30

I turned 30 over the weekend. On Saturday, my brother took me to afternoon tea at the Ritz Carlton.


Tom, looking earnest.


Finger sandwiches, and little cakes. I like the warm scones with clotted cream.


Relaxed with tea.


They brought out a little cupcake for me.

Tom: "When I called, they asked me to spell your name over and over. I spent five minutes correcting them laboriously, and they ended up just writing 'Happy Birthday N'."

Me: "Is there an N? I think it's an exclamation point."

Tom: "You know the pastry chef probably got a notecard from the phone person, with misspellings of your name crossed out six times, and then 'Niniane' with a question mark at the end."


Sunday morning, a few friends went hiking in South San Francisco. BaHiker.com is a great web site for finding hikes.


Picnic breakfast. I am so impressed that Meghana actually packed fried eggs and individual cups of sliced fruit.


Later in the day, I wanted to go hiking again. I requested a place with trees and water. Dan picked Land's End in northwest San Francisco.


Dan called out with relish how the hike contains both trees (pointing at trees) and water (pointing at ocean). I like how you can see the Golden Gate Bridge in the background of this photo.


Good job, Dan! I am surprised the hiking trail was not overrun by tourists. It was actually pretty empty.


The trail ends on the beach.




Then we went to Sushi Bistro, where I ate a lettuce wrap with unagi and sashimi. It's the first time I've seen a lettuce wrap in a sushi place. It was great.

eating contest!

My brother and I have been invited to an eating contest!

In high school, Tom ate a pound of chocolate in 22 minutes to win a bet. Last month, his Sims 3 team held a contest to eat 30 chicken mcnuggets within an hour. He came in second place, finishing in half the allotted time.

The contest is in August, in Mountain View! Discussing the contest with my brother, over tea:

Me: "I'll make a war banner that says WANG in chinese."


Tom: "And I'll bring mustard and ketchup, and use them as war paint." [mimes streaking paint onto his cheeks]

Me: "Okay. I'll pick a theme song too."

Tom: "This is so much setup. What if I eat one hot dog and I'm done? You'll still be trying to extend the war banner, and the song won't even be playing yet."

...

Later, chatting over IM with the eating contest host:

y.w.: say hi to your awesome-sounding brother for me.
niniane: ok
niniane: my brother says hi back, in an awesome-sounding voice
y.w.: cool. i imagined guitar riffs playing as he said hi.

show him the hand, jenny

I would like to hereby show my support for Governor Sanford's wife. Finally there is a politician wife who is not standing idly in support through her husband's infidelity.

"His career is not a concern of mine," she told reporters as she departed the family's vacation home in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. "He's going to have to worry about that. I'm worried about my family and the character of my children."

She added that she would be fine, with or without her husband.

"I have great faith and great friends and great family. We have a good Lord in this world and I know that I'm going to be fine and not only will I survive, I'll thrive," she said.

... Jenny Sanford would not reveal whether she was headed back to the family's home in Columbia. "Right now we're taking it a day at a time. Right now we're going out on a boat."

Photo from previous times. She was a Wall Street executive before marrying him.

You go, Jenny Sanford!

(My previous thoughts on this matter)

bagel

Dinner at Chez Panisse last night with David and Nina, who are here for a wedding. They live in New York City.


David told a story of his friend visiting recently from Berlin. He took the friend around Manhattan. They stopped at a bagel shop.

Friend: "This bagel is amazing."

David: "Yup."

Friend: "I wish we could have bagels this good in Germany."

David: "Well, whose fault is that??"

O_o

Aziz Ansari

Last night, I watched a live standup comedy routine by Aziz Ansari. It was a one-night performance at the Punchline club in San Francisco.


It is hard to believe that a single human can be so funny.

He joked about how he's addicted to using his phone at stoplights. One day his parents will get a call that their son died in an automobile accident while googling his own name in quotes.

I hope next time he googles "aziz ansari", this blog post shows up in the results! And that he leaves a comment on this post. Because he is the funniest person that I have seen in person.

Partway through the show, Aziz took out his cell phone and said he was dialing Kanye West. He asked Kanye for permission to tell a story involving him. (My companion said he attended this same show two months ago, and the material was similar but there was no phone call.)

One audience member asked him to put Kanye on speaker phone and have him sing. Aziz said into the phone, laughing, "Did you hear that? No auto-tune!" Then he put the phone into speaker phone, and the person at the other end sang a verse from "Heartless".

