How to look good on email

I've figured out that it looks good to send work emails at night.  Even if you're just working for the five minutes it takes to send the email, it's a lot more impressive to send the email at 10:05 PM than it is to leave the office five minutes late and send it at 5:35 PM.

One of my colleagues took this to the next level by sending out a half-dozen emails on Christmas day.  I'm not sure, but I think he was actually working.

Very, um, creative

While I was doing the dishes tonight, Anja was playing with a pretend pair of a scissors and a toy horse, and I heard her say

"Aaah! I cut off the horsey's head!  She's dead."

Blogs posts now on Facebook (is that good news?)

Six months after getting tired of Facebook and starting my own blog, I've figured out how to have my posts automatically appear on Facebook.  I feel strangely ambivalent about this, but I'm not sure why.

An email I received the other day

Hi Babriel,

Please send out the meeting invitation.

Thanks...

N.

What to do with an iPod Touch

Okay, I've had this iPod Touch for a couple of weeks now and it's actually incredibly useful. Here is a list of things that I like the best so far:

1. Recognizing Chinese characters using the Pleco app. You draw a character that you don't recognize on the screen and it tells you what it is. The app is also a Chinese-English dictionary so you can also search by pinyin or English word, all from the same search bar.

2. Listening to music. It is an iPod, after all, and why I wanted it in the first place. Not a surprising use; just a very useful one.

3. Task management using Things. I can make tasks for anything from grocery lists to things I need to do the next day at work. The iOS version syncs with the Mac version when the two are on the same wireless network.

4. Reading the news around the house.  You would think that since my main computer is a laptop, I could easily bring it over to the sofa, the dining table, and so on.  But even my laptop has to be carried with both hands, and the battery only lasts a couple of hours.  The iPod is normally in my pocket, and its battery lasts all day.

5. Taking notes at work.  Because my work computer is a desktop, I can't bring it to meetings, which means that I've been using a notepad to take notes.  But I often don't manage to transfer these notes to my computer, so they don't end up in my workflow, which sort of defeats the purpose.  But if I type them in the Notes app, it's not particularly fast, but then I can email them to my work email account, from where I can process them along with my other emails.

6. Watching movies.  The screen is small, but it works surprisingly well, especially in a dark room.  You just want to avoid any epically panoramic films.  I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and it wasn't comically small, but it was certainly underwhelming.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is a good solution for writing blog entries.  I give my current app, BlogBooster, a fail for not supporting any formatting or linking, and for adding extra HTML code advertising itself to each post that I write.

Guster

My latest music find is a band called Guster. Very roughly, a mix of Keane, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Beatles. Maybe a bit of Death Cab for Cutie.

Here's one of my favorite songs so far.

So inconsiderate!

The other morning Anja was tired and cranky, and wanted to go back to sleep. Suddenly, an ambulance passed by below, and Anja got mad and shouted "That ambulance is too noisy! I can't sleep! Why are so many people getting hurt?"

Greetings from my iPod!

I've got a new iPod Touch, and I wanted to see if there were apps for writing blog posts from it. As it turns out, there are, but with the tiny virtual keyboard, whether you use it depends on how far away from you computer you are. Or how lazy you are.

All I want is my fair share!

Anja wrote a letter to Santa Claus today:

In case it's hard to read, the letters read "Santa please bring me a Barbie" (Chieni helped her spell the words).

Bai tuo!

I understood that the phrase "Bai tuo!" in Chinese means something like "Come on!" spoken in an exasperated tone of voice -- as in, "Come on, you're blocking the road!"  Local elections are coming up, and advertising trucks and scooters are driving around featuring not only billboards promoting various candidates, but also loudspeakers which convey the candidates' messages to everyone within earshot.  I don't understand much of these, but one day I heard one clearly saying "Bai tuo!  Bai tuo!"  This confused me.  Was the candidate saying "Come on, how can you even think about voting for that other guy?  He's got a mole on his face with two-inch long hairs growing out of it!"?

I asked Chieni about this, and the truth is less hilarious.  "Bai tuo!" is actually a formal way of saying "please".  If you say it in an exasperated tone of voice, then it means "Come on!" – or perhaps actually "Please!"  But the candidate I heard was saying it nicely, so she was simply asking people to vote for her, please.

Contact window

I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day, and I thought I heard her say, "You need to talk to the contact window."  "I'm sorry?" I said, "Are you saying 'contact window'?"  It turns out that the Chinese word for "contact person" is "联络窗口", which literally means "contact window", and that Taiwanese people generally think that this is a real English word and use it with each other all the time.  There are an awful lot of English teachers in Taiwan who are native English speakers, but I suppose there are also enough English teachers who are Taiwanese to perpetuate the mistake.


