Collision

I was rear-ended on Sunday, en route to Andrew's wedding. I'm okay, but my beloved car is injured.



Last night, while carpooling up to San Francisco:

Alipé: [talking about a new model of car] It's like the Audi TT, but a longer body.

Me: That sounds nice! But I still love my car.

Alipé: Even now that it's damaged?

Me: Especially now, in its hour of need! In sickness and in health, Alipé.

World Cup.

Today I watched soccer for the first time in my life, and I LOVE IT.

The reason is that all these tough men are showing massive amounts of emotion. In the finals, one Italy team member reached out and ruffled the hair of a French team member to show good sportsmanship. It was so sweet! Right before the penalty kicks, the goalies embraced, and patted each other on the neck in goodwill, and I was really touched. When else do you see grown men doing that? I certainly don't see Joby patting Alipé supportively on the neck before we go into our VP reviews.

When they lose, they kneel on the ground in agony of defeat. When they win, they hug and run screaming around the field.





Also, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that soccer players have beautiful, tall, lean, tight bodies.

Next World Cup, I am watching every single game.

the family jewels

Google's hallways are littered with exercise balls, and in the past 2 weeks, I've taken to sitting on a yellow exercise ball instead of in a desk chair. When I get deep into thought, sometimes I bounce up and down on it.



Today I was coding away, sitting on the exercise ball as usual. Suddenly, from behind me, I hear Joby's voice say, "Hey, it's time for our group meeting." at the same time that I feel my exercise ball bump gently below me.

I turn around, while saying, "Did you just kick ..."

When I see Joby's little smile and simultaneous looking away to the side, the culprit is clear without me needing to finish the question.

"Joby, please don't kick me in the ball," I say.

Sweetness.

love
I get so lost, sometimes
days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
but whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches

- "In Your Eyes", Peter Gabriel


Tonight Jill told the story of the start of her relationship with Adam. I know both of them, so as she told it, I re-enacted the two of them in my mind. He pursued her for many months, ironclad in his faith that they would be great together. But she had reservations, so for months he stayed madly in love and she resisted.

Then after many months, he declared that he was going to stop insisting and agreed to just be friends with her, and talked about how much he still valued the friendship. This melted my heart, because it's a rare man who actually will hold dear to a friendship with a woman who turns him down.

THEN she changed her mind and they had a date. She told us about the first time that he held her, and the sweet sweet things that he said. "You are my dream girl" was just the beginning.

I imagined Adam, that reserved engineer who was too private to even tell us which suburb he lives in, gushing these unbelievably sweet things, and WOW. My heart was beyond melted. There was a big puddle in my chest cavity where my heart used to be.

Offensive pickup lines

[Kevin (one of my SF roommates) says I should have sympathy for the man in the story below because it's hard to start up conversations with female strangers, so I almost didn't post it. But then desire to write overcame sympathy!]

Sunday night I'm at Harry's Bar waiting for Cecilia and her boyfriend. They're lost driving up to Pacific Heights, so I sit on a stool and watch the bar's plasma TV playing "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on mute.

A Caucasian man, around 30 years old, 5'10" with short wavy brown hair, comes up next to me.

Guy: I'm going to put my drink here next to your water, okay? [Editor's Note: This line isn't the bad one -- it doesn't go bad until a couple minutes in.]

Me: Okay.

Guy: Hey, so where are you from?

Me: Originally? China.

Guy: Where in China?

Me: Beijing.

Guy: But you don't have an accent. You must have been very young when you came to the States.

Me: Yes, I was 5.

Guy: So you're basically American then. You're an AMERICAN GIRL. You're not really Chinese. You can't call yourself Chinese.

Me: Can.

Guy: You can't! You're not Chinese! You can't call yourself Chinese! [keeps going in this vein]

Me: [slightly annoyed, starts looking away from him]

Guy: Okay, okay. So where did you go to high school? Did you go to high school?

Me: [in disbelief] Did I go to high school? What kind of question is that??? By U.S. law, everyone under the age of 16 is required to go to school!!

Guy: Oh. Hey, what the hell would I know about US law?

Me: I guess you can't call yourself an American then.

Just then Cecilia came in and saved me.

