My Take On Professional Journalism

You know you are living in a very sad world when cnn.com decides to make unimportant news seem very important as the frontpage headline.

Want Tom Cruise to tell you that we're not alone? Click here.

Google Launches Google Earth

This product was previously developed by Keyhole. It has since been bought by Google and got renamed to Google Earth.

I just got it installed on my computer. It is pretty neat. I checked out some of the areas in San Francisco, and you can actually see some of the buildings in 3D!

I gotta run, so I am just going to cut and paste this blurb that I got from slashdot:

Nathan Weinberg writes "Google launches Keyhole 3 today, rebranded Google Earth, and are dumping the subscription rate (except for a $20/year "plus" versions with prettier pictures) available soon at earth.google.com. The program lets you fly around a 3D globe, with overhead satellite photos, tilted 45-degree photos, 3D rendered buildings, and overlays that display everything from roads to hotels to bike routes. I have a lot of info and screenshots at InsideGoogle, and Search Engine Watch has a big writeup. With yesterday's Google Video release, this is shaping up to be a major week for the search giant."

Satelitte Images of my Motherland

Wow. I just realized that they have expanded the salitte images on Google Maps. Now they've got satelitte view of Hong Kong, the city in which I grew up from.

Check it out here.

It is truely a spectacular view. It is amazing that 7 million people can fit in such a small city. I used to live on the island at the bottom of the page. I am having trouble pin pointing exactly where I lived though, as it does not support address search for Hong Kong just yet.

Engineer Interview technique?

Came across this blog by Joe Kraus about the three questions that he uses during interviews to see whether or not the candidate is a good engineer.

Here are my answers to his three questions:

Do you have a blog?

Yes. This one.

What is your homepage?

http://www.google.com/ig

Do you contribute to an open source project?

Uhm I guess. I'm a contributor of the webinject project.

So based on my answers, I only satisfied 2 out of 3 criteria. Am I a horrible engineer now?

I'm not quite sure how he thought he could determine whether or not someone is a good engineer based on these three questions. It sounds like he just wants to hire introvert that fall under the "geeks" category. While I'm not saying that geeky people are either good or bad engineers, it does make me believe that the author is extremely narrow-minded, in such a way that he thinks only geeks make good engineers.

So I got an idea for you, Joe. Why don't you simplify your three questions into just a yes or no question: Are you a geek?

Building a successful engineering team requires people of different personalities and backgroud. I can care less whether or not you like to blog outside of work. I care a lot more about what you know, your aptitude to learn, and your passion about your work.

When I interview people for my team, I don't look for specialists; Rather, I look for generalists who seem to enjoy a broad range of subjects and technologies. Specialists can be a quick win in the beginning for your company, but the technologies that he/she knows will become obsolete very quickly anyway. On the other hand, generalists are those who enjoy going out and trying out new technologies. They usually do a much better job at evaluating and choosing the right technology for a project, rather than just sticking to a specific one just because they specialize in it.

The next thing I do is try to give them a fairly open ended question and see how the candidate analyzes it. If the candidate gets stuck, I usually ask them to make a few logical guesses before giving him/her more hints. This way, it tells me whether or not the candidate has great analytical skills and whether or not the candidate is a quick learner.

Much of my interviewing style was adopted from Joel's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. For those that are interested in figuring out a good way of finding the right candidate for your team, this is an excellent read.

Bad Parenting!

It never ceases to amaze me how the media can spin a story.


Utah Scout feeling 'good' after ordeal

By now, I'm sure most of you have already heard about the missing of this 11 year old boy scout in Utah. After being lost for four days, he was finally found by a volunteer searcher at about five miles away from the origin point. When he was found, it was said that he was extremely dehydrated and that he did not want to talk.

Today, the parents of the boy scout came out and said what I thought was the most absurd things ever:

"Brennan continues to amaze us," said his father, Toby Hawkins.

Brennan's mother, Jody Hawkins, suggested her son may have been avoiding searchers by following his father's advice.

"He had two thoughts going through his head all the time," she said. "Toby's always told him that 'if you get lost, stay on the trail.' So he stayed on the trail.

"We've also told him don't talk to strangers. ... When an ATV or horse came by, he got off the trail. ... When they left, he got back on the trail."

"His biggest fear, he told me, was someone would steal him," she said.

To be honest, I'm not sure how amazing that is. Imagine this - You're a silly scout who decided to run away from your camp. Then, you realize that you've made a horrible mistake and now you're lost. You have no food, no water for four days. You know you are in trouble. All of a sudden, you see people walking along the trail, and you are so dumb that you decide to hide!!!

If this boy was as amazing as his parents claim he is in following instructions, he shouldn't have gotten lost to begin with, because I'm sure that he was told not to run away from the camp, right?

So if I was a news writer, I would spin the story such that the parents did a horrible job at raising this kid in such a way that he did not have any natural survival skills. He is just lucky that he was found by a volunteer searcher by accident.

Who is with me on this?

Dim Sum 101

Since it's Jenny's last day in the Bay Area before moving back to New Jersey, Rico, Trevor, Andy, Ray and I went to ABC restaurant up in Foster City for some dim sum.

Throughout the entire time, most of us were wondering what the english names of some of the dim sums were. I was a little bit embarassed to admit that I really didn't know what some of them were called in English, as I was, afterall, the only authentic chinese among the gang there.

There was one dim sum in particular that really grasped our imagination. Let me tell you how we were trying to describe it to each other:

You know, that one where there's rice, and it's kinda sticky, and it's wrapped around with leafs.