I was very excited at the thought that maybe it really was Kanye. But Kanye doesn't have a Twitter account to update the world on his every movement, so I cannot verify.

nom nom singularity

Eating with my brother Tom and another companion YY.

Me: [to YY] "Tom used to eat so much. I called him the Vortex."

Tom: "Yup, that's me."

Me: "You know that scene in Star Trek where a singularity opens up, and starts sucking in all the ships and planets around it? It was like that."



Tom: "That was my cameo."

(Image from James Clyne)

---

When visiting my parents two weeks ago, I saw a photograph in the upstairs hallway. It was of me at eight years old, holding a six-month-old Tom. I took a photo of it, and later showed it to Tom:



Me: "You must have weighed 15 pounds. I'm surprised I could carry you."

Tom: "You were stronger back then."

Me: "What?!"

Tom: "You could lift me up back then, and you can't now."

for the deer with a refined palate

Last month, on a houseboat trip for Memorial Day Weekend, a deer came up to the boat:


One of my companions, "Bob", ran over with grapes to feed the deer.

Several other people: "Don't feed the deer! You're not supposed to feed human food to wild animals."

Bob: "I'm not feeding it human food. It's grapes! Grapes existed before humans."

Dan2: "Are they seedless grapes?"

server hosting mimicking the show "24"

A surprising amount of drama happened with my server hosting company over the weekend.

I use two Virtual Private Servers for the software that I'm working on -- one in Atlanta and one in Texas. They are hosted by VaServ, a UK-based company.

Sunday morning, my monitoring service alerted me that my site went down. I attempted to ssh in, and found both servers unreachable. I began to realize the severity of the outage when my emails to VaServ bounced, and even their home page was down.

A moment later, VaServ sent an email saying that they've been hacked via a vulnerability in HyperVM, a piece of software that they license. I went on the WebHostingTalk forum to get the scoop from other customers. It is revealed that there may be data loss. The forum is divided between extremely anxious people:

I have no clue what server I'm on, don't know if I have data loss or not, and certainly have no idea when I'll be back online.. I can't do this anymore, and to retain what sanity I still have I'm getting drunk. Let's hope I pass out and wake to at least one of my servers up

Can ping the node, but not my VPS. Been down the entire time and although I understand they're working very hard, I can't help but pass my customer's frustrations on to them. I've got pages and pages of Paypal disputes.. Down for 2 days and I may be ruined here

and others rebuking those people:

If one company going down can ruin your business and lose you customers, that's just not sound DR planning. Disasters *will* happen. Plan accordingly! Especially if you have paying customers.

The next morning, I am surprised by this Register article about the founder of LxLabs, which owned the flawed software HyperVM that Vaserv licensed:

The boss of Indian software firm LxLabs was found dead in a suspected suicide on Monday.

Reports of the death of K T Ligesh, 32, come in the wake of the exploitation of a critical vulnerability in HyperVM, a virtualization application made by LXLabs, to wipe out data on 100,000 sites hosted by the UK web hosting firm VAserv.

On the forums, most people write their condolences, and how it was not worth giving up his life over his job, no matter how dire it seems at the time.

There are also a significant fraction of the posts asking "What control panel software will I use now??" followed by lengthy discussions on the merits of alternatives to HyperVM.

A few hours later, I am shocked to see a post from someone purporting to be the hacker, addressed to the CEO of the company, Rus:

...We were in ur networks sniffing ur passwds for the past two months... Telling you this cuz we got bored of this ****, it's just too easy and monotonous so patch ur crap, if your too dumb to secure a simple web server my rate is $100/hour or one night with ur sister hauhaiahiaha.

...

[logs to show how he hacked the system, and passwords he stole]

The next few forum posts were all along the lines of "OMG." One said, "This is better than watching a tv show."

By this point, the VaServ people had worked nonstop for 48 hours to restore servers, while customers screamed unabated. Two hours later, I received an email that VaServ was just sold to a larger web hosting company, Blue Square.

On the forum, Rus wrote:

I've personally reached the end of my physical and emotitional tether. With customer attrition etc I'm not sure we could deliver the level of service that we do aim to deliver. We have worked pertty much continsouly for the last few days firefighting. Taking I'm also debating if I'm responsible for someones death I'm not in a good place currently. As such I was left with two fairly stark choices

1) Run away and hide and just say to everyone "good bye"

2) Do what is best for the customer "base" as it stands and get some big boys in behind to help get things back up and running and give people a chance.

This broke my heart a little, to think of this hardworking guy building up his company over five years. They weren't the biggest operation, but they were always responsive and competent. Gradually they were expanding to the US and working on different brands for market segments. It took only one night to undo it all.