Johnny Depp, sweet

This positively biased interview with Johnny Depp made him sound like a truly upstanding man:

He is hugely loyal, hugely old-fashioned, and I think he just wants to be involved with Vanessa, so much so that even a screen kiss with Keira Knightley for Dead Man's Chest got him twitchy and feeling a little awkward.

and really knows what's in his heart:

Johnny Depp seems straightforward but you know he's complex. "Well," he says, "I was given the 'weird' badge but I think everybody's weird and that's the key to it. We should celebrate our individuality, not be embarrassed or ashamed of it. We all have idiosyncrasies, tics that are obsessive-compulsive. People do themselves a great disservice by not allowing themselves to see who they really are because they are afraid."

It's so sweet that I find myself wanting his marriage to work out. Because then it's a sign that it really can happen, a celebrity mobbed by thousands of women daily can stay true to his wife and love her and be loyal for the rest of their years. And then there would be hope for all of us.

It's also why I want Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to last.

San Fran, fish out of water

My weekend crash pad is 4 blocks from Haight St (of the famous Haight-Ashbury), and these 2 days I've felt like a fish out of water.

Where are my Starbucks on every corner? With their trusty Internet connection and decaf Java Chip frappucino! Instead I'm writing this from the Sacred Grounds Cafe (kudos on the witty name). Sitting on a chair outside the cafe is an Asian man sporting dreadlocks, smoking a joint. He was originally smoking it at a table 10 feet from me, until the waitress asked him to move outside.

Another reason for fish out of water is that the Internet at my crash pad is broken, and an internet connection is definitely water to my fish. We pay $20 per month to use the connection from Tully's directly below us, and their router is on infinite reboot. When I went down to tell the barista...

Me: Hi, I'm trying to use your internet, but the connection is cycling on and off. It looks as though your router might be rebooting.

Barista: [blankly] Our what is what?

Me: Your internet isn't working.

Barista: The technical support said our power supply might be broken. Hey, maybe that explains why the ice machine next to it is broken too!

Me: Wait, if your ice machine also isn't working, then it's probably not the power supply on the router. It's probably the electrical outlet or the wiring in the wall.

Barista: [slowly, as if speaking to idiot] No, it's the PO-WER SU-PPLY. See, there are surges of power, and then no power.

Me: Uh...

Barista: They're sending out a technician on Monday.

Me: [with relief] Thank you.

I do like it, this challenging of my comfort zone. And there are perks nearby which are right in the middle of my area of comfort. I'm a few blocks away from Golden Gate Park and the de Young Museum. Check out this cocoa pod sculpture from de Young. It's a coffin.



That's right, the artist was a maker of coffins, and his fisherman uncle asked for a special one, so he made a boat. Then more friends started asking for special coffins. He lived in a country where the main export is cocoa. Hence, the cocoa coffin.

One of my favorite paintings is this one:



My mother said on our visit a few weeks ago, "This painting is so easy! Just a few rough slashes with a brush!"

But I was captivated. The man and woman are looking straight at each other, in a gorgeous room with high ceilings and sunlight streaming in through picture windows, yet the scene screams desolation.

Most of us have been at that place before, yes?

Real World

Today was a long and tough day, bookended by two difficult conversations.

In the morning, I confronted a dear friend about my perception of a possible conflict of interest (her: "Niniane, are you questioning my ethics????" Me: "Uh ... honestly, yes."). She gave me some additional info which satisfied my worries, but I walked away with a heavy stone in my heart. It had to be done, but surely now our bond is damaged!

Fortunately, in an impressive demonstration of classiness, she emailed me afterwards to say that she wants to protect the friendship.

Evening-time, I performed a social reminder. I won't say what it is, but it was equivalent in difficulty to telling your manager that she's had broccoli stuck in her teeth all day. Fortunately, again, extreme classiness.

I came home, sat on my couch as a worn-out shell, and spent the past hour flipping through my MTV Real World book.



Reading celebrity gossip and watching reality TV can be so relaxing. It's just delightful when the facades come down and you see the real-life arguments and anger and tenderness! The stuff that I wish I could see in my regular life, but cannot due to silly things like privacy and personal boundaries and window curtains.

Whenever I'm asked to fill out an online survey on my purchasing habits and periodicals, I wonder if my info is going to throw off the results. "We've discovered how to target to Google engineers! The preferred periodical turns out to be People magazine!"

my 27th

From Tom:

Happy Birthday!! Your brother sends his love from afar.

By `your brother`, I mean me. Unless, of course, I was really picked up out of a trashcan. Oh horrors!