Amazingly, that afternoon I received an email from Dutch colleague who wrote, "Ask E. for the name of the contact window at the vendor."  He had clearly been talking to too many Taiwanese people.

'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy

Anja has a CD of Chinese children's songs that we listen to in the car, and one of the songs goes like this:

"The women of Alishan are as beautiful as the water; the men of Alishan are as strong as the mountains."

However, it uses some poetic words that Anja (and I) don't know, so she hears it wrong and sings it like this:

"The women of Alishan didn't sleep; the little birds of Alishan are as strong as the mountains."

Do you really need training?

A new colleague of mine sent an email out yesterday that read in part,

"I will be out of the office today as I am attending oriental training."

I think he meant to say that he was attending orientation training.  Unless he forgot how to use chopsticks or something.

Angels and Demons

In the morning, Anja asked me how to spell "Thank you".  I said "T, H, A, N, K", and waited for her to finish those letters.  But instead, she said "OK I've finished now".  I looked and she had written "THANK Q".

In the evening, I said "Anja, it's not all right to hit anyone, ever."  She replied, "But then how I am going to fight?"

Welcome to Barcelona!

I'm in Barcelona this week, attending the ACM Recommender Systems 2010 conference.  Flying here yesterday morning, I had to change planes in Paris.  Unfortunately, the woman at the Eva Air check-in desk in Taipei wasn't able to check my bag through to the Air France flight to Barcelona, and the travel agent had only given me two hours in Paris, so I didn't have time to pick up my bag and check back in again.  So I didn't clear customs at all, but transferred directly to my Barcelona flight, leaving my bag to make lonely trips around the luggage carousel in Charles de Gaulle airport as it waited for the Air France lost luggage agent to come pick it up.

Once I got to Barcelona at about noon, the very nice woman at the lost luggage desk told me that the luggage would be delivered to my hotel by 9 PM the same day.  That proved to be overly optimistic, and by 8 AM this morning, the bag still hadn't arrived, forcing me to attend the first day of my conference unshaven and wearing exactly the same clothes I had worn while traveling for 23 hours the day before.  At lunch, I walked over to a nearby H&M to look for some clothes in case my bag was further delayed, but the men's section was limited to one aisle, and the only thing that looked good enough to try on was a shirt with black and grey horizontal stripes that made me look like a mime.  So I pinned my hopes on the bag arriving today and went back to the afternoon sessions of the conference.  By 5 PM I was feeling quite stale, so I went back to the hotel early to check for my bag, and found that it had finally arrived!  I was able to change my clothes and shave.  Once I get some dinner and take a shower, I'm sure I'll feel almost myself again.

I am a paradox

Anja:  "Mama is super smart because she remembers everything, and you're not because you forget everything, so why do you remember when I sprayed cream all over the sofa?"

What I actually do

I haven't said much about what I actually do at HTC.  But today we announced the service that my team is working on.  It's called htcsense.com and it provides web services to HTC phone owners.  It will be going live at the end of the month.  Here's the best write-up of the announcement that I've seen:

http://www.slashgear.com/htc-sense-evolves-dlna-remote-wipe-htcsense-com-15102322/

My main role in this is that I am leading the development of the recommendation engine that will be a part of this service.  The reference points are pretty obvious:  Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, iTunes Genius, and so on.  Recommendation engines have gotten so important and ubiquitous that they are basically table stakes for any set of web services.  Our web services not only provide dashboard-type functionality like making your phone ring by clicking a button on a web site, but also offer content to users such as applications and music, and once you start talking about content, you are talking about recommendations.  The first version of htcsense.com won't feature many recommendations, but that's because I just started two months ago.  Pretty soon, if you own an HTC phone and use the service, then you'll see some recommendations about what kinds of content you might be interested in, and those will have been enabled by me.  You'll also hopefully see recommendations being used in some cool new ways that I'll talk more about later on!

I thought it was supposed to just work

Our wireless router died last week so I bought an Apple Time Capsule to replace it and the external hard drive I had been using to back up our computers. This was supposed to be a great improvement because it is a faster wireless router, and the hard drive means that our machines would be backed up without attaching a USB cable to them every day. But something went wrong, and I ended up spend all my free time (which is not very much these days) for a week trying to figure out why my computer was trying to back up 100GB of data, over the wireless network, every time I changed anything in my backup configuration.  I finally determined that it was because something had gotten corrupted within my OS, and so was able to fix the problem, but not before I got very tired of dealing with it.