The next morning, it's finally confirmed that while my Atlanta server is intact, my Texas server has lost all data. I had backups of data and code, but not of the server configuration. As I began the process of moving onto Amazon EC2 and re-creating the configuration:

sha-mayn: did you find out what happened?

me: one server is ok, the other has 100% data loss.

sha-mayn: oh no!

me: doesn't seem quite as bad when you consider that someone lost his company last night, and someone else lost his life

sha-mayn: that's true. we should all have more perspective about work

supernova in your eye

One of my friends is considering a job switch. He made an updated resume and sent it to various software companies.

Friend: "I feel like Silicon Valley judges your resume less by your actual skills and more on how hot your current company is."

Me: "Hehe, you have a point there."

Friend: "I bet some recruiters aren't even reading the resume carefully. They just see how much hotness jumps off the page."

Me: "Yes, you should take advantage of your current hotness."

Friend: "They're asking themselves, 'Is this mildly scalding, or is it a supernova in my eye?'"

Honest Sim

My brother gave me a copy of Sims 3 as a gift on Friday. He watched as I selected traits for my Sims avatar.

Tom: "I think you should remove 'brave' and add 'good sense of humor'."

Me: "Oh yeah?"

Tom: "Well, are you trying to model it after yourself?"

Me:


...

Here is a screenshot of my Sims avatar. She already progressed into the Elder stage.

birthday costume

Our friend Lily's birthday was last week. We surprised her with a Gossip Girl themed party.

Omar decided to dress up as a character from the Gossip Girl show. He picked his favorite character, the 15-year-old Jenny:


Here he is, as Jenny:


I think he did a great job on the costume. I helped him put on the smoky eye shadow and smoldering eyeliner:


Adit brought a birthday cheesecake:


We also took a freeze frame of the women from the show:


Prasanna's colleague Michael photoshopped Lily in place of the third woman. Then we found the Gossip Girl font and used it to write a note:


We had it printed onto an ice cream cake.


It was vanilla cake with strawberry ice cream:


Lily was pretty surprised.

best tweet I've seen

This is the single best tweet I've read:

checking "remember me" every time i log into a website, doesn't seem to stick, feels like a "poignant personal metaphor"

The entire stream is also very funny. Read from the bottom up.

xbox controller-free gaming

When is Project Natal (Xbox controller-free gaming) coming out? I hope there will be an API for it, so that random people (me) can make games with it.



The DirectX API for joysticks and steering wheels is called DirectInput. I think the Natal API should be called DirectNoInput.

Dan will probably say that doesn't make sense, because there is still input. In fact there is more input.

Anyway, it's been five minutes and I already thought of two ridiculous games I want to make. I hope they actually get the camera recognition to work with reasonable quality under all types of lighting and clothing & skin colors. The disclaimer of "actual functionality may differ" is concerning.

the tragic shooting of George Tiller

I am horrified at the shooting of George Tiller yesterday. He was shot at church, while he was ushering and his wife was in the choir. Now his family won't even be able to seek solace from their grief by going to their family church.

It is impressive that Tiller did not mentally buckle under the 18 years of death threats he received. He was already shot in both arms during a murder attempt sixteen years ago. His name was found fifteen years ago on an assassination list. He fortified his clinic with bulletproof class, and traveled with a bodyguard.

The story of his earlier life is also poignant (article):

... his path was altered by a 1970 plane crash that killed his father, mother, sister and brother-in-law.

The former Navy flight surgeon was left with his father's family practice in Wichita, and he soon learned a secret. One of his father's patients asked him whether he, like his father, would perform abortions.

At first, Tiller said, he did not believe his father had risked his medical license by performing then-illegal abortions. But after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortions in 1973, Tiller began providing them.

pretty

Watermelon pedicure photo that I saw (original):

laffy taffy jokes

Yesterday a few of us were sitting around, reading the jokes printed onto Laffy Taffy wrappers.



I would read the joke opener, and then we'd guess what the answer would be. Here are my favorites. See if you can determine which ones were made up by us, and which were the Laffy Taffy answers.

Q: If your dog kisses you, what do you call it?
A1: Arr-ful.
A2: A pooch smooch.

Q: What do you call an owl in armor?
A1: Armored-owl-o.
A2: Knight owl.

Q: What has a head and tail but no body?
A1: A linked list.
A2: A coin.

star trek outing (no spoilers)

On Saturday, Azer and I went to see the new Star Trek movie on IMAX.



