priceless photos

Yesterday I visited my uncle who lives in Taipei. During the end of the 1940s, he was a boy in China, and visiting his uncle in the army. When the losing army withdrew to Taiwan, they took him with them in the chaos.

He exchanged a few letters with my grandparents, but later communications were severed between China and Taiwan. There was no more contact between them for the next 40 years. My grandfather passed away without seeing his son again.

My mother met my uncle for the first time at age 41.

But that's a story for another day.

I visited his house yesterday, and he brought out a photo album of old photos. Some were from his own life, and some were sent by my parents throughout the years.


This was sent by my grandfather before communications were severed. It's my grandparents and four of their children. That's my mother in the upper right.

I stared at this photo for at least ten minutes. The facial features of each of my uncles are clearly visible in the faces of these children.

On the back of the photo is a caption written by my grandfather, labeling each of the people. It is the only time in my life that I've seen my grandfather's handwriting. I couldn't stop staring at it.


A picture from my toddler days in China. That's my grandmother, then me (looking super-fat), and my mother (looking super-gorgeous).


This is a photo of my parents and me. My parents sent my uncle this photo years ago as a keepsake.

I really like the pants I'm wearing in the picture. I think I'm going to buy a pair just like that, and wear them around Google.

so Taiwan is like this too?

Dinner last night, with our family friends who live in Taiwan. The last time I saw them was when I was seven years old.

Mrs. FF: "Do your parents insist that you only date within your race? Only Chinese?"

Mr. FF: "Only from Anhui?" (Anhui is the Chinese province of my ancestry. My grandparents moved from there to Beijing before my mother was born.)

Me: [laughing] "Heavens, no."

Mrs. FF: "They're okay with you dating non-Chinese?"

Me: "Yeah."

Mrs. FF: "As long as it's not a black person, right?"

As soon as the words left her mouth, I thought, "God damn it, not this again." Modern-day Chinese people will say such things without batting an eyelash. The anti-racism social pressure is not as high as in America.

Me: "My parents have no racial restrictions on who I date."

Mrs. FF: "My friend emigrated her family to America, and her big fear was that her daughter would marry a black man. Because then you know, they'd have mixed children."

Me: [in horror, grasping for the fastest way to shut her up] "My mother says it's fine even if I'm gay."

Mr. and Mrs. FF: "What???"

pet peeve + away

It really gets on my nerves that so many web sites have their own messaging system. Why would I want a yelp.com inbox?? Just send yelp messages to my email address!

Ditto Facebook.

Ditto YouTube.

Ditto LinkedIn.

When questioned, one founder said, "What, I should send my traffic to Gmail instead of back to my own site?"

YES. It's a much better user experience!!!

---

In unrelated news, I'll be in Taiwan over the next week, for Wei-chao's wedding.

More than one person said, "Have a good time! Don't eat too many puppies."

my car is apparently a traveling museum

Three little exchanges from my life this past month.


1. At dinner with Nina and Dan:

Me: "I had a really rough week earlier this summer, when everything went wrong in a single week. I was really upset one night during the thick of it, and Dan stayed up until 2:00am talking to me on the phone. I will never forget that, for as long as I live. I mean, he usually goes to sleep at 1:45am, but he stayed up that extra fifteen minutes to console me."

Dan: "Which phone conversation was this again?"

...

2. Exiting my car with my brother, outside his apartment.

Me: [picking up package of instant noodles from my backseat] "Do you want this yakisoba?

Tom: "It's been in your car for five months, but sure. It's time to give the yakisoba a home."

Me: "By home, do you mean your apartment, or your stomach?"

Tom: "First one, and then the other."

Me: [laughing very hard] "And then the one again."

...

3. Driving in my car with my brother. I hit the brakes in my car, and an object rolled from the backseat under the driver's seat. I picked it up. It was an extremely withered apple, deep wrinkles lining the surface.

I handed it to Tom. "Want an apple?"

He cupped it in his palm. "This is Apple before Steve Jobs."

when giants walked the earth

Today, in my Stanford writing class, the professor said Hemingway claimed he could write a story in six words.

Here is the story:

"For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn."

Hemingway was bad-ass.

and then I was obliged to leave the room

At dinner, discussing a past decision that I now think was misguided.

Me: "You know how some people appear to be completely assured, and never experience regret or doubt? That would be nice."

Dan2: "Those people are disliked by most other people."

Me: "Naw, that's not true."

Dan2: "I think it is. However, they probably don't care about others disliking them, because they're just above it all. But then they don't self-correct, and can go down disastrous paths."

Me: "I guess if you never experience doubt, eventually you become Hitler."

Dan2: "Godwin's Law has been invoked. This conversation is over."

Googleween

Final Halloween photos for 2007.


People standing in the lunch line next to me.


