Category: blog

First Dental Experience in US

My top wisdom tooth was broken 2 weeks ago, actually right after I had that wonderful pizza. A small piece of it fell off. Then the sharp edge at the broken place had been bothering me until this morning.

I found a list of dentists on AETNA(the insurance company) website, then picked a close one based on reviews on Yelp. On Tuesday I called them and made an appointment on Thursday.

The treatment experience was better than I expected. I got the broken wisdom tooth extracted, then took a teeth cleaning. I had been worrying if it would be super expensive or the doctor/hygienist would be inexperienced. It turned out those worries were nonsense. They have very good manners and skills. No pain at all when the doctor took out the tooth. And the cost is just about 60$ (teeth cleaning covered by insurance).

Watching NCAA March Madness Online

Due to work reason, I was watching NCAA basketball match on iPad, iPhone and Nexus S, at the same time…

iPad and iPhone have HD streams. Video quality is awesome on these 2 platforms. The experience of watching it on iPad is almost as good as watching on TV, thanks to the nice screen. But the quality on Android is really poor. It is so pixelated that you can’t even read the scores!

In the online video streaming market, iOS devices are absolutely dominating. Android hardware and OS are too fragmented, and most Android devices are low-end. So no one wants to spend much development effort to build video streaming service for Android. This NCAA Android app is built on Flash. Even on Nexus S, a model pushed to market one year ago, its performance isn’t good enough to support HD streaming.

A few days ago I tried YouTube Android app on Acer ICONIA A500 tablet. It crashes and hangs very often, though this is supposed to be the best video app on Android.

In conclusion, if you want to watch some video on mobile/tablet, stay away from Android for now.

Twitter Open House

Went to an open house event at twitter NYC office. There were 2 short speaks: one was a twitter semi technical introduction and the other was about real time search. Not very in-depth actually. Some Q&A were quite deep though. I guess most audiences were engineers and some of them do search-related works.

An interesting thing is I met @nk, who I saw once 2 years ago in Beijing QCon. He gave a presentation about real time search at that time, a really great one. It’s very nice to see him again and have some talk.

In twitter office there are some photos on the wall, with tweets. The most impressing one is a photo of the airplane on Hudson river. That was probably the first photo of that accident online. And a funny video to tell u tweet is faster than earthquake.

I have always been respecting twitter as a company. They are doing something

  1. Changing the world.
  2. Helping ppl’s daily life.
  3. Open. Compared to close system like FB and Apple.
  4. Elegant. From a product perspective.

The more I respect twitter, the more I feel sick of sina weibo…

My Wife is Young

2 ppl came to my place today to check bills. Xw was at home.

They introduced themselves, blar blar blar. But xw couldn’t understand them well.

So they asked: “Are your parents at home?”

PARENTS? REALLY?

iPhone is a life changing gadget

I started to use iPhone after moving to NYC. It has been 2 months. I want to say it really changed some part of life.

First, I rarely open my laptop at home now. Almost all casual tasks can be done on iPhone, with an as good or even better user experience. Email, twitter, IM, video call, search, browse web, ebooks, a little bit music sometimes… All well supported by iPhone. The only chance I need to open laptop is for playing some pirated movies, actually. Or serious works like reading a long doc, but that’s more of an office case.

Second, I’m even more closely bound to Internet now. I have been a heavy user of Smart Phone (if BlackBerry can count :/) for years. However it was in China and it was stupid BlackBerry and poor 2g network. The bandwidth and the fucking GFW limited my mobile digital life to an eunuch level. Now, welcome to Zion… Unfortunately, or fortunately, I still have 1.5 hours Internet-free time each weekday because of subway. But it’s definitely not iPhone-free. Kindle app and Podcaster are my company.

Last word: I used an Android phone in US for a few months. It’s not the same thing. User experience matters. It determines whether you want to stick to phone or open a laptop, though the difference is hard to be measured.