geek alert

I was watching Everwood on Tivo tonight, and I was absurdly excited to see Dr. Abbott putting in a new computer system in his office, complete with a Dell Ultrasharp 2001FP monitor.

I have two of those at work, mounted on a set of monitor arms, and I don't remember how I did without them. I'm thinking of buying one for my home computer.

cooking for engineers

I ran across this blog the other day, thanks to the new blogger nav bar. I really like the way the recipes are written; compared to standard step-by-step recipes, it's much easier to see which actions apply to which ingredients.

hard contacts vs soft contacts

Yesterday when I was playing pickup, a rebound deflected off of an arm and hit me in the eye. I was wearing hard contacts due to some dry eye issues, so it hurt more than usual, and my left contact popped out and fell on the ground. I yelled at everyone to stop moving, picked it up, rinsed it off in the water fountain, and popped it back in.

To me, that incident perfectly illustrates the pros and cons of hard contacts. It hurts pretty bad when you get hit in the eye. Also, if you step on one, it's done. On the bright side, you can use plain water to rinse them, and you don't have to worry about them drying out your eyes.

Actually, there are a couple additional downsides. Hard contacts are less comfortable in general, since you can kind of feel them in your eye all day. If you ever get a speck of dirt in your eye while wearing hard contacts, it'll hurt like hell. Plus, no one has made disposable hard contacts yet, so there's all that cleaning overhead and worrying about losing them.

I've been switching back and forth depending on how dry my eyes are in a given week.

do I look like an HR person?

When engineering candidates come onsite, we usually schedule them so that they jump right into technical interviews, rather than having a meeting with a recruiter first. It's expected that they will have talked to the recruiter over the phone already, and given limited HR resources, it makes more sense for the candidate to get a wrap-up meeting than an intro meeting.

Today, I was the first person on an interview schedule, and apparently the candidate thought I was an HR person, until I started asking him technical questions. Envision this:

me:	How was your flight? Did you come in yesterday?
him:	Good, yeah I got in yesterday evening.
me:	So, do you want anything to eat or drink?
him:	Sure, I'll have a coffee, thanks.
me:	Here you go. Okay, so how would you reverse a linked list?
him:	Eh??

I'm not sure what to take away from that experience. Maybe I should stop making small talk with candidates. Maybe I should make sure to wear clothes with big MIT logos. Or maybe I should just be amused.

dentists

I keep forgetting to schedule my next dentist appointment. It just isn't the kind of thing you have a lot of motivation to remember.

Although, I've been mostly lucky when it comes to teeth. I still have all of my wisdom teeth, and none of my dentists have ever suggested pulling them. I've never had braces, and I've never had a root canal. (Knock on wood.)

Once I did have to have four fillings, but I made him do them all together so I wouldn't have to have novacaine twice. I don't understand why dentists think it's better to come back again and again, for multiple fillings. I swear the worst part of going to the dentist is when you can feel him aiming that needle all around your mouth. Ugh.

hero, again

Someone sent me an article about Zhang Yimou's Hero, which does a better job than I did of examining the message of the movie:

Nameless chooses loyalty, and his own death, after a long conversation with the King of Qin. The king asserts that Nameless’s quest is only negative, he acts out of hatred and revenge. He reveals that he himself is misunderstood, that the king’s strength is used for the sake of unifying a great Chinese nation, a nation that will comprise “everything under heaven” (this crucial phrase was translated in english as "our land"). And the king asserts that the truest understanding of Nameless’s martial art is to choose peace, which the king asserts is also the end of what he does. Attaining universal empire will finally bring peace to China.

The king’s speech in effect asserts there are no claims the individual might make that the state must honor. A powerful, unified China, which finds its strength in his kingship, should be the object of everyone’s devotion.

It's a bit too creepy for me. Too bad, because otherwise it's a beautiful movie.

airport codes

Recently I came across this interesting article that explains the origin of some of the more confusing three-letter airport codes.

Some tidbits:

Some special interest groups successfully lobbied the government to obtain their own special letters. The Navy saved all the new 'N' codes. The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. The lack of these letters puts a crimp in the logic of some codes: if the city starts with a 'N', 'W', or 'K', it's time to get creative! Norfolk, Virginia, ignored the 'N' to get ORF; Newark, New Jersey, is EWR, Newport News, Virginia, chose to use the name of the airport to get PHF -Patrick Henry Field.

