As part of trying to adopt a better work schedule and feel healthier, I’ve set aside time on Mondays and Thursdays for going to the gym.  I’ve been going for about two weeks now.  I started off by doing the usual routine:  running on the treadmill for 10-20 minutes and then weighlifting.  I noticed though that there were various classes that the gym had.  Yoga classes in particular interested me so I asked one of the staff (there’s virtually no English) if I could join.  Sure, she said, I could join and there was no additional fee.  Great.

I went yesterday for the first time.  The teacher was a guy in his late twenties, I’m guessing.  There were maybe ten people in the class.  Another man, in his late 40’s probably, and me were the only guys.  OK, nothing too unusual here.  That was the breakdown in the US when I went regularly two to three times per week for about seven or eight months.  I enjoyed it then and noticed that I better, plus could concentrate better in key situations.  (One such incident I can still clearly remember using the tantric breathing or whatever was on the Brothers Traverse)

Even though I haven’t done real yoga in about five years, not including the easy yoga classes that I attended this summer with my dad, I remembered a lot.  But, this class was tough and some of the stuff I couldn’t do, nor did I try.  I was content to stick with the most basic levels.  We held the positions for a long time, which I like.  It was hot and I was sweating like crazy.  The instructor also came by and corrected us (mostly me) numerous times, easing me into the proper form of the pose.

The class was, of course, in Chinese and I only grasped about 10-15%.  The instructor had decent English though, much better than anyone else at the club I’ve talked to.

Looking forward to going back.

I’ve been pretty lucky in Shenzhen to have avoided being returned counterfeit bills.  Not that people haven’t tried.  One such incident was when Robert and I were in Dong Men and a DVD street salesman (to be avoided) wanted me to pay with a crisp 100 instead of a ratty 10 so that he could give me fake 10’s in exchange.  No such luck.  I also had a colleague have a few of his 100s stealthily replaced with fake ones while he was in Dong Men.  Bad move there – don’t ever whip out a few 100s in front of those folks.

But, the other day, I did get handed a fake 50 from a taxi driver.  I was in a hurry so didn’t bother to check.  My mistake.  And, I have had a tough time unloading it.  No one has fallen for it.  I’ve had to get rid of a 20 before, and that was pretty easy.  But, maybe I’ll just stick with this 50 for a constant reminder to be on the lookout.

The 50 RMB note, worth roughly $7,  is the most popular fake bill in China because it’s the second highest bill available.  Any time you purchase something on the street markets or get change from a taxi, you should check.  The funny thing with the taxis is that they are virtually never fooled when you hand a fake one to them.  First, they do this all day.  Second, they have a little infrared light above the overhead light that you can hold a note to which will verify for certain if the bill is fake.

But, what are you to do if you have no such high tech equipment or skill?  Here are the ways that I’ve been told:

• The coarseness of the paper just to the right of Mao’s chin is present on real notes.  This one is tough for me.
• The magnetic strip; this is easy to fake, it seems.  But not to a machine that can read it.
• The detailed symbol in the upper left.  Hard to tell if the note has been crumpled.
• The Mao watermark.  I think you need a lot of experience with this one.
• The note numeral on the lower left on the lower left will sort of sparkle on real notes.
• The half-circle on the front and the half-circle on the back that, when viewed with a back light, form as a perfect circle.  This is the one that works for me.

Let me demonstrate:  Have a look at the two bills below.

[View with PicLens]

One is a real; one is fake.  See the difference in the circles?  The perfect circle is very hard to duplicate.  The only trick is actually paying attention to when you get one in return and making sure that it’s legit.  I think I was laughing it up with the driver when he passed this to me and offered me a friendly, “Bye bye!”.  Well played, sir!

Since moving to the “Coastal City” neighborhood, I’ve become much more adept at riding the bus. I was a little skeptical about moving to Coastal City, having been so dependent on the subways before.  But, I’ve adapted well.  The busses, despite having a few with English announcements, are generally a tougher form of transportation than the subways.  The main reason is that all of the routes “maps” are not really maps; they’re just ordered names of locations.  And, those location names are only in Chinese characters.  So, if you only know how your destination sounds, you’re out of luck.

However, since I committed to sending text messages in Chinese to Chinese people, my character recognition has gotten good enough to where I can go to a bus stop, read a route map and generally know if a bus can take me roughly where I want to go.  I haven’t made a mistake yet and taken a bus to some bizarre location (that happened to Daryl on his most recent trip out here.  Took a couple of hours in hard rain to get back.  Daryl’s one of the few people I know who doesn’t speak Chinese brave enough to try the busses).  It’ll probably happen to me eventually.