Time Capsule

Angry gorilla

Your Vegas

I was looking for new music to listen to at work last night, and I discovered a very cool band called Your Vegas. A bit like Keane, which I also like a lot.

Language and thought

In grad school, we studied the idea that the thoughts that one is able to think are constrained by one's language.  In yesterday's New York Times is an extremely good article that brings this debate up to date.  At university, we were taught that language has no ability to constrain what one thinks, and I taught this point of view to my students.  My point of view softened a bit after some interesting discussion with my dad one day, and the article supports that softened point of view:  language does not absolutely constrain what can be thought, but it does influence what is thought.

A high level of self-awareness

Anja:  I'm not crying, I'm whining!

Yeah, you've really locked the place down

My office has this sign on the door:

Let's think for a moment about how 1994 this is.  Firstly, every single person in this company is given an HTC smartphone that can hold a micro SD card along with a USB cable that allows the phone to attach to a computer.  My micro SD card holds 16GB, which is enough to hold the entire contents of my computer.  Secondly, every computer in this company is connected to something called the Internet, which means that any file could be sent anywhere in literally dozens of ways.

Oh, and I bring a 30GB iPod to work every day, and today I also brought my camera, which contains an 8GB SD card.

Basically, the way that it works today is that employees sign a legal document in which they agree not to steal information, and companies trust that employees will respect their legal obligations.  The sign on the office door, in contrast, is completely meaningless.

Monster feet! (and yet more pictures)

Reiya's feet are well more than half as long as her calves.

She's also pretty cute.

Sitting on a bench in a park

Chieni is doing the Taiwanese one-month confinement (月子), and she is doing it at home so we have a lady who comes six days a week to cook, clean, and watch the baby when Chieni wants to take a nap.  On Sunday, the confinement lady has the day off and so it becomes my job to take care of Anja, bring Chieni's meals up to her, clean the house, and so on.  It's not particularly hard work, but it's a bit draining.  But yesterday, Anja and I managed to go out to the neighborhood park for an hour.  Yes, it's in the middle of a dense urban neighborhood, and yes it was 32 (90°F) degrees outside, but the sun was getting a bit low in the sky, there was some light cloud cover, there was a refreshing breeze, and I found a bench in the shade of some trees where I could sit while Anja played on the jungle gym.  And I realized that it's a very nice park:  there are lots of trees, relatively speaking, and although it's on an arterial, it's a quiet arterial with just a single lane in each direction.  I ended up really relaxing for ten minutes, and when we got back home I felt much better the rest of the day.

The Dora hat saves the day

Anja and I went to the zoo yesterday to get her out of the house while our confinement person (we've hired her to come six days per week for the first month) helped Chieni take care of Reiya.  After we parked the car and bought a Dora hat for Anja in the parking lot, we walked around the zoo in sweltering heat for a couple of hours.  When we got back to the car, we were really looking forward to air conditioning, but the car wouldn't start!  It was pretty obvious that the battery had died.  Having very little idea what to do, we walked over to sit under a tree for a minute.  Already there was the man who had sold us the hat earlier.  We started talking, and hearing what our problem was, he suggested that I call a taxi for a jump, and handed me a business card.  It turns out that people often turn their headlights on when driving through the many tunnels in the area to get to the zoo, and out of the thousand or so cars that use the zoo parking lot each day, several forget to turn their lights off, and their batteries run out of electricity.  (Our car complains if you leave the lights on, so our problem was that the battery was just old.)  This is an opportunity for a taxi driver to make $200 or $300 NT for five minutes' work, so the taxis all carry jumper cables.

So I called the number on the business card.  "I need a taxi", I said to the dispatcher, "but I've got a special problem:  I've got my own car–" "Dead battery?" the dispatcher interrupted.  "What's your parking space number?"  "I'm in the Taipei zoo parking lot–" "Yes, I know, but what's your number?"  "Seven."  "Okay, we'll be there in a few minutes."  It was when I expressed my surprise that the dispatcher knew exactly what my problem was that the hat seller explained what a common situation this was.

The taxi arrived about five minutes later, and with the assistance of the guy who was in the parking space next to mine, we quickly got my car started.  We started driving towards home, and I decided to drive directly to the garage that had fixed the car the last time it broke down (in an underground parking lot that the tow truck was too big to drive into, but that's another story).  When we got there, we were able to watch cartoons in the waiting room while we waited, and the car was fixed in half an hour.  So in all, we arrived home about an hour later then we originally planned.  Have I mentioned how convenient Taiwan is?  And the solution was thanks to Anja, whose Dora hat was the reason why I was able to talk to the hat seller after our battery died.