Just as we drove up, a car vacated the best parking spot along the street, right under the theatre. In his excitement to parallel park into the spot, Azer ended up too far from the curb.

Azer: [completely pulling the car into the street] "Let's just start over."

Me: "This is just like how I'd expect you to be at work. 'Let's just delete this piece of code and write it over again from scratch.' I can totally see it."

Azer: "Yup." ... [as the car rear wheel hits the curb] "And this is what happens when you rewrite the code. You solve the existing problem, and introduce the opposite problem. Now we are too close to the curb."

...

He managed to straighten out the car. As we get out, crowds of people walk past us from the garage a block away, where they had to pay $10 for parking.

Azer: "That's it. We can't leave the theatre tonight. This parking spot is too good."

We got there 30 minutes early, but the line already wrapped around the lobby. While waiting for the movie to start:

Me: "I'm excited. I'm a big Star Trek fan."

Azer: "I've never seen any Star Trek."

Me: "I watched every episode of The Next Generation."

Azer: "I don't know anything about the next generation, the previous generation..."

...

Anyhow I quite liked the movie. [TINY SPOILER] Spock was very charming. It was strange for the Starfleet cadet to remember the epithet "cupcake" for three years, but otherwise the plot continuity was good. It was lovely to see Captain Pike. His calm demeanor reminded me of my friend Bob L.
[END OF TINY SPOILER]

Yesterday, when discussing the movie, Omst claims that in his prime, William Shatner was very good-looking. I disagree! He has a smarmy look to him.

san francisco summer spectacular

I moved to Noe Valley in San Francisco for the summer. I'm sharing a sublet with my college friend Lori. This is my room:


We have a little yard that is pleasant on sunny days. View from the yard:


I am more affected by the weather than I previously realized. San Francisco climate flips wildly from one day to the next. Monday was bitterly cold. Yesterday, I bundled up in two sweaters, to find it sunny and 70 degrees outside.

Tom is still staying at my townhouse in Mountain View. I miss living with my brother.

Lately I was organizing some photos. Here is one of my all-time favorite photos of me and Tom, because he is acting like a goofball. It is from the Louvre:

eloquent story about gay marriage rights (updated)

I found this three-minute excerpt by Dan Savage very eloquent. He opens with a story about a woman whose partner of 18 years was barred from her deathbed, by a Florida hospital.

He also has an interesting take about America's stance on gay marriage and equality rights in general:



UPDATE: Now I am reading an article about this story and similar stories, and it's bringing tears to my eyes.

Such was the case with Sharon Reed, another Washington resident who said she was repeatedly told to leave her dying partner's hospital room by a "temporary" night nurse in 2005.

Reed, who, like Langbehn, had all the legal directives to serve as her partner's health proxy, has filed a lawsuit against the employment agency that hired the nurse at Seattle's University of Washington Medical Center.

...

"The day before Jo died, she told me, 'I'm scared, don't leave me,'" said Reed, now 70 and a psychotherapist. "I promised I would stay with her, but every time I tried to see Jo [the nurse] would scream at me to get out of the room, 'You don't belong here.' She was very hostile from the beginning."

...

Today, Reed told ABCNews.com that she felt she had let her partner down at the end of life.

"Ours was the kind of relationship had been a dream of a lifetime for both of us," said Reed. "We had spent the last 17 years, buying a home, raising a child, being successful in our careers, having loyal friends and sharing time with our families."

"We absolutely adored each other and everybody knew it," she said.

startup humor

Talking over IM to a friend from college and Google, who founded a startup in China. He's on a trip to the US, meeting with corporate partners. After discussing our respective work endeavours:

ac: good luck

ac: Add oil! (chinese phrase, meaning 'go for it')

niniane: thanks, you too

niniane: though it sounds like you don't need it

niniane: you are already on fire!

ac: yeah, it's called my burn rate

my brother is so funny

Talking to my brother in the living room.

Me: "Nice haircut. [looking at it] Are you no longer spiking it in the front?"

Tom: "I usually do, but I didn't today."

Me: "Oh, I like it this way. This says 'I'm a casual guy.' When you spike it, the message is, 'I'm a high-maintenance metrosexual."

Tom: "I better spike it then! Wouldn't want to give the wrong idea."

yay indentured servitude

I had a tea party yesterday. Just before the party started, Susan was in my kitchen preparing papaya and cantaloupe.

Me: [setting laptop to play pandora.com classical music]

Susan: "Wow, the music really changes the setting."

Me: "Oh?"

Susan: "Before, I was just cutting up fruit. Now I'm in your Victorian household as an indentured servant."

