I clicked the “automatic upgrade” to WordPress, whatever. Now I am a Chinese blog. Hmm…
I decided to live with this for a while. When WordPress asks me to upgrade again, I will choose the English version and see what will happen. For now, bear with me.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Casinos are extravagant by necessity. After all, the definite objective of gambling is material. Venetian is the clear biggest among all those glittering monstrosities in Macau (澳门). The 2nd floor simulates Venice: the street, the side-walk restaurants, the blue sky, and, yes, canals, three of them, teeming with Gondola . The fully air-conditioned “outdoor” is huge as a real city. Our pedometer registered more than 10,000 steps when I left the compound, tired legged and confused by the real sky that obviously darkened hours ago.
This Hong Kong’s little brother is now the choice destination for conferences and gambling recreation in Asia, siphoning revenue and visitors away from Las Vegas. Inside the familiar named compounds: Wynn, Sands, MGM, Venetian, the floor designs reflect drastically clientele and gambling pattern. Unlike Vegas casinos that assault visitors upfront with loud forest of slot machines, the gaming areas are buffered by stores, barriers, or short corridors. There are variety of games such as Keno, sport gambling, nor big buffet restaurants. Instead, there are seas of Baccarat tables of various table limits and rule variations. Macau is a Baccarat town.
Baccarat is a curiously simple game that requires no judgment. It is completely a game of chance. The minimum bet for a typical table is 300 MOP (Macau money, about one eighth of a dollar). The “high limit” tables are 2,000 MOP or higher. For several hours’ fun at the minimal table, a gamer needs a thousand dollar’s bankroll. My wallet informed me that it failed to meet this requirement (I only gamble with cash). I watched the crowd in awe: larger sum of money changes hands here than Vegas, per capita!
China ceded Macau to Portugal in 1887. When Britain returned Hong Kong to China by the term of the lease, in 1997, Portugal government also agreed the same two years later. Under the “one Country, two systems” policy, The only things China changed was defense and foreign affairs. For all practical purposes, Macau’s change of sovereignty had no effect on people’s lives.
A friend highly recommended a French restaurant, Robuchon a Galera (法國餐廳), in Lisboa Hotel, so I just showed up without a reservation. Lucky me that someone cancelled and I took a table on the spot. It was an amazing meal: near perfection in almost all regards: foods, wine pairings, plating, timing, service, and ambience. (Of course the company was simply perfect!) I later found that this restaurant has 3 Michelin stars. Lady Luck was with me, just not for the gaming table. For dinner, I tried the Portugese restaurant Gosto (葡軒) at Galaxy casino. The roast suckling was literally finger sucking good and the seafood rice was rich and tasty. By comparison, the Portuguese chicken, a curry dish, became too mild. Bacalhau (Cod fish in Portuguese, 馬介休) is really made of salted dried cod mixed with potato and deep fried. Every household has its own recipe and the one from this restaurant is not bad.
I strolled through the busy alley and visited the famous church ruin (大三巴排坊). The stores and crowd were more interesting than the destination. Then I went to the Taipa old town (官也街) and tried the famous pork-chop sandwich from a glorified street vendor (大利来) near a temple (天后宫). This place makes only 400 French-style buns for pork-chop sandwich everyday (800 during weekends) starting at 2:30pm sharp. They usually sell out within 20 minutes. We got one with a different bun (which they sell all day with unlimited quantity). It was a good sandwich, great if you consider the price of 22MOP (same price for the special bun). I honestly failed to see what can possibly be the big deal about the special bun. Guess I will need to find out next time.
In the 1930s (before the first computer was constructed), one Alonzo Church introduced Lambda Calculus to the field of mathematics. In short, this obscure field of math introduced a structured way to substitute symbols.
Imagine you can give a set of symbols a shorthand and can selectively replace part of the symbols with something else. For example, you can call a complicated construction of fabric and other materials “shirt.” Then you can substitute the color of the “shirt” with “blue.” Voila, you have a blue shirt.
λ-calculus also defined a way to reduce a long set of symbols into a much shorter one; such as the set of symbols “3 + 2″ can be “reduced” to “5.”
This sound too geeky to you? Sorry, but computers are dumber than you think. With symbol substitution and reduction, all computation can be performed mechanically — the mathematical theory behind computation. Without λ-calculus, there would be no mechanical computation, without that, there will be no computers, without that, there will be no iPad, cell phones, or MP3 players.
A separate thread of developments was also going on at the hardware side of the computer science. Cut to the chase, one Alan Turing (founder of computer science) invented the Turing Machine that can execute λ-calculus. Then one John von Neumann turned that into a real computer, from which ENIAC was built, in the 50s.
When it came to how to program that machine, the world quickly divided into two camps: one to program it as closely as how the machine was built, and the other based on λ-calculus. The first camp invented Fortran and COBOL. Both were terrible. Then they kept on tweaking and changing until the world had C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, etc. The λ-calculus camp came up with a language called Lisp. Lisp has pretty much stayed the same since the 50s and has had very few variations. (Scheme is my favorite.)
Lisp had its glory in the 80s as the premiere choice for artificial intelligence. It has pretty much retreated into academia as a teaching tool. In my opinion, all programmers should begin their training with Lisp that gives the solid foundation of λ-calculus. They will become much better software engineers with this foundation. Many shared this belief and therefore many schools insisted on a heavy dosage of Scheme for all computer science freshmen.
