Niniane's Blog

slashdot taking a lesson from Fox News

2009-11-21T00:09:00.000-08:00

It irks me to see clearly biased journalism presented as fair articles. Take a look at this slashdot article:

Headline: "Bing Gains 10% Marketshare"

Wow, you might think, Bing gained a delta of 10% market share? That's quite a lot!

The article reveals that Bing gained market share for a final total of 10%. That is very misleading. If I say "Tom gains 150 pounds", what would you intrepret that to mean? By this usage, it would mean he gained a few pounds to reach a total of 150.

Here's another example from the slashdot blurb:

That's a gain of two large points in five months.

Oh, these are "large" percentage points? That must be a lot more impressive than two "small" percentage points. What about the five months -- are they large or small?

Ridiculous.

sha-mayn visit

2009-11-20T11:58:00.001-08:00

Sha-mayn was in town last week, visiting from Beijing. I hesitate to write this, because at least one of you will email her, "Why didn't you tell me you were in the Bay Area?"

Anyway, we had dinner at Calafia, the restaurant of chef Charlie from Google. The salmon was very good.

Afterwards we talked at my house for a couple hours. I played with bubble wrap from a package Sha-mayn received. It was even better than the iPhone bubble-wrap application.

Talking to Sha-mayn in person was like eating at Fuki Sushi after a long break. I was struck by how awesome it was.

Sha-mayn was much more cheerful than the current Bay Area vibe. She's naturally positive in general, but I wonder if also Beijing is more optimistic than California right now. Ever since the market crash a year ago, the entire SF area has shifted from Tigger toward Eeyore. I wonder if this is on par with the rest of the US, or if the Bay Area has been hit especially hard with people stressing about personal finances, raising their next round of funding, etc.

self poking

2009-11-17T22:10:00.000-08:00

Tonight Lily, Charles, and I cooked.

Afterwards Charles was washing dishes in the kitchen, while Lily and I were in the living room.

Charles: "These forks are sharp!"

[small delay]

Lily: "Did you poke yourself?"

Me: [puzzled for a few seconds] "Oh, I thought you meant on Facebook. I was going to say, I didn't know that was possible."

ice & errors

2009-11-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

My Antarctica tour is canceled. The boat engine crankshaft broke. I received an email notifying me of this on Monday. I was supposed to fly down to Argentina next week, and make my way down to the southernmost tip to board the boat at the end of the month.

I should be singing "I'm on a boat" Antarctica-style in a couple weeks! Instead now I am scrambling to figure out alternate travel arrangements in South America.

Right now, it looks like I will be spending a week in Buenos Aires with my dad, and then a week in Santiago, Chile.

I am changing the plane tickets right now. The change fee is $200, which causes me stress. I want to make sure to research flight prices thoroughly. If I make a mistake and need to call in again, I would have to pay another change fee.

My dad likes to say that my brother and I are suited for a job where mistakes can be tolerated, like computer science. If your program doesn't compile the first time, fix the error and try again. In fact, it's rare to have a non-trivial program run perfectly the first time.

Most things in computer software are fault-tolerant. Accidentally push out bad code to your web server? Just roll it back. Faulty client code can be auto-updated (provided you did not hose the auto-updater).

An example of a job that Tom and I would do poorly at, according to my dad, would be performing arts, where it is important to deliver an impeccable performance on stage. Another example is being an athlete.

Recently I learned that being a lawyer would fall into the same category! Lawyers have deadlines by which they must file certain motions. If they miss the deadline, their client could lose the case by default. Also, if your case goes to trial, you cannot undo mistakes at the trial. If the trial ends and you discover another precedent you could've cited, it's too late.

I never appreciated how difficult it is to be a lawyer! Also there is so much guilt, if your client loses the case and goes to jail, but you believed them to be innocent. It is a tough profession.

Halloween photos

2009-11-05T11:21:00.000-08:00

On Halloween, after attending a wedding, I went to a pub crawl for an hour. It was in the Mission district of San Francisco.

I saw this couple across the room. He's wearing a penguin hat. She's wearing an insect hat. I walked across the pub to ask if their costume is "linux bug". They confirmed that it is.

This girl came as Mike Tyson. We all agreed this was a well-executed costume.

This guy had 16 remote controls strapped to him. His costume is "control freak".

