From concrete to water

A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature article on Lee Myung-Bak, the then-presidential candidate (and now president) of South Korea. As an aside, the article said that as mayor of Seoul, Lee had ordered an elevated highway torn down to unearth a buried stream and turn it into a park. Of course, I couldn’t let that pass without doing more background reading.

The stream that was restored is called Cheonggyecheon, and the success of its restoration helped launch Lee’s presidential candidacy. Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon web site has a link to an interesting Discovery Channel Asia documentary (411 MB Windows Media video file, 47 mins), which covers engineering, environmental and archaeological aspects of the project. (Yes, of course, I’ve already watched it!)

While reading up on Cheonggyecheon, I remembered that Taipei had a similar situation. After more research, I found out that Xinsheng Road follows the path of an old canal, and that when he was mayor of Taipei, Ma Ying-jeou also proposed daylighting the canal (although not the part that’s under the elevated Xinsheng Expressway). And now Ma is running for president of Taiwan! In east Asia, tearing down roads is becoming the clear path to launching your presidential career.

Roundup

A few months ago I said I’d blog about the highlights I had gleaned from my friends’ blogs. Well, here they finally are:

What do you mean, Super Tuesday was only two weeks ago?

It’s amazing how fast this year’s primary season is going, thanks to the compressed primary schedule. Two weeks ago Senators Clinton and Obama were essentially tied. A little over one week ago, Willie Brown, former San Francisco mayor, former speaker of the California State Assembly, and all-around political guru, said that since Obama was favored to win most of the contests between Super Tuesday and the March 4 primaries, he wouldn’t gain momentum, since momentum comes from something unexpected.

Looks like Mayor Brown was wrong. Obama has gotten momentum from his 9 wins in a row because something unexpected did happen: he has won by double-digit margins and cut into Clinton’s base of support. Clinton needs blowout wins in Ohio and Texas just to back into the delegate count lead.

 

Clinton’s campaign wants to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida at the convention, even though the Democratic Party took away their delegates because those states defied the party by moving up their primaries too early. To me, trying to change the rules in the middle of the game shows a lack of respect for the voting process, which made my opinion of Clinton more negative.

The Democrats should have done what the Republicans did and take away only half their delegates.

 

I’ve gotten really swept up in the excitement of this year’s election. Every primary night, I am glued to the 24-hour news networks, switching mostly between CNN and MSNBC. I love listening to the endless analysis, such as from Pat Buchanan (on MSNBC), who is as feisty as ever. The way he describes McCain’s speeches is hilarious. For example, regarding his victory speech on February 12:

McCain looked like he was briefing a flight crew, frankly, rather than a speech. Behind him you’ve got John Warner—I know all of them. They’re all good buddies of mine. What are these old guys doing there?

For a political and news junkie like myself, this year is the best I’ve seen.

Wow

This year, I watched the Super Bowl at a party where almost everyone was for the New York Giants. I wasn’t strongly for either team. On the one hand, when I lived in Connecticut, I rooted for the Giants. But this year, I was leaning towards the New England Patriots, because I wanted to see history made. Instead, I saw a different type of history: one of the greatest upsets in pro football history. I can’t truly imagine how absolutely crushed Patriots fans are or how elated Giants fans are.

But I can’t say I was surprised: I watched the Giants come close to defeating the Patriots in their last regular season game, and I also watched them defeat heavily favored Dallas and Green Bay. The Giants played scrappy, bare-knuckled football and made plays when it mattered most; they deserved to win the game. This Super Bowl was one of the best I’ve seen.

Microsoft’s Building 7: now you see it, now you don’t

Last month, Danyel blogged about Microsoft Research’s moving into a new building, Building 99, and linked to several newspaper articles about Microsoft’s expansion in general. I’m somewhat familiar with the Microsoft campus, having interned there in 1995 and visited a few times since, so I was curious to find out even more.

