Jean's Weblog

July 15, 2010

It is 1:44am, i’m writing a blog entry in my PJ, wide awake even though i haven’t really slept for more than 3 hours in the past 24. Living on something a little more than adrenaline: we now have a new member in the household!

Tonight was the first night this week any of us has slept at home.

I plan on start a new blog for all Noah related writings so i can keep my current blog(s) still about me.  But setting up a new blog will take a little more time than i could spare at the moment. And a few of you out there has been wondering what has happened.

So here is a quick intro, and hopefully “Jean’s Weblog” will resume its usual random program when life becomes more sane.

It has been a roller coaster week. I had no idea how we had managed to pull through all these so quickly. Luckily we did and things are looking up (at least at the moment, i’m in the optimistic cycle of the mood swing).

Noah has been a model baby. Even nurses in the hospital were telling us how calm and pilot Noah has been. He rarely makes a fuss about anything and the only thing really bothers him has been hunger, even that he protests in a very restrained way.

He has this amazing highly choreographed facial expression plus elaborate hand gesture reflex that totally blew us away.  80% of his time since being born has spent with an IV tube taped to his left hand. So we always thought he only had a single hand gesture routine, which often mimic either a passionate speaker or a symphony maestro. What he couldn’t talk, he made up using his facial muscle and intricate finger language. I often said he had an obama routine where you could imagine an Obama speech was given.

But since last night when his left hand was also freed from the iv, we realized it was really a double hands gesture routine that he was excelling at. definitely a maestro.

Tonight i discovered something else, he can pull a super vivid and accurate marlon brando Godfather routine with his facial expression and his hands and shoulder. And he only does that when he was pooping.  It was hilarious.

Unfortunate Noah has been a complete night owl, to witness any of these performance, you have to be present around 2am.

July 18, 2010
There are so much i wanted to write, only if there is some kind of thoughts->words program so i can dump everything in my mind in words without actual sitting down and typing them out…

Since Thursday night, i’ve been struggling between co-oping with Noah’s feeding schedule and keeping my own sanity by sneaking in as many naps as possible. I’ve realized that if i wait till i have enough time to make a proper introduction and recording all the little things i want to say about Noah since his birth a little over 6 days ago, i would have to wait for a long long time.

so here are some vital stats:

Noah Tian-Yi Zhou (周天翼）
Born on July 12th, 2010, 15:05
Weight: 3.895Kg (8lb, 9.39 oz)
Height: 54.6cm (1′9.5″, i.e 21 and 1/2 “)
APGAR (okay, i know this is too “typical asian parent” to include such stats, but just for the fun of it. I will try not to do it again):
one min: 7
five min: 9

Since Thursday night, he has been doing better at waking up occasionally during the day too. So to give Grandma Aiqi a glimpse of what he looks like when he is happy and awake!

Holding Noah in my hands, i am still awed by this reality, it still feels like a miracle. Surreal.

Was clearing out closets over the weekend, and uncovered a past issue of New Yorker. Before discarding it to the recycle bin, i browsed through the content and read one article: “Heroes and Zeroes”. It is a book review on “Lords of Finance” which is about the world first batch of central bankers from countries like USA, UK, Germany and France.

The book and the review both sound just okay. But one sentence in the reviewer’s 2nd paragraph caught my eye. John Lanchester was trying to illustrate a point of how hard it is for ordinary people to grasp the difference figures in millions, billions and trillions.

A million seconds is less than twelve days; a billion is almost thirty-two years.

I think that’s by far the best illustration i’ve heard on the delta between a million and a billion.

Now that issue of New Yorker can go in the recycle bin.

As it happened, most of the time i need to work with people in the Far East. It exacerbates my tendency to follow a night-owl schedule: sleep late and get up late.

Recently I had to work with people on the east coast instead. Slowly I had to change my sleep pattern to be in-sync with the Right Coast. This morning was especially bad. Started dealing with emergency after emergency starting at 7am. By 11am, i already felt exhausted. The good thing about working in early morning was the entire campus was so quiet. I could concentrate on tasks at hand without disturbance. Soon I happily realized something else: that i had the entire afternoon to myself cuz the Right Coast has gone home! I went to a couple of training instead. It was kinda nice. Feeling a sense of accomplishment by noon and stay relaxed for the remainder of the day.

