Author: Muninn

Chia-ying says I have too many friends. My taiwanese friend from graduate school in New York complained that she never felt like she could get to know me because my social circle was too wide. She said this to me some weeks ago in Taiwan but her words have stuck with me.

Chia-ying might be surprised to hear another story from my time at a summer language program in Beijing some five years ago. I used to spend everyday with my roommate Stuart and almost every meal at Korean restaurant on the northern side of the Beijing Normal University campus where I first discovered Bibimbap. I spent hours a day making and studying little paper vocabulary flashcards and when I needed a break I would ride my bicycle around the back streets of Beijing. A Chinese-American classmate, who I called Da-lin and had a crush on at the time joined me for lunch at my favorite little restaurant one day. While I was loudly slurping some noodles she suddenly put her chopsticks down and broke (for the first time that I had seen) the vow that we all signed that summer promising to speak nothing but Chinese for ten weeks. She said, “Lin Shudao, you are asocial, aren’t you?” Without waiting for my answer, she continued eating and our discussion resumed in Chinese…

I think she was right, by any definition of the word. I spent little or no time with other students in the program. Here in Japan, my friend Lars has essentially accused me of the same, claiming that I rarely emerge from my cottage to “go out” with friends, resembling a hermit if anything else.

Yet if you ask my Danish friend Jens here what I’m doing and he’ll claim that I’m always off meeting yet another friend in Ginza, or Shinjuku or Shibuya, as if I was some high-spending social butterfly.

In New York, I spent almost all my time with Sayaka and Jai (Sayaka was worried the amount of time I spent with Jai was revealing some kind of bisexual tendencies, which I have ever since tried to convince her is unfounded). And yet Chia-ying and other friends believed that I was all over the place.

In thinking about Chia-ying’s memorable words, and Da-lin’s before that, I tried to explain the seeming contradiction by saying, “I just don’t settle well into groups of friends, but prefer to develop strong friendships with people one-on-one, without ‘inheriting’ their whole social network.” Yes, I liked that one. It gives me that individualist, rugged traveler and leader type of image.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work….
Continue reading Social Butterfly or Asocial?

I gave my presentation today at the ICICE conference being held at the Yuanshan hotel here in Taipei.

To be honest, it was a spectacular failure, and I record the story of it here for posterity. From the time I arrived, well before the conference formally opened with smoke, flashing lights, and Las Vegas boxing match intro-music and drums I was memorizing various notes I had taken in Chinese and working out the exact minute by minute allocation for my presentation. I slipped out a little early from the last morning session and ran down to the lunch area where downed a boxed lunch in about 5 minutes in order to use the lunch hour to make final preparations for my presentation.

Almost an hour before I presented, I confirmed my Power Point presentation was working on the conference supplied laptop, and tried to open the web pages of the OWLS software that I had developed. We soon discovered that their whole wireless network was down (a room nearby with dozens of laptops for conference participants to use were all also being scanned for viruses and reconfigured by a group of techies, which is never a good sign). I explained that I was presenting on some software and giving a demonstration that was online and would need to know if the network was going to be down during my presentation. If so, I could use various snapshots of OWLS and Sutaitai.com which I had brought on a CD. I was assured the net was going to be working by 13:30 and indeed, they resolved the problem within 15 minutes. I then tested the network every ten minutes or so until my presentation started. I also made a change to the order of my presentation file.

I estimate there were between 50-100 Chinese instructors and other conference participants in the audience for my presentation. As I approached the podium to begin my presentation, while they were introducing me, there were suddenly two conference employees hovering about the computer I was to use. I looked at the screen – the Windows XP machine had crashed and she was restarting the computer. Meanwhile, my 20 minutes for the presentation were already ticking and the audience was waiting while I was surrounded by conference employees whispering Chinese SOS signals into the CIA style radio sets attached to their uniforms.

I lost all composure. I completely lost all the stuff I had memorized and, between trying to work with the staff on the technical problem, tried to start a presentation by just casually introducing software and features that I had neither a Power Point presentation or a working computer to demonstrate. It was a nightmare. My Chinese totally failed me in this desperate moment of required spontaneity.

Half way through, the computer was up and running and I quickly tried to demonstrate the Sutaitai.com site. After finishing this, with again horrible Chinese, I then moved to my climax: trying to show the instructors how simply anyone with OWLS can create interactive exercises. Of course, just that moment, the whole wireless network of the conference hall died again and was I faced with a beautiful white Microsoft IE connection failure screen.

Again losing all my composure I fumbled for words for a minute or two while hoping the network would revive itself, again finding myself swarmed by conference employees who had no technical ability but who decided to stand around me and whisper into their radio sets. My time quickly came to an end.

There were two comments and two questions. A Chinese instructor teaching in South Africa was kind enough to be blunt, “Your software isn’t useful” (没有用).

Another Chinese instructor who teaches US military personnel caught me in the elevator as I was trying to flee the conference in despair. She tried to be polite by saying the same thing in about 15 minutes of indirect criticism.. From what she said, I realized how completely I had failed to communicate some of the most basic features of the software and the limited applications for which it can truly be useful.

There was one technical question about the software and the other question was simply a request for the password to be removed from Sutaitai.com so the teachers can evaluate for themselves how effectively the software can been used.

I learnt a few things from today’s complete humiliation: 1) When I panic, anything stored in short-term memory gets fried, especially when it is in a foreign language. 2) Try at all costs to avoid doing presentations which heavily depend on technology or computers not under your direct control. If you can’t, make sure emergency plans (like my snapshots) are available for fast and immediate implementation. 3) When you are giving a presentation, make sure you front load and heavily emphasize points which can funnel constructive criticism into the areas where it is most useful and relevant. 4) My Chinese, and especially technical Chinese, still needs a lot of work. 5) When measuring time for parts of a talk, double the time it takes you when you practice your presentation. 6) Know your audience well. Preferably speak their language fluently.

It has been quite busy since I arrived in Taipei. I have been trying to pack paper research, PhD applications and rewrites of my statement of purpose, spending some time with Sayaka and preparations for next week’s conference all into my limited two weeks here.

Last night I began working on the powerpoint presentation (due today) for my talk at the conference this Friday when I got an email with some brutal, but much needed and appreciated comments back from my friend Jai on an early draft of my PhD statement of purpose and was just moving between Microsoft’s email application for Mac, Entourage, and Word when everything froze up and I couldn’t force quit anything. My computer is a Mac, this is not supposed to happen. We don’t have crashes anymore.

When I restarted the machine in “verbose” mode to read what was going on in the background as the machine starts up, I find that I have been hit with the infamous B-Tree corruption, and in all likelhood, my hard drive, and all of its contents are lost…As far as I can remember, this is about the 4th time I have had B-Tree corruption destroy my hard drive’s contents in as many years and every time it happened just as I was using Microsoft’s email application. The demons of Microsoft must, of course, be responsible for my ills, trying desperately to get me to abandon the outlaw world of Apple for the imperial XP operating system. Jai, who is a Windows user, is of course their agent, and was instructed to deliver the order to strike via the trojan Microsoft application on my machine…
Continue reading A Diabolical B-Tree Crash

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the conference I was to present at in Taiwan was postponed because of SARS. Well, in about an hour I’m finally heading for Taipei both for this conference and to do a some research for a paper I’m working on. It doesn’t hurt of course, that Sayaka is living and studying in Taipei and I will definitely try to spend some time with her even as I continue my various other projects (including PhD applications, which I’m in the middle of). I’ll be back on the 28th but expect to have fairly regular email access while in Taipei.