that’s whacked

how do I know who YOU are?

Thursday, Oct 28. 2004  –  Category: Musings

A thought crossed my mind today as I called TechCU to report that yes, I had lost yet another ATM card (well, left it in the machine, which I assume then ate it for lunch). To the girl who answered the phone’s credit though, she didn’t ask me why I was requesting my 4th card in the past 6 months.

Anyway, she asked me to confirm my date of birth, my membership number, and all that usual stuff… which makes me wonder, how the hell do I know who YOU are? I realise the need to confirm who I am, that’s obvious. And I know that I’m dialing the # listed on the TechCU web page - but who’s to say that: 1) the web page hasn’t been hacked and had its phone number altered? 2) the phones haven’t been diverted

(1) is more likely to happen than (2). Web servers get hacked all the time, but usually by kids who put up intellectually thought-provoking messages like “J00 HAVE BEEN OWNED.”, or something else obvious that is immediately noticed. But who would notice if the webserver had been hacked, and someone changed the phone number on the “Contact us” page? Hrm…

In any case. There should be some method that I should be allowed to use to authenticate the other end. This could be as simple as a password/passphrase, which I think would work. Why don’t we do this?

droooling over the new SunRay

Wednesday, Oct 27. 2004  –  Category: Sun

damn…. the new SunRay 170 is soooo hot. i want it.

never thought i’d say it, but Sun hardware is getting mighty sexy. the new Opteron workstations w1100z and w2100z are sweet, and this SunRay is beautiful. i’d love to get one or two of these with the new SunRay Server 3.0 running on my Linux server.

sigh.

i can dream…

tetley

Wednesday, Oct 27. 2004  –  Category: Food

i’m down to my last 9 Tetley’s tea bags. every year i go to Canada and buy some more, but i fear i may run out before my next run to the border. anyone know anywhere in the Bay Area i can get Tetley’s tea at, and not get ripped off?

time…just keeps slipping by…

Wednesday, Oct 27. 2004  –  Category: Musings

what was only supposed to take an hour ended up taking two … then three … then four

it’s now 1:30am, but i finally got MPI, ATLAS, and linpack all compiled on S10 in AMD64 bit mode, so i can finally get some benchmark results.

ironically, the whole reason i was compiling all this now was so i could do an overnight run and have results tommorrow morning. at the rate i was going at, i was starting to despair that i wouldn’t finish COMPILING until tommorrow morning.

in any case. xhpl is now running, and i can finally go to sleep.

toomba

Tuesday, Oct 26. 2004  –  Category: Musings

if my TiVo and my Roomba mated and had a little robot baby, i’d call him toomba.

i love my TiVo.

i love my Roomba.

combine the two, and i’m fairly certain you’d have the first generation Hal (of 2001 fame). or maybe even the first stirrings of the Matrix.

either way. toomba would rock.

catch the fever

Friday, Oct 22. 2004  –  Category: Musings

a recent post by erik made me wonder about yellow fever.

(yellow fever in case you’re wondering is a slang term used for when a non-asian person prefers to date asians)

most of the time, when we say a guy has yellow fever - it seems to come with a derisive connotation. by saying someone has yellow fever, it almost implicitly means they prefer a quiet, domesticated, and dare i say it, obedient, stereotypical asian wife… usually Japanese. i know this is a huge generalisation, but just bear with me.

but when we say a girl has yellow fever (like Liz, Erik’s ex), people have a different view. “wow, that’s so cool that she’s going to work in Japan!” vs. “wow. that perv is just going to Japan to find a Japanese wife”.

why is this? why do we admire a girl for having “a touch of the yellow fever”, but condemn the guy?

the best i can come up with is that Asian cultures have typically been male-dominated. this was also true of older Western cultures, but now (despite what you feminists say), i think things have gotten pretty equal. but Asian cultures still seem to be relatively male-dominated. a Western woman going to an Asian culture is thus to be admired, since she’s going to be facing different challenges, stereotypes, etc. but a Western man is to be villified for going to take advantage of the male-dominated culture to “find himself an Asian bride”.

just a random thought.

new computer!

Tuesday, Oct 19. 2004  –  Category: Musings

i caved in. Dell had a $750 off $1500 laptop purchase coupon.

i bought a new Inspiron 700m. it’s supposedly pretty small and light, and most importantly - it all works under linux.

will update more when i have i receive it and set it up.

laptop suggestions

Monday, Oct 18. 2004  –  Category: Musings

so i think it’s time for me to get a new laptop…. anyone got any suggestions?

i need it to be light (<5 pounds), as i’ll be commuting with it on BART. i’m thinking of the Fujitsu Lifebook P1120, and Dell Inspiron 700m. Anyone got any other suggestions? It’s got to be able to run Solaris or Linux though…

Anyone in the Bay Area have a P1120 I could play with for a bit? I love the specs, but I wanna see how it actually feels before I commit to it.

completely random thoughts

Thursday, Oct 14. 2004  –  Category: ChinaBlog

i’m about 30 minutes into a 5 hour layover in Narita (Tokyo). it’s such a long layover, the departure board doesn’t even go up to 17:55 for our departure flight. warning: i’m a man stuck in an airport with nothing to do….the rest of this blog entry is going to be the bane of the web: product of a bored man, with web access.

i’ve been sent on a mission for duty free items and Japanese snacks by wendy. except duty free sucks. witness Creme De La Mer, which sells at Saks for $195. factor in local sales tax of 8.25% and we can pick it up in Cali for $211. but here, at duty free, WITHOUT tax (!!!) we can get it for the low low price of…. $247. as Jon Stewart would say (and I really can’t mimic it over a blog)… “WHA!!?!?!?”