Since returning, three new subway stations have opened along the main line, extending westward into the High Tech Park where the MS office is located.  There are many other stations still under construction and are set to open in a year or so (dang!).  The new stations are very nice.  Shenzhen is still rapidly transforming and it’s going to be a great city once all those subways are opened.  Fix the air and this will be a world class place.

Many people have been telling how good of a show that HBO’s Deadwood is.  Since I had no new DVD material that I was regularly watching, I decided to pick it up.  Not to mention, it would be a good diversion from working into the evening.  I scouted around the DVD places and learned that the name of the show is a direct translation:  “Dead” and “Wood”.  In Chinese, it’s “Si”, tone 3 (we don’t have this “i” sound in English; it’s not the same as the Spanish word for “yes”!), and “Mu”, tone 4 (Basically like a cow:  “Moo!” with a strong downward inflection (that’s what “tone 4″ means)).  So, this is pretty easy to pronounce correctly.

I didn’t buy anything right away.  But, I came back a week later to the place that had all three seasons with good quality and a good price.  I couldn’t find it, so I asked for “Si3 Mu4″.  Confused looks.  I explained a little more, “It’s an American TV show.  It’s called ‘DeadWood’.”  Instead, I was directed to someone else.  More confused looks.  I know I was pronouncing it correctly.  Eventually, someone handed me a piece of paper and a pen asked me to write it down in English.  Then we translated it.  “A!!!  Si Mu!”  Yeah, that’s what I was saying!

Anyway, I bought it, but as a continued experiment, I asked a few English-speaking Chinese if they could understand what I was saying.  Most of them weren’t sure.  One good response was “Dead Deer?”

See, it’s not that I was mispronouncing anything.  It’s just that Chinese is such a damn weird language that without the context, you can’t tell what I’m trying to say!  The sound “si”3 and “mu”3 are represented by multiple characters, so with so few words, how do you know for sure what I’m saying.  If I were better at Chinese, I would have said something like, “‘Si’ as when you die and ‘mu’ as what trees are made of.”

Some seventy or eighty years ago, as I understand it, there was a movement to do away with the Chinese characters and adopt some sort of alphabet, like the Western alphabet.  To demonstrate how necessary the characters were, a professor in Beijing wrote a nonsensical story that told about someone named Mr. Shi who lived in a stone hut and was addicted to eating lions.  Sounds weird, but the point was that although he used numerous characters to tell the story, there was only one phonetic sound (excluding the tones):  “Shi”.

See how messed up that is?  People who read the story can understand it fine, but if they hear it, they have no idea what’s being said.  Pretty crazy, huh?  Outside of maybe a short sentence, this isn’t conceivable in English.

The Chinese language is optimized for subterfuge, double meanings, and confusion.  No wonder Westerners here often get frustrated or just plain perplexed.  Maybe this is why Chinese have such a great reputation in negotiation and business; they are accustomed to wearing down opponents just by using frustrating language.

Man, I can’t believe this project is finished.  It’s been in the works a long time.  Again, something that sounded very easy turned out to be involved and lengthy.  This time, despite it being a music project, I was completely ignorant of the effort that was going to be involved.

Basically, I wanted to improve my recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on the electric guitar.  I recorded it a long time ago with synthesizer tracks replacing the orchestra.  Although I was happy with the recording, the synth sounds had always been the weakness.  Just a year or year and a half ago, a friend, colleague, and fellow guitarist suggested that I redo the MIDI tracks with real orchestral recordings.

I finally got around to looking into this.  However, I was convinced that all that was involved in converting a MIDI file into orchestral sounds was running the MIDI file through some high end samples and call it good.  Boy, was I wrong.

I started out by posting a job on Elance requesting someone to convert a MIDI file into a WAV file.  I got numerous responses whose prices ran the gamut from $50 to $500.  This seemed weird, but I didn’t really think much of it.  I ended up picking a really nice and knowledgeable guy in Argentina.  He was way on the low end of the price, but I really picked him because he sounded informed and communicated well.  However, when it came time to share the job with him, I got a nice but firm email stating that he’d misunderstood the requirements and that it was way beyond what he had originally had bidded on.  He was nice enough to spend a lot of time with me to explain exactly what would be involved.  About the same time, I met a guy in China, Xiao Xie, through another friend who, having studied music and was working in the music industry here in Shenzhen as a game and advertisement composer, seemed to be a great fit for the job.  So, I hired him.  A great find!

