A few days ago, several state-run companies in Taiwan removed “China” from their names. The old names date back to when the Taiwanese government claimed to represent all of China. Mainland China wants that practice to continue, lest anyone think Taiwan is separate from China. The Taiwanese government claims it simply wants to reduce confusion, …
Author Archives: Jimmy Lin
This blog has moved… one more time
This blog has already moved twice before, but I expect this move will be the last. I’m posting all new entries right here: http://blog.jameslin.name I bet you didn’t realize .name existed, eh? That’s right, I have my very own domain, registered with directNIC and hosted by Dreamhost. I’m still using WordPress software for my blog …
Cheap books
Recently I scored great deals on a few books. At Moe’s Books in Berkeley I bought: Symbols by Sandra Forty. $9.98 $6.00 Good Luck Life: The Essential Guide to Chinese American Celebrations and Culture by Rosemary Gong. $14.95 $4.00 The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang. $29.95 $6.00 And then at Compass Books (owned by …
Visiting Orlando
Last week I was in Orlando for a customer conference, Lotusphere. For 3½ days straight I manned a demo station in the Innovation Lab on one of my research projects, which was worthwhile but tiring. But there was a payoff: the conference party was at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and Jeff and I spent Thursday afternoon …
China From the Inside
Last night, Jon, Jerry and I finished watching a four-part documentary on PBS, China From the Inside. The documentary was very well done, and I was surprised by how outspoken the critics of the government were. The overall conclusion: China from the inside is in bad shape. The four parts were about politics, women, the …
Way too many editions of Office 2007
I thought five editions of Windows Vista was a bit much, but then I saw that there are eight editions of Office 2007. Take a look at the comparison matrix from Microsoft’s web site: There are holes where you wouldn’t expect*, and there is no single edition that contains every Office program. Office Ultimate lacks …
More good shows on PBS
Just saw two fascinating shows on KQED: A story in Frontline World covered an ingenious idea called Play Pumps. It takes water pumps and turns them into a piece of playground equipment, so that kids have fun while they pump water. It started out as a cheap way to bring clean water to poor areas …
Windows Live Writer
I’m now using Windows Live Writer to compose my blog posts. I hadn’t seen the point of a standalone blog editor until yesterday, when I was blogging at work and accidentally closed the browser tab that contained the blog editor online, losing 15 minutes of work. Windows Live Writer’s user interface is straightforward and well …
The streak is broken
Last weekend, I went to see the Cal-Washington basketball game at Berkeley. Before that, I had seen four sporting events: a Yankees game, a Mets game, an A’s game, and Cal at Stanford basketball. In every case, the home team lost, and only in one case did I want the home team to loseWeight Exercise. …
More iPhone reaction
I just watched Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote introducing the iPhone. Boy, he is a great speaker. His reality distortion field was in full force — an article in Palm Infocenter argues that iPhone’s phone features aren’t new (but they’re sure slick). In contrast, the CEO of Cingular was stiffly reading off of index cards for …