint my issue.

So, the first division of social skills can be into the “Professional Social Skills” and the “Personal Social Skills.”  At least for the purposes of this entry, the professional social skills isn’t as interesting.  I have some hiccups from time to time, but generally, am OK there.

“Personal Social Skills” can be further divided into the different purposes or scenarios where personal social skills are required.  For example, one’s relationship with one’s family, one’s relationship with close friends, one’s relationship in meeting a first time acquaintance.

My problem falls in the “Dating Social Skills” category.  So sue me, I never got into reading chick magazines with all the reputable articles about dating - and please feel free to apply the most sarcastic inflection to the word “reputable.”  They bore me and I’m sorry, but can they REALLY be trusted?

I read a ton of romance  novels - they being my favorite genre along with science fiction / fantasy.  But really, there’s a reason why the genre is FICTION.  There aren’t enough super heroes out there in the world waiting to sweep the fair maiden off her feet.  Besides, have you ever read a romance novel?  Some of them are a total hoot - fluttering eyelashes over come-hither eyes, coy smiles surrounding huskily whispered words, rump twitching in a butt-skirt as the heroine struts away on four inch heels.  But come on… let’s be realistic.  I’m more likely to be rubbing my eyes because of allergies than fluttering my eyelashes (which incidentally, I just tried, and the result is that I physically can’t seem to blink my eyelids fast enough or long enough to achieve a full eyelash flutter).  Whereas other girls may have come-hither eyes, mine are more sleep-deprived than anything.  I’ve never figured out the coy smile thing - I’m either smiling or I’m not.  I’ve never tried the huskily whispered words thing, but I can’t imagine myself huskily whispering anything without guffawing out loud (thank heavens I live alone).  Butt-skirts I don’t own, and I swear the only people who would put a heroine in four inch heels are MALE writers of romance.

I’m more inclined to watch action flicks / dramas, or any kind of winter sport, than chick flicks.  And action flicks and winter sports aren’t exactly educational in the dating department.  Mind you, it’s not that I have a wholesale dislike of chick flicks, quite the contrary, it’s just that I have to really be in the mood.  When I take a closer look at the issue, I think it stems from my pickiness about stories.  There has to be something that really engages me for me to actually want to spend the time with the TV show / movie.  For example, an intricate plotline like Fight Club (OK, the violence is a little off-putting), or multi-level storytelling like Invictus (how the movie starts with two distinctly opposing sides but at the World Cup, the film jumps from location to location and shows how as the game progresses, the two sides begin blending - brought together by the game on TV / radio such that by the end of the game, they are one nation in celebration, thus wrapping up the theme of the movie nicely), or engaging characters, like JAG, and NCIS / NCIS: Los Angeles, or superb dialogue like Shakespeare’s plays.  But chick flicks… for some reason they’re like a piece a gum to me: it’s fresh when you first start chewing on it, but the taste eventually peters out and you spit out the old piece and never look back.

All that being said.  I’ve hit a rut: work, work, get nagged by the parents about hurrying up and getting married (apparently they’re antsy for grandkids… gimme a break, I offered to adopt a dog to be their grand-dog, but they weren’t amused… pity….), work some more, study, work, get nagged.  And you know what?  I still haven’t found an implementable solution.  I wonder if there’s like some kind of class I could enroll in: “How to date: Cues and Methods” or maybe “Flummoxed Over How To Meet a Spouse?”

I’ve done the set-up thing… which, incidentally DOES NOT WORK, though people tell me that it’s because the people doing the set up are from my parents’ generation and have no clue about the actual set-up-ees.

But I think the best approach is go about this methodically.  Learn the does and don’ts of dating first.  THEN see what’s out there.  So, I don’t suppose such a class exists?  Or an authoritative book?  Something?

And finally, I want to THANK all my friends who upped and got married.  BOOOOO…. it’s thanks to you all that I’m getting pressured to hurry up.

*mutter* I want to start a single-and-happy-to-be-single club *mutter*  Of course then I’d have to brave the wrath of the “I want grandkids” group.

Humbug.

