women's basketball at Oracle

I've joined the women's league at the Oracle Gym again. I'm a little surprised and a little annoyed that we can't get 24 women to sign up this year.

My first thought is that there are just way more guys than girls at Oracle, but this logic doesn't stand up to closer inspection. Let's do the numbers...

The men's 5-on-5 league has 3 tiers (recreational, intermediate, and competitive), each with about 10 teams, with at least 6 players on a team...that works out to over 180 players (probably closer to 200). Did I mention there's also a 4-on-4 men's 6ft-and-over league, a 4-on-4 men's 6ft-and-under league, a 4-on-4 coed league (primarily comprised of men) and at least one 3-on-3 men's league? Granted lots of guys play multiple leagues, but I'm still going to guess that there are at least 500-600 men that play basketball on a regular basis at Oracle, especially if we count all the guys who are too intimidated to play in a league. Of course all the good players show up for lunch pickup games too, so the regular guys have to shoot around at like 2 in the afternoon.

Okay, let's get to percentages. There are about 8,000 employees at Oracle headquarters. Probably 80% of them are men (giving us 6,400 men), so we're looking something on the order of 10% of the men at Oracle playing basketball, even if we assume some of the league players aren't Oracle employees. Let's say conservatively that 6-10% of the men play basketball.

Using our 20% women number, there are at least 1,600 women who can play eight weeks of league ball for $15, and have chosen not to, despite two months of advance notice. Of the 20 people that have signed up, I know of at least 4 (including yours truly) who don't even work at Oracle. So that's 16 women out of 1,600, or 1%. Granted, there are some women who play only in the coed or men's leagues, but I'm going to guesstimate that number at about two or three. It's also possible that some women don't feel that they're good enough to play in the league, but given the level we play at, and the fact that six of us started playing in the league last year with no prior experience whatsoever, that barrier should be fairly low. So optimistically, slightly more than 1% of the women play basketball.

So our conclusion is that proportionally, somewhere between 5 and 10 times more men than women play basketball at Oracle. No wonder the guys always crowd around, they're used to us giving up the court because we don't have enough women to hold it.

So, tonight we're having a scrimmage, in an effort to recruit more people. I'm cautiously optimistic.

evite rules my life

My life is totally driven by evite.

It's a sad story...in the beginning, I tried to resist. As a rule I hate HTML mail, so when I first got evites, I'd just reply and ask the organizer to give me details. As you can imagine, people were lazy and didn't respond, and I was forced to cut and paste the URL into a browser. For awhile after that, I resisted signing up with evite, but finally I figured out that if I created an account, I wouldn't have to cut and paste at all; I could just login to my evite account and all my evites would be displayed on one page. Three years later, I organize any event for more than 5 people with evite, compulsively check replies when I organize an event, use my evite page as a calendar, and am hopelessly lost when evite is down. What am I doing today after work, you ask? I'll have to check with evite. On average I have between 5 and 10 evites in my upcoming events calendar, and a draft or two ready to go.

The thing is, the features that evite offers are really too tempting to resist. My top five favorites:

- seeing when someone has viewed my evite
- offering multiple scheduling options that guests can vote for
- specifying a list of options for things that guests should bring
- privacy options, especially being able to choose if your guests can invite more people, and if so how many
- automatic reminders (somehow i feel less bitchy when i use evite to nag people)

Wow, I sound like an ad for evite, don't I? My biggest criticisms are:

- the UI is just awful...who came up with this color scheme? and lots of preferences are hidden way too deeply
- the site requires cookies to function at all
- there should definitely be a way to say, "copy this evite" and then be able to make small changes (good for recurring events)
- of course, the nasty blinking ads
- the archives only go back about six months, as far as i can tell

I wish that someone would come up with a site that worked like evite but actually had a decent UI.

"Together" and my first Wal-Mart experience

A bunch of us went to go see "Together" last week. It's a Chinese movie directed by Chen Kaige, about a 13-year old violin prodigy and his father. I enjoyed the non-Hollywood-ness of it, even the ending was a bit obvious. Plus, I really love watching movies with great soundtracks, and this one featured lots of "classical" music that I liked, some of which I recognized. I do have to mention the subtitling, which as usual, failed to impress me. I shudder to think of how much I miss when I see other foreign films, when the original language is not Chinese.

Interestingly, I find I understand a fair amount when I watch French movies...and last weekend I went to a wedding where the groom was French, and I was able to understand about 80% of his father's toast. Maybe all those years of high school French weren't a complete waste after all. It's a pity I never learned to speak French properly, or I might actually be able to survive in Paris for awhile, without being derided to death by ticket booth clerks who smirk at my poor attempts to communicate. Yes, that's another story.

