Happy Messy New Year Ken Carroll from Chinesepod , one of Time Magazine's Top 10 podcast sites in the world, turned me on to a site called BubbleGeneration that discusses issues in the Internet Economy. While reading the analysis of why MySpace works...

from xkcd Internet access in China is improving but still blocks many from doing their work. I just chatted with one of my ex-interns who now works for a large multinational game company in Shanghai. All work on Xbox Live platforms has stopped since...

Having been part of the IE team here in Beijing, I have a healthy respect for both Firefox 1.0 and Maxthon. Knowing how much work goes into making browsers work will rock your world. Personally, I use Firefox, IE, Maxthon and Opera depending on the platform...

The Chinese Internet outage, Day 2: 'The Great FireWall' was just the beginning. "China" in Mandarin translates to "Middle Earth" or, "The Center of the World". But how often do Chinese businesses rely on external websites for their daily business...

Beijing demolition. Run Run Run Its all said in CNN's Earthquake story . "Taiwan lost almost all of its telephone capacity to Japan and mainland China. Service to the United States also was hard hit, with 60 percent of capacity lost. Later...

Dōngzhì ( pīnyīn ) or Tōji ( rōmaji ) ( Chinese and Japanese : 冬至; Korean : 동지 ; Vietnamese : Đông chí ; literally: "winter solstice") is the 22 nd solar term. It begins when the Sun reaches the celestial longitude of 270° and ends when it reaches the...

A MySpace like blog entry for Xmas Christmas dinner was spent eating Indian food. For the first time, I saw someone selling live tortoises door to door on the highway to cars stopped at the traffic light. Christmas is not complete in Beijing...

China always has a clutch of weird news coming out each day so I 'm always wondering when Festivus will be the official holiday in China. Mu - the blood saint of Festivus Since the holidays approach including kwaanza and Saturnalia, it only fitting...

Microsoft offices are coming up all over China like earthworms after a rain. Chengdu public art and some out of town tourists. My team went to the new Xbox Live Arcade incubation center in Chengdu a few weeks ago. It is not really an MS office...

A friend sent me this thread on a Chinese BBS. I love the anguish. -neema

A new e-mail was distributed to us today concerning the placing and eating of smelly food in the office. Cafeteria food for those who cannot eat at their desk anymore. Subject: Minimize Food Smell in Sigma Office In order...

Microsoft just announced the MultiPoint SDK , which will be released soon. It will be included in the 2007 ImagineCup contest , which has lots of quality entries in China. There's even a Channel 9 video for it already. While the idea of multiple mice...

This is basically a nifty implmentation of the paper I published last year (PDF), except Chinswing has left out a core affordance: easy quoting. Without quoting, context and quick browsing decrease in quality. Still, it's neat to see this tech in beta...

Think week is almost over and I just finished writing 4 papers . One of them is with my esteemed MSRA colleague Neema. Not only do we collaborate on high level thought projects, we also perform together with our dueling Tablet PCs (mine is dual core though...

ACID under Neema has conducted interviews with several families and young children in Beijing to better understand the structure of the youth education market in China. I have seen very little corporate ethnographic study of this new emerging group from...

Local media site Danwei created a great video piece on a Chinese HipHop artist in the city of Qingdao. It is very interesting to see how the impact of western media and technology morphs and adapts to the Chinese economic reality. Seeing the interview...

In one of our more obscure diversionary projects at MSRA, we tried to see if we could create music by KTVing to popular tunes using programming code for the "Hello World" script.. We tried C++, BASIC, Pascal, and some really obscure legacy computer languages...

The results of our public survey on RSS usage are now available in Chinese and English . -neema