Hee hee. Tom knows I like inside jokes, so he has jam-packed them. When I was 10 and he was 3, I liked to make fun that we found him as a baby in a trash can, hence the trashcan allusion. :(

The "Oh horrors!" is from when we played the video game Pikmin in 2002, and I accidentally killed a third of our pikmin population. Pikmin has a video game diary. That day's auto-generated entry read, "Oh horrors!", and Tom giggled and giggled in delight.



I have 3 birthday resolutions this year (in the same vein as New Year's Resolutions):

1. Listen to people intently, without interrupting. Pay attention even when tempted by distracting thoughts.
   
2. Be punctual.
   
3. Sleep enough.
   

I decided this year not to have a big hullabaloo, and instead do a small, intimate, lovely dinner. We went to 71 Saint Peter:



Mingjing came over beforehand and brought me 3 presents. One of them was ... gummies!!



Thank you Mingjing! You know me so well!

Ode to Mingjing

O Mingjing, bringer of candies!
You've fulfilled my gummy dream.
You knew I wanted them so,
To share them with my team.

Away you drove to Cupertino,
To find the ichiban store.
At last I can slumber in peace,
for I yearn for gummies no more!

gg locking out of apartment complex

Last night I drove to the Kirkland apartment at 1am, ready to catch 5 hours of sleep before heading to the airport.

As I settled in, I realized that I needed my cell phone charger, so I walked down a flight of stairs and walked out of the apartment complex into the garage. I picked up the charger, and then turned with horror to realize that I left the keys in the apartment.

The apartment itself I left unlocked, but my car was in visitor parking, and I needed a key to get into the complex itself. A key that was sitting on the kitchen counter. I called upon my ingenuity. I rattled the doors. I called the apartment manager -- no response. I walked around and tried all the entrances into the complex.

Finally I managed to squeeze through the leftmost hole in the gate through which cars enter (to the left of the yellow-and-black stripes):

B of the B

Lunch at Cafe 150.

Max: Over the weekend I was hanging out with my friend Eric, who was a character artist on Tomb Raider 2.



Me: Oh, he'd get along great with George. (George is an engineer who enjoys ample-chested female game characters.)

Max: He didn't create the original Tomb Raider character. He just did improvements based off the original model.

Me: Okay. [pause] You know what, I'm going to write a game where the main character is a guy with a really huge bulge.

Max: [laughing while shaking his head]

Me: That's right. He'll run around in tight pants, and I'll make a level with a bunch of cold water pools that he has to avoid falling into.

Max: Will that appeal to the ladies?

Me: Sure, why not. I'll call it "Battle of the Bulge".

Piggy.

Yonatan's dogs are at doggy day care. While we were talking, the day care dog-sitter called to ask what type of dog food to feed them. Fancy names were bandied about -- California Whole Dog Food or some such.

My reaction was my usual surprise that someone would spend so much time and energy over a dog.

But then I remember how I feel about a pig. Two years ago I researched a half dozen web sites about owning a pig. Pigs are so cute! Their little snouts and ears, and they have no fur, and their little tail, and little hooves. They oink instead of bark. Pigs are the bomb.

I was concerned because pigs grow to be 75 to 150 pounds. I'm worried about having a pet that may weigh more than I do. But then I read this:

The weight of a pig is deceiving because they are so hard-bodied. A pig who measures 14" tall by 24" long and weighs 60 lbs. takes up very little space (about half the dimensions of an ottoman) and is a manageable size for a house pet and travel companion. Compare this size pig to a 100 lb. German Shepherd who is taller and longer than a coffee table, with an extension (the tail) that is capable of knocking everything off the coffee table.

This is very exciting to think about! I would have a warm cuddly pig to sleep with at night. This could be me:

to Alipé

Godspeed on your recovery.

Those dirty-minded ACM-ers.

Yesterday the top US teams from the ACM International Programming Contest came to visit Google, and I gave a tech talk. I can't talk about my current project, so I chose to recycle an old tech talk on Desktop Search.

I kicked off with a demo, and took a chance by asking the audience to suggest query terms for me to perform against my own hard drive, to show that the demo is not canned.

"Dark fiber!"
"Top secret!"
"Google confidential!"

Silly ACM-ers.

They were a great audience, because they got all my jokes (yay!).

At one point I segued into the profanity filter for certain query situations. I was the one who coded this, and I talked about how the challenge is that some phrases are clearly questionable, though each individual word is not. For example, "girl-on-girl action".

