Phil’s blog

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

About a month ago I took a day trip to a meadow on the outskirts of Beijing province and rode a horse and a dirtbike, both for the first time. The place was in the middle of nowhere; a couple of hours’ train ride from the city of Beijing, plus a fun van ride on a very bumpy dirt road. We hired 2 guides and 5 horses - for me, Clement, XinXin, Andrew, and Vivian. I started with a guide riding next to me and holding the reigns of my horse, but after a little while I was riding on my own without much trouble. The horse was well trained to follow the other horses, perhaps too well because it would often get so close to another horse that my leg would be brushing against it or the other rider. I was able to break away by making him go faster, but I don’t think we ever reached a full gallop (which was probably for the best). After 2 hours of riding we feasted on shrimp, vegetables, and a whole barbecued rabbit that looked gross but tasted great. Then we rented 2 off-road go-karts and a small dirt bike. The go-karts were entertaining but the dirt bike was amazing. It wasn’t a full-sized model - maybe about 3/4 size but still ridable. It had a single gear so no clutch, but the throttle and brakes functioned as they do on a normal motorcycle. Safety wasn’t much of a consideration there; one of the guides spent a few seconds showing me how to work the controls and then sent me on my way. The one helmet they had was old and didn’t even have a chin strap, so I left it behind and was careful. It was actually very easy to ride because it was so small and light, and could reach decent speeds despite the single gear. On straightaways I pulled the throttle all the way back but it was scary fast so I never kept it there long. I’d guess I maxed at 30 mph but it felt faster with the wind on my face. It was so thrilling and frightening and fun I was laughing uncontrollably while riding. I definitely need to try that again, maybe next time with a proper dirt bike More photos here.

About a month ago I went back to VA to visit for two awesome weeks. During my stay I went out to eat at least 17 times, seriously, which inspired me to start reviewing restaurants on Yelp. Here’s my Yelp profile which includes all my reviews. The highlight of the trip was renting a cottage with Justine outside of Charlottesville for a few days. We went back to some of our favorite places including The Korean House, Tea Bazaar, Splendora, the Creperie, Cafe Europa, and various stores on the downtown mall. A few of our friends are still in school (mostly in the wushu and lion dance clubs), so we got to hang out with them and join them for a wushu team practice, which brought back all kinds of great memories. The weather was perfect so we also took a hike on part of the AT and watched the sun set from one of the overlooks. Other highlights of the trip included hanging out with the family; preparing a feast of pumpkin bisque, steak salad, and Thai curry; watching Transformers (finally!); baking some incredible chocolate chip cookies; celebrating Syl’s 22nd birthday; and watching the season premiere of The Office. Two weeks felt way too short, but in another two months I’ll be home again for Christmas

Almost forgot to mention that on the flight back to Beijing, the video screen in my section didn’t work so I got 50k frequent flyer miles! United rocks.

Yesterday I went hiking on the Great Wall with Keen, Clement, and Clement’s friend Sheng. Our segment took about 4 hours and consisted almost entirely of climbs and descents, some of which were treacherously steep and broken. I actually slipped on some loose rocks and fell on my butt at one point going downhill, but I was fine. It’s supposed to be a less touristy area but we still passed the occasional hiker, all of whom were foreign - especially from France and England. The only Chinese people we encountered were selling drinks and souvenirs. They’d stake out places in towers where hikers would have just ascended steep sections of the wall. Some were persistent and one lady followed us and talked to us for at least 5 minutes until we took a break, at which point she tried selling us water, coke, a t-shirt, a book about the wall, postcards, and bracelets. We bought the water and the coke so she’d leave us alone. The most interesting part of the trip for me was seeing an old man herding goats on a hill next to the wall. He stopped on the wall to talk to us for a while (well, to talk to Clement in Chinese). He was curious about where we were from and said he was 78 years old and told Clement a bit about his 2 sons. He was the only Chinese person there that didn’t try to sell us anything :]

More photos from the Great Wall.

Clement, Keen, and I were in Singapore last week for the State of Play V conference. There was nothing groundbreaking in the talks but we got to meet some key people from the virtual worlds industry, notably Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD.