Me: [lol]

disgusted by froyo!!

Dan and I were walking down University Ave in Palo Alto an hour ago. We walked past the Grand Opening of a frozen yogurt store. So we went in.

There were three young men standing around in aprons. One of them looked familiar. I asked where I saw him before, and he said he worked at the Apple Store. He was the Mac Genius Bar employee who treated my MacBook when its hard drive failed.

Dan got colorful yogurt, and I got cheesecake froyo and chocolate froyo.



Well, now I feel uber disgusted! There must have been too much sugar. I even threw away most of the brownie and pound cake pieces. Blech! I wish I could vomit. Or go back in time and un-eat this frozen yogurt. Disgusting!! I want to go into a sauna and sweat all the froyo particles out of my system.

the Getty

I went to the Getty Museum recently. I saw it in 2005 and was underwhelmed, but this time it was just gorgeous.


Overlooking the cafe. Later, I sat in one of those chairs and ate chicken tortilla soup.


Lovely period rooms.


I really liked this painting, because if you look closely, you can see the horse is smiling. It's a Mona Lisa smile.


Garden by the tram.

should be easy to write a rap song about Safeway

randell: there are names for three of the safeways in san francisco
randell: the one in marina is dateway
randell: the one on castro is gayway
niniane: oh that's good
randell: the one in the mission is stayaway
niniane: the safeway in hollywood can be waifway
niniane: in quake, it'd be strafeway

amusing exchanges from this weekend

On my laptop in Susan's living room, on Saturday night.

Susan: [emerging from the bathroom with wet hair] "Hey, get ready. We're going out at 7:30."

Me: "I don't know how you're planning to achieve that. It's 7:32 right now."

Susan: [cutely] <litany of curse words>

---

Over instant messenger.

percyvale: [status message is lookatthisfuckinghipster]
niniane: I looked at that web site and it's kind of funny.
niniane: But not as good as hotchickswithdouchebags
percyvale: douche bags don't care they like the attention
percyvale: but hipsters
percyvale: it takes work to get into those skinny jeans and growing odd moustaches
percyvale: so they deserve their own category of site
niniane: are you a hipster? :)
percyvale: do i look like a hipster :P
percyvale: if i do don't answer

[I got distracted for several minutes. When I look back...]

Message sent at 7:06 PM.
percyvale: the polite thing would have been to answer

---

Picking up my brother last night with my car:

Me: "Sorry I'm late! I was playing Starcraft with a few entrepeneurs."

Tom: "Did you win?"

Me: "No, I lost. When it was down to three people, the other two allied against me."

Tom: "Did you have fun?"

Me: "It was so fun! I was rusty though. I was like, 'What is this Queen's Nest? I think it's good...'"

Tom: "The fact that you even got to a Queen's Nest before the game ended means you're all a bunch of noobs."

Related content as you type

Over the years, one idea that recurs is to intelligently show the user information related to what he's typing. The thinking goes like this: "Since related-links on web pages work well, and related-videos on YouTube are awesome, it will be great to target information on what the user is typing! Especially since the user is indicating proactive interest rather than passively web-surfing!"

I've experimented several times with this, and most results were actually NOT great. I've given some thought to this, and would be interested to hear other people's insights.

The components I perceive are:

1. Deciding what counts as the user's "current context". If they're typing a long email or document, do you use the last sentence? The last paragraph? Or time-based (the last 20 seconds of typing)?
   
   
2. Extracting the most interesting parts of the user context.
   
   
3. Matching information to the extracted parts of user context. If I'm writing to Neha about hiking in SF, the matched information might be links (top google result is the useful bahiker.com), my own documents (previous communications with Neha about hiking), products (hiking shoes), or ads (such as Gmail Ads which I worked on).
   
   
4. Ranking the information results, based on their quality and correlation to the extracted user context.
   
   
5. Deciding when the user is in the right mindset to be presented with information. If they are focused on finishing their writing, they may want to minimize interruptions. My instinct is to use typing speed (faster typing = less interest in interruptions).
   
   
6. Displaying the information in a non-obtrusive way. If the information changes every 30 seconds with the user's typing, it can get annoying to have an area of the screen updating so frequently.
   

#3 (matching) and #4 (ranking) are very similar to web search, so the existing solutions are mature. #1 (determining user context) can be reached with some tweaking. The parts I found most challenging were #2 (extracting the key parts of the context) and #5 (determining when to show results).

I think #6 (displaying) depends on #5 (user mindset). Solving #5 would make #6 tractable.

