Conversation with M and D

So I called M today to wish her a happy birthday and D picked up the phone. The enlightening phone conversation went like this:

Me: Hi D. What are you doing for M's birthday?
D: Did you forget M's birthday today?
Me: Noooooo. Did you?
D: Nooooooooooooo. Did you?
Me: D, you forgot M's birthday, didn't you?
D: Noooooooooooooooooo. You did.
Me: No I didn't, I just called home to wish M a happy birthday.
D: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Such a deep conversation!

Academic integrity

Here's a rare serious post on my blog. I recently went to the big device conference and saw that a paper was published by a group at Stanford (by two big name EE professors). The professors (and their grad students, of course) were reporting on some simulations for a particular device. However, students in my research group had found similar results earlier, and chose not to publish these simulation results without experimental data.

Now here's the bad part. The main professor on the paper is in charge of a research center involving many research groups from different universities. He is also the Chair of the conference that I attended. He had heard a presentation from my research advisor during one of the research center updates - basically, this prof knew what one of the students in my group had studied yet still decided to publish his own paper. Not only that, the other professor on the paper was previously a professor at my school before moving to Stanford, and had a close working relationship with our group. Talk about dishonesty.

That's just not right. BOYCOTT STANFORD. They conduct some dirty business.

Pro-Bowlers from the Bay Area teams

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... This had me laughing for a while:

"The Bay Area's NFL teams haven't been stellar on offense this season, but they're certainly skilled when it comes to giving the ball back to the opponent.

Power and placement, along with the NFL's best net averages, secured Pro Bowl berths for 49ers punter Andy Lee and Raiders punter Shane Lechler."

You can find the full San Francisco Chronicle article here.

Leafs are dumb.....

Brad Boyes is on track for a 50 goal season....of course not with the Leafs.

The Leafs just love to trade away their first round picks or first round choices for old foggies. Come on you stupid Leafs, trade some of the old guys for draft picks. Maybe then you can win a Cup!

Oh, another thing the Leafs seem oblivious to is the fact that there are prospects from Ontario. Hey, Ferguson et al., you are allowed to draft players from Ontario. They don't always have to come from Europe!

Japanese and English...again

Yet another display of Japanese second language abilities....



the guy on the video is my hero!

Also, listen to this one!

This one is another funny "Learn to speak English" commercial...

Learning English...

So, being in Europe, I am amazed how well some people speak English, especially here in Germany. Maybe the French are not as good, but in any case the average French person speaks better English than the average American/Englishman speaks French. And the northern European countries are amazing at English...Denmark, Holland, Norway, etc.

So I guess English is indeed the international language, and learning it is important....
If one needs further motivation, you can see this:




Now that we've established that English is important to learn, what is the most effective way to learn it?

I vote for this method:



he he he he he....no wonder Japanese people speak English so well!

Anyway, once that's done, unfortunate situations like this one can be avoided!
Win-win situation!

Genius relatives...

I was recently went to a conference and was able to meet up with some of our relatives (who will not be named) who live nearby. One of them is a genius, but I have proof now of how much of a genius he is.

I went to dinner with family on Sunday night and then they were kind enough to drop me off at my hotel. They turned on the GPS to see directions to the hotel, but my genius family member decided to ignore the directions. The entire time. Haha... I think he ignored 4-5 directions, saying that he was able to get back to the hotel. And lo and behold, he got me to my hotel! What a genius!

Name Change

So I was able to get a radio interview, but it was in Mandarin.

You can see the summary here.

The interviewer wrote to me in English and addressed me by my English name, but as the interview was in Mandarin, she got my name wrong (she never really asked me for my Taiwanese name, and I'm not sure where she got the new name from).

Apparently, my name is now:
賴宏吉

Who would've thought?

STUPID NFL TV Rules

Really really stupid....

I watch NFL (and even better, College Football) on the awesome Slingbox that my sister setup, so that I get the TV feed from her local cable. So this Sunday, I had an interest to watch as the early game, Chargers vs. Titans. But of course its a local station in the Bay area, so CBS instead is broadcasting Raiders vs. Packers.

Ok, this is reasonable, but I didn't want to watch 4-8 Raiders being blownout by the 10-2 Packers (38-7). So I would like to watch maybe an NFC game instead...like maybe: Eagles vs. Giants (NFC East traditional rivalry), or Cowboys vs. Lions (playoff implications). But NOOOOO, NFL stupid rules prevent FOX in the Bay area to broadcast something up against the Raiders game on CBS.

For the late game, I'd really like to watch the Steelers play the Patriots, (Go Steelers!), but NOOOO, NFL stupid rules prevent CBS from broadcasting something against the 49ers game (who are 3-9) against the Vikings (6-6).

STUPID STUPID STUPID

Is there any wonder, more people are watching NCAA football instead of the NFL? Hey idiots in the NFL commissioners' office, stop being idiots and let us watch more than a 4-8 or a 3-9 team every single week!

BOOOOOOOOOO! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Laptop for Thought

A couple of device group folks were talking about the "One Laptop Per Child" initiative and someone brought up that Intel decided to organize a similar initiative to compete, called "Classmate PC". Both initiatives are developing cheap but usable laptops to kids in poor countries to help education standards.

Funny that an initiative that has such noble intentions ends up being a competition. Regardless, having both initiatives should in theory help the world out a little more... right?

Anyway, as we were discussing these programs, I was looking around the coffee shop and almost every single person there had a nice laptop (mostly MacBooks, some HPs and some Dells). I encourage everyone to check out the laptops being developed cheaply for these kids. Best of luck to these programs!