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I am demoing Sensor.Network at the First International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2010) at PerCom 2010 in Mannheim, Germany. This dynamic map trace liveplot is set up to show live data from my travels in Germany at the conference. Visualization powered by sensor.network.com

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My dad will turn 70 this year. In about a month. And he sent his first text message a week ago. They were all addressed to his grandson, of course, but they were obviously sent to my phone. I haven't had a chance to talk to him about the reason behind the text message (why now, for instance?) or the 2 messages that followed the day after. But today, he revealed to me why. He was explained by his good friend (who is ironically a total gadget geek -- by comparison, my dad does not know his way around a computer PERIOD...like you give him a mouse and suddenly your desktop is missing all sorts of things, your taskbar displaced, misplaced or altogether just gone) that text messaging is more or less replacing voice calls, particularly among the younger generation. My dad suddenly became convinced that in order to communicate with his grandson (in the very distant future, but still a concern to him) in any sort of meaningful way, he had better master text messaging RIGHT NOW. In fact, his 2nd SMS indicated "just practicing sending these", which now makes more sense.

I thought that was very cute.

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So the potty training is in full force, and I have to say, I'm rather impressed with how quickly David has gotten the hang of things. As with all issues and milestones around parenting, it's very difficult to gauge whether one's child is early or late with anything since the absolute truth is hidden behind a need to compete or brag or over/understate in some form or other for reasons not clearly known.

If I were to be very honest, I'd say that potty training has been easier than expected. There was probably a month of set-up. The potty was purchased almost 2 years ago, just so that its presence in the bathroom would not itself introduce any anxiety from the sheer novelty. But the day I started putting him on the potty with clear expectations of what should happen (though still with the diaper on), I'd say that went on for a few weeks. Then the build-up of a reward (a Hot Wheels size monster truck, new in box) perched ever so visibly on a shelf from where he sits on his potty. The constant talking through the process. The grunting, the making of faces (all by me of course) to help out the product and to make the whole thing light and amusing (perhaps only for my own benefit).

It got to the point where he was sitting on the potty for 45 minutes, just playing with his cars, singing, reading, with no end product.

Suddenly, one day, not just any day, but the day after Christmas 2009, he sat on the potty for what I had assumed would be at least 15 minutes, and he said "poo poo comin' out!" And sure enough - it was a U-shaped humdinger that forced me to see right then and there that my baby made an adult sized poop. There was screaming, there was shouting, there was yelling, cheering, and since it was the holidays, everyone ran into the bathroom to tell David what a great job he had done, grandma, grandpa, ee-moh - there was no shortage of cheers.

Now that 3 weeks have gone by since that wonderful day, it feels appropriate to take stock of how much has been accomplished. He is now in underwear. Honest to goodness underwear - the kind that will soak through completely if he decides to pee in it - and thank goodness has only done that once (during a nap, which is totally understandable). He has upgraded to a seat attachment onto a real toilet - an unexpected development that occurred when he announced a week ago that he needed to pee while I was at a restaurant, totally unprepared (had plenty of diapers on me, though, as I was still in "that mode"). Now I no longer have to clean out a separate potty seat, since he insists on going into the toilet (this is usually a major next step that needs to be worked toward - but he nailed it early. Yay!) He will now ask to go to the potty when he needs to, signaling to me that he's actually paying attention the signals his body is giving him that he has to go. While on the toilet, he'll say "poo-poo comin' out!", sometimes following it up with "a BIG one!" or a modified "a HUGE one!" which is just so totally hilarious. He also understands that closing the seat, flushing, and moving his stepstool from toilet to sink to wash his hands is part of the process (btw: never too soon to connect the whole toilet - handwashing thing). He enjoys pulling his sleeves up, testing the water temperature, and pumping the soap onto his hand. The best part of this whole thing (other than the obvious no-poo-cleanup factor) is that he now only uses one diaper per day (at his peak, he used 15 diapers a day) and that is only for when he goes to bed, and more for my convenience in case he pees. Most mornings, we wake up and look at his diaper to see if he kept it dry (he usually does) and I'll celebrate by saying "look, no pee pee!!" and he beams with pride.