I did an experiment a couple years ago to automatically match images as users typed in an IM conversation. I wanted to see if IM conversations could be summarized via images. Then if you had a lobby of real-time group chats, you could look at the image streams to decide which of the chats was most interesting to you.

I preprocessed a few million online images to match each one with semantic word-clusters. During an IM conversation, I took lines of typing and converted them to the same clusters, and then correlated that with my image corpus.

The results were mixed. Sometimes the image matching worked serendipitously well. Once I was writing about my experiment, and the algorithm posted one of the standard image-processing photos (I think it was the babboon). The issue was the amount of noise, caused by images being related to a tangential part of the conversation rather than the main gist (the extraction problem discussed in point 2).

I've also done this experiment using emails instead of IM, and another time even hooking into the user's keyboard strokes so that I captured whatever they were typing at the moment. Increasing the amount of input context didn't actually help too much. At any moment, the user is still only interested in a small amount of information that he's typing. It is hard to capture the gist from that short piece of text.

The academic papers in this area (at least the ones I read a few years ago) didn't seem to have good solutions to this problem.

I think this is an interesting area. Seeing advancements in this space would be pretty cool.

tweet tweet

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!

If you can't get enough of my writings, you can follow me on twitter!

You're welcome.

---

(The over-the-top tone is a joke. If you didn't get that, please don't follow me since you won't enjoy it anyway.)

ack ack uwink

From: Niniane Wang
To: Dan E.
Subject: ack ack uwink


Mountain View uWink is closing!!!!! Ack ack

But the bet is that ALL uWinks have to close. This was very specific!!

From: Dan E.
To: Niniane Wang


LOL

From: Dan E.
To: Niniane Wang

[link to article]

(The article describes how uWink is trying to de-list its stock and then license its technology.)

why is coolness proportional to number of participants

Have you noticed that American society can be very critical about people spending time alone? Let's consider Friday night activities. The societal "coolness" factor of pursuits is directly proportional to the number of people involved:

1. coding at home alone
2. watching a movie at home with a friend
3. going out to the movies with 5 friends
4. going out to a house party with 50 attendees
5. going to a nightclub packed with 400 people dancing

Many people would rank these as ascending in coolness, i.e. descending in lameness.

I imagine that evolution rewarded sociable people who worked with others to build grass huts and hunt buffalo together, and that turned into a societal bias toward social interaction. But you'd think the sweet spot would be interactions of small groups, rather than enormous gatherings that are inefficient.

This rule can be broken with the inclusion of romantic partners. Watching a movie with a date is considered more cool than going to a house party with 50 attendees. This is presumably because evolution also rewards procreation, thus any overtures in that direction are also blessed.

UPDATE: Another aspect of this contemplation is over why society expects people to be social on particular times of week, e.g. Friday and Saturday nights. It's fine to read the newspaper alone on Saturday morning, but much less acceptable to do that on Saturday night.

american song titles can join candor club

Loli: "I'm beginning to listen to more chinese songs, because the lyrics are better."

Me: "Yeah. Chinese songs have titles like '月亮代表我的心' (The Moon Represents My Heart), '发如雪' (Hair like the Snow), '追风的少年' (Youth Chasing the Wind)."

Loli: [nodding]

Me: "American songs have titles like 'My Life Would Suck Without You'."

You're such a nice friend -- the best! Wait, that means i have to give the prize back to you...

Last week, my friend "Don" and I were discussing a web contest held by an ex-Googler startup. The top prizes are Kindles.

Me: "I'm going to lose. The contest page actually features my profile, but I'll lose."

Don: [visiting the page] "What's the judging criteria? Number of reviews written? Seems that would encourage spamming."

Me: "Yeah. I actually spent time writing witty content, but I was quickly overtaken by people who wrote over a thousand one-sentence reviews."

Don: "It's okay. I'll buy you a Kindle."

Me: "No."

Don: "The Kindle will be for winning my contest."

Me: "What's your contest?"

Don: "Most Awesome Friend in the World."

Me: "Oh. [momentarily happy] But... due to extrinsic motivation, that'll make me want to be your friend less."

perfectionism

One of my friends was having a bout of perfectionism lately. It reminded me of the best advice I ever heard on this topic.

Six or seven years ago, I was chatting with a friend from SIGGRAPH.

Me: [obsessively nitpicking over whatever I was working on]

Mark: "Why are you being so perfectionist?"

Me: "I want to make this perfect!"