Omar as a box of wine. He wore a five-pound bag inside the box, and hooked it up to a spigot. You could actualy serve yourself wine from his costume. The pub wasn't too thrilled about him doing this.

C3 and I also visited my friend Kevin Fox's haunted house in Sunnyvale. It was stunning.

Mad scientist room. There is a robotic laughing-scientist, as well as a live actor. Guess which one is which.

The "biohazard" hallway, with a live actor halfway down.

Pirate room. There was appropriate pirate music.

Spider lair.

I was awed that Kevin, his wife Rachel, and their neighbors were able to construct a professional-quality haunted house in their spare time. In this world of commercialism, it's inspiring to see people create art just for the enjoyment of making it.

funny "emasculating your spouse"

2009-11-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

From here.

Halloween! With Tom

2009-11-01T10:11:00.000-08:00

My brother is in town for two days, visiting me and his college friends.

I picked him up from SFO in costume, and we had breakfast at Cafe Borrone.

Tom: "What time is the wedding?"

Me: "I need to leave in an hour."

Tom: "Where are you going to change?"

Me: "I brought a dress, but now I'm thinking of just going in costume. This isn't a scary costume."

Tom: "It's not a costume wedding though."

Me: "It probably won't matter that much."

Tom: "No! Don't go in costume. How would you like it if some yahoo came to your wedding in a costume?"

Me: "Oh, that'd be awesome."

Tom: [at the same time] "Yes, okay, you would. But don't do it!"

...

I listened to Tom, and changed beforehand. I was very grateful for this, when I arrived at the wedding. There were eight bridesmaids and eight groomsmen. All the attendees were in very formal wedding attire.

giving an online talk about interviewing

2009-10-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

My friend Lily is Director of Marketing at eduFire, an online video-learning web site.

Next Tuesday at 2pm PST, I'm giving an eduFire talk How to Rock Your Next Engineering Interview. Sign up, or pass onto any friends who may be interviewing for a job!

Here is the syllabus:

* Interview format
* The mindset
* Discussing past experience
* Coding questions
* Brainstorming questions
* Brainteasers
* Asking the interviewer about the company
* Following up
* Dress code, preparations

my brother is visiting

2009-10-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, I got an email out of the blue from Southwest Airlines. It was an itinerary for my brother Tom to come to San Francisco for the weekend. I haven't seen him since two months ago, when he moved to Irvine to work for Blizzard.

niniane: YAY!!!!!!
niniane: OH MY GOD I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!
Tom: haha yes, i'm visiting this weekend =)
niniane: oh, i was excited because Amazon EC2 dropped their prices.
niniane: Are you coming to visit?
Tom: haha what is ec2?
niniane: just kidding, i am excited!

Moments later, we were discussing our plans for the weekend.

niniane: i am at a wedding on saturday from 4pm to 9pm+
Tom: oh okay then i will hang out with someone else during that time
Tom: is it a halloween wedding?
niniane: sadly no
niniane: it is a travesty to hold a wedding on halloween but not have it be a costume wedding
niniane: wtf!
Tom: yes 'wtf' is right
Tom: when they ask if anyone has any objections .. you know what to do
niniane: lol lol lol

eBooks

2009-10-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

Barnes & Noble announced the Nook eBook reader.

I am curious about the touchscreen. I bought a Kindle last month, and still sometimes find myself jabbing its screen instead of pushing the buttons on the side.

Being able to lend a virtual book to your friend for 14 days is pretty cool. I would lend and borrow books more frequently, if there wasn't the concern about forgetting to return them. One of my friends actually keeps a library system for her books, with a card she sticks into the book cover.

The B&N advertising claims "over a million titles" whereas Amazon says 350,000. I wonder how B&N can have more titles. Perhaps through the Google Books project?

I've really enjoyed having a Kindle. I carry it in my purse. It is convenient to have a dozen books on hand to read, depending on my mood.

Another unforeseen benefit has been the ability to highlight sections and add notes, and have those saved into a single file.

Eating Contest 2

2009-10-19T22:14:00.001-07:00

From the second eating contest, Taco Bell challenge:

I beat my previous time of 2 minutes 32 seconds. This time I ate two soft tacos in 2 minutes 8 seconds.

hehe

2009-10-17T17:37:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I had dinner with C3 (my college friend), and two of his friends from high school.