On Microsoft’s web site, I found a couple of maps showing its Campus Development Plan, one from February 2006 (PDF), and another from November 2007 (JPEG). There are a couple of minor differences, which is to be expected as a master plan is implemented. One of them shows how the footprints of Buildings 94–98 have gotten more funky:

Microsoft West Campus plan - Feb 2006

Microsoft West Campus plan - Nov 2007

But more interesting is a change in the original campus. Currently, there is empty space next to Buildings 5 and 6. The 2006 map shows the space occupied by a new Building 7, where the 2007 map has it renumbered to Building 37:

Microsoft Building 7 - 2006

Microsoft Building 7 - 2007

7 makes more sense than 37 — why the change?

There has never been a Building 7 at Microsoft. The numbers jumped from 6 to 8. Company pranks soon began referring to the mythical Building 7, such as sending new interns there for an urgent meeting, or employees announcing they were heading over to Building 7 when they were heading out for lunch.

So not surprisingly, there was an outcry in the company when facilities announced a new Building 7 in the expansion plan. Luckily, facilities has a sense of humor and decided to renumber the building. (I guess there wasn’t a Building 37 either…)

Busy busy

Last week was the most action packed I’ve had in a while. Between Monday and Saturday, I only spent Wednesday night at home:

Not surprisingly, on Sunday I decided to relax. In my case, that meant reading through a bunch of newspapers and a couple of months’ worth of my friends’ blog entries. I picked up a few interesting tidbits on the way, which I’ll write about over the next few entries.

More Internet video fun

  • For you Billy Joel fans, Here Comes Another Bubble.
  • Earlier this year, Conan O’Brien was in San Francisco for a week. Watch his visit to Intel (part 1, part 2) and you’ll be impressed with what he gets away with. And I bet Sam Wo Restaurant in Chinatown is getting a bump in business after Conan’s ad for the hole-in-the-wall.
  • Bustin’ out of the late ’70s, the pop band Dschinghis Khan seems to be Germany’s answer to the Village People. A video of their 1979 hit, “Moskau,” has become one of those odd Internet fads. To top it off, someone made a “translation” of the lyrics.
  • The Second Life hype is unreal. Leave it to the TV show The Office to deflate some of it. And the advertising firm DraftFCB announces their debut on Second Life by parodying it.
  • Kurt Thomas probably would have won the gold in gymnastics if the U.S. hadn’t boycotted the 1980 Olympics. To keep himself in the public eye, he starred in the movie Gymkata, one of his more ill-advised career moves. But it’s left us with gems such as a fight scene where the village well is conveniently shaped like a pommel horse.

Cupertino gets a new bookstore… Crown Books?

Remember this slogan? “If you paid full price, you didn’t buy it at Crown Books.” Another company bought the naming rights to Crown after it went bankrupt in 2001, and the chain has opened a store in Cupertino. This incarnation of Crown Books buys remainders and overstock at big discounts and passes the savings onto customers. It may not be a first-run bookstore, but it’s the closest thing to a mainstream bookstore Cupertino has, and I’ll take what I can get. Time to pay them a visit.

You took how long to graduate?

I was recently helping out Ron with his Ph.D. defense talk, and sent him slides from my talk as a reference. He said, “By the way, your last slide is amazing. best defense slide ever.” My last slide was titled, “What has happened since I entered grad school.” So are some of the notable products that were released and events that occurred what I was a graduate student:

  • USB
  • DVD
  • Wi-Fi
  • DSL
  • Java 1.2 and Swing
  • XML
  • digital cameras gone mainstream
  • cell phones gone mainstream
  • the term “open source”
  • e-mail worms
  • spam from Nigeria
  • Google
  • Windows 98
  • Y2K
  • Napster
  • Haas Pavilion
  • “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”
  • Pac Bell Park
  • President Clinton’s impeachment
  • Osama bin who?

Another story from Morris Chang

One more amusing anecdote from Morris Chang. The initial funding for TSMC came mostly from the Taiwanese government (48%) and Philips. There were also a few key individual investors who put their own money into the company. But TSMC was proposing to be a silicon foundry, a brand new business model. How did the company convince those people to invest?

Dr. Chang said the government essentially coerced them to put their money in. One person was asked to take a 5% stake, and he started getting cold feet. The premier of Taiwan actually called him and said, “It is government policy to get this company started. Don’t you want to support government policy?” It turned out to be be pretty enlightened coercion.

This was back in 1987, when Taiwan was just starting to transition from an authoritarian government to a democracy. I doubt it could get away with that now.