He is all set now to go to preschool (and the top choice has a requirement to be trained by the day he starts), and what started off as a potentially stressful experience turned out to be quite reasonable, and frequently amusing and enjoyable.

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Aibo… My new MINI =) He’s so cute!

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So, I'm back on the road again.  I didn't realize how strong my continued urge to save money was until I was in my hotel room, huddled under a faucet with barely any warm water dripping out of it trying in desperation to take a warm shower as the only guest in this place in 5 degree Celsius weather in Darjeeeling (NE India).  Total cost: $4/night.

I'm actually too exhausted from 2 days of less than 3 hours / night sleep in three days, so I'm going to crash.  Here's the "executive summary":
-Mumbai: Bye!
-Darjeeling: Cold, bad weather, but discovered that Makaibari teas are actually more famous & recognized than Darjeeling ones; confluence of Indian, Tibetan, Nepali, and Bhutanese ppl.
-Kolkata: Dirtiest city I've ever been in.  Period.  Breathing is a big effort.  But the food (& gracious hosts, the Dasgupta Family) made it all worth while!

Currently in Yangon - liking it so far, but taking a flight north to Mandalay & working my way back down to Yangon.  The temples are really distinct and beautiful!  Ok, note to self: don't write when tired.  Hopefully, the next entry will be more interesting.  Zzzz.....

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Recently I decided to pick up tennis again.  I’ve always loved the sport and for some reason I just stopped playing.  I think part of it was that over the past few years I’ve looked for activities that both Mara and I could enjoy together, but recently I’ve realized I have to pursue my own passions.

I can’t begin to describe how invigorating it is to be out there hitting tennis.  I was a pretty decent High School player, but my peak was actually when I was at UCLA.  A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I got even better in college.  I used to hit about 3-4 times a week and got really good.  I was able to whip my forehand cross-court and inside-out whenever I got a short ball.  I hit my backhand with heavy spin and good depth.  And I was able to place my topspin second serve almost anywhere in the box, and disguise it with a slice as well.  I controlled pace, spin, and angles effortlessly.

When Wendy recently wanted to learn, it gave me a great opportunity to do the two things I love… teach and play tennis.  I needed to go out there with somebody who was just starting so that I could get my hand/eye coordination back.  After some sessions with Wendy, Lawrence, and Danyel (a random that I found off CL), I’ve started gaining some control over my groundstrokes.  It feels amazing to be out there.  I find myself smiling halfway through each match.

I saw something that touched my heart tonight at Rengstorff.  A Chinese father and mother were teaching their two boys how to play tennis.  If I had to guess their ages, I would say one was 5 and the other 10. I actually see families out on the court all the time, but this family reminded me of my family when I was young.  While those children probably need formal coaching soon, I deeply admired that both of their parents were doing their best to guide those two children.  I almost wanted to walk over and tell the family how happy I was to see them out on the court.

It brought back memories of my father and mother exposing Jack and me to a wide variety of sports.  While most Asian families usually didn’t see the value in sports, our parents gave us tennis, basketball, baseball, swimming, and skiing.  My father even coached one of my baseball teams, despite the fact that he never had any formal training in baseball.  The most important lessons I’ve learned in life came early on from the sports that I played.  The importance of hard work, practicing to be perfect, consistency, patience, playing to win, losing gracefully, how to play nice with other children, having confidence in myself, understanding how to handle the spotlight, and many more lessons.

I hope that Mara and I will be able to give our children the same opportunities as my parents have given me.  And more importantly I hope my children will find their own passions in life.  And while it doesn’t have to be tennis, I hope that my children will find a passion in their lives that will fill that spot in their heart as tennis does in mine.  I wonder what their “tennis” will be?

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A lonely Ford tractor reigning as the king of its fields while we were cycling towards Biei (Hokkaido, Japan).  The lens flare is 100% natural (no artificial Photoshop additives or colouring).

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Check Out this Birthday Card I Just Received!

Create your own!

