A full year of Seattle! Who’d have thought of that?

I wondered if I actually like to travel. If not, why do I travel so much? This year I left home probably once a month and sometime twice. Oversea trips were mostly to Asia, but once to Greece. Pretty much all of them were business trips. We are, however, getting better at combining business with pleasure: rendezvous and steal a day or two for tourist activities in the city that I went to for business.

Kid engaged and set the wedding date for next May. We knew this wa coming and gave them all our blessings. At the same time, the sadness of the inability to hold onto them slipped in. They are all growing up and we are both growing old. Soon, there will be this old couple on their recliners staring at the TV all by themselves. I thought of my parents more and more as I tried to see myself from kids’ eyes. I remembered how I felt when I was their ages. This is very strange: to remember through kids’ eyes as parents.

The other Kid graduated and entered grad school. Life is now building the launch pad. Decision time is sooner. But there is still precious time to goof off once in a while: it is hard to wean away from the nice college care-free lives.

Nephew got married. We all have been holding our breath for this moment and so glad that they finally overcame all barriers. Another niece is now a Mom! Man, I am now a grand-uncle. Another, slightly more distant, niece moved to the US and recently got pregnant with her second kid. This trend of grand-uncling is not slowing down, I can see. Soon, I will acquire the title of 小明叔公 (long story, inside joke, another blog).

The job is its usual high-stress, high-demand, high-tech drill. No job is perfect. This one is on the better side, on the scale of my long list of employments. I really enjoyed the direct, non-bullshit small company culture. We operate at a much faster pace. Yes, the competition is fierce and we will die easier and quicker if we screw up. Guess what, so it is for the biggest companies in the world too. This is the era where size does not really have real advantages, at least not for the industry that I am part of.

I still feel like a visitor to this city of Seattle. I am not sure if the feeling of “temporarily” will ever be gone. We moved into our own condo in the summer and let the city grow on us. After all, this is where Kid will get married, I am sure that we will remember that day for a very long time.

Everyone knows that chocolate comes from cacao. That’s like saying steak comes from cattle. How exactly?

Theo (the name refers to the cacao tree) is a small chocolate factory in the Fremont neighborhood. The tour was educational and entertaining. The cocoa beans first go through a fermentation process, in their own pulp, after harvest. This critical process changes the color of the beans and makes them more chocolate in flavor. When sacks of beans arrive at the factory, they go through a pretty standard cleaning, sorting, and roasting process. Then the beans are smashed open to separate the husks and nibs (the inside of the cacao beans). Finally, there is the process of grinding down the nibs and mixing them with sugar and other ingredients to make chocolate.

The best part of the tour is after the ending. The retail store allows sampling and we duly tasted pretty much every flavor. I concluded that Orange Dark Chocolate is my favorite. With many repetitions and serious experiment, I also concluded that 80% chocolate is probably my upper limit and 70% is my most comfortable range. Milk chocolate (typically 25%) masks too much chocolate flavor and becomes plain candy.

Of course Theo makes ganache and of course we also sampled them (duh). I couldn’t resist the Single Malt Scotch Ganache and bought the box of with four different scotches. Theo also makes very unusual flavors like spicy chile (that I don’t like). There is Chipotle Spice sipping chocolate that needs to be mixed with warm milk that I do like. The flavor is quite “adult” in the sense of having a bit of spicy heat and a strong spice aroma. The drink, that Kids made according to the recipe, was thick, strongly chocolate, and flavorful.

Of course I ignored the calories count. Silly.

I like my Kindle3. Kid bought a Kindle Touch and I have been comparing them side-by-side. I am not sure Touch is any better, just smaller. I do have several pet peeves regarding Kindles.

• It can’t lend or transfer books to others easily. Physical books are so easy to pass around. Other ebooks are copied as files. But Amazon makes it hard.
• No Chinese books. I would read a lot more Chinese books if they were easier to get. For now, my only way is to buy and ship them from Beijing or Taipei. Really, Amazon? There are billions of us who read.
• Can’t borrow or check-out books from the library. Honestly, the greatest thing to all readers is the library. But Amazon seemed lukewarm on supporting libraries.

For all these flaws, I loyally pack my Kindle around the world with me. I love cuddling up in bed with my Kindle in one hand. It is light, it turns easily, it remembers where I was, it looks up words for me instantaneously. So I tolerate and accept the flaws, like those regrets we reluctantly bury when we accept the facts of life.

Then Kid showed me Seattle Public Library’s Kindle collection! Really? I searched some books on my list, and wow. One of them was available. I clicked several buttons and ended up on Amazon.com that, as the last step, delivered the book to my Kindle. Magic! So delighted.

Supposedly, I have the book for 21 days. Unlike real library books, I don’t seem to have a way to return the book before the due date. I also don’t know if I can “renew” the book. Most of the Kindle books are already checked out and I need to wait for the them to be returned by others.

This is still a good step forward. Good job, Seattle Public Library and Amazon!

Want to become a US citizen? Tired of waiting in the tedious visa application process? No problem. For the low low price of half a million dollars (and you can get it back in a couple of years, plus interest), you can become one today!

This is the “Immigrant Investor Visa” called EB5 that grants anyone who would create 10 new jobs in the US, with about $500,000 of investment, permanent residency. According to The Economist and Seattle Business Magazine:

95 would-be immigrants, mostly Chinese, have invested nearly $48 million in a company set up to buy bonds funding the replacement for the aging State Route 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington. If the deal receives final approval, the 95 would be eligible to apply for green cards to live and work in America. The innovative deal is believed to be one of the first times the federal government’s Immigrant Investor Program, also known as EB-5, has been used to fund a public infrastructure project using municipal bonds anywhere in the United States.