This proved to be the most remembered part of the talk. During the Q & A, I got all sorts of questions on it:

"Can I turn off the profanity filter?"
"Can I adjust the words in the profanity filter?"
"How did you come up with the words in the profanity filter?"

Those ACM-ers with their dirty minds!

My gummies!!! A poem to you, my dear sweet gummies.

Dan worked out of Kirkland today, and I'm also in Kirkland for the weekend and then working here Monday. We met for dinner at the Great Wall shopping mall near the Seattle airport.

Walking through the mall to the restaurant, I saw a store selling ichiban gummy candies. "My team will like those!" I thought, and bought 20-30 in different flavors.



We ate dinner, drove off. Half an hour later, I suddenly turned to Dan with horror. "OH NO!!!" I shouted.

"What? What?" he said.

"I FORGOT MY GUMMIES in the restaurant!"

My chinese anti-food-wasting side kicked in with vigorous force, and I've been lamenting them since. I decided the only way to get over them is to write a poem.

Ode to Gummies

Oh gummies, my gummies,
Your luminiscence once filled my heart.
Lychee, peach, melon, and grape.
How it pains me to see us apart!

You laid in a white plastic bag.
I took you out to dine.
I placed you on the cloth chair,
Right beside mine.

I sat and chatted and as time passed,
Gradually you slipped from my mind.
When I left, I forgot you!!!!
Oh, how could I be so unkind?

Now I lament thee! I miss thee!
Your smooth skin and sweet taste.
Oh gummies! My gummies!
What a terrible and tragic waste!

self removal

I took down my most recent post, because one reader made a point that writing about being considerate is not very considerate. It is a good point that I agree with.

So you could say that I filled out the blog removal form on myself.

However, taking down a post removes associated comments, and I would like to preserve the comments. Here they are for posterity:

"I feel sorry for the poor fellow who'd be interested in someone so self-absorbed."

"From the pictures on the blog, the attraction must be something other than physical. Is there such a thing as an ego-fetish?"

"Crazy self-limitation. One day you'll wake up having missed a great opportunity. Or several. "

Writing group.

JTR: I did NaNoWriMo (writing a novel in 30 days) again last year. The first year I wrote the daily suggested amount until Thanksgiving. The second year, until Nov 15. The third year, I lasted 5 days. Last year ...

Me: [bracing myself]

JTR: Last year I finished.

Me: Wow! Congrats!

JTR: Yeah. I copied the "WINNER" banner onto my web page.

Me: So let's meet again with our writing club. I haven't touched my novel in 4 months, and one of my New Year's Resolutions is to finish a draft.

JTR: Okay.

Me: I like our writing club because I can always count on you for honesty. Like the time you told me, "You know how there were redeeming points about my story? Yeah, I can't say the same about your story."

JTR: [laughing] Ah, yeah.

Tips on interviewing.

This weekend, I wrote up this article on "Preparing for a Software Engineer Interview".

Article.

I originally used "Hot Cross Buns" as the violin analogy instead of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", but it seems people don't know what that is. Don't they teach that in music class any more?

dangers of reading ahead

The first assessment that my leadership class analyzed is our skill-o-scope, a 360 evaluation of our skills as seen by our selves, boss, and peers.

I'm very enthusiastic about this material. So, as the instructor presented slides about the metrics, how to read the form, blah blah, I eagerly skipped ahead in the notes. I turned a few pages and saw the profile of strengths and development needs.

I skimmed down to the "development needs as assessed by others" section and was flabbergasted by the fifth item. "Public speaking: speak compellingly in front of an audience."

What??? I thought to myself. I just CAN'T BELIEVE my coworkers think I'm poor at public speaking! That's one of the things that I know I can do well!

Then I looked at the section of "development needs as assessed by self" and was even more shocked that public speaking was again listed, at #4.

I MYSELF selected that as a development need?? I sat in puzzlement.

Then the instructor announced that the paper in our brochure is the average across 1800 previous respondents, and that they would now hand out booklets with our individual results.

Public speaking was not in there as a development need.

Amusing celebrity dialogue.

Celebrities can be so funny.

Angela Bassett: [to Posh Spice] Why exactly do they call you posh?

Posh Spice: Well, why exactly do they call you beautiful?

Bill Gates: "With great wealth comes great responsibility. Many years ago I made it clear that almost all my wealth would be returned to society."

Slashdot: "Who knew Bill Gates is also Spiderman?"