Today, over IM:

C3: It turns out that before yesterday, Bob had thought you were two separate people, 'eggplant' [my college username for the computer cluster] and a guy named 'Gideon' who I initially met in high school. This is what happens when I don't enunciate 'Niniane' precisely enough.

I am trying to imagine the conversation wherein Bob discovers that this guy Gideon is actually me.

Ithaca, NY

2009-10-16T01:54:00.001-07:00

Last week I visited my friends Melba and Hod at Cornell University. Ithaca is so beautiful!

People told me how pretty the gorges are, but I thought they were in state parks, cordoned off from the rest of the town. Instead, we walked over a number of gorges from Melba & Hod's house to Cornell campus.

The architecture of the campus is pretty too.

This is on the Cornell campus!

A requirement for graduation is to pass a swim test. My young friend Josh said this is to safeguard students who like to gorge-dive. But later I learned that MIT also has the swim requirement, and they have no gorges.

Treman State Park. This reminds me of "Lord of the Rings" when Frodo hides from the Nazgul.

Apparently one of the drawbacks of Ithaca is that the winter lasts for a long time. Otherwise it would be too perfect.

Melba and her large poodle.

We walked the dogs every day. It was my first time walking a dog. At first, it was hard to know how much leeway to give on the leash. I didn't want to yank the dog around, but I also needed to keep it out of traffic. After I figured out the right balance, I found dog-walking to be surprisingly fulfilling.

Me with Melba's little dog. It was very quiet, and also liked having its belly rubbed. It was warm, and liked to cuddle, and didn't wiggle around very much. If I were designing a dog, I would create the same features.

rainy humor

2009-10-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

It's raining heavily outside right now.

Omar reported that the Google shuttle from San Francisco hit massive flooding. After taking a long time to travel a few blocks, he got off the shuttle and is working from San Francisco. On twitter:

Over IM:

Lily: omar said, "misha looked outside and didn't want to go but then remembered he had lunch with niniane so decided to go. big mistake."
Lily: "he's at 1:45 in and still not in mv"
niniane: poor misha
niniane: we could've rescheduled!
niniane: hahaha imagine if i txt him in an hour, "hey misha, it's so rainy outside, let's reschedule." he'd freak!
Lily: omg!!!

caltech logic

2009-10-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

Walking along the Palo Alto farmer's market with C3, my friend from Caltech.

Me: "Guess who was on the same flight as me two weeks ago? I'll give you ten yes-or-no questions."

C3: "Is it someone I know from Caltech?"

Me: "Yes."

C3: "Is it someone in your graduating class?"

Me: "Yes."

C3: "Ah, now I must be able to guess it, because there are fewer than 257 people in your graduating class."

:)

Later:

C3: "This is going to yield less than one bit of information, but ... is it a guy?"

Me: "No."

C3: "Oh! That was more than 1 bit of information."

...

(He didn't guess it in the end.)

cute sarcastic-looking owl

2009-10-08T06:26:00.001-07:00

Today I saw this livejournal entry (courtesy of Sean Hewitt) of a woman who found an owl by the side of the road. The owl was injured, so she took it in her car to an animal rescue organization.

The owl, looking un-amused.

After putting the owl into a cardboard box, so that it wouldn't flap around.

I'm sure that if the owl could talk, it would make the best deadpan jokes! It would be cracking us all up with its dry wit.

Willingham

2009-10-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran a riveting article about a Texas man executed under the death penalty: Trial By Fire. He was accused of burning down his house with his three young daughters inside.

He insisted that he was innocent. As the years went on, many of the prosecution's witnesses were discredited for being sensationalist, and working from urban myths instead of scientific fact. A leading arson expert wrote a scathing report a few months before the scheduled execution, insisting that there was no evidence for arson.

Regardless, the state of Texas refused to re-examined his case. He was killed by lethal injection.

Now, several years later, there is some investigation into whether he was wrongfully executed. Yesterday was a scheduled commission meeting, to hear evidence from arson experts. The evidence points toward an accidental fire.

Two days before the commission hearing, the Texas governor replaced three members of the commission and postponed the hearing indefinitely. He is up for re-election. It would look bad for him if the commission concludes that he refused the appeal of an innocent man on death row.