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Very exciting news!  This weekend, my brother proposed to his girlfriend Ivy, and she accepted!  I think Ivy is such a great girl and I’m very excited for both my brother and our family.  I’m just so happy for Jack.  I can’t help but feel a sense of pride to see my little brother growing up and taking the next step in his life.

Growing up, I always had a very strong support system.  Without exception, I always felt that I had the full attention and support of my grandparents, parents, and my brother.  As we grow older, I think it’s inevitable that we need to shift priorities a bit.  As I start a family with Mara, and now Jack with Ivy, we may have to spend more time and energy focusing on our own homes.  But I think that we’ll always do a good job keeping up with each other and helping when and where we can.

Congratulations to my little brother and his new fiancee!

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Seriously though… TWO YEARS since I last made a blog entry??? That’s pathetic! Well, those two years have gone by in a flash, I must say!  I recently finished my fifth semester teaching here at the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (GUCAS), and I can say that it has gotten easier, compared [...]

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Two schoolkids flashing us some West-side love.  (Ubud, Bali, Indonesia)

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upgraded to snv_109 in preparation for this weekend's datacentre move

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after 263 days of uptime, i rebooted into a newly upgraded snv_95 build.

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I was offered a position at UCLA, and I am taking it. I would have loved to see UCSF and UW first-hand, but that’s just the way things go when your specialty is not match. Even so, chances are very good I would have gone to UCLA anyway. I have been reluctant to define which program is my “first choice” (as so many have recently asked) simply because I haven’t had the chance to see many programs. But given what I now know, UCLA is a great program. Their faculty coverage is great and stable with a 3:1 student to faculty ratio, the clinic is modern and technologically up to date (with digital radiography and computers in each cube, plus a surgical microscope about to be installed), their faculty wrote the perio book that 80% of dental schools use, and the director is a level-headed, fundamentals-based periodontist who strives for clinical excellence and has vision for the program. Oh yeah, and one of the covering faculty just won the Master Clinician Award from the AAP, given to one periodontist per year. So you could say that things could be worse. There is no tuition, and stipend is a cool $20,000 per year.

Given that I will be in L.A. for the next 3 years and 9 months, I decided to go home, especially since I’m on break now. I brought my camera with me, and I spent the past couple of days surfing and photographing the coast. Here are some of my better pics (the proper gallery will be set up soon). Click for a larger image (trust me, it’s worth it).

Brown pelican in Half Moon Bay:

Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz (incidentally, the point break where I decided to become a surfer two years ago):

Shortboarder at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz:

A bird at a beach just south of Ano Nuevo. There was a whole flock of these wading in the surf, and whenever a wave came they’d pop up and over the wave. I must have spent an hour trying to capture the right moment, and this was the closest I came. Not bad, eh?

This is that same beach:

Call me crazy, but I loved the overcast weather, the Monterey pines, the lack of crowds and the chilly wind. It just felt like home, and it was a great break from the ghastly heat that’s been afflicting most of California recently.

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For the next few days you can download Bruce Springsteen’s new single, Radio Nowhere, free off of iTunes. It’s an awesome summer top-down-driving rocker with the full E Street Band backing the Boss; too bad summer is almost over. The new album is out October 2nd, and I’m psyched. Yes, I’m easy to please.

Today’s partial UCLA interview went great; I had three of my five interviews, with the next one on Friday and the final one next Thursday. I’m optimistic. I certainly enjoyed all of the compliments on how much better I look in a suit compared to my usual Smurf scrubs. I also submitted my SF application today. I just hope I’ll have a chance to interview before I get my first offer.

I blame that program’s six different essay questions for my last-minute application. Those were some of the most difficult questions ever - imagine trying to answer “please tell us about yourself” in half a page. Now do something like that six times. Sheesh! Every other specialty has standardized applications.
Other happenings this week: reviewing 1,086 powerpoint slides for one class, and writing a 15 page business plan without any instruction. Yikes! Oh yeah, and I have a morning and afternoon patient tomorrow. I can’t decide if I’m going to party like a rock star on Friday or just go to bed early.

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we had a great time in spain for bren and merce's wedding.

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pics up from our baltimore trip.