Off the bottom right of the photo, you can see part of the stuffed sheep that Brad threw at people.

Across the ass of the pants, he taped a banner that read "Super Poke". There was some temptation to poke it with my costume parasol.


One of the few times when I've found a dog cute.


He's wearing a pirate hat, and a YouTube T-shirt.

That's right, his costume is "pirated YouTube videos".


The Eye of Sauron was my favorite costume from Googleween. Because the original character from the movie -- the Eye -- was just so cool. And so hot!

Anyway, here I am defending against the Eye using my parasol.


Mii!


She taped sentences across her back, including "What an adorable baby", "I like your haircut", and others.

Her costume is White Lies. She said I was the only one to get it, all day. A common guess was "Things that Men Say". :(


Some Googlers will understand why this costume is so hilarious.


Unabomber, complete with badge photo of the Unabomber.

these are some of the nation's best and brightest

A week ago, I attended a party in Oakland with Caltech friends. The conversation turned to our college classmates. (all names changed)

Mark: "William might be coming back to do a startup, if the funding goes through."

Me: "Wow, he'd move back here from China? That would be a big change. Did you know he's currently living in a house without running water or heat?"

Mark: "Why is he living without running water or heat???"

Me: "Yes, this is the question I posed to him also. He gave some long answer about pipes bursting, and how they have a water well. I understood every sentence he said, but afterwards I still didn't know why he's living without running water or heat."

... [later] ...

Stefan: "Tim performed the ceremony when Lina and I got married."

Mark: [to me] "You see, Tim is a man of the cloth."

Me: "Is he the one who's on the run?"

Mark: "No, I said he's a man of the cloth. He applied on the internet to become a priest -- "

Me: "I know, but is he a man of the cloth on the run? Didn't he escape the country?"

Stefan: "Tony is the one on the run from the law, not Tim. Tony is wanted for arson."

Me: "Oh, right. But wasn't Tim busted for dealing acid?"

Mark: "Yes, but he just got suspension for a year. He got fingered by another student, but he wouldn't rat anyone else out, so he ended up with the suspension."

Me: "That's really noble of him, to not tattle on anyone else even though it was done to him."

Stefan: "Yeah, he's a stand-up guy."

...

The next day, talking to my brother.

Me: [after recounting the conversation] "Do you have these conversations with your Stanford alum friends? Like, who's on the run, who was dealing acid, who is a man of the cloth?"

My brother: "No."

Me: [pause] "I'm glad I went to Caltech."

:)

I like non-conformists.

Halloween photos II

Pirate holding a little chicken! The chicken is sucking its thumb. Awwww. AOL! (That means "'awww' out loud".)


Legos!

Convenient that she can balance her drink on her costume.
...


I like these cookies. Form and function!


Cute OMG pumpkin.


Cute fractal pumpkin.


Cute witch pumpkin.


Cute spider web pumpkin, and jack-o-lantern pumpkin.

Okay, now are you ready for the shocker? The pumpkins in those last two photos ... are not real pumpkins. They're actually CAKES. I ate a piece. They look like this inside:



How awesome would it be if during your everyday life, you regularly discovered that objects around you are actually cakes.

"That keyboard had a strange reflective glint to it... [huge bite] Oh, butter cream filling!" etc.

T + 2 hours

From nanowrimo.org:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

...

In 2006, we had over 79,000 participants. Nearly 13,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

This year 90,000+ people have signed up.

My word count so far: 384.

If I get stuck, I can do what my friend Rory suggested.

rory: how's your nanowrimo.org thing going ?
rory: are you simply dumping huge chunks of code into your novel ?
rory: "and then.. the programmer wrote this: ...."
niniane: lol
niniane: yeah!

first set of Halloween photos

Friday night party in SF Potrero Hill.


The hostess, sporting a Justin Timberlake "Saturday Night Live" Dick-in-a-Box.


The woman in the green dress is wearing a fake ass.


There's nothing to say here. Except: awesome.


Guess what this costume is? The doll's shirt says, "Sean Preston Federline".


He's a PC! From the "PC vs. Mac" commercial.


He's wearing a blue shirt, with cutouts pinned to him labeled "Australia", "South America", etc. He's fanning himself, between exclamations of "It's so hot!"

Yes, he's "global warming".

"it just works"

Driving in my car, with my brother.

Tom: "Skill at work can be transferred to dating, right?"

Me: "No."

Tom: "It would work for some people. Like Steve Jobs. He can just convince you that he's good in bed."

Me: [laughing]

Tom: [in Steve Jobs voice] "Steve Jobs will show you something amazing tonight."