I could get use to this Right Coast schedule.

Speaking of the Right Coast, it is pretty freaky what happened today with the stock market!

1. SMS
140 characters limit starts with SMS.

My first encounter with SMS was at Beijing, China, 2006. Sister was visiting China a few months earlier. She loved the SMS experience so much that she bought a cheap Nokia GMS phone and told me to use it when i was there.  After she returned to the States, she tried very hard to figure out a way to SMS Chinese back to her friends in the Mainland from the US. But it didn’t work. (even today, we still can’t SMS Chinese from ATT to T-Mobile, US Carriers are so awful!)

SMS in Chinese totally rocks! Not only that everyone there SMS each other (cuz SMS is so much cheaper than a voice call, you rarely hear people yapping on their cell in public like in the US. Instead everyone was heads down doing the finger dance on the phone), but also the fact that you could pack in so much more information in 140 Chinese characters than in 140 English characters. It also helps that cellphone coverage is truly ubiquitous in China, no matter how remote you are, you are bound to have cell coverage, very unlike our experience with ATT here in the US.

I remember visiting the forbidden palace on a snowy day. Maybe because of the bad weather, the enormous palace ground was mostly desolate, hardly any visitors in sight. It was such a rarity to find oneself all alone in a place so famous! I Texted a friend in Shanghai about the atmospheric experience as i was wondering from empty courtyard to empty courtyard. She texted back her agreement that winter time is the most romantic to visit Northern China; while the south is much better during Spring time. The texting experience made that trip a lot more interesting because i could have a real time discussion with someone who was not physically present but totally understood how i felt.

Later when i met up with a friend of my sister, she showed me some SMS she saved, the ones my sister sent her while she were in Beijing during previous summer. Some were beautifully written, some were hilarious. Together they added another dimension to sister’s trip. It was like pieces of jewels in the form of words. The best part about SMS was they were spontaneous, and you often get real time response/reactions from the recipients. And the convenience of sending one SMS to a group of friends made it even more interesting.

Organizing group outings, which is almost a daily event in beijing, is also incredibly easy with SMS. Instead of yelling at your cellphone to give the address of a place 15 times, you just text it to everyone needs to be there. Piece of cake.

When i got back to the US, the SMS favor sorta just died. I couldn’t convince any of my friends or family to pay more money for SMS service. They all thought why not just pick up the phone and call? And SMS in English is not quite the same either. The ROI is drastically lower because you couldn’t pack in as many meaning to 140 characters. Also the fact most people don’t use public transportation cut down the time you really can use SMS. Because it is harder to type a msg while driving. and when you are not driving, you often have access to a computer, where you could Email or IM.

Later when i heard of twitter, my first reaction was, ah, that’s like public SMS.Since i can’t convince my friends/family to join SMS, twitter is also out of the question.

2. small groups of think-alike vs. the masses
i read about Jason Byrne’s ah-ha moments on twitter(http://isaa.ch/1b). One of his major points was revolved around getting to know a small group of people who has similar taste. he is worried that as subscription size grow, that intimacy and dynamic will be lost. a trendy place can remain trendy only when it is relatively less known. once your granny heard of it and started going, then it is no longer cool.

i knew exactly what he meant, because i have already experienced the full cycle of elation to disappointment on a different site, where i joined during its initial launch, met quite a few like minded people from all kinds of geo/profession, the percentage of high quality people was really astonishing. What’s more, most of them were content creators, and they generated interesting/original content. then the word got out, the site became popular, the average quality of people dropped, most of these new comers were pure consumers. Dilution of people’s quality and interests changed the dynamic, most of the old-timers remained subscribers, except they are now less active, and become consumers too. The only difference is whenever they do create something, they are still of higher quality than the masses. It is a pity that somehow facing the massive incoming consumers made originally active creators dormant.

I don’t think this is a unique problem to twitter. All the web 2.0 sites face the same issue. I wonder if there is a way to keep these small active group’s spirit intact within a massive popular site, kinda like keeping a small community/neighborhood intact within a metropolitan. Both are hard problems that currently dont’ seem to present a solution.

In the physical city, once a neighborhood becomes interesting, say after a group of artists moved in, yuppies will follow and the housing price rise and the original artists got priced out while they were the ones who made the place interesting in the first place. i.e. Gentrification.

