LA Trip Bullets

A week ago we spent a week in LA to visit friends and family, eat food, and visit the Getty Center and Warner Brothers studio. Been a busy week at work, but finally had the chance to upload pics (Facebook). Couple of quick thoughts and observations...

• It's a great blessing to be able to get together with old friends around the dinner table and talk about everything under the sun.  We got to converse about topics ranging from parenting (the way we were brought up and the way we want to bring up our kids), Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour mark for developing expertise, to our own issues and conflicts dealing with boundaries with our parents.  Lots of laughter and insight.
• Every time I go down to SoCal, I'm amazed at the sprawl of the area and the scope of multiple millions of people... who all want to be on the road at the same time.  People have to be asleep by 10 and out the door by 6 to get to the office on time at 8.  If we lived down there, the prospect of facing a 45-90 minute drive every commute would make me pull my hair out, and would be enough to discourage ever going out for fun.
• After going to Italy and visiting the Uffizi Gallery, showcasing the history of art from medieval times through the Renaissance, I've gained a greater appreciation for painting.  The audio guides explained how the painters during the Renaissance were experimenting and making breakthroughs in being able to depict accurate images with correct proportions in the fore-, mid-, and backgrounds, and going to the Getty, we could also see how artists in the 19th century were able to "perfect" realistic painting techniques before moving into the Impressionist period.  I suppose painting is one of those things you don't really start to enjoy until your 30s.
• Being avid Top Chef fans, we were disappointed that season 6 winner Michael Voltaggio's new restaurant "Ink." hadn't opened up yet, so we settled for going to his old place of employment, The Bazaar.  Most interesting dishes were the Philly cheesesteak and the Caprese salad, both re-imagined using molecular gastronomy to look and feel different but taste similar to what we were expecting.
• The Warner Brothers studio tour was our concession to an LA-specific thing we could do, since we didn't have the energy to get the most out of a Disneyland trip.  Interesting things we learned about the TV and movie-making business:
• Clint Eastwood has an almost-exclusive agreement with WB to be his movies' studio.
• The same outdoor sets have been used to depict urban New York and other cities since the 1930s.  To change the epoch, they change things like doorknobs and fire hydrants.
• Also, all the outdoor sets are fiberglass fronts on top of wood awnings and not brick and mortar.
• They build houses with two fronts rather than a front/back because there's no real need for a backyard in filming.
• We got to go onto the set of "Chuck" because we told our tour guide we were fans, so we saw the Buy More back room (with the cage) and the apartment complex... pretty cool.

A few thoughts on marriage

Today, my lovely wife and fellow parent-to-be celebrates her birthday. As we enjoyed food and dessert with a few of her friends, as well as looking forward to going out ourselves tomorrow, I'm reminded that marriage is this neat and mysterious thing.

I remember the long conversations late at night during college and after graduation, musing about our future spouses and the age-old question, "How do you know he/she's the one?" And while you might chalk it up to a checklist of qualities, a vision of flowers and sunshine, hormones, a voice from God, or some indefinable feeling, ultimately, we don't really know for sure. We just know what we know about each other, make a commitment based on that, then spend the rest of our lives working on making that commitment more and more sure day by day. Kind of like faith.

I know from friends' experiences and books that our marriage will be tested, perhaps severely, as we transition into this next stage of our lives, but I'm still glad that we get to do this together.

Happy birthday, honey.

7 Billion People in 2011

Sometime in 2011, the world's population will surpass 7 billion... and Baby Lin just might be the one to push it over that mark!

Interesting video from National Geographic depicting what 7 billion looks like, and the impact on resources, etc:



Direct link (for Facebook)

I hope our child will be able to bless and impact others more than he/she consumes.  Speaking of which, hopefully we'll learn the gender this week.

Reactions to "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"

Since we're hoping to enter the realm of parenthood later this year, I've been following the various links and comments across Facebook on Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. As an Asian, an American, and also a Christian, there's an interesting confluence and clash of values, goals, and styles showing up. Some of my own brief reactions and thoughts on the article, and the numerous followup articles springing up all over the web...