I don't understand why this isn't given more media coverage. An innocent man may have been executed. The governor seems to be using a shady maneuver to deny the hearing. Why is this getting a tiny blip of coverage compared to the Letterman scandal? It is literally a matter of life and death.

tragic FML

2009-09-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

From FMyLife:

Today, I open my front door and saw a covered basket with a card from my girlfriend on it. I picked it up and read, "Hope this cheers you up." I uncovered the basket to find a golden labrador puppy. Its eyes were closed and it wasn't breathing. FML

The comments:

> oh my god... :[ did she give you a dead dog on purpose...?

> either way a dead animal is a pretty evil gift
> unless its a cow
> yum

and

> It sucks that its eyes were closed.

> > "It sucks that its eyes were closed"
> REEAALLY? THAT'S what you got out of the story??? Wow. WOOWWW.

This reminds me of an incident that happened at Google a long time ago. Someone emailed the company-wide mailing list to say "Free cocker spaniel to a loving home." The contents of the email described the puppy.

Chef Charlie did a reply-all, "I have a great recipe for stewed spaniel."

C.S. Lewis discourse on money vs power

2009-09-28T17:24:00.001-07:00

This writing by C.S. Lewis about money and power is very interesting:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force? This lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons why I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishment of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his place? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

It is from this post which I saw from Wes Bigelow's blog.

wallace and grommit would understand

2009-09-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

Misha: "How do you like EC2?"

Me: "It's good so far. It's been reliable, and they're adding features quickly, like auto-scaling."

Misha: "How much is it?"

Me: "It starts at $72 / month."

Misha: "That's a lot!"

Me: "Don't you spend that much per month on many other things?"

Misha: "Like cheese? Well, yes."

it's like the IT Crowd episode with "FriendFace"

2009-09-23T15:01:00.001-07:00

Jade: "My dad told me that he joined MyFace."

Me: "Oh, what's that?"

Jade: "He got mixed up between MySpace and Facebook."

space

2009-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

In the popular article about MIT students launching a camera into space, this segment was striking:

Four hours after the launch, Lee said, the team thought all was lost.

"We were like placing bets on whether we thought it would work or not," the 23-year-old mechanical engineering grad student said. "Early on, we were optimistic that it would work. About 4 hours after, [when] we hadn't heard any news about the device, we had sort of given up hope. We'd thought we'd lost it."

Dejected, the group drove back to Boston to Lee's apartment.

They checked his computer and found an unlikely signal: The camera had landed in a construction zone outside Worcester, Massachusetts, about 25 miles from the launch site.

"We were so excited, we jumped right back into the car, and we drove out to Worcester, and we found it. That was a great moment," Lee said.

They were amazed with the results. The camera was unharmed. The hand warmers were still hot. And the photos were amazing.

I imagine the three students driving out to the construction site. Who was the first to spot the styrofoam container? Were they quivering with anticipation when they pressed the Canon image-preview button?

When they saw the phenomenal photo with the black of space, did they experience an irrationally destructive temptation to press the delete button? Similar to standing by a cliff and repressing an unexplained impulse to jump off, which most of us have felt at one time or another.

uWink++

2009-09-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

Two British students, Jade and Dan, just told me about a restaurant in London called Inamo. The tabletop consists of a video screen, which customers use to place their orders.

Jade: "After you order, the screen shows an image of your food in front of you. So you can see what you'll be eating, while it's being cooked."

Dan: "You can play battleship while you wait."

Jade: "The food is really good. It's Oriental fusion."

Dan: "You can watch the cooks on a webcam from your screen."

Jade: "The prices were really reasonable too. My entree with a drink was 15 pounds."

Dan: "The table computer has maps. You can pull up a London map, and plan where you'll go the rest of the night. It has a tube map too."

I am totally sold. Next time I'm in London, I will be going to Inamo! It sounds like uWink, with much better execution.

MIT charm school

2009-09-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

Recently my friend, a MIT graduate student, told me that MIT has a charm school for guys, to learn social skills and how to woo women.

I am skeptical that attendance would be high. (Any MIT people want to confirm or deny?) Most guys I know who would most benefit from this service are also the ones most likely to shun it. Their motivation is lower than their actual skill. The low motivation is probably what led to the undeveloped skills in the first place.)

These guys say things like, "Why should I lend a woman my jacket when we're out at night? She should've thought ahead and brought her own jacket!"

The logic is reasonable, so it is usually useless to argue.

Misha says his retort to all these arguments is, "Dude, do you ever want to get laid?"

That would make a good tagline for the MIT charm school for men.

OMG

2009-09-15T22:04:00.001-07:00