On the web, it is not housing price that forced out the original voices. It was more like the “noise” or the “clutter” of less-interesting voices that silenced people.

3. Local news
This is what i find Twitter so unique: “Real Time Search-Twitter FTW“. It is a new form of media platform for the masses to report news around them. Things that major news outlets aren’t interested, and local news outlet doesn’t have enough bandwidth to cover 24/7.

That’s also why i think of twitter less like a social platform.

For anyone who reads anything at all on the English speaking web, yesterday was a day of bombardment of the new Apple Hype – the iPad (i’ve finally become desensitized when reading it on the screen, but i still cringe when hear this word pronounced on TV, what an awful name).

I remain skeptical. For all those who are hailing this product as revolution and life changing, i have one simple question. Other than making the internet more like TV, what else does it do? In other words, it makes the “consuming” act of web surfing more pleasurable (maybe, since it is so big i still can’t imagine carrying this everywhere i go).

What exactly does it do to help people CONTRIBUTE to the web? What exactly does it help people to CREATE something for the web?

My biggest frustration with all these new devices, iphone, android, or kindle has been the awkwardness of “writing”. I want to be able to jog down notes, thoughts, and compose something on the go. So far none of these super popular devices have provided an acceptable means for that. A notebook, a paperback and a pen have still been the most convinient, light-weighted, and versatile tools.

Instead, i find myself more and more like a “walking potato” holding these devices, consuming, consuming and consuming, while producing little. It is passive and encourage laziness and lame complaints of being bored.

When writing i still need to turn to my laptop keyboard. Writing makes me feel active and it energize me.

Until someone can prove to me that iPad can revolutionize the “production” part of the web, all i can say is …

doh.
—–
Update 4/6/2010: Quite a few interesting discussion on this topic in twitter land. Check out some of them from http://twitter.com/stop on 4/5/2010. The conclusion there seems to be iPad is not designed primarily for content creation, but for content consumption. But that doesn’t mean people can’t create content using iPad in some form. It also has dependency on the type of content you would like to create and your preference with tools. As Zeze pointed out in the comment, she could use iPad to draw sketches freehand because the screen is bigger. and http://twitter.com/ahbei mentioned he prefer touch UI for jotting down notes.

So i should qualify my argument to my own preference, which is physical keyboard. Because i type so much faster than writing using a pen. So touch UI is not for me. Also i’m mainly a writing person, not a drawing person. I should adopt @stop’s point, “Given the circumstance that I prefer to use computer as my web content creation tool, and my content creation is mainly limited to photo editing and blog writing; I’m not in iPad’s target audience.”

*
Wake up to a rainy morning, soft warm rain. Forecast is promising many sunny days after this rain cloud passes. Shuttle driver is joking about reindeer. happy morning.

**
Turned out it was only raining in the City. It was dry when i got off the shuttle and promptly forgot my umbrella on the shuttle.

***
My small “London Fog” fold up umbrella with black, white, blue and pink cats. I’ve had it for over four years. It went with me to Paris and Pompeii.

As I walked over to our evening shuttle stop and wondering whether i should call ZM to come and pick me up when i got home since it is raining in the city again. I saw the shuttle driver from my morning bus, he was walking into the “Lost and Found” office, with my umbrella!

All is well ends well.

I am acutely aware that many hours when i used to read have now been taken up by web surfing.  This simple substitution tends to mislead me in thinking only the access point of information has shifted, from a paper based book to a computer screen, everything else stays the same.

But that’s not true.

When it comes to the recipient’s mental state, web surfing resembles television more than it does a book. It is passive rather than active.

90% of the things i come across during my web surfing leaves my mind, at best placid, at worst a complete blank; while 90% of my book-reading fascinates me and gives me the urge to write something, to note down something, or to express something. My mind is so much more active while reading than while web surfing.

Why is that?

Is it because web publishing is easier, so the content are largely blah? While paper publishing is much more demanding, and as a result, most of things on paper are more condensed, more precise, better written, more interesting?

Or am I better at identify good readings on paper than on the web? as a result i spent more time browsing blend content on the web?

Or maybe the internet simply resembles TV program more than it does a book. It is more varied, with lower quality, but more addictive than a book.