I have long lamented the idiocy of US immigration policies. They are based on an ideal of fairness and justice, instead of pragmatic thinking about what’s good for the country. There are over 10 million illegal immigrants in the country, the majority of them are from Mexico and in the low-wage service industry. Yet USCIS refuses to grant even visiting visas to senior executives, engineers, or wealthy tourists.

I once attended a conference in Europe where over half of the attendants were from Silicon Valley. I asked the organizer why she didn’t just hold the conference in San Francisco. The answer was startling: “There is no way to guarantee that critical attendants can get visas into the US.” It turned out that the US requires an in-person interview to obtain a visa and the queue can be several hours long. The official reason for such policy? Part Homeland Security and part concern that they might “jump ship” and stay in the US. Those senior executives, among the elite of their society, just wouldn’t bother. They would take their money where they are welcome, instead of being suspected as a criminal.

Honestly, which country you have visited required you to interview in person to get a visa?

Other countries, most noticeably Canada, take a very simple approach: they welcome those who can make Canada better. Anyone can get a Canadian green card by buying a house that is more than $500,000. Many believe that was a key driver to Vancouver’s and Toronto’s real estate market.

Wall Street Journal estimated that a $500,000 income would put one nearly at the top 1% of the US population. Washington state now has 95 new residents who are at the top of the US income scale. Keep them coming. Each and every one of them will spend money, lots of it, in the state. And we like that. Right?

The medical industry recommends 2 servings of fish every week; preferably one fatty kind, like Salmon or Tuna, and another white fish. This, they say, is good for our health. If everyone on earth followed that advice, we would extirpate all edible fish from the ocean, and probably fresh water too. So ecology is against personal health. Historically, ecology always loses in such battles.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) predicted that the world will run out of foods to sustain human population. This famous Malthusian crisis became a fallacy. Industrial and green revolutions drastically increased human productivity and probably extended earth’s capacity for human population to essential infinity. (That is, we will have mastered space colonization before we run out of foods.) In term of food production, however, there is an interesting concept of “feed conversion ratio,” that certain foods are economically costlier to produce than others. If they are similar in terms of nutrition or to human palates, then it would be logical for us to choose those foods of better conversion ratio. Or, turning the question 180 degrees, if we are genetically engineering foods anyway, we should aim to make ones with better and better conversion ratio.

Paul Greenberg depicted the gloomy destinies for all four fish: Salmon, Bass, Cod, and Tuna. He loves Salmon and Tuna. They are beautiful animals, excellent in taste, and good for our health. Bass, to Paul, is a generic name for fishes of a similar shape and meat texture. Cod is supposed to be the epitome of ocean abundance. Human beings have long and loving relationships with all four fish for centuries. And, at the same time, we are destroying them, intentionally and systematically: people, Paul being one of them, simply enjoy hunting and eating those fish too much to stop. What to do?

Ban all industrial fishing. Fisheries shall be open only for “artisan fishermen” that are licensed and their catch limit controlled. For supermarket level consumption, turn to farm fish that have excellent conversion ratio, such as Tilapia.

Can wild- and farmed-form of any animal co-exist in this human-centric world? Yes, there are pigs and boar, farmed and wild turkeys, probably both farmed and wild rabbits too. Same could work for fish. Let’s see.

Mom learned Mahjongg when I was in first or second grade. (The solitaire game of the same name was invented by Westerners, and completely unrelated.) As a stay-at-home mom, she needed to pass the time after Dad had gone to work and we schools. There were many young mothers like her in that sleepy mid-Taiwan governmental town. Mahjongg caught on. Pretty soon, it became the standard weekend social activity (sleepy governmental town). A few rounds of phone calls would arrange the game. People gathered after lunch and played on until the small hours — every weekend.

We kids had the job of not bothering them and we were very good at that. We would come back to re-energize and quickly escape back out of their sensory ranges. By the time the games ended, the kids would have been sound asleep here and there, and got carried home. Good times!

The game continued pretty much to even today — different city, different players, but the same game. Grown up kids became helpers and servers: refresh tea and snacks, empty ash trays, set up and clean up, etc. We were also drawn to the game, those complicated patterns, strategies, joking, teasing, and jousting. Mahjongg was fascinating.

But they would not teach us! This is gambling and for adults only. If we catch you playing Mahjongg with ANYBODY, you will be punished.

Finally, in my mid-30s, I sat down with my in-laws and asked to be taught. Surprisingly, they didn’t fully agree with each other on what exactly the rules are. Players obviously would invent new variations on the fly. The in-laws usually played with different circle of friends and, over the decades, developed different “dialects.” My tutelage was as enlightening to them as to me.

As Kids grew up, they were intrigued by the mysteries of the game. In our variation, each player gets 13 tiles and tries to arrange them into winning patterns, Gin Rummy style. Different patterns win different amounts. So this is a game of optimization: assess the tiles on hand, choose the most profitable path, and be ready to change as new tiles are dealt into your hand continuously. This constant re-evaluation and seizing/missing opportunities are additive. Time elapses quickly.

Like me, they sat down with me the second day and tried to learn the game for real. Wife and I, surprised, found ourselves explaining the rules slightly differently. Hmm.. Life is a full circle.