More pictures of Baby Reiya

Chieni has put up more pictures of Baby Reiya at http://picasaweb.google.com/chienimc/BabyReiya?feat=directlink.

Baby Reiya

Reiya Niamh Webster was born on August 9, 2010, at 11:25PM! She weighs 6 pounds 13 ounces.  Here are a couple of pictures:

More to follow shortly....

Math genius

I asked Anja how old she would be when her little sister turns 4, and she thought for a few seconds and then said "8".  I don't even know how she knew that.

Next move, July 2011

The other day I started thinking about the fact that our current apartment is our third apartment in three years in Taiwan.  I counted how many times I've moved in my life, and the total is 22 times, which over 38 years is once every 20 months.  But that's actually misleading, because in my adult life I've moved 19 times, which over 20 years is almost once a year!  So the fact that we lived in Danshui for two years and that we have a two-year lease here means that I've really settled down.

The whole list, which admittedly is totally self-indulgent, is as follows:

My parents' apartment, Berkeley, March 1972
My parents' house, Seattle, September 1972
Highgate, London, spring 1974
South Woodford, London, spring 1981
Clark Kerr Campus, Berkeley, August 1990
Apartment, Berkeley, June 1991
Room, Berkeley, February 1992
Cité André Allix, Lyon, France, August 1992
My mom's house, Seattle, June 1993
Room, Berkeley, January 1994
Apartment, Oakland, June 1994
Apartment, Piedmont, October 1995
My dad's house, Seattle, September 1996
Lake shack, Seattle, May 1997
Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK, September 1998
Densmore Avenue, Seattle, September 1999
Woodland Park Avenue, Seattle, January 2000
Natal Road, Cambridge, UK, June 2002
Melrose Avenue, Seattle, September 2003
13th Avenue NW, Seattle, December 2003
Hongshulin, Taipei, October 2007
Danshui, Taipei, August 2008
Xindian, Taipei, June 2010

Two birds with one stone

Anja was taking a bath last night.  "I'm the world's most beautiful princess, and I can use this", she said, brandishing a toy watering can, "to fight monsters and water flowers".

Act first, ask questions later

Me:  "Anja, go to sleep; you're just delaying."
Anja:  "I'm not delaying.  What is delaying?"

I am Clark Gable

One of my colleagues just told me that my first name in Chinese, 蓋博 "Gai-buo", is the same as Clark Gable's last name in Chinese:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/克拉克·盖博

I wonder if the guy at the Taiwanese fair who chose my name for me knew that.

Shotgun wedding

Anja drew a picture of Mama and Baba getting married, with Anja as a baby in Mama's belly.

A story, by Anja

(Translated from Chinese by me)

My friend went to the doctor to get a shot.  But when the doctor was going to give her the shot, he closed his eyes so he cut her arm off.  The doctor said "oh, no problem" and found a new arm and fixed her arm and said "move your arm around" and she could move her arm around and so her arm was fixed.  But then she went to school and played all day long and her arm broke again.  So she went to her mom and it turned out that the doctor didn't put a bone in the new arm and that was why the arm broke.  So her mom put a bone in the arm and fixed it again and said "move your arm around" and she could move her arm around and so her arm was really fixed.  So her mom was even better than the doctor.

What music the magic happens to

I've noticed that I listen to some artists a lot more than others at work.  At some personal risk, here are the ones that I seem to keep comping back to:

• The Dandy Warhols
• Keane
• Django Reinhardt
• Saint-Saëns
• Fauré, particularly the Requiem
• Pink Floyd
• Wes Montgomery
• Rachmaninov
• Muse

Generally I like a lighter sound while I work so it's not too distracting, but when I get a bit frustrated I have to start hitting slightly harder stuff.

Where the magic happens

I took some pictures of my office at HTC.  Our group is in a single big room in one of HTC's Xindian offices, and the style is "start-up", as evidenced by the big red sofa and the gym lockers.

My desk.  Note that there is a smartphone, but no landline.

Ethan and the big red sofa

The gym lockers

My ride when I have to pick up Anja after work

Christmas every day

I was looking out at the main street outside our apartment one evening, and I was suddenly struck by how many flashing lights I could see.  Looking more carefully, I saw that there were several cars doubled-parked in the street with their hazard lights on.  Over the next few days, I noticed that there are always several cars doubled-parked, making the street look like it is permanently decorated with so many amber Christmas lights.