We stayed in Geylang which we didn’t realize was a famous red light district until the cab driver told us. Clement’s girlfriend XinXin apparently didn’t know either because she booked the hotel for us. I’m actually glad we stayed there because it contrasts so much with the clean, modern, luxurious image that Singapore strives for. The conference was held in the Marina Mandarin Hotel which is in the midst of shopping malls and huge office buildings. That would have been our impression of Singapore had we not stayed in Geylang, which mostly consists of small shops and restaurants and cheap hotels. When we first pulled up to our hotel, we were shocked to see ladies of the night lined up on the sidewalk all the way down the street. I had never seen anything like it. Later in the trip we walked along this street to observe. Almost all of the pedestrian traffic was men, and usually the women would stand or sit off to the side with a pimp not far away. Usually it would be the pimp who tried to solicit customers, asking something like “Need a girl?” when you pass by. Sometimes the more aggressive women would try to grab you, and one even stopped Keen and stood in front of him asking “Hey superman, want to go with me?” There were also pornography merchants and people running dice tables. Our walk down the back streets was pretty interesting, but the best part about Geylang was the cheap, delicious food. Actually all the food we had in Singapore was excellent. Highlights included Indian roti with various fillings, Thai beef noodle soup, and of course chili and black pepper crab, which are specialties in Singapore. Other highlights of the trip included walking around Sentosa Island, clubbing at the Ministry of Sound, and shopping in and around Suntec City.

Here are all of my photos from Singapore.

I arrived in Beijing almost 3 weeks ago on June 19th, so this update is long overdue! For context, I moved out here to work on a startup with my friend Clement from UVA. For the first week, my friend and soon to be coworker Keen (also from UVA) was also visiting, so we spent most of the time taking care of things like apartment, insurance, cell phone, and generally scoping out the area with Clement and his girlfriend XinXin as our hosts. Keen only spent a week here but will move here for real around the middle of July. For my second week, we started working at an office we shared with Clement’s friend Felix’s company, and my evenings were spent settling into my new apartment and visiting the internet cafe. My third week has been more routine; we moved our office into my apartment to avoid the hour long commute, have been working out roughly every other day at a gym that’s about a 2 minute walk door to door, and go out for dinner a few times a week. I spend most of the evenings chatting with Justine and catching up on emails and blogs and everything I neglected while I didn’t have consistent internet access. There’s a lot to cover about my experience here thus far, so I’ll just put down my general and miscellaneous thoughts here and write about major things in other posts for easier reading.

The first thing I noticed walking out of the airport was the amount of smog. Some days it’s better than others, but even on the best days, visibility is worse than in any place I’ve ever been. I heard that the government will try to reduce pollution in time for the “green” olympics, but that’ll be pretty tough because apparently a lot of it blows in from outside the city.

The second thing I noticed riding to Clement’s place from the airport was that drivers are very aggressive by US standards, especially taxi drivers. The rule seems to be that if 1) there’s space in front of you wide enough for your car and 2) any cars about to fully or partially occupy that space have enough time to stop or slow down, go for it. It seems really dangerous but I’m told there are relatively few traffic deaths here, at least in the city, because you can never drive that fast since there are so many cars. Even the bicyclists are bold; nobody wears a helmet and people don’t hesitate to ride alongside cars and across intersections when they don’t have the signal to go.

There’s construction everywhere, mostly offices and apartment buildings. This means a lot of migrant workers are in the city, sleeping in ramshackle huts and even under bridges. I felt bad for them initially but a friend told me that people jump at the opportunity to do these construction jobs because they get paid far more than in the villages they come from. When they return home where the cost of living is even lower, they can live pretty well. They may not have amenities like internet and flush toilets, but I can see how a simple life could be pretty good too.

People like to sit around outside and chat or play card games and the like - in parks, on sidewalks and bridges, in front of stores, and especially in front of residences in the poor areas. Clement suspects it’s because their homes are so small, the outside is like their living room. It’s neat that these people probably see each other every day and are perhaps like extended families.

The quality of things ranging from mass produced goods to buildings is generally lower here than in the US. We’ve all heard about the toxic toothpaste and pet food, and probably numerous other cases like excessive levels of cancer-causing preservatives. The drive to produce things cheaply leads to cutting corners, substituting cheaper materials, and a lack of quality control. I saw this first hand in Clement’s building, where some of the wall surfaces are stripped away to reveal large cracks in the concrete. In one place there’s a hole about the size of a large loaf of bread that looks like it was filled in with some kind of Styrofoam spray.

People pay for almost everything in cash because there’s no credit system here, and no checks either. I felt like a gangster or something when I went to the bank to withdraw money to pay 6 months’ rent; I left with 50,000 RMB - more currency than I’ve ever handled in my life. Clement said he once saw a guy use two giant sackfuls of cash to pay off his condo, which a group of property management staff then spent hours counting.

Unlike in Japan, very few people speak English here. I get by through a combination of scattered Chinese words, gestures, drawings, pre-written addresses for taxi drivers, and when all else fails, a call to Clement so he can translate for me.

Possibly my favorite thing about China is that the food is incredibly cheap, both at restaurants and in grocery stores. I’ll write more about this later, but to give you an idea, I now consider $5 US to be pricey for a meal :]

That’s all I have the energy to write for now, but I hope to soon post about friends, living arrangements, food, shows, and maybe even work. Hope everyone is well back home!