John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp, died at 84 on Oct 24, 2011. From The New York Times, “Dr. McCarthy, who taught briefly at Stanford in the early 1950s, returned there in 1962 and in 1964 became the founding director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. Its optimistic, space-age goal, with financial backing from the Pentagon, was to create a working artificial intelligence system within a decade. Dr. McCarthy had begun inviting the Homebrew Computer Club, a Silicon Valley hobbyist group, to meet at the Stanford lab. Among its growing membership were Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who would go on to found Apple. Mr. Wozniak designed his first personal computer prototype, the Apple 1, to share with his Homebrew friends.”
Really? It came out?
January of 2005, yes, more than six years ago, I saw Solaris 10 released to the world. I was so proud to be associated with that release. I loved Solaris 10. Every machines that call itself a server should run this OS. I was also very proud of its Trusted Extension. I can talk about it all day and bore everyone to death on the fine points of multi-level security.
We vowed never to commit to a release number again, so we called the next version of Solaris “Nevada.” (Austin Yeats, I believe, should get the credit for that code name.) Soon, Nevada became the source for OpenSolaris. I loved OpenSolaris. I believed that it will change the world and tried to be one of the helpers. I made many friends in that cult and was sad to see its demise.
Many of the Solaris heavy hitters left Oracle. I read the press release and felt sadly removed; that was such a big part of my life then that it almost defined me. I have fully converted into the Microsoft land. Everyday, I outlook email and Excel spreadsheets, like many of the corporate drones. I am at peace with this, since I no longer think the choice of desktop OS, or applications, defines individuality.
It is simply nostalgia to see Fowler on stage. I miss ERI and MPK, but they are no more.
總有五六年了吧,有一天在北京逛書店,看到部”四大小說”評書(就是說書). 現在早忘了多少錢,反正不貴,買下來再說. 不久開始聽水滸,一回半小時,共百來回,有時聽聽,有時擱下,林沖宋江,從北京聽到美國,居然聽了三年多才聽完. 過癮,但也停了小半年才有過勁去聽下一本:三國. 這回聽的勤些,但也快兩年才聽到赤壁之戰.可是心裡納悶,一百一十五回快完了,難道講完赤壁就沒了嗎?
果然,關公義釋華容道後,就沒了. 就是最後一回. 太不爽了.
好在我剛好來了北京.上網一查,好小子,全書365回,那書店根本沒賣全.當當網有全集,88元. 當場(立馬)下單,下午送到兩盒子.共16張CD. 365個MP3檔.看來全了.
為甚麼商人要做這種事呢? 不就是幾張CD嗎?這麼便宜東西,還要惹人罵一陣子.嘆!
Two years in a row since I arrived, Myrtle Beach hosted Seattle Hempfest: a celebration for Marijuana or “the world’s largest marijuana decriminalization gathering.” This year, the envelope was, again, pushed a bit further. Jonathan Martin of Seattle Times reported:
Squeezed between a Ben & Jerry’s cart and a booth selling rolling papers, two naturopathic doctors worked briskly through a line of patients. … The ads offered authorization to use medical marijuana for one year for $150 if the patient had medical records; $200 with no medical records.
The state law (RCW 69.51A.005) that legalize medical marijuana said,
Qualifying patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses shall not be found guilty of a crime under state law for their possession and limited use of marijuana;
Persons who act as designated providers to such patients shall also not be found guilty of a crime under state law for assisting with the medical use of marijuana
Further, the law explains that “pain unrelieved by standard medical treatments and medications” qualifies: headache, stress, muscle pain, arthritics, back pain, mood swing, menopause, or just about anything. The challenge is to find a willing provider. That problem, the market sure has solved.
Since this substance is illegal federally, doctors cannot prescribe it, they can only recommend. That means medical professional are not regulated with any laws at all. The state laws protect them and no federal laws were broken either. The laws actually prevent medical professional to actually apply Marijuana medicinally, since that will be illegal under federal laws. So, medical Marijuana’s real serious purpose is recreational. Of those 100,000 or so who attended Hempfest. The majority probably agreed.
This is just silly.
Honestly, by Book #7, I was not anticipating its release. J.K. Rowling wrote lengthier and darker as Harry Potter saga continued. The books became adult-level effort with teenager level enjoyment. But I am the guy who read all six of the Dune series and watch RoboCop #3: a sucker for sequels. So I dully read HP7 and went to see the movie that was supposed to be the last. How fitting, when HP7.2 poster showed up, it said, “It all ends on July 15.” Never had I so welcome the ending for the reason of “Let’s get it over with.”
Overall, it was actually a good movie. Harry’s struggle and sacrifice was heart-felt. Hermione, how lovely Emma Watson turns out, is a bit weak. Snape was as delightfully hateful. Ron, oh well, was Ron. The epic battle reminded me a bit of Helm’s Deep. I also liked Snape’s memory replay a lot.
The bad parts of the movie came from the book. The over-complication of the Deathly Hallow objects. The confusion among the Horcruxes and their destruction. The Ex Machina of Dumbledore and Harry’s other dead relatives. And, worst of all, the unnecessary epilogue of the “19 years later” and the pathetic make-ups (except for Ron’s bulging mid-section).
I don’t know how well will the “Deluxe 8 DVD Set” sell. I am not going to buy them and sure glad this whole series, books and movies, is now over.