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.