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Yet Another Week In Seattle

Jan 20 - Jan 25, #1109, Hyatt Regency Bellevue, window facing west, over the hills down the road is the Lake Washington.

The only task was to attend the ExPo-Tech program. All the time I explained it as a training, although it is stressed as a journey at the kicked off meeting months before. I totally agree with Karen that it is so much more than a training. Training usually gives one person some things like knowledge, skills, techniques. To talk about journey, it mainly means you are part of it other than standing outside. Here you learn, you experience, you grow. The only difference from general journey is that no goal is predefined. The only commitment is our time. The achievements totally depend every individual.

The content focuses on personality, networking, and communications. It added some about self-awareness as well. The 3.5-day-long time was full of these bunch of things, which made me exited, surprised, and a little bit tired. Hardly can I spell out every details. Let me try to highlight some points which impressed me a lot.

CREDIBILITY. I became to recognizing the importance of it as soon as I learn about this word, which is definitely one of the core values for the western people. To my understanding so far, it is kind of capability that others can expect something on you, although it is not necessary they do require that from you. They know you can make it. They believe you can achieve it. No promises, no conditions, only credit. Also, that reminded me that the whole western world is build on a solid credit base. Credibility is just like the sun rising everyday. I'd ever taken honesty as the most important thing to me. From now on, it is upgraded to credibility. Where is your sun? Is it rising tomorrow?

YOUR BUSINESS V.S. MY BUSINESS. It's well-known that the western people do not consider others as we Chinese do. Basically they are described more self-centric. They enjoy living isolate. They care about privacy. They break into your speech suddenly if they have question. They drive the children out once they are 18. They do not even take care of the elders. Is it true? Perhaps mainly yes. However, you may also find some other interesting things. They respect your greatness. They donate a lot. They serve the society. They enjoy being volunteers. They approach to help you out as soon as you are lost. They never hesitate show up the greatest smile to you. What's up? Why these things look so different from each other? I suppose they are clearly separate things of what's your business and what's my business. Never step on others' feet. Nor boring me by attempting to do me a favor without permission. Giving someone a hand is greatly praised. But, it must be necessary and the privacy is not violated.

CULTURE DIFFERENCE. It is even more complicated than that I can imagine. One game from Day 1 is to select top 6 personal important words from a bunch of cards labeled with words such as curiosity, passion, family, innovation, integrity, health, blabla. Possible you can figure out that curiosity must be have for the western guys. However, can you imagine that family is seldom included in their selection? Neither is the health. We randomly selected a partner to share the top 6 words with each other. It turned out to be a very small intersection.  The paragraph above can add to this point as well. Why it seems somewhat wired to us? It is roughly because the difference between cultures.

LANGUAGE PROBLEM. Again and again I suffered from the fact that English is my second language. Thinking, translating, then communicating. There's an extra step, which make me mad, especially in the small group discussion. Conversation kept flowing quickly from time to time. It is really hard to concentrate on both the idea and the language. Whatever, everything around language stuffs were improved more or less. I had no choice but try my best to catch up. One more personal trick is that speak aloud is really more important and more acceptable than murmured without language problem, especially for the western people. They will pass you if you cannot be heard clearly twice.

[-- Main part stops here. Some other interesting things below --]

Seattle was clear and shinning. But San Francisco was raining.

Watched one NBA game. Houston Rocket V.S. Seattle Super Sonic. 109:107 Yao was not bad.

Had a tour on the Museum of Flight. Amazing. 

Bought two books.

1. Yoga - The Path to Holistic Health by B.K.S Iyengar.
2. The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Happy Birthday to Min

　斯地哪得度波劫
　爱把新桃徒相叠
　是非乘除存自在
　守心翼翼何患耶

忽然又想起东岳庙里林林总总的衙司——掌管福禄寿喜的，门庭若市，径有余香；而收纳祸端虫豸之类的，则是门可罗雀，尘比钱肥。人心之趋利避害可见一斑。那些泥胎寄托的、受了香火的、天上地下的神仙鬼怪们，是安安然各享其供了还是付之一笑呢——纵使铜骡子如镜，新桃符似垒，也不比现世的一缕善缘罢？人间的美丑善恶，终会回到一个对应的归宿，乘除分明，毫厘不爽。为人必守心翼翼，行事须举步兢兢，年底是小结的时候，且留一个注脚在这里，并祝福天下的好人一生平安。

祝张敏生日快乐，天天快乐，永远快乐。

http://ditu.live.com

Please check it out. I will write more about it some later.

http://ditu.live.com

[update: December 14th, 2007]

Virtual earth is a map service already deployed in US for years. Also, there're lots of local map services in P.R.China. Now, the local map service specified for P.R.China is going live from Microsoft. It is developed by the VE team in Windows Live (China).

