Taiwanese Travels

I just returned from probably the best vacation I've had for a while. What made it special were the people I met and spent time with, but I also found that the country itself was a wonderful place to visit on its own merit. I'll outline a brief daily summary here. You might also want to check my complete set of photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/nstoertz/2008Taiwan.

First though, a plug for Taiwan as a place for anyone to visit. Besides the entertaining cities and the beautiful volcanic country-side, I found that nearly everyone I ran into was intelligent, friendly, curious, and eager to help me. Here's a video that gives something of an idea about the country: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRu2oK0Kqc4 - it is a marketing effort by the government, but does offer a nice preview of some nice things to see. By all means, visit Taiwan if you have a chance!

Day 0: Saturday, 1-19-2008

I left San Francisco destined for Taipei after a long day at work, but feeling ready for the trip. At midnight I boarded, and 13 hours later arrived in Taiwan at 6:00 Sunday morning. Taiwan's time difference is +16 hours, but my sleep schedule had been so erratic that it wouldn't be too hard for me to adjust. I stood in the line for customs for an hour, bought some duty-free Macallan for $46 USD, exchanged some American dollars for Taiwanese dollars at a rate of 1:32, and headed to the meeting area. There my friend Alice and her friends Willie and Gina met me, all looking very nice if a little bit tired from getting up at 3 in the morning.


Day 1: Sunday

Willie drove us all to the city of Hsinchu where they live. The city roads were littered with scooters, and the streets were muddy from the recent rain and quite crowded. We stopped at a small restaurant and I had my first taste of Roa-bao (sp?), a burrito shaped rice-ball filled with delicious chicken, as well as some hot soy milk. Back at Alice's apartment we ate and chatted, and then to Willie's dismay verified that even an American can enjoy Taro soup. We took a nice sunny walk down to Tsing Hua University where Alice is getting her master's in computer communications engineering. The campus was pretty, and covered in buildings and little fish-filled ponds. Back at the apartment I received a quick lesson in playing Mah-jong and then watched helplessly as Alice beat everyone handily. It wouldn't be the last game I would lose to her during the trip.





After Mah-jong we went out for a hot pot. I told my friends that I wanted to try something unique and that I liked spicy food. They obliged, ordering a soup with pig blood, sheep ears, cow cartilage, and tofu. It was so hot that I cried and thought I was going to choke to death. A second soup was much more tolerable, and mixing the two soups seemed to work well.



After lunch we returned to Alice's apartment and packed hastily for Taipei. First though, we took the bus to Taichung where we me Alice's friend Shantee and headed to the Fungcha night markets. The markets were an amazing cultural and culinary experience. I'll let the pictures do the talking.






Day 2: Monday

Taipei is certainly a very modern city, and today was a fun day, if not as busy as yesterday. We spent the morning at the National Palace Museum. Inside were 1000s of old Chinese artifacts and artistic masterpieces which we were not allowed to photograph. We took a few pictures outside though.






Exhaustion forced an afternoon nap, after which we ate at the Sushi Express, and headed to the Shilin night markets in Taipei. They were bigger and even more crowded than the Taichung markets, and had a huge area dedicated to games. Alice dominated all games, winning in racing, in air hockey, in drums, but especially in basketball. I was astounded by her basketball skills - she more than doubled my score.

Day 3: Tuesday

Today we did more site-seeing in Taipei. Taiwan Storyland was a small museum dedicated to showing what old Taiwan looked like, and one of my favorite stops of the trip. The museum was a series of streets with old shops, games, and restaurants to explore. Adding to the fun was the fact that the streets were filled with hundreds of kids on a class field trip, and that many of them thought it would be fun to try to talk to the American foreigner. We played some games, took some pictures, ate lunch, and explored. Alice showed me one store that was similar to her father's medicine store which has been in her family for three generations.




In the afternoon we did some shopping and then headed to the famous Dintaifung Resturant for dinner, recommended to me by my friend Brian. The food was fantastic, but the atmosphere lacked the local quality that many of the less expensive upscale restaurants that we visited during the trip. After dinner we went to the club Brown Sugar where the famous Taiwanese pop singer ???? was performing. We stood (it was standing room only) and had drinks while we watched her play with the crowd until everyone was singing and dancing in a joyous stress-releasing party. We clapped and moved along with everyone.