You Know You're an Engineer When...

by Niniane Wang, Tom Wang

1. When you agree with someone, instead of saying "Yeah" or "Okay", you say "Obviously" or "Clearly."

2. You think Track 1 of the CD is the second song on the album.

3. There are things you wouldn't do for $1000, that you would do to win a free T-shirt.

4. You've never dated anyone who doesn't use vi.

5. You've never dated anyone.

6. You think the author line of this article should be written as "{Niniane, Tom} Wang".

7. "Big O" has a totally different meaning to you.

funniest thing I heard this week

IM with my friend David. We started on the same day at Microsoft, and independently came to Google around the same time. David endured some negative events at Microsoft.

niniane: [complaining about Silicon Valley stuff]
david: did you see? microsoft up to 35???
david: didn't think i'd see that this decade
niniane: hah
david: damn, we should have stayed there!
niniane: lol

photos from the city of angels

I spent the weekend in Los Angeles, prior to my Caltech tech talk.


Chateau Marmont, the bar that Elaine chose for Saturday night.


Token LA celebrity encounter! In the parking lot, we ran into Nicole, lead singer from the Pussycat Dolls.

...


Lovely LA morning with my friend's baby. My friend is half-Filipino half-Caucasian, and her husband is half-Japanese half-Caucasian, but for some reason, their baby looks completely white.

I know I'm inviting trouble (in the form of snarky comments) just by saying the word "Caucasian", but damned if I'm going to self-censor. Bring it!


My friend's backyard. This is the best house I've ever seen.


The rotunda in her house.

She excitedly showed me an interior design magazine with photos of a "dream house", which confused me because her own house looked just as impressive to me.


I like how the brunch restaurant thwarted my attempt at healthy eating, by topping the salad with a stack of onion rings.

...


I prefer the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Getty Museum. The Getty is high-maintaineance, with laborious parking and a 20-minute shuttle just to enter.


LACMA architecture is all high ceilings and glass. I approve!


Some of my actual friends don't look this alive.


I want to sit in this chair every day at work.

Software on the Edge of Forever

Tonight, I laid out a map on my brother's dining table to plan my family's Christmas trip.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with Dan about Google Local / Maps, and about how Chrysanthemum had ideas for a maps product in 2003 but didn't end up working on it.

Me: [to Tom] "If you could have worked on any product throughout history, which one would you pick?"

Tom: "Any product?"

Me: "Right."

Tom: "The Bible."

Me: [laughing]

Tom: [jovially] "I'll be Jesus Christ, your savior!"

...

Me: "So if you could pick any software product within the last twenty years to have worked on, which would it be?"

Tom: [after a few minutes of thinking] "The Sims Online. It had so much potential. The potential wasn't realized, but it was there."

Me: "My choice is Starcraft. It's still being played today. You know, if I had been willing to leave Caltech one year sooner, I could've worked on it. [pause] That game was the pinnacle of the real-time strategy genre."

Tom: "Until now."

Me: "I don't see how Starcraft can possibly be topped."

Tom: "Sure. You just have to name your company Blizzard and kick ass."

Caltech photos

I gave the Google recruiting tech talk at Caltech yesterday. Afterwards I traipsed around campus.


Jorgensen, home of the undergraduate computer lab. It was the hot hangout in my time, but I hear that now students mainly program from computer in their own rooms. Ode to the loss of forced social interaction!


Cute soda machine. The top middle says "Mysterious Random Soda". The bottom panel says, "Pseudo-Random soda" with a probability formula.


Mural on a wall from my student days. Each of these fish was painted to resemble one of my peers.


Courtyard of Dabney House, known for its hippie lifestyle and tie-dye-wearing denizens. I lived here during all four years of my undergraduate life.

I told two students that I belonged to Dabney, and they eyed me curiously. "You're not dressed like it," said one.

"This is what happens later," I said. "Hippies turn into yuppies."

They pictured their most hippie Dabney friend, morphing into a Starbucks-drinking tie-wearing yuppie, and burst into uncontrollable giggles.


Pumpkins for the Halloween liquid nitrogen pumpkin drop.


Student who agreed to pose as a token undergraduate. Represent!

He's a physics major.

"So you stuck to physics," I said. "Half the incoming freshman class say they'll major in physics, and they all switch to computer science at the end of first term."

"Not quite," he said. "Actually, the incoming freshmen say they'll double major -- physics plus math."

selling

I need to decide how much stock to sell tomorrow, when the trading window opens.

This is usually an annoying decision. The Chinese immigrant in me is willing to take the bus across SF instead of a cab, in order to save $10. This decision will impact slightly more than $10, which makes me feel compelled to do a massive amount of research -- read all the quarterly reports, compute projections, etc.

Luckily some of my friends have a good attitude on it all.

Googler #1: [looking at stock price of $600] Maybe selling at $200 was a mistake.

Googler #2: Not buying MSFT for $0.11 in 1986 is a much worse mistake. Also, you should have named the winning lottery numbers in last week's Powerball. Hindsight is 20/20, the market is random, and we're all lucky fuckers.