Although live search is coming better and better, the virtual earth is now rushing ahead. I haven't used it too much. However, I believe it is a great product which can compete against the ones from other competitors. I know the guys in the VE China very well. They are excellent, crazy, full of passion. They devote very much to the baby product. I do know the difficulties of make it happen in this country as a foreign company. Both the tech things and the non-tech things. After all, after months, it happens. And, it will be better and better.

Usually, I used go2map, mapbar, mapabc, 51ditu, the map services from baidu and google while search somewhere in China. Now, I have another good choice. To be frank, I do not think the accuracy could be very different across so many map services. Especially in this country, too much changes are happening day after day. G, a super guy in VE China team, kept talking to me, his commitment is to achieve the top accuracy. His confidence impressed me a lot. And, I do know he is well qualified to achieve this goal because of the strong tech background and high level view. To talk about the user experience of this map service, it is my favorite feature, especially of the transit service. No longer type in, search and then route, Click-route instead. Open the map, right click your location, set as the start point, right click the target location, set as the stop point. That's ALL. It is really straight forward, really COOL as well. Look into the results, the transit points are marked with dash lines and you are kindly informed a walk is possibly necessary. It looks like a service provided by human other than by machine. It is really awesome, isn't it? I like these features even though I seldom take a bus nowadays. While I introduced this service to Min yesterday, she performed several tests, which turned to be really difficult to make a satisfied route by machine. One typical scenario is to find a transit plan between two points WITHIN Tsinghua (Haha, this naughty girl). Know what? The transit plans returned are almost the same as we expected, even the two points are somewhat far from the gates. Can't you help loving such a service?

地圖服務在中國大陸已經遍地開花。微軟早已擁有自己的地圖服務，但在中國一直是個空白。現在，微軟中國終于也交出了自己的答卷，這就是http://ditu.live.com。

這是一個優秀的服務。我尤其喜歡其中的公交換乘功能。與以往的類似服務不同，查公交換乘，可以不需要先搜索出發和到達的地點，而只需要直接在圖上用右鍵就可以直接標記出發和到達的地點了。對於並不知道確切的車站分佈的情形，這顯然是非常有用的，當然，方便更是不用説了。此外，如果中途需要換乘，那麽在換乘點會用虛綫標出兩個車站的位置，距離和行走的估計——這個設計確實很人性化。尤其在北京這樣的城市，往往一個站名在多條綫路上會對應多個不同的地點，是不是在馬路同側不必說，單是距離有時候就有夠人走的，還不算走錯的情形，而有了這個換乘點的信息，是多麽方便的事情啊？真貼心！雖然我已經很少去乘公交車，不過，這仍然是我最喜歡的功能之一。

關於地圖數據的精確度再説兩句——其重要性自不必言，實現難度也是周知的，尤其在中國北京這樣變化日新月異的地方。我不敢說微軟地圖服務的精確度和其他相比會如何，畢竟，數據本身的準確從根本上我們作不了主，我們的工作與合作夥伴的努力是緊密相關的。但是，一個地圖的核心開發人員G，我的好朋友，一直對我說，他就是要做中國精確度一流的地圖，這是他的承諾。我深知這是我能期許和等待的承諾，因爲我了解他，了解他們做地圖的一群人，他們有這個信心，更重要的有這個能力達到這個目標。他們了解中國，他們有微軟支持，他們有合作夥伴的幫助，需要的只是時間和耐心了。

昨天，向敏介紹這個服務的時候，她頗刁難了一下公交換乘。比如，在清華“裏面”選兩個地方，讓地圖找出一個換乘方案（這丫頭有夠狠）哈，一開始我可沒期望機器能夠得出讓人滿意的結果。但看到方案后，還是讓人很滿意的，不信可以親自試試哦。:p

Ocean Apart

原来，有了家，离开家，开始想家的感觉是这样的。
手指敲出来的是惦记和思念，琐碎但真实。
几次想抓起电话，还是最终放下，
忍不住地泪流满面，哽咽而无法言语。

Javascript: Number <--> UTC

<script>
  document.write(
    (new Date(112345920*1000)).toUTCString());
  document.write(Date.UTC(2007, 06, 07)/1000);
</script>

Attention:

1.  The month is ZERO-based while invoke UTC.
   
2. Millisecond, other than Second, is the functions variables

Reference: Date reference from w3schools.

Movie: SECRET [不能說的秘密]

I love this movie.

 

--

Update[10 Aug. 2007]:

Watched the movie again last night. Even love it more.