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UPDATE: 03 Sept 2007. I finally got my photos online. Click these links for my SF photos and Wedding photos. ======== Well, it’s been a while since my last posting, and so I’ll try to get a few more up in the next week! It was great to see everyone again, even if only for [...]

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The body of James Kim was found today in the Oregon wilderness. Though I have never met him in person, I have had the opportunity to read some of his columns and also listened to one of his podcasts in the past. I was really pulling for him.

It was heroic of him to set out into the wilderness to find help for his stranded family. Who knows if they would have been discovered if they all stayed in the car. They were missing for 11 days. It is not difficult to see myself get into a difficult situation similar to what he faced. Sometimes difficult circumstances and situations quickly get out of control and you find yourself trapped. In his situation, I probably would have done exactly what he did. Hopefully I will be able to stay away from situations like that.

Condolences to his family.

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I caught “The Departed” with Mi last night at the Eastridge AMC. Really fantastic movie… possibly the best I’ve seen in the past year. I am also starting to realize that Leo DiCaprio is possibly the best actor of our generation. His performances in the “Gangs of New York”, “Catch Me If You Can”, and “The Aviator” were pretty good. But I feel in “The Departed”, he delivered his most charming and mature performance to date.  I hope he makes some noise when the Academy Awards come along… probably the first time in my life I’ve felt that way.

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I HATE LAX so much!  urgh! Slow lines, annoying security staff, no proper shopping, no proper food, terminals far away from each other, i can go on for all day.  Anyway, so I was at LAX McDonalds after battling through the 2 hour luggage bomb check line, and some announcement came in Korean “blah blah blah Kim Jung Il, Kim Jung Il”.   May be that’s Bush’s new strategy to catch the guy, page him at LAX Bradley International Terminal cuz it seems like that’s where all the Asians are!  And I wonder if Mr Kim ever made it to through security and get on the plane …..

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I’m very sad to hear this news. Boeing is stopping its Connexion service, which offers highspeed internet service (well not cable modem speed, but not it wasn’t bad either) on selected trans-continental flights (http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2006/q3/060817a_nr.html).  I’ve used it a number of times, and it’s just really really cool to stay in touch while flying across the Pacific, not to mention it’s a great time killer.  I just cannot believe that this business didn’t survive while the stupid phone in the plane that costs 10 bucks a minute still exists!   I could just get the internet, which is 20 bucks for the entire flight, turn on my bluetooth headset, launch Skype and I can talk for no extra charge until the batteries die or until the person sitting next to me punch me in the face.  sigh……

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After spending the latter half of the evening telling myself repeatedly that I could play just one more round of the game Tradewinds instead of doing my CS assignment (due at 6 am!), I was pretty impressed that I managed to finish everything on time and still feel like I did a pretty good job without having to cram. Of course, finishing my homework on time is not an indication that I will actually arrive at class on time, but I figured being fifteen minutes late for a 2 and a half hour class wouldn’t be too bad.
So imagine my surprise, upon walking into our small seminar classroom, of having the professor announce “Tammy, you have just won an award…” (pause for dramatic effect while I wonder if I might actually be called out for being late to class) “for being the person to turn in the assignment the latest at 5:48 am.” Oops, I guess he does pay attention to our email timestamps. Thankfully, he also presented me with a free cup of coffee (which I desperately needed…yay!) so I didn’t have to spend too long debating whether I was supposed to be embarrassed or amused, and instead just very gratefully accepted the free caffeine . Apparently, my work at school has not gone unnoticed…

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So my group’s design project for our Comm class was asked to present at a poster session at the MediaX Conference at Stanford, a conference about interdisciplinary research. We created a PC tablet-like device that looks like an Etch-a-Sketch that can be used for storytelling to AIDS orphans in China. The monkey mentor character in the device tells Chinese fables and traditional folk tales in an attempt to teach children how to have a healthy attitude despite losing their parents. It ended up being well-received, which was pretty exciting, and we had a number of requests for prototypes (I see another technical nightmare looming).

Steve and Erik, you will be tickled to know that the character of the monkey was partially inspired by the Monkey King =D.

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