• First, thanks to Andrew N and Andrew W for posting this comment thread that includes an email reply from the author, Amy Chua, to an upset reader, pointing out that she did not choose the title of the WSJ article excerpt, and that the excerpt is not necessarily indicative of the content of the book it is promoting.  So, no need to demonize the author as this is all a (very successful!) marketing stunt.  Still, a good topic to consider.
• Things that most everyone seem to agree on as good goals and principles for successful parenting of one's children:
• Development of a strong work ethic, delayed gratification, and other good habits (quote: "Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America.").
• Equip them to be able to be independent and self-supporting as adults.
• Discipline and tough love are often needed to teach/direct children to what is best for them and their future because they can't see it themselves.
• However, the various articles linked above are filled with testimonies of the damage that can be inflicted by the extreme aspects (in particular, insults, belittling, unreasonably high standards, and lack of praise/satisfaction) of the "Chinese" parenting style mentioned in the article:
• Chinese women have one of the highest rates of suicide and depression.
• Products of this childhood often include high achievers and materially successful adults who hate their parents.
• Personally, while I grew up with parents who helped set high goals for my brother and I, they generally did not resort to insults and belittling as motivators.  Because of this, I never doubted my parents' love and trusted that they knew what was best for me.  I would try to work hard to delight them because I wanted to.  I hope to model that for my kids too.  Some of the things they did that I can remember:
• Spending a lot of time patiently, firmly, but kindly teaching and working with me on things until I "got it".
• Praising effort as well as success - something that I think may be relatively unusual about my family.
• I'd like to believe that the "strengths-based" literature that has been gaining popularity in the business world over the last two decades or so can be applied to parenting as well.  After the development of good habits and character (honesty, integrity), it seems to make sense that since each person has innate natural gifts and talents, after getting to a "competent" level in other areas, it is more worthwhile to hone and develop these natural gifts and talents rather than spending an inordinate amount of time becoming "Excellent" in everything.  As several people have pointed out, academic excellence can lead to good doctors, lawyers, and engineers, but doesn't develop leaders and innovators.
• This means that at some point in the kid's development, in addition to character and work ethic development, we need some way of identifying gifts and talents to develop... which seems like the freedom, and perhaps the motivation, to experiment is needed.
• Brian L pointed out, and I agree, that another aspect of parenting I'd aspire to based on my own experience is helping my kid to avoid regrets later in life, because as adults with more experience, we can see and give personal testimony to things we wish we'd have done differently.  Two personal examples:
• I didn't necessarily enjoy piano growing up, but it did give me a solid background and foundation in music that has helped nurture a great love and appreciation for many different types of music and instruments today. In the long view, I'm grateful that my parents introduced me to it.
• I wish I'd have made more of an effort to learn Mandarin when I had more opportunity and more ability to do so, and I'll probably make that known to my kids.  Incidentally, it seems that while learning a language similar to English (like Spanish or French) is do-able in high school, learning an entirely different language like Mandarin is best undertaken either when very young when the brain is still developing, or intensively in college when there is greater desire.
• Finally, as a Christian, it is sobering to consider that my relationship with my kids will likely be the biggest influence on their view of their relationship with God.  Judging by the comments and testimonies I've seen from Asian American Christian friends on this topic, many of us are still saddled with baggage from our pasts with overbearing parents and with Asian churches who seem to espouse similar values of conditional love based on obedience and success.  
• How can we avoid this?  I agree with Byron that one thing to be conscious of is that insults, berating, belittling, shame, etc. as motivation might be effective motivators, but at the cost of relationship.  That being said, given human nature, I think it's almost unavoidable that at one point or another, the patience of a parent will give way to these things.  In that case, it's equally as important to be able to apologize to our children and ask forgiveness, and not just assume that the ends justify the means.
• All in all, I hope and aspire that the unconditional love, acceptance, and approval that is available to me through Christ can be the foundation for all my relationships, especially with my children - and that the unconditional love they receive from their heavenly and earthly fathers can be the foundation for their lives as well.

2010 Italy Recap: Overview

It's been two weeks since we got back from 2 weeks and 2 days in Italy.  Awesome trip!  Highly encourage anyone who can make their way over to Italy to spend a good amount of time soaking in the sights, sounds, history, and food of this very-California-like country.

I'll do my best to summarize the highlights and lowlights of our time, that'll hopefully be entertaining for you, dear reader, as well as providing a resource to anyone trying to plan their own trip sometime down the line.

Itinerary
... with day trips noted.  Links go to the photo albums for that site:

• 2010-09-27 to 2010-09-30 - Rome
• 2010-10-01 to 2010-10-03 - Sorrento
• 2010-10-02 - Pompeii day trip
• 2010-10-03 - Amalfi Coast, Amalfi, and Positano day trip
• 2010-10-04 - Naples
• 2010-10-05 to 2010-10-09 - Florence
• 2010-10-07 - Brief outing to Siena and San Gimignano
• 2010-10-09 to 2010-10-12 - Venice
• 2010-10-10 - Murano, Burano, Torcello day trip
• 2010-10-11 - Verona day trip

We got a pretty good hotel and travel deal from Costco Travel that covered hotels and transportation for Rome, Florence, and Venice, with a few sightseeing tours included.  Since we wanted to visit the coast as well, we built in the side trip farther south to Sorrento and Naples.

