Saturday, March 31, 2007

.

I was writing sth from work last night till 2 o'clock in the morning. So just got up then.
Write some Japanese here, Just have a try:)
今日は いい天気じゃない。ですから うちで のんびりします。

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

On the Ground & Samurai Spirit

Still sleeping on the floor, Just don't wanna climb up there and sleep in the hole like some cave people.
Tomorrow will be nice weather. UMmmm.....

Tomorrow there will be a Team Review since it's the end of the fiscal year here in Japan, so everyone is crazily busy these day leaving me aside and playing all alone by myself. Actually I've been working all by myself ever since arriving here.
Maybe tomorrow's Team Review will be a good chance for me to know what other team members are doing. Since we don't have many chances to communicate with each other in the team. However, I may get confused because everything is said and done in Japanese.

Everytime I asked people here why when I found out that there may be something going wrong e.g the lack of communication stuff, the no hi stuff down in the aisle, the answer would always be like "Wow, You know this is the Japanese way."; "Japanese do things like that". What the hell is that, we can't change?? Just like several hundred years ago Japanese learnt from the west. If we can make things better why not venture a change. Maybe we need more Samurai Spirit!

I came across this on BusinessWeek last week:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_13/b4027052.htm

Killing off the battery

Something last night:needle mushroom +a pack of seasoning for Noodle...
After putting the TV down on the floor, I turned this little corner into a nice working place.
Last Sunday's Dinner table.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Damn Mosquito

I was waked up by a damn small mosquito around 3 o'clock this morning. Can't fall asleep than. Trying to find the dude by ended up in vain.
The only thing I can do is opening the window to let the cold air blowing in and sleeping my head down by the window and turning on the light in the bathroom to lure it to the other side of the room.
p.s. I just found him and killed him.
Temperature's getting back on high, bugs coming out again. Need to Get ready for the coming summer.
Got up early this morning to catch the 8:00 shuttle. Getting up early makes me feel really cool. Cuz you've got the whole morning to do something meaningful. However, skipping breakfast make the last morning hour unbearable.

The afternoon is still the hardest time. With the fever and the dizziness, I just can't ..... zzz zzz...

Monday, March 26, 2007

Life is a game

Life is a game, Let's enjoy.

Having a fever right now. It came out of nowhere. (Used this phrase for too many times)
May be my half hour nudity after shower;
May be trying to work out my final dissertation with my Jerk Prof. and all the anxiety caused by it;
May be having lunch too late on Saturday and going to bed the next morning.

Contacted my Prof. 2 hours ago. Same old fucking stuff. Maybe "Later" is hard coded into his ROM. Anyway gotta work him out in the CHINESE way!

Still can get GeoReview working on Cell phone. I downloaded the OpenWare simulator. Though everything's fine in the simulator, all the dynamic generated content just vanished! What a Crap.
(Too many dirty words...)

Nothing exceptional except that I came home early in the afternoon. Took a nap from 4:35 to 5:40 cuz I was really feeling dizzy.
Ohh, I finally got the cover of the bulb in the bathroom open. And succeeded in changing the light there. Don't have to worry about touching which part of the body while showering.
Still a hard day to go tomorrow. Whatever, Life's just a game, enjoy it.

Check out my dinner: Orange Juice, Fired Spaghetti with Lettice and Onion, Chicken Nuggets with Carrot Slices


Need a good shave

Sunday, March 25, 2007

GeoReview

Stayed up till 3 o'clock yesterday to get this done.
http://www.lynxstudio.com.cn/georeview
However, it only works fine in Firefox. Out of no where the code just got broken in IE. Still can't figure out why.
Wish that I can fix this next week.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Cute Car


On my way back last night, I saw this cute car parking in front of a Japanese Family Hotel.

Small Japanese Isagaya

Went to a small traditional Japanese drinking bar in Hon-Atsugi with my OJT yesterday afterwork. The bar is so tiny that it only has less then 20 seats. And you have to watch out your but when heading to the bathroom, other wise you may accidently hit your neighboring table's sashimi off to the ground.
What's interesting is that
  • they don't give menus to their customer, instead the menu are just pasted all over the wall.
  • There was a waiter who I first thought as a waitress. All waiters & waitress, men & women, were wearing traditional Japanese cloth and a pair of rubber boots, which is insanely dirty. They look pretty much like fisherman.
  • No non-smoking area, Just feel free to smoke.
  • They do drink a lot. I saw 2 young Salarymen sitting at the next table finish 2 bottles of Nihhon Sake in less than 30 mins.
  • The floor is sticky and slippery, which really reminds me of the small restaurant lining up a the back gate of ECNU.
Anyway, that's so typical Japanese Life style, though may be a bit old. But I just love the place, you feel so relaxed. Free to smoke, Free to get drunk, Free to talk loud, Free to laugh like an ass. What's better then that.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

My Dear Professor

Sending my 3 weeks ago. Calling from time to time during the past few weeks.
Calling him 2 times just now, hit the damn machine. When I tried to call for the 3rd time, "Power OFF".

My professor is just a big piece of SHIT that god put on my head.
He is a SON OF A BITCH!!!!!!

Fuck Off!

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The Pursuit of Happyness

Never take the easy way.
I've been faced with the situation of making a life long choice in my life for 2 times. And I think I've made wrong choices taking the easy ways.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Time's like flying by

Everyday's like flying by. I'll go to Tokyo to visit the new HORK3 system in Akasaka headquater and attend a Japan Domestic Academic conference in the afternoon. Though even till now, I still have no idea about what is HORK, and why Fuji Xerox should behind this.
Here are the reasons holding me from accepting HORK:
  • it can be simply replaced by a really powerful computer with inhanced display. Currently there are way cheaper hardware and software solutions to achieve this.
  • The performance of the current version of HORK is far from pleasant. The only thing that you can do with the system is to drag the mouse from one computer to the other one which is interconnected with the cable line.
  • You can migerate data among those PCs, neither can you distribute computing tasks among those computers.
Let's face the problems here:
  • The whole thing HORK does not have any clear aim. Neither to say any marketing plan or biz goal.
I think before this team move anything further forward, all the team members should be able to answer the following questions:
  • What is the difference between HORK and a really powerful computer with mutiple displays or even a bunch of seperate computers at hand?
  • What benefit can we get from using HORK other than conventional systems?
  • What's the learning curve of using the system? Compared to the benefit we get from changing current system and work style is it worth while?
Some of my ideas,

Something More And HOME
Since the system is named HORK, which means the combination of Home and work, we can really make it to be the future of Home entertainment and Working Environment.
We can focus more on Home entertainment, while gaints like Intel & Microsoft have already shown their ambitions in the field with the newly released Vista's Home Entertaining enhancement on the Intel VIIV platform.

Computing in the Environment - Going Ubiquitous
The new concept behind HORK is actually the new working style. (Something still not sure about for the moment, especially what's the difference between the current working style.) Some of the ideas behind Hork is quite similar to the concept of Ubiquitous computing. HORK would like to make the user feel that

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Mixing all the languages

When I was taking a ride on the train heading for the Japanese class the other day, I was suddenly faced with the mixing up of 3 language. I was reading anEnglish book listening a Chinese song while hearing the train clerk's Japanese in the Radio. It's lucky that my Japanese's poor so that I can't understand the radio, otherwise it's like getting information from 3 dimensions.

So fast

Time's like flying by.
Japanese Class now comes to an end. So we'll face the real stuff after all this.
Busy perparing my grad paper all these days.