Day 4: Wednesday

Today I ran clean out of money. Here is my last $100 bill (worth about 3 USD).



We spent the entire morning in a frustrating attempt to withdraw money from my American bank account, and after visiting several impatient banks, I finally made one more effort at an ATM machine and magically received the cash I needed. If I go back to Taiwan I think I'm either going to have a Taiwanese bank account or bring as much money as I'll possibly need, as the whole experience was rather painful.

That afternoon we went shopping in an attempt to spend my new cash, and then headed up to the top of the world's tallest building (for now), Taipei 101.



The night was dark and cloudy with a stiff wind, and after riding the world's fastest elevator to the observation deck, we found that we couldn't observe much of the city. We could however, feel the tower swaying in the dark clouds and see glimpses of the city below. It felt like we were on a different planet, and Alice and I held hands and walked with each other. With just half my trip over, it seemed that I would be returning to the states with a new girlfriend.

That night we had a wonderful dinner at an all you can eat bar called Magic Curry, and then met Alice's room-mate Jason and his girlfriend Aggie. A few hours and several tunnels took us to the city of Illan where we found a hostel for the night.

Day 5: Thursday

Today was one of the best days of the entire trip. After several days in the crowded cities, we were finally on the mountainous east coast. Alice had planned to visit some hot springs, and we spent most of the morning trying to find the secluded town from which to hike to the springs. After much Chinese discussion that I didn't understand we ended up in a tiny Taiwanese Village. A short hike with several treacherous stream crossings ensued, and the hard work paid off. I did some exploring, and found a secluded waterfall as well as several nice pools of water, and we sat and talked for some time in the warm water.







After our day exploring, we went to a fantastic seafood restaurant, where we picked our fish and had a family style hotpot. Somehow I ended up with a fish eyeball and some strange looking organs floating in my bowl, but my friends didn't make me eat them. The food was delicious.

Day 6: Friday

Today we went to the famous Taroko National Park. The Park is spanned by a huge gorge carved out by the Liwu River, and contains some marvelous geological phenomena. You could see sedimentary rock that had been shifted vertically by tectonic plate movement, limestone caves covered with stalactites, streaks of marble from metamorphic compression of limestone, and layers and layers of moss covered rock that had been worn down by the river. We went on two short hikes - one up to some waterfalls and then into some soaking wet caves which Alice and I ventured into, and another hike down one of the narrowest parts of the gorge. I wish I'd taken more pictures, but here are a few:








That night we went to another famous and fantastic restaurant called Mr. Goose, where I learned the goose was indeed better than chicken.

Day 7: Saturday

Today was my last day in Taiwan. We visited a Taiwanese distillery, and then drove to the ocean and took a walk on the beach in the rain. The sand was covered in beautiful polished stones and Alice and I each chose one to take home.


Then it was to the airport and away. I'm sure I'll be back.

Thanksgiving Recipes

Here's what my father says we are having for Thanksgiving. Some of these recipes look quite good:

Le Menu:

Appetizer
* Hickory-Bacon and Roasted-corn Gougeres

Dinner
* Parsley-root Soup with "Truffled" Chestnuts
* Maple-glazed Turkey with Gravy
* Hazelnut, Sage, and Mushroom Stuffing
* Cranberry Sauce with Port and Tangerine
* Cider-Glazed Carrots
* Gratineed Mustard Creamed Onions
* Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Garlic and Parsnips
* Haricots Verts with Herb Butter
* Red-Leaf and Celery Salad with Caraway-seed Dressing

Dessert
* Pumpkin Plum Tart
* Apple Walnut Torte
* Calvados Vanilla Cream

El Capitan

Last weekend I went to Yosemite with a few friends. The trip was thrown together at the last minute, and done with the goal of hiking up El Capitan. One of my friends is training to climb Kili this December, and we figured this would be good training. In the end, I'd put the hike as slightly harder than a single day Half Dome trip, but less difficult than Mt Whitney or the 34 mile days I've done in the San Gabriels. The trip went as follows: drive to Yosemite Friday afternoon, camp at Camp 4, hike El Capitan Saturday, and drive back Sunday afternoon.