His English was pretty good, better than my Chinese, but at least he had a command of the technical terms in English, so we could get by.  He basically confirmed what the guy in Argentina had stated:  we needed to render each instrument into a wave file, and usually each track would need to be rendered multiple times.  For example, we’d need to render some violin sections with long bow strokes with pronounced vibrato, other times we’d need to use a swift marcato, and then everything in between.  Strings are always the most difficult, but we had to do the same for winds and brass as well.  On top of that, for the challenging full orchestral moments, we rendered multiple versions of the same track to give it a full ensemble sound.  We neede to separate some tracks, like some of the flute tracks, so we could bring out the melody better.  Then, we went back, mixed it all together, reworking sections multiple times so that the balance would be good.  We added equalization, reverb, and so on.

As you can see, this is way more work than simply turning on orchestral samples, pressing “play” on the MIDI file and “record” on the WAV recorder.  We usually spent one day per weekend, for anywhere from two to six hours working through the piece.  It took about three to four months to do the whole thing.  We worked hard on it, got testy with each other from time to time, but remained friends throughout. A celebration is called for!

And, I’m very happy with it!  The CD artwork is already finished, so now, it’s just a matter of uploading the right files to a duplication company in the US and re-releasing on CDBaby.  I’ll send out another announcement once the recording is for sale.

Have a listen of a brief sample from the first movement:

And some pics from the home studio:

[View with PicLens]

One thing I’m not so good at:  Letting go of the reigns and delegating to other people.  One thing that plays into this is money.  If I can do something myself, then I’m often reluctant to spend money on someone else doing it.  Most things I can do, so I think that it’s best that I do them myself.  And so I do.  And then I end up driving myself crazy with too many obligations and deadlines.  That happened last week and I realized I had to take a break and relax.  I’d basically been working from sun up to past sun down and should have had more to show for it.  At least I realize it.  And I’m trying really hard to get better at it.  I think it’s something that’s just going to take concerted effort and practice.  And repeatedly reminding myself that I’ve got to get better at it.

Stuff I was driving myself crazy with this past week:

• Choosing membership software – There are tons of solutions out there, each with pros and cons.  Though I haven’t settled on one, I’m a lot closer.  Getting to this point though was a pain.
• Investigating merchant accounts – Same thing here with tradeoffs and pros and cons.  I use a website for advice, but that’s nothing like trusted advice, and it’s so easy to get contradicting information.  In the end, it comes down to your own investigation which is time-consuming.
• Video technical problems – Actually, there weren’t too many problems, but hunting down the right cables, testing out the green screen, etc. etc. takes time.  I spent a long time looking for a stupid Firewire 800 cable which is surprisingly impossible to find in Shenzhen now.  I had to order one from Shanghai.
• Buying a plane ticket – Once I decided that I needed to come home for Christmas, I spent a lot of time online looking for a ticket.  At first, I wanted to use my miles, but every time I went to purchase a ticket, the Delta site would tell me that “a leg of your trip is sold out.  Please try again.”  Well, thanks for telling me which one.  I had to make at least three phone calls to customer service.  In the end, I realized that since Delta partnered with Northwest (or was the same airline) and that all my flights would be on Northwest, I’d get more accurate information on their site.  One trip to the NWA site and I found a relatively cheap ticket from Hong Kong to Hotlanta.
• WordPress mail problems – A new version of a plugin that I endorse had a weird problem of stripping HTML from mail when generating mail from the “Edit Post” page, though it worked fine from the “New Mail” page.  Numerous back-and-forth with a support group didn’t yield much.
• The Great Firewall of China blocked a client’s URL – Why?  After networking around, I found out that you have to register a site in China if you don’t want it to be blocked.  I then contracted another trusted contact to help out.  In the mean time, I had to console and explain what was going on to my clients.
• Create a test ad campaign – This is just an idea that I had after creating the first website.  As part of the negotiation (due to a misunderstanding that I was forgiving with), I got some free advertising in a Shenzhen magazine.
• The Great Firewall of China blocked one of my sites – Same thing.  At least I’d seen this before.  But, this affects my ad campaign.  I now need to think about revising the ad.
• Health Certificate – As part of my visa requirement, I had to go get a medical examination at a designated hospital.  The first time, I had someone help me.  This time, it was just me.  Got it, and all is well.
• More visa stuff – Trips to police stations, getting the runaround, visiting five places until finding the right one, dealing with officials who don’t know what the process is.  This caused numerous headaches.  At least I had someone helping during key moments otherwise it would have been much longer.
• International Bank Accounts – Learning the ins-and-outs of moving money around.  What a pain.  I’ve been working on this one for weeks, it seems.  I owe my friend in Hong Kong money for purchasing my laptop.  He’s been very nice.
• Business accounting – Related to the above item, I had to contact my accountant and ask some things that have been on my mind.
• Learning RegNow’s fulfillment and affiliate system – It’s huge, complex, and poorly documented.  I often lose patience with the documents and then just settle for an-email-per-day support while I concentrate on other things.
• Finding an appropriate WordPress theme for a new site – This is time consuming and I haven’t found anything I like.  I think the solution is to hire someone to create one.  Create the job, post it, review the dozens of bids, follow-up, establish payment rules, etc. etc.