Unlike some guides, we scheduled our trip going from south to north, rather than north to south.  We actually liked this a bit better because we packed most of the sights and high-intensity cities at the beginning (Rome and Naples in particular) when we had more energy, and were able to relax and chill more towards the end in Florence and Venice, as we got ready to come home.

Overall City Ranking

1. Florence
• our favorite because it had the best combination of interesting stuff to see and learn about (Renaissance history, art, and science), food, and relaxed atmosphere - wide streets so you don't feel the crowds, plenty of open piazzas to people watch.
2. Rome
• second favorite because of the fascinating Roman Empire and all the associated history - the scope of the empire, innovations in government and finance, the birth and corruption of the Christian church.
3. Pompeii
• amazing to see 1st century Roman civilization frozen in time, and realizing that it's not that much different than our own.
4. Sorrento
• made for a relaxing home base to explore Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast.  Some good restaurants too.
5. Venice
• iconic canals, but kinda pricey and super crowded with tourists coming in every day off gigantic cruise ships.
6. Amalfi/Positano
• beautiful coast towns with great views, but it didn't really feel like "Italy" considering everyone was a tourist.  We heard more English than Italian here.
7. Naples
• Manhattan on steroids, or Italy at its most concentrated.  Very few tourists, so we stuck out; someone attempted to pickpocket my backpack.  However, the birthplace of pizza, and we had some in the restaurant most consider to be the originator.

In the next few posts, I'll go into more detail with pics.

Time capsule

Had a little bit of a dive into my recent history today as I cleaned out some drawers in my desk.  Since I had left this at my folks' place when I moved out in 2005, all the items in it were from late college (1998-ish) to 2005.  The things I found reminded me a bit of what life was like in college, missions, and in my early twenties out of college, and the friends that I saw more often back then.  Things I found included:

Wedding programs from:
- Jason/Iris
- Andy/Pam
- Torence/Nicole

Missions support letters from:
- Danny Y
- Jason/Iris
- Wilma
- Dan/Tina
- Jason K
- Andy H
- Hideyo
- Ivana

Various thank you and birthday cards from:
- my old worship team
- James/Luwen's baby shower
- aforementioned weddings
- my missions team NYC 2000

A church bulletin from 2005.  I noticed that only 7 out of the 22 names listed on the bulletin in any capacity were still at the church, which made me somewhat sad.

A playbill for "Rent"

Letter I wrote to myself on 12/31/2000, intended to be opened up a year later.  At the time I had just finished my "0.5" out of my 4.5 years at Cal and was getting ready to move into the working world.

Fantasy basketball cheat sheet, with the top five: Shaq, Duncan, TMac, Kobe, Webber

Various Bible studies that I thought were good enough to keep but not smart enough to organize in a usable way.

Stack of business cards from my first job, as well as various paychecks/commendations etc.

3 packs 7-8 years old gum

1997 Cal AACF Brother's Appreciation invitation.  People put a lot of effort into those and it's still pretty cool to remember.

Spain 2005 paraphernalia (guidebook, ticket stubs, maps, etc.)

My 2003 layoff notice from my previous company and my hiring forms into a startup

Fun to look back every so often.

What happens when a basketball bounces off a finger...

... it becomes a little more difficult to grip things.

It's been 2 months since I regularly posted in June, will aim to have some updates later this week.

Chrome vs. Firefox

Although I'm generally a Google products enthusiast, I'm wondering if I should be a bit more antsy about monopolizing so much of my cloud information on one company's servers.  Still, in general my experience with their products tends to be better than most of the competitors, so it's hard to stay away.

Maybe a year and a half ago, I switched from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome as my primary web browser, but I still use both on a daily basis.  Just for fun, I figured I'd chronicle my reasons for switching and the pluses and minuses for each.

Why Chrome?
+++ The biggest feature that Chrome has that Firefox hasn't implemented yet is a separate process for each tab, and for various sub-processes/functions.  This was my primary pain point with Firefox that Chrome solved - whenever a page in FF got unwieldy or started running away with memory and CPU, I had to restart the entire browser.  In Chrome, I can pull up the process manager and kill Flash or the offending webpages, then refresh them, without losing all my good tabs.  This feature alone, and the amount of mental well-being it provides, was enough for me to switch.
+ The tabbed interface for Chrome has some nice features - being able to drag a tab into a new window lets me group like tabs together much more easily than in FF.