Some highlights:

* Laying in the grass watching the bright Milky Way belt, and hearing stories of Perseus and Andromeda as told by one of the guys who joined us.

* Climbing to the tip top of Eagle's Peak and seeing the breath-taking panorama of glacier torn Yosemite and its surrounding mountains.

* Eating lunch at the top of El Capitan, giddy from the climb, and meeting a couple hikers there who also work at Google Mountain View.

* Laying comfortably in our 6 man tent listening to climbers talk about chimneys, cracks, 2 finger jam holds, and their hands getting mauled by bad rock.

Some lowlights:

* Searching for food in Yosemite Valley which was largely shut down for the season.

* Having knee pain set in around mile 16 during our descent. Apparently my bike wreck last week did more damage than I thought.

* Realizing that we hadn't brought bowls or spoons for the cereal.

Next time I will do a little more prep, including making sure to bring stuff for a fire and perhaps a cooked meal. The trip brought back so many memories of my Pacific Crest Trail adventure, and I am resolved to do that entire trip at some point.

Here are some pictures:



On top of El Cap!


A not so wet Yosemite Falls

7500 ft - A mere shadow of elevations to come

Hawaiian Adventure

I went to Maui this summer for a kiteboarding trip, and just dug up some of my notes from the trip. I figure I'll post them for those who are interested in Maui, kiteboarding, or just humorous antidotes about me.

----------------

The first three days I kept an actual journal, as follows:

Day 1 - The airport

Today I flew to Hawaii. Since I slept only two hours last night, sleeping on the plane was easy. When I did wake up to look out the window, the earth looked like a giant blue sphere dotted with puffy white clouds. Oahu appeared at last, a solid cloud with a volcano sticking up out of it, like a fire hydrant in the snow. We landed, I took a quick flight to Maui and was there. Kiteboarding here I come.

I've never seen as many gorgeous Filipino girls as in the Maui airport. It turns out there is a Miss Filipino beauty pageant in town. I fumbled around a bit with my luggage and took a taxi to the house. I am impressed by what Ben was able to find.

Having the afternoon free, I jogged a couple miles to Paia. Some girls were selling lemonade so I bought some for a $1. $1 for lemonade! Either the price of lemonade has gone up since I was a kid, or Hawaiian kids learn about upselling tourists early. The lemonade was delicious. Paia was a small relatively quiet town with a bit of a hippie influence and much more local than some of the Hawaiian tourist traps. It reminded me of Carmel in California, with a slightly schizophrenic clash between local, franchise, and tourist. The organic Mana foods stood next to the 76 gas station, across the street from a place where you could buy wooden boats and postcards to send home.

I headed to the beach and watched the windsurfers, who were racing, and then back home to meet a freshly arrived Ben, complete with his red convertible Mustang.

We headed downtown to one of the Saturday night clubs, and were greeted by a bunch of dicks in the parking lot yelling "Look at the gay boys!" The people inside weren't such asses, but I didn't enjoy the scene that much. It was impossible to get a drink, and although the band was good, I found myself with my guard up and feeling uncomfortable. There were a few people dancing, but most were just standing around feeling socially awkward. I don't like clubs in Hawaii much more than I do in San Jose.

Back home Ben and I opened a couple beers and planned our trip a bit. Kiteboarding is the order of the week. We need lessons, I need a kite, and the trade winds are blowing strong.


Day 2 - Kite in a tree

Ben has a nice tear in his kite courtesy of a tree. He went body-dragging this morning while I watched, and a nice gust of wind took him far too close to the shore when landing his kite. The wind in Maui averages much stronger than the wind on the bay and we need practice.

We found someone to repair Ben's kite, signed up for kiteboarding lessons, and then headed out of town for a long drive down the Kona highway to the end of the island. It was a slow winding road with lots of traffic and one lane road, but the views of the ocean were gorgeous. We explored a couple trails on our way and found an empty pond at the bottom of a waterfall. We also stopped at several fruit stands. The fruit had a euphoric effect.