It’s about a week after I pulled back a bit so I’m wondering what I’m forgetting.  It doesn’t matter, that’s enough.  Well, one day, my head was hurting so much that I decided I needed a head massage, or more accurately a “wash head” or “xi1 tou2″, as they say in Chinese.  The beautiful thing as that there’s a place right outside of my apartment complex, a hair salon actually, that offers this.  I’ve written other posts that talk about haircuts in China.  In these haircut places, you can get these wonderful head massages before you get your haircut.  I thought my last place was pretty good, but this one takes the cake.  Here’s what you get with a “head wash” at the place next door:

• Three washes, each one lasting ten minutes.  And you’re not sitting in some stupid chair wrenching your neck backwards like you do in the US.  You’re supine on a cushioned table with your head balanced on a small padded column above a sink.  The first two washes are with shampoo.  And, once there are enough suds, the girl washing your hair will just rub your temples, forhead, sprinkle water down your closed eyes so it runs off your cheeks (very refreshing), massage your neck and shoulders.  Fantastic.  The last wash is with some sort of cleanser with a menthol sort of feel to it.  The same techniques are used.
• Five minutes to clean your ears with Q-tips.
• Five minutes of arm massage.  This is very comfortable if done well.  A lot of it is focused on massaging your hands and fingers.
• Ten minutes of back massage – great way to round out the whole experience.

After fifty minutes of that, I always end up staggering home.  A hot shower and I’m ready to hit the sack and feel revived in the morning.

Total cost:  10RMB ,or, $1.46

Check out this recent story about a developer interview at Microsoft.  I know Igor through a mutual friend back in Georgia.  Igor came up to Redmond for a conferece a few years ago when I was still there.  He reminded me of me – enthralled with everything Microsoft and willing to work to make himself an expert so he’d have a chance to work for the empire.  After I read this recent post about his interview with Microsoft, he reminded me even more of myself!  My first interview at Microsoft went badly as well.

This was a long time ago, not long after I was out of college.  The year must have been early 1997 when I was really into Microsoft technology and programming.  I spent all of my commuting time on the bus reading programming books.  I spent much of my reading time before bed reading programming books or a subscription to MSDN magazine.  With this rate of information intake, I became one of the top programmers at my company pretty quickly, but I was still unprepared my interview at Microsoft.

I expected my interview at Microsoft to concentrate on high level technologies like MFC and COM, which I’d pretty much mastered.  Indeed, when I did get asked questions about COM, I knocked them out of the park and the interviewer was outwardly impressed.  However, the rest of the interview, say 90% of it, was just straight C programming.  It’s hard for me to remember the exact questions I got, but here are some:

• Reverse the words in a sentence.  This was pretty tough for me at the time, since it required careful attention to pointers.  Today, it’s a piece of cake.  I eventually got it, but my solution wasn’t impressive or quick.
• Write a function to convert a number to a string and a string to a number.  I did decently on this, but nothing to impress according to Microsoft standards.
• Write a function to reverse the bits in a byte.  This one I completely flunked.  I stood in front of the whiteboard for a long time, just silent, with no help from the interviewer.  At the time, I felt like an idiot, but in retrospect, I suspect he had no idea what to do with me either.  I gave a ton of interviews at Microsoft myself, and I would have been ashamed to behave as this interview did.  Regardless, I’m sure he wasn’t happy with my performance and I didn’t get the job.  But, even worse, I left not really wanting the job.