Why Firefox?
+ A feature of Firefox that I miss in my daily web-browsing now is the "Awesomebar".  In Firefox, the location bar will do on-the-fly pattern matching in your history, bookmarks, etc. and it is incredibly useful to pull up pages that you looked at a few days ago.  Chrome is beginning to implement this and it's gotten better since the first release, but FF is still better.
+ Another FF feature that is easier to use than on Chrome is the keyword bookmarking feature - basically, saving various searches as keywords so that I can go to the location bar and type "wiki [search term]" to find something on wikipedia.  Chrome can do this but it isn't as easy to implement.
+ I was never that into the multitude of extensions that FF provides, but it's nice to have the option.
+ The history on FF is much easier to navigate than on Chrome.  Oddly enough coming from Google, the search function in history didn't seem to work well - there's no hierarchy of ranking search results (i.e., if I'm looking for "NBA" in the history, I don't want it to return all the non-NBA ESPN pages I browsed just because there was an "NBA" term somewhere in the text of the page).
+ Interestingly enough, Yahoo! Mail works really badly on Chrome, while working just fine on FF.
+ Finally, FF tends to be tested and supported by more commercial/financial websites, since it was the first "successful" big competitor to IE, so sometimes I'll switch to FF or IE for personal finance stuff, etc.

Anyway, those are some of my reasons.  If FF were to ever implement the features I mentioned in Chrome above... I might switch back.

Here are Lifehacker's reasons for one or the other.  Which one do you prefer?

I ain't got time to (not) bleed

One of my favorite "community service" type activities that I've taken up these last few years is blood donation.  Since I'm in OK shape, not overly squeamish about needles, and have humongous veins running down my arms, I try to go every couple of months - my last trip was a week ago, and over the last few years have been able to donate over a gallon of A+ blood (my blood type, not my perception of my blood's quality, mind you).

I typically visit the Stanford Blood Center at Hillview.  Here are a few reasons why...
- The technicians are pretty good - never had any bruising or mistakes.  I probably make their lives easier with my prominent left elbow vein though.
- They have free wi-fi - I can connect to work through my laptop during the wait/procedure.
- Since I've moved up to doing a "double red blood cell" donation (takes twice as long, need to wait twice as long before coming back, hopefully twice as useful!), they've given out some free T-shirts.  You can never have too many T-shirts.
- The cookies in the break room are quite tasty.
- The cherry on top of this bloody sundae is that if you donate on Mondays, they will often have a promotion giving away 1 (or sometimes more!) AMC Silver Ticket vouchers.

I highly encourage you to donate!  It feels good to "change the oil" in the body every so often, so to speak.

On a somewhat related note, any action movie fan should be able to identify where I got my inspiration for this post title (which came to mind as I had the inspiration for the blood topic).  Here's the other quote that came to mind:

"Wipe yourself off.  You're bleeding."

NBA thoughts

Couple of quick thoughts on the recent NBA draft and the upcoming free agency period...

• The Warriors make me sad.  Out of Udoh, Randolph, Wright, Biedrins, and Turiaf, considering a big man rotation is 3 guys playing big minutes and maybe one other backup, I definitely pick Turiaf (good contract, solid locker room guy, good defense).  I have no idea of who I pick out of the other four.
• Since the sale is taking so long, I think the W's will probably have to write off all hope of improving much this season.  If they can get the team sold and get a competent ownership/front office in place, then spend the season developing Curry and the other young talent, that's about as good as we can hope for.
• Warriors master plan: 
• Sell to Ellison
• Hire a younger, competent GM who apprenticed for other successful front offices like Presti or Morey
• Sign Lebron since he's buddies with Curry.  Okay, maybe that won't happen.
• I hope Lebron goes back to the Cavs.  From what I've read about his impact on the city, and the tortured psyche of Cleveland sports fans, it would be the best for the general level of happiness in the world, methinks.  The Cavs' beat writer made the good point that most of the current Cavs fans are young (teens to 30-somethings) who aren't old enough to remember the old frustrations of the Browns, Cavs, and Indians, so Lebron leaving would create a lot of embittered people.
• That being said, my head guesses that he'd most likely go to Chicago.  Too much talent, and they could pick up a PF too with the cap room available.
• I think Wade will entice Bosh or Amare to come to Miami.  Whoever doesn't goes to Chicago.
• I'm interested in seeing the Spurs make a run at Mike Miller, but they won't be able to do anything without moving Jefferson's contract, so not much will happen.