Archive for April, 2006

Rockstarts at Stanford!

April 30, 2006 at 6:11 pm · Filed under Web/Tech

Start up school organized by Y Cominbinator was held as the Stanford Kresge auditorium yesterday.

Y Cominbator’s Paul and Jessica directed a great show filled with rockstarts, media folks and a lawyer for inspired students and people in industry looking for direction to either build a startup or ensure that they are moving in the "right" direction. It was a packed house, and very well timed; talks were 20-30 minutes and breaks were frequent 15 minute intervals that gave way to many introductions. Unsurprisingly, most enjoyed the rockstarts more and were less interested in media or pitch talks . 

Incase it wasn’t apparent, "Rockstarts" are rockstars of the startup community.  These are people that have made it big (famous or/and rich) from the people sucking internet software that they’ve developed. Rock on!

Comments off

Eyeballs Wide Open

April 28, 2006 at 9:51 pm · Filed under Web/Tech

This post is about my coming of age with social networks, Seth Godin, and getting out of my scientific and old-school shell. babbling!

Beginning first:
    I am a zeroth generation of chinese immigrants, and I came to the US when I was 4.  Now this means that I had NO choice or idea to where I was going. I grew mostly in a household without a father and an angry mother, which was not my choice either. My family to this day thinks that I should work for the government (job security) or be a grade school teacher (time flexibility with my kids and take care of my husband)… you know, old-school.

Crawling at College:
    I want to be a doctor – biology degree at a nearby state university cured that and didn’t cost my faimly too much. Took a class called Modeling of Biological Systems with Dr. Wiliiam Collins at SUNY Stony Brook that opened my eyes to computers.

Standing in Grad School:
    Accepted at NYU MSCS program and working at a research facility full time as a software engineer and natural science researcher was a dream come true.  I’m independent! and chasing my dream to understand technology and primarily softwares to make processes go FASTER: FASTER results, FASTER testing, FASTER improvement/evolvement, and FASTER delivery – no humans, just products.

Scaling Industry:   
    Got a job at the biggest ad company in the world thinking about how to make finance processes go FASTER by designing a in-house-web-based financial management system. I had an easy time interacting with people (it was part of my job to be hated) and learned a little bit about taming the crowds. Dear starts a company with humans as the fuel and he supplied the engine. Humans as fuel – how weird is that?  Sociology, psychology == soft science.  Biology, Computer Science == hard science. 

Immersion:
    Forced to move to Silicon Valley.  Everyone who’s anyone knows about "Web2.0". I was somebody who was nobody who knew everybody’s anybody. My dear has ignited "humans as fuel" to the tech industry (at least partially responsible if you don’t believe that), but I never took part of the fun. All finance, science, analysis of hard data.

Dinner:
    Met some guy named Seth at a dinner dear threw in NYC. He was sitting next to me, I introduced myself as the arm-candy of the person that formed the dinner and griped about my recent move to the west coast and not wanting to be a housefrou.  He told me about himself, spoke like a combination of Dr. Phil (not accent) and Buddha (not fat).  At the end I asked for his email to possibly give me advice in the future, and he replied "Google for ‘Seth’".

LinkedIn (not an endorsement, just a story):
    Created an account to linkedin in January and only started looking at it past couple of weeks.  Why? Dear isn’t good at hand-holding AND we weren’t full-time Californians till April.  Started flipping through the features of LInkedIn while playing housefrou and saw the "people that you wen tot school with" feature. LOVED IT! Found people there I didn’t talk to for years!  Not happy about paying 10$ to get to know 2 of them again, but kept it in the back of my head. Couple of days later I sent out invitations to 2 coworkers and one good friend. My supervisor signed in, and found 7 people in 1 day, (light bulb #1) and one of them happened to be an employee of the recruiter I worked with in NYC(light bulb #2)!  Wholly CRAP, IT WORKS!! Knowing me IS knowing YOU! The portable little black book, I get it and I did it all by myself – there is hope.

Reread:
    Ok, I partially got it. Now go back and read Seth’s blog again because I have all the surfing time in the world now (light bulb #3).  His words are pertinent through all aspects of the market. Why do I want to shove it into the web2.0 wave? Because I WANT to. I want to be immersed, enlightened, and smiling again. I want to help myself helf others through technology and mentality.

Begin:
    I was toted to a party with VCs, startups, and Stanford grad students (yeah, i know it’s like every other event in the Bay area). I could only talk for 2.5 hours, but that is better than before. It was a slow start like changing from biology to computer science, but i’m getting it, liking it and i’m learning FAST.