 Later in the evening, only four or five double-parked cars

What I do at my new job

In the time-honored tradition of avoiding creating new content by linking, here's what HTC does:

Or, alternatively:

Why mama gets mad

Anja:  "Mama, sometimes when you get mad it's not my fault, right?"

Chieni:  "Yes, that's right."

Anja:  "Sometimes when you get mad it's baba's fault, right?"

Chieni:  "Yes, that's right."

The World Cup final

I'll be setting my alarm for 2:30 AM tonight to watch the World Cup final.  I like Spain, but I'm going to root for the Dutch because they are crazy.  I do admit that I may be influenced by the Brazilian guy who gave me a lift in Florence many years ago, and claimed he could drive as badly as he wanted to because his car had Dutch plates.  Then he hit a pedestrian's hand with his side-view mirror.

The view from our house

I managed to get out on the balcony at sunset today and take some pictures of our view:

Looking towards the north

The, um, west

The south, towards Wulai and the old highway to Yilan

The tenement effect of all of the top-floor residents having built corrugated metal awnings over the building roofs to give them extra space

The Health and Safety class

Being a new HTC employee, I had to take a health and safety class.  Unfortunately, the class was not offered in English.  Even more unfortunately, the HR people decided that my Chinese was probably good enough to take the class.  Whether it actually was is debatable, as I got the gist of most of it, while missing a lot of in-domain and formal keywords like "evacuate" and "first aid".  At the end of the class was a test, and this I thought I was going to definitely be exempted from because I really can't read that level of Chinese.  But no, they had prepared an English version of the test specifically for me.  It turned that it was one of these non-tests with questions like "True or false:  it is a good idea to follow all safety regulations", so it should have been easy to pass even without having attended the class.  But the English was so bad that sometimes it was completely impossible to figure out what they were trying to say.  But at the end of the day, if I failed the test, they will tell me, and I'll tell them how bad their English is.

The class made a big deal out of being environmentally friendly and doing things like riding your bike to work and recycling.  But when I asked where I could park my bike, the course instructor didn't know, and the next time I visited the kitchen I noticed there was no recycling bin next to the trash can.

Goodbye England, hello HTC!

Last week I made my last trip to England for Toshiba.  Since I was in the office over parts of two weeks, my original idea was to go somewhere really beautiful over the weekend, like the Clarendon Way between Salisbury and Winchester, or part of the South Downs Way.  But the weather was so fabulous the entire time I was there – about 25 degrees and sunny every day – and Cambridge is such a beautiful town, that by Friday I had decided that there wasn't any need to go anywhere else.  Of course, by Friday, World Cup group play had determined that the U.S. was to play Saturday evening and England Sunday afternoon, so that also made it difficult to

I arrived back in Taipei at 11PM on Wednesday.  On Thursday morning at 9AM, I arrived at HTC's Xindian offices, conveniently located three minutes away from our new apartment by taxi.  There, I had spent an hour in the HR department when Chieni called to say that she had badly hurt her back and couldn't walk!  So I rushed back home and drove her to the hospital, where they they couldn't do anything, and so said she just needed to go home and rest.  However, when we tried to drive home, we discovered that the car wouldn't shift out of park!  So Chieni took a taxi home, and I spent two hours in the company of a grumpy tow truck driver who couldn't tow the car because it was parked in an underground parking lot with a height limit that was too low for his truck.  He eventually called a friend who showed up in a beat-up sedan that towed our car to the parking lot entrance, from where the tow truck driver was able to tow the car to a garage.  It turned out that a small $15 part in the brake system electronics had broken, thereby disabling the system that requires the driver to put his foot on the brake in order to shift into drive.  So in summary, I took my first day at HTC off as a personal day.  On Thursday, I managed a full day of work, so I'm at 50% so far.  Hopefully I can increase that percentage next week.

Still in Taiwan!

So, we were all set to move back from Taiwan to Seattle. I was looking for a new job, and we were planning a remodel of our house. Then, at an ex-pat parents' group Easter party, I met a guy who eventually offered me a job at the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC. So we are now in Taiwan for a couple more years!

For this part two of our stay in Taiwan, we will have have a new apartment, a new baby, and a new blog! The old blog got killed a combination of an unspellable name, too much working in the evenings when my UK colleagues were around, and, especially, Facebook. However, I got sick of distilling my life into witty one-sentence statuses, so I'm going to try to have a proper online presence again.