Ben: I've got mango on my mind!
Nassar: That sounds like a good song title - "Mango on my Mind". It would need some sort of reggae beat.
Ben: (imitating reggae) I've got... got Mango on My Mind
Nassar: Mango, mango. Mango on my mind.
Ben: We need to go raid some more fruit stands.
Nassar: Yeah, let's go up to the next fruit stand and tell them, "Give me all your mangos or else. And your banana bread too."
(a bit later at the next fruit stand)
Nassar: This banana is the sweetest banana I've ever tasted. Too sweet to deserve being in my mouth. I wonder how you say banana in Hawaiian.
Ben: hanahanabananananana
Strange guy: (waving a strange looking banana) Look, it's a retarded banana!
Strange guy: (being scolded by his girlfriend) Yeah, the bananas we eat are the retarded ones. These bananas are perfectly normal.

Tonight we ate dinner at a sushi / sports bar / fish fry restaurant (speaking of skitzo) and then turned in for bed

Day 3 - Body dragging upwind

This morning we busted out of the house early and made our way to Kite Beach for lessons. Leim was our instructor, a long haired surfer dude from the island. He got us out on a 6 meter Naish kite with super short lines, and taught us how to body drag upwind by steering the kite with one hand and using the other had as a rudder. We managed pretty well, and he lengthened the lines and had us take out boards.

I didn't fair so well with the board. For starters, I am used to having a leash on my board, and the Hawaiian guys insisted that that was a bad idea and that we needed to learn without. I very quickly lost my board, and spent most of the lesson trying to body drag back to it. In the end, I was pretty successful going upwind, but the most frustrating part was trying to relaunch the kite from the water. The wind kept dying, I got my lines tangled, and I couldn't seem to focus on not letting go of my board and controlling the kite at the same time. By the end of the lesson I was doing a bit better, but I need to practice. Ben fared a bit better until the end of the lesson, when the wind seemed to lull.

We picked up Ben's patched kite, grabbed a pizza and then went to the kite shop where I bought a new kite, an 11 meter Best Waroo. It is a high performance kite with a 1 to 1 line to kite movement ratio that will give me lots of control over the kite. I really like the simplicity of the bar and how much power range the kite has, although I'm a bit worried that 11m may be too much for Hawaii. Deja sold it to me, and she was one of the nicest, most talkative people I have ever met. Deja says that learning to fly with this kite is like learning to drive with a Porsche, but that if you can learn to drive with a Porsche, good for you. At least I got a used Porsche, so I paid very little for it.

Ben grilled steaks for dinner and I picked up movies and a case of Negro Modelo. We are both sunburned and tired, but ready to go out without an instructor tomorrow.

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Since I slacked off with my journal, the remainder of this post is just a few interesting antidotes I remember from the trip.

Teabagging on the Waroo:

On day 5 the wind picked up, and I took out my new Waroo to give it a go. The biggest kite on the water was a 9 meter, but caution be damned, I launched my 11 and bounded out into the ocean. What followed was probably one of the most scary body dragging session ever.

I quickly discovered that I was overpowered, but hey, at least there would be no problem keeping my kite in the air. Then a gust jerked me out of the water and then dropped me back in like a teabag. Then it happened again, and again. Each time I would madly kick my legs to try to keep my balance, so I must have looked hilariously out of control. Ben, standing on the beach, was asked by some of the locals if he was friends with the "jumping guy out there". I finally figured out my power lines and got things under control, and as I hauled through the water things were starting to feel OK. Suddenly, I felt a burning sensation on my hand and wrist, and looked down to see a purplish gelatinous substance streaked across my skin. I had just blown through a Portguese Man-o-War!

I wiped off my arm as best I could and kept going, not thinking much of it, but a few minutes later my situation deteriorated. My armpits began to swell up as my lymphatic system kicked in, and I felt pretty sure I was going to puke. I flagged down Ben and made my way quickly back to the beach, where they gave me an ointment that was supposedly an antitoxin. I sat on the beach for a while, through for the day.

Visiting Haleakala:

On day 6 we took the afternoon to visit Hawaii's tallest peak, Haleakala. At the top was a beautiful barren landscape of reddish volcanic rock. At 11,000 feet we were high above the condensation point, and through the cool air it looked like we were on an island in an ocean of clouds. It reminded me a bit of the scene in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy" where Xi finds the end of the earth.