Comments off

Social Networking – Analog style

April 19, 2006 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

This morning dear and I were walking to the parking garage and saw this on the inside of the elevator:
Photo_041906_001_1

10am

This isn’t the first way  I’d think of to finding a good dentist, but it’s a great idea isn’t it?  Ok, the post person probably would want to test out and interview the dentists before committing but isn’t it just the same as Amazon’s sort by customer rating?  It doesn’t cover the full spectrum of variables that determine if (a product or) a dentist is good, but it’s a good starting point!

Photo_041906_002

10pm

Comments off

graphs are for stupid people

April 18, 2006 at 5:29 pm · Filed under Books

So I’m listening to sciam’s podcast and one of their guests was Joel Shirkin, a science historian that just finished writing William Shockley’s biography. I had no idea this Shockley guy was so famous – ok, now you know that I’m not from an engineering background.  He pretty much founded "silicon valley" (Shockley was into semiconductors), opened up the first shop in SV, and his old buddies opened up Intel!  Wow!!  You can read more about Shockley here on wikipedia. If you read further down the page, there is a section on "Later Years" that mirrored Shirkin’s griping in his radio interview.

If you ever get to hear the podcast, Shirkin says something about the general public not liking to hear that in intelligence tests certain races do better than others, even though studies have been done and graphed and verified. While I do believe in genetics and understand nature vs. nuture, which most people can’t deny, I guess it is our social manner that wants us to turn a blind eye to these facts. It has its pros and cons.  The pros being social acceptance and the cons being social acceptance.  I think the biggest take home of these "social studies" are that there needs to be change that we as a society can do, and I don’t mean eugenics.  Maybe focusing on the nuture part of our socieital deal should be more emphasized, and with it ‘intelligence’ can excel.  Like they always say, being comfortable means that you’re probably not learning.

segue to…

With all the hype on social software/computing/networking, is there a way to sprinkle the capability to help others that are not in "the network"? How can we reach out to people with technology? especially to the people that don’t have access to it?

Comments off

Google Quantified

April 13, 2006 at 11:35 am · Filed under Web/Tech

I recently discovered FuckedGoogle.com using the google search “comparison of cafeterias google yahoo apple” – which I thought was pretty funny. All I wanted was to find more information about the cafeteria and bam! more pistol whipping of google. Like the total num.phile that I am, I stayed and read its article about how google’s profits are on a down trend for the past four months. Then I looked at yahoo and they’re not much different!

Percentage wise, google is down 1.5% vs Y!’s 0.29%, but it’s like comparing my weight loss against Star Jones – she just has more useless fat to lose. Maybe google will stop with the yo-yo copying and wittle down to something more original and meaty.

Comments off

Foods That Bind

April 12, 2006 at 10:15 pm · Filed under Food and Drink

Ok, maybe the word “Bind” is misleading for some of these cases but some of these food combinations really do bind acids together forming calcium or acid crystals which settle in the kidneys (kidney stones) – according to the radio source. I was listening to my usual 96.1 mandarin radio station at 1130am in the morning and they were talking about foods that shouldn’t be eaten together. Most of the reasons were either that they reduce the absorption of the other food’s nutrition into the body or that they can produce other malicious substances in your body when ingested together. Here’s the list:

1. Alcohol + Carrot

2. Meat (or high protein foods) + Tea

3. Egg + Tea (similar to #2)

4. Tofu + Spinach

5. Tofu + Raw Scallion

6. Soymilk + Egg

7. Seafood + Fruit

8. Dikon (or Turnip) + Fruit

9. Carrot + Dikon

10. Egg + MSG

11. Potato + Beef

Interesting list right? We should all cut down our pickled carrot intake anyway!

Comments off

Insomnia

April 6, 2006 at 3:53 pm · Filed under Health

Last night/this morning I had the worst insomnia ever. Usually I’m a heavy sleeper, woken only by serious truck-crossing or the aroma of bacon cooking in the air. Drifting into sleep was something familiar and warm, measured only by the speed of total submersion into the unconscious. It starts off as thoughts to an event or a make believe scene. You think about how the situation looks like, what you or whatever subject focusing on’s actions and feelings – like you are directing them (or yourself) on what you think they/it should be doing. Then is sinks in, that dizzy melting feeling when you go under – maybe you’ve had similar experiences with drugs, either in the hospital or at home. External characters come alive, you don’t have to concentrate on what they should be doing or concentrating on watching them; they become autonomous. Scenes shift, and the play begins.

See doesn’t that sound sexy? I love going to sleep. I love that time between waking and getting up, the vivid dreams that I know Steven Spielberg or Spike Lee would pay a small fortune if he only know what kind of blockbusters or oscar-winning indies I dream. I wake up remembing everything; to the color of the alien standing behind the door, to the texture of the skin of the girl I was having sex with (in this dream I was a boy).