on the plus side, there is a Yahoo! Cafe with free Internet. on the down side, the Japanese keyboard is killing me. i memorise my passwords as “actions” rather than the actual characters. this lets me type my password on my crazy keyboard at work. on the downside, when the actual keyboard map is different, this screws me up considerably. the Roman alphabet characters are the same, but all the punctuation marks and special symbols are different. also, Yahoo has managed to find quite possibly the world’s smallest mousepad. the length of the pad is such that there is about 3cm above or below the mouse. whine whine whine. bitch bitch bitch. i’m starting to sound like poorna (kidding dude)

i wish i’d bought my token card in my carryon. i could be productive and actually doing stuff rather than rambling in a blog with four and a half hours left to kill.

one thing i immediately notice upon landing in Tokyo. dental hygiene. [huge generalisation on] the Japanese brush their teeth. the Chinese don’t. [huge generalisation off]. i know this is a clear sign i hang around with dentists too often, but i still can’t help wondering what a graph of a nation’s average oral hygiene condition would look like overlaid on top of a nation’s economic status. at what point in a country/culture’s economic economic development do they start to brush their teeth? maybe this is my western-egocentric view, but do they start brushing their teeth in order to emulate the western world? clearly looking after one’s oral hygiene is important, but i wonder when it started to become important….. a long time ago being fat was considered beautiful. i wonder if brown teeth and bloody gums was ever considered beautiful. probably not…but still, a bored man with 4 hours left to kill wonders.

in Mandarin Chinese, Japan is called “ri ben” in pingying (Romanisation of the Chinese language). the very first time i saw this in college, my immediate thought was “i wonder if Japanese people drink Ribena.” and now everytime i hear someone say Japan or describe something as Japanese in Chinese, that thought flashes in my head. on our Japan Airlines flight from Beijing to Tokyo, when they kept saying everything in Japanese, then English, and lastly Chinese… i would tune out the Japanese, listen to the English, and then try to listen to the Chinese as i thought about random things Ribena related like “when was the last time i had a Ribena?” and remembering fond first memories like my first Ribena and Vodka.

i suppose i should file this as random ramblings and retire the “China Experiences” category i made to blog my thoughts while in China…but i think this is still an extension of my China Experiences. in order to make it more related, i’ll mention how Poorna and I had fun trying to leave the apartment this morning. we needed to come to the airport early so Poorna could pick up his tickets at the ticket counter (he’d made a change a few weeks ago in his flight). so the driver picked us up at 5:30… but the security guards wouldn’t let us leave. at first, Poorna and I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were saying. they kept pointing at our luggage, and all i could pick up was “tai duo” as in ‘too much’. this confused me to no end… are they saying we have too much luggage? what problem is it of theirs if i’ve got a lot of luggage. it turns out they thought we were moving out (which we obviously were), and that we were running out without paying this month’s rent (which we weren’t). thankfully the driver understood what was going on and kept saying the apartment belongs to the company, and that it’s all taken care of. they kept us detained for a little while still though while they tried to figure out what to do with us. we ended up not leaving for about 20 minutes.

okay, that’s all i can think of to write at this moment. i’m going to see if i can find some japanese snacks to eat, fluff my (free!) japanese Yahoooooo! pillow, push my tiny little japanese baggage cart around, find a (hopefully not tiny) japanese chair to park my english-american-chinese ass on, and try to finish my epic chinese novel/poem (on the third and last volume of Journey to the West!)

exit(0)

Thursday, Oct 14. 2004  –  Category: ChinaBlog

Ahhh….down to my last 14 hours in China. The past few days have been rushed with last-minute shopping, and trying to finish up stuff at work so we don’t leave too much stuff hanging.

We never did get to see the Summer Palace.

What did we do in this final week…hrm… well, we played with the door to our floor, which if you leave it open for a while, says a sing-songy rhythmic “[da da da da da da] please close the door”. We can’t figure out what it’s saying in the front, but we like to think it’s saying “Poornaprajna Udupi - Please close the door”.

Or in the event Poorna starts singing along with his music (there’s something really cool about playing mp3s streamed from my laptop to his SunRay w/ XMMS) out loud without realising it, we like to think it says “Poornaprajna Udupi - please shut the fuck up.”

On a complete whim last night, I bought a Japanese CD from a local CD shop. It’s by a group called ‘J’, and the CD is called ‘Red Room”, it’s basically Japanese hard rock. Pretty good stuff…and a welcome change from all the Chinese pop we’ve been listening to. Yes, thank you Poorna, you can stop singing “Superstar” by S.H.E now.

I’ve got to admit, I had a blast here, and part of me wants to spend more time here working with our Beijing group (they’ve been a great group to work with, btw) - but the other part of me is definitely missing home. I don’t know that I could do a full 3 month rotation, I think I am too attached to the Bay Area, what with Wendy, my family, and my house being all there.

Things I’ll miss about China? The ridiculously cheap shopping. The fun bargaining (”special price my ass!”) experiences. The public fights. The great food (well, I know I’ll miss it…not so sure about Poorna). The insanely cheap food. Beer from a bag. Yong He and their 75 cent breakfast of Shaolong Bao & soy milk. The feeling of living on the edge and near-death that you only get by riding shotgun in a Beijing taxi when he runs a red light making a left turn into oncoming traffic and mis-shifts his gears. Among many many others…

WR (workplace resources) finally gave me my nameplate for my cubicle…. 2 days before I leave Beijing…

Zai jian!