There were lots of roped off sections to keep the tourists away from the massive telescopes; apparently the thin, dry, air of Haleakala makes an excellent observatory of the night sky. Next time I'm in Maui I will come up here before the sun rises to see for myself.

More kiteboarding lessons:

Ben and I tried kiteboarding a few days on our own, but then enlisted Leim for lessons 2 and 3. Our second lesson was excellent - Leim got us out on two kites, which in itself was well worth the money. He had good advice, but was mainly interested in keeping us on the water. Ben was able to get up and going a few times for a good 30-60 seconds, and I also had a few good runs.

Our third lesson was much worse, as the wind was erratic and weak, and we spent much of the time with our kites on the water. I had one scary moment where I had to release myself from my kite and then self rescue. My body got so tangled up in lines that I could barely move, and I spent so much energy trying to untangle myself that I barely had the strength to pull myself up the slippery rocks once I hit shore. Thankfully no bodies (or kites) were injured.

Friday night on the town:

On our final weekend, Ben and I went back to the club in Paia, and once again had a drab experience. I tried starting up a conversation with a couple people, but twice I got a snobbish response indicating that non-islanders were not particularly welcome. Oh well. This was supposed to be a kiteboarding trip anyway, not a clubbing trip.

Ben and I got had several Vodka shots, and in our drunken state the walk home was quite fun. As we neared home at 3 in the morning, a group truck full of guys and girls pulled up to a convenience store and made their way inside. "Hey, your robbing the convenience store!", Ben shouted. "Hey your the guy who needs to put on sunscreen!" one of the girls shouted back. Apparently she recognized him from an earlier shopping excursion.

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I enjoyed being in Maui, and Ben was awesome to hang out with. The trade winds were strong, and I could see spending an entire summer on the island doing nothing but kiteboarding. As for this trip, there are few few things I wouldn't change, and a few that I probably would.

Fantastically done:
* Kiteboarding! I'm glad we spent so much time on the water. I got better, and enjoyed the ocean.
* Lessons. I think that signing up for lessons ad-hoc worked pretty well, and that we got a good deal.
* The condo rental. Ben did an awesome job finding a nice place for a good price.
* The excursions. I'm glad we did trips to Kona and Haleakala. They were fun and a nice change of pace.
* The food. We had a good balance of eating out and buying groceries. The highlight was a dinner of deliciouly grilled burgers, courtesy of Ben's chef skills.

Some things to do differently:
* Don't lose my wallet. Um, like, dude, you lost your wallet. Yeah.
* The car rental. The car was too small and got filthy fast. The convertible top was nice at times, but was often a pain to deal with. Next time we should get an SUV or jeep. Also, I have the navigational abilities of a deaf bat.
* Invite more people. Others would have enjoyed this trip too, even if they weren't planning on kiteboarding.

Next year I'm going to try to put together a North Carolina Outer Banks trip and invite as many people as possible. If you read this and want to come, you are 100% invited. We'll make sure there is plenty of kiteboarding, swimming, frisbee, volleyball, good music, games, fun people, and relaxing beach front to enjoy. I'll post more about dates later.

Sick, plus ordered bell numbers

I've been sick the last few days. I did a hard run last Friday, had dinner with a friend, and woke up the next morning with the worst sore throat imaginable. Since then I've been battling with a nasty upper respiratory virus that has me hacking like a tuberculosis plagued sailor. I've mostly been in bed.

While in bed, I've been doing programming problems. Now that I am done with my job interviews at Yahoo and Google, I'm not sure I really need to practice problems, but I enjoy them immensely, and have been hanging out at the website TopCoder. It has become a replacement for the amount of time I usually spend online playing chess.

I've done hundreds of these problems, but one interesting one yesterday went something like this:

GEEK ALERT! I'm going to get technical on your ass, so don't feel obligated to continue reading.

Suppose you have N different objects and have been 
given some informationabout their ordering. The 
information will be given as a vector<string> 
facts whose elements will be of the form "A=B" where A 
and B are integers between 0 and N-1 inclusive. "0=8" 
means the 0th object is equal to the 8th object. Given 
these facts you will return the total possible number 
of distinct ways the objects could be ordered. 