Mark: "Michael Jackson wants to be perfect too, and look at him!"

meow meow vroom

An email exchange:

From: Niniane Wang
To: Om K

Check out this story from fmylife:

"Today, I ran over a squirrel. I saw it twitching so I backed over it to end its suffering. It wasn't a squirrel it was a kitten. The children it belonged to watched as I ran over their kitten. TWICE. FML"

From: Om K

niniane i have a cat!!!

but this is still funny

From: Niniane Wang

Are you sure you still have the cat? When was the last time you saw it?

From: Om K

now now now now 1 second ago now now

From: Niniane Wang

lol

web contests: could be harmful if mis-designed

Web sites often hold contests as a marketing tool. I myself have thought about doing this for various projects (past and present), but today I started wondering if it actually saps the long-term desire to use the site.

There is a known psychological effect where giving people a reward for doing an activity makes them do it much less once the reward is gone, compared to if they never got the reward at all. See the wikipedia writeup about extrinsic motivation:

Extrinsic incentives sometimes can weaken the motivation as well. In one classic study done by green & lepper, children who were lavishly rewarded for drawing with felt-tip pens later showed little interest in playing with the pens again.

Perhaps the contest holders are willing to accept this negative hit of user retention in exchange for getting their name out, as people tell their friends about the contest. In that case, it's important to design your competition for maximal reach. Make sure the goal aligns with spreading the word about your site, and not about encouraging heavier activity amongst your existing users.

You could take this to its natural extreme and just have a contest of who can refer the most number of users to your site.

amusing dialogue from a long time ago

I came across this draft from many months ago. It made me laugh, so I am posting it.

Me: "I can't find my How of Happiness book. The last time I saw it, you carried it in your bag along with your own book."

Trenton: [goes in closet very briefly, then emerges]

Me: "Was it there?"

Trenton: "No."

Me: "That wasn't very long. It seems as though you just walked in, paused for a few seconds, and then walked out."

Trenton: "Oh, I didn't pause long enough! Oops!"

Me: "Ha ha."

Trenton: "Did you own this book?"

Me: "Yes, before it was lost by you."

Trenton: "That's why I used the past tense."

brief browser compatibility happiness

A couple weeks ago, I was hanging out with a friend, and trying to get wireless to work on both our laptops. This friend is not in a tech-related field, and doesn't spend much time in front of the computer.

Me: "Can you try to access the internet?"

Him: [opens a browser at his laptop]

Me: "You use firefox?" [overjoyed]

Him: "Yeah... why?"

Me: "That's great! So do I! I'm so excited!"

Him: "I don't understand."

Me: "It's, um, it's like if we both really liked the same movie."

Him: "Oh... [deep look of understanding] Well, I just like firefox much better than safari."

Me: "Oh right, this is a Mac. Firefox is the only reasonable choice." [greatly disappointed]

my favorite video game of all time

Today my brother and I talked about the excellent video game Rock Band. This got me thinking about video games in general.

It saddens me that as the industry matured, production costs rose, and risk-taking became more expensive and hence more rare.

It's nice to see breakthrough games like The Sims, DDR, Guitar Hero. I wish there were more games in that vein, and not just reiterations of formulas that worked before. I like seeing a true innovation, and not just an improved graphical effect like hyper-realistic blood splatter pattern on the wall, or having the blood stay around forever even after the avatar leaves the room.

For a time, it seemed as though storylines within games were becoming more advanced. I was very excited about this. There were ARGs with interesting plots, and in-game cut scenes were getting longer with witty dialogue. Alas, that trend never really came to be.

My favorite video game of all time embodes a great story: Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within.



It's a beautiful game with full-motion video. You solve puzzles to help Gabriel Knight hunt down a werewolf. Halfway through, he gets bitten, so you race against the clock to find a cure.

Gabriel has a lady friend. As he weakens from his condition, she takes over portions of the game. There's romantic tension, but they stay platonic friends. It's so nice to see a video game where the male lead and female lead do not hook up!



Along the way, you learn interesting facts about the history of werewolves. The acting is pretty good too.

The way I encountered this game was by accident. During my senior year of college, I was fortunate enough to have a job offer from Blizzard. As enticement, Blizzard gave me a few T-shirts, and a Starcraft beta pre-release CD. "This will make you the most popular person at your school," they said.

How indisputable. People borrowed my Starcraft CD day in and day out. My friend Victor took it for an entire week. After much nagging from me, he finally presented me with a nice gift-wrapped box.

"You wrapped my Starcraft CD?" I said, amused.

I opened it and was puzzled to find a box for The Beast Within. "Ah, he must have recycled an old software box," I said to myself, "For easier gift-wrapping."