About three years later, I got the chance to interview again and this was when I landed my job at Microsoft.  I was way more seasoned as a programmer (I still regard GeoGraphix as the best programming job I’ve ever had), and I knew what to expect.  In short, I crushed this Microsoft interview.  However, I did think it was pretty easy by typical Microsoft standards.  The hardest question that I can remember was:

• Something like, write a function to reverse a string using a char* but keep in mind that the string is a multi-byte character string.  Dang, I wish I could remember the details of this one a little better, but the trick was that you simply couldn’t write a string reverse; you also had to take into account that some of the characters were more than one byte.

One thing to note about Microsoft interviews is that when you’re in front of that whiteboard trying to find a solution to a really hard program, you’re also expected to write very clean and efficient code.  When I came on board the team and finally got my first look at some real Microsoft code, I was shocked.  “Wait, this is Microsoft right?  Who wrote this code!?”  That story is for a different post.

A few years later, when I felt I needed another change but was still interested in programming, I went on my last round of interviews.  I interviewed for the Office group, for Internet Explorer, and a couple of others that I don’t recall.  Office and IE were the most memorable because they were the closest that I came to getting an offer, but I never did.  In retrospect, this was a good thing, but I left again with a sour taste in my mouth about the whole interview process.  The questions that I was asked this time were ridiculously hard.  The ones I remember best, though still it’s fuzzy, were from the office group:

• A problem involving binary trees.  I had prepared for binary trees, but this problem had a twist on it that made it really hard.
• A problem that I later discovered was taken out of the Programming Pearls book.  In case you don’t know, this book has some super hard problems in here that some university classes take a couple of weeks to study.  I was expected to solve it in one hour.  I never did, but I was happy with how well I did.
• I went through a few more questions but I can’t recall the details.  But, it suffices to say that they all dealt with either trees, hash functions, or lists.  Each was really hard.  I may have had less than a 50% success rate, but, again, I was personally happy with the progress I made on each.  I assumed that this would be taken as positive.

After maybe four or five interviews, I was shown back to the hiring manager’s office.  I’d had a great conversation with him the week before.  He had waived the screening interview because he was impressed enough with our conversation.  However, this time, he came in with a scowl and promptly announced, “Well, it seems it’s not going that well for you.  I’m not going to bother with an ‘as-appropriate’ (MS terminology) interview with you.”

I gave him a shocked looked and retorted, “Oh, I was under the impression that I was doing pretty well.”  This prompted mixed-up looks from both of us at each other.  To make a long story short, our short conversation eventually turned to me giving him a stern but nice lecture about how his team interviewed me on one skill, algorithmic programming, which I had already professed was my weakest trait.  If this was what they were looking for, then they likely made a good choice, however, if they were looking for a well-rounded developer which strength in distilling problems to their most simple components and a flair for creativity, then they failed.  I honestly can’t remember that much, but I seem to recall that he was a little shocked that I talked back to him the way I did.  I’m no super MS programmer by any stretch, but I had been at MS long enough to know that there are plenty of so-called geniuses that cause all sorts of problems with the code that they write and that hiring manager should look for balance on their teams.

After that, I made special strides to be a different sort of interviewer.  I never asked the super hard programming problems.  In fact, my problems were pretty easy.  Of course, if you wanted a chance, you had to nail it, and if you did, you had to be able to intelligently take it to the next level, explain why, and show your own brand of excitement while you do it.

I was proud of my track record:  People that I strongly endorsed when on to become great full-time hires.  Some people that I “no-hired” (MS terminology) and who were hired anyway eventually ended up being fired.  I can think of two right now!  Not to mention the numerous interviews that I conducted in China, which was a completely different animal.

To close, I wish you would have asked me to help you prepare in advance, Igor.  You gotta know the linked list backwards and forwards.  I know you do, but at least now you’ve had your trial by fire and you’ll be ready next time.  Those interviews can be unsettling.  I’ve never experienced the phone “whiteboard” interview.  I bet it’s even worse than the basic whiteboard interview.  Give it some time and try again.

I forgot to announce on this site last week that my upgrade to my Cascade climbing site is now complete (I did announce on Facebook).  I used the same technique as I did for the Gore Range Site.  There are also newer movies available on various reports.  I decided to use Vimeo.  I prefer their interface to youtube’s.  Of course, youtube gets way more traffic.  You can click on the “Movies” category to see all reports with movies, by the way.  I still have several to add, including some HD ones…whenever I get around to making them.