For example: N = 4 facts = {"0=2","1=3"} Possible 
orderings: 0=2<1=3, 1=3<0=2, 0=1=2=3 In this case 
there are 3 possible orderings, so you would return 3. 
If no facts were given, there would be 75 possible 
orderings. As seen above, the orderings described here 
are total orderings. This means, for all pairs of 
objects, the ordering is specified (one is less than 
the other, or they are equal). Two orderings are the 
same if all pairs of objects in each ordering have 
exactly the same relationship.

I generally love probability problems, but it took me a while to figure this one out. It wasn't reasonable to loop through all possibilities since there could be billions. The problem reminded me of the problem trying calculating how many possible rolls there are with N number of K sided dice. In that problem you have K buckets and try to determine how many ways to fit the N dice inside of them. In our problem, however, the number of buckets aren't fixed.

A simplification of the problem is to ignore the facts. Actually, when you have a fact, you can just treat the resulting information as one number. So if you know that a==b, you can pretend you have one less number to work with. The simplified problem goes like this:

Given N numbers, how many ways are there to group 
them into sets. Each set will have equal signs 
between it's members, and between the sets you 
will place less than signs. The order of the sets 
is important. The order of the numbers within a 
set is unimportant.

I manually calculated the first few results, then came up with a mechanism for counting them which became a royal pain to implement programatically. The first few results for N items are: 1, 3, 13, 75, 541... After some frustration I hit the jackpot, a really cool website that allows you to look up integer sequences. I discovered that the sequence above lists the ordered Bell numbers also known as the Fubini numbers. There is also an interesting set of numbers called the unordered Bell numbers or just plain Bell numbers, which tells you the number of ways to group N items into sets when the order of the sets is unimportant. Information on calculating regular Bell numbers was abundant, but not ordered Bell numbers, which is what I needed.

After some more research I disovered something called Stirling numbers, or more specifically, Stirling numbers of the second kind. Stirling numbers form a table that looks like this:

n \ k  1  2  3  4  5  6 
1  1
2  1  1
3  1  3  1
4  1  7  6  1
5  1  15  25  10  1
6  1  31  90  65  15  1

Note that we've labeled each row n, and each column k, so we can write S(n,k). S(5,2) is 15 for example. Each number can be calculated by taking the number above itself times k + the number diagonally northwest of itself. So S(n, k) = S(n-1, k) * k + S(n-1, k-1).

Why are Stirling numbers useful for calculating the ordered Bell numbers? It turns out that if you want to find an ordered bell number, you just have to pick the corresponding row of stirling numbers, and sum them, multipying each term by k factorial as you move across the row. For example to find the 4th ordered Bell number B(4), you would pick the 4th row of Stirling numbers and add as follows: 1 * 1! + 7 * 2! + 6 * 3! + 1 * 4! = 75. Magic!

This works because you are actually summing the combinations for different ways of grouping the numbers. It makes for some easy code. Since the internet seems void of code to calculate ordered bell numbers here's a rough snippet in case someone finds it useful:

   ...
        //Get the ordered bell # using a stirling transform 
        long long fub = 0;
        long long kFact = 1;
        for(int k = 1; k <= n; ++k) {
            kFact *= k;
            fub += calcStirling(n, k) * kFact;
        } 
        return fub;

   ...

    static long long calcStirling(int n, int k) {
        assert(n > 0);
        assert(k > 0);
        if (k == 1) {
            return 1;
        }
        if (k == n) {
            return 1;
        }
        long long result = calcStirling(n - 1, k - 1) + 
                                k * calcStirling(n - 1, k);
        return result;
    }

Enough geeky math stuff. Next time I'll talk about my triathlon training.

Finding a Job

What is a job?

According to the Internet, a job is:

• a piece of work, esp. a specific task done as part of the routine of one's occupation or for an agreed price.
• a suffix that can be added to nearly any body part to create a sexual connotation.
• a book of the Old Testament between Esther and Psalms.

