Phil’s blog

I tend to forget that this thing exists.

Anyway, here are some cool things that have happened in the last few months:

1. We moved to a new office in a more central part of Beijing, next to the Lama Temple. It’s way more spacious than the old one and right next to a subway station as well. Only downside is that it’s in a basement so I spend most of the day bathed in artificial light.

2. I moved to an apartment about 12 minutes’ walk from the new office. As much as I liked the young demographic of Wudaokou, I much prefer being closer to the east side where there are more interesting things. It’s a very comfortable place and my bedroom window faces a hutong which is a nice change from the.. well, my old bedroom window looked into part of our kitchen so I guess almost anything is an improvement.

3. I bought a sweet road bike from my friend Wen for mad cheap because he didn’t need it after getting a car. I ride it to work through the hutong every day, takes like 5 minutes and it almost never rains in Beijing. I had forgotten how much fun riding can be, and it feels effortless with a road bike on pavement. Previously I owned a mountain bike despite only having used it on trails a handful of times. I’m totally sold on thin tires now.

4. I visited the States for a week and change for the holidays. It was great catching up with people in person after a year but there’s never enough time, and it’s like playing Tetris with everyone’s schedule. So why isn’t there a clever website that lets everyone put in their free times and produces an optimal hangout schedule? Perhaps a Facebook app? Well, one thing is that probably not everyone you want to hang out with would be using this tool, but even if everyone was using it, I think the problem would be that it forces you to explicitly prioritize your friends and family. We all kind of do this anyway when deciding who to hang out with but we never have to be too conscious of it. Or maybe this wouldn’t be so bad - I think I saw a Facebook app that lets you rank friends. I guess as long as people are never aware of their rankings it might work?

5. And finally, I switched to Mac. The fall ‘08 redesign of the Macbook Pro pushed me over the edge, and I’m quite happy with it. There are many nice little things about OS X and Mac hardware, and the general trend is that they tend to do what you want them to do without much fiddling. For example, the first time I plugged it into my mom’s HDTV to play a movie, bam, it extended the desktop onto the TV with the correct resolution. Ditto when I plugged in my HD projector in Beijing. There’s one universal volume control (with dedicated keys), unlike Windows which has who knows how many. Program installations usually amount to dragging a program icon into your Applications folder. Apple’s strategy is to make it easy to do what most people want to do most of the time, and they do make that a beautiful experience. But if you venture off the main path and try to do obscure things, it seems harder than Windows because they hide so many options so as not to overwhelm you. Still, a quick Google search usually yields a solution. I also picked up an iPod Touch, which I use and love every day. I resisted for a long time but what pushed me over the edge was a free Chinese/English dictionary app called DianHua. It’s a simple program that allows lookups from either language, but combined with the iPod’s handwriting recognition of characters, it allows me to understand words I’ve never seen - making me nigh unstoppable. Actually I’d be better off if I just stopped being lazy about studying Chinese but that’s for another post.

I’ve been in crunch mode for a while and haven’t been so good about keeping up with people, sorry! I’m already thinking about my trip home for Christmas - it will have been a year since I’ve set foot in the States. I’m so looking forward to seeing everyone back home.

This is a view of Beijing from a peak in Xiangshan (香山 a.k.a. “fragrant hills”) park. I took several photos along the horizon and used Hugin to stitch them together. You can see the full-sized version here.

From a bag of beef jerky I recently consumed (albeit with difficulty): “Add:Bldg.2,Section B,Shoes Industry Park,Economic Development Zone of Pingyang.”

It’s 6am and food poisoning and a mosquito in my room are conspiring to keep me from sleep. Someone once told me to never eat raw vegetables in China, so I guess I should be especially wary of the huge 6 yuan (almost $1) salads from the small restaurant in the basement of the building where I work. But it’s such a good value! Anyway things have been quite busy lately, working ’til 10 or later most nights. We’re approaching a major milestone and I’m feeling good about it. I don’t go out as much lately (other than to eat), not due to work but because I just feel like staying in most of the time. When I have a chunk of time I’ll usually watch a movie, play GTA IV or Rock Band, or reply to non-work emails (which I’ve been horribly delinquent on). I haven’t been to the east side of Beijing for a couple of weeks now. Oh, and I’ve been getting facials at Beauty Farm every couple of weeks. I first tried it last month when my gf invited me to go with her and get a massage while she got her facial, but I opted for a facial too and it made my skin noticeably better so now I’m hooked. They also shape my eyebrows with a razor, very metro. No recent pics but I will probably take a bunch next weekend when I go to Shanghai, and post a couple if I’m not too lazy.

Last week I spent 5 days relaxing on the beach and eating seafood. And of course taking photos.

A funny thing happened a couple of nights ago. Someone knocked on my door around 10:30 at night and it was this middle aged Chinese woman who was trying to tell me that she needed to come into my apartment for a reason I couldn’t understand. She seemed harmless so I let her in. Yes, in retrospect I realize I was too trusting, should have called someone to interpret before allowing her to enter. Anyway, she walked over to the window in the living room and peeked outside behind the curtain, then asked me to help her move the table so she could stand in front of the window. I did, puzzled, and she stood there in front of the open window with the curtain over her. I tried to pull back the curtain but she said no need, so I stood there and after about 10 seconds I heard this muffled panicky noise. For an instant I was afraid this woman was crying and about to jump out my window. Then she emerged holding a chicken by neck and chest, which was clucking and struggling to break free. I looked outside the window and there was a metal air conditioner or something, so the chicken must have jumped out the window from a floor above and landed on it. I’m on the 15th floor so that’s a lucky bird. Anyway, it was hilarious and I was relieved. I laughed and she smiled, said thanks, and took her chicken home.

The 3 of you who occasionally look at this blog may have noticed that I’ve changed to a rather minimalist layout. I was inspired by tumblr and set out to find a way to give my blog a similar look, and this is what I came up with. I figured the old layout with all its functionality made me feel obligated to write more substantial posts, while the minimalist tumblr style encourages brevity, so the result would be that I’d do shorter but more frequent posts. We’ll see what happens.

The company is doing well and we took our first trip together which you can see photos of in my last post. Our funding situation is good and the development is speeding up. Our public launch isn’t too far away now.

I’ve been lifting at the gym regularly for the past month or so, about 3 times a week. I’m definitely stronger than I’ve ever been, but have neglected cardio. My natural state is to be rather skinny so when workouts are limited I always opt for lifting because I want to gain weight, not lose it. Ideally I’d alternate between cardio and lifting but it would cut too much into my limited social life.

Actually socially things are pretty good; I go out about 3 nights a week and spend at least one day doing something fun or relaxing on the weekend. Lately I’ve spent a fair amount of time at Houhai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants. It’s rather touristy but there are a few good places to eat/drink/chat, and it’s really nice to walk by the water at night.

My Mandarin these days is not so good. The money we paid a few months ago for classes finally ran out and I didn’t buy more because all we did was go through the book or talk freely, both of which I can do with friends for free and on my own time. Actually my character recognition is holding steady or even improving because I chat with people on IM in Chinese every day. Yesterday I even tried chatting with a few of my coworkers in a QQ chat room they set up, but they were typing way too quickly for me to translate so I only picked out the lines that had “phil” in them. My speaking and listening are definitely worse because people usually don’t understand me the first time and vice versa. The real value of this Chinese class is that it forced me to practice speaking regularly, just a discipline thing. I hate getting up early for class so I’ll try to come up with another way to practice…