Do not park here

The garage on Ellsworth between 1st and 2nd Avenues in downtown San Mateo is not a safe place, especially at night. Maybe that's why nobody parks there, making it even less safe. I think it's called the Downtown Central Garage. To be unsafe in such a nice neighborhood shows terrible design. It's small but deserted, walled by concrete so noone can see or probably even hear if anything happens inside, and has a dead end in the basement level. It's also not staffed but you have to pay, and the pay machine forces you to stand with your back vulnerable.

The saga. My friend and I were driving separately and I was following her. We couldn't find parking in the garage by the movie theater, so I followed her out to find parking elsewhere. She turned into this garage, but for some reason, I just got the feeling I didn't want to park there. Bad vibes maybe? So I went to look for street parking. Yeah, I just peered in and it looked so enclosed with concrete.

After finishing having tea at the Hong Kong dessert place next to the theater, I went along with her to get her car first. A good thing because she probably had a much higher chance of being mugged otherwise. As we walked in the garage, there was a man coming up the driveway from the basement. Strangely enough, he turned up behind us on the ramp we were going up, and there is definitely no reason to do this, as the exit is the other direction which is where you would go if you had just parked your car downstairs. And if he needed to go to the first floor parking area, there was no reason for him to have been coming from downstairs. Even more so, by 9pm, there is no reason to park in a pay garage as there is plenty of street parking, so the only reason he could have had for coming from downstairs would be looking for people to mug.

I can "watch" our behinds with peripheral vision and watching our shadows in front of us. It's a good thing when the light is behind and the shadows clearly fall pretty far in front. So my thinking goes, as long as I can't see his shadow, he's just far enough behind us to have enough time to run out the other entrance. My friend actually didn't stop at the pay station because the guy was following us. So we did actually walk out the other entrance. The guy went through the glass doors by the pay station where the elevator is. Yeah, interesting path if he had just come from downstairs parking.

We returned a few minutes later to the pay station. Lo and behold, the guy comes out of the glass doors again, slithers around and watches us for a few seconds, walks a little too close passing behind us to the other side, loiters around a car nearby that he doesn't get into, walks a little further, turns around to face us and watches us from a slight distance, but too far to be normal if he were waiting to pay for parking, which he wasn't since he had just come from the dead-end basement parking level, and didn't stop to pay the first time he walked by the pay machine. My friend was getting a bit nervous and jittery as the pay machine wasn't working. And she was quite obviously watching him nervously. I was watching him sideways and thinking, "Okay, my friend is nervous but you can't take on the both of us, if even one. We're not idiots." My friend is deceptively strong too, and well, I have to rely on my brain to compensate for muscle. (However, in time of need, I do know kung fu like Zhang Ziyi....)

Finally, it's done, and we go through the glass doors, aware the guy is now walking back towards us. We don't wait for the elevator, and instead walk out the other side and back around to go down the ramp to the basement. This is a dead end, so I'm thinking, as soon as we set foot down there we have to move fast. My friend is not a fast person so this is making me a little nervous.

We didn't see the guy following us anymore, but as we drove out of the garage and around the block, I peered into the garage, and geez, this guy is standing in the middle of the deserted garage just staring out like watching us. Okay, there is no reason for a guy to be standing in the garage doing that. The only things normal to do in a garage are either pay for your parking or get your car and leave.

Given the need, I think I can fight off the guy. But I'd run and yell first before even getting into that situation. But even before that, I don't even park there.

Late Bloomer

Pui pointed me to some very good information about Chinese language programs in China, at the top universities in Beijing and Shanghai. The Peking University Web site really reminds me of the Stanford Web site, somehow, in its layout and color scheme. And the "campus scenery" pictures were the most creatively aesthetic of all the university Web sites I browsed. Just like Stanford. :) According to some ranking, it's also the number two university. It's better to be number two than to be number one. ;)

Overall, I was very impressed with the Web sites, which have full English versions as well. Compared to our Web sites, they only seem a few years behind. As I was browsing the Web sites, I came across this online Chinese language degree program for foreigners at the Beijing Language and Culture University.

It looks quite good, even better than my Pimsleur audio lessons, and quite economical, so I already signed up. Unlike Pui, I probably can't take a year off to live in Shanghai to study Chinese. Maybe just vacation.

My coworker said he learned English at the age of 25, and he speaks quite well. So, I can learn Chinese at the age of... uh... slightly older than that. :) I seem to be a late bloomer in a few things.

Yesterday I picked up some take-out food from Shanghai East. As I was waiting for the food, I sat at the counter and browsed their pictorial book on modern Shanghai. The pictures were really beautiful, and amazing. It looks nothing like what we saw when we were there in 1991. Not only that, but the people dress like Americans. Or, according to Lewis, the girls are even hotter and better dressed than those in NYC. I don't recall seeing people wearing jeans and such back then. I don't think I'm that old, but even in my time already, the change is astounding.

Purchasing the online course seems to be the first purchase I've done directly with a Chinese source, with the online transaction also processed by a Chinese source. This is somewhat significant, that the best online educational program I could find is from somewhere other than the United States. Not only that, but more and more Chinese Web sites have been starting to show up in Google search results.

This Stanford Travel trip looked really interesting: Yunnan and Tibet Suitcase Seminar. However, my sister pointed out that it's quite expensive and the average age of travelers is probably around 65 years. Sigh.

It's inevitable that the standard of living in China and other countries will become comparable to that of the United States someday. Just think of 1.2 billion people, four times the population of the United States, with room to grow 20 times the current per capita income (in nominal terms). This is just the tip of the iceberg.

However, crap, that really does mean we have a dire environmental and energy problem in the quite near future.

Itchy

It's buzzing again, louder and louder, unmistakeable.

Symbolic, the Asera sign came down recently. I guess the lease they signed during the heyday is finally up.

Commute time has been inching up. Daylight savings time change makes people bad drivers... either that, or all of a sudden a whole lot of new people got employed in the Bay Area. It took over an hour each way today. I used to be able to make it in under 40 minutes sometimes.

The fact is we're back to 1995-1996 employment rates. The dawn of Yahoo! and the Web. And the momentum is similar, looking at the graph. 10 year cycles of the unemployment rate skyrocketing for 3 years and going down for 7.

Random attempt to categorize Internet communication:

E-mail...message boards
Instant messaging...chat rooms
Blogs...wikis

Synchronous...asynchronous
Private...public
One...many

What comes after wikis? Blogs are one person serving content to some public. Wikis are anyone in the public contributing to the content. The contributors find the content and volunteer themselves. Next, maybe a way to draw content from selected people and sources, instead of relying on the self-seekers. And real-time, being able to find and drop in on live people chatting.

And a whole lot of other stuff way beyond this.

Organic food. Taxing plastic bags.

Businesses perhaps starting to look more like the Internet. Network infrastructure allows smaller units to act more autonomously.

Who eats Wonder Bread anymore? I buy Real Bread now.

Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com almost killed Kepler's, but people are willing to pay for personality, and will try to figure out a way. Another tug-of-war shifting from small to big to small...

Going to Draeger's and thinking it doesn't seem very expensive at all. This is normal for San Mateo. Trag's however is not doing so well. Probably didn't evolve fast enough. They had entire shelves full of expiring orange juice and milk, both. A grocery store in the U.S. cannot ever not have milk. The only people who seem to shop there are the old people in the retirement communities next door.

At work, people leaving the company.

I'm itching.