There are good jobs, bad jobs, and jobs in between. My first job was working as a stable boy, shovelling horse shit 8 hours/day in 100 degree heat for minimum wage. I actually liked the job, as it gave me a chance to think, hang out with the horses, and made me really strong over the course of the summer. My worst job was working as a waiter for an extremely angry Italian owner who would yell and break things in the kitchen - I didn't work there long. My software engineering jobs have been good for many reasons, but I have had a tendency to burn myself out by working too many hours and placing extremely high expectations on myself.

Here are some things that good jobs seem to have in common for me:

• I look forward to waking up and going to them in the morning.
• They allow me to be creative and build things that I am proud of.
• They provide me tools I need and help me set reasonable expectations for myself.
• They surround me with competent people who I enjoy working with.
• They challenge me and help me improve myself.

Bad jobs have many of the opposite characteristics:

• They grind my efficiency to a halt for various reasons that they don't let me control - inadequate tools, constant meetings, a ridiculously long build process, or by giving me poorly designed and buggy software to build on top of.
• They set unclear expectations and provide me with little feedback showing the value of my work.
• They bore me by making me do endless repetitive tasks.
• They surround me with incompetent or paranoid people.
• They ask me to work on ideas or projects that I disagree with.

I got asked three questions today in an email from a prospective boss.

• What are the top 3 things you would like to accomplish in life?
• What would you like your career to look like in 4 years - what does the dream job look like then?
• What are the 3 most important criteria of your next job?

These are good questions, and I am impressed that he asked them, as they show some savvy on his part, both because he seems to care about my goals and because he will get some insight into convincing me to work for him. If you are reading this, you should try answering those questions for yourself.

Here are my attempts at answers:

What are the top 3 things you would like to accomplish in life?

I'm not sure there is anything specific I need to accomplish to be happy. It is probably more important how I live my life and interact with others than what I accomplish. But if I had to choose 3 things to accomplish they might be the following:

• I'd like to build something that effects many people and makes their lives better.
• I'd like to find a spouse I love, have kids with her, and raise them well.
• I'd like to create a means by which to teach others about my passions - specifically technology and the outdoors. I might do this by creating software, starting a summer camp, writing a book, or even becoming a teacher.

What would you like your career to look like in 4 years - what does the dream job look like then?

In four years I'd like to be able to say a couple things about my career:

• I have a resume that will allow me to work for nearly any software company I'd like to in the world.
• I have the skills, contacts, and personality to find, lead, and motivate other talented engineers to accomplish something that I believe in doing.

I'm not sure there is a specific dream job as there are many jobs I might like. I would love to be somewhere where I got to spend my days solving problems, where people liked working with each other, and where I am working on a product which I think is important and that many people will use including myself.

What are the 3 most important criteria of your next job?

• I want to work somewhere where I will learn as much as possible.
• I want to like the people I'll be working with.
• I want to like the products I'm building and be able see a practical path towards their successful widespread adoption.

Napolean Dynamite said "Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills." He must have gotten companies and girls confused, but that's understandable. It's nice to have skills either way.

Prelude to the Adventures

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” --J.R.R. Tolkien

I like adventures. I am always excited to try things that are new, novel, and that test my limits. Here are a few of the more adventurous things I've done in my life:

• Leaving school to write and sell genetics software while saving money by living out of a van.
• Moving from North Carolina to San Francisco to find work at a computer startup and quickly taking a leadership role there.
• Spending time on numerous challenging athletic accomplishments - running races, participating in triathlons, and backpacking throughout California and on the east coast.
• Taking a year off work to travel, hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and make money playing Poker.
• Experimenting with freelance software development with my company Adventure Support.
• Joining Google as a software engineer.

While none of the things I've done are exceptional, I do think a pattern emerges - I find myself the happiest when I don't quite know what the day or year will bring. I would be an unhappy farmer, but perhaps a spirited hunter gatherer.

Some recent things that I have been excited about include:

• My current work at Google. I have tons of respect for what the company is doing, and the fact that I can affect so many people there.
• Triathlons. I've been doing some triathlon training in hopes of doing a half Ironman next year
• Kiteboarding. I really want the season to pick up so that I can get better at this insanely fun sport.

I'll be blogging about these intentions, as well as other ideas, so stay tuned.