In 3 weeks I’m moving to Beijing to start a company with 2 friends from UVA. Crazy? Just a little, but it’s an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Reasons against: leaving a good job and a comfortable life, being away from Justine who had just moved in with me from across the country, and the risk inherent in startups. Reasons for: the chance to pour myself into something I believe in that’s incredibly challenging and find out once more what I’m capable of. I say once more because I’ve experienced this once before.

When I was a junior in high school, two of my best friends and I entered a contest called ThinkQuest in which teams of students create educational websites in competition for a scholarship. Our site is called The Artificial Intelligence Resource. It teaches AI by illustration through the LISP programming language. I wrote a LISP interpreter (a program that runs programs written in LISP) in Java so it could be embedded directly into our lesson pages, and created a content system where people could sign up for an account, log in, and submit LISP programs that other people could run, tinker with, and learn from through the site. My friends wrote all the content and created demo programs, some of which were pretty cool (e.g., graphical Frogger against a computer opponent). Anyway, what amazes me to this day is that we were in 11th grade, we had just learned LISP from an AI class at school, and I had only rudimentary knowledge of Java and almost no knowledge of Perl before we started. In retrospect, I wish I had known what a database was as it would have made account management much easier. But despite our lack of experience and knowledge, for 6 weeks that summer we poured our minds into it and built this thing. Long story short though, we only got an honorable mention because the interpreter didn’t work on the judges’ computers; they were using Netscape with Sun’s Java plugin, but I had only tested in IE which at the time used Microsoft’s own JVM. Tough lesson, but the experience was priceless.

Fast forward to 2007 and I have not been so passionate about anything since. I’ve worked on some interesting problems and have done ok, but the conditions were never quite right. But this opportunity makes me feel like I did that summer of my junior year. It has all the ingredients: an idea I believe in, a capable team that I have great chemistry with, an enormous and interesting challenge, a feeling of ownership, and tremendous experience to be gained whether or not the business is a success.

Career reasons aside, it was still a very difficult decision because it means I’ll be away from Justine. The timing is especially bad because I made the decision just as she was moving in with me from Virginia. She graduated last year and had been staying with her parents doing occasional temp work while deciding how to start her career - which depended on where she would be living. She finally decided to move here a couple of months ago - just before I decided to leave. Now she’s back in VA starting the career search over again. I feel pretty bad about it, but Justine has been understanding. It’ll be hard being across the planet from her, but the plan is for me to return in about a year to set up shop in the US if we’re successful (of course if the startup fizzles I could be back much sooner than that).

Friends in VA, I’ll be back in town June 14th and will fly to Beijing on the 18th - hope to see many of you.

Justine and I went up to Lake Tahoe a couple of weeks ago for the Google ski trip. The company only pays for a one-day lift ticket, but we went up a couple of days early and stayed three nights total at the Tahoe Inn in King’s Beach (a great deal at $30/night). We did a bunch of fun things and the area is beautiful. Here are all of our photos from the trip.

Hanging out on the shore

Lake Tahoe is stunning, and we had the great fortune to be there under clear, reasonably warm skies. According to a brochure, the water is so clear you can see a white dinner plate at a depth of 80 feet. The day after we arrived, Justine and I spent part of the afternoon lounging, skipping rocks, admiring the scenery, and taking photos on the shore at King’s Beach.

Ice skating

I had only been ice skating once previously, which was several years ago, so when we went to the rink at Northstar I was pretty much starting from scratch. Justine taught me the basics again and after a couple of circuits along the rail and some hand-holding, I was able to skate without any support. By the time we left I could go reasonably fast and without looking like too much of a goon. It was fun holding hands and skating with Justine, who is much better at it and able to do fancy stuff like going backwards. I was amused and inspired by a little boy who was unphased by repeated falls, and at one point actually came over to give me some advice :] He tried to explain how to do it but this basically amounted to something like “move your feet like this.” Cute.

All-you-can-eat sushi

We got dinner one night from Hiro Sushi in King’s Beach. For $26 you can order as much sushi as you can eat for one hour. The rules are that you can’t place a new order until you’re done with the current one, you have to eat all the rice, there’s a max of two hamachi (yellowtail) orders per person, and you can’t bring back leftovers. The chef was pretty responsive and we always had food in front of us. We ordered: 3x saba (mackerel), 3x hamachi, smoked trout, anago (sea eel), unagi (fresh water eel), ankimo (monk fish liver), soft shell crab roll, rainbow roll (crab roll covered with various fish and avocado), halibut roll, spicy albacore roll, and Hawaiian roll (tuna, mango, avocado, and macadamia nuts). My favorites were the hamachi and the Hawaiian. This was easily the best sushi meal ever, and needless to say I left the place cripplingly stuffed.