Then I reached in the box and pulled out the Gabriel Knight CD. It dawned on me that Victor did this to stall for time.

So I played the game, and it turned out to be wonderful! I was completely hooked. I let Victor keep the Starcraft beta for another week without any further complaint. Instead, I was full of praise for his kindness in giving me the Gabriel Knight game.

I think he was pretty shocked. He later told me that he felt guilty for my grateful reaction to his gag gift. But the game was so good!

Will the world ever have a full-motion video game again with great acting and a compelling story?

I miss you, Gabriel Knight 2.

pulse of mass opinion

I like the Facebook redesign. In particular, I like that my feed now consists of two-way conversations between friends, rather than mostly one-way sharing of photos and profile changes. I used to get my conversation fix from FriendFeed, but early on in the site's evolution, friend-of-friend strangers got added to my feed and the signal to noise ratio became too low for me.

I've been seeing around the blogosphere reports of haters for the new Facebook UI. Much like every other redesign, there is an anti-redesign Facebook group with a million people, etc. I want to know the actual pulse of the people, and whether the dissenters are a vocal minority vs. widespread! I want to go to a site and see a clear percentage breakdown of who likes it vs. hates it.

In general, for any controversial issue that I'm curious about (abortion, gay rights, No Name Cafe food quality), I want to go to a site and see the pulse of public opinion about it.

I hope one of these prediction market sites will take over and become used by everyone, to satisfy this purpose. I've seen them used within private contexts, and they were very effective in showing what the crowd thinks.

funny fmylife entry

I am really amused by this user story:

Today, I woke up a little after seven. I felt sick to my stomach because last night was my bachelor party and I drank more than I ever have before. I checked my phone, and I had received 42 missed calls. It was seven o'clock pm. Today was my wedding day. FML

photos of Berlin: faces and places

A few places that made an impression on me in Berlin:



A sobering exhibit at the Jewish Museum. Each face represents a person who suffered during the Holocaust. The idea is that you can walk on the faces, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.



An audio exhibit at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Stereos around the room play a 30-minute loop of birds on the beach, orchestral music, and a woman's voice narrating her nightmares.

In the beginning, you hear the surf coming at you from all directions while the woman describes walking into her beach house to find a leg sticking out from a sheet. The end is a majestic crescendo of horns over the sound of the ocean.

I liked it. It made me want to get audio equipment for my own house.



Potsdam, site of the post-World War II conference. The guide showed us where Stalin entered via a side door, and where Churchill strolled around.



Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam. Look at the grand staircases leading down from the palace! Turns out this is just the servants quarters, and the cooks would run down these steps to carry the soup to the royals.



Omar and Neha at the Green Door, a cheerful little bar down the street from us. One night had live music, featuring a singer with a sultry voice. The next night, the bartender came out and danced with a guest. It was a happy little bar.



A T-shirt I thought was funny. It only came in men's sizes, so I didn't get one.



We saw a dazzling collection of Picassos at this museum. This is a painting of Picasso's second wife. He noticed her at a cafe, where she was sitting alone at a table. She suddenly pulled out a knife and started playing the game of stabbing the table quickly in between the fingers of her other hand. By the time she was finished, her hand was bloody, and Picasso was fascinated.



Rather than getting hotel rooms in Berlin, we rented a furnished apartment. It's nice to have a living room (pictured) and kitchen.



The bedrooms had good lighting and pleasant furniture. However, we were constantly thwarted by the lack of internet.

The landlord promised us DSL but then gave us a USB stick. I had to install software and reboot my laptop, only to be confronted with modem-speed internet. To add insult to injury, he only gave us 10mb of bandwidth, so we ran out after a few hours.



We spent a lot of time at Cafe Bilder Buch, which has free wireless. It also has these "ice chocolate" drinks which are tasty, and comfortable couches. I wish there was a place this cozy in Mountain View.

this advice has never worked for me

I just read a blog post about how you should tell your family and friends that you love them. I see this advice all the time. "Don't wait! Tell your loved ones how you feel about them! What if they died in a freak accident tomorrow? Let them know you care!"

This has never worked for me. I tell people, and then they get uncomfortable and don't know how to respond.

The worst was in 2007 when I was so overcome with joy over life that I emailed three close friends to say how much I love them and appreciate their quirks and friendship and support over all the years. There was no response for days. I think they felt awkward. This made me feel awkward in turn.

Maybe I am doing it wrong. Or I already am too prone to being verbally effusive, so this just pushes it over the line. But it is annoying to see this advice everywhere, when following it tends to lead to awkward results.