I went to Wal-Mart yesterday to pick up a folding table for my party. Two nice things happened:

- I was struggling to put the table on my shopping cart, when a middle-aged woman offered to help me. I'll admit my first thought was, "Yes I need help, but probably not from you" but the two of us managed to get the box on top of the cart. Random acts of kindness, and all that.

- After I spent about 5 minutes coaxing the box to fit in my trunk, I pushed the shopping cart back up to the front door. Another woman was sitting on a bench there, and told me it was very nice of me to bring back the cart. I do like it when other people appreciate my random acts. Yes, I'm silly that way.

I conclude that sometimes people suck, but there definitely times when they don't.

CrisisWeb on Taiwan-China relations

I had a discussion with someone the other day about whether people who don't capitalize are just lazy. Just to prove my point to myself, I'm going to write my posts using proper capitalization, for at least the rest of the month. Here I go...

There's a fairly intelligent and unbiased analysis of the Taiwan-China situation at CrisisWeb, which is the International Crisis Group (ICG) web site.

Those who know me will recognize another one of my favorite subjects, and run away and/or cower in fear.

In the interest of full disclosure:

- My parents were both born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. All four of my grandparents were schooled under the Japanese occupation, and both my parents under KMT martial law.
- I've been brought up on horror stories about KMT rule. I've read and/or heard about unprovoked killings of civilians during the 2/28 massacre, beating of schoolchildren for speaking native Taiwanese, massive disregard for property rights of local landowners, and general suppression of the educated upper middle classes by the KMT.

That having been said, I recognize my bias, and am able, I think, to semi-objectively evaluate other people's analyses of the current political situation. The ICG makes a major point in each of three reports:

1. Taiwan has been moving "slowly but surely" away from the "one-China" principle, primarily due to increased democratisation and the emergence of the "new Taiwanese" identity.
2. The risk of war remains distant, for two main reasons: Beijing's objectives are "reunification" and economic development, and the first is at odds with the second. China does not have the military force necessary to conduct an effective blockade, which would be the most logical military strategy.
3. Peace may be achieved across the Taiwan Strait if proper measures are taken by Taiwan, China, and the international community. Specific steps are outlined in the report.

I can not agree more with the first point. In fact, this is a point that I often try to explain to people who haven't been to Taiwan recently. There is a real cultural gap between Taiwan and China right now; the political freedom that the people of Taiwan enjoy has become a cherished part of the new Taiwanese identity. In the last presidential election, voter turnout was around 80%, and there were grandparents and parents going to political rallies and protests. I would argue that Taiwanese people appreciate their newfound freedom even more than Americans, who have enjoyed their civil liberties throughout their lifetimes. It's hard to imagine that the people of Taiwan, who have fought for their freedom, and now live in a vibrant democracy, would ever accept any kind of governance by Beijing.

The second point is another one that I have made before. I once posed the idea the Taiwanese government shouldn't try to kowtow to Beijing at all. In fact, it should cause the situation to come to a head right now, rather than to let the status quo drag on until China is a real military threat to Taiwan. If Beijing were forced to attempt a blockade or invasion of Taiwan right now it would most likely fail, and Taiwan might gain sovereign nation status in the eyes of the international community. This would be a major risk for the DPP-led government to take, and I doubt it will happen, but it's an interesting scenario to think about.

The last point about peace being achievable assumes that the Chinese government is or will at some point be willing to take steps to stabilize the situation. I argue that this is a flawed premise, since Beijing has shown again and again that it will always take the hard-line stance towards Taiwan. A few weeks ago, pressure from China on the officials at the Miss Universe pageant caused Miss Taiwan to have to change her sash to say, "Miss Chinese Taipei". China has fiercely opposed the inclusion of Taiwan in the WHO, in spite of the SARS threat and the fact that a WHO entity does not have to be recognized as a nation state. Most disturbingly, after entry into the WTO, China has repeatedly tried to downgrade Taiwan's membership status in the WTO, to the same level as Hong Kong. Unless there are radical changes within the Chinese government, peace will not be achieved in the near future...and every year the Taiwanese people take another step towards a separate national identity.

steve young sighting!

i was eating lunch on the cafeteria patio the other day, when the door opened, and out walked our CEO, with steve young, my second favorite football player of all time (and a bunch of other people who i didn't really look at). they sat down with their lunch trays at a nearby table.

so i promptly regressed into crazy niner fandom, turned around and hissed to a co-worker, omigod, it's steve young!

to which there were several replies:

- are you sure? (yes, he's wearing a visitor badge that says, "Steve Young")
- he's in a car commercial, right?
- which sport does he play? baseball?

i conclude that the sign of a true geek is to not know who steve young is...or at least not know what he looks like.

but now that i think about it, maybe the reason steve young likes to eat here is that no one knows who he is.

and that's not even the coolest celebrity sighting this month. apparently gwyneth paltrow was here last week with coldplay.

this can't be good for productivity.