Well said.

ridiculous. awesome. ridiculously awesome.

I held an early Halloween party, because this was the only week that Sha-mayn is in the US.

Photos:


"My Fair Lady" outfit, and musketeer.


After half a lifetime of friendship, I thought I knew Dan pretty well. I predicted he would arrive without a costume. When I saw him at my door dressed as a train engineer, I was so moved that I almost wept.


Chinese Googlers.


I fulfilled my dream of wearing a huge dress with a petticoat.

beta signup by invitation only

Over dinner with Dan and Nina, I described meeting "Jenkins" yesterday, a friend of my good friend "Mary".

Me: "Jenkins said he heard a lot about me, but it turned out it wasn't from Mary. It's just from random Googlers. As we talked, it became clear that Mary has never mentioned me. And she's one of my best friends!"

Dan: "Not everyone talks about their friends as much as you do. You're always 'Sha-mayn did this' and 'Tom said that'."

Nina: "That's true."

Dan: "Yeah, you're like some kind of ... [thrusting hands in shoving motion toward me] accumulator of news about your friends."

Me: "I am FriendFeed."

why I blog

A long time ago, an internet blogger tagged me to list reasons why I blog. I didn't, because I thought it was obvious. But tonight someone else asked, after reading through my entire blog. So I guess it's not obvious.

I will quote from a book I just bought. It's for authors who want to write their first novel:

Why are you writing? There are hundreds of easier ways to make money. Thousands of better methods by which to self-actualize. Millions of less taxing ways to entertain oneself. You should write because you can't not write. You should write because some stray scrap of your soul is trying to manifest itself verbally. ... You should write because even though the process terrifies you, the absence of that process terrifies you more. Which is to say, you have to love it. Unconditional love, and often, unrequited. There is no guarantee it will love you back.

I've written almost every day since I was thirteen years old. In high school, I painstakingly wrote longhand in narrow-ruled journals with floral covers.

At fourteen, I decided my thirteen-year-old writing was so immature and poorly written, and I tried to burn the journals. It's actually pretty hard to burn a thick wad of paper. I finally just threw them into the trash. For the next year, I periodically suffered moments of horror when I imagined that a stranger would come upon them in a landfill and read my secrets.

I still write into electronic journals daily. When I go to a place without a computer (like Burning Man), I carry a paper journal.

Writing for an audience is different from writing for myself. It requires more thinking -- tweaking of sentence structure, endings, general flow.

Blogging = writing for an audience.

Occasionally on other blogs, the author will drop a mention of "my other more personal blog" or "some other blogs I write for myself", and I know they blog for the same reason as I do -- because we are compulsive writers.

poster I ran across tonight

I've been waxing nostalgic about Caltech, since I'm going there in a week to give a recruiting tech talk.

Tonight I ran across this.



This made me LOL. Ah, Techers, you big goofballs.

I don't recognize this room. The table and bookshelves look like the Dabney House library, but the furniture configuration doesn't fit.

alas for future furniture

Bombay Company filed for bankruptcy. It was auctioned off, and the buyer will begin closing all US stores next week.

This is tragic for me, because all of my furniture comes from Bombay Company.


My dresser (stock photo).


My television stand (stock photo).


My dining table and chairs, plus the clock on the wall, plus the side table between the couches (real photo).

My house looks like the Bombay Company catalog. Now where will I buy furniture?

korean zug-zug

Last Thursday, I opened my email inbox to find a code changelist I didn't recognize. It was a modification to our unittesting tool.

Perplexed at why I was Cc'ed, I scanned the changelist description. "Make startup message 1% funnier."

Then I saw the author is my dear friend Dan. I opened the code change. It turns out that Dan changed the initialization message from its normal note. During 1% of the time, it will instead output "Zug zug".

"Zug zug" is what the orc peons say in Warcraft II.



Ah, Warcraft II, the game which altered the course of my life and career, because it led me to choose the field of games programming for five years.

The afternoon after I saw the changelist, PR asked me to do a written interview for a Korean newspaper. One of the questions asked for a recent Googley event. Since the "zug zug" incident was on the top of my mind, I used it as my answer.

I told Dan later that I utilized his story.

Dan: "That's very appropriate."

Me: "Why?"

Dan: "Don't Koreans love Blizzard?" [Blizzard is the company that makes Warcraft II.]

Me: "Oh yeah! I probably didn't even need that sentence explaining where 'Zug zug' comes from."

As I picked up my brother for dinner that night, I told him the story too.

Tom: Hehe, 'zug zug'. [looking out the car window] [in orc voice] 'Ready to work!' Well, you'd have to say it in Korean.

Me: [nodding]

Tom: Oh! It's good he picked 'Zug zug' as the startup message. That's the only phrase that didn't need to be localized to Korean.