In cantonese, that's called "Law Mai Gei," and in English, Rico called it "Chinese Tamale."

So I decided to do my due dilligence and found this page, which has both the chinese and english terms of most of the dim sums that you will find.



So there. Now, we know that it's simply called "Sticky Rice with Lotus Leaf."

Until next time!

Triumph Strikes Again

http://download.ifilm.com/qt/portal/2672935_300.mov

Michael Jackson - Not Guilty

Similar to my previous analysis on killing your wife, my prediction was right once again. If you are rich, you are going to get away with anything.


CNN: Jackson Not Guilty

I guess Michael will become Robert Blake's golf buddy instead of Scott Peterson's boyfriend...

Stranded in the Water!!

I tried to dedicate today to let my mind off of work by going out and enjoying the nice weather. Unfortunately nowadays I rarely get one weekend without being called from work. Right when I was in the middle of Lake Merrit paddling along my boat, I received a phone call from work, and, I literally had to tell them that I was in the middle of a lake and I did not have access to the Internet. I am not sure if they believed me, and so I am posting a picture here to prove that I was indeed stranded!!!



Me on a paddle boat at Lake Merrit

My Friend's Wedding

I guess an obvious sign that you are getting quite old is when you receive a wedding invitation from your high school friend. For those who don't know, Ka, Debbie and I (as shown in picture below) have known each other for over 10 years. We were the only three chinese in our high school and, during those three years, we spent 90% of our time hiding in the library to stay out of trouble. Hmm so yeah, we had to stick together during those years and we became pretty good friends as a result.

The wedding took place at some chinese restaurant in Union City. It was quite an interesting wedding since she's getting married to a vietnamese guy, Tai. So, during the entire ceremony, the MC had to speak in three different languages: Cantonese, Vietnamese, and English. Of course, you never call it a chinese/vietnamese wedding without the presence of karoke (as shown in second picture below). Ka forced Debbie and I to go out and sing. I had previously warn her that it would be a really bad idea, and it really was. By the end of the song, 50% of the people had disappeared, and the groom got really drunk. I guess he started chugging the bottle of Hennesey when he heard my voice...

Oh well.


Me, Ka, and Debbie


William Hung wannabe... she bangs!

Am I Beavis?

My worker, Jenny, will be transferring to the NY office next week. So over the weekend, Ray, Andy and I decided to throw her a go(ing) away Jenny dinner in the East Bay. After dinner, we decided to walk around and take a few pictures.

Out of the 20 or so pictures that were taken from Andy's kickass camera, one of them had a slight resemblence of me looking like Beavis. Look at this:

Me looking like Beavis

and then look at this:


Actual Beavis


Hmmmm....

How Stupid is This?

Is it just me, or is there something just so unbelievably ironic that this was published as the headline of cnn.com?

CNN: Feds: Science paper a terrorist's road map

"WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The federal government has asked the National Academy of Sciences not to publish a research paper that feds describe as a "road map for terrorists" on how to contaminate the nation's milk supply."

So, we are now in a much safer world now that CNN has announced to the world about this vulnerability in our nation's milk supply. I am sure terrorists don't browse the web, especially CNN. This is brilliant!

Learning Python

While most of the guys here in the Bay Area went out to enjoy the nice and sunny weather today, I went to Barnes and Nobles and bought a copy of Learning Python. When I got home, I decided to read up about python online before starting on the book, which quickly led me to my first lesson:

The official website for Python is http://www.python.org, not http://www.python.com.

So next time, save yourself the embarassment in front of your friends and load up the correct website when you want to show them what python the programming language is all about.

Reminiscing The Good Old Days

Have you ever had one of those nights were you decided to look up your old email addresses on google and see what would get returned? I got really bored after watching 20 minutes of infomercial, so I decided to start looking up my old online nicknames and email addresses on google.

So what did I find? I found this text based MUD (multi user dungeon) that my buddy James and I wrote back in our high school days named Tharsis Gate. I decided to telnet to the MUD and see if there's still any players there, and to my surprise, there were! I had fully expected all mudders to have moved on to real graphical RPG games like Everquest, but I guess some of them are still addicted to the text based world!

Here are a couple of the screen shots that I am linking from James' MMORPG page:


In-game screenshot.


A thumbnail map of Tolnedra, the town where Tharsis Gate begins. Click to view the complete map from the official website.


Anyways, so that's where I spent most of my after-school hours on back in the day, and that is why I am such a loser today.

Yosemite Trip

As I promised, here's one of the pictures taken by my sister when I was in Yosemite. This is the view coming from Glacier point, which is at about the same elevation as the half dome. It was very chilly over there for this time of the year, and as you can see, there is still snow at the top of some of the mountains.

While we were at the top of the mountain taking pictures of the waterfalls, I made a bet with my sister that I would be able to stand at the bottom of the waterfall without getting myself killed by the force of the water. My sister didn't believe me. So, I told her to wait there for 30 minutes for me to drive to the valley and stand under the waterfall. Once I got to the bottom, I waved my arms violently to signal that I was there, and at that moment, she took the picture of me, as shown here:

Picture of me standing at the
bottom of the waterfall.
Can you spot me there?

Thanks for this bet, I did not have to shell out any money from my pocket to cover the cost of the cabin there during the weekend!

My New "Get Rich Quick" Plan

CNN: Stage set for '.xxx' Internet addresses

So, who is interested in joining me later this year and purchase all the potential popular names out there?