I didn’t get any last night. My mind couldn’t and wouldn’t focus on a scene. I would desparately think of a black clean slate, waiting for my opening chapter but nothing happened. And the snoring. Blank sleep would sink in and then I’d be woken up by snoring.

I think the most important time of the going-to-sleep phase is not before you get into bed, it’s the period right before you slip into the dizziness, that semi-conscious wet-dream goodness (yeah, girls have them). When that is disturbed, I grumble big time.

335am I get up, sleep on the couch. I still hear the snoring. I pop open the food network and watch a whiny Bourdain circa 2002 along with a glass of warm water and two biscuits. I try to sleep again; still hear the snoring. Take my pillow and blanket into the study, lay down on the floor and closed the door. The laptop cheerfully told me that it was getting email every 5 minutes with a “pong” .wav. I mute it and shut the screen. I drift into blank sleep and don’t get woken up by the snoring. I slept, slept for 30 blank minutes, flipped over did it again. One hour later (I have an amazing sense of time) I feel day pricking at my eyelids and flipped over again cursing at it. 15 minutes later I was forced to get up by dear because he couldn’t sleep anymore either. It was 8am anyway.

I begged to sleep a little more and he stormed out saying that he was angry because it was my setting the heater to Lo and making him snore. At this point I feel pretty messed up in the head. Guilt, hate, exhaustion – the later took over, at least until 10am which it when I asked for my wake up call.

I’m up now damn it, and I can’t wait to go to sleep again. I couldn’t at 330pm. Let’s try again in the evening.

Comments off

Harvest Nut n’ Grain

April 3, 2006 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Food and Drink

First, I’d like to say that I Hate to post things twice. So I was in IHOP this morning and trying to make a post using my treo, but typepad doesn’t want to play nice with stupid palm so i lost my entire post! I mean I was at the heat of the moment, ready to rumble, with syrup dripping down my chin and I was writing! Writing like there was tomorrow! Like the two minutes after climax! Ok, i would never be writing after climax, but you get the foodgasm reference right? Stupid treo! Crazy Typepad! UGH.

Ok, at IHOP I:
ate alone
had coffee
had the Harvest Grain n’ Nut pancake special with 2 eggs, 2 bacon strips, and hasbrowns

and afterwards I felt:
odd that growing up in suburbia, I never made it a staple of hangouts for friends or family
not guilty about eating 110% of today’s fat and caloric intake
good after eating it alone and savoring every bite of that carb-licious gorge-fest
full! I’m skipping lunch to semi-comp this meal

I think I’m over my bad relationship with food. Now I just have to get to a good relationship with my knees and exercise routine.

I also checked on the nutrition values when I got home (to add more guilt subconciously I think), and it didn’t work! There are NO NUTRITION FACTS on IHOP.com/nutrition or anywhere else on the IHOP website. They should provide nutritional information, and maybe that will decrease sales even more so and fat people or suburbia will definitely either quit or not get started on making it a regular pit stop, but what the hey we’re all gonna die anyway – might as well be shoveling bacon and pancakes down the ol’ feeding tube. Good relationship with food… aww yeeah.

Comments off

Love Apple Farms

April 2, 2006 at 4:43 pm · Filed under Travel

Love Apple Farms is supposedly the best place to get tomato-lings (baby tomato plants). After getting advice from a man-sized tomato at the 12th Annual Spring Garden Market in San Jose, dear and I went on a road trip to fellow typepad user Cynthia’s Love Apple Farms .

We started a little late at 11am, but thought it would be just fine for our 50 minute drive according to the nav system in the car. I personally think that our car is punishing us for putting in regular unleaded fuel the past two times as it took us through the most torcherous road in Los Gatos – Bear Creek Road, or “crazy-ass road-street” as dear wants to put it. I broke a sweat driving on that damn street! Some shit heal kept honking at me because I was pushing 25 (the speed limit) and no more than that. There was a cliff on my right and single file double yellow line lane to my left. Don’t do this street it unless you really want to die. Below is the new and improved/screw the damn nav because people are better route.

We’ve been advised to to get soil from Orchard Supply and a 15 gallon pot EACH. I hope the supplies aren’t expensive! More updates on the little ones later.

Directions to:
CA-85 East to CA-17 South
2.3 miles Right on Mt. Hermon
Immediate Right again
1.5 mile make Right (Hwy 9)
House is on the Left

Directions from:
Right at the end of driveway
Go 1.1 mile to light – make Left (Hwy 9)
1.5 mile to second light – make Left
Immediate Left again onto Mt. Hermon
2.3 miles to CA-17 North
CA-85

Comments off