Lacking both 'W' and 'N' Washington National has a code of DCA for District of Columbia Airport. The newer Dulles airport just outside D.C. was DIA (from Dulles International Airport); however, the DIA and DCA were easy to confuse, especially when hastily written in chalk on a baggage cart, scribbled on a tag or a handwritten air traffic control strip, so we are stuck with the backwards IAD.

Oh, still wondering about the world's busiest airport, O'Hare International, and its ORD code? Well once upon a time, before the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert McCormick suggested a name change as tribute to pilot Lt. Cmdr. Edward "Butch" O'Hare, USN, there was an airstrip well to the northwest of Chicago with a quaint, peaceful name -- Orchard Field.

what's a dialect?

In Taiwan, the native dialect is Taiwanese, and the official language is Mandarin Chinese. (Although, there is a push to make English an official language as well.)

Taiwanese and Mandarin are similar in syntax, but very different in pronunciation and intonation. Someone who understands Mandarin will not understand Taiwanese. For the most part, words can be translated directly, and are represented by the same characters in writing, but direct translations often sound awkward and sometimes are incorrect. For example, the word for "run" in Taiwanese corresponds to the word for "walk" in Mandarin.

The other day, I was talking to someone about the distinction between dialects and languages. My argument was that Romance languages such as French, Spanish, and Italian are just as similar (perhaps more so) than different dialects of Chinese such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Shanghainese. Her comment was that all Chinese dialects use the approximately the same written characters to represent the same words, which sounded reasonable to me.

But, why are Spanish and Italian written differently? It comes down to the usage of a phonetic alphabet. I bet that historically, words in all Romance languages sounded almost the same. As pronunciation began to diverge, spelling would also be forced to evolve. For example, Old English is significantly different from Modern English, even in writing, to the point where it is unrecognizable by native English speakers. In Chinese, characters represent whole words or parts of words, and they aren't constructed phonetically. Thus, different "dialects" can share the same characters. (For now, I'm ignoring the difference between the "Simplified" characters used in China and the "Traditional" characters used in Taiwan.) In fact, even Japanese kanji are just a subset of Simplified Chinese characters.

So, to go back to the initial question: What's a dialect? What's a language? Where do we draw the line?

celebrity sighting

Yesterday, Jimmy Carter waved at me, but I wasn't paying attention. The person I was sitting with said "Hi!" back, just as I looked up.

9/11

I wrote this on Saturday, but wasn't sure if I wanted to post it, since it's not entirely coherent. I've decided one can't be expected to have coherent thoughts on such a world-changing event.

Random thoughts:

- I saw today that flags were at half-mast, but honestly it took me a second to realize why. Should I feel guilty about that? I wasn't affected very personally by the attacks, so perhaps it's a little snarky for me to say this, but I don't feel that we should wallow in grief. We should remember, but we should move on.

- I was reading an article about how teachers are choosing to address the cultural and political impact of 9/11 rather than the emotional aspect, now that we are several years removed. Not sure what I think about that. I hope the teachers aren't using the event to promote their own political agendas.

- I guess my second cousin must have been married almost three years ago. Her wedding, originally scheduled for mid-September, was postponed after her maid of honor went down on Flight 11, on her way to the wedding. That was my closest connection to a 9/11 victim. I remember that even at the time, it felt like there was a significant gulf between the East and West Coasts, in terms of personal loss and overall emotional impact. My sister was a freshman at Columbia that September, and for a while pretty much all she wanted was to go home.

- I was in New York last year, and it was strange seeing the subtle changes to the subway maps. Makes me feel like we're living in an alternate universe. I used to take the PATH train from Hoboken to the WTC...it sounds pretty callous, but one of the things that really makes me sad is that the big Borders bookstore, that I used to hang out in after work, is gone.

- I think "on September 11th" will be the "when Kennedy was shot" moment for our generation. On September 11th, I was still sleeping when my housemate ran into my bedroom and told me that the one of the WTC buildings had just fallen down. I did go to work that day, but I came home early, and my housemates and I watched CNN until we were sick to our stomaches, and switched to Tivo-ed episodes of Friends. One can only take so much.

- In Taiwan, significant events are often referred to by date, such as the 2-28 massacre, or the 9-21 earthquake. In this country, we tend to name events, such as the Loma Prieta earthquake or the Boston Tea Party. Why do we refer to 9-11 by date?

- Has this country become more united or more divided since 9/11? I myself have become increasingly disgusted with politicians who play the 9/11 card to try and gain votes. I am also saddened by the increased prejudice towards Arab-Americans, and even those who resemble Arab-Americans. I'm thinking specifically of a Sikh friend who, due to religious beliefs, has a beard and wears a turban. He's the most friendly, easy-going personality I've ever met, but he was removed from an airplane on the way from Boston to San Francisco because some people were uncomfortable with his presence.

- Has the world become safer or more dangerous since 9/11? As an American citizen who travels several times a year, I lean towards the latter. In particular, anti-American sentiment is at all all-time high, which was glaringly obvious watching the crowd boo the American Olympians, at the Athens Games.

- A high school friend came to visit me this weekend. He's still in college, having spent a year in Japan, a year in Paris, and a summer in Ireland. He is of Chinese ethnicity, was born and raised in California, and currently lives in DC, but is determined to move to Europe after graduation. I almost envy him. This country has too much baggage, and I have little faith in our leadership and our populace. I wish every American citizen were required to spend three months living in a foreign country (yes, even Canada), before being allowed to vote. We've gone from being dumb and happy to being dumb and angry, and as we've seen in the last few years, that's a potentially explosive situation.

basketball update

A bunch of us joined a women's basketball league in Menlo Park about a month ago. Since then, we've been slaughtered by an average of over 30 points. So, we decided to look for a new league.

I was convinced that the San Carlos women's league would be easier, so we started to look into that, but we found out last week that several of the women in the Menlo Park league are also in the San Carlos league. I guess it's a small world, when it comes to women's basketball.

We're still going to give it a shot, and if we're totally out of our depth, then I guess we will go back to playing the Campbell Novice league. Frankly, there aren't a lot of options for a group of short Asian girls who've only been playing for a little over two years. It's too bad more women don't play.

tech support

At work, we have a helpdesk that serves the whole company, from sales and marketing to engineering and operations. Sometimes the person on the other side of the line knows less about my system than I do, and sometimes he/she is really helpful in solving my problem.

While I was waiting for a helpdesk guy to debug my frozen Xsession a couple of days ago, I was thinking that a good optimization for a helpdesk/tech support system might be some kind of user categorization.

From what I hear, there are usually several "tiers" of tech support. The first tier consists of people reading from scripts and following flowcharts. If the problem doesn't fit in the flowchart or is otherwise too complex, the customer is escalated to the next tier. The frustrating thing about this is that every time I call with a new problem, I have to convince the first tier people that I know what I'm talking about, so they'll escalate me up. Ideally, I should get credit for not asking stupid questions, and get automatically escalated when I call again.

Companies store all kinds of information about users anyway, why shouldn't they store a couple extra bits of data which describe the user's level of technical expertise? Let's take DSL as an example. If a user calls up her ISP and says that she can't ping the gateway, she should get some "techie-points" and the call should probably be routed to someone who actually knows what ping is. She should get bonus points for having run traceroute and having correctly rebooted all applicable hardware, and so on. Net result: tech-savvy users have good customer support experiences, companies don't waste knowledgeable support resources on clueless users, and everybody wins.

I wonder if Speakeasy does this already. The only reason I would think not is that I've never talked to a support person there who didn't know what he/she was talking about.

discussing religion

I've vacillated between atheism and agnosticism for the last ten years or so, but I do find the practice of organized religion interesting from a cultural and sociological standpoint. The Old Testament, for instance, has lots of great, timeless stories, and beautiful writing. I love this line from L.M. Montgomery (in a WWI context):

The age-old cry--"Joseph is not and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away." How the mothers of the Great War echoed the Patriarch's moan of so many centuries agone!

But I digress. Although I'm pretty much secular myself, in high school, I was good friends with a devout Presbyterian (daughter of a minister) and a practicing Catholic. We often had great conversations about religion; we talked about faith and logic, the spread of Christianity in Asia, the role that religion plays in communities, and other topics.

Consequently, I was rather surprised when I went to college and found that some people got very upset talking about religion at all. I didn't understand, if a person had so much faith in something, why he/she would have a problem with exploring the roots of his/her beliefs.

Recently I asked this question of a friend, and his answer rang true to me. His analogy was that asking a deeply religious person to justify his/her faith was equivalent to asking a person involved in a serious relationship to justify his/her feelings. While some might consider logical analysis of religious ideas interesting from an intellectual standpoint, those who have a very deep personal connection with their faith might see those same probing questions as attacks intended to poke holes in their cherished beliefs. I would likely feel similarly if someone took a microscope to my relationships with my friends and family.

I guess the thing to remember is that there is a strong emotional component to religious belief. However, that does rather confirm my theory that logic and religion can't easily be mixed.