Snowboarding

Neither of us had snowboarded before so we took a group lesson which taught us how to: propel ourselves on flat areas with one foot, turn, and slow/stop our descent by keeping the board perpendicular to the slope and digging the rear edge into the snow. It hadn’t snowed for a while and the surface was icy, but we did reasonably well and had a great time. The weather was so warm I shed my jacket for a while and was wearing only a t-shirt! We snowboarded into nightfall, which was better with fewer people to crash into. By the end I was able to make it down the beginner slope we were on without falling, albeit pretty slowly. The scenery was gorgeous, especially as the sun was setting, casting pink across the sky.

Snowmobiling

We took a 2-hour snowmobile tour with Lake Tahoe Adventures on the last day of our trip. It was amazing! The route was pretty tame, but the tracks left by other snowmobiles made it kind of hard to control because our machine’s skis would tend to follow the grooves, but we both got the hang of it. Riding on the back with Justine driving was actually harder than driving myself because I was afraid I’d pull her off since she’s so small. I got used to it pretty quickly though and took a bunch of photos and videos over her shoulder. During one of the rest stops, one lady’s helmet rolled down a pretty steep hill and the guide took his snowmobile down to retrieve it. It would have been great to go off road and push the machines closer to their limits - perhaps next time we’ll sign up for something more advanced.

Christmas vacation has been great. I arrived at Dulles ~3am Friday the 22nd, spent a week in NoVA, and am now in Jackson, TN visiting my dad and relatives. Highlights:

• Having lunch with Syl and Justine at Panera and catching up on Syl’s love life.
• Pot luck dinner at Hao’s place with Elaine, Justine, Syl, Rajib, Abe, Abe’s sister Diana, Vickie, Matt Mah, and Rong. Delicious food + good company + dogs = awesome time.
  
• Playing Gears of War co-op with Rong until 5am. I had intended to go home at 1:30 but we couldn’t stop.
• Last-minute Christmas shopping on Christmas eve with Mom, Andrew, and Dennis.
• Exchanging presents. I got an Xbox 360 from the family (which I asked for after playing Gears of War). From Justine and her family: a sushi book, a Christmas ornament, a gift certificate for a pedicure (not that I have bad feet, but Syl likes making me pretty :), a tie, a glass sake set, a money clip, a stuffed foxy, a $50 gift credit card, and a pair of super-rare yellow and black Asics like the ones Uma Thurman wears in Kill Bill which I had tried unsuccessfully to find in the past but Teeny somehow found.
• Getting a pedicure at Nail Pro in Fair Oaks. For the most part it felt quite nice, but when she was removing dead skin and trimming and cleaning under my nails, I was a bit tense. The scrubbing also tickled a lot. I opted for clear nail polish just for fun.
  
• Feasting on delicious leftovers at the Kwan house.
• Catching up with Junghoon and Stephen at Stephen’s house.
• Dinner at la Madeleine with Junghoon, Stephen, Chris, Matt, and Ben. 5 out of 6 members of my UVA suite from 2nd and 3rd year! All we needed was Dave to be complete, but he was in LA for work. It was still great to catch up with the old gang, and the food was pretty good! I like the self-serve arrangement because you don’t have to tip and the delicious bread+jam are unlimited.
• Lunch at Super H Mart with Carlton, Syl, and Teeny. We ordered some dishes from the in-store Korean restaurant that were outstanding. Kalbi and bibimbop are always good, and we got this beef stew with noodles that was amazing. We also tried cold, spicy noodles which weren’t so great.
• Seeing Curse of the Golden Flower with Carlton, Teeny, Syl, Cons, and Patty. I wasn’t that happy with the ending but there wasn’t a clear side to root for since each character had done something selfish. The fighting was pretty sweet though, and the scenery and cinematography were great.
• Trying unsuccessfully to make sushi. Almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. The tuna we got at Super H Mart was bad, we accidentally used sticky rice instead of sushi rice (or even regular medium grain rice) and had to use leftover rice from a day or two before, the avocados were bad and we had to make a last minute run for fresh ones, we couldn’t find a suitable quantity of roe or good pickled ginger (Super H was only selling large containers of each), we ran out of rice vinegar, and we didn’t have a good knife for cutting the salmon. By the time everything was ready, we were too hungry to actually make rolls. What we ended up with were bowls of leftover rice, Japanese seaweed/sesame seasoning, mutilated salmon, and slices of avocado and cucumber. It tasted ok but I’ve definitely done much better in the past. I’ll